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'I've given up my life to care for my mum' - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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For Sue Jenkins, whose 88-year-old mother needs round-the-clock care, life can be very difficult.
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Health
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The life of a carer can be very difficult. For Sue Jenkins, whose 88-year-old mother Patricia needs round-the-clock care, it is very hard indeed.
Two years ago, Patricia was diagnosed with dementia. An accident four years earlier broke her back and since then she has been disabled, doubly incontinent and using a wheelchair.
"I have given up my life," says Sue. "I used to sail a lot. I used to do so many things. I'm a very outward-going person. But I take care of my mother. And that's it.
"Love is something that drives you to give up those things. You'll give up anything."
But she's struggling. She cares for her mother 24 hours a day. Even taking the time to speak to us was difficult.
Her mother calls for her constantly. She can't spend very much time away from Sue before becoming agitated.
There are professional carers who come to the house to help, but none lives with them full time and it seems a big part of what Sue does is to manage them.
More than 20 professional carers have come and gone over the last few months because Patricia's behaviour can be so difficult.
"Dementia strips the person of their personality," says Sue
"She has a lot of challenging behaviour," says Sue.
"Screaming, hitting out. It's horrible because dementia strips the person of their personality."
Her eyes fill with tears as she talks. The physical exhaustion of a life with little sleep is obvious.
But the emotional strain of watching her mother deteriorate is pushing her to breaking point.
"I've lost my friend. My best friend. She's there - somewhere inside. But the person I dearly love and dearly want to talk to about so many things has left me already.
"And the thought of losing her fills me with complete dread. Because my life is very much her," she says.
I ask her what it's like when her mother hits her.
"It's heartbreaking. It can make you feel useless. As she's saying that, it can make you want to run for the hills and just run into the night.
"And there have been many occasions when I've wanted to run off, thinking I was a useless carer."
The thought of losing her mum fills Sue with "complete dread"
It costs more than £2,800 a week to keep Patricia at home. That money is paid by local care services.
But the authorities have twice tried to stop the money. Sue says it is an attempt to force her to put her mother in a home.
That is something she is adamant she will never do.
"I've seen what goes on in those places. It would kill her," she says.
She feels hounded by the authorities and says it's taking valuable time away from her and her mother. She's says she is sometimes up through the night replying to emails, while still caring for her mother.
"It's been absolutely devastating. The hours that have been stolen from me - email after email after email - chasing and phoning," she says.
"The government wants to encourage people to stay in their own homes and nurse people in their own homes. And say there's support out there. But there isn't.
"It's the most isolating situation anyone could find themselves in," she adds.
Sue says there are now only "occasional little laughs" with her mum
There are more than 6 million people in the UK who look after sick or elderly relatives full time. Those numbers have been steadily increasing. But so have the pressures on people like Sue.
UK Homecare Association this month said 900 carers are quitting the industry every day.
Government ministers say they will spend an extra £2bn on social care over three years.
And earlier this week, Luke Hall, a Conservative MP on the Commons Work and Pensions Committee, said carers made "a huge contribution to society".
"It's only right that we do everything we can to support the selfless work they do," he said.
"That's why we already increased the rate of carer's allowance, meaning an additional £450 a year for carers since 2010."
For Sue, her dedication to her mother has meant she has sacrificed her own happiness. Her husband left her six years ago when she decided to look after her mother.
"You find that having any kind of relationship is very difficult. It would take a very understanding man to understand my situation."
Life has become increasingly lonely for her. Yet she tries to remain positive.
"It is worth it. There are occasional little laughs. Not often these days, but they're there. It's love. It's what you do. It's deep."
Watch the Victoria Derbyshire programme on weekdays between 09:00 and 11:00 on BBC Two and the BBC News Channel.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39654596
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Real Madrid 2-3 Barcelona - BBC Sport
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2017-04-24
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Lionel Messi scores his 500th Barcelona goal to send them top of La Liga with a last-minute winner against Real Madrid.
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Last updated on .From the section European Football
Lionel Messi scored his 500th Barcelona goal to send them top of La Liga with an injury-time winner against 10-man Real Madrid at the Bernabeu.
Barca, whose win put them top because of a better head-to-head record, have five games left, Real have six to play.
Casemiro scored first for the hosts before Messi and Ivan Rakitic put Barcelona in front and Sergio Ramos was shown a red card for a wild lunge.
Substitute James Rodriguez thought he had earned Madrid a point late on.
But Messi, who scored his first with a superb jinking run and finish, fired in from the edge of the area to win it for Barcelona.
Both Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo had earlier missed good opportunities to give their sides the lead, with the Argentina international poking wide of an open goal before the break and the Real Madrid forward slicing over in the second half.
Real - who have a game in hand on Barcelona - also felt they should have had a penalty when Ronaldo was clipped by Samuel Umtiti after only two minutes.
• None Analysis: 500 up Messi proves he's still the best
Reaching the Champions League quarter-finals and competing to win La Liga would hardly constitute a crisis for most clubs, but this is Barcelona.
Trophies are often the minimum requirement for those in charge at Camp Nou. Fans expect to see their side win in style and have questioned the merits of boss Luis Enrique, who is to leave at the end of the season.
The travelling Catalan contingent could not complain about Sunday's heroics, however, as they were treated to two fine finishes from Messi that were complemented by an equally composed Rakitic strike from the edge of the area.
Any crisis talks can be postponed while this side continues to boast Messi in its ranks, with the little magician showing he still has the ability to carry the Blaugrana against the world's best teams.
A genius with the football at his feet, Messi continued to be the creative spark for Barcelona even after Casemiro - lucky not to be sent off himself - had twice scythed the forward down and an innocuous Marcelo elbow left the Argentine with a bloodied mouth.
His reward, as well as outshining Real Madrid counterpart Ronaldo in this Clasico, was to further ingrain his name into Barcelona folklore.
Real Madrid have won the Champions League in two of the past three seasons, but have been less successful domestically - they are without a La Liga title since 2012, with Barcelona taking the trophy three times and Atletico Madrid once since then.
Down to 10 men after Ramos' sending off and having pulled level with five minutes to spare, Zinedine Zidane's outfit looked intent on a winner that would have effectively put the title beyond Barcelona.
That left the space for the visitors to break away and score themselves. Tactical naivety from Zidane? Perhaps, but with a game in hand, La Liga still looks Real's to lose.
It had started promisingly for the hosts, with Casemiro the unlikely early hero when he poked home after Ramos hit the post. However, when Gareth Bale limped off with an ankle problem, the momentum swung in Barcelona's favour.
Has the momentum in the title race also shifted away from Los Merengues?
If Zidane's side, who remain on course to become the first team to secure back-to-back Champions Leagues, can win their remaining six games in La Liga, the Frenchman will end Madrid's five-year wait for the domestic title.
Keepers come out on top... almost
Even with Brazil international Neymar suspended for Barcelona and Bale going off injured in the first half for Madrid, both sides boasted a plethora of attacking talent at the Bernabeu.
But it was the goalkeepers who looked, for a long time, to have come out on top as Marc-Andre ter Stegen and Keylor Navas made a series of fine saves to keep the score down.
Barcelona's Ter Stegen was equal to efforts from Ronaldo and Karim Benzema in the first half, before Paco Alcacer, Gerard Pique and Luis Suarez were all denied by Navas after the break.
Ter Stegen made 12 saves in total, the most by a Barcelona keeper in La Liga since the 2003-04 season, but had little chance with either Casemiro's opener or Rodriguez's late leveller.
Eventually Barcelona's class in attack also shone through, La Liga's top goalscorer Messi leaving Navas well beaten with the winner.
La Liga title 'will be tight until the end'
Barcelona boss Luis Enrique: "We are first now but Madrid have an extra game. It will be tight until the end. We got the result we came here for.
"This is a season that weighs on us like five. So many things have happened, good things, not so good things, things I've already forgotten.
"The 2-2 goal was a terrible blow but players were able to come back in the last breath - the happy ending that we all wanted at Barcelona."
Real Madrid coach Zinedine Zidane: "Nothing changes now. Maybe after today the league will be more open. But we still depend on ourselves."
Both sides are back in La Liga action on Wednesday, as Barcelona host Osasuna and Real Madrid visit Deportivo La Coruna.
• None Lionel Messi (Barcelona) is shown the yellow card for excessive celebration.
• None Goal! Real Madrid 2, Barcelona 3. Lionel Messi (Barcelona) left footed shot from the centre of the box to the bottom left corner. Assisted by Jordi Alba.
• None Attempt missed. Cristiano Ronaldo (Real Madrid) left footed shot from the centre of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Marco Asensio.
• None Attempt saved. Marco Asensio (Real Madrid) left footed shot from the left side of the box is saved in the bottom left corner. Assisted by Cristiano Ronaldo.
• None Attempt saved. James Rodríguez (Real Madrid) left footed shot from the left side of the box is saved in the centre of the goal.
• None Goal! Real Madrid 2, Barcelona 2. James Rodríguez (Real Madrid) left footed shot from the left side of the six yard box to the top left corner. Assisted by Marcelo with a cross.
• None Attempt saved. James Rodríguez (Real Madrid) left footed shot from outside the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Daniel Carvajal.
• None Ivan Rakitic (Barcelona) wins a free kick on the right wing.
• None Attempt saved. Lionel Messi (Barcelona) left footed shot from outside the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Sergi Roberto.
• None Mateo Kovacic (Real Madrid) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39668462
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Reality Check: Are a quarter of Scottish children in poverty? - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Official figures suggest that the number of children in poverty in Scotland has jumped to 260,000.
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UK Politics
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The claim: 260,000 children in Scotland are living in poverty, 40,000 up on last year.
Reality Check verdict: The best available figures suggest he is right to say there has been a jump in child poverty in Scotland to 260,000 after several years of little change.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn addressed the Scottish Trades Union Congress in Aviemore on Monday.
He highlighted the increase in relative child poverty in Scotland, saying that 260,000 children are living in relative poverty, which is up 40,000 on last year.
The figures come from a Scottish Government publication, which calculates relative poverty as living in households with incomes below 60% of the median income for the UK, after housing costs have been paid.
The median income is the one for which half of UK households have a higher income and half have a lower one.
The most recent figure is for the financial year 2015-16, and suggests that 260,000 children were living in relative poverty after housing costs, which is 26% of children in Scotland. That's up from 220,000 or 22% in 2014-15.
The figures in this report come from the Family Resources Survey, which collects information about 2,700 households in Scotland.
That's a large survey, but it still has a margin of error, so when it suggests that 260,000 children are living in poverty it means that the statisticians are 95% confident that the actual figure is somewhere between 190,000 and 320,000. That means that even though 40,000 is an unusually large increase, it is well within the margin of error and so the change is not statistically significant.
The Scottish Government proposed a Child Poverty Bill last year. The bill will set ambitious targets for reducing child poverty by 2030.
The report itself warns against placing too much emphasis on a single year's figures. "More data will be required to judge whether these changes are indicative of a longer term trend," it says.
Nonetheless, these are official figures and they are the best figures available, suggesting there may have been a jump after several years of little change.
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39696117
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'Everything's on fire' - the scramble to organise an election - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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News of a snap poll means many late nights and cancelled weekends for some over the coming weeks.
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UK Politics
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When Theresa May announced on Tuesday she was seeking an early general election, scores of people saw their weekends and half-term holidays vanish in a giant puff of electioneering, manifesto-writing and the mammoth admin task of staging a nationwide ballot.
By anyone's estimations, the general election of 2015 was an immense piece of administration.
Forty-five million ballot papers were printed to reflect 650 separate candidate lists for the election. Forty-three thousand polling stations were staffed for 15 hours by 120,000 people. And the total cost of it came to £98,845,157.
But all that was organised with five years' notice - the duration between the previous election and the date of the 2015 poll.
The time frame for the 2017 ballot, which takes place on 8 June, is little more than seven weeks.
One Conservative member of staff told the BBC she was completely taken aback. "I have friends who work for ministers and even they didn't see it coming until the Cabinet meeting took place."
The clock is already ticking, and there is much work to be done. A Labour aide working for an MP described the past week as "very stressful".
"In my own time after work I've been contributing to campaign materials and arranging to uproot myself from London so I can go back to the constituency."
While general elections are about putting MPs in Parliament, it falls to councils to organise the nitty-gritty of voting and counting.
Venues for polling stations and counting centres will need to be earmarked and reserved for 8 June. And that needs to happen before polling cards can be sent out.
Some of the 120,000 people employed to conduct the 2015 election
This work is carried out by local authorities' electoral services divisions and overseen by returning officers.
John Turner, chief executive of the Association of Electoral Administrators, predicts this election will be particularly onerous for two reasons - the compressed time scale, and the fact local elections are already taking place in many areas in less than two weeks.
"Many polling stations aren't publicly owned," said Mr Turner. "They're church halls or community centres, and a lot rests on returning officers' ability to persuade the owners to move things around and make the space available."
As for staffing, electoral services departments maintain databases of temporary workers. But "in this case some of them may already have made other plans or booked holidays".
"Although returning officers are helped by permanent teams, this varies a lot. In some district councils it will only be two or three people and colleagues from other departments will have to pitch in.
Polling stations have to be organised
"It's going to be an intense time for many of us, working 12-hour days."
Mr Turner is confident, however, that it will all come together in time, noting: "We're a bit like the duck paddling away beneath the water but serene on the surface."
There's equally little hope of sleep for those in charge of political policy making. They will be working around the clock on putting together manifestos.
It's a particularly stressful time for the party in government, says Nick Pearce, head of the No 10 policy unit under former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. As well as existing government duties, staff will be working "flat-out" to get the document finalised.
"A minister, usually from the Cabinet Office, takes overall responsibility, working with political staff from different departments to draft sections and liaise with the prime minister and her chief of staff," he explained.
Ministers, lobbyists and Treasury staff also get heavily involved, trying to place pet projects and ensure big-ticket items are properly costed.
"There's huge pressure not to get anything wrong," said Mr Pearce. "But working quickly like this there is certainly potential for that to happen."
And what of getting the message out?
Seven weeks is "a very, very tight time frame" for organising a marketing and advertising strategy, said Rachel Hamburger, an advertising executive and former Lib Dem campaigner.
"I'd be very surprised if we saw any nationwide broadcast campaigns comparable to famous ones of the past such as the Blair 'devil eyes'," she said.
"With a long run-up, parties could be expected to run focus groups, market research and analysis of what is most important to their campaign before deploying adverts.
This time, she believes. parties will "concentrate resources on individual seats and simple messages".
Elsewhere in the media, broadcasters are preparing for election night. The BBC is reassigning hundreds of researchers, producers, camera crews and local reporters to put together its results programme.
Parties, meanwhile, have to deal with the small matter of ensuring there are candidates in place in 650 constituencies for people to elect.
Labour and the Conservatives have both altered their normal selection procedures to speed things up, while all 54 of the SNP's existing MPs are expected to stand again.
The other parties are in varying states of readiness.
The Lib Dems say they have about 100 candidates still to pick. UKIP and Plaid Cymru will adopt the bulk of their candidates next week, while Greens' selection is under way with local electoral alliances under consideration.
None of Northern Ireland's parties are thought to have selected candidates, as talks continue about restoring devolved government.
Most candidates will not have had a chance to allocate resources. It has already led some to take the unusual step of appealing for online donations.
Regional party offices will provide MPs and activists with support, but the prevailing mood could be described as one of apprehensiveness.
When asked to sum up how things were going, a fretful Conservative source said: "Everything is basically on fire."
A Labour campaigner replied with a series of distressed crying and screaming emojis.
However, on a purely technical point, it's worth noting the 50-day gap between announcement and polling day is actually the longest since 1983.
What's different this time is the lack of preamble, and thus preparation.
As the BBC's former head of political research David Cowling put it: "Everyone was lulled into a false sense of security by assurances... and we're now completely stunned."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39660686
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Will NHS stats spark polling day debate? - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Key statistics on NHS performance are due to be published on the day of the general election.
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Health
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On general election polling day, broadcasters are obliged to refrain from coverage of campaigning and stick to uncontroversial accounts of politicians voting or the weather.
But there could be an important news story that day relating to one of the main issues of the campaign - the state of the health service.
Thursday 8 June is the day announced by NHS England for the publication of its monthly statistics.
These cover a raft of data, including waiting times for accident & emergency and the number of people waiting longer than they should for cancer treatment and routine surgery.
In the absence of campaign coverage before the close of polls at 22:00 BST, the NHS figures published that day for the month of April may generate a certain amount of broadcast and online media interest.
Given trends revealed in previous months, it's likely that waiting lists will be longer than a year earlier although there may have been improvement on previous months.
NHS England updated its publications calendar only last week after the prime minister's announcement of the general election on 8 June.
The monthly performance statistics are usually published on the Thursday of the first full week of a month so the choice of date is logical.
The date chosen for the previous month's statistics is 11 May and the data then may fuel exchanges between the parties at the height of the campaign.
This data publication issue has not occurred before because in previous campaigns NHS England was not putting out such a wide range of statistics on a single day each month.
The current system only started in the summer of 2015.
As things stand and if the chosen date is not altered, voters could head to the polling stations with the performance of the NHS one of the main news stories of the day.
So are any other important health announcements due during the campaign?
Whitehall's traditional "purdah" during an election period has begun.
This obliges government departments and other public sector organisations to refrain from new policy announcements.
The idea is to stop a government rushing out initiatives close to polling day.
Usually purdah takes effect when parliament is dissolved but this time it has been imposed more than a week before that.
There have been claims, denied by government sources, that closing down the official news machine early is part of Downing Street's attempt to tightly control the agenda.
Pre-announced official statistics, like the NHS England performance figures, are not affected by purdah.
It is the same for economic data announcements like unemployment and inflation which go ahead as usual.
There is, however, uncertainty around one other key health service publication - the quarterly financial figures from hospitals and other trusts in England.
The regulator NHS Improvement would normally publish in late May the total deficits for trusts for the three months ending in March.
These are especially important as they cover the final quarter of the financial year and so give the full year total.
The state of NHS finances is a political hot potato and these figures are sure to generate more heated debate. But will they be published during the campaign?
Unlike pre-announced official statistics, the precise date for the NHS Improvement financial data is not confirmed until close to the chosen publication date.
I am told there is a debate at a high level of the NHS over whether they should be released, as would be expected, a couple of weeks before polling day in June.
There is a delicate balance to be struck between the public's right to see normally published information from autonomous NHS bodies and the need to take on board the sensitivities of a campaign.
Some delicate decisions have to be made.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39695598
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Target Somalia: The new scramble for Africa? - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Many different countries are trying to get a toehold in Somalia as it slowly emerges from chaos.
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Africa
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I know some rather annoying crows in the Somali port town of Berbera. Every morning, as I eat my breakfast by the beach, they swoop down and steal my bread, my jam, even my butter.
Then they fly back up to their perches on a tall metal fence. They look like sentries, their black feathers gleaming, beaks curved and sharp.
"The Russians brought those birds," an elderly Somali tells me. He shows me the giant site of the old Soviet military base, the still-functioning runway they built during the Cold War to counter US influence in the Horn of Africa.
At more than 4km (2.5 miles) in length, it's one of the longest on the continent.
Fast-forward nearly half a century and, once again, Berbera, now part of the self-declared republic of Somaliland, is full of chatter about military bases.
That is because a deal has just been struck for the United Arab Emirates to build a facility there. There is talk of MPs being bribed handsomely to accept it.
Some Somalis feel this is part of yet another effort to colonise their country. They have even started a social media campaign - #UAEHandsOffSomalia.
The Emirates already have a base in Eritrea, just up the coast, which is used to conduct war against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, a short way across the sea.
Travel in the other direction and you hit a huge Turkish base stretching along the beach south of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Engineers working on its final touches tell me it's going to be Turkey's largest overseas military training camp.
The base is just a small part of Turkey's massive involvement in the country, which started in 2011 during the first famine of the 21st Century. Somalia is an eccentric choice for a gateway into Africa but, like other foreign powers, Turkey wants influence, prestige and economic gain.
It sometimes feels like Mogadishu is a Turkish colony. As soon as you land at the airport, red and white Turkish flags seem to outnumber the sky blue Somali ones.
Many of the staff at the glistening new Turkish-built terminal come from Turkey. They tell me they do not like living in Somalia - it is too hot and there are too many explosions.
Talk to the United Nations and to what, in development jargon, are called Somalia's "traditional donors" - in other words, the US and Europe - and they say, fairly diplomatically, that although they appreciate the efforts of the "newcomers", there is a lack of co-ordination.
Too many countries are training too many different sections of the Somali security forces, which are already fractured and have a tendency to fight each other almost as much as they fight the local partners of al-Qaeda and so-called Islamic State.
I also get the sense that they are a tiny bit envious of all the kudos countries such as Turkey, Qatar and the UAE get for rebuilding Mogadishu and flying in supplies for people affected by the current drought.
"They are small fry doing highly visible projects," one Western diplomat tells me in his base inside the heavily protected international airport. "We do far more but we prefer not to shout about it."
America in particular has good reason not to show off about its activities in Somalia, which include drone attacks and vast amounts of financial assistance.
The 1993 helicopter downings in Mogadishu shocked and angered the US
It cannot forget Black Hawk Down, when its troops withdrew in humiliation after a Somali militia shot down two of its helicopters in Mogadishu in 1993, dragging naked bodies of US servicemen through jeering crowds.
At times, Somalia seems like a vast international marketplace with foreign diplomats, private security companies and a few bold businessmen coming to ply their wares.
There is vast profit to be made in securing and rebuilding a broken country that has come top of the "failed states" list for several years in a row. Plus there's oil, minerals, fish, livestock and a fabulously strategic location.
The regional powerhouse, Ethiopia, is not at all happy about Somalia's new friends, especially those from the Gulf. It sees Egypt behind all of this, plotting reprisals for the giant dams Ethiopia is building, which Egypt fears may starve it of waters from the Nile.
Pessimists see real danger in this geopolitical realignment. They fear a war, with Somalia and Eritrea, emboldened by their new Gulf allies, taking on Ethiopia. More conflict in an already volatile region would threaten the global economy. Most of Europe and Asia's maritime trade, worth about $700bn (£550bn) a year, goes through the narrow Bab-el-Mandeb strait between Eritrea and Yemen.
The optimists see opportunity, with a thriving Red Sea zone opening up new economic partnerships and giving landlocked Ethiopia increased access to desperately needed ports.
Somalis are worried about unintended consequences. Just like the US, which in 1993 saw a well-meaning humanitarian effort turn into a humiliating nightmare, they say all this friendship from the Gulf is going to end in trouble.
"Look at the Taliban of tomorrow," says a Somali friend, pointing towards neatly dressed children in the playground of a Saudi-funded school. "A new Cold War is being fought on our land, and one side, the West, doesn't even know it."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-39654795
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Newcastle United 4-1 Preston North End - BBC Sport
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2017-04-24
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Newcastle United secure an immediate return to the Premier League with a convincing home win over 10-man Preston.
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Last updated on .From the section Football
Newcastle United secured an immediate return to the Premier League with a convincing home victory over Preston.
Christian Atsu put the Magpies 2-1 up at half-time after Jordan Hugill had cancelled out an Ayoze Perez opener.
On a tense evening at St James' Park, Newcastle nerves were settled when Preston's Paul Gallagher was sent off for handling on the line and Matt Ritchie scored the resulting penalty.
Perez got his second from close range to send Newcastle up with Brighton.
• None Listen: 'Newcastle can't be loyal to the players who won promotion'
• None How Newcastle won promotion - relive the action as it happened
Rafael Benitez's side had taken only one point from their previous three matches, but their late-season wobble was not punished by their closest rivals.
Defeats for Reading and Huddersfield on Saturday left Newcastle needing one more win to guarantee a top-two finish.
Nerves were evident among the players and the crowd, which was in excess of 50,000, until Ritchie converted his spot-kick to stretch Newcastle's advantage against 10-man Preston with 25 minutes to play.
The hosts took advantage of poor Preston defending for all four goals, with Perez netting twice from corners and Atsu finishing a counter-attack in first-half stoppage time after North End had lost possession in midfield.
Benitez had made a huge impression on Newcastle supporters in his two-month stint at St James' Park, despite being unable to save the Magpies from dropping out of the Premier League at the end of last season.
He was widely expected to leave a club destined for the Championship - he was, after all, a former Champions League winner with Liverpool and had been in charge of Spanish giants Real Madrid only two months before replacing Steve McClaren.
However, instead of activating the break clause allowing him to leave Newcastle in the event of relegation, the Spaniard chose to sign a three-year contract.
"The love I could feel from the fans was a big influence for me," said Benitez in May 2016, upon signing his new deal.
"This is a huge club and I wanted to be part of the great future I can see for Newcastle United. The main thing for me is that I have assurances that we will have a strong team - a winning team."
Benitez told BBC Newcastle after the match: "I have to congratulate the players, the staff, everyone here in the club and city.
"In the end it was a very difficult task because it's a very difficult division and we had to keep going and pushing. There are a lot of things you cannot control but in the end we are where we wanted to be.
"This day is massive because everyone said at the beginning you have to go straight up. You know from experience it's not easy for any team, especially when you go down and have to change half the squad.
"I think it's a really important achievement for everyone involved because you have to keep strong mentally and keep going for so many months."
Newcastle forward Aleksandar Mitrovic, who had a number of chances to add to the scoreline against Preston, said: "Trust me, this team is really special. That's the reason why we made it in the end.
"I didn't believe when they told me this league was so hard, but for me this league, physically, is harder than the Premier League.
"We still have a chance to win the league but the most important thing is next year we have Premier League football here."
Benitez was backed extensively in the transfer market and more than £50m was spent as one of the most expensive squads in Championship history was assembled.
Among the incomings were striker Dwight Gayle and winger Ritchie, who cost a combined £22m from Crystal Palace and Bournemouth respectively and have repaid their sizeable transfer fees with 34 league goals between them this term.
Newcastle recouped all of that outlay and more with the sales of high-profile players such as Moussa Sissoko, Georginio Wijnaldum and Andros Townsend to Premier League clubs.
As for those who stayed following relegation, they have also played their part in Newcastle's success.
Jonjo Shelvey, an England international as recently as November 2015, has featured in every league match he has been available for this season and been one of the team's main creative forces in midfield.
Newcastle secured promotion this term with two games to spare, but they will not match the achievements of the last Magpies side to go up from the second tier in 2009-10.
They had been relegated in 2009 with the club's record goalscorer Alan Shearer in caretaker charge - and began 2009-10 with Chris Hughton as caretaker manager.
After a positive start to the season, Hughton was given his first permanent managerial role in October and he led Newcastle to the title with 102 points from their 46 games - 23 points more than third-placed Nottingham Forest.
There was little investment in new players but the majority of the squad from the previous season remained. Captain Kevin Nolan led by example, scoring 17 league goals from midfield, a tally matched by emerging striker Andy Carroll.
Although promotion to the top flight has once again been achieved at the first opportunity, the Championship title is likely to elude Newcastle this time around.
Leaders Brighton - now managed by Hughton - will be crowned champions if they win either of their final two league matches.
• None Attempt missed. Aleksandar Mitrovic (Newcastle United) header from the centre of the box is too high.
• None Attempt saved. Yoan Gouffran (Newcastle United) right footed shot from the centre of the box is saved in the bottom left corner. Assisted by Daryl Murphy.
• None Attempt blocked. Aleksandar Mitrovic (Newcastle United) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Paul Dummett.
• None Attempt missed. Aleksandar Mitrovic (Newcastle United) right footed shot from outside the box is just a bit too high from a direct free kick. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39618289
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Barcelona Open: Dan Evans and Kyle Edmund through to second round - BBC Sport
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2017-04-24
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Dan Evans claims his first ATP Tour win on Clay at the Barcelona Open as fellow Briton Kyle Edmund also progresses to the second round.
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Last updated on .From the section Tennis
Britain's Dan Evans claimed his first ATP Tour win on clay to reach the second round of the Barcelona Open, as compatriot Kyle Edmund also progressed.
World number 43 Evans took a final-set tie-break against Thiago Monteiro to triumph 6-7 (4-7) 6-2 7-6 (7-2).
The 26-year-old's only two previous wins on the surface at tour level came in Davis Cup dead rubbers.
Edmund, the world number 42, brushed aside Frenchman Jeremy Chardy 6-3 6-4 and faces Austria's Dominic Thiem next.
Evans will play Mischa Zverev, who beat Andy Murray at this year's Australian Open, in the second round.
His most recent Davis Cup win on clay came earlier this month as GB lost to France in the quarter-finals.
He was outplayed by Chardy in his first Davis Cup singles rubber, before beating Julien Benneteau as the match descended into chaos.
Much of the build-up to the tie focused on Evans' inexperience on clay, and dislike for the surface.
British number two Edmund, who also lost to Chardy in the singles at the Davis Cup, exacted revenge on the world number 70 with a straight-set victory in Barcelona.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/tennis/39696317
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Lib Dem membership tops 100,000 after snap election call - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Leader Tim Farron says the party is the only one opposing Theresa May's "hard Brexit".
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UK Politics
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Lib Dem membership has passed the 100,000 mark following a surge of new joiners since Theresa May announced a snap general election.
The party said it has signed up 12,500 new members since last week - and is expected to reach its highest total in its history "within days".
Leader Tim Farron said Lib Dems are the only party opposing Mrs May's "hard Brexit agenda".
He insisted the party would not enter a coalition with the Tories or Labour.
The biggest membership number the Lib Dems have had since their formation was 101,768 members in 1994.
The recent flurry of interest means more than 50,000 members have joined since last year's European referendum - and more than 67,500 since the party's electoral low point, at the 2015 general election.
Mr Farron, who pledged to build the membership to 100,000 when he became leader in 2015, said reaching the goal "tells us that there's an appetite for change in British politics and Liberal Democrats are the vehicle for that change".
He said: "People want a strong opposition to Theresa May's hard Brexit agenda and the Liberal Democrats are the only party challenging them up and down the country."
In an appeal to would-be supporters, he said: "This election is your chance to change the direction of our country. If you want to stop a disastrous hard Brexit, if you want to keep Britain in the single market, if you want a strong opposition to fight for an open, tolerant and united Britain - this is your chance."
The Lib Dem leader also repeated his insistence that there are "no circumstances whatsoever" that the party will go in to a coalition with the Conservatives or Labour after the 8 June election, given the current approaches of those two parties.
He also dismissed an informal arrangement to offer his party's support on budget measures and other key votes to help a minority Tory or Labour administration.
On Sunday he told ITV's Peston on Sunday: "What Britain needs in this election is clarity and a contest. Theresa May has called this election because she believes it'll be a coronation.
"The Liberal Democrats are determined to make it a contest with a clear alternative position, and I don't want people thinking a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a proxy for anything else."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39694417
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Arsenal 2-1 Manchester City - BBC Sport
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2017-04-24
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Alexis Sanchez's extra-time winner sees Arsenal beat Manchester City at Wembley to reach a third FA Cup final in four seasons.
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Last updated on .From the section FA Cup
Alexis Sanchez's scrambled extra-time winner secured Arsenal an FA Cup final date with Chelsea - and ensured Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola will end a season without a trophy for the first time in his coaching career.
Sanchez settled a contentious semi-final 11 minutes into the extra period after Manchester City failed to clear Mesut Ozil's free-kick.
Arsenal showed great resilience to come from behind - and eased the pressure on manager Arsene Wenger - after Sergio Aguero raced clear of Nacho Monreal to put City ahead in the 62nd minute.
Monreal made amends with the equaliser 11 minutes later as he drilled in Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain's cross at the far post - but City were left nursing a serious sense of injustice after this disappointing defeat.
They had a goal wrongly ruled out in the first half when Leroy Sane's cross was adjudged to have gone out before Aguero and Raheem Sterling combined to turn it into the net, while Yaya Toure and Fernandinho hit the woodwork after the break.
It left Arsenal victorious and Wenger aiming for a record seventh FA Cup triumph.
• None Analysis: This is now Pep's biggest moment as Man City manager - Jenas
Wenger gets his statement of intent
Wenger's future - and the lack of clarity surrounding it - has only been brought into sharper focus by Arsenal's recent fall outside the Champions League places.
The manager needed a statement, as did his team, to ease the growing disquiet among Arsenal fans at the prospect that he will extend his stay as manager.
Arsenal's Wembley win against Manchester City will not ease the concerns in the minds of the doubters but he can point to the victory, and the manner in which it was achieved, as evidence that he could yet be the man to take the club forward.
Victory in the final on 27 May would strengthen his and Arsenal's case for continuity, but for now there was much for the Frenchman and his players to treasure about this triumph.
Wenger persisted with an unfamiliar three-man defensive system comprising youngster Rob Holding, Gabriel and Laurent Koscielny and set up his team to deliver an uncharacteristically stubborn performance.
Arsenal rode their luck at times - but Wenger will take that all day.
Wenger's players have been accused of not playing for him in recent months. No such accusation could be levelled here as they dug deep for victory.
The Gunners' embattled manager pumped his fists towards the skies at the final whistle and beamed with delight - he may yet achieve glory amid the worst discontent of his reign.
Manchester City will argue long and hard that their chances of reaching the final were sabotaged by a first-half decision that saw a good goal ruled out.
Referee's assistant Steve Child judged that Sane's cross had gone behind before Aguero turned it back at the far post and then Sterling made sure. Replays suggested the ball had not gone out and City were the victims of an injustice.
City will also feel Lady Luck deserted them as they lost playmaker David Silva to injury early on and saw those efforts from Toure and Fernandinho hit the woodwork.
In the final reckoning, they must also accept the brutal truth that once more they enjoyed superiority in possession and territory but could not find the ruthless touch.
Guardiola, arguably football's most celebrated coach, was brought to Manchester City to lift them to another level - and on that basis his first season without a trophy in a glittering managerial career will be regarded by many as a failure.
He has found it more difficult than he may have imagined after the seamless successes of his years in charge of Barcelona and Bayern Munich.
Manchester City named an unchanged line-up under Pep Guardiola for the first time, in what was his 50th game in charge. The three players who have started the most often are David Silva, Raheem Sterling and Kevin De Bruyne - 38 times each. Another three players have started just once for Guardiola - Joe Hart, Tosin Adarabioyo and Angelino.
He must now address the problems that have undermined City this season, particularly uncertainty over the goalkeeper position, where his decision to replace Joe Hart with Claudio Bravo has been unsuccessful, and also sort out an uncertain and ageing defence.
Guardiola's main priority now is securing a top-four place and getting into the Champions League, starting with Thursday's derby against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium.
Failure to achieve that objective is unthinkable.
• None This was Manchester City's first FA Cup semi-final defeat since 1932, also against Arsenal - the Citizens had won eight consecutively before this defeat.
• None Alexis Sanchez is Arsenal's top scorer in games at Wembley, with four goals - he overtook Marc Overmars and Ian Wright on three.
• None Sanchez has now been involved in more goals than any other Premier League player in all competitions this season (38, 24 goals and 14 assists).
• None Sergio Aguero has scored 12 goals in his past 12 matches for Manchester City in all competitions.
• None It was Aguero's second goal at Wembley, having netted for City against Chelsea in the FA Cup semi-final in April 2013.
• None Nacho Monreal's last two goals for Arsenal have come in the FA Cup, both against Manchester clubs (having scored against Manchester United in March 2015).
• None Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain has six assists in his past 10 FA Cup starts for Arsenal. In all competitions this season, only Mesut Ozil (10) and Alexis Sanchez (14) have more assists than Oxlade-Chamberlain (nine).
Manchester City return to Premier League action with a home derby against neighbours United on Thursday. Arsenal are at home to Leicester in the league on Wednesday.
• None Offside, Manchester City. Jesús Navas tries a through ball, but Kelechi Iheanacho is caught offside.
• None Attempt missed. Yaya Touré (Manchester City) right footed shot from outside the box misses to the right. Assisted by Gaël Clichy.
• None Nicolás Otamendi (Manchester City) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.
• None Attempt missed. Kevin De Bruyne (Manchester City) right footed shot from the right side of the box is close, but misses to the left. Assisted by Jesús Navas.
• None Attempt missed. Kelechi Iheanacho (Manchester City) header from the centre of the box misses to the right. Assisted by Kevin De Bruyne with a cross following a corner.
• None Attempt blocked. Fabian Delph (Manchester City) left footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Assisted by Kevin De Bruyne.
• None Attempt blocked. Yaya Touré (Manchester City) right footed shot from outside the box is blocked.
• None Attempt missed. Fabian Delph (Manchester City) left footed shot from outside the box misses to the right. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39612222
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Geeks v government: The battle over public key cryptography - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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The technology which underpins the internet's security has always been disputed.
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Business
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Two graduate students stood silently beside a lectern, listening as their professor presented their work to a conference.
Usually, the students would want the glory. And they had, just a couple of days previously. But their families talked them out of it.
A few weeks earlier, the Stanford researchers had received an unsettling letter from a shadowy US government agency. If they publicly discussed their findings, the letter said, it would be deemed legally equivalent to exporting nuclear arms to a hostile foreign power.
Stanford's lawyer said he thought they could defend any case by citing the First Amendment's protection of free speech. But the university could cover legal costs only for professors. So the students were persuaded to keep schtum.
What was this information that US spooks considered so dangerous? Were the students proposing to read out the genetic code of smallpox or lift the lid on some shocking presidential conspiracy?
No: they were planning to give the International Symposium on Information Theory an update on their work on public key cryptography.
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy highlights the inventions, ideas and innovations which have helped create the economic world we live in.
The year was 1977. If the government agency had managed to silence academic cryptographers, they might have prevented the internet as we know it.
To be fair, that wasn't their plan. The World Wide Web was years away. And the agency's head, Adm Bobby Ray Inman, was genuinely puzzled about the academics' motives.
He felt cryptography - the study of sending secret messages - was of practical use only to spies and criminals.
Three decades earlier, other brilliant academics had helped win the war by breaking the Enigma code, enabling the Allies to read secret Nazi communications.
Now Stanford researchers were freely disseminating information that might help adversaries in future wars to encode their messages in ways the US couldn't crack.
His concern was reasonable. Throughout history, the development of cryptography has been driven by conflict.
Two thousand years ago, Julius Caesar sent encrypted messages to far-flung outposts of the Roman empire - he'd arrange in advance that recipients would simply shift the alphabet by some predetermined number.
For example, "jowbef Csjubjo" - if you substitute each letter with the preceding one - reads "invade Britain".
Deciphering the Enigma code gave a significant strategic boost to the Allied campaign in WW2
That kind of thing wouldn't have taken the Enigma codebreakers long to crack. Today, encryption is typically numerical: first, convert the letters into numbers and then perform some complicated mathematics on them.
The recipient needs to know how to unscramble the message by performing the same mathematics in reverse. That's known as symmetrical encryption. It's like securing a message with a padlock, having already provided a key.
The Stanford researchers wondered whether encryption could be asymmetrical. Could you send an encrypted message to a stranger you'd never met before which only they could decode?
Before 1976 most experts would have said it was impossible. Then Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published a breakthrough paper. It was Hellman who, a year later, would defy the threat of prosecution by presenting his students' work.
That same year, three researchers at MIT - Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman - turned the Diffie-Hellman theory into a practical technique, called RSA encryption, after their surnames.
These academics had realised that some mathematics are a lot easier to perform in one direction than another.
Take a very large prime number - one that's not divisible by anything other than itself. Then take another. Multiply them together. That gives you an extremely large "semi-prime" number, one divisible only by two prime numbers.
It turns out it's exceptionally hard for someone else to take that semi-prime number and figure out which two prime numbers were multiplied together to produce it.
In effect, an individual publishes his semi-prime number - his public key - for anyone to see. And the RSA algorithm allows others to encrypt messages with that number, in such a way that they can be decrypted only by someone who knows the two prime numbers that produced it.
It's as if you're distributing open padlocks for the use of anyone who wants to send you a message which only you can unlock. They don't need to have your private key to protect the message and send it to you.
They just need to snap shut one of your padlocks around it.
In theory, it's possible for someone else to pick your padlock by figuring out the right combination of prime numbers. But it takes unfeasible amounts of computing power.
In the early 2000s, RSA Laboratories published some semi-primes and offered cash prizes to anyone who could figure out the primes that produced them.
Someone did scoop a $20,000 (£16,000) reward - but only after 80 computers worked on the number non-stop for five months. Larger prizes for longer numbers went unclaimed.
No wonder Adm Inman fretted about this knowledge reaching America's enemies.
But Prof Hellman had understood something the spy chief had not.
The world was changing and electronic communication was becoming more important. Many private sector transactions would be impossible without secure communication.
You take advantage of this every time you send a confidential work email, or buy something online, or use a banking app, or visit any website that starts with "https".
Without public key cryptography, anyone would be able to read your messages, see your passwords and copy your credit card details.
Public key cryptography also enables websites to prove their authenticity - without it, there'd be many more phishing scams. The internet would be a very different place and far less economically useful.
To his credit, the spy chief soon accepted that the professor had a point and no prosecutions followed. Indeed, the two developed an unlikely friendship.
But Adm Inman was right that public key cryptography would complicate his job.
Encryption is just as useful to drug dealers, child pornographers and terrorists as it is to you and me paying for something on eBay.
From a government perspective, perhaps the ideal situation would be if encryption can't be easily cracked by ordinary folk or criminals - thereby securing the internet's economic advantages - but government can still see everything that's going on.
Edward Snowden leaked tens of thousands of documents revealing mass surveillance by the US and UK governments
The agency Adm Inman headed was called the National Security Agency (NSA). In 2013, Edward Snowden released secret documents showing just how the NSA was pursuing that goal.
The debate Snowden started rumbles on. If we can't restrict encryption only to the good guys, what powers should the state have to snoop - and with what safeguards?
Meanwhile, another technology threatens to make public key cryptography altogether useless: quantum computing.
By exploiting the strange ways in which matter behaves at a quantum level, quantum computers could potentially perform some calculations significantly more quickly than regular computers.
One of those calculations is taking a large semi-prime number and figuring out which two prime numbers you'd have to multiply to get it. If that becomes easy, the internet becomes an open book.
Quantum computing is still in its early days.
But 40 years after Diffie and Hellman laid the groundwork for internet security, academic cryptographers are now racing to maintain it.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39341663
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World Championship 2017: Mark Selby beats Xiao Guodong - best shots - BBC Sport
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2017-04-24
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Watch five of the best shots from Mark Selby's 13-6 win over Xiao Guodong 13-6 to reach to reach the World Championship quarter-finals.
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Watch five of the best shots from Mark Selby's 13-6 win over Xiao Guodong 13-6 to reach to reach the World Championship quarter-finals.
Available to UK users only.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/snooker/39698776
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Anthony Joshua v Wladimir Klitschko: 'Father Time' has caught up with Ukrainian - BBC Sport
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2017-04-24
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Briton Anthony Joshua says "Father Time has caught up with Wladimir Klitschko" as the two prepare for Saturday's heavyweight world title bout.
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Last updated on .From the section Boxing
Coverage: Live radio commentary on BBC Radio 5 live and text commentary on the BBC Sport website and app from 21:00 BST.
Briton Anthony Joshua says "Father Time has caught up with Wladimir Klitschko" as the two prepare for Saturday's heavyweight world title bout.
Klitschko, 41, lost his heavyweight title to Tyson Fury in November 2015 - his first defeat in 11 years.
The Ukrainian will fight Joshua for his IBF title and the vacant WBA Super and IBO heavyweight belts at Wembley.
"He has to pass on the baton. I do hear it a lot, he's too old, he's faded," Joshua, 27, told BBC Radio 5 live.
"But then I try and flip it. Even if he is too old, which I think he is, he's in a good place mentally and that's a dangerous fighter.
"Timing is everything and maybe Father Time has caught up with the former champ."
• None Hear more from Joshua speaking to BBC Radio 5 live
• None Listen to the full 5 live Boxing with Costello and Bunce - Joshua v Klitschko preview
• None Wladimir Klitschko: Anthony Joshua will be 'facing Mount Everest' for heavyweight title
Rob McCracken, who has trained Joshua since his days as an amateur, said the Ukrainian's age was a factor in his team accepting the fight.
"I'd be a liar if I said it wasn't the case. I think the last couple of fights he hasn't looked at his best," said McCracken.
"Timing is huge in boxing. Klitschko is coming to the end of his reign as a heavyweight on the planet.
"We are rolling the dice with Anthony in this situation. It's a huge step up in terms of experience and the calibre of the opponent but we think the timing is right."
In 2014, Joshua visited Klitschko's training camp to help the Ukrainian prepare for his bout with Bulgarian Kubrat Pulev, which he won.
And Joshua, unbeaten in 18 fights since turning professional in 2013, believes he has come a long way since the two last met three years ago.
"I am a completely different person now. I'm at a place now where he's obsessed with beating me and I'm confident," he said.
"I'm not a gym fighter. If I'm depending on his age and he's depending on the sparring from years ago then he will definitely get it wrong.
"He's got to come across a young lion who studies the game.
"Whatever type of fight he wants to fight, if it goes down the route of us two swinging until the cows come home, I don't think I will back out.
"My obligation first and foremost is to make him look like a novice."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/boxing/39690692
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Munch inspired by 'screaming clouds' - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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A new theory may explain the background to one of the most famous works of art ever produced.
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Science & Environment
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Edvard Munch's The Scream: One of the world's most famous works of art
Norwegian scientists have put forward a new theory to explain the inspiration behind one of the most famous works of art ever produced.
The Scream (1892), by Edvard Munch, depicts a figure holding its face, which is making an agonised expression.
But look above this individual and the sky is full of colourful wavy lines.
The researchers say these are probably Mother of Pearl Clouds - rare phenomena that would have had a big impact on anyone who saw them for the first time.
"Today the general public has a lot more scientific information but you can imagine back in his day, he'd probably never seen these clouds before," said Helene Muri from the University of Oslo.
"As an artist, they no doubt could have made quite an impression on him."
Dr Muri was speaking here in Vienna at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly.
Mother Of Pearl Clouds seen at Lørenskog, Norway, in 2014
"I went along the road with two friends – the sun set
I stopped, leant against the fence, tired to death - watched over the
flaming clouds as blood and sword the city - the blue-black fjord and the city
- My friends went away - I stood there shivering from dread - and
The unusual sky formation in The Scream has previously been ascribed to volcanic effects.
Just nine years before Munch's first rendering of The Scream, Krakatoa famously blew its top.
This eruption in what is now Indonesia was one of the biggest such events in recorded history, and its sulphurous emission circled the globe to generate some spectacular sunsets.
But the Norwegian group argues that the wavy shapes painted by Munch are a far better match for what are termed Polar Stratospheric (Type II) Clouds; or as they are also sometimes called - Nacreous Clouds.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Helene Muri: "They would have made quite an impression on the artist"
Their rarity comes from the very particular conditions needed in their formation, at altitudes between 15km and 20km.
These requirements include not only very cold winter air, down at minus 80-85C, but a good degree of humidity as well.
Atmospheric flow up and over mountains helps because it can inject moisture from the troposphere into the stratosphere, followed by a process called adiabatic cooling that can then greatly reduce air temperatures.
"That's when you can get very small ice crystals of about one micrometer," explained Dr Muri.
"These clouds are very thin and are best seen just before sunrise and after sunset, when the sun is below the horizon.
"You get these very distinct colourings, from the combination of scattering, diffraction and internal refraction of the sunlight on these tiny ice crystals."
Dr Muri has lived in the Oslo area for 25 years. She says she has seen the iridescent clouds only once with her own eyes - and she knows precisely when and what to look for.
Such phenomena could have taken Munch completely by surprise, she believes.
The background to The Scream was Oslo fjord, but what was the inspiration?
The team first started investigating the possible link between the unusual meteorology and The Scream when consultant Svein Fikke observed a display of the clouds in 2014.
He managed to take a series of stunning photos, and then started delving deeper into the story.
Some very rare cloud types are reported to be increasing in frequency and distribution, perhaps due to climate change.
An example would be Noctilucent Clouds. These are the highest clouds on Earth, forming at altitudes of 80km and more. There is evidence to suggest they are becoming more visible at lower latitudes than used to be the case.
It is conceivable similar trends might occur with Nacreous Clouds, Dr Muri said, although no statistics can justify such a statement yet.
"We know that the troposphere is warming and expanding while the stratosphere above is compressing and cooling. So, the temperature characteristics of minus 80C and below might become commonplace in the future," she speculated.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39697256
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The Holocaust: Who are the missing million? - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Researchers have so far named nearly five million victims, but now they are in a race against time.
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Middle East
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Two-thirds of European Jewry was murdered by the Nazis
Giselle Cycowicz (born Friedman) remembers her father, Wolf, as a warm, kind and religious man. "He was a scholar," she says, "he always had a book open, studying Talmud [compendium of Jewish law], but he was also a businessman and he looked after his family."
Before the war, the Friedmans lived a happy, comfortable life in Khust, a Czechoslovak town with a large Jewish population on the fringes of Hungary. All that changed after 1939, when pro-Nazi Hungarian troops, and later Nazi Germany, invaded, and all the town's Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
Giselle last saw her father, "strong and healthy", hours after the family arrived at the Birkenau section of the death camp. Wolf had been selected for a workforce but a fellow prisoner under orders would not let her go to him.
"That would have been my chance to maybe kiss him the last time," Giselle, now 89, says, her voice cracking with emotion.
Giselle, her mother and a sister survived, somehow, five months in "the hell" of Auschwitz. She later learned that in October 1944 "a skeletal man" had passed by the women's camp and relayed a message to anyone alive in there from Khust.
"Tell them just now 200 men were brought back from the coal mine. Tell them that tomorrow we won't be here anymore." The man was Wolf Friedman. He was gassed the next day.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, some 900,000 Jews were murdered on arrival
Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices during World War Two. In many cases entire towns' Jewish populations were wiped out, with no survivors to bear witness - part of the Nazis' plan for the total annihilation of European Jewry.
Since 1954, Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem ("A Memorial and a Name"), has been working to recover the names of all the victims, and to date has managed to identify some 4.7 million.
"Every name is very important to us," says Dr Alexander Avram, director of Yad Vashem's Hall of Names and the Central Database of Shoah [Holocaust] Victims' Names.
"Every new name we can add to our database is a victory against the Nazis, against the intent of the Nazis to wipe out the Jewish people. Every new name is a small victory against oblivion."
In Western Europe, the Nazis kept records of victims, such as this Frankfurt to Theresienstadt deportation list
The institution, a sprawling complex of buildings, trees and gardens on the western slopes of Mount Herzl, gathers details about the victims in two ways: through information from those with knowledge of the deceased, and archive sources, ranging from Nazi deportation lists to Jewish school yearbooks.
Today Giselle has come to dedicate her father's name, nearly 73 years after he was killed, a small piece in a vast jigsaw.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. "I never got the chance to kiss my father goodbye"
She is helped by trained staff through the process of recording Wolf's details on a Page of Testimony, a one-page form for documenting biographical information about the deceased, such as where they lived before the War, their occupation and the members of their family, and, if available, a photograph.
"Only two-thirds of the way down do we ask where they were during the war and what happened to them," Cynthia Wroclawski, deputy director of Yad Vashem's Archives Division, points out.
"We're interested in seeing a person as a person and who they were before they became a victim."
Details about the lives of millions of victims are held in Yad Vashem's Hall of Names
It is, the institution says, a kind of paper tombstone. So far Yad Vashem has collected 2.7m Pages of Testimony.
Each is stored in black boxes, each containing 300 pages - 9,000 boxes in all. They are kept in climate-controlled conditions on shelves surrounding a central installation, a 30ft-high conical lined with the faces of men, women and children who were murdered, rising up towards the sky.
Here in the Hall of Names groups of visitors pass through in quiet contemplation. There is space on the shelves for 11,000 more boxes - or 6m names in all.
With the last survivors dying out, Yad Vashem is facing a race against time to prevent more than a million unidentified victims disappearing without a trace.
This is apparent in the decreasing number of Pages of Testimony it receives - down from at least 2,000 per month five years ago to about 1,600 per month currently.
The memorial is trying to raise awareness, including among Holocaust survivors who have not yet come forward. For decades, for many of them the experience was still too painful to talk about.
"It's quite a common occurrence, not only in Holocaust survivors but survivors of prolonged and extreme trauma in childhood," says Dr Martin Auerbach, Clinical Director at Amcha, a support service in Jerusalem for Holocaust survivors.
There are spaces on the shelves for a possible six million Pages of Testimony
That began to change, he says, after about 30 or 40 years, when many survivors started talking about what happened, not with their children but with their inquisitive grandchildren. Dr Auerbach sees the Names Recovery Project as a valuable part of the healing process.
"Filling out this page of information saying this was my father, mother, grandfather, nephews and nieces - you cannot bury your relatives who perished but you can remember them in a way that will commemorate them forever, so this is very important and also therapeutic for many survivors."
While Yad Vashem has made great strides in identifying victims from Western and Central Europe - about 95% have now been named - far fewer names have been uncovered in Nazi-occupied areas of Eastern Europe, where about 4.5m Jews were murdered.
This is because while there was an organised, official process of arrest and deportation further west, in the east whole communities were marched off and massacred without any such formalities.
Only about half the victims of the Babi Yar massacre have so far been named
An estimated 1.5m Jews alone were shot to death by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) in what has become known as the Holocaust by Bullets, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
In Babi Yar, in Ukraine, for instance, of the 33,000 Jews from Kiev and its surroundings who were slaughtered in a ravine in September 1941 in the largest massacre of its kind, about half are yet to be identified.
Others not murdered by the Einsatzgruppen died, without a trace, from starvation or exhaustion in ghettos and labour camps, or were killed in nearby extermination camps, where they had been herded without any kind of processing.
Yad Vashem is working with Jewish organisations in those countries to try to reach remaining survivors in the former Soviet Union, where the Holocaust was not officially commemorated, and who may have little awareness of the memorial's existence.
It is a massive and often complex task. The memorial holds some 205m Holocaust-related documents, which are examined meticulously in the search for names.
"There is a lot of documentation where there are names that are very scattered," says Dr Avram. "Names mentioned in a letter here or a report there. This can be very labour intensive. Sometimes you have to go through thousands and thousands of pages just to retrieve a few dozen names."
The difficulty is compounded by the fact that sources can be in 30-40 different languages, most are handwritten and can be in different scripts, such as Latin, Hebrew and Cyrillic. "Our staff not only need to be linguists but they need to know calligraphy," says Dr Avram, himself a language expert.
Pages remembering victims have been filled in more than 20 languages - such was the scale of the Nazis' reach
One of the biggest gaps is with children, of whom some 1.5 million were murdered in the Holocaust. Only about half have been identified.
"It's one of the saddest things," says Dr Avram. "We have reports where parents are named with say three or four children, unnamed. They were little children and people just don't remember."
The aim is to turn them from anonymous statistics into human beings again, like seven-year-old Edward-Edik Tonkonogi, from Satanov in Ukraine. His childish innocence and sweetness of character come across in a letter he wrote in 1941 to his parents who were travelling with a Russian theatre troupe:
Edik was murdered after the Nazis entered the town that same year. His name was later memorialised in a Page of Testimony by a relative.
As time moves on, the task of finding missing names is getting harder in some respects but easier in others. The availability of source material is greater than ever and advances in technology mean it can be a less arduous task to gather information and manipulate the data.
However, the fewer the names left to uncover, the more activity it takes to find them.
The digital age also means there are more tools at researchers' disposal than ever before. The department searching for names recently took to social media, including Facebook, in a push to reach untapped survivors. The campaign generated many new Pages of Testimony.
"When you're talking about social media you have the younger generation now understanding that those names are not in our database and trying to find out the information from their family members," says Sara Berkowitz, manager of the Names Recovery Project.
There is another significant, sometimes life-changing, outcome of the growth of the names database, which has been available online since 2004. It has led to emotional reunions of survivors who had lived their lives not knowing there was anyone else from their family left alive.
Last year two sets of families belonging to two sisters, each of whom thought the other had perished in the Holocaust, were united after a chance discovery through the Pages of Testimony. It transpired the sisters had lived out their lives just 25 minutes away from each other in northern Israel, but passed away without ever being aware.
In 2015 a pair of half-siblings who did not know the other was alive were reunited as a result of searching the database, while in 2006 a brother and sister, one living in Canada and the other in Israel, were reunited 65 years after becoming separated in their hometown in Romania.
The project has also brought to light other, unfortunate findings. Argentinean-born Claudia de Levie, whose parents fled Germany in the 1930s, believed she had lost four or five relatives in the Holocaust. A search of the database to help with her daughter's homework revealed in fact 180 family members had been killed.
Claudia de Levie lost many family members in the Holocaust, but found new living relatives
Further research however revealed through a signature on a Page of Testimony the existence of cousins of her husband, living in Hamburg. The families now speak to each other each week on Skype.
Ironically, a chief architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, lived as a fugitive in the same neighbourhood as Claudia when she was a child in Argentina, as she would later learn.
The importance of the mission to recover victims' names received global recognition in 2013 when the United Nations cultural agency, Unesco, included the collection in its Memory of the World register.
The agency lauded it as "unprecedented in human history", pointing out that the project had given rise to similar efforts in other places of genocide, such as Rwanda and Cambodia.
Manual searches of thousands of documents might yield just a few names
Despite the millions of names recorded so far, there is still a long way to go if all six million are ever to be recovered, but those behind the project remain determined.
"I personally would like that we do reach that goal, that at least among those who perished there won't be a person who remains unknown. It's our moral imperative," says Sara Berkowitz.
"Until I sit in the office and days will pass by and I won't have work to do, I'll know that we've more or less raked the universe to try to get to every name and there is no more there."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-39062221
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UKIP: Full face veils are 'barrier to integration' - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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UKIP's proposed ban on full veils worn by some Muslim women has "great public support", it claims.
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UK Politics
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UKIP's proposed ban on full veils worn by some Muslim women has "great public support", the party's deputy leader has claimed.
Peter Whittle said wearing a burka or niqab is "an absolute symbol of the subjectification of women".
UKIP wants no new Islamic schools in the state system until the Muslim community "is better integrated".
She spoke out after UKIP used a central London event to broaden its agenda beyond its successful campaign for Brexit.
The party says it wants girls at risk of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) to have annual school-based medical examinations. It also wants failure to report FGM to be made into a specific criminal offence.
Mr Whittle insisted his party wants people "to integrate properly", adding that UKIP firmly believes "a multi-ethnic society can be a harmonious and successful one if it's bound together by an overarching attachment to Britain and British identity".
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But he argued that face coverings "such as the Islamic veil are a deliberate barrier to integration - they say 'don't speak to me, I will not speak to you'," adding that they are "a potent symbol of female oppression" and a "security risk".
"When it comes to things like the veil, France has banned it, Belgium has banned it," he told the BBC. "The biggest parliamentary party in the European Parliament has recently called for an EU-wide ban on it."
Other UKIP policies unveiled ahead of the 8 June general election include:
Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party, claimed UKIP's integration agenda was "an assault on multiculturalism and an attack on Muslims - it's full throttled Islamaphobia".
"Now that the referendum has passed Nuttall's party is desperately scrabbling around for relevance and seems to have settled upon attacks on Muslims and fringe far right politics as their new home," she said.
Former Lib Dem home office minister Baroness Featherstone claimed UKIP's FGM medical checks were "horrifically heavy-handed", arguing they would "alienate the very communities we are trying to reach out to".
"We should be training our teachers and other providers such as community experts to identify those at risk and teaching children themselves that FGM is wrong and to come forward if they fear for themselves or a friend," she said.
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But Labour shadow home office minister Diane Abbott appeared to back the policy for mandatory medical checks during a Westminster Hall debate in 2014.
At the time she said: "It is a disgrace and a shame that in 2014 we cannot protect those young girls in London and other big cities. We have to face up to the need for prosecution and for routine medical examination."
Former UKIP member and donor, Arron Banks said he was not in favour of his party's proposed ban on the full face veil. "I think people have a right to their religious beliefs," he told BBC's Sunday Politics show.
"I think there are certain circumstances where if it's a security issue - maybe the airports, or public transport - it's acceptable, but I'm not in favour of curtailing people's [freedoms]."
However, he stood by the previous call he made on Twitter for a ban on Muslim immigration into the UK.
The former UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, proposed a burka ban in 2010. But the party later dropped the policy, and it did not appear in its 2015 manifesto.
Full-face veils are already banned in public in some European countries, including France.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39693154
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To Ray Davies, America is a 'beautiful but dangerous' place - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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America is "a beautiful but dangerous place," says Ray Davies, as he discusses his new album.
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Entertainment & Arts
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Ray Davies' new album contrasts the America of his childhood dreams to the reality he discovered while living in New Orleans
"Sorry, I'm chewing gum," says Ray Davies five minutes into our interview, before extracting the offending substance from his mouth.
It's a fitting interruption. We're here to talk about his latest album, Americana, which charts his love-hate relationship with the US - and there's nothing more American than chomping on a stick of Wrigley's.
Of course, our most recently-ennobled rock star is best known for his writing about England on songs like Waterloo Sunset, Muswell Hillbilly, Sunny Afternoon, Dedicated Follower of Fashion, but his obsession with the States started early.
As a schoolboy, he was captivated by black and white cowboy movies and the be-bop records his older sisters would bring home.
After receiving a guitar for his 13th birthday, he devoured records by Muddy Waters and Slim Harpo. His love affair with the blues was so strong that when he wrote The Kinks' first hit single, You Really Got Me he intended it to be "a blues song".
"Then it turned out to be a pop hit."
Somewhat disingenuously, he tells the BBC You Really Got Me was supposed to be The Kinks' only song (even though it was their third single).
"I wanted that to be a hit and then I was going to get out of town," he says.
"Unfortunately they asked me to write another one, and another one."
The star recently received a knighthood for services to music
The Kinks' success meant Ray and his younger brother Dave could finally visit the Land of the Free - but things didn't go entirely to plan, as he describes on the new album.
"They called us The Invaders, as though we came from another world," he sings. "And the man from immigration shouted out, 'Hey punk, are you a boy or a girl?'"
The band could have overcome the prejudice if they weren't already in disarray - prone to fighting on stage, and let down by a promoter who refused to pay them in cash.
Things came to a head while taping Dick Clark's TV show Where The Action Is in 1965.
"Some guy who said he worked for the TV company walked up and accused us of being late," Davies wrote in his autobiography X-Ray.
"Then he started making anti-British comments. Things like 'Just because the Beatles did it, every mop-topped, spotty-faced limey juvenile thinks he can come over here and make a career for himself.'"
A punch was thrown, and the American Federation of Musicians refused to issue the Kinks permits to perform in the US for the next four years.
"It was a terrible blow to our career," says Davies. "We couldn't tour. We couldn't play Woodstock.
"Being a bolshie 21-year-old, I said, 'Let's make records and tour the rest of the world'.
"But deep down I was really hurt, because America was the inspiration for much of our music."
The Kinks' hits included Sunny Afternoon, All Day and All of the Night and Set Me Free
When the band were finally allowed back, in 1970, they had to start from scratch, plying their trade in tiny clubs and high school gymnasiums.
"It was quite a humbling experience after being really successful before," Davies recalls.
Yet the US became the band's lifeline in the 1970s, providing adulation, success and financial reward as interest dwindled at home.
"We ended up playing Madison Square Garden in 1980, which is a sign you've made it back. So it was a 10-year programme. It was hard work but, in a strange way, we built a loyal fanbase in that time."
So perhaps it's no surprise that Davies sings "I want to make my home/Where the buffalo roam" on the title track of his new album.
Indeed, he moved to the US for several years, finding his spiritual home - and sanctuary - in New Orleans.
"I'm just another person there, which is really nice," he says. "And I fitted in with the music scene."
Living across the road from a church, he would frequently witness the city's brass band funerals, which stretch through the streets in celebration of local musicians and dignitaries at the end of their life.
But his sojourn in the city ended badly one Sunday evening in January 2004.
Davies was strolling along an unusually deserted Burgundy Street with his girlfriend Suzanne Despies.
A car pulled up alongside them, a young man got out, and demanded Despies' purse. She handed it over without any resistance, but Davies suddenly decided to give chase.
His assailant was armed, and shot Davies in the leg, breaking his femur.
"Why did I do it? That's the unanswerable question," he says.
"I've never really been the sort of person who would chase a man with a loaded gun. But I did. Foolishly, perhaps, and irresponsibly. But I did it.
"It was one of those heat of the moment situations, and I have no explanation other than that."
Americana, is based on Davies' 2013 memoir of the same name
He ended up in hospital, heavily drugged and, for the first 24 hours, an anonymous "John Doe".
The experience informed a song - Mystery Room - in which the star faces his mortality for the first time: "My brain's hit a brick wall / My body's in free-fall."
It's partnered with another track, Rock 'N' Roll Cowboys, which equates ageing rock stars with gunslingers about to hang up their holsters.
"Rock and roll cowboys, where do you go now?" asks Davies. "Do you give up the chase like an old retiree? Or do you stare in the face of new adversaries?"
It's a question that's flummoxed many of his 60s contemporaries. Has he ever contemplated giving up?
"Every writer who's written and toured for more than five years reaches a point where they think, 'Do I keep going?' or, 'Where do I go next?'" he says.
"Every day I wake up and say, 'I love writing songs but do I want to do this?' and the answer is I do.
For the new record, he sought the help of alt-country stalwarts The Jayhawks, whose deft arrangements provide a rich backdrop to Davies' wry and incisive lyrics.
Was it challenging, I wonder, for him to walk in and take charge of an already-established band?
"It was a diplomatic situation," he says... well, diplomatically.
"At first, they were trying to sound English in their backing vocals, but I deterred them from that.
"The reason I picked them is because they just play the songs. They don't embellish too much unless I ask them to, which is great."
The star hopes to tour with the Jayhawks later this year. 'If the diaries coincided, it would be wonderful.'
The Americana sessions went so well that there are "another 20" songs waiting to be finished and released, all derived from Davies's 2013 book of the same name.
"It's a big work, but I hope it'll be put together for a deluxe record later on."
Is he tempted to write something more topical for that record, given the ongoing political turmoil in the US?
"Everyone who knows my work comes up to me and says: 'It's time to revive Preservation,'" he says, referring to The Kinks' 1973 concept album and tour, in which a comedian becomes a dictator, funded by big business and using the media as a tool of control.
"It was a fun show but it had quite serious undertones," says Davies, "and I think that sums up America at the moment: it's a fun show with very serious undertones.
"I do hope America balances itself out. It's slightly off-kilter at the moment.
"He [Trump] has still got to face Congress, and it's still a democratic country. I think the will of the people will be heard, and America's constitution is strong.
"It's a difficult time of re-adjustment for them - but I think in time it'll balance itself out.
"It's a beautiful place but a dangerous place, as I found out."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39665367
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Kelly Sotherton: Ex-heptathlete to get Beijing Olympic bronze upgrade - BBC Sport
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2017-04-24
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Britain's Kelly Sotherton is set to be upgraded to an Olympic bronze medal for the second time in five months after retrospective drug tests.
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Last updated on .From the section Athletics
Britain's Kelly Sotherton is set to be upgraded to an Olympic bronze medal for the second time in five months after retrospective drug tests.
Russian Tatyana Chernova has been stripped of the heptathlon bronze she won at Beijing in 2008 after testing positive for a steroid.
Sotherton won heptathlon bronze in 2004 and had already been moved to third in the Beijing 4x400m relay after Belarus and Russia's disqualification.
She was fifth in the 2008 heptathlon.
However, the 40-year-old has now climbed to third after the previously announced doping ban of Ukrainian Lyudmila Blonska and now Chernova.
Sotherton retired five years ago after failing to recover from a back problem in time to qualify for the heptathlon at London 2012.
After finding out she was to become a three-time Olympic medallist, Sotherton posted an emotional video on social media showing her reaction.
"Yes I had tears. Happy ones this time," she said.
Sotherton's compatriot, Jessica Ennis-Hill, belatedly won the 2011 World heptathlon title last year when Chernova was similarly stripped of gold for doping.
Former UK Athletics performance director Dave Collins, who oversaw the 2008 Games, said that British athletes receiving their medals was an "essential step for the sport".
Collins' contract was not renewed after Britain fell one short of their medal target in Beijing.
"It's great to see but clearly it's a disappointment they didn't get their day in the sun," he said.
"It's great to see the teams getting recognition late, because it's better late than never. But by gosh, it would have been a lot better at the time."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/39695739
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The seats that could decide the election - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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Where do the Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems have to fight hardest to win the general election?
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UK Politics
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Note: Battleground seats are defined as those where the winning party had a majority of less than 10%
There are 650 constituencies in the United Kingdom. But the election campaign over the coming weeks will be concentrated in the marginal battleground seats - the ones with small majorities that are most likely to change hands.
There's no official definition of a marginal seat but people often look at constituencies where the majority - the gap between the first and second placed parties - is under 10%.
For politicians it's obviously a good idea to focus on these battleground seats. There's not much point in spending lots of time and money in constituencies that they already hold comfortably, or where they're so far behind they have no realistic chance of winning.
There are exceptions to this. In 2015 the SNP surge in Scotland was so powerful that apparently "safe" seats fell. And the collapse of the Lib Dems saw them lose some seats they'd held with sizeable majorities.
Such large swings are rare though. And even in 2015 the Conservative/Labour fight took place almost exclusively in the battleground seats.
Eighteen seats changed hands between the two biggest parties. Only one of those, Ilford North, had a majority above 10%.
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Seats the Conservatives will be gunning for include Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East, Birmingham Edgbaston and Wirral West.
Recent elections have seen poor returns for the Conservatives in the north-east of England but it's a part of the country that voted strongly for Brexit and Prime Minister Theresa May hopes her focus on the issue will help them gain seats.
Labour-held Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East is a good example. Its voters backed Brexit and there's a considerable pool of almost 7,000 voters who went for UKIP last time.
That's one group the Conservatives will target. If they trust Theresa May to deliver Brexit, the Conservatives will argue, why vote UKIP? Picking up a decent chunk of them would be enough to overturn Labour's majority of 2,268.
Other pro-Brexit Conservative targets in the north of England and the Midlands include Halifax, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Derbyshire North East and Walsall North. In all of them there's a sizeable number of people who voted UKIP in 2015 and a small Labour majority.
Birmingham Edgbaston is a different sort of target. Its voters were fairly evenly split on Brexit. But it's a relatively prosperous part of the city which used to be a Conservative stronghold.
An increase in the number of ethnic minority voters helped Labour last time round but it's always remained in the Conservatives' sights. With Gisela Stuart standing down after 20 years as the MP, they'll see an opportunity.
Wirral West is one of 10 seats lost by the Conservatives to Labour in 2015 - Esther McVey was ousted as the MP after just one term.
With their current lead in the opinion polls, they'll be highly optimistic they can take it back - along with other seats lost in 2015 such as City of Chester, Dewsbury and Lancaster and Fleetwood.
Labour start the election as the clear underdogs compared to the Conservatives. But Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn hopes to win over voters during the campaign.
Gower, in South Wales, has the smallest majority of any seat in the country - a mere 27 votes. If just 14 voters switched from the Conservatives, Labour would take it so they will be campaigning for every vote. Before 2015 they'd held it for more than 100 years and it had been considered a Labour heartland seat.
Other losses from 2015 they'll want to reverse include Morley and Outwood, former Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls's old seat, and Plymouth Sutton and Devonport.
In recent years London has been Labour's strongest region. They made seven gains here in 2015 and Sadiq Khan went on to win the 2016 mayoral election comfortably.
Croydon Central was a seat they narrowly missed out on last time but they reduced the Conservative majority to just 165 votes. In a sign of their intentions, Jeremy Corbyn went to the constituency on the very afternoon that MPs voted to allow the early election.
Hendon and Harrow East are other London targets
Labour lost 40 Scottish seats to the SNP in 2015. In many cases the swing was so massive that they now look beyond reach.
But they'll be looking for any signs of the beginning of a fight back. RenfrewshireEast, which used to be Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy's seat, is their top target. Next down the list is Edinburgh North and Leith.
The Lib Dems are starting from a low base. They lost 49 seats in 2015, holding on to just eight, and are looking for a recovery this time.
As the most pro-EU of the national parties, the Lib Dems will particularly target seats like Conservative-held Twickenham in London, which voted heavily for Remain in last year's referendum and where Sir Vince Cable is returning to refight his old seat.
The December 2016 by-election in neighbouring Richmond Park, where they overturned Conservative Zac Goldsmith's 23,000 majority, showed their strategy could work.
Other pro-Remain constituencies in their sights include Kingston and Surbiton and, outside of London, Bath and Cambridge - the latter held by Labour.
Dunbartonshire East also voted for Remain but here they must challenge the SNP, another strongly pro-EU party. Nevertheless, the Lib Dems will think they have a chance.
Jo Swinson was ousted there in 2015 when the SNP's vote surged by 30%. She's standing again and won't need much of that back to recapture the seat.
The pro-EU message probably won't go down so well in Yeovil, which backed Leave in the referendum. But it's a constituency that the Lib Dems held for more than 30 years before it went Conservative in 2015 - Paddy Ashdown used to be the MP - and the broader south-west region used to be a stronghold for the party.
Other targets here include Thornbury and Yate, on the outskirts of Bristol, and St Ives in Cornwall - a county where the Lib Dems used to dominate.
With the SNP already holding 56 out of 59 seats in Scotland it's clearly impossible for them to make significant gains. But they'll be gunning for Labour's only Scottish constituency, Edinburgh South, and they're not far behind in Lib Dem-held Orkney and Shetland.
Plaid Cymru are just 229 votes behind Labour in Ynys Mon (Anglesey). But there could also be an intriguing battle in Rhondda if party leader Leanne Wood decides to stand, even though mathematically it's a lot further down the target list. She achieved a tremendous 24% swing there in the Welsh Assembly election last year, so a gain is not out of the question.
UKIP's results in 2015 demonstrated again how parties can suffer under the first-past-the-post electoral system.
They received 3.9 million votes but won just one seat, Clacton, and even there the victor was Douglas Carswell, who had defected from the Conservatives.
The problem UKIP have is that their vote is very evenly distributed compared to the other main parties - in fact, so much so that they're not even a close second in many places.
Former leader Nigel Farage fell 3,000 votes short in Thanet South last time. They're also close in Hartlepool where the Labour MP is standing down so that may be their best chance.
The Green Party are also badly served by first past the post. The only seat where they start in second place within 10% of the winner is Labour-held Bristol West. The Lib Dems are also a significant presence in that constituency and even the fourth-placed Conservatives got nearly 10,000 votes in 2015 so there a lot of possible outcomes.
It may be only two years since the last general election. But in Northern Ireland it's less than two months since voters last went to the polls. The Assembly election held on 2 March saw gains for Sinn Fein and losses for the main unionist parties (UUP and DUP). It would be wrong to assume the general election will automatically follow the same pattern but it will certainly have an impact on the campaign.
Sinn Fein will be eager to recapture Fermanagh and South Tyrone - reversing the loss they suffered in 2015. The swing they achieved in March would be enough to get them over the line.
Belfast South is a rare three-way marginal. Both the DUP and the Alliance Party (APNI) are within 10% of the incumbent SDLP. In fact Sinn Fein is less than 11% behind as well so there are lots of possible outcomes. Perhaps the most important factor, here and elsewhere, will be whether all the parties stand. In 2015 the DUP and UUP agreed to co-operate by standing aside for each other in four constituencies. That certainly helped and the UUP have already announced they'll do the same again. Previously the SDLP have refused to enter any deal with Sinn Fein but they are thinking of doing so this time as part of a broader anti-Brexit alliance. That could change the complexion of a number of battleground seats.
The contest in South Antrim is different. It has an overwhelming majority of unionist voters. The question is whether they'll back the UUP or DUP. The seat has switched between the two parties four times this century. It wouldn't take much of a shift for it to switch again.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39655379
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'The grief can damage your mental health' - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Survivors say the pain of bereavement can easily push people into mental illness without proper support.
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Health
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It is a sunny Saturday afternoon and sausages are sizzling on the barbecue, wine is flowing and children shuttle between the swings and a plate of cupcakes.
This gathering in Nottingham looks like any group of friends, but the adults have one thing in common - they have all been widowed.
Way: Widowed and Young is a peer support organisation, introducing people in similarly tragic situations to others who can understand their complex grief.
All the members present agree that its regular meetings and internet chatroom have been an essential part of coping in the days and years since their bereavements.
"When my husband first died, suddenly from meningitis, I couldn't be in the house on my own. I had panic attacks," says Georgia Elms, who is now chair of Way.
Georgia Elms was pregnant when her husband died
She was widowed 10 years ago and discovered she was pregnant with her second daughter the following day.
"It really does affect your mental health. You become a different person and your self-confidence goes," she adds.
"You think you're going mad when you're grieving. For me - and everybody grieves differently - I wanted to check that what I was feeling was normal. It made me feel a lot calmer, that everybody else felt the same way."
Mental health concerns are a common theme in the group.
"It's normal to feel a little bit crazy. You feel these hugely strong emotions and the kids do too," says Sarah Philips, another member of the group.
"If that's not handled well, you can end up being a bit crazy."
Kevin Moore lost his wife to breast cancer eight years ago and joined Way in order to meet other fathers in the same position.
"It's a very traumatic experience. It turns your whole world upside down. It certainly does affect your mental health overall," he says.
"There are some very dark times and it's very despairing at times when you don't know what happens next. Being able to share your concerns helps you move through those times together.
"It's not a medical condition you can go to the doctor's with."
Angela Sumata's husband took his own life
Being widowed at all is highly traumatic, but for Angela Sumata, whose husband Mark took his own life 13 years ago, her grief was almost impossible to process.
"Bereavement and grief is something that we all have to deal with in life. The thing that compounds it when somebody takes their life, is that it brings with it a whole different level of complexity, the emotions you feel, how they can change from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute."
Angela joined Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide, another peer support organisation, in the wake of her experience.
"When Mark took his life we were very well treated on the night, but after that you're really reliant on your friends and family. What we didn't have was the offer of support from any professional.
"All of my help has come from the charity sector, from people realising that the specialist services aren't there and forming charities themselves."
It is especially important for people affected by suicide, says Angela, who is now a campaigner and fronted the BBC documentary Life After Suicide.
"There's people who consider suicide because they've been bereaved by suicide. If you don't receive the help you need to navigate through the issues, then absolutely it can lead to mental health issues."
Yvonne Tulloch said society was not geared up to help people who were suddenly bereaved
One of the biggest issues, according to former cathedral minister Yvonne Tulloch, is finding the support when you need it.
Her husband died suddenly nine years ago while on a business trip. She found her grief hard to contain and says she had suicidal thoughts herself.
"It's this massive sadness that comes over you and you just can't get out of that, and you feel like life just isn't worth living," she says.
"These days it feels like people just don't understand what you're going through, and society's not geared up to help.
"I spiralled down very rapidly and got to the point of beginning to think there's no point to my life any more. The thought of ending it began crossing my mind."
She has set up the website At A Loss, where users can search for the most suitable support, be it for the loss of a parent or partner, tailored to the individual's age.
"We are providing a one-stop shop website to help signpost the bereaved to support," she says.
"If you find somebody who's been through what you're going through, and has come out the other side, it gives you hope."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39653676
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General election 2017: Where UK's parties stand on Brexit - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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The issue of Brexit looms large over the general election - here's where the parties stand.
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UK Politics
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Brexit is a major issue at the UK general election - here's what we know about where the main parties across the UK stand.
In short: Prime Minister Theresa May was against Brexit before the EU referendum but now says there can be no turning back and that "Brexit means Brexit". The reason she gave for calling a general election was to strengthen her hand in negotiations with the EU.
How the party sees Brexit: The Conservatives' priorities were set out in a 12 point plan published in January and the letter formally invoking Brexit in March.
What we don't know: The Conservatives have not said how they will control migration from the EU after Brexit. They have also not committed to the size of any separation payment they would accept, beyond saying the UK would meet its international obligations.
They have not specified which matters returning from Brussels will be handed to devolved administrations and which will be kept at Westminster.
Negotiating style: Mrs May has talked tough towards the EU in recent weeks, claiming some key figures were trying to interfere in the general election and promising to be a "bloody difficult woman" during negotiations.
Where the MPs stand: More Tory MPs backed Remain than Leave in last year's referendum - but they now strongly support the UK leaving - in February, only one voted against the government beginning Brexit by invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.
All but one Tory MPs supported Theresa May in invoking Brexit
Risks and rewards: Theresa May would use an election victory to say the country is uniting around her approach to Brexit, and has moved on from the divisions of the referendum campaign. But her uncompromising approach to leaving could upset some of the 48% who wanted to stay in, with the Lib Dems hoping to capitalise in areas - like London's Richmond Park in last year's by-election - that backed Remain.
In short: The Labour Party campaigned against Brexit in the referendum but now says the result must be honoured, and is aiming for a "close new relationship with the EU" with workers' rights protected.
How the party sees Brexit: Labour has set out several demands and tests it says Brexit must meet:
What we don't know: Like the Conservatives, Labour has yet to spell out how it will manage migration after Brexit, and has not been drawn on the size of "divorce bill" it would be willing to pay.
Negotiating style: Jeremy Corbyn says he is aiming for "sensible and serious negotiations" and will not be "threatening Europe".
Where the MPs stand: The vast majority of Labour MPs backed Remain ahead of the referendum - but most followed party orders to allow Article 50 to be invoked in February's vote.
Risks and rewards: Labour is hoping its acceptance of the result will fend off attacks from the Tories and UKIP in Leave-backing areas - including Stoke Central where it won February's by-election. But there are divisions among MPs on the best way forward, and Labour faces the challenge of having to appeal to both sides of a polarising debate.
The Lib Dems hope a pro-EU stance will help them repeat their Richmond Park success
In short: The Liberal Democrats are strongly pro-EU, and have promised to stop what they call a "disastrous hard Brexit".
How they see Brexit: Central to the Lib Dems' offer is another referendum - this time on the terms of the final Brexit deal - in which the party would campaign to stay in the EU.
The Lib Dems also say they will fight with "every fibre of their being" to protect existing aspects of EU membership, such as the single market, customs union and the free movement of people.
They would guarantee EU citizens' rights and remain in Europe-wide schemes like Erasmus.
Where the MPs stand: All of the Lib Dem MPs backed staying in the EU, and seven out of nine opposed triggering Article 50, with two abstaining.
Risks and rewards: The Lib Dems are hoping their pro-EU pitch will help them gather voters in pro-Remain areas, as when they captured Richmond Park in London in December's by-election. But according to estimates based on the referendum results, two of their sitting MPs represent areas that backed Leave last June - which might make the party's second referendum policy a tough sell on the doorstep.
In short: SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon wants Scotland to have a special status after Brexit and for a second independence referendum to take place before the UK leaves.
How they see Brexit: The SNP's manifesto says it will demand a place for the Scottish government at the Brexit negotiating table.
It says it will fight to keep Scotland in the EU single market. The SNP says it will also press the UK government to guarantee the status of NHS workers from mainland Europe, and oppose any attempt to treat the fishing industry as a "bargaining chip".
Once negotiations are complete, and before the UK has left, the SNP wants a referendum on Scottish independence to take place.
Where the MPs stand: The SNP's 54 MPs voted en masse against triggering Article 50 and are expected to maintain their vocal opposition to Brexit in the next Parliament.
Risks and rewards: The SNP will hope to harness Scotland's support for remaining in the EU (it voted Remain by 62% to 38%). But a significant minority of its supporters are thought to have backed Leave - while the Tories are said to be targeting the Moray seat of SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson, where Remain only narrowly saw off the Leave campaign in the EU referendum.
UKIP says it will ensure the government does not "backslide" on Brexit
In short: UKIP has long campaigned to leave the EU - and having finished on the winning side in the referendum, is now styling itself as the "guard dog of Brexit".
How they see Brexit: The party has set six "key tests" for Brexit: Supremacy of Parliament, full control of migration, a "maritime exclusive economic zone" around the UK's coastline, a seat on the World Trade Organisation, no "divorce" payment to the EU and for Brexit to be "done and dusted" by the end of 2019.
Green Party of England and Wales joint leader Caroline Lucas has called for a second EU referendum on the Brexit deal reached with Brussels, and the Greens have promised "full opposition" to what they call "extreme Brexit".
Plaid Cymru, which campaigned to stay in the EU, says it accepts that the people of Wales voted to leave, but says single market membership should be preserved to protect Welsh jobs.
The DUP campaigned in favour of leaving the EU - and, in its manifesto for this year's Assembly elections, said it wanted to see a "positive" relationship with the rest of Europe, involving "mutual access to our markets to pursue common interests".
Having campaigned to stay in the EU, the SDLP's MPs have opposed the invoking of Article 50, saying it is being done "against the will of people in Northern Ireland", where most people voted to Remain in the EU.
Before the referendum, the Ulster Unionist party said that on balance, it was better for Northern Ireland to stay in the EU - although not all its members agreed. It says it would honour the referendum result, and wants "unfettered" access to the single market and no hard border with the Republic of Ireland.
Sinn Fein has accused the Conservative government of "seeking to impose Brexit on Ireland". It wants Northern Ireland to have a "designated special status" inside the EU.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39665835
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French election: Why EU should not count its chickens on Macron - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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But the EU should not count its chickens just yet, warns the BBC's Europe editor Katya Adler.
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Europe
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The relief in Brussels is palpable. It believes it is (almost) back from the brink.
A passionate Europhile, Emmanuel Macron's presidential campaign is as much blue and yellow as it is the "tricolour" of France.
The EU, he believes, should to be at the heart of French politics, with more integration in finance, defence and migration.
He wants to breathe life into the now-spluttering Franco-German motor; to take a lead role with Germany to - in his eyes - Make Europe Great Again.
Angela Merkel and the European Commission's Jean-Claude Juncker can hardly conceal their delight. Both were quick to get on the phone to congratulate Mr Macron on his strong showing in Sunday's vote.
By this autumn fervent Eurocrats hope to look back fondly to a string of electoral defeats for populist Eurosceptics in Austria, the Netherlands, France, and then Germany.
But they shouldn't count their chickens.
Euroscepticism is widespread in France, whether or not Marine Le Pen becomes president.
In the post-industrial north-east of France, with its hopelessly high unemployment, and in the resentful south-east with its struggling small businesses, globalisation and the EU are seen as joint public enemy number one.
The nostalgic nationalism peddled by Ms Le Pen is a source of comfort and hope.
"In the name of the people" is her campaign slogan. Woman of the people is her image.
She was the only presidential candidate amongst 11 to hold their Sunday night election party outside Paris, basing herself in the troubled town of Hénin-Beaumont where she first made a political name for herself as a local councillor.
Sharpening her political claws against Emmanuel Macron, she is now keen to portray him as an arrogant elite-educated former banker, best friend of Brussels and the French bourgeoisie.
And if Ms Le Pen beats the odds and garners France's top political job, that would spell the end of the European project as we know it.
She wants France out of the euro - which so many French blame for high prices and uncompetitiveness.
And she dreams of the EU's demise, favouring a looser union of European nations over what she calls Brussels-domination.
The two will now go head-to-head in the second round
Post-Brexit Britain would then be high up on her list of preferred European partners.
But before that could happen, current Brexit negotiations and future trade talks would be left hanging as the EU slowly imploded.
There would be chaos across EU countries which would affect Britain too.
A President Macron, when it comes to Brexit, would likely play hardball.
He would help to keep the EU united in negotiations, making it harder for the UK to pick off individual countries, attempting to pressure or entice them to make a sweeter Brexit deal.
But EU passion aside, Mr Macron is not wedded to ideology. He is a newcomer to politics who claims to be neither right- nor left-wing.
During his meeting with Theresa May in February he said post-Brexit economic, defence and security co-operation with Britain must remain close.
As a former (if not long-standing) Minister of the Economy in France, he is unlikely to turn up his nose at a good trade deal with the UK.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39697005
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Celtic 2-0 Rangers - BBC Sport
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2017-04-24
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Celtic beat Rangers to set up a Scottish Cup final meeting with Aberdeen and the chance to complete a domestic treble.
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Last updated on .From the section Football
Celtic beat Rangers at Hampden to set up a Scottish Cup final against Aberdeen and the chance to complete a domestic treble.
Callum McGregor's superbly placed finish put the Premiership champions ahead during a dominant first half from Brendan Rodgers' side.
Scott Sinclair squeezed in a penalty after Rangers' James Tavernier had fouled Leigh Griffiths.
Goalkeeper Craig Gordon twice denied Kenny Miller in Rangers' best attacks.
But the Ibrox side could not prevent the first defeat of Pedro Caixinha's reign as manager and must now focus on securing European qualification through the league.
Celtic have already won that tournament and the League Cup and will face the Dons back at the national stadium on 27 May - the second Aberdeen-Celtic cup final this season - hoping to complete the domestic clean sweep for the first time since 2001.
This was a difficult day for Rangers, but one can only speculate as to how much sorer it might have been had Andy Halliday been sent off after lunging in on Patrick Roberts early on. The Rangers midfielder took Roberts out and was fortunate to see yellow instead of red.
Quickly, Celtic took hold of things and their greater intensity, accuracy and quality paid off with the opener. Mikael Lustig hit a long ball over Danny Wilson's head and into Moussa Dembele, who took it down, looked around him and saw McGregor steaming forward untracked.
The Frenchman played it to McGregor, who stroked it coolly into the corner of Wes Foderingham's net.
Celtic were dominant but their mission was not helped when they lost Dembele to a hamstring injury just before the half-hour. Griffiths came on.
Rangers had been fortunate to escape a dismissal earlier with Halliday and were lucky again when Myles Beerman, already on a yellow for fouling Roberts, impeded him again a minute later.
Beerman survived, but it was not long before Rangers' hopes of a cup final appearance were extinguished.
Caixinha made two substitutions at the break - Joe Dodoo coming on for the peripheral Joe Garner and Barrie McKay replacing Halliday - but no sooner had those changes bedded in than Celtic hit their opponents on the counter-attack and smoothed their passage to the final.
It was Dedryck Boyata who broke up a Rangers attack and got his team on the front foot. Roberts took it on and put Griffiths into the box, where he was taken down by Tavernier. The spot-kick from Sinclair found the target via Foderingham's diving hands and then the inside of his right-hand post.
There could have been more. Foderingham tipped over Griffiths' shot, Boyata headed over and Roberts had one saved. Celtic then lost their edge and Rangers got on top and started creating chances - good ones.
Just after the hour, Miller had a close-range header saved by Gordon. The striker might have done a whole lot better.
Then, with 10 minutes left, he had another opportunity - a point-blank shot kicked away by Gordon. Again, it was the type of opening that Rangers had to convert.
Martyn Waghorn headed over from a good position, Dodoo forced a diving save from Gordon and, at the other end, McGregor's replacement Tom Rogic hit a post for Celtic.
Those late chances will give Rangers hope for their Old Firm league meeting at Ibrox on Saturday - but Celtic's victory was well earned and their treble dream remains very firmly on track.
• None Attempt saved. Joseph Dodoo (Rangers) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the top right corner.
• None Tomas Rogic (Celtic) hits the left post with a right footed shot from outside the box.
• None Leigh Griffiths (Celtic) wins a free kick on the right wing.
• None Tomas Rogic (Celtic) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul.
• None Attempt missed. Martyn Waghorn (Rangers) header from the left side of the box is close, but misses the top right corner.
• None Attempt saved. Kenny Miller (Rangers) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the bottom right corner.
• None Jozo Simunovic (Celtic) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39612250
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General election 2017: Women's Equality Party leader to challenge MP Philip Davies - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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Sophie Walker accuses Philip Davies of misogyny but he calls her plans "extreme political correctness".
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UK Politics
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The Women's Equality Party leader says many women are being shut out of the political debate
The leader of the Women's Equality Party, Sophie Walker, is to stand against Tory MP and male rights advocate Philip Davies in the election.
If elected in the West Yorkshire seat of Shipley, she said she would be a "voice for all women" in Westminster.
She said Mr Davies had a "track record of misogyny", including trying to block laws on domestic violence.
Mr Davies said he welcomed his rival "parachuting herself" into the seat with a "politically correct agenda".
Mr Davies, who won the Shipley seat with a majority of more than 9,624 at the last election, is an outspoken critic of political correctness and what he has described as "zealous" feminism.
The MP, who has warned that men's voices are being "neutered" and that their rights must be more strongly defended, caused a stir when he was elected to the Commons equality and women's committee last year.
Announcing her candidacy on 8 June, Ms Walker - a former journalist - took a swipe at Mr Davies, suggesting that it was a "national embarrassment" that he was on the committee.
Mr Davies has claimed militant feminists want to have "their cake and eat it"
"Shipley deserves an MP that will represent the needs and interests of all its constituents, instead of one who spends constituency time on a self-indulgent anti-women campaign," she said.
"Right now if you live in Shipley, your MP is best known in Parliament as a sexist whose favourite pastime is inventing long speeches to prevent other MPs from passing important legislation such as the provision of free hospital parking for carers and compulsory sex and relationships education in schools."
Ms Walker also criticised the Conservatives' record on equality issues, saying public spending cuts had disproportionately affected women and Brexit would exacerbate the situation.
She said she would campaign for a fair immigration system after the UK's exit from the EU, more support for women's pensions and for social justice to be put at the heart of a "caring economy".
"Philip Davies' party's austerity policies hit women harder than men and pushed more women into poverty. His party's funding cuts shut vital services to survivors of violence, when two women a week die at the hands of abusive partners."
Mr Davies, who has represented Shipley since 2005 and strongly supported the UK leaving the EU, challenged Ms Walker to back up her claims of sexism with any evidence.
"I have consistently asked Sophie Walker to quote just one thing I have ever said which has asked for a woman to be treated less favourably than a man, and she hasn't been able to find even one quote from the 12 years I have spent in Parliament," he told the Observer.
"I would very much welcome Ms Walker parachuting herself into Shipley as a candidate with her extreme politically correct agenda of positive discrimination and quotas, and am very happy to let the good people of the Shipley constituency decide who they want to represent them."
Mr Davies has regularly called for more focus in the Commons on men's issues, including suicide rates and educational under-achievement among young men and what he says is the varying treatment of male and female prisoners.
In a speech last year he attacked "militant feminists and politically correct males", accusing them of fighting for equality while also seeking special protection when it suited them.
Earlier this year, he was accused of trying to block a Parliamentary bill that would force the UK to sign up to the international Istanbul Convention on preventing domestic violence by making a series of long speeches in the House of Commons.
The Women's Equality Party, co-founded by comedian and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig, was founded in 2015. Ms Walker stood for London mayor in May 2016.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39683982
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London Marathon: Why do some runners get 'jelly legs'? - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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Why do some runners experience "jelly legs" at the end of a marathon?
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UK
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This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Matthew Rees helped David Wyeth up The Mall to the finish line of the London Marathon
It's been hailed as the defining image of this year's London Marathon: runner Matthew Rees stopping to help fellow competitor David Wyeth after he almost collapsed just metres from the finish line. But why do some runners' legs turn to jelly?
With the end in sight, David Wyeth's legs began to buckle. Staggering along The Mall, head dropping, it looked like he would not complete the race.
But - in a show of comradeship that has quickly gone viral - fellow runner Matthew Rees stopped, pulled Mr Wyeth up and they completed the 26.2 mile challenge together.
"I saw David and his legs had completely collapsed beneath him," the Swansea Harriers runner told BBC Breakfast.
"I went over and he said 'I've got to finish' and I said 'you will' and I helped him up."
His struggle is reminiscent of an exhausted Jonny Brownlee, who was helped over the finish line by brother Alistair in the Triathlon World Series in Mexico last year.
Jonny required treatment but later tweeted he was OK, with a photo of himself lying in a hospital bed on a drip.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Jonny Brownlee helped over finish line by brother Alistair in Mexico
At the time, Alistair said: "I wish the flippin' idiot had paced it right and crossed the finish line first.
"You have to race the conditions. I was comfortable in third. I raced the conditions, I took the water on, made myself cool and I was alright."
London Marathon Coach Martin Yelling says it is like runners have "run out of petrol".
"At the end of a marathon runners usually have given so much physically that their energy levels are completely depleted - the term is hitting the wall," he says.
"What that means is your body is struggling to find enough physical energy to move forward, the body is trying to tell you to stop."
He says there is a clear wrestle between physical exhaustion and "incredible mental strength" in runners who have hit the wall.
"For every-day runners it is about learning to understand how your body responds.
"We would call it listening to your body."
Training for a marathon, pacing yourself and the correct fuel and hydration is important in avoiding the wall and the so-called "jelly legs", he says.
Other runners were helped by others as they collapsed before the London Marathon finish line
Tim Navin-Jones, from running club London City Runners, is one runner who can sympathise, having "hit the wall" himself during the New York Marathon.
"Your mind is telling you to keep going and your body is getting to the point where it says 'no'," he says.
"Your legs really do turn to jelly - it is horrific.
"It is like being a really horrible version of drunk. It is sheer exhaustion."
Mr Navin-Jones, who has run five marathons among other distances, says it is difficult to know how to pace a marathon for those who have not done it before.
A common mistake is runners starting a race too fast, he says.
Emma Ross, head of physiology at the English Institute of Sport, says runners "hit the wall" in a marathon when they run out of carbohydrate to use as a fuel for running.
"So what you want to try and do is keep your carbohydrate stores topped up during the race to prevent you from predominantly having to use fat as a fuel," she says.
"When we use fat as a fuel, we have to go slower because as a process of burning energy it is a more complex and a slower system, so we can only support slower exercise."
She also warns that dehydration causes a decrease in blood volume, which makes the heart work harder, so it is important for runners to keep hydrated.
Runner Gary McKee completed 100 marathons in 100 days for MacMillan Cancer Support, finishing on Sunday at the London Marathon.
Gary McKee completed 100 marathons in 100 days for MacMillan Cancer Support, raising more than £67,000
The 47-year-old, from Cleator Moor in Cumbria, says he managed to not hit the wall as he paced himself carefully during his challenge.
He says runners have to recognise when their body is telling them to stop.
"It is down to hydration. You will come to a point when you are tired.
"Have you overexerted yourself? Have you had enough calories? Enough carbs?
"The more you train, the higher your fitness levels become, so you can sustain it (running) for longer.
"If you understand what your body wants, just give it what it wants."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39693082
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Ched Evans: Sheffield United set to re-sign striker from Chesterfield - BBC Sport
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2017-04-24
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League One champions Sheffield United are set to re-sign striker Ched Evans from Chesterfield, reports BBC Radio Sheffield.
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Last updated on .From the section Football
League One champions Sheffield United are set to re-sign striker Ched Evans from Chesterfield.
BBC Radio Sheffield reports the clubs have agreed a fee of about £500,000.
Evans, 28, last played for the Blades in 2012 before he was found guilty of raping a 19-year-old woman in a hotel room in 2011 and sentenced to five years in prison.
That conviction was quashed and, following a re-trial last October, Evans was found not guilty.
Wales international Evans joined Chesterfield last summer and has scored seven goals in 29 appearances for the relegated League One side this season.
He scored 42 goals in 103 league appearances in his first spell at Bramall Lane.
Evans joined Sheffield United from Manchester City for £3m in 2009, but struggled in his first two seasons with the club, scoring only 13 goals in 74 games.
His form improved dramatically in his final season with the Blades, as he found the net 35 times in 42 appearances, before being jailed six days after his final game - a 3-1 win over Leyton Orient.
After his release in October 2014, having served two and a half years of his prison sentence, the Blades revoked an initial offer to allow him to use their training facilities after 170,000 people signed an online petition against the move.
United's main shirt sponsor threatened to end their association with the club if they re-signed Evans, three club patrons resigned, while Olympic heptathlon champion Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill wanted her name removed from a stand named after her if the striker was offered a contract.
He then nearly joined League One side Oldham Athletic in January 2015 before the club pulled out of the deal following threats to their staff and pressure from sponsors.
Chesterfield offered him a return to professional football in June 2016, two months after his conviction was quashed, saying "a great deal of thought" had gone into the signing.
Evans scored in his first professional game in over four years with the equaliser in a 1-1 draw against Oxford on the opening day of this season in August.
He scored six more times before the turn of the year, but has failed to score in his past 11 appearances and has not featured since 4 March.
The Blades clearly believe they can get the best out of Ched Evans. He played his best football at Bramall Lane and Chris Wilder is known for his man-management skills.
Fans will be torn on this one. Some will back the signing and remember the days, albeit five years ago, that Evans was a prolific goalscorer. Others will see it as an unnecessary distraction.
United have already won the League One title and this story will now dominate the headlines before their coronation as champions on Sunday.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39697804
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UKIP 'gets radical' with return to right-wing policies - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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UKIP searches for a new unique selling point after Theresa May steals a march on Brexit.
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UK Politics
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What do you do when the central policy on which your party was formed and has long campaigned becomes the domain of a political rival? If you're UKIP, get radical.
Theresa May has framed this election in terms of Brexit. The Conservatives are the party which will deliver on the referendum result, she has said, while other parties - namely Labour and the Lib Dems - want to frustrate the process.
In doing so she's stolen a march on UKIP; the party which for so long was the sole advocate of leaving the EU.
It hasn't abandoned Brexit. It has said it will continue to "hold the government's feet to the fire" and push for the kind of EU exit it wants, adamant there's still a role to play.
But UKIP needs a new unique selling point.
Cue a plethora of policies designed to appeal to the party's core voters; a moratorium on new Islamic schools in the state system, Sharia courts outlawed and a ban on face coverings in public places.
Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage is not standing this time
This is a return to right-wing territory in which UKIP has dabbled before. A step away from the libertarian values the party has said in the past that it stands for.
It's an extension of the party's popular stance on controlled immigration; limit the number of people who come to the UK and ensure those who do fully integrate into society.
UKIP has long appealed to a certain emotion among parts of the electorate, portraying itself as the true protector of British values, proud to stand up for a way of life it claims is at risk of erosion from political correctness.
Its integration agenda was quickly labelled by some as offensive, even Islamophobic, but for UKIP these policies are true patriotism, a defence of the realm and its values from what it calls "crude multiculturalism".
UKIP still sees itself as the party prepared to say things other politicians won't, unafraid to risk offence to create debate. It takes credit for forcing other parties to talk frankly about immigration; now they hope to do the same with integration and in doing so ensure their relevance beyond Brexit and appeal to their traditional supporters.
The Tories have stomped on UKIP turf, so the party's trying to break new ground.
If it's more radical as a consequence? So be it. The question is whether it will be enough.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39698976
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Fears over fake Bieber and Styles accounts - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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Law enforcement agencies around the world are concerned about an increase in fake celebrity social media accounts.
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BBC Trending
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Law enforcement officers have been warning BBC Trending radio about a growing number of social media accounts wrongly purporting to be teen idols like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber, speaking inappropriately to young children.
The growing world of social media apps with big teenage audiences has made the situation even more difficult to police, they say.
"Identity assumption by child sex offenders is increasing quite steadily," Detective Inspector Jon Rouse, who runs task force Argos, a specialist branch responsible for tackling online child exploitation in Queensland, Australia, told us.
Detective Inspector Rouse led a recent investigation that led to a 42-year-old man, who allegedly posed as Canadian singer Justin Bieber on a number of social media platforms in order to gain indecent images of children, being charged with more than 900 child sex offences.
"The fact that so many children across the world could believe that they were talking to Justin Bieber, and that Justin Bieber would make them do the things that they did, is really quite concerning," he says, "I think a re-evaluation of the way we educate children about safe online behaviour is really needed."
One mother of an 8-year-old girl, who has asked to remain anonymous, told BBC Trending that her daughter had downloaded a popular social media app for just two days before she was approached by an account impersonating a celebrity.
"The first message was inviting you to enter a competition and to win it you get a five minute chat (with the celebrity)," she says.
"And then the second message that came up was along the lines of 'all you need to do is send me a photo of you naked or of your vagina.' And then all these messages flew across the screen.
"Then the third message said 'don't worry about it. All the girls are sending me these photos. Just do it. It'll be our secret'. And then the last message was 'do it now'."
The problem is found across the internet, from big platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to newer platforms which have large teenage audiences.
Detective Inspector Rouse of task force Argos raised concerns about Musical.ly, a social platform which launched in 2014. "Lots of child sex offenders are utilising Musical.ly to groom children. That's a very well-known international fact, believe it or not," he says.
The issue is not that safeguards on Musical.ly are particularly different when compared to other social platforms, but rather that there are a lot of young people using the app. It's been downloaded by more than 50 million people under the age of 21, with a sizeable number of them being under the age of 16.
Musical.ly told BBC Trending: "We take the safety of our users very seriously and we have zero tolerance for inappropriate, illegal, or predatory behaviour on our apps. We urge our users to report any inappropriate activity to us."
• There are more resources on the BBC Stay Safe site
• The NSPCC also has a series of guidelines about protecting children
Chatter about this issue has been trending in the UK since February, when Gemma Styles, the sister of One Direction singer Harry Styles, alerted her followers to a fake Twitter account in her brother's name. She said the account was "preying on vulnerable girls".
The account @PrvtHarryStyles claimed to be a private page belonging to the One Direction star in which he could give advice to girls with mental health issues. It had over 10,000 followers.
A One Direction fan named Amy told BBC Trending that she had been the one to notify Gemma Styles to the account. Amy adds adds that she's seen dozens of fake accounts pretending to be various members of One Direction.
"They work as kind of a network a lot of times, where a person will make a fake account and then they'll make a fake Louis account and a fake Liam account and a fake Zayn account and all these fake accounts will talk to each other which kind of props up all of them," Amy says.
This fake Harry Styles Instagram account has now been shut down.
A number of people have posted about alleged inappropriate behaviour towards underage girls by the fake Harry Styles account.
We were unable to verify any of these allegations but we were contacted by someone saying they were a 19-year-old from the United States claiming that she sent naked pictures to this account, believing it was Harry Styles that she was talking to. She said she engaged with the account for about a month.
BBC Trending contacted Twitter who said they don't comment on individual accounts, but they do have strict rules around impersonation. That account has now been closed down.
There have also been allegations made by Amy, and others on Twitter, that the person who ran the @PrvtHarryStyles account also ran a fake Harry Styles Instagram account under the name vharrystyles. That account had been active up until this week had 138,000 followers.
Amy told BBC Trending that she tried to report the account to Instagram, but had difficulty doing so. According to Instagram's impersonation policies, only the person who is being impersonated can file a report.
BBC Trending raised concerns about the account to Instagram. The photo-sharing site has now shut the account down, saying that they removed it because it violated their impersonation policies.
An Instagram account purporting to be Harry Styles has been shut down since BBC Trending spoke to Instagram about concerns from fans.
A number of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have verification for public figures - a little blue tick logo that is supposed to allow famous people to signal that social media account is theirs.
But Sharon Girling, a safeguarding consultant who was the co-founder of the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, says underage children may not be savvy if they have not been properly educated about the internet.
"When you're nine or 10 or 12 looking at these accounts, they seem to be genuine and so as a consequence it's the younger element that is getting fooled into believing that they are legitimate," she says.
"We don't let people drive a car until they're 17 because it's illegal to drive a car and we understand people have got to have an understanding of their responsibilities.
"Yet we give mobile phones and apps to children as young as five and six without parents having any understanding of what they're doing on them."
NEXT STORY: The rise of left-wing, anti-Trump fake news
Following the results of the US presidential race, has fake news from the left seen a surge in popularity? READ MORE
You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us on Facebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-39670673
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Fed Cup: GB beaten in Romania as Johanna Konta and Heather Watson lose - BBC Sport
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2017-04-24
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Great Britain are consigned back to the Europe/Africa Zone group after losing their Fed Cup World Group II play-off in Romania.
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Last updated on .From the section Tennis
Great Britain have lost their Fed Cup World Cup Group II play-off in Romania, consigning them back to the Europe/Africa Zone.
It was 1-1 after Saturday's play, when host captain Ilie Nastase was banned for swearing at the umpire, Johanna Konta and her captain Anne Keothavong.
On Sunday, Simon Halep won 6-1 6-3 against Konta to put Romania in front.
Irina-Camelia Begu then beat Heather Watson 6-4 7-5 as Romania took an unassailable lead before the doubles.
Konta was left in tears after Nastase's conduct and, even though the world number seven still beat Sorana Cirstea on Saturday, she found Halep a tougher test.
Halep, ranked fifth in the world, raced into a 4-0 lead as she made the most of her clay-court knowhow and broke to love in taking the first set in 27 minutes.
Konta gave signs of a comeback by breaking Halep and taking a 3-1 lead in the second set, but the Romanian responded by impressively taking five games in a row to win the match.
After that result, world number 113 Watson knew she had to win against 33rd-ranked Begu and she was involved in a tight match with plenty of quality and drama.
There were five breaks of serve in the first set, which Begu took, but none in the second until Watson lost the seventh game.
The Briton broke back but then lost her serve again at 5-5 and Begu served out for a match that lasted two hours and two minutes to secure victory for Romania.
Britain's Laura Robson and Jocelyn Rae defeated Simona Halep and Monica Niculescu in the dead rubber.
Cirstea claimed Konta had "overreacted" by crying in their match but the British number one has defended her actions.
The incident that led to Nastase being dismissed on Saturday happened when Cirstea was 2-1 up in the second set.
After Konta and Keothavong had complained of calling out from the crowd at 1-1, former world number one Nastase was involved in a discussion with officials in which he used foul language before verbally abusing the British player and her captain.
He was sent off the court by referee Andreas Egli and, after initially taking a seat in the stands, was then escorted back to the locker room.
Konta went 3-1 down after her serve was broken in the next game and was in tears before the umpire suspended play for about 25 minutes.
"With all due respect to Sorana, she was not in my shoes at that end of the court being verbally threatened," said the Briton. "Any abuse is not all right.
"But when it's a couple of metres away from you, screaming at you, I think that's a different ball game.
"It's not something that you truly know how it affects you until you experience it, so I do believe she may have been slightly unaware of the events that happened."
Halep defended the crowd following her win on Sunday and, on Nastase - whose has been suspended by the International Tennis Federation (ITF) while it investigates the incidents, said "maybe he did mistakes".
"I was not there right on the court but I heard some things so I cannot defend anything here," she added.
"I don't know exactly what happened but the people from ITF, they will know what they're going to do."
It was a classy performance from Simona Halep, who was superior in every department. She has just indicated in a TV on-court interview that she really liked her chances - as she feels she has "dominated" previous matches against Konta, despite losing both.
The last few games of the Begu-Watson match were a reminder of the drama Fed Cup and Davis Cup matches usually throw up.
It is not a weekend we will forget in a hurry, but there is no doubt the best team won.
The zonal competition of Euro Africa Zone 1 beckons once again for the British team in February next year. It is a routine they are tiring of.
The United States will take on Belarus in the Fed Cup final after overcoming defending champions Czech Republic on Sunday.
Bethanie Mattek-Sands and Coco Vandeweghe downed Kristyna Pliskova and Katerina Siniakova 6-2 6-3 in the crucial doubles of their semi-final in Florida for a 3-2 winning margin.
The US are 17-time champions and will be facing debutants Belarus in Minsk on November 11-12.
Belarus made the final by defeating Switzerland 3-2 in their semi-final by sweeping after winning both the reverse singles on Sunday.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/tennis/39684043
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World Championship 2017: Marco Fu beats Neil Robertson, faces Mark Selby next - BBC Sport
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2017-04-24
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Marco Fu edges past 2010 champion Neil Robertson 13-11 to reach his fourth World Championship quarter-final.
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Last updated on .From the section Snooker
Fu lost the first two frames of the final session to trail 10-8, but breaks of 78 and 115 pulled him level.
Robertson took an error-strewn 21st frame on the black, but Fu remained the calmer player and took the next three.
The world number eight from Hong Kong plays Mark Selby in the last eight, the defending champion having earlier beaten Xiao Guodong 13-6.
Barry Hawkins, runner-up in 2013, won by the same scoreline, securing his place in the quarter-finals with victory over Scotland's Graeme Dott.
Robertson screamed in delight and hit the table in celebration after clinching what seemed to be a pivotal frame to go 11-10 ahead.
But Fu dug in to get over the line and continue a consistent season, that has seen him secure the third ranking title of his career, reach two semi-finals, as well as make the last four at the Masters.
Two-time Crucible semi-finalist Fu told BBC Sport: "It was very tough. I had so many chances and missed so many chances.
"It was one of those matches that neither of us deserved to win. For fighting spirit I was a 10 out of 10, but for snooker it was four out of 10."
Robertson described his performance as "garbage".
"I played awful snooker," said the Australian. "It wasn't good to watch. I was awful in my first match too."
World number one Selby, who led 10-6 overnight, rattled off breaks of 101, 73 and 60 to see off his Chinese foe.
The 33-year-old from Leicester told BBC Sport: "To win the first frame and get settled - and to do it with a century - was great.
"I played a really solid game. I didn't make too many mistakes and put him under pressure. And when he made mistakes I capitalised.
"I won a couple of key frames from 40 or 50 points behind and made a couple of good clearances on Sunday afternoon. That was probably the turning point. To come out at 4-4 and keep that four-frame lead was vital."
'Hawk' flies into last eight
Hawkins was also a 13-6 winner, beating former champion Dott to secure his place in the last eight.
Like Selby, world number seven Hawkins was in no mood to hang around, quickly taking the first frame, wrapping up the second with a superb break of 98, before getting over the line in a scrappy third frame.
The Kent-based left-hander, who will play Stephen Maguire in the quarter-finals, said: "I'm glad it's over. You want to finish off as quick as you can because it's a long tournament.
"Over the years I have had some unbelievably gruelling matches and it takes it out of you. I wasn't in top form but I played pretty solid. I kept him pretty cold and away from the table."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/snooker/39695301
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Seven bands from the 80s we wish would reunite - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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As Bananarama's original line-up get back together, what other 80s bands would we like to see reunite?
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Entertainment & Arts
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Children of the 1980s, rejoice - the original Bananarama line-up is back together at last. Which got us thinking - lots of 80s bands have reformed over recent years but which ones are we still wishing would reunite?
Frankie says relax - still the best slogan T-shirt ever
Liverpool band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, fronted by Holly Johnson, are still best remembered for their debut single Relax, which was famously banned by the BBC in 1984 due to its sexual lyrics but topped the UK singles chart for five consecutive weeks.
The band went on to become only the second act in the history of the UK charts (after Gerry and the Pacemakers) to reach number one with their first three singles when Two Tribes and The Power of Love also hit the top spot.
But their glory was short-lived. Their second album, Liverpool, released in 1986, failed to live up to expectations and a backstage bust-up between Johnson and bassist Mark O'Toole at their final gig at Wembley Arena sounded the death knell.
While various reincarnations of the band have since reformed, we're still waiting for the original line-up to hit us "with those laser beams."
The Smiths - we are never, ever, ever, getting back together
Never gonna happen. Yes, we know. But just imagine! Johnny Marr and Steven Morrissey formed the band in 1982 with bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce.
They went on to release 17 singles and four studio albums, becoming one of the most influential bands of the 1980s.
Hits included This Charming Man, Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now, How Soon is Now?, Big Mouth Strikes Again, Panic and Girlfriend in a Coma.
But the dream combo of Marr's melodies and Morrissey's musings was broken with the band's acrimonious split in 1987.
In Marr's autobiography Set The Boy Free, he revealed that the official version of him walking out on the band wasn't the full story.
The tipping point, says Marr, was when Morrissey didn't turn up for the video shoot of the single Shoplifters Of The World Unite, and ordered him to sack their latest manager.
Whatever the truth, Marr also wrote that he and Morrissey discussed the possibility of a reunion back in 2008. We're still waiting.
Ben Vol-au-vent Parrot, as Smash Hits liked to call him
Ring a bell? We've been wondering whatever happened to the beautiful beret-wearing Ben with the exotic-sounding surname Volpeliere-Pierrot (although Smash Hits preferred to call him Ben Vol-au-vent Parrot), not to mention Julian, Nick and Migi.
The band enjoyed 80s success with soulful pop hits including Down to Earth, Ordinary Day, Name and Number and Misfit.
They split after a last hurrah with a cover of Johnny Bristol's Hang On In There Baby in 1992. While Ben has joined some 80s tours singing solo the band have never reunited as a four-piece.
It's 30 years this year since Misfit and Ordinary Day entered the charts, so perhaps now would be a good time to hit the road again?
It wasn't a real 80s band without the obligatory sax
It's well documented that Paul Weller would only reform The Jam if his children were "destitute".
But what about his later band, Style Council, which he formed with Mick Talbot, formerly of The Merton Parkas and Dexy's Midnight Runners?
The Style Council had hits such as Walls Come Tumbling Down!, Shout to the Top, You're the Best Thing and Long, Hot Summer.
The band broke up in 1989. Weller has since said they didn't get the credit they deserved.
"I thought we were quite misunderstood and misrepresented. Yet, at the end of the day, we made some good records and I wrote some good songs around that time, songs I still stand by, and I think that will last as well."
The Housemartins - "the fourth best band in Hull"?
Formed in Hull in the 1980s, The Housemartins line-up changed frequently over the years but most of us will remember its most famous members, Paul Heaton and Norman Cook AKA Fatboy Slim.
Caravan of Love and Happy Hour were probably their best known hits and Heaton and Cook went on to further success with The Beautiful South and Beats International/Fatboy Slim.
In 2009, Mojo magazine got The Housemartins' original members together for a photo-shoot and interview but they said they would not be reforming.
So it looks like we won't be hearing from "the fourth best band in Hull" - as The Housemartins often described themselves - anytime soon.
Don't Leave Me This Way Jimmy!
While Bronski Beat continued following the departure of vocalist Jimmy Somerville in 1985, they are still best remembered for the hits they had with him at the helm, including Why?, Smalltown Boy and It Ain't Necessarily So.
Somerville, of course, went on to form The Communards with Richard Coles, who is now a Church of England priest and Radio 4 presenter.
But will we see either of these bands back together?
Larry Steinbachek, former keyboardist with Bronski Beat, sadly died at the age of 56 in January.
And the Communards? Coles and Somerville fell out, not least because Coles lied when he told Somerville he had HIV.
The two are back in touch now but with Coles' commitments to the Church, a reunion seems unlikely.
The Thompson triplets - sorry, Twins, in their most recognised form
Yep, it's our wildcard entry - the band that was named after the two bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson in The Adventures of Tintin.
The band had various line-up changes over the years but they were best known as the mid-80s trio consisting of Tom Bailey, Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway.
Their hits included Hold Me Now, Doctor! Doctor! and You Take Me Up but Leeway left the band in 1986 and Bailey and Currie could never replicate their earlier success (although they did have a dance hit in 1991 called Come Inside).
The pair had two children together and moved to New Zealand. While they did briefly reunite with Leeway on a Channel 4 show in 2001, they have so far resisted the urge to go down the nostalgia road and reform.
In 2014, Bailey began performing the band's hits as The Thompson Twins' Tom Bailey and continues to tour in 2017.
Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39692931
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General Election 2017: Would you support a burka ban? - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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UKIP's manifesto will include plans to ban the burka, sparking strong reactions on both sides of the debate.
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UK
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UKIP's manifesto will include proposals to ban full veils, the party's leader Paul Nuttall has told the BBC.
The announcement has sparked strong reaction on both sides of the debate.
Nazif, 37, is Muslim. Originally from Afghanistan, he has lived in the UK since 2002.
While his relatives do not regularly wear either the burka or the niqab, he is not in favour of an outright ban.
"If it came about voluntarily I would welcome it," he said.
"I'm not in favour of the burka.
"But if women want to wear it or they don't, it should be up to the women themselves."
Mr Nuttall has cited security concerns as one of the motivations behind the proposed ban.
But for Nazif and his family, back in Afghanistan it was the burka which offered security on otherwise dangerous journeys across the country.
Travelling to Pakistan, he says they were forced to go through checkpoints controlled by non-government forces.
"Having your face revealed was a sign that you are part of the government," he said.
"My sisters wore the veil in order not to arouse suspicion."
When they were safe, they would remove the veil again.
"If they want to ban the veil it must not be banned under the pretext of security," he said.
"Paul Nuttall sees it as an election chip but he doesn't know the full reason.
"In my own family's experience it was a way of getting from point A to point B.
"I am 100% behind a move towards phasing out the veil. But encourage those who wear it to feel safe."
Writing on Twitter, social media user Rachel Robbins was equally sceptical of the security pretext for UKIP's proposed ban.
But others disagree. Brian, from Lichfield, reflected the mood of much of the correspondence the BBC received.
"You can't go into a bank or building society wearing a crash helmet or other 'western' headgear that covers the face.
"The same should apply to the burka and the veil."
Mr Nuttall also highlighted concerns about integration as a key reason for proposing the ban.
"I don't believe you can integrate fully and enjoy the fruits of British society if you can't see people's faces," he said on the BBC's Andrew Marr programme.
Jennifer, who works in Bradford, agreed that full-face veils could be a barrier to integration.
"I've worked in Bradford for a long time," she said.
"I'm increasingly seeing more women with their faces covered.
"I see the increase in women wearing it as evidence of the polarisation of these communities and the isolation of these women from mainstream society.
"It seems like a deliberate barrier to separate them."
Marwa, from London, disagrees. Two years ago she decided to start wearing a hijab - a headscarf worn by many Muslim women. The hijab would not be included in the proposed ban.
"A lot of my family don't wear the hijab," she said, "but it was my individual choice.
"I liked the way I felt when I wore it.
"I'm not sure that banning religious expressions and beliefs will help Muslims feel like they're part of Britain.
"It's this kind of barely tolerant attitude that makes Muslims feel further excluded and alienated.
"It seems to me that Mr Nuttall believes that in order to allow women to be free and to be 'integrated' they must first be told how to dress.
"The hypocrisy of his argument is baffling. What is it that he really wants?"
Others have also questioned the motivation behind Mr Nuttall's announcement.
Writing on Twitter, Brendan Cox, the activist and husband of murdered MP Jo Cox, suggested the move had more to do with UKIP's poll numbers.
Some European countries, including France, already enforce a public ban on full-face veils, while in December 2016 German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that wearing full-faced veils should be prohibited in Germany "wherever it is legally possible".
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39684530
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Arsene Wenger: Arsenal answered their critics in FA Cup win over Manchester City - BBC Sport
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2017-04-24
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Arsene Wenger says Arsenal answered their critics with a "strong and united" performance as they reach a third FA Cup final in four years.
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Last updated on .From the section FA Cup
Arsene Wenger believes Arsenal answered their critics with a "strong and united" performance as they beat Manchester City to reach a third FA Cup final in four years.
Alexis Sanchez scored an extra-time winner as the Gunners came from behind to win 2-1 and reach a record 20th final - and an eighth under Wenger.
"People questioned us, we went through tough times," Wenger said.
"You can be divided or united and we have shown the right response."
Wenger, 67, has come under more scrutiny this season than at any other time in his 21-year reign at Arsenal, with the Gunners lying in seventh place in the Premier League and on the receiving end of a 10-2 aggregate thrashing by Bayern Munich in the Champions League.
The Frenchman is out of contract at the end of the season and has been offered a new two-year deal, although he is yet to announce whether he will continue.
Some sections of Arsenal fans have protested against Wenger in recent months, but the manager was pleased to see his side rally after falling behind to Sergio Aguero's opener.
"You know I feel the club is in a very strong shape, and that we have a very strong overall situation and a very strong team," he said.
"One day I will leave anyway so the most important thing is that Arsenal will always be a great club that everybody admires.
"I felt it was a big test for us today, a mental test because many people question if we can turn up on an occasion like this.
"It was a very tight game but overall I think we deserved to win the game. The players showed great togetherness."
• None Wenger has been 'let down at times' - Ramsey
• None Should this 'goal' have been ruled out?
'Sanchez will be here next year'
Sanchez and Mesut Ozil have been linked with moves away from the club this summer, and the Chilean highlighted his importance with his 24th goal of the season which settled the tie,
Wenger expects the former Barcelona forward to extend his stay at the Emirates.
He said: "Alexis Sanchez was like the team. He had problems at the start and became stronger and stronger.
"He is an animal, always ready to kill the opponent. He will never give up.
"He will be here next year because he has a contract and hopefully we will manage to extend him."
Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola said he had no regrets after seeing his side beaten, a result which means the former Barcelona and Bayern Munich boss will end a season without a trophy for the first time in his coaching career.
"We performed like we would want to in a final," he said.
"We did absolutely everything. Congratulations to Arsenal. We'll improve next season.
"We competed here, we had more chances but the finishing was like it has been throughout the season."
• None Analysis: This is now Pep's biggest moment as Man City manager - Jenas
Arsene Wenger's mask slipped as he pumped his fists in triumph repeatedly at the conclusion of Arsenal's win.
Wenger has never been under greater scrutiny or pressure than he has been in recent months, dealing with the toxic combination of growing unrest among Arsenal fans and a collapse in form that leaves their Champions League ambitions under threat.
And yet here, with the pressure at its highest, Wenger coaxed the sort of performance out of Arsenal that puts him on course for an historic FA Cup win when they face Chelsea in the final in late May.
Yes, his Arsenal side enjoyed large portions of good fortune with Raheem Sterling's disallowed goal and efforts against the woodwork from Yaya Toure and Fernandinho - but Wenger deserves credit for persevering with a three-man defensive system that goes against his natural instincts.
This was an Arsenal display of steel, grit and resilience topped off by a comeback crowned by Sanchez's poached winner.
And Arsenal's players played for their manager, with some dedicating the victory to the man who has been a convenient shield for their own shortcomings during the recent slide.
Reality dictates that Arsenal's ills and the uncertainly surrounding Wenger cannot be wiped away by one win. He will need a trophy and/or that top-four place otherwise they idea of him staying on and signing a new deal will be a hard sell to that disgruntled strand of Gunners support.
As for Wenger's opposite number Guardiola, he may have had a hard luck story to tell as he left Wembley but the bottom line is the man brought to Manchester City to move them on to the next level in succession to Manuel Pellegrini will end the season empty-handed and that is a serious disappointment.
This was not how it was meant to be but this City team simply has too many flaws. For all their attacking riches, they are not ruthless enough, are insecure at the back and uncertainty continues over the goalkeeping position, where Guardiola's choice to replace Joe Hart, Claudio Bravo, has not convinced.
And now the pressure is really on - if Guardiola fails to guide City into the top four then this season will be nothing other than an abject failure after the exit at the last 16 stage to Monaco in the Champions League.
City are currently fourth, a point ahead of Manchester United before Thursday's derby at Etihad Stadium.
A top-four place was the very minimum requirement for Guardiola and his players before the start of the season - failure to deliver would not be well-received by the club's fiercely ambitious Abu Dhabi-based hierarchy.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39688031
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Is Maria Sharapova still a box office draw for sponsors? - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova returns to action next week looking to boost her sponsor appeal.
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Business
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The player's kit suppliers Head and Nike have stood by her
Maria Sharapova faces the biggest challenge of her tennis career - namely her return to the sport after a 15-month drugs ban - and it is not just her continued sporting success that is in the spotlight.
Off the court, where she makes the bulk of her earnings, the question is - can she be as big a sponsor draw as she was before her enforced absence?
The 29-year-old will return to action on Wednesday, 26 April, in Stuttgart after being handed a wildcard.
Although some fellow players have expressed misgivings, she has the support of the WTA tour, and her fans.
And, with biggest commercial rival Serena Williams announcing she is pregnant and facing time away from the game, the Russian's return is certainly timely.
In the year from June 2015, Forbes estimates the five-time Grand Slam winner made $1.9m (£1.5m) in prize money from playing, but a whopping $20m from endorsements, a sum matched only by Williams.
And it is this primary source of earnings that Sharapova will be looking to reinvigorate.
Sharapova has participated in Evian promotional events during her ban
"During her time out there will have been some continued relationship with her sponsors," says Simon Chadwick, professor of sports enterprise at the University of Salford.
"But I am sure there will have been some sort of penalty clause in her sponsor contracts for incurring a suspension."
Following Sharapova's admission in March 2016 that she had tested positive for a banned drug at that year's Australian Open, she was initially banned by the International Tennis Federation for two years, later reduced on appeal.
But unlike golfer Tiger Woods, who haemorrhaged sponsors very quickly after his extra-marital affairs came to light, Sharapova's backers waited to see how things played out.
"That was because they had invested so much money and effort into their deals," says Prof Chadwick.
"Also, to terminate deals could have been dangerous as she might come back successfully, and if you as a sponsor have decided to cancel her contract then the door has been left wide open for a rival."
Sharapova's deal with Tag Heuer was not extended
As it was the sponsor reaction was mixed - Head and Evian were immediately supportive, Nike and Porsche put their relationships on hold but later came back on board, while Tag Heuer and Avon chose not to extend deals that had ended.
Given the large amounts of money and time invested - Nike's relationship with the player dates back to when she was 11 years old - it is not surprising the major brands wanted to think hard before reaching their decisions.
"In terms of brands and reputation, what all this has highlighted is that first of all Sharapova is a major brand in her own right," says Karen Earl, chairman of the European Sponsorship Association.
"She commands a lot of media attention, as the furore about her comeback demonstrates. It also highlights that she is a huge star, and that women's tennis feels it needs her.
"That is one of the reasons why brands want to continue to associate with her. Those that stuck with her value the association of her brand with their brands."
Mrs Earl says the fact that Sharapova immediately put her hand up and admitted the drugs breach helped mitigate the damage to her brand, and those of her partners.
"Sharapova admitted she had done a wrong thing.
"She has gone out of her way to recognise what she has done and has handled that situation in a credible way. She has been contrite and said it will not happen again," says Mrs Earl.
"The fact there hasn't been a public outcry against her return will have reassured brands to stick with her.
"If there had been protests from tennis fans, then that might have influenced her sponsors' decisions."
Prof Chadwick says Sharapova's management and advisers, those who look after her profile, grabbed hold of a difficult situation very quickly.
He believes the Russian is now pushing at an open door with regards to her return to the sport, with WTA boss Steve Simon quoted as saying: "I believe that the game, the fans, the tour... everybody is going to welcome Maria back."
Even before Serena Williams' pregnancy announcement, Prof Chadwick says that the sport was struggling to find an heir apparent at the top of the women's game.
"There is not a great deal of highest-quality talent following on behind," he says.
"Nobody seems to be able to string together a consistent run of results. Women's tennis needs all the help it can get in terms of heroes, big names, elite talent to attract fans to the sport.
"As a constellation of female tennis player brands, the sport has been somewhat diminished by Sharapova's absence."
The Russian took part in an exhibition match with Monica Puig in Puerto Rico in December 2016
Mrs Earl points out that while many players have not taken too kindly to Sharapova's return, for her sponsors the important thing is the welcome she will receive from her fans, who are potential purchasers of their products.
"The sponsors are not endorsing her because she has been the most successful player, it is because of what she brings off the court," she says.
"Her persona and brand are what is most important. She knows how to market herself. She is commercially astute.
"To her credit, even after her time away, she is still probably the most marketable female tennis player."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39512639
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How would the Tory energy price cap work? - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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The Tories have said they want an 'absolute' cap on prices, rather than a 'relative' limit.
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Business
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The Tories have announced a key new detail in how their proposed energy price cap would work.
It will be an "absolute" cap, based on the way limits for pre-payment meters have worked since the beginning of April.
The party has rejected the idea of a relative cap, which would limit the difference between the cheapest fixed-price deal and the more expensive Standard Variable Tariff (SVT) to, say, 6%.
That model was particularly controversial, as critics said suppliers would simply increase the price of fixed-rate deals, to maintain the differential with SVTs.
The idea of any form of capping was rejected by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) last summer.
However, when it issued its final report, the CMA admitted its members were divided on the issue.
If the Conservatives win the election, the regulator Ofgem would be asked to introduce a price cap along the lines of one introduced in April to cap prices on households with pre-payment meters.
Currently 16% of consumers are forced to buy their energy in advance, usually because their credit rating is poor.
The CMA ordered a cap on their charges because such households do not benefit from the competition that exists for all other consumers.
Under this system, the CMA has come up with an initial maximum figure for prices in each region of the UK, usually in line with the cheapest existing pre-payment meter tariff.
That number is adjusted every six months, taking into account wholesale energy costs, inflation, environmental obligations and the cost of transporting energy around the network.
But the CMA has always stressed that the pre-payment meter cap is temporary. By the time every home has a smart meters installed, it expects competition between suppliers to be working properly. As a result this cap is due to expire in 2020.
The cap is also designed to allow suppliers to price below the level of the cap if they want to.
However, critics say that suppliers would be likely to increase their prices up to the level of the cap.
"In New Zealand, a price cap resulted in price bunching up around the cap, and a loss of competition," said Iain Conn, chief executive of British Gas owner Centrica.
He also said that a cap in Spain resulted in a shortfall in infrastructure spending, which had to be plugged by the government.
An absolute cap would be fundamentally different to the controls advocated by Labour leader Ed Miliband in the run-up to the 2015 election.
He had proposed a price freeze for just 20 months. As far as we know, the Tory cap would be permanent.
Consumer groups are generally opposed to the idea of any sort of cap, as it would tend to give consumers a false sense of security.
Householders might think they are getting a good deal, so would make even less effort to switch suppliers.
"They're really difficult to get to work in practice," says Richard Neudegg, head of regulation at comparison site Uswitch.
He also believes that a cap would create higher prices in the long term, and entrench the position of the big six suppliers.
At the end of its two-year enquiry the CMA rejected the idea of a price cap on standard variable tariffs, saying that a cap would run an "excessive risk" of undermining the competition process.
Nevertheless the economist Martin Cave, a member of the enquiry, argued that a broader cap was necessary "to address the scale of detriment" because millions of the poorest consumers are still paying too much for their gas and electricity.
In December 2016 Ofgem said that 66% of consumers were still on expensive SVTs, and paying up to £260 a year too much.
Since then, five of the big six suppliers have announced plans to raise their SVT prices, or have already done so.
There is also some evidence that fixed-price deals have also risen, closing the gap with SVTs.
But whether that is because of increasing wholesale costs - or because suppliers have been acting to mitigate the effects of a cap in advance - is hard to determine.
While Ofgem has repeatedly said there was no justification for them doing so, it has so far refused to comment on the Conservative idea of a cap.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39694183
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What does French result mean for Brexit? - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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With Emmanuel Macron installed as favourite to be French President - what does that mean for Brexit?
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Business
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French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron is the favourite to win the next round
Emmanuel Macron has been installed as the overwhelming favourite to be the next French President - but what does that mean for business and Brexit?
For the bigger economic picture, a Macron win removes the chance of a political and economic shock to Europe's core.
Marine le Pen's calls for France to leave the eurozone have been seen as an existential threat to the entire European project.
Macron's likely win has seen the French stock market and the euro surge as that threat is seen as receding.
A Macron win will be cheered by business who see him as untested and inexperienced but pragmatic and pro-business.
Some argue that his business-friendly policies - such as cutting corporation tax from 33% to 25% and making it easier to fire (and therefore hire) workers - make France look more attractive to businesses scouring Europe for a potential EU base.
Most bankers, for example, had put France near the bottom of the list when mulling any potential moves for those very reasons. A Macron presidency could see that change.
But there are two good reasons a Macron win could still be good for the UK in its Brexit negotiations.
First, Macron may want to cut taxes and water down workers' rights - but he has to form a government to do it, and may need the support of French socialists who were excited by Benoit Hamon's ideas of a universal basic income and 32-hour working week.
His attempts to make France more attractive to business will have to navigate the rocks of coalition building. There have been many attempts to reform the French labour market. I can't think of a single success.
The second is a wider point about the security of the European project.
Fears that the UK's vote to leave the EU would inspire anti-EU sentiment right across Europe now seem to be fading.
Geert Wilders' far right party in the Netherlands failed to live up to pre-election hype while its counterpart in Germany, Alternative fur Deutschland, is in disarray.
The UK's antipathy to the EU has, so far, failed to catch on elsewhere.
With that in mind, there is less reason to punish the UK in upcoming negotiations as a deterrent to other would-be leavers.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39691352
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What is superfoetation? - BBC News
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2017-04-24
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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It's when someone conceives and then gets pregnant again between two weeks and a month later.
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Newsbeat
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We're as confused as these guys...
A British woman's revealed she fell pregnant with twins, then conceived while carrying them and gave birth to triplets.
It's called superfoetation - when someone conceives then conceives again between two weeks and a month later.
It's extremely rare in humans. This is only the sixth time it's happened in 100 years.
Fertility expert Professor Simon Fishel says: "It ought not to happen, but it does."
"The first case was reported in 1865 and there have been odd ones every now and again over the decade."
Most of us assume that once a woman becomes pregnant then that's it, but not according to the man who delivered the first IVF baby in 1978.
"Evolution is designed, especially in women, that they don't release another egg," he says.
"If they ever did then it shouldn't be fertilised because the sperm shouldn't be able to get through.
"Even if that happens the lining of the womb would be unable to accept another embryo as changes have taken place while the foetus is growing in there."
It is remarkable for superfoetation to occur, but there's not always a happy ending.
"There have been cases where the other foetus has died in the womb as one could stop growing and have to be delivered early," says the professor.
One of the questions raised is how the foetuses will cope in the womb and whether they will end up competing at feeding time.
"It depends on the quality of the placenta, that is the most important thing for nutrition and development of the growing baby," Prof Fishel adds.
"If the placenta develops normally then it's fine but if the placenta fuses then that can cause problem. In the superfoetation situation we've seen here, it's worked fine."
It's claimed it's more prevalent in animals such as rodents, rabbits, horses and sheep.
Although rare in humans these miracle births do happen and sometimes can be even more extreme.
"There was a case in Rome some time ago where they estimated it was about three to four months difference," says Prof Fishel.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/articles/39692070
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World Championship 2017: Ding Junhui takes charge against Ronnie O'Sullivan - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Ding Junhui dominates the second session of his World Championship quarter-final with Ronnie O'Sullivan to take a 10-6 lead.
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Last updated on .From the section Snooker
World number four Ding Junhui dominated the second session of his World Championship quarter-final with Ronnie O'Sullivan to take a 10-6 lead.
Having shared eight frames in the opening session, the pair began Tuesday evening by winning a frame each.
But breaks of 64, 65, 120, 59 and 56 ensured China's Ding took complete control of the 25-frame match.
However, a typically rapid 104 break stopped the rot for five-time winner O'Sullivan and gave him hope.
It was another two hours of gripping entertainment that maintained the trend of a break of at least 50 in every frame.
In the other game to resume on Tuesday evening, Scotland's John Higgins stormed into an 11-5 lead against 25-year-old Kyren Wilson.
The afternoon session saw reigning champion Mark Selby build a 6-2 lead over Hong Kong's Marco Fu, while Barry Hawkins is 5-3 ahead against Scottish qualifier Stephen Maguire.
Ding, 30, has not beaten world number 12 O'Sullivan in a ranking event since his 9-6 victory in the Northern Ireland Trophy in 2006.
There is a strong possibility of that run coming to an end at the Crucible after his stunning display on Tuesday evening, which began with a frame-winning 63 clearance in the ninth.
O'Sullivan came from behind to win the next but was unable to repeat the feat in frame 11 as Ding seized control.
Storming into a 7-5 lead before the interval, he resumed with a 120 break and went on to stretch his lead to 10-5 with a 58 in frame 15.
O'Sullivan, though, produced a defiant rapid-fire 104 in the final frame to give himself a chance of matching Stephen Hendry's record of playing in 12 World Championship semi-finals.
World number 14 Wilson had levelled from 2-0 down in the morning, helped by a 92 break, but damaged his cue tip and, after a brief stoppage for repairs, saw four-time Crucible champion Higgins open up a 5-3 lead with breaks of 62 and 59.
The Scot began the evening with a 129 and, after the next two were shared, added breaks of 74 and 135 either side of the interval to lead 9-4.
Wilson responded well with a 97 but Higgins won the last two to leave himself two frames from victory at 11-5.
World number eight Fu has got used to doing things the hard way at this year's tournament, having fought back from 7-2 down to beat Luca Brecel and recovered from 4-1 behind to see off Neil Robertson.
There seemed little chance of a comeback when he trailed world number one Selby 5-0, the Leicester man finding some of his best form to compile breaks of 80, 72 and 94.
Fu went more than an hour without potting a ball before taking a scrappy sixth frame and making it 5-2 with a stylish break of 60.
But Selby got Fu in a fuddle on the final red and went on to take a four-frame advantage at 6-2. They resume on Wednesday.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/snooker/39708569
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Reality Check: Have we seen record numbers of jobs? - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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The prime minister says the record number of jobs is evidence of her strong leadership.
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UK Politics
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The claim: There is a record number of jobs in the UK.
Reality Check verdict: The number of jobs in the UK is indeed at a record level as are the numbers of people employed and the proportion of those aged between 16 and 64 who are in work.
Prime Minister Theresa May has been speaking to a Conservative rally in south Wales.
She claimed that the evidence for her strong leadership could be seen, among other things, in the "record number of jobs".
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggest that between December 2016 and February 2017 there were 31.84 million people in work.
The figure is actually a touch below the one for November to January, but the difference is well within the margin of error.
The November to January figure was indeed a record number, but with a growing population the employment rate is probably more relevant.
The employment rate for those aged between 16 and 64 was 74.6% in the latest figures, which is also the highest since comparable records began, in 1971.
That picture was not uniform across the UK though, with Wales, where the prime minister was speaking, having a 73% employment rate between December and February.
Only north-east of England, the West Midlands and Northern Ireland have lower rates.
While those are the figures everyone usually reports, they are not, strictly speaking, the same as there being a record number of jobs, because one employed person can have more than one job.
The ONS also releases figures for workforce jobs, which are collected from businesses rather than workers.
That suggests there were 34.62 million jobs in December 2016, the highest since comparable records began in 1958.
The number of people working part-time has risen considerably since 2010, although it has been relatively stable for the past couple of years.
The vast majority (85%) of UK workers are employees rather than being self-employed, but since 2008, 40% of the overall increase in the workforce has been down to a growth in the number of people who are self-employed.
Some of this shift will be down to people working in the so-called "gig economy" - that is, people in fairly insecure work such as driving cabs or delivering takeaways.
Because these changes have been so recent and rapid, there is no breakdown in the official statistics, which means we can't say how much of the increase in self-employment is down to insecure working and how much to entrepreneurship.
Think tank the New Economics Foundation published research in December, which suggested that in London the gig economy had grown by almost three-quarters since 2010.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39710052
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Alexis Sanchez: Arsenal forward will not move to Premier League club - Arsene Wenger - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Arsenal forward Alexis Sanchez will not be sold to a Premier League rival, according to manager Arsene Wenger.
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Last updated on .From the section Arsenal
Arsenal forward Alexis Sanchez will not be sold to a Premier League rival, according to manager Arsene Wenger.
The 28-year-old Chile international, who scored Sunday's FA Cup semi-final winner against Manchester City, has a year left on his Gunners contract but is yet to sign a new deal.
"I don't think you would sell him to any Premier League club, that is for sure," said Frenchman Wenger.
"But as I have said, I think he will stay and sign a contract."
Wenger has yet to confirm his own future at the north London club, but says he is working on transfer targets for next season.
The 67-year-old is out of contract at the end of the season and has been offered a new two-year deal.
"I work until the last day of the season for the present and future," he added.
"Transfer targets are the future of the club and are very important."
He added: "That (my future) is secondary, what is important is the future of the club."
Wenger said in February that he would decide on a new deal in March or April and later revealed "I know what I will do" and "you will soon know".
However, no announcement has yet been made as Arsenal, sixth in the league, challenge to finish in the top four to secure a Champions League berth - during Wenger's 21 years as manager, Arsenal have not finished outside the top four in the Premier League.
When asked about if there was an update on his future, when he would reveal his decision or whether events in the rest of the season would have an influence, Wenger said: "It's a triple no."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39703517
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Anthony Joshua surprises former coach with a car - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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IBF heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua surprises his former coach, Sean Murphy, with a car to say thank you for introducing him to boxing.
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IBF heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua surprises his former coach, Sean Murphy, with a car to say thank you for introducing him to boxing.
Watch more in Anthony Joshua: The Road to Klitschko on BBC One, the BBC Sport website & mobile app from 22:45 BST on Tuesday, 25 April.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/boxing/39699356
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Serena Williams calls Ilie Nastase comments 'racist' and backs investigation - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Serena Williams says Ilie Nastase's comments about her unborn child are "racist" and backs an International Tennis Federation investigation.
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Last updated on .From the section Tennis
Serena Williams says Ilie Nastase's recent comments about her unborn child are "racist" and has given her backing to a full investigation.
Nastase, a former world number one, was heard speculating whether Williams' child would be "chocolate with milk?"
"It disappoints me to know we live in a society where people like Ilie Nastase can make such racist comments," Williams said in a statement.
Williams, 35, is due to give birth to her first child in the autumn.
"I have said it once and I'll say it again, this world has come so far but yet we have so much further to go," Williams added. "Yes, we have broken down so many barriers - however there are a plethora more to go.
"This or anything else will not stop me from pouring love, light and positivity into everything that I do. I will continue to take a lead and stand up for what's right."
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) has launched an investigation into the comments made by 70-year-old Nastase, Romania's Fed Cup captain, at a news conference before their tie with Great Britain in Constanta last week.
"I humbly thank the ITF for any consideration given to all the facts in this case. They will have my full support," added Williams, who announced her engagement to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian in December.
The 23-time Grand Slam champion also included passages from the poem Still I Rise by American civil rights activist Maya Angelou in her statement.
"I am not afraid like you. You see, I am no coward. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? You may shoot me with your words… you may try to kill me with your hatefulness, but still like the air, I rise."
Williams, who won her record-breaking Grand Slam at the Australian Open while eight weeks pregnant, thanked her unborn child as she regained the world number one ranking on Monday.
"You gave me the strength I didn't know I had. You taught me the true meaning of serenity and peace. I can't wait to meet you," Williams said in a separate statement.
"I can't wait for you to join the players box next year. But most importantly, I am so happy to share being number one in the world with you."
Williams captioned the statement on Instagram "from the world's oldest number one to the world's youngest number one."
WARNING: Some people may find the language below offensive
Nastase's comments about Williams were followed by a foul-mouthed outburst during Romania's Fed Cup win over Great Britain.
Nastase swore at the umpire before abusing Johanna Konta and GB captain Anne Keothavong - calling them both "a bitch" multiple times - leaving Konta reduced to tears.
Before the tie began, he also put his arm tightly around Keothavong and asked for her room number, in earshot of the watching media.
Williams referenced the incidents in Romania in her statement, saying Nastase had made "sexist comments against my peers".
Nastase was banned from the tie and later handed a provisional suspension by the ITF.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/tennis/39700229
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Maria Sharapova: Stuttgart opponent Roberta Vinci questions wildcard - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Maria Sharapova's first opponent following her 15-month doping ban questions the decision to give the Russian wildcards on the WTA Tour.
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Last updated on .From the section Tennis
Coverage: Live commentary from 17:30 BST on BBC Radio 5 live sports extra, BBC Sport website and mobile app.
Maria Sharapova's first opponent following her 15-month doping ban has questioned the decision to give the Russian wildcards on the WTA Tour.
Sharapova plays Italy's Roberta Vinci in the first round of the Porsche Grand Prix in Stuttgart on Wednesday.
The 30-year-old's wildcard entry has already been called "disrespectful" by ex-world number one Caroline Wozniacki.
"I don't agree about the wildcard here and about the wildcard in Rome and the other tournaments," said Vinci, 34.
Sharapova was given a two-year ban last year, backdated to 26 January 2016, after testing positive for heart disease drug meldonium at the Australian Open.
Her suspension was reduced to 15 months in October, following her appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Sharapova will also receive wildcards for upcoming tournaments in Madrid and Rome.
World number 36 Vinci added: "She made her mistakes for sure, but she paid and I think she can return to play - but without any wildcards."
Agnieszka Radwanska of Poland, who could meet Sharapova in the second round in Stuttgart, has also been among those to question the treatment of the former world number one, saying she should not be invited to Grand Slams.
Those views were met with a scathing response by Sharapova's agent Max Eisenbud, who labelled Radwanska, 28, and 26-year-old Wozniacki of Denmark "journeyman" rivals who wanted to prevent the Russian playing at next month's French Open because it is their "last chance to win a Slam".
Sharapova, twice a winner at the French Open, is unranked and will require a wildcard to compete at Roland Garros when the tournament starts next month, with France's tennis federation yet to announce its decision.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/tennis/39699807
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Reality Check: Are a quarter of Scottish children in poverty? - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Official figures suggest that the number of children in poverty in Scotland has jumped to 260,000.
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UK Politics
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The claim: 260,000 children in Scotland are living in poverty, 40,000 up on last year.
Reality Check verdict: The best available figures suggest he is right to say there has been a jump in child poverty in Scotland to 260,000 after several years of little change.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn addressed the Scottish Trades Union Congress in Aviemore on Monday.
He highlighted the increase in relative child poverty in Scotland, saying that 260,000 children are living in relative poverty, which is up 40,000 on last year.
The figures come from a Scottish Government publication, which calculates relative poverty as living in households with incomes below 60% of the median income for the UK, after housing costs have been paid.
The median income is the one for which half of UK households have a higher income and half have a lower one.
The most recent figure is for the financial year 2015-16, and suggests that 260,000 children were living in relative poverty after housing costs, which is 26% of children in Scotland. That's up from 220,000 or 22% in 2014-15.
The figures in this report come from the Family Resources Survey, which collects information about 2,700 households in Scotland.
That's a large survey, but it still has a margin of error, so when it suggests that 260,000 children are living in poverty it means that the statisticians are 95% confident that the actual figure is somewhere between 190,000 and 320,000. That means that even though 40,000 is an unusually large increase, it is well within the margin of error and so the change is not statistically significant.
The Scottish Government proposed a Child Poverty Bill last year. The bill will set ambitious targets for reducing child poverty by 2030.
The report itself warns against placing too much emphasis on a single year's figures. "More data will be required to judge whether these changes are indicative of a longer term trend," it says.
Nonetheless, these are official figures and they are the best figures available, suggesting there may have been a jump after several years of little change.
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39696117
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Kelly Sotherton: British athlete feels third Olympic medal gives career 'more meaning' - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Kelly Sotherton feels her career has "more meaning" after she is upgraded to a three-time Olympic medallist following retrospective drug tests.
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Last updated on .From the section Athletics
Kelly Sotherton feels her career has "more meaning" after she was upgraded to a three-time Olympic medallist following retrospective drug tests.
Sotherton, who won heptathlon bronze in 2004, has been given third for the same event in Beijing 2008 after Tatyana Chernova tested positive for a steroid.
In November, the Briton was moved up to bronze in the 2008 4x400m relay after Belarus and Russia's disqualifications.
"Until now I felt my career could have been better," she told BBC Sport.
"I left Beijing in tears because I thought I had failed. But I am a lot happier now because I feel my career has more meaning to it and I am worthy.
"I would swap all three medals for a gold, obviously, but to win three Olympic medals, regardless of what colour they are, is an achievement and I feel very happy about that."
'It isn't just about me'
Sotherton, 40, retired five years ago after failing to recover from a back problem in time to qualify for the heptathlon at London 2012.
She initially finished fifth in the heptathlon in Beijing but climbed to third after the previously announced doping ban of Ukrainian Lyudmila Blonska was followed by that of Russia's Chernova.
After finding out she was to become a three-time Olympic medallist, Sotherton posted an emotional video on social media showing her reaction.
"I am happy but obviously at the same time disappointed to have missed nine years as a three-time Olympic medallist," she said. "You feel all of the emotions in a space of a minute.
"All of my friends and family saw my emotions so they have been emotional when they have messaged me.
"It isn't just about me, it is about the people who support me and were around me at the time. They are happy because they feel like they have won that bronze as well."
'Massive steps made but still more to do'
More than 100 athletes have had positive results in re-tests conducted by the IOC of samples taken during the London 2012 and Beijing 2008 Olympics.
Sotherton's compatriot, Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, belatedly won the 2011 World heptathlon title last year when Chernova was similarly stripped of gold for doping.
The 31-year-old, who retired last year and is due to receive her gold medal from Daegu in a special ceremony at the World Championships in London in August, said: "We have made massive steps to becoming a cleaner sport in the past year but there's a lot that needs to be done.
"It's not something that's going to happen in a short amount of time.
"Hopefully we have a fantastic World Championships and we don't have this case of three, four or five years down the line where people are having medals stripped off them.
"I hope as we continue with our sport over the next few years it just gets better and better."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/39713814
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Will NHS stats spark polling day debate? - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Key statistics on NHS performance are due to be published on the day of the general election.
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Health
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On general election polling day, broadcasters are obliged to refrain from coverage of campaigning and stick to uncontroversial accounts of politicians voting or the weather.
But there could be an important news story that day relating to one of the main issues of the campaign - the state of the health service.
Thursday 8 June is the day announced by NHS England for the publication of its monthly statistics.
These cover a raft of data, including waiting times for accident & emergency and the number of people waiting longer than they should for cancer treatment and routine surgery.
In the absence of campaign coverage before the close of polls at 22:00 BST, the NHS figures published that day for the month of April may generate a certain amount of broadcast and online media interest.
Given trends revealed in previous months, it's likely that waiting lists will be longer than a year earlier although there may have been improvement on previous months.
NHS England updated its publications calendar only last week after the prime minister's announcement of the general election on 8 June.
The monthly performance statistics are usually published on the Thursday of the first full week of a month so the choice of date is logical.
The date chosen for the previous month's statistics is 11 May and the data then may fuel exchanges between the parties at the height of the campaign.
This data publication issue has not occurred before because in previous campaigns NHS England was not putting out such a wide range of statistics on a single day each month.
The current system only started in the summer of 2015.
As things stand and if the chosen date is not altered, voters could head to the polling stations with the performance of the NHS one of the main news stories of the day.
So are any other important health announcements due during the campaign?
Whitehall's traditional "purdah" during an election period has begun.
This obliges government departments and other public sector organisations to refrain from new policy announcements.
The idea is to stop a government rushing out initiatives close to polling day.
Usually purdah takes effect when parliament is dissolved but this time it has been imposed more than a week before that.
There have been claims, denied by government sources, that closing down the official news machine early is part of Downing Street's attempt to tightly control the agenda.
Pre-announced official statistics, like the NHS England performance figures, are not affected by purdah.
It is the same for economic data announcements like unemployment and inflation which go ahead as usual.
There is, however, uncertainty around one other key health service publication - the quarterly financial figures from hospitals and other trusts in England.
The regulator NHS Improvement would normally publish in late May the total deficits for trusts for the three months ending in March.
These are especially important as they cover the final quarter of the financial year and so give the full year total.
The state of NHS finances is a political hot potato and these figures are sure to generate more heated debate. But will they be published during the campaign?
Unlike pre-announced official statistics, the precise date for the NHS Improvement financial data is not confirmed until close to the chosen publication date.
I am told there is a debate at a high level of the NHS over whether they should be released, as would be expected, a couple of weeks before polling day in June.
There is a delicate balance to be struck between the public's right to see normally published information from autonomous NHS bodies and the need to take on board the sensitivities of a campaign.
Some delicate decisions have to be made.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39695598
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Meeting an organ trafficker who preys on Syrian refugees - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Abu Jaafar's job is to find people desperate enough to give up parts of their body for money.
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Magazine
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There's a glint of pride in Abu Jaafar's eyes as he explains what he does for a living.
He used to work as a security guard in a pub but then he met a group which trades in organs. His job is to find people desperate enough to give up parts of their body for money, and the influx of refugees from Syria to Lebanon has created many opportunities.
"I do exploit people," he says, though he points out that many could easily have died at home in Syria, and that giving up an organ is nothing by comparison to the horrors they have already experienced.
"I'm exploiting them," he says, "and they're benefitting."
His base is a small coffee shop in one of the crowded suburbs of southern Beirut, a dilapidated building covered by a plastic tarpaulin.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. "I know what I'm doing is illegal, but I'm helping people, that's how I see it."
At the back, a room behind a rusty partition is stuffed with old furniture and has budgerigars singing in cages in each corner.
From here he has arranged the sale of organs from about 30 refugees in the last three years, he says.
"They usually ask for kidneys, yet I can still find and facilitate other organs", he says.
"They once asked for an eye, and I was able to acquire a client willing to sell his eye.
"I took a picture of the eye and sent it to the guys by Whatsapp for confirmation. I then delivered the client."
The narrow streets in which he operates are crammed with refugees. Around one in four people in Lebanon today have fled the conflict across the border in Syria.
Most aren't allowed to work under Lebanese law, and many families barely get by.
Among the most desperate are Palestinians who were already considered refugees in Syria, and so are not eligible to be re-registered by the UN refugee agency when they arrive in Lebanon. They live in overcrowded camps and receive very little aid.
Almost as vulnerable are those who arrived from Syria after May 2015, when the Lebanese government asked the UN to stop registering new refugees.
"Those who are not registered as refugees are struggling," Abu Jaafar says. "What can they do? They are desperate and they have no other means to survive but to sell their organs."
Some refugees beg on the streets - particularly children. Young boys shine shoes, dodge between cars in traffic jams to sell chewing gum or tissues through the windows, or end up exploited as child labour. Others turn to prostitution.
But selling an organ is one way to make money quickly.
Once Abu Jaafar has found a willing candidate he drives them, blindfolded, to a hidden location on a designated day.
Sometimes the doctors operate in rented houses, transformed into temporary clinics, where the donors undergo basic blood tests before surgery.
"Once the operation is done I bring them back," he says.
"I keep looking after them for almost a week until they remove the stitches. The moment they lose the stitches we don't care what happens to them any longer.
"I don't really care if the client dies, I got what I wanted. It's not my problem what happens next as long as the client got paid."
His most recent client was a 17-year-old boy who left Syria after his father and brothers were killed there.
He's been in Lebanon for three years with no work and mounting debt, struggling to support his mother and five sisters.
So, through Abu Jaafar, he agreed to sell his right kidney for $8,000 (£6,250).
Two days later, clearly in pain despite taking tablets, he was alternately lying down and sitting up on a tattered sofa, trying to get comfortable.
His face was covered in a sheen of sweat and blood had seeped through his bandages.
Abu Jaafar won't reveal how much he made from the deal. He says he doesn't know what happens to the organs after they have been removed, but he thinks they're exported.
Across the Middle East there's a shortage of organs for transplant, because of cultural and religious objections to organ donation. Most families prefer immediate burial.
But Abu Jaafar claims there are at least seven other brokers like him operating across Lebanon.
"Business is booming," he says. "It's growing and not decreasing. It definitely boomed after the Syrian migration to Lebanon."
He knows what he does is against the law but doesn't fear the authorities. In fact he is brazen about it. His phone number is spray-painted on the walls near his home.
In his neighbourhood, he is both respected and feared. As he walks around people stop to joke and argue with him.
He has a handgun tucked under his leg as we talk.
"I know that what I am doing is illegal but I am helping people", he says.
"That's how I perceive it. The client is using the money to seek a better life for himself and his family.
"He's able to buy a car and work as a taxi driver or even travel to another country.
"I am helping those people and I don't care about the law."
In fact, he says, it's the law that lets many refugees down by restricting access to work and aid.
"I am not forcing anyone to undertake the operation," he says. "I am only facilitating based on someone's request."
He lights a cigarette and raises an eyebrow.
"How much for your eye?" he asks.
Abu Jaafar is not his real name - he would only agree to talk to the BBC on condition of anonymity.
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General Election 2017: Lib Dems to keep 'nuclear deterrent' - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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Leader Tim Farron also accuses Jeremy Corbyn of being "weak and dangerous" on defence matters.
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UK Politics
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The Liberal Democrats would "maintain a credible nuclear deterrent" if they won power, leader Tim Farron says.
"Our nuclear deterrent keeps us at the top table in this post-Brexit world," he said.
But Mr Farron also advocated replacing the current system of continuous-at-sea deterrence with more irregular patrolling patterns.
And he accused Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of being "weak and dangerous" on defence matters.
Earlier this week, Mr Corbyn - a long-standing opponent of nuclear weapons - said "all aspects" of defence would be reviewed if he won power in the snap election on 8 June.
"I have made clear there would be no first use of it and that any use of nuclear weapons would be a disaster for the world," he told Andrew Marr on BBC One.
His party, however, issued a statement later the same day clarifying that Labour as a whole was in favour of renewing the existing Trident nuclear weapons system.
MPs overwhelmingly voted earlier this year to build four new submarines to carry missiles armed with nuclear warheads. They are intended to replace the existing Vanguard fleet from the early 2030s at an estimated cost of £31bn.
Mr Farron was expected to make his comments in a speech to supporters in Portsmouth, but the Lib Dems said the visit had to be cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
The pre-released text of his speech said: "If you say that you would never press the button, as Jeremy Corbyn seems to have suggested, that makes a mockery of having a deterrent or indeed sound defences."
He added that the Liberal Democrats are committed to Nato, the European Union and the United Nations.
Each Vanguard submarine can carry up to eight Trident missiles
"We believe that our safety and security as a country is best achieved through co-operating with the UK's allies," he said.
"That is why we are committed to maintaining a credible nuclear deterrent, because there is nothing to gain from walking away from the table and turning our back on those who rely on our protection."
Switching from a continuous at-sea deterrent to irregular patrols "would maintain the ability to surge to more frequent armed patrols, or drop down to a low-readiness posture if the security situation allows", he argued.
Mr Farron also said the party's long-term goal will "always be a nuclear-free world", and it would use the UK's position to lead international efforts towards multilateral disarmament.
The Lib Dems have faced division on the issue in the past, with some activists calling for Trident to be axed, saying it is expensive and unnecessary.
A commitment to replacing Trident was a Conservative manifesto pledge in the last general election in 2015.
And shortly before becoming prime minister, Theresa May said it would be "sheer madness" to give up the UK's nuclear weapons because of the threat posed by other countries including Russia.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39702865
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Rafael Benitez: Newcastle boss needs transfer funds - Alan Shearer - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Newcastle boss Rafael Benitez must be given money for new players before their Premier League return, says club legend Alan Shearer.
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Last updated on .From the section Football
Newcastle manager Rafael Benitez must be given money to improve the team before their Premier League return next season, says club legend Alan Shearer.
Benitez spent over £50m last summer after relegation, but Shearer says there is a risk of losing the Spaniard if he is not backed financially.
"I would think giving him transfer funds would be key to keeping hold of him," said the Magpies' record scorer.
Newcastle secured promotion with a 4-1 home win over Preston on Monday.
Speaking on BBC Radio 5 live, former England captain Shearer added: "He's a huge figure at the club. He loves the place and the passion of fans - and it's hugely important Newcastle keep hold of him.
"I'm sure he will demand the team has to be improved and will demand a few quid to do that.
"You can't stand still. You can't be loyal and give all the players that have got the team promoted a chance. You've got to go out and buy new players.
"People realise the team needs improving to get to where they want to be and that's got to be the top half of the Premier League.
"Now it's about where Newcastle want to be - do they want to get up to the Premier League and be in the bottom three or four fighting against relegation, or do they want to have a go at it? I'm pretty sure I know what Rafa will want to do."
Former Newcastle winger Chris Waddle echoed Shearer's view and believes Benitez will be in demand.
"The fans love Rafa - obviously - but I think Rafa will have a lot of tasty offers on the table from around Europe," Waddled told BBC Radio 5 live.
"If he doesn't get the reassurances he needs to strengthen his team - and I mean strengthen it - he's probably going to be looking elsewhere.
"I know fans will not want to hear that but he'll not want to be in a relegation battle next year."
• None Listen: Newcastle can't be loyal to the players who won promotion - Shearer
• None How Newcastle won promotion - relive the action as it happened
Now is the time to buy and build - Stone
Benitez was appointed by Newcastle in March 2016 but could not save them from relegation to the Championship.
He had a break clause in his contract allowing him to leave if the Magpies went down, but instead the former Liverpool and Chelsea boss opted to sign a new three-year deal.
One of the most expensive squads in Championship history was assembled last summer, mainly using funds generated from the sales of Moussa Sissoko, Georginio Wijnaldum, Andros Townsend and other high-profile departures.
Monday's victory over North End secured an immediate return to the top flight with two games to spare and ex-Newcastle keeper Steve Harper hopes the Magpies hierarchy give Benitez £60m to strengthen.
"He generated a £30m profit last year and you'd like to think they might give him double that," Harper told BBC Radio 5 live.
"Matt Ritchie and Jonjo Shelvey have had excellent seasons but I think every single Newcastle fan would want to see another five or six definite starting line-up Premier League players arrive so, when they go back, they're set up to compete.
Nobody will know that better than Rafa Benitez. He's united the fans again with his honesty and his integrity.
"He knows his stock is high. He's in a very strong position so he can ask the serious questions now and, hopefully, they do back him."
Against Preston, Christian Atsu put the Magpies 2-1 up at half-time after Jordan Hugill had cancelled out an Ayoze Perez opener.
On a tense evening at St James' Park, Newcastle nerves were settled when Preston's Paul Gallagher was sent off for handling on the line and Ritchie scored the resulting penalty.
Perez got his second from close range to send Newcastle up with Brighton.
Former Newcastle coach Steve Stone also believes the squad needs strengthening again at the end of the season.
"They still need an awful lot of new players before next season," he told BBC Radio 5 live.
"Fans realise they're not going to win the Premier League next season and they will struggle to get into the top 10. They need to get a foothold in the Premier League first, otherwise they will become a yo-yo club.
"It's been a long time since Newcastle were battling at the top of the Premier League. They finished fifth under Alan Pardew the season I was there (2011-12), but they haven't been up there on a consistent basis since Bobby Robson left (in 2004).
"Now is the time to buy and build, and make sure club doesn't have to play in this division ever again."
Former Nottingham Forest and England midfielder Stone added: "The fans absolutely adore Rafa Benitez and they have from the start. They chanted his name throughout the game.
"But he knows now that he needs money and it will be interesting to see if they give him the money he deserves.
"Everywhere Rafa goes, he gets a massive reception. Newcastle were lucky to get him - they needed him more than he needed Newcastle.
"Since getting here he has realised what it's all about and he's bought into it."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39699186
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Joshua v Klitschko: Why Mihai Nistor won't cash in on beating a champion - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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Mihai Nistor was the last fighter to stop Anthony Joshua - but while Joshua earns millions, Nistor remains an amateur on a modest income. Why?
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Magazine
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Mihai Nistor was the last - and only - fighter to stop world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua. But while Joshua now earns millions, Nistor survives in his Bucharest apartment, still an amateur on a modest income. Why has he spurned boxing's riches?
He sits alone on a park bench, surrounded by an endless sprawl of discoloured communist-era apartment blocks.
As the midday commuter traffic bustles around him in this crowded suburb of the Romanian capital, Mihai Nistor is barely recognised by passers-by.
It's just six years since Nistor stopped Anthony Joshua with a flurry of hard punches to the head in the third round of their fight at the European Amateur Championships in 2011 in Turkey, but since then their careers have taken starkly different paths.
This weekend Joshua will step into the ring at London's Wembley Stadium to defend his IBF world heavyweight title in a unification fight against Wladimir Klitschko.
It will be one of the biggest fights in British boxing's history, with 90,000 tickets expected to be sold, and both boxers will earn millions of pounds for a maximum 36 minutes of ring time.
Nistor, 26, will watch the fight from his couch in the modest Bucharest apartment he shares with his younger rugby player brother. He still boxes as an amateur and his salary of £1,200 ($1,500) per month is funded by the Romanian army.
But Nistor, from one of Europe's poorest and most corrupt countries, insists he doesn't dwell on the gulf between his income and Joshua's.
"I don't do this sport for money," he says. "I do it for pleasure, because you don't win if you are motivated by money," he adds.
Listen to Radio 5 live commentary from 21:00 BST and follow text updates on the BBC Sport website as Anthony Joshua takes on Wladimir Klitschko for the IBF and WBA heavyweight titles on Saturday 29 April
What also gives him pleasure are his memories of beating Joshua. "It was a special day," he recalls.
"My trainer said: 'Don't worry, Joshua is big but he'll go down quickly if you punch him correctly.' I didn't know who he was or what he was going to become… He was a good boxer, he was moving all the time and he had a strong punch."
"I beat him in 2011 and in 2012 he was an Olympic champion," Nistor adds, grinning.
Despite Nistor's technical knockout win in Turkey, where he won a bronze medal, he failed to qualify for the London 2012 Olympics - "poor judges" were to blame, he says. His old foe Joshua, on the other hand, went on to qualify and won the biggest prize in their sport - an Olympic gold.
Nistor during his defeat to Iashaish of Jordan in the 2016 Olympics
An Olympic boxing medal can lead amateurs to lucrative professional contracts. Indeed, not long after his spectacular London Olympics win, Joshua ditched his amateur vest and five years later, the 27-year-old is now a global superstar and a multi-millionaire.
However, Nistor continues fighting amongst the amateurs, surviving on his modest income. Until recently, only amateurs could box at the Olympics and he carries an undying dream of winning a gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics — despite his failed attempt to bring home a medal from Rio last year.
"I don't know what the judges were looking at," Nistor says, reflecting on his disappointing loss in Rio, where he was the only boxer to represent Romania.
"I lost the first round because of the emotion, but the second and third I won clearly," he adds.
Spending time with Nistor, he gives the impression of a boxer unsure of how to advance.
He keeps training, thinking about the big time, but he can't move past a marker, the Olympics, that many fighters - win or lose - would be only too glad to use as a stepping stone to launch a profitable professional career.
Nistor started boxing at 16 years old, and many considered it too late for him to achieve anything meaningful in the sport. However, just three months after first lacing up his gloves, he won a national heavyweight amateur title.
"I am not too talented," Nistor admits. "But I love combat and I like to work… Hard work, hard work, hard work." He repeats it like a mantra he's grown only too familiar with during his gruelling six-day-a-week training regime.
"If you don't have much talent but you work really hard, hard work will beat talent - every time," he adds.
Even now, Nistor's boxing style could be a tricky one for any current professional heavyweight boxer. Although Nistor is short for his division at just 6ft tall, he has an aggressive, relentless style and power in both hands.
Some parts of the Romanian media have nicknamed Nistor the "Tyson of Romania". With his thick-set frame and looping heavy punches - like the ones that stopped Joshua six years ago - the likeness is fitting.
"I am like Tyson because I have the power and movement," says Nistor, strolling along a congested Bucharest street, as car horns endlessly sound and locals scramble to get their lunch, paying him no attention.
Nistor is well aware that by delaying his move from the amateur to the professional code he risks missing out on some prime fighting years, but his desire to strike Olympic gold keeps on persisting.
It doesn't help, either, that he wants to remain in his home country. Nistor would probably have to move abroad to a country with a more developed boxing scene than Romania if he were ever to reach his full potential as a professional fighter.
Even now, Nistor has to regularly venture abroad to get quality sparring partners.
"It would be to America as that's where people make it in boxing, and people there love the boxers," Nistor says, matter-of-factly.
Beyond his vague indifference to follow in the footsteps of Joshua, Nistor has another strong reason to delay turning professional.
"Romania has only ever had one Olympic gold-medal boxer - Nicolae Linca at the Melbourne 1956 Olympic Games," Nistor says.
"He's my hero. I'm delaying turning professional because I want to win a gold medal in Tokyo," Nistor adds.
However, unlike Nistor, Linca never had the chance to cash in financially on his boxing abilities, because he fought during a period when Romania was a communist dictatorship.
After boxing, Linca's life was blighted by Parkinson's Disease and he died in poverty in 2006.
Nistor says that the disparity in wealth and status between him and Joshua is of little concern to him, and that he's happy with his close-knit family life, his long-term girlfriend and to have "beaten a man who won an Olympic gold medal".
Even still, Nistor believes that he could repeat his win against Joshua if the two were to fight again. "I see many imperfections in Joshua… He leaves himself too visible [to take punches]," says Nistor.
"I would study him for a month and create tactics with my coach," he adds.
The worry for Nistor, as he gets ready to watch his old rival fighting under the bright lights of worldwide stardom, is that he might never get his own shot at the big league.
Photos by Stephen McGrath except where otherwise stated
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Lib Dem membership tops 100,000 after snap election call - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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Leader Tim Farron says the party is the only one opposing Theresa May's "hard Brexit".
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UK Politics
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Lib Dem membership has passed the 100,000 mark following a surge of new joiners since Theresa May announced a snap general election.
The party said it has signed up 12,500 new members since last week - and is expected to reach its highest total in its history "within days".
Leader Tim Farron said Lib Dems are the only party opposing Mrs May's "hard Brexit agenda".
He insisted the party would not enter a coalition with the Tories or Labour.
The biggest membership number the Lib Dems have had since their formation was 101,768 members in 1994.
The recent flurry of interest means more than 50,000 members have joined since last year's European referendum - and more than 67,500 since the party's electoral low point, at the 2015 general election.
Mr Farron, who pledged to build the membership to 100,000 when he became leader in 2015, said reaching the goal "tells us that there's an appetite for change in British politics and Liberal Democrats are the vehicle for that change".
He said: "People want a strong opposition to Theresa May's hard Brexit agenda and the Liberal Democrats are the only party challenging them up and down the country."
In an appeal to would-be supporters, he said: "This election is your chance to change the direction of our country. If you want to stop a disastrous hard Brexit, if you want to keep Britain in the single market, if you want a strong opposition to fight for an open, tolerant and united Britain - this is your chance."
The Lib Dem leader also repeated his insistence that there are "no circumstances whatsoever" that the party will go in to a coalition with the Conservatives or Labour after the 8 June election, given the current approaches of those two parties.
He also dismissed an informal arrangement to offer his party's support on budget measures and other key votes to help a minority Tory or Labour administration.
On Sunday he told ITV's Peston on Sunday: "What Britain needs in this election is clarity and a contest. Theresa May has called this election because she believes it'll be a coronation.
"The Liberal Democrats are determined to make it a contest with a clear alternative position, and I don't want people thinking a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a proxy for anything else."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39694417
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The Holocaust: Who are the missing million? - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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Researchers have so far named nearly five million victims, but now they are in a race against time.
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Middle East
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Two-thirds of European Jewry was murdered by the Nazis
Giselle Cycowicz (born Friedman) remembers her father, Wolf, as a warm, kind and religious man. "He was a scholar," she says, "he always had a book open, studying Talmud [compendium of Jewish law], but he was also a businessman and he looked after his family."
Before the war, the Friedmans lived a happy, comfortable life in Khust, a Czechoslovak town with a large Jewish population on the fringes of Hungary. All that changed after 1939, when pro-Nazi Hungarian troops, and later Nazi Germany, invaded, and all the town's Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
Giselle last saw her father, "strong and healthy", hours after the family arrived at the Birkenau section of the death camp. Wolf had been selected for a workforce but a fellow prisoner under orders would not let her go to him.
"That would have been my chance to maybe kiss him the last time," Giselle, now 89, says, her voice cracking with emotion.
Giselle, her mother and a sister survived, somehow, five months in "the hell" of Auschwitz. She later learned that in October 1944 "a skeletal man" had passed by the women's camp and relayed a message to anyone alive in there from Khust.
"Tell them just now 200 men were brought back from the coal mine. Tell them that tomorrow we won't be here anymore." The man was Wolf Friedman. He was gassed the next day.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, some 900,000 Jews were murdered on arrival
Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices during World War Two. In many cases entire towns' Jewish populations were wiped out, with no survivors to bear witness - part of the Nazis' plan for the total annihilation of European Jewry.
Since 1954, Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem ("A Memorial and a Name"), has been working to recover the names of all the victims, and to date has managed to identify some 4.7 million.
"Every name is very important to us," says Dr Alexander Avram, director of Yad Vashem's Hall of Names and the Central Database of Shoah [Holocaust] Victims' Names.
"Every new name we can add to our database is a victory against the Nazis, against the intent of the Nazis to wipe out the Jewish people. Every new name is a small victory against oblivion."
In Western Europe, the Nazis kept records of victims, such as this Frankfurt to Theresienstadt deportation list
The institution, a sprawling complex of buildings, trees and gardens on the western slopes of Mount Herzl, gathers details about the victims in two ways: through information from those with knowledge of the deceased, and archive sources, ranging from Nazi deportation lists to Jewish school yearbooks.
Today Giselle has come to dedicate her father's name, nearly 73 years after he was killed, a small piece in a vast jigsaw.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. "I never got the chance to kiss my father goodbye"
She is helped by trained staff through the process of recording Wolf's details on a Page of Testimony, a one-page form for documenting biographical information about the deceased, such as where they lived before the War, their occupation and the members of their family, and, if available, a photograph.
"Only two-thirds of the way down do we ask where they were during the war and what happened to them," Cynthia Wroclawski, deputy director of Yad Vashem's Archives Division, points out.
"We're interested in seeing a person as a person and who they were before they became a victim."
Details about the lives of millions of victims are held in Yad Vashem's Hall of Names
It is, the institution says, a kind of paper tombstone. So far Yad Vashem has collected 2.7m Pages of Testimony.
Each is stored in black boxes, each containing 300 pages - 9,000 boxes in all. They are kept in climate-controlled conditions on shelves surrounding a central installation, a 30ft-high conical lined with the faces of men, women and children who were murdered, rising up towards the sky.
Here in the Hall of Names groups of visitors pass through in quiet contemplation. There is space on the shelves for 11,000 more boxes - or 6m names in all.
With the last survivors dying out, Yad Vashem is facing a race against time to prevent more than a million unidentified victims disappearing without a trace.
This is apparent in the decreasing number of Pages of Testimony it receives - down from at least 2,000 per month five years ago to about 1,600 per month currently.
The memorial is trying to raise awareness, including among Holocaust survivors who have not yet come forward. For decades, for many of them the experience was still too painful to talk about.
"It's quite a common occurrence, not only in Holocaust survivors but survivors of prolonged and extreme trauma in childhood," says Dr Martin Auerbach, Clinical Director at Amcha, a support service in Jerusalem for Holocaust survivors.
There are spaces on the shelves for a possible six million Pages of Testimony
That began to change, he says, after about 30 or 40 years, when many survivors started talking about what happened, not with their children but with their inquisitive grandchildren. Dr Auerbach sees the Names Recovery Project as a valuable part of the healing process.
"Filling out this page of information saying this was my father, mother, grandfather, nephews and nieces - you cannot bury your relatives who perished but you can remember them in a way that will commemorate them forever, so this is very important and also therapeutic for many survivors."
While Yad Vashem has made great strides in identifying victims from Western and Central Europe - about 95% have now been named - far fewer names have been uncovered in Nazi-occupied areas of Eastern Europe, where about 4.5m Jews were murdered.
This is because while there was an organised, official process of arrest and deportation further west, in the east whole communities were marched off and massacred without any such formalities.
Only about half the victims of the Babi Yar massacre have so far been named
An estimated 1.5m Jews alone were shot to death by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) in what has become known as the Holocaust by Bullets, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
In Babi Yar, in Ukraine, for instance, of the 33,000 Jews from Kiev and its surroundings who were slaughtered in a ravine in September 1941 in the largest massacre of its kind, about half are yet to be identified.
Others not murdered by the Einsatzgruppen died, without a trace, from starvation or exhaustion in ghettos and labour camps, or were killed in nearby extermination camps, where they had been herded without any kind of processing.
Yad Vashem is working with Jewish organisations in those countries to try to reach remaining survivors in the former Soviet Union, where the Holocaust was not officially commemorated, and who may have little awareness of the memorial's existence.
It is a massive and often complex task. The memorial holds some 205m Holocaust-related documents, which are examined meticulously in the search for names.
"There is a lot of documentation where there are names that are very scattered," says Dr Avram. "Names mentioned in a letter here or a report there. This can be very labour intensive. Sometimes you have to go through thousands and thousands of pages just to retrieve a few dozen names."
The difficulty is compounded by the fact that sources can be in 30-40 different languages, most are handwritten and can be in different scripts, such as Latin, Hebrew and Cyrillic. "Our staff not only need to be linguists but they need to know calligraphy," says Dr Avram, himself a language expert.
Pages remembering victims have been filled in more than 20 languages - such was the scale of the Nazis' reach
One of the biggest gaps is with children, of whom some 1.5 million were murdered in the Holocaust. Only about half have been identified.
"It's one of the saddest things," says Dr Avram. "We have reports where parents are named with say three or four children, unnamed. They were little children and people just don't remember."
The aim is to turn them from anonymous statistics into human beings again, like seven-year-old Edward-Edik Tonkonogi, from Satanov in Ukraine. His childish innocence and sweetness of character come across in a letter he wrote in 1941 to his parents who were travelling with a Russian theatre troupe:
Edik was murdered after the Nazis entered the town that same year. His name was later memorialised in a Page of Testimony by a relative.
As time moves on, the task of finding missing names is getting harder in some respects but easier in others. The availability of source material is greater than ever and advances in technology mean it can be a less arduous task to gather information and manipulate the data.
However, the fewer the names left to uncover, the more activity it takes to find them.
The digital age also means there are more tools at researchers' disposal than ever before. The department searching for names recently took to social media, including Facebook, in a push to reach untapped survivors. The campaign generated many new Pages of Testimony.
"When you're talking about social media you have the younger generation now understanding that those names are not in our database and trying to find out the information from their family members," says Sara Berkowitz, manager of the Names Recovery Project.
There is another significant, sometimes life-changing, outcome of the growth of the names database, which has been available online since 2004. It has led to emotional reunions of survivors who had lived their lives not knowing there was anyone else from their family left alive.
Last year two sets of families belonging to two sisters, each of whom thought the other had perished in the Holocaust, were united after a chance discovery through the Pages of Testimony. It transpired the sisters had lived out their lives just 25 minutes away from each other in northern Israel, but passed away without ever being aware.
In 2015 a pair of half-siblings who did not know the other was alive were reunited as a result of searching the database, while in 2006 a brother and sister, one living in Canada and the other in Israel, were reunited 65 years after becoming separated in their hometown in Romania.
The project has also brought to light other, unfortunate findings. Argentinean-born Claudia de Levie, whose parents fled Germany in the 1930s, believed she had lost four or five relatives in the Holocaust. A search of the database to help with her daughter's homework revealed in fact 180 family members had been killed.
Claudia de Levie lost many family members in the Holocaust, but found new living relatives
Further research however revealed through a signature on a Page of Testimony the existence of cousins of her husband, living in Hamburg. The families now speak to each other each week on Skype.
Ironically, a chief architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, lived as a fugitive in the same neighbourhood as Claudia when she was a child in Argentina, as she would later learn.
The importance of the mission to recover victims' names received global recognition in 2013 when the United Nations cultural agency, Unesco, included the collection in its Memory of the World register.
The agency lauded it as "unprecedented in human history", pointing out that the project had given rise to similar efforts in other places of genocide, such as Rwanda and Cambodia.
Manual searches of thousands of documents might yield just a few names
Despite the millions of names recorded so far, there is still a long way to go if all six million are ever to be recovered, but those behind the project remain determined.
"I personally would like that we do reach that goal, that at least among those who perished there won't be a person who remains unknown. It's our moral imperative," says Sara Berkowitz.
"Until I sit in the office and days will pass by and I won't have work to do, I'll know that we've more or less raked the universe to try to get to every name and there is no more there."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-39062221
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Tyson Fury: Former heavyweight champion targets July return - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Former heavyweight champion Tyson Fury targets a July return on the Billy Joe Saunders-Avtandil Khurtsidze undercard.
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Last updated on .From the section Boxing
Former heavyweight champion Tyson Fury is targeting a July return to boxing.
The 28-year-old said in a post on social media he was aiming to return on the Billy Joe Saunders-Avtandil Khurtsidze undercard.
Fury, who has not fought since he beat Wladmir Klitschko in November 2015, had his licence revoked in October as he dealt with mental health problems.
He initially wanted to return in May but the British Boxing Board of Control told the BBC he was still suspended.
Fury posted that he was travelling to Marbella to train for the Saunders-Khurtsdize bout, which is scheduled for 8 July.
He vacated his WBO and WBA world heavyweight titles a day before his licence was suspended, saying he was unable to defend them because of his health.
The BBBofC said at the time that Fury's licence was suspended "pending further investigation into anti-doping and medical issues".
He would have to appear before the board to be given permission to fight.
• 29 November 2015: Beats Ukrainian Wladimir Klitschko to become the WBA, IBF and WBO champion
• 8 December 2015: Stripped of his IBF title for failing to fight the mandatory challenger
• 24 June 2016: Postpones July's rematch with Klitschko after injuring an ankle in training
• 4 August 2016: UK's anti-doping body confirms it charged Fury with a doping offence on 24 June
• 23 September 2016: Postpones rematch for a second time because he is "medically unfit"
• 3 October: Appears to retire from boxing, tweeting: "I'm the greatest, and I'm also retired." Three hours later he reverses the decision, tweeting he is "here to stay"
• 5 October 2016: Reveals he has been taking cocaine to help him deal with depression
• 10 October 2016: Given extended deadline to convince the WBO not to strip him of his world heavyweight title
• 6 March 2017: Suggests he could make a comeback on 13 May
• 25 April: Says he wants to fight on Billy Joe Saunders-Avtandil Khurtsize undercard
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/boxing/39709069
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Chris Ofili is weaving magic - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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How the Turner Prize-winning artist has moved on from elephant dung to lyrical tapestry.
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Entertainment & Arts
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Chris Ofili's tapestry took three years to create
I know some folk think Chris Ofili has gone off the boil since his Turner Prize-winning heyday, when he was considered one of Charles Saatchi's gang of Young British Artists.
Back then, Ofili incorporated elephant dung and cut-outs from porn mags in his paintings, which upset Mayor Giuliani considerably (and the current President who called Ofili's painting, Holy Virgin Mary, "absolutely gross") when Saatchi took his Sensation show to NYC in 1999.
Nowadays, the Mancunian artist lives and works in Trinidad and produces lyrical paintings full of myth and mysticism, infused with the spirits of Henri Matisse and William Blake. El Greco-like elongations have taken the place of porn, the turquoise of the Caribbean Sea now as present as was once elephant dung.
I like his new work. I don't think he's lost form, just moved on. The core of what he does is the same, which is to mix pop culture and art history. From a technical point of view it seems to me that his sensitivity to colour has developed, and his line is more assured. The effect of moving from a modern metropolis to a rural island culture has clearly had a big impact on how he perceives and represents the world.
All of which can be seen in his latest work, a large-scale tapestry called The Caged Bird's Song (a riff on Maya Angelou's book, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings) currently hanging at the National Gallery in London, before taking up permanent residence at the Clothworkers' Company - the London Livery Company that commissioned it.
It is arranged as a triptych, with the two side panels featuring standing figures pulling back curtains to reveal a mythical world. The male figure on the right holds a cage in which a songbird is perched, while the woman on the left has a sprig of black berries clasped between her fingers drooping in anticipation of being eaten by the bird.
The central panel has two lovers sitting by a rock in front of the sea. The man plays his guitar, while the woman drinks a green potion funnelling down from a tree above her head. If she looked up she would spot a man with a bow tie (based on the footballer Mario Balotelli) hiding in the branches, pouring the elixir she is knocking back.
The tapestry was hand-woven by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, whose weavers have done a magnificent job in transposing Ofili's small watercolour painting into an enormous woollen wall-hanging. Had it been a single weaver working on the project and not four or five, it would have taken sixteen years to complete (it took just over three years).
The detail is remarkable, as is the weavers' ability to capture the fluidity of a watercolour painting in wool. For the viewer, the tapestry is a celebration of nature and love. But it is also a very real celebration of a craft skill that is sadly dying out in the UK.
According to Peter Langley of The Clothworkers' Company, there are only two professional hand-weaving tapestry studios left in the UK. It'd be great if this artwork were the catalyst for a weaving renaissance.
Chris Ofili - Weaving Magic runs at the National Gallery in London from 26 April to 28 August 2017.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39710402
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Chelsea 4-2 Southampton - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Diego Costa scores twice as Premier League leaders Chelsea edge closer to the title with victory over Southampton.
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Last updated on .From the section Football
Chelsea restored their lead at the top of the Premier League to seven points with a convincing win over Southampton at Stamford Bridge.
Antonio Conte's side had seen their advantage cut by Tottenham after the Blues' loss at Manchester United - but this was an emphatic response to follow on from Saturday's FA Cup semi-final win against their London rivals.
Eden Hazard and Diego Costa were both back in the starting line-up after Wembley and were key figures, the Belgian putting Chelsea ahead with a low shot after five minutes.
Former Chelsea midfielder Oriol Romeu bundled in an equaliser for Saints before Gary Cahill headed the title pace-setters back in front right on half-time, a moment that effectively decided the destination of the points.
Costa confirmed Chelsea's supremacy with a header early in the second half before scoring his second with a low shot late on.
Ryan Bertrand, another former Chelsea man, was on target in the dying seconds - but the victory was secured for Conte's men and now Spurs must respond at in-form Crystal Palace on Wednesday (20:00 BST kick-off).
Conte gets Hazard and Costa calls spot on
Conte manoeuvred his resources to perfection in the victory against Spurs at Wembley - and did it again here as Hazard and Costa made decisive contributions to a vital Chelsea win.
Conte raised eyebrows when he left his two most dangerous attackers out of his starting line-up on Saturday but used them as game-changers to great effect, deploying them as substitutes after an hour and Hazard then scoring the goal that swung the match in favour of his side.
Hazard and Costa were back from the start against Southampton and illustrated why they have been such integral components of Chelsea's rise to the top of the table this season.
The pair combined in the fifth minute for Hazard to score and Spain striker Costa was simply too strong for Bertrand when he arrived on the end of Cesc Fabregas' cross to score the third goal early in the second half.
And they were at it again soon afterwards - a neat exchange with Pedro leading to Costa getting his second and Chelsea's fourth with a powerful low drive in the closing moments.
Conte has put the Blues right back on track after their loss at Manchester United with wins in the FA Cup semi-final and here at Stamford Bridge - and his shrewd use of two of his most vital assets has helped him achieve it with a superb piece of management.
Southampton - and of course Tottenham - would have been hoping anxiety and pressure might just have played a part in a shock result at Stamford Bridge.
And for a spell those factors came into play as the Saints recovered from Chelsea's perfect start to equalise through Romeu and then exert a measure of control.
However, the hosts kept their nerve to run out comfortable winners and avoid the sort of slip-up that would have played into the hands of Spurs.
Stamford Bridge ended the game in celebratory mood and the feeling that Chelsea's equilibrium had been restored after those recent slips at home to Crystal Palace and away to Manchester United.
Mauricio Pochettino's side will have felt the door had opened when Chelsea lost at Old Trafford and the gap at the top of the table was reduced to only four points. Suddenly the pressure was on Conte and his players.
The tables have now been turned and it will be Spurs and their manager who will be feeling the heat and the need to win when they travel to in-form Crystal Palace on Wednesday.
Spurs have reeled off seven straight league wins - their best sequence since 1967 - but all the self-belief built up during that run will be required to face Sam Allardyce's rejuvenated side, who have beaten Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool in recent weeks.
They will not only have to respond to the Blues' win that restored their seven-point lead, but also to the disappointment of losing the FA Cup semi-final to their London rivals at Wembley on Saturday.
These are defining moments in the Premier League season - with a huge weekend ahead as Chelsea travel to Everton and Spurs face Arsenal in the north London derby on Sunday.
• None Costa's first strike was his 50th in the Premier League in his 85th game - only seven strikers have reached the milestone faster.
• None Hazard has scored 15 league goals this season - his best return in a single campaign in the competition.
• None Since their return to the top-flight in 2012-13, Southampton have scored more away Premier League goals at Stamford Bridge than any other side (nine).
• None Fabregas' assist for Costa's goal was his 103rd in the Premier League - second only to Manchester United legend Ryan Giggs (162).
• None Cahill has scored 26 Premier League goals - excluding penalties - the second most of any defender in the competition (after team-mate John Terry with 40).
• None Saints conceded four goals in a Premier League away game for the first time since 5 April 2014, when they lost 4-1 at eventual champions Manchester City.
• None The Blues have now failed to keep a clean sheet in their past 11 Premier League games.
The Blues are at Goodison Park to face Everton on Sunday (14:05 BST) and the Saints will be at home to struggling Hull on Saturday (15:00 BST).
• None Goal! Chelsea 4, Southampton 2. Ryan Bertrand (Southampton) header from the centre of the box to the bottom left corner. Assisted by Cédric Soares with a cross.
• None Goal! Chelsea 4, Southampton 1. Diego Costa (Chelsea) right footed shot from the centre of the box to the bottom left corner. Assisted by Pedro.
• None Attempt blocked. Nemanja Matic (Chelsea) left footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by N'Golo Kanté.
• None Attempt missed. Pedro (Chelsea) right footed shot from outside the box is close, but misses to the left. Assisted by N'Golo Kanté.
• None Attempt missed. Diego Costa (Chelsea) header from the centre of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Eden Hazard with a cross following a corner.
• None Attempt saved. N'Golo Kanté (Chelsea) right footed shot from the right side of the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Eden Hazard.
• None Attempt blocked. Steven Davis (Southampton) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39625846
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Kelly Sotherton: Ex-heptathlete to get Beijing Olympic bronze upgrade - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Britain's Kelly Sotherton is set to be upgraded to an Olympic bronze medal for the second time in five months after retrospective drug tests.
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Last updated on .From the section Athletics
Britain's Kelly Sotherton is set to be upgraded to an Olympic bronze medal for the second time in five months after retrospective drug tests.
Russian Tatyana Chernova has been stripped of the heptathlon bronze she won at Beijing in 2008 after testing positive for a steroid.
Sotherton won heptathlon bronze in 2004 and had already been moved to third in the Beijing 4x400m relay after Belarus and Russia's disqualification.
She was fifth in the 2008 heptathlon.
However, the 40-year-old has now climbed to third after the previously announced doping ban of Ukrainian Lyudmila Blonska and now Chernova.
Sotherton retired five years ago after failing to recover from a back problem in time to qualify for the heptathlon at London 2012.
After finding out she was to become a three-time Olympic medallist, Sotherton posted an emotional video on social media showing her reaction.
"Yes I had tears. Happy ones this time," she said.
Sotherton's compatriot, Jessica Ennis-Hill, belatedly won the 2011 World heptathlon title last year when Chernova was similarly stripped of gold for doping.
Former UK Athletics performance director Dave Collins, who oversaw the 2008 Games, said that British athletes receiving their medals was an "essential step for the sport".
Collins' contract was not renewed after Britain fell one short of their medal target in Beijing.
"It's great to see but clearly it's a disappointment they didn't get their day in the sun," he said.
"It's great to see the teams getting recognition late, because it's better late than never. But by gosh, it would have been a lot better at the time."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/39695739
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Has Trump kept his campaign promises? - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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Donald Trump gave out promises like candy during his campaign. It's time to visit the dentist.
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US & Canada
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This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Donald Trump: First 100 days in 100 of his own words
Determining a presidency's success by inspecting its "first hundred days" is a bit of an artificial construct. If humans were born with 12 fingers, then perhaps we'd be evaluating presidents based on their first 144 days instead. If the Earth rotated a bit more slowly, then presidents would have more time to notch accomplishments.
Then again, 100 days is plenty of time to get a rough handle on the shape and thrust of a presidency - and to evaluate what kind of progress a leader has made toward fulfilling campaign promises.
The first 100 days of Donald Trump's presidency have been anything but boring or slow, but how much of it was sound and fury and how much entailed real action?
Here's a quick review of some of the peaks and valleys.
Let's start with the wall - not the president's only promise, but certainly one of his oldest, most high-profile ones. Candidate Trump constantly spoke of the great wall that he plans to build along the US-Mexico border at his campaign rallies, and the crowd roared in agreement when he said Mexico would pay for the project.
Contrast that certainty with this tweet, which the president wrote over the weekend.
"Eventually, but at a later date so we can get started early, Mexico will be paying, in some form, for the badly needed border wall," he tweeted.
It's a case of Trump promises meeting political realities, in 140 characters or less. Campaign rhetoric is easy; turning talk into action in Washington is much more complicated.
The administration has pledged to reshuffle some moneys to begin wall construction, but it is increasingly clear that Congress will need to find billions of dollars to make the wall a reality. That sets up a showdown between the president and legislators, with many Republicans - particularly those representing areas along the US-Mexico border - not keen on opening up the federal purse for Mr Trump's pet project.
Mr Trump promised to choose a Supreme Court justice to fill the empty seat on the bench from a list he released during the presidential campaign - and, by tapping Neil Gorsuch, he did.
"I've always heard that the most important thing that a president of the United States does is appoint people - hopefully great people like this appointment - to the United States Supreme Court," Mr Trump said at Mr Gorsuch's White House swearing-in ceremony. "And I can say this is a great honour. And I got it done in the first 100 days. That's even nice. You think that's easy?"
That kind of depends how one defines "easy". Mr Gorsuch's confirmation hearing was bruising, no doubt. Facing united Democratic opposition, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell broke with longstanding precedent to allow a simple majority vote for Supreme Court confirmations. Once that was done, however, it was simply a matter of the Republican majority in the Senate imposing its will.
While Mr Trump may have only had to put a name on a piece of paper and rely on Senate Republicans to do the heavy lifting, he did tick a major item of his presidential to-do list. He satisfied a Republican base that stuck with him through a tumultuous campaign on the understanding that they'd get just such a reliable conservative on the court.
They may continue to stand by this president in the hope there will be more nominees like Mr Gorsuch to come.
"Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated."
It's way too early for political epitaphs, but if the Trump presidency collapses under the weight of disorganisation and broken promises, this February quote from the president - made as it became increasingly clear his own party couldn't even agree on healthcare reform - will make a fitting inscription for a tombstone.
At one point during the presidential campaign, Mr Trump promised that the Democratic healthcare reform legislation - Obamacare, as it has become known - would be repealed on his first day in office.
Then, after the first Republican legislative effort crashed and burned in late March - 64 days into his presidency - Mr Trump backtracked on his timeline.
"I never said repeal it and replace it within 64 days," he said. "I have a long time. But I want to have a great healthcare bill and plan, and we will. It will happen. And it won't be in the very distant future."
Since then there's been speculation that a new deal could be in the works - but such rumours have evaporated upon closer scrutiny.
There's no telling what the future may bring, but the reality at this point is that healthcare reform was Mr Trump's first major legislative push - the de facto focus of his first 100 days in office - and it has done nothing but expose the Republican Party as fractured body incapable of advancing a coherent agenda.
Promise kept? Uh, no. Definitely not.
Mr Trump may have a bit of a mixed record when it comes to fulfilling his promises on immigration, but it's not for a lack of trying. His administration has taken two shots at curtailing the US refugee programme and preventing citizens of a handful of majority Muslim nations from entering the US, but those executive actions have been stymied by a handful of court judges (one, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions put it, residing on an "island in the Pacific").
Mr Trump has also stepped up immigration enforcement across the US, threatened "sanctuary cities" that don't co-operate fully with federal immigration officials, ordered a review of immigration programmes, including H-1B visas given to high-skilled immigrants, and announced a hiring spree on border patrol agents and immigration court judges.
Immigration arrests were up 32.6% in the first month and a half of the Trump presidency, according to the Washington Post, with a larger share coming from those without a prior criminal record. Meanwhile, border apprehensions have dropped.
Throughout the campaign the president talked tough on immigration - even though the number of undocumented migrants entering the US had been declining over recent years. Given that the law grants the president sweeping authority over immigration policy, Mr Trump is clearly following his words with actions.
Promise kept? Yes - despite the effort of "so-called judges" on the mainland and in Hawaii.
During the campaign, Mr Trump's foreign policy vision was a collection of sometimes contradictory, often controversial proposals.
The candidate spoke of getting tough on the so-called Islamic State, Iran and China, reaffirming an alliance with Israel and mending relations with Russia. He entertained the notion of lifting restrictions on the use of torture on detainees and giving the US military more authority to act, including by targeting the families of suspected militants.
Above all else, he promised to put American priorities first and downplayed support for US allies and international alliances that he deemed too burdensome.
As president, the contradictions may have changed in nature but the controversy lingers.
He pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as promised and has begun a review process for the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Torture remains off the table, thanks to the influence of Defence Secretary James Mattis. Mr Trump has occasionally told foreign leaders - Germany's Angela Merkel and Italy's Paolo Gentiloni, for instance - of his expectations that they increase their military spending. On the other hand, he has recently acknowledged the value of Nato membership.
When it comes to China, however, he's taken a softer line. He's backed away from his promise to label the nation a "currency manipulator" or impose steep import tariffs, instead seeking the nation's help in dealing with North Korea.
Then there's Mr Trump's missile strike on Syrian forces following that government's use of chemical weapons on its own people. It's the kind of move that candidate Trump may have dismissed as ineffective - and, in fact, reality TV star Trump had condemned in no uncertain terms in 2013, when Barack Obama proposed his own Syrian intervention.
Promise kept? Yes, no, maybe. Take your pick.
On 22 October, just a few weeks before election day, Candidate Trump gave a speech in Pennsylvania announcing a "100 Day Plan to Make America Great Again" - a contract, he said, with the American voter.
Included in the accompanying document was an outline of a series of official-sounding pieces of legislation he would "work with Congress to introduce" and "fight for" in his first 100 days. They included the Middle Class Tax Relief and Simplification Act, the End the Offshoring Act, the Affordable Childcare and Eldercare Act, the Repeal and Replace Obamacare Act, and the American Energy and Infrastructure Act.
Aside from the aforementioned Obamacare repeal effort, which is currently a smoking crater somewhere on the floor of the House of Representatives, the rest of these pieces of legislation remain in the realm of unicorns and fairies. Mr Trump has said details of a tax plan are coming as soon as this week, but - as we saw with healthcare - a detailed plan creates a juicy target for opponents of all political stripes.
The president signed a raft of executive actions - rolling back Obama-era regulations, authorising the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and instituting a federal hiring freeze (which has since been lifted) - but in the vast scheme of things those are low-hanging fruit for a new president.
The White House has also boasted that Mr Trump has signed more laws at this point than any president since Harry Truman - but that list includes measures naming Veterans' medical clinics, making appointment to museum boards and creating a memorial to the 1991 Gulf War. Many of the remaining laws rolled back Obama-era regulations, most of which had yet to go into effect.
Legislation that can last beyond any one president is a heavier lift, and Mr Trump has yet to show he has any real muscle.
Mr Trump is far from a traditional president, so perhaps it's unfair to evaluate the first few months of his presidency in traditional ways, such as by tallying up his policy accomplishments and failures. His voters largely didn't back his candidacy based on specific promises - on the wall, on healthcare, on taxes - but because of his attitude and his promise to shake up the political system.
If the performance metric is how much the Trump presidency has disrupted politics as usual, Mr Trump has posted a clear victory.
He continues to dominate the national conversation with his controversial tweets and off-the cuff statements, and his actions have defied traditional political norms and standards, whether it's his apparent steadfast refusal to fill lower-level political appointments or observe precedents on open-government practices. He's lectured foreign leaders, browbeat major companies and taken a poleaxe to disfavoured media (while still giving them choice interviews when it serves his purposes, of course).
Mr Trump campaigned on draining the swamp, and he's taken some executive actions to limit administration officials from becoming lobbyists after they leave government service. On the other hand, his promises to avoid conflicts of interest over his wide-ranging business empire have proven vague and unenforceable and he's stocked his administration with the kind of financial insiders and Wall Street bigwigs he regularly railed against on the campaign trail.
So far, however, his dedicated supporters - the ones who powered him to a narrow electoral victory if not a popular vote plurality - seem pleased as punch. According to a recent poll, 96% of Mr Trump's voters in November stand by their support of the man. They've apparently seen enough action to convince them that the president is doing what he said he'd do, even if it hasn't yet translated into legislative accomplishments.
If the economy is humming and unemployment stays low, they'll probably remain in his corner for the long haul. For them, the apparent chaos in the nation's capital is a feature, not a bug.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-39697637
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Challenge Cup sixth round-draw: Castleford Tigers host St Helens - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Super League leaders Castleford Tigers are drawn at home to St Helens in the sixth round of the Challenge Cup.
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Last updated on .From the section Rugby League
Super League leaders Castleford Tigers will host St Helens in the sixth round of the Challenge Cup.
Holders Hull FC entertain Catalans Dragons while Warrington Wolves, last year's losing finalists, are at home to local rivals Widnes Vikings.
League One side Barrow Raiders, the lowest-ranked team left in the competition, travel to Leeds Rhinos, who are second in Super League.
Elsewhere, Hull KR travel to Salford Red Devils in a rerun of the Million Pound Game, which Salford won 19-18 to maintain their Super League status and relegate Rovers.
Second-tier Dewsbury Rams face a local derby against Wakefield Trinity, while Featherstone meet Halifax in the only all-Championship tie.
All sixth-round ties will be played over the weekend of 13-14 May.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/39712156
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The seats that could decide the election - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Where do the Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems have to fight hardest to win the general election?
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UK Politics
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Note: Battleground seats are defined as those where the winning party had a majority of less than 10%
There are 650 constituencies in the United Kingdom. But the election campaign over the coming weeks will be concentrated in the marginal battleground seats - the ones with small majorities that are most likely to change hands.
There's no official definition of a marginal seat but people often look at constituencies where the majority - the gap between the first and second placed parties - is under 10%.
For politicians it's obviously a good idea to focus on these battleground seats. There's not much point in spending lots of time and money in constituencies that they already hold comfortably, or where they're so far behind they have no realistic chance of winning.
There are exceptions to this. In 2015 the SNP surge in Scotland was so powerful that apparently "safe" seats fell. And the collapse of the Lib Dems saw them lose some seats they'd held with sizeable majorities.
Such large swings are rare though. And even in 2015 the Conservative/Labour fight took place almost exclusively in the battleground seats.
Eighteen seats changed hands between the two biggest parties. Only one of those, Ilford North, had a majority above 10%.
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Seats the Conservatives will be gunning for include Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East, Birmingham Edgbaston and Wirral West.
Recent elections have seen poor returns for the Conservatives in the north-east of England but it's a part of the country that voted strongly for Brexit and Prime Minister Theresa May hopes her focus on the issue will help them gain seats.
Labour-held Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East is a good example. Its voters backed Brexit and there's a considerable pool of almost 7,000 voters who went for UKIP last time.
That's one group the Conservatives will target. If they trust Theresa May to deliver Brexit, the Conservatives will argue, why vote UKIP? Picking up a decent chunk of them would be enough to overturn Labour's majority of 2,268.
Other pro-Brexit Conservative targets in the north of England and the Midlands include Halifax, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Derbyshire North East and Walsall North. In all of them there's a sizeable number of people who voted UKIP in 2015 and a small Labour majority.
Birmingham Edgbaston is a different sort of target. Its voters were fairly evenly split on Brexit. But it's a relatively prosperous part of the city which used to be a Conservative stronghold.
An increase in the number of ethnic minority voters helped Labour last time round but it's always remained in the Conservatives' sights. With Gisela Stuart standing down after 20 years as the MP, they'll see an opportunity.
Wirral West is one of 10 seats lost by the Conservatives to Labour in 2015 - Esther McVey was ousted as the MP after just one term.
With their current lead in the opinion polls, they'll be highly optimistic they can take it back - along with other seats lost in 2015 such as City of Chester, Dewsbury and Lancaster and Fleetwood.
Labour start the election as the clear underdogs compared to the Conservatives. But Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn hopes to win over voters during the campaign.
Gower, in South Wales, has the smallest majority of any seat in the country - a mere 27 votes. If just 14 voters switched from the Conservatives, Labour would take it so they will be campaigning for every vote. Before 2015 they'd held it for more than 100 years and it had been considered a Labour heartland seat.
Other losses from 2015 they'll want to reverse include Morley and Outwood, former Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls's old seat, and Plymouth Sutton and Devonport.
In recent years London has been Labour's strongest region. They made seven gains here in 2015 and Sadiq Khan went on to win the 2016 mayoral election comfortably.
Croydon Central was a seat they narrowly missed out on last time but they reduced the Conservative majority to just 165 votes. In a sign of their intentions, Jeremy Corbyn went to the constituency on the very afternoon that MPs voted to allow the early election.
Hendon and Harrow East are other London targets
Labour lost 40 Scottish seats to the SNP in 2015. In many cases the swing was so massive that they now look beyond reach.
But they'll be looking for any signs of the beginning of a fight back. RenfrewshireEast, which used to be Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy's seat, is their top target. Next down the list is Edinburgh North and Leith.
The Lib Dems are starting from a low base. They lost 49 seats in 2015, holding on to just eight, and are looking for a recovery this time.
As the most pro-EU of the national parties, the Lib Dems will particularly target seats like Conservative-held Twickenham in London, which voted heavily for Remain in last year's referendum and where Sir Vince Cable is returning to refight his old seat.
The December 2016 by-election in neighbouring Richmond Park, where they overturned Conservative Zac Goldsmith's 23,000 majority, showed their strategy could work.
Other pro-Remain constituencies in their sights include Kingston and Surbiton and, outside of London, Bath and Cambridge - the latter held by Labour.
Dunbartonshire East also voted for Remain but here they must challenge the SNP, another strongly pro-EU party. Nevertheless, the Lib Dems will think they have a chance.
Jo Swinson was ousted there in 2015 when the SNP's vote surged by 30%. She's standing again and won't need much of that back to recapture the seat.
The pro-EU message probably won't go down so well in Yeovil, which backed Leave in the referendum. But it's a constituency that the Lib Dems held for more than 30 years before it went Conservative in 2015 - Paddy Ashdown used to be the MP - and the broader south-west region used to be a stronghold for the party.
Other targets here include Thornbury and Yate, on the outskirts of Bristol, and St Ives in Cornwall - a county where the Lib Dems used to dominate.
With the SNP already holding 56 out of 59 seats in Scotland it's clearly impossible for them to make significant gains. But they'll be gunning for Labour's only Scottish constituency, Edinburgh South, and they're not far behind in Lib Dem-held Orkney and Shetland.
Plaid Cymru are just 229 votes behind Labour in Ynys Mon (Anglesey). But there could also be an intriguing battle in Rhondda if party leader Leanne Wood decides to stand, even though mathematically it's a lot further down the target list. She achieved a tremendous 24% swing there in the Welsh Assembly election last year, so a gain is not out of the question.
UKIP's results in 2015 demonstrated again how parties can suffer under the first-past-the-post electoral system.
They received 3.9 million votes but won just one seat, Clacton, and even there the victor was Douglas Carswell, who had defected from the Conservatives.
The problem UKIP have is that their vote is very evenly distributed compared to the other main parties - in fact, so much so that they're not even a close second in many places.
Former leader Nigel Farage fell 3,000 votes short in Thanet South last time. They're also close in Hartlepool where the Labour MP is standing down so that may be their best chance.
The Green Party are also badly served by first past the post. The only seat where they start in second place within 10% of the winner is Labour-held Bristol West. The Lib Dems are also a significant presence in that constituency and even the fourth-placed Conservatives got nearly 10,000 votes in 2015 so there a lot of possible outcomes.
It may be only two years since the last general election. But in Northern Ireland it's less than two months since voters last went to the polls. The Assembly election held on 2 March saw gains for Sinn Fein and losses for the main unionist parties (UUP and DUP). It would be wrong to assume the general election will automatically follow the same pattern but it will certainly have an impact on the campaign.
Sinn Fein will be eager to recapture Fermanagh and South Tyrone - reversing the loss they suffered in 2015. The swing they achieved in March would be enough to get them over the line.
Belfast South is a rare three-way marginal. Both the DUP and the Alliance Party (APNI) are within 10% of the incumbent SDLP. In fact Sinn Fein is less than 11% behind as well so there are lots of possible outcomes. Perhaps the most important factor, here and elsewhere, will be whether all the parties stand. In 2015 the DUP and UUP agreed to co-operate by standing aside for each other in four constituencies. That certainly helped and the UUP have already announced they'll do the same again. Previously the SDLP have refused to enter any deal with Sinn Fein but they are thinking of doing so this time as part of a broader anti-Brexit alliance. That could change the complexion of a number of battleground seats.
The contest in South Antrim is different. It has an overwhelming majority of unionist voters. The question is whether they'll back the UUP or DUP. The seat has switched between the two parties four times this century. It wouldn't take much of a shift for it to switch again.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39655379
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General election 2017: Where UK's parties stand on Brexit - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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The issue of Brexit looms large over the general election - here's where the parties stand.
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UK Politics
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Brexit is a major issue at the UK general election - here's what we know about where the main parties across the UK stand.
In short: Prime Minister Theresa May was against Brexit before the EU referendum but now says there can be no turning back and that "Brexit means Brexit". The reason she gave for calling a general election was to strengthen her hand in negotiations with the EU.
How the party sees Brexit: The Conservatives' priorities were set out in a 12 point plan published in January and the letter formally invoking Brexit in March.
What we don't know: The Conservatives have not said how they will control migration from the EU after Brexit. They have also not committed to the size of any separation payment they would accept, beyond saying the UK would meet its international obligations.
They have not specified which matters returning from Brussels will be handed to devolved administrations and which will be kept at Westminster.
Negotiating style: Mrs May has talked tough towards the EU in recent weeks, claiming some key figures were trying to interfere in the general election and promising to be a "bloody difficult woman" during negotiations.
Where the MPs stand: More Tory MPs backed Remain than Leave in last year's referendum - but they now strongly support the UK leaving - in February, only one voted against the government beginning Brexit by invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.
All but one Tory MPs supported Theresa May in invoking Brexit
Risks and rewards: Theresa May would use an election victory to say the country is uniting around her approach to Brexit, and has moved on from the divisions of the referendum campaign. But her uncompromising approach to leaving could upset some of the 48% who wanted to stay in, with the Lib Dems hoping to capitalise in areas - like London's Richmond Park in last year's by-election - that backed Remain.
In short: The Labour Party campaigned against Brexit in the referendum but now says the result must be honoured, and is aiming for a "close new relationship with the EU" with workers' rights protected.
How the party sees Brexit: Labour has set out several demands and tests it says Brexit must meet:
What we don't know: Like the Conservatives, Labour has yet to spell out how it will manage migration after Brexit, and has not been drawn on the size of "divorce bill" it would be willing to pay.
Negotiating style: Jeremy Corbyn says he is aiming for "sensible and serious negotiations" and will not be "threatening Europe".
Where the MPs stand: The vast majority of Labour MPs backed Remain ahead of the referendum - but most followed party orders to allow Article 50 to be invoked in February's vote.
Risks and rewards: Labour is hoping its acceptance of the result will fend off attacks from the Tories and UKIP in Leave-backing areas - including Stoke Central where it won February's by-election. But there are divisions among MPs on the best way forward, and Labour faces the challenge of having to appeal to both sides of a polarising debate.
The Lib Dems hope a pro-EU stance will help them repeat their Richmond Park success
In short: The Liberal Democrats are strongly pro-EU, and have promised to stop what they call a "disastrous hard Brexit".
How they see Brexit: Central to the Lib Dems' offer is another referendum - this time on the terms of the final Brexit deal - in which the party would campaign to stay in the EU.
The Lib Dems also say they will fight with "every fibre of their being" to protect existing aspects of EU membership, such as the single market, customs union and the free movement of people.
They would guarantee EU citizens' rights and remain in Europe-wide schemes like Erasmus.
Where the MPs stand: All of the Lib Dem MPs backed staying in the EU, and seven out of nine opposed triggering Article 50, with two abstaining.
Risks and rewards: The Lib Dems are hoping their pro-EU pitch will help them gather voters in pro-Remain areas, as when they captured Richmond Park in London in December's by-election. But according to estimates based on the referendum results, two of their sitting MPs represent areas that backed Leave last June - which might make the party's second referendum policy a tough sell on the doorstep.
In short: SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon wants Scotland to have a special status after Brexit and for a second independence referendum to take place before the UK leaves.
How they see Brexit: The SNP's manifesto says it will demand a place for the Scottish government at the Brexit negotiating table.
It says it will fight to keep Scotland in the EU single market. The SNP says it will also press the UK government to guarantee the status of NHS workers from mainland Europe, and oppose any attempt to treat the fishing industry as a "bargaining chip".
Once negotiations are complete, and before the UK has left, the SNP wants a referendum on Scottish independence to take place.
Where the MPs stand: The SNP's 54 MPs voted en masse against triggering Article 50 and are expected to maintain their vocal opposition to Brexit in the next Parliament.
Risks and rewards: The SNP will hope to harness Scotland's support for remaining in the EU (it voted Remain by 62% to 38%). But a significant minority of its supporters are thought to have backed Leave - while the Tories are said to be targeting the Moray seat of SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson, where Remain only narrowly saw off the Leave campaign in the EU referendum.
UKIP says it will ensure the government does not "backslide" on Brexit
In short: UKIP has long campaigned to leave the EU - and having finished on the winning side in the referendum, is now styling itself as the "guard dog of Brexit".
How they see Brexit: The party has set six "key tests" for Brexit: Supremacy of Parliament, full control of migration, a "maritime exclusive economic zone" around the UK's coastline, a seat on the World Trade Organisation, no "divorce" payment to the EU and for Brexit to be "done and dusted" by the end of 2019.
Green Party of England and Wales joint leader Caroline Lucas has called for a second EU referendum on the Brexit deal reached with Brussels, and the Greens have promised "full opposition" to what they call "extreme Brexit".
Plaid Cymru, which campaigned to stay in the EU, says it accepts that the people of Wales voted to leave, but says single market membership should be preserved to protect Welsh jobs.
The DUP campaigned in favour of leaving the EU - and, in its manifesto for this year's Assembly elections, said it wanted to see a "positive" relationship with the rest of Europe, involving "mutual access to our markets to pursue common interests".
Having campaigned to stay in the EU, the SDLP's MPs have opposed the invoking of Article 50, saying it is being done "against the will of people in Northern Ireland", where most people voted to Remain in the EU.
Before the referendum, the Ulster Unionist party said that on balance, it was better for Northern Ireland to stay in the EU - although not all its members agreed. It says it would honour the referendum result, and wants "unfettered" access to the single market and no hard border with the Republic of Ireland.
Sinn Fein has accused the Conservative government of "seeking to impose Brexit on Ireland". It wants Northern Ireland to have a "designated special status" inside the EU.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39665835
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Wolverhampton Wanderers 0-1 Huddersfield Town - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Izzy Brown's strike is enough to give Huddersfield Town a narrow win at Wolves to secure a Championship play-off spot.
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Last updated on .From the section Football
Izzy Brown's strike was enough to give Huddersfield Town a narrow victory at Wolves and secure the Terriers a Championship play-off spot.
Brown curled home in the first half, his fifth Terriers goal, as David Wagner's side moved eight points clear of seventh with two games to play.
Wolves came close when Dave Edwards hit the post as the hosts were frustrated.
Terriers sub Collin Quaner missed a number of chances to extend his side's lead, but the Yorkshire side held on.
At one stage of the season Huddersfield had looked to be automatic promotion contenders but a run of two wins in seven games allowed Newcastle to take advantage and beat Preston on Monday to secure their Premier League place next season.
However, the Terriers had the chance to be the first Championship side this season to seal a play-off place with victory in the West Midlands.
Chelsea loanee Brown's low strike past keeper Harry Burgoyne, a late replacement for Andy Lonergan, was the high point of a drab first half.
Visiting keeper Danny Ward did have to deny Edwards in the first half, and had to be at his best to keep out Andreas Weimann's effort before Edwards could only fire the rebound against the woodwork.
Wagner's side had the opportunity to increase their advantage, but Quaner was wasteful. He fired wide from six yards, shot straight at youngster Burgoyne and took too long to decide when well-placed to allow a defender to block his strike.
But Town's 25th win of the season - the 22nd with a single-goal margin - is enough to take them up to third place and put them in pole position for a home second leg in the play-offs.
Huddersfield head coach David Wagner: "You cannot imagine how big this achievement is. The journey marches on into the play-offs.
"I'm happy for the chairman and everyone at this football club. We've all worked so hard to make this happen.
"We will now make the right decisions in the next two games to keep everybody fresh for the play-offs. Today we celebrate.
"We got together at the end to show our unbelievable togetherness for the fans. I'm very happen for them."
• None Attempt missed. Harry Bunn (Huddersfield Town) right footed shot from outside the box is close, but misses to the left.
• None Attempt blocked. Collin Quaner (Huddersfield Town) right footed shot from the left side of the box is blocked. Assisted by Harry Bunn.
• None Attempt saved. Collin Quaner (Huddersfield Town) right footed shot from the centre of the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Nahki Wells.
• None Attempt missed. Harry Bunn (Huddersfield Town) right footed shot from outside the box misses to the right. Assisted by Michael Hefele.
• None Attempt blocked. Silvio (Wolverhampton Wanderers) right footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by Jordan Graham.
• None Attempt missed. Collin Quaner (Huddersfield Town) right footed shot from the centre of the box is close, but misses to the left. Assisted by Christopher Schindler with a headed pass following a set piece situation.
• None Silvio (Wolverhampton Wanderers) is shown the yellow card for a bad foul. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39035260
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French election: Why EU should not count its chickens on Macron - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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But the EU should not count its chickens just yet, warns the BBC's Europe editor Katya Adler.
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Europe
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The relief in Brussels is palpable. It believes it is (almost) back from the brink.
A passionate Europhile, Emmanuel Macron's presidential campaign is as much blue and yellow as it is the "tricolour" of France.
The EU, he believes, should to be at the heart of French politics, with more integration in finance, defence and migration.
He wants to breathe life into the now-spluttering Franco-German motor; to take a lead role with Germany to - in his eyes - Make Europe Great Again.
Angela Merkel and the European Commission's Jean-Claude Juncker can hardly conceal their delight. Both were quick to get on the phone to congratulate Mr Macron on his strong showing in Sunday's vote.
By this autumn fervent Eurocrats hope to look back fondly to a string of electoral defeats for populist Eurosceptics in Austria, the Netherlands, France, and then Germany.
But they shouldn't count their chickens.
Euroscepticism is widespread in France, whether or not Marine Le Pen becomes president.
In the post-industrial north-east of France, with its hopelessly high unemployment, and in the resentful south-east with its struggling small businesses, globalisation and the EU are seen as joint public enemy number one.
The nostalgic nationalism peddled by Ms Le Pen is a source of comfort and hope.
"In the name of the people" is her campaign slogan. Woman of the people is her image.
She was the only presidential candidate amongst 11 to hold their Sunday night election party outside Paris, basing herself in the troubled town of Hénin-Beaumont where she first made a political name for herself as a local councillor.
Sharpening her political claws against Emmanuel Macron, she is now keen to portray him as an arrogant elite-educated former banker, best friend of Brussels and the French bourgeoisie.
And if Ms Le Pen beats the odds and garners France's top political job, that would spell the end of the European project as we know it.
She wants France out of the euro - which so many French blame for high prices and uncompetitiveness.
And she dreams of the EU's demise, favouring a looser union of European nations over what she calls Brussels-domination.
The two will now go head-to-head in the second round
Post-Brexit Britain would then be high up on her list of preferred European partners.
But before that could happen, current Brexit negotiations and future trade talks would be left hanging as the EU slowly imploded.
There would be chaos across EU countries which would affect Britain too.
A President Macron, when it comes to Brexit, would likely play hardball.
He would help to keep the EU united in negotiations, making it harder for the UK to pick off individual countries, attempting to pressure or entice them to make a sweeter Brexit deal.
But EU passion aside, Mr Macron is not wedded to ideology. He is a newcomer to politics who claims to be neither right- nor left-wing.
During his meeting with Theresa May in February he said post-Brexit economic, defence and security co-operation with Britain must remain close.
As a former (if not long-standing) Minister of the Economy in France, he is unlikely to turn up his nose at a good trade deal with the UK.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39697005
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Sir Rod Stewart's son Liam Stewart stars for Great Britain - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Liam Stewart - the son of Sir Rod Stewart and Rachel Hunter - scores his first international goal as Great Britain beat Estonia 5-1.
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Liam Stewart - the son of music legend Sir Rod Stewart and former model Rachel Hunter - scores his first international goal as Great Britain beat Estonia 5-1 at the ice hockey World Championship Division 1 Group B in Belfast.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/ice-hockey/39704274
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Women's World Cup 2019: England face Wales in qualifying group - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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England and Wales women have been drawn in the same group for European qualifying for the 2019 Women's World Cup.
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Last updated on .From the section Women's Football
England women have been drawn in the same qualifying group as Wales for the 2019 Women's World Cup.
Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are also together, in a group featuring Norway and the Netherlands, while Scotland will face fellow Euro 2017 qualifiers Switzerland.
England and Wales are joined in Group 1 by Russia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Kazakhstan.
The finals will be held in France in June 2019, with 24 teams taking part.
The seven European qualifying group winners will all progress automatically, while the four best runners-up will face a two-round play-off to fill the eighth European spot at the World Cup.
England last faced Wales in 2014, during qualifying for the 2015 World Cup, in which Mark Sampson's side went on to finish third.
The Lionesses - ranked fourth in the Fifa world rankings - were seeded in Pot A for the 2019 qualifying draw, with Scotland in Pot B, Wales and the Republic of Ireland in Pot C and Northern Ireland in the lowest, Pot E.
Scotland, who will join England at this summer's European Championships in the Netherlands, will also face Poland, Belarus and Albania in their group, with Switzerland the top-seeded team.
Qualifiers will take place between 11 September 2017 and 4 September 2018.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39706004
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How Nepal quake turned women into builders - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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Women are breaking with tradition and helping rebuild Nepal after the earthquake two years ago.
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Asia
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Nepal needs women like Sanumaya to help rebuild
Reconstruction in Nepal has been slow since a devastating earthquake two years ago. But in some rural areas women are breaking with tradition and picking up tools to speed things up.
Sanumaya Kumal does everything from carrying sand and bricks, to digging foundations.
In a badly affected district north-west of Kathmandu, she and other women are helping rebuild houses damaged by the quake.
Women have traditionally been limited to household chores but with many men working abroad, Nepal faces a lack of manpower at a crucial time - hence Sanumaya's move into construction.
"I am very happy with my job. I can do everything that a male mason can do," says Sanumaya, who used to work on a farm.
Her other tasks include building walls, roof-fitting and plastering.
Sanumaya says she's just as good at the work as the men
According to official estimates, nearly 1,500 young Nepalis travel to the Gulf and the Middle East every day in search of jobs.
Officials say this has created a labour shortage locally and is even holding up reconstruction and essential work on schools and health centres.
But in the areas worst hit by the 25 April 2015 earthquake, women are gradually taking up prominent roles in reconstruction.
More than $4bn has been pledged in post-quake aid but progress in one of the world's poorest countries has been painfully slow.
The disaster killed nearly 9,000 people and damaged a million houses.
Rural women can earn a good wage building - and they say it's safe
Various national and international organisations have been helping the women gain the skills they need to build.
And the women say they are earning a decent living, as well as being happy that they are taking part in important national work.
Sanumaya was one of eight women the BBC found working at the building site in the town of Bidur in Nuwakot district.
Her fellow construction worker Srijana Kumal says she likes the work because the pay is attractive.
"Women are facing a lot of problems when they go abroad for work," she told the BBC.
"Almost all the houses in the villages are damaged. We have a lot of work to do here and the working conditions are very safe."
Sanumaya and her friends are making about 1,200 Nepalese rupees ($11.50; £9) for a day's work in their new roles, a decent sum compared with other manual jobs in rural Nepal.
Many of Nepal's men are working abroad, or don't have the right building skills
The Post Disaster Recovery Framework states that Nepal needs nearly 60,000 skilled building workers to complete the reconstruction of houses within five years.
However, officials say that as well as the manpower shortage, many existing construction workers do not know how to build houses to earthquake-resistant specifications.
There are no reliable figures on how many women are currently involved in reconstruction in Nepal.
But the United Nations and other donor agencies who are providing training to construction workers say they have given high priority to enrolling women on their courses.
And Sanumaya and her colleagues have no shortage of work.
"With the reconstruction going on, I am busy almost every day," she says.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39694171
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Is Labour's Brexit plan too subtle? - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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Labour has a clear Brexit plan but some in the party would prefer more robust opposition to the Tory position.
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UK Politics
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If in years to come, students are asked an essay question - Is Nuance an Effective Weapon In Politics? - they might cite Labour's position on Brexit in 2017 in their answer.
As things stand, with the party trailing in the polls, it would appear that if it is a weapon at all, it's been decommissioned.
On the surface, Labour has a difficult task. It has to attract - or at least not repel - those Labour voters that backed Leave in last year's EU referendum, as well as those who backed Remain.
The Liberal Democrats - starting from a low base - need only to attract a small percentage of the 48% who voted Remain to improve their representation in Parliament.
So campaigning to reverse the result of the referendum - by having a second one - carries little political risk for them.
The Conservatives can pretty much go hammer and tongs for the UKIP vote by saying they can deliver on Brexit - and achieve sympathetic headlines from some of the tabloids as a bonus.
Labour has a trickier balancing act to perform but some in the party's ranks wonder if their frontbench isn't making the issue more difficult for itself than it need be.
Shadow Brexit Secretary Sir Keir Starmer set out Labour's position to an audience of successful business people, professionals, lobbyists and one or two trade unionists today, the vast majority of whom were Remainers.
Tim Farron has nothing to lose by promising second referendum
Sir Keir tried to emphasise the differences between Labour and the Conservatives - Labour would prioritise trade with the EU; it might stay in the customs union; it would give EU citizens a unilateral guarantee that they could stay on in Britain; and, symbolically, it would ditch the Great Repeal Bill and emphasise the continuation of EU rights post-Brexit.
But some in the audience were privately worried that the differences with the Conservatives were too subtle.
General election campaigns are painted in primary colours, not in shades of grey.
Sir Keir ruled out a second referendum because he said Labour had to "genuinely" accept the referendum result but also, for practical reasons, he felt there would have to be transitional arrangements at the end of the two-year Article 50 process so the final nature of any deal might not be apparent for six years.
Now when Sir Keir was introduced, his audience of achievers were informed that he had a "brain the size of China".
But some who heard him speak - while not doubting the Asiatic extent of the former Director of Public Prosecutions' legal mind - privately wondered whether his political nous was more in the Luxembourg or Monaco range.
Because while a second referendum might not turn out to be practical, signalling a willingness to hold one might rally Remain votes to Labour and create a far less subtle divide between his party and the Conservatives.
And while many in the audience like and sympathised with him - so much so that one of them confided that he had refrained from asking a difficult question - they were keen for more clarity.
The shadow Brexit secretary told them that he would put jobs and the economy first.
Sir Keir Starmer left some in his audience wanting more
He said immigration shouldn't be the "over-arching" concern in negotiations. But he also insisted that free movement would end when Britain left the EU.
He was asked by Sir Roger Lyons - a former union leader - what was wrong with the "Norway model" - a country outside the EU which has traded free movement for single market access.
That would indeed involve putting the economy before control of immigration.
Sir Keir said that what works for Norway wouldn't necessarily work for the UK. He preferred a bespoke deal.
He then made clear that migration was a key concern after all: "We must listen to what people tell us about immigration."
It was only in an interview with the BBC's John Pienaar that he indicated that negotiations to achieve a good trade deal with the EU might involve discussion of free movement of labour (not of all people, as at present).
In other words, the freedom of EU citizens to move to take up offers of work.
But this wasn't said loudly and proudly in the speech itself.
So not only some in the audience but former - and even two current frontbenchers - have been questioning privately whether the party's message should be more robustly opposed to Mrs May's apparent Brexit strategy, and should be more explicit about a route back to the EU if negotiations go badly.
Some of them have read an analysis by polling expert Professor John Curtice, which concluded: "Most of those who voted Labour in 2015 - including those living in Labour seats in the North and the Midlands - backed Remain.
"The party is thus at greater risk of losing votes to the pro-Remain Liberal Democrats than to pro-Brexit UKIP."
But for now the strategy, if not all the detail, is clear - the desire to appeal to Leave voters on immigration and jobs, and to Remainers in vying to enjoy a close partnership with the EU and as many of the benefits of the single market as possible.
That requires a nuanced message. So that essay question will be definitively answered in this election.
But with Labour's campaign messages emphasising public services, the NHS, and the economy - and their determination not to allow this to be a "Brexit election" - I suspect the party's strategists already know the answer.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39709403
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Eight ways intelligent machines are already in your life - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Many people are unsure about what machine learning is, but the chances are they are using it every day.
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Technology
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Voice recognition allows virtual personal assistants to carry out commands
Many people are unsure about exactly what machine learning is. But the reality is that it is already part of everyday life.
A form of artificial intelligence, it allows computers to learn from examples rather than having to follow step-by-step instructions.
The Royal Society believes it will have an increasing impact on people's lives and is calling for more research, to ensure the UK makes the most of opportunities.
Machine learning is already powering systems from the seemingly mundane to the life-changing. Here are just a few examples.
Using spoken commands to ask your phone to carry out a search, or make a call, relies on technology supported by machine learning.
Virtual personal assistants - the likes of Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant - are able to follow instructions because of voice recognition.
They process natural human speech, match it to the desired command and respond in an increasingly natural way.
The assistants learn over a number of conversations and in many different ways.
They might ask for specific information - for example how to pronounce your name, or whose voice is whose in a household.
Data from large numbers of conversations by all users is also sampled, to help them recognise words with different pronunciations or how to create natural discussion.
Many of us are familiar with shopping recommendations - think of the supermarket that reminds you to add cheese to your online shop, or the way Amazon suggests books it thinks you might like.
Machine learning allows Amazon to make recommendations to individual shoppers
Machine learning is the technology that helps deliver these suggestions, via so-called recommender systems.
By analysing data about what customers have bought before, and any preferences they have expressed, recommender systems can pick up on patterns in purchasing history. They use this to make predictions about the products you might like.
Similar systems are used to recommend films or TV shows on streaming services like Netflix.
Recommender systems use machine learning to analyse viewing habits and pick out patterns in who watches - and enjoys - which shows.
By understanding which users like which films - and what shows you have watched or awarded high ratings - recommender systems can identify your tastes.
They are also used to suggest music on streaming services, like Spotify, and articles to read on Facebook.
Machine learning can also be used to distinguish between different categories of objects or items.
This makes it useful when sorting out the emails you want to see from those you don't.
Spam detection systems use a sample of emails to work out what is junk - learning to detect the presence of specific words, the names of certain senders, or other characteristics.
Once deployed, the system uses this learning to direct emails to the right folder. It continues to learn as users flag emails, or move them between folders.
Ever wondered how Facebook knows who is in your photos and can automatically label your pictures?
The image recognition systems that Facebook - and other social media - uses to automatically tag photos is based on machine learning.
When users upload images and tag their friends and family, these image recognition systems can spot pictures that are repeated and assigns these to categories - or people.
By analysing large amounts of data and looking for patterns, activity which might not otherwise be visible to human analysts can be identified.
One common application of this ability is in the fight against debit and credit card fraud.
Machine learning systems can be trained to recognise typical spending patterns and which characteristics of a transaction - location, amount, or timing - make it more or less likely to be fraudulent.
When a transaction seems out of the ordinary, an alarm can be raised - and a message sent to the user.
Doctors are just starting to consider machine learning to make better diagnoses, for example to spot cancer and eye disease.
Patients at eye hospitals often have photographs taken of their retinas - this can reveal problems
Learning from images that have been labelled by doctors, computers can analyse new pictures of a patient's retina, a skin spot, or an image of cells taken under a microscope.
In doing so, they look for visual clues that indicate the presence of medical conditions.
This type of image recognition system is increasingly important in healthcare diagnostics.
Machine learning is also powering scientists' ability to make new discoveries.
In particle physics it has allowed them to find patterns in immense data sets generated from the Large Hadron Collider at Cern.
It was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs Boson, for example, and is now being used to search for "new physics" that no-one has yet imagined.
Similar ideas are being used to search for new medicines, for example by looking for new small molecules and antibodies to fight diseases.
The focus will be on making systems that perform specific tasks well which could therefore be thought of as helpers.
Self-driving cars will use machine learning to help avoid accidents
In schools they could track student performance and develop personal learning plans.
They could help us reduce energy usage by making better use of resources and improve care for the elderly by finding more time for meaningful human contact.
In the area of transport, machine learning will power autonomous vehicles.
Many industries could turn to algorithms to increase productivity. Financial services could become increasingly automated and law firms may use machine learning to carry out basic research.
Routine tasks will be done faster, challenging business models that rely on charging hourly rates.
Over the next 10 years machine learning technologies will increasingly be part of our lives, transforming the way we work and live.
This analysis piece was commissioned by the BBC from an expert working for an outside organisation.
Dr Sabine Hauert is a member of the Royal Society's machine learning working group. Dr Hauert is also co-founder and president of Robohub.org and assistant professor in robotics at the University of Bristol. Follow her @sabinehauert.
The Royal Society describes itself as the UK's independent scientific academy. More details about its work and its funding can be found here.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39657382
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Nine ways to organise your life in your lunchtime - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Rushed off your feet? Not enough hours in the day? Here are some apps to help you take control.
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Business
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Busy tech entrepreneur and mum Colleen Wong likes any apps that can save her time
With two children under the age of four and a tech start-up to run, Colleen Wong has her hands full.
She is happy to use any technology that can help her manage her hectic lifestyle, including family activity planning app Hoop and food-sharing service Olio.
"I will embrace any tech that offers practical benefits and can save me time," says Ms Wong.
A finalist in the Women Who Tech European Start-up Challenge, she runs her child tracker firm, TechSixtyFour, from her home in Teddington, Middlesex.
She is typical of a new breed of hi-tech mums and dads around the world using lunchtime "life hacks" to juggle work and family commitments.
So what useful apps that could help you take back control of your life?
Fed up of washing and ironing? Try a laundry app such as FlyCleaners in New York, or Laundrapp, available in UK cities such as London, Glasgow and Harrogate.
The FlyCleaners app is free to use and offers an overnight service for when you need clean clothes fast.
Just pick a slot and hand your washing over to a FlyCleaners representative as little as 20 minutes later.
Washing and pressing one shirt in Chelsea, Manhattan costs $2.99 (£2.34), and deliveries are free when you spend more than $30 (£23).
With Laundrapp, booking the 48-hour service is also free, while prices depend on your location and the load.
Getting five shirts washed and pressed in south London, for example, costs £11.
Organising who does what around the house can be a chore in itself, but with US firm FamilyTech's apps Mothershp and Choremonster, you can set jobs for each member of the family from your office.
The Choremonster app enables parents to give rewards to kids who help around the home
FamilyTech co-founder Chris Bergman says: "With Mothershp, parents set chores and rewards. Their child then logs into Choremonster, where they can earn rewards such as 'screen time', and unlock monsters, for completing those chores."
Both apps are free to use and are available worldwide in eight languages.
Wherever you live, you can use your lunch hour to plan evening meals using a home cooking app such as BigOven.
Features on the free app, which is available around the world, include a grocery list organiser and more than 350,000 recipes.
If you want access to money-saving tips and nutrition tools, you can also sign up for the "Pro" version costing $19.99 a year or $1.99 a month.
Once you've planned your meal, you could order the ingredients from independent retailers using a locally focused app such as Epicery. It launched a one-hour delivery service in Paris last year.
Deliveries cost from €2.90 (£2.46) up to €6.90 (£5.89) if you order produce from three or more of its 250 members, which include local butchers, fishmongers and off-licences.
"Our aim is to expand into several other French and European cities soon," says Elsa Hermal at Epicery.
Then if you have food left over, why not "freecycle" it, rather than throw it away, using a UK-based app like Olio? It enables families and local business owners to redistribute food and other household items that would otherwise go to waste.
The free app is a hit with Ms Wong, 40.
"Food waste drives me mad, so I love Olio," she says.
Free 360-degree virtual reality (VR) tours are the new way to plan your next holiday from your desk.
All you need is your smartphone and the website of a VR specialist such as Ascape VR or YouVisit and you can escape into another world on your lunch break (with or without a VR headset).
Valeriy Kondruk, chief executive of Ascape VR, says: "Working in an office, you spend 90% of your time reading and writing.
"Taking a virtual trip is a great way to switch off and really get personal with a destination."
With online marketplace TaskRabbit you can tackle all those odd jobs you never seem to have enough time to do, from clearing the loft to fixing that leaky tap. Simply choose a "tasker" based on experience, reputation and hourly rate.
Once the job is done, pay securely via the app, which is currently available in 23 cities across the US, as well as in London.
Elsewhere, ServisHero is one of the most popular apps for Singapore residents in need of a handyman.
Its users describe what needs doing, wait for the quotes to roll in, and then pick a "hero" to do the job.
You can find fun family activities in minutes with free apps such as the UK's Hoop and Yuggler in the US.
Hoop users can set filters to find nearby events that suit their children, and can share those they find interesting with their friends.
You can plan family activities using apps like Hoop and Yuggler
"I use Hoop to do last-minute planning on where to take the kids," Ms Wong says.
Yuggler, which is only currently available on iOS devices, offers similar features in US cities including San Francisco and Philadelphia. It is planning to expand into 22 more cities soon.
Apps such as DocTap and iCliniq offer a way for busy professionals to get medical advice without taking time off.
ICliniq users can set up a video consultation with one of its 2,000 or so doctors in countries including the US, India and Germany.
And with London-based DocTap, you can pay £24 for 15-minute face-to-face GP appointments at clinics and pharmacies around the UK capital.
DocTap user Jamie Ritchie says: "It was pretty much impossible to fit an appointment with my local doctor around work.
"With DocTap, I got an appointment at lunchtime, and was back in the office within half an hour."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39657640
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London Marathon: Why do some runners get 'jelly legs'? - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Why do some runners experience "jelly legs" at the end of a marathon?
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UK
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This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Matthew Rees helped David Wyeth up The Mall to the finish line of the London Marathon
It's been hailed as the defining image of this year's London Marathon: runner Matthew Rees stopping to help fellow competitor David Wyeth after he almost collapsed just metres from the finish line. But why do some runners' legs turn to jelly?
With the end in sight, David Wyeth's legs began to buckle. Staggering along The Mall, head dropping, it looked like he would not complete the race.
But - in a show of comradeship that has quickly gone viral - fellow runner Matthew Rees stopped, pulled Mr Wyeth up and they completed the 26.2 mile challenge together.
"I saw David and his legs had completely collapsed beneath him," the Swansea Harriers runner told BBC Breakfast.
"I went over and he said 'I've got to finish' and I said 'you will' and I helped him up."
His struggle is reminiscent of an exhausted Jonny Brownlee, who was helped over the finish line by brother Alistair in the Triathlon World Series in Mexico last year.
Jonny required treatment but later tweeted he was OK, with a photo of himself lying in a hospital bed on a drip.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Jonny Brownlee helped over finish line by brother Alistair in Mexico
At the time, Alistair said: "I wish the flippin' idiot had paced it right and crossed the finish line first.
"You have to race the conditions. I was comfortable in third. I raced the conditions, I took the water on, made myself cool and I was alright."
London Marathon Coach Martin Yelling says it is like runners have "run out of petrol".
"At the end of a marathon runners usually have given so much physically that their energy levels are completely depleted - the term is hitting the wall," he says.
"What that means is your body is struggling to find enough physical energy to move forward, the body is trying to tell you to stop."
He says there is a clear wrestle between physical exhaustion and "incredible mental strength" in runners who have hit the wall.
"For every-day runners it is about learning to understand how your body responds.
"We would call it listening to your body."
Training for a marathon, pacing yourself and the correct fuel and hydration is important in avoiding the wall and the so-called "jelly legs", he says.
Other runners were helped by others as they collapsed before the London Marathon finish line
Tim Navin-Jones, from running club London City Runners, is one runner who can sympathise, having "hit the wall" himself during the New York Marathon.
"Your mind is telling you to keep going and your body is getting to the point where it says 'no'," he says.
"Your legs really do turn to jelly - it is horrific.
"It is like being a really horrible version of drunk. It is sheer exhaustion."
Mr Navin-Jones, who has run five marathons among other distances, says it is difficult to know how to pace a marathon for those who have not done it before.
A common mistake is runners starting a race too fast, he says.
Emma Ross, head of physiology at the English Institute of Sport, says runners "hit the wall" in a marathon when they run out of carbohydrate to use as a fuel for running.
"So what you want to try and do is keep your carbohydrate stores topped up during the race to prevent you from predominantly having to use fat as a fuel," she says.
"When we use fat as a fuel, we have to go slower because as a process of burning energy it is a more complex and a slower system, so we can only support slower exercise."
She also warns that dehydration causes a decrease in blood volume, which makes the heart work harder, so it is important for runners to keep hydrated.
Runner Gary McKee completed 100 marathons in 100 days for MacMillan Cancer Support, finishing on Sunday at the London Marathon.
Gary McKee completed 100 marathons in 100 days for MacMillan Cancer Support, raising more than £67,000
The 47-year-old, from Cleator Moor in Cumbria, says he managed to not hit the wall as he paced himself carefully during his challenge.
He says runners have to recognise when their body is telling them to stop.
"It is down to hydration. You will come to a point when you are tired.
"Have you overexerted yourself? Have you had enough calories? Enough carbs?
"The more you train, the higher your fitness levels become, so you can sustain it (running) for longer.
"If you understand what your body wants, just give it what it wants."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39693082
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Dani King considering Wales switch for 2018 Commonwealth Games - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Olympic gold medallist Dani King could cycle for Wales at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, having previously represented England.
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Last updated on .From the section Wales
Olympic gold medallist Dani King could cycle for Wales at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, having previously represented England.
King, who won team pursuit gold with GB at London 2012 and is a three-time world champion in the discipline, has focused on the road since 2014.
Southampton-born King, 26, represented England at the 2014 Commonwealth Games but is now based in Wales and meets the qualification criteria.
"It is a possibility," King said.
"It's still being decided at the moment."
King trains in Cardiff and is engaged to Welshman and former rider Matt Rowe, brother of Team Sky cyclist Luke Rowe.
"I think my major target would be the road, but I'd like to think I could go well in the bunch races on the back of road training and specific track training as well," King said.
"At the moment I'm focusing on the road, but I do miss racing on the track."
King was left out of British Cycling's plans for Rio 2016 having won gold four years earlier with Laura Kenny and Joanna Rowsell-Shand.
The four-rider, four-kilometres team pursuit - one rider and one kilometre was added to the women's event in late 2014 - is part of the Commonwealth Games programme.
Wales could potentially have a a strong team with 2016 Olympic champion Elinor Barker, world medallist Ciara Horne, Manon Lloyd and Amy Roberts also in contention.
"It's whether it would fit with my specific target and also whether I'd be good enough to slip into a team pursuit line-up," King added.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/39704623
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Ched Evans: Sheffield United set to re-sign striker from Chesterfield - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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League One champions Sheffield United are set to re-sign striker Ched Evans from Chesterfield, reports BBC Radio Sheffield.
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Last updated on .From the section Football
League One champions Sheffield United are set to re-sign striker Ched Evans from Chesterfield.
BBC Radio Sheffield reports the clubs have agreed a fee of about £500,000.
Evans, 28, last played for the Blades in 2012 before he was found guilty of raping a 19-year-old woman in a hotel room in 2011 and sentenced to five years in prison.
That conviction was quashed and, following a re-trial last October, Evans was found not guilty.
Wales international Evans joined Chesterfield last summer and has scored seven goals in 29 appearances for the relegated League One side this season.
He scored 42 goals in 103 league appearances in his first spell at Bramall Lane.
Evans joined Sheffield United from Manchester City for £3m in 2009, but struggled in his first two seasons with the club, scoring only 13 goals in 74 games.
His form improved dramatically in his final season with the Blades, as he found the net 35 times in 42 appearances, before being jailed six days after his final game - a 3-1 win over Leyton Orient.
After his release in October 2014, having served two and a half years of his prison sentence, the Blades revoked an initial offer to allow him to use their training facilities after 170,000 people signed an online petition against the move.
United's main shirt sponsor threatened to end their association with the club if they re-signed Evans, three club patrons resigned, while Olympic heptathlon champion Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill wanted her name removed from a stand named after her if the striker was offered a contract.
He then nearly joined League One side Oldham Athletic in January 2015 before the club pulled out of the deal following threats to their staff and pressure from sponsors.
Chesterfield offered him a return to professional football in June 2016, two months after his conviction was quashed, saying "a great deal of thought" had gone into the signing.
Evans scored in his first professional game in over four years with the equaliser in a 1-1 draw against Oxford on the opening day of this season in August.
He scored six more times before the turn of the year, but has failed to score in his past 11 appearances and has not featured since 4 March.
The Blades clearly believe they can get the best out of Ched Evans. He played his best football at Bramall Lane and Chris Wilder is known for his man-management skills.
Fans will be torn on this one. Some will back the signing and remember the days, albeit five years ago, that Evans was a prolific goalscorer. Others will see it as an unnecessary distraction.
United have already won the League One title and this story will now dominate the headlines before their coronation as champions on Sunday.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39697804
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Macron - not the only young achiever - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Emmanuel Macron will be the youngest ever president of France at just 39. Who else has achieved at such a young age?
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World
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He's young and he looks it. And at 39, Emmanuel Macron has won the final round of the French presidential election to become the country's youngest president - ever.
But he's not the youngest young achiever, by a long way. From ancient warriors to high-tech wizards, here's a random selection to rival Mr Macron.
The clue's in the name. At just 24, William Pitt the Younger became British prime minister in 1783. He stayed in the post almost continuously until his death in 1806.
Key events during his premiership: defeating the French at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805; the introduction of income tax; the Act of Union with Ireland.
Coming back to the present day, Mr Macron will not be the only world leader under 40. This group includes Macedonian Prime Minister Emil Dimitriev, 38, and the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, 36. Not forgetting the ever prominent Kim Jong-un, 33, leader of North Korea. The last two have, of course, inherited the role.
And if you happen to be strolling through the European microstate of San Marino - location, north-eastern Italy - you might come across 28-year-old Vanessa d'Ambrosio, one its two leaders, or captains regent.
The US tech entrepreneur was 19 when he launched Facebook with four other Harvard students in 2004. With more than 1.8 billion users and market capitalisation of around $400bn (£312bn), it is widely seen as the world's most successful social networking site.
One of the greatest military commanders of all time, Alexander the Great inherited the Macedonian throne in 336 BC aged 20. After conquering the huge Persian empire, still in his 20s, he went on to rule over an empire spanning three continents. Biggest single victory: the Battle of Gaugamela, in present-day Iraq.
Sean Connery played Alexander in a BBC adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play, Adventure Story, in 1961
In sport there are many firsts and youngests, but Romanian Nadia Comaneci caught the imagination more than most at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Aged just 14, she was the first gymnast in Olympic history to score a perfect 10.0 - on the uneven bars.
The gold medallist, who began in the discipline at the age of six, went on to score six more 10.0s.
Comaneci retired in 1981, later defecting to the United States from then Communist Romania. In 1997, gymnastics' world governing body raised the minimum age for senior competition to 16.
Here's Comaneci again, four decades later at a Golden Globes after-party in California in January:
For those of us who have failed to reach pinnacles of achievement at an early age, there is hope however.
Here are a couple of late bloomers, who took time to reach their full potential.
The founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken opened his first franchise in Utah in 1952. Harland Sanders was 62. His early career included tyre salesman, motel manager and ferry operator. KFC now has outlets in more than 100 countries.
A statue of Harland Sanders, on the left, and business partner Pete Harman was erected in 2004 at the site in Salt Lake City of the first KFC outlet.
The Edinburgh-born author of The Wind in the Willows worked for the Bank of England from the age of 20 but was already known in literary circles and went on to publish essays and stories about children.
The Wind in the Willows, a mystical adventure starring animals Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad, was not published until 1908 when Grahame was 49.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-39694634
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UKIP 'gets radical' with return to right-wing policies - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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UKIP searches for a new unique selling point after Theresa May steals a march on Brexit.
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UK Politics
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What do you do when the central policy on which your party was formed and has long campaigned becomes the domain of a political rival? If you're UKIP, get radical.
Theresa May has framed this election in terms of Brexit. The Conservatives are the party which will deliver on the referendum result, she has said, while other parties - namely Labour and the Lib Dems - want to frustrate the process.
In doing so she's stolen a march on UKIP; the party which for so long was the sole advocate of leaving the EU.
It hasn't abandoned Brexit. It has said it will continue to "hold the government's feet to the fire" and push for the kind of EU exit it wants, adamant there's still a role to play.
But UKIP needs a new unique selling point.
Cue a plethora of policies designed to appeal to the party's core voters; a moratorium on new Islamic schools in the state system, Sharia courts outlawed and a ban on face coverings in public places.
Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage is not standing this time
This is a return to right-wing territory in which UKIP has dabbled before. A step away from the libertarian values the party has said in the past that it stands for.
It's an extension of the party's popular stance on controlled immigration; limit the number of people who come to the UK and ensure those who do fully integrate into society.
UKIP has long appealed to a certain emotion among parts of the electorate, portraying itself as the true protector of British values, proud to stand up for a way of life it claims is at risk of erosion from political correctness.
Its integration agenda was quickly labelled by some as offensive, even Islamophobic, but for UKIP these policies are true patriotism, a defence of the realm and its values from what it calls "crude multiculturalism".
UKIP still sees itself as the party prepared to say things other politicians won't, unafraid to risk offence to create debate. It takes credit for forcing other parties to talk frankly about immigration; now they hope to do the same with integration and in doing so ensure their relevance beyond Brexit and appeal to their traditional supporters.
The Tories have stomped on UKIP turf, so the party's trying to break new ground.
If it's more radical as a consequence? So be it. The question is whether it will be enough.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39698976
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Labour's Brexit plan takes shape - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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The Labour Party are backing Brexit but setting out a very different approach to the Conservatives.
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UK Politics
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Dividing lines. Now, where have we heard that before?
Gordon Brown loved them. George Osborne relished them. In an era that had been dominated by centre ground politics where everyone fought over the middle, those lines were important to answer voters' claims that "they're all the same".
Today, Labour is spelling out "dividing lines" for a different reason.
For months the party has agonised over its position on Brexit. Wrangling with four seemingly incompatible truths - millions of their voters in traditional Labour areas wanted Brexit; the vast majority of the party's MPs wanted to stay, in line with its official position; the leader was Remain but not exactly in love with the idea, but an important constituency of Labour voters at the New Labour end of things were ardent Remainers.
In the end, Labour concluded it had to back the government's triggering of Article 50 with a few notable exceptions. And now it has officially backed Brexit. How, on this issue, can they show they are different to the Tories?
Enter Sir Keir Starmer's speech this morning, interestingly, well ahead of the party's manifesto.
He'll promise Labour would guarantee rights for EU nationals who live in the UK, sources say a '9am, day one' action for a Labour government.
He'll say Labour would scrap the Tories' Brexit plan and in its place put forward legislation that would more fulsomely and explicitly protect all rights currently enshrined in European legislation. He'll say the idea of walking away with no deal must not be an option, and give Parliament a say on the final deal as well as regular formal updates.
It is very different to the Tory plan and there has been a very active campaign to protect EU citizens who live in the UK.
And a second referendum will not be in the party's manifesto. Labour will hope not to get bogged down in arguments over that.
Privately senior figures say it's not possible to see how you get to a second vote, logistically or politically.
But on the fairly understandable basis that in 2017 politics it is foolish to rule absolutely anything out, they can't or won't say explicitly say that under no circumstances could there ever be a second vote, or under no circumstances could we ever stay in.
A senior source told me they would never argue to stay in the EU as it is, but IF there were significant reforms that situation could hypothetically change. It is a massive IF, even worth putting in capital letters in bold!
For some of their voters, particularly in London, that's the kind of approach they crave.
But claims from their critics that Labour could potentially seek to stay in the EU is a dividing line the party hardly needs.
• None Brexit triggered: What happens now?
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39703633
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World Championship 2017: Marco Fu beats Neil Robertson, faces Mark Selby next - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Marco Fu edges past 2010 champion Neil Robertson 13-11 to reach his fourth World Championship quarter-final.
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Last updated on .From the section Snooker
Fu lost the first two frames of the final session to trail 10-8, but breaks of 78 and 115 pulled him level.
Robertson took an error-strewn 21st frame on the black, but Fu remained the calmer player and took the next three.
The world number eight from Hong Kong plays Mark Selby in the last eight, the defending champion having earlier beaten Xiao Guodong 13-6.
Barry Hawkins, runner-up in 2013, won by the same scoreline, securing his place in the quarter-finals with victory over Scotland's Graeme Dott.
Robertson screamed in delight and hit the table in celebration after clinching what seemed to be a pivotal frame to go 11-10 ahead.
But Fu dug in to get over the line and continue a consistent season, that has seen him secure the third ranking title of his career, reach two semi-finals, as well as make the last four at the Masters.
Two-time Crucible semi-finalist Fu told BBC Sport: "It was very tough. I had so many chances and missed so many chances.
"It was one of those matches that neither of us deserved to win. For fighting spirit I was a 10 out of 10, but for snooker it was four out of 10."
Robertson described his performance as "garbage".
"I played awful snooker," said the Australian. "It wasn't good to watch. I was awful in my first match too."
World number one Selby, who led 10-6 overnight, rattled off breaks of 101, 73 and 60 to see off his Chinese foe.
The 33-year-old from Leicester told BBC Sport: "To win the first frame and get settled - and to do it with a century - was great.
"I played a really solid game. I didn't make too many mistakes and put him under pressure. And when he made mistakes I capitalised.
"I won a couple of key frames from 40 or 50 points behind and made a couple of good clearances on Sunday afternoon. That was probably the turning point. To come out at 4-4 and keep that four-frame lead was vital."
'Hawk' flies into last eight
Hawkins was also a 13-6 winner, beating former champion Dott to secure his place in the last eight.
Like Selby, world number seven Hawkins was in no mood to hang around, quickly taking the first frame, wrapping up the second with a superb break of 98, before getting over the line in a scrappy third frame.
The Kent-based left-hander, who will play Stephen Maguire in the quarter-finals, said: "I'm glad it's over. You want to finish off as quick as you can because it's a long tournament.
"Over the years I have had some unbelievably gruelling matches and it takes it out of you. I wasn't in top form but I played pretty solid. I kept him pretty cold and away from the table."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/snooker/39695301
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Seven bands from the 80s we wish would reunite - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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As Bananarama's original line-up get back together, what other 80s bands would we like to see reunite?
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Entertainment & Arts
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Children of the 1980s, rejoice - the original Bananarama line-up is back together at last. Which got us thinking - lots of 80s bands have reformed over recent years but which ones are we still wishing would reunite?
Frankie says relax - still the best slogan T-shirt ever
Liverpool band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, fronted by Holly Johnson, are still best remembered for their debut single Relax, which was famously banned by the BBC in 1984 due to its sexual lyrics but topped the UK singles chart for five consecutive weeks.
The band went on to become only the second act in the history of the UK charts (after Gerry and the Pacemakers) to reach number one with their first three singles when Two Tribes and The Power of Love also hit the top spot.
But their glory was short-lived. Their second album, Liverpool, released in 1986, failed to live up to expectations and a backstage bust-up between Johnson and bassist Mark O'Toole at their final gig at Wembley Arena sounded the death knell.
While various reincarnations of the band have since reformed, we're still waiting for the original line-up to hit us "with those laser beams."
The Smiths - we are never, ever, ever, getting back together
Never gonna happen. Yes, we know. But just imagine! Johnny Marr and Steven Morrissey formed the band in 1982 with bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce.
They went on to release 17 singles and four studio albums, becoming one of the most influential bands of the 1980s.
Hits included This Charming Man, Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now, How Soon is Now?, Big Mouth Strikes Again, Panic and Girlfriend in a Coma.
But the dream combo of Marr's melodies and Morrissey's musings was broken with the band's acrimonious split in 1987.
In Marr's autobiography Set The Boy Free, he revealed that the official version of him walking out on the band wasn't the full story.
The tipping point, says Marr, was when Morrissey didn't turn up for the video shoot of the single Shoplifters Of The World Unite, and ordered him to sack their latest manager.
Whatever the truth, Marr also wrote that he and Morrissey discussed the possibility of a reunion back in 2008. We're still waiting.
Ben Vol-au-vent Parrot, as Smash Hits liked to call him
Ring a bell? We've been wondering whatever happened to the beautiful beret-wearing Ben with the exotic-sounding surname Volpeliere-Pierrot (although Smash Hits preferred to call him Ben Vol-au-vent Parrot), not to mention Julian, Nick and Migi.
The band enjoyed 80s success with soulful pop hits including Down to Earth, Ordinary Day, Name and Number and Misfit.
They split after a last hurrah with a cover of Johnny Bristol's Hang On In There Baby in 1992. While Ben has joined some 80s tours singing solo the band have never reunited as a four-piece.
It's 30 years this year since Misfit and Ordinary Day entered the charts, so perhaps now would be a good time to hit the road again?
It wasn't a real 80s band without the obligatory sax
It's well documented that Paul Weller would only reform The Jam if his children were "destitute".
But what about his later band, Style Council, which he formed with Mick Talbot, formerly of The Merton Parkas and Dexy's Midnight Runners?
The Style Council had hits such as Walls Come Tumbling Down!, Shout to the Top, You're the Best Thing and Long, Hot Summer.
The band broke up in 1989. Weller has since said they didn't get the credit they deserved.
"I thought we were quite misunderstood and misrepresented. Yet, at the end of the day, we made some good records and I wrote some good songs around that time, songs I still stand by, and I think that will last as well."
The Housemartins - "the fourth best band in Hull"?
Formed in Hull in the 1980s, The Housemartins line-up changed frequently over the years but most of us will remember its most famous members, Paul Heaton and Norman Cook AKA Fatboy Slim.
Caravan of Love and Happy Hour were probably their best known hits and Heaton and Cook went on to further success with The Beautiful South and Beats International/Fatboy Slim.
In 2009, Mojo magazine got The Housemartins' original members together for a photo-shoot and interview but they said they would not be reforming.
So it looks like we won't be hearing from "the fourth best band in Hull" - as The Housemartins often described themselves - anytime soon.
Don't Leave Me This Way Jimmy!
While Bronski Beat continued following the departure of vocalist Jimmy Somerville in 1985, they are still best remembered for the hits they had with him at the helm, including Why?, Smalltown Boy and It Ain't Necessarily So.
Somerville, of course, went on to form The Communards with Richard Coles, who is now a Church of England priest and Radio 4 presenter.
But will we see either of these bands back together?
Larry Steinbachek, former keyboardist with Bronski Beat, sadly died at the age of 56 in January.
And the Communards? Coles and Somerville fell out, not least because Coles lied when he told Somerville he had HIV.
The two are back in touch now but with Coles' commitments to the Church, a reunion seems unlikely.
The Thompson triplets - sorry, Twins, in their most recognised form
Yep, it's our wildcard entry - the band that was named after the two bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson in The Adventures of Tintin.
The band had various line-up changes over the years but they were best known as the mid-80s trio consisting of Tom Bailey, Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway.
Their hits included Hold Me Now, Doctor! Doctor! and You Take Me Up but Leeway left the band in 1986 and Bailey and Currie could never replicate their earlier success (although they did have a dance hit in 1991 called Come Inside).
The pair had two children together and moved to New Zealand. While they did briefly reunite with Leeway on a Channel 4 show in 2001, they have so far resisted the urge to go down the nostalgia road and reform.
In 2014, Bailey began performing the band's hits as The Thompson Twins' Tom Bailey and continues to tour in 2017.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39692931
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Battle for Welsh votes shows Tory ambitions - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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Theresa May knows it will be difficult but she is deadly serious about a potential reshaping of Britain at this election.
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UK Politics
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This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Labour voters in Porthcawl weigh up their options
She hardly cuts the jib of a radical. But despite warnings against complacency from the prime minister's own lips today, be in no doubt - the Tories are deadly serious about a potential reshaping of Britain at this election.
Any day on the trail is precious campaigning time. Leaders only tend to turn up where they think they are in the game. So a Welsh visit, Theresa May's fifth in three months, is revealing.
It shows the Conservatives are not just contemplating a bigger majority by scooping up traditional Tory-Labour marginal seats in England.
But even if you ignore the polls, senior sources indicate they could possibly return to levels of support not seen in Wales for more than 30 years.
And privately they expect gains in Scotland too. Theresa May hopes to make her claim there are no Tory no-go areas come true. The European referendum has redrawn the map. She wants to colour it blue.
For that to happen here in Wales, that means overturning decades of support for Labour in many areas. Are voters ready to do that in high enough numbers? It's of course far too early to tell.
Don't forget the Tories already improved their share of the vote significantly in 2015, winning 11 seats.
But on the Porthcawl seafront in Bridgend, the backyard of the Welsh Labour leader Carwyn Jones, we met plenty of voters who are certainly ready to consider it.
The Edwards, father and son, told me they'd both been Labour voters all their lives. But could they switch? Mark told me his 85-year-old father had already done so. He said "she is wonderful, best we've had," when he started talking about Theresa May.
Mr Edwards senior told me he had been 'life-long Labour' but that Jeremy Corbyn was "30 or 40 years out of date - he wants to introduce a gimmick, communism".
He was plainly angry about what's happened to the Labour party in recent years, saying it had been led by "conmen". Mr Edwards parting shot was "bye, bye Mr Corbyn".
Labour has held Bridgend for the past 30 years
Another voter, Brian Holley presented his own dilemma, that could be shared by many voters in Wales, where overall, the vote was to leave the EU. Brian told me he'd voted to Leave but his local Labour MP had backed Remain.
That was reason for him to be, as he expressed it, "on the border" between sticking with Labour and voting Tory for the first time.
Sharing a morning cuppa with him was Eira Linehan, who said for the "first time ever" she was considering voting Tory because while she agreed with Jeremy Corbyn's ideas, they wouldn't work in the "real world".
They said "we're all Labour" in their constituency, but they are likely to vote Tory because of Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, even though, "my father will be spinning in his grave".
Conversations about voting intentions seven weeks out are absolutely no substitute for the final poll of course. And we are only at the early stages of this campaign. It's worth noting too there were warnings of Labour taking heavy fire in the Welsh Assembly elections last year.
In the end, they remained the largest party, and Carwyn Jones kept his job as First Minister, albeit with the help of Plaid Cymru.
Yet even the Welsh Labour leader was plain to the BBC today that Jeremy Corbyn still has to "prove himself", warning there is a "mountain to climb".
In remarks that could become very significant after the election, Mr Jones was clear "Jeremy is leading the campaign and Jeremy will take credit or responsibility". He also called for a manifesto that has the "widest buy-in possible from people".
But 'wide buy-in'? Support that Labour can truly bank on? Not a bit of it.
Yet, as Theresa May left the community centre where she had talked to activists tonight, a small, but determined crowd had been waiting in the rain, if only for the chance to shout at her car as her convoy left at speed.
As she swept away, the PM won't be in any doubt that winning Wales or any traditionally Labour territories won't be easy.
And in the volatile world of 2017 politics, there is nowhere where she can be guaranteed of a universally warm welcome.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39713864
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Anthony Joshua v Wladimir Klitschko: Title fight is a whole new level, says Briton - BBC Sport
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2017-04-25
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Anthony Joshua says he is competing at a "whole new level" against former champion Wladimir Klitschko in Saturday's world title fight.
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Coverage: Live radio commentary on BBC Radio 5 live and text commentary on the BBC Sport website and app from 21:00 BST.
Anthony Joshua says he will be competing at a "whole new level" when he takes on Wladimir Klitschko in Saturday's world title bout.
The two heavyweights fight for the IBF title and vacant WBA belt in front of 90,000 fans at Wembley.
Joshua, 27, says his 13 weeks of preparation have been "tougher times than I have had in any walk of life".
Klitschko, 41, lost his heavyweight title to Tyson Fury in November 2015 - his first defeat in 11 years.
In an interview at his Sheffield training camp before the biggest fight of his career, Joshua spoke about his motivation, being a "man of the people", the state of British boxing, and his family.
Joshua, unbeaten in 18 fights since turning professional in 2013, said he is not worried about his safety in the ring because of the intensity of his training before the fight.
"I've been pushed to places I've never been pushed before," said the Briton.
"I think I take more punishment in the gym than I do in the fights. Sometimes I try things and it doesn't work and I've broken my ribs, my hand, dislocated shoulders in the gym but we get it right for the fight.
"One of the main things is his mindset at the minute. He claims he is obsessed and I ask 'What is he obsessed about?' I look at myself in the mirror and it is about beating me.
"I've lived simple. I've been training under the dark light so I can shine under the bright lights on April 29."
Joshua had numerous incidents with the police as a youth, including being arrested for ABH, drug possession and being electronically tagged. He has previously stated that he would have been in jail were it not for boxing.
But Joshua said: "I've had tougher times in the gym than I have had in any walk of life at the minute.
"I put myself through it and it is important to because I don't want to be star of the gym and then when I get to the fight it's like: 'I've never faced this type of warrior before.'"
• None Watch Joshua: The Road to Klitschko on iPlayer
• None Listen to 5 live Boxing with Costello and Bunce - Joshua v Klitschko preview
• None 'Father Time has caught up with Klitschko'
Asked if this is the defining fight of his career, Joshua replied: "It is one of them. If this was towards the end of my career, I would say: 'This is the defining fight that's going to write the history books.'
"But I've still got so many more years. I'm confident. I'm learning about myself, so this fight is, for me, one fight that I've got to take in my stride round by round and when I take that attitude the victory comes and we move on and there are so many other big fights in the UK."
Joshua does not believe Klitschko has underestimated him, saying: "He's coming game, he's coming ready, and the body does what the mind tells it. His mind seems to be in the right place so I'm in for a tough fight."
"I may not express myself flashing what I've done and telling everyone I'm the greatest," he said.
"Where we grew up, everyone was about making money, but low key, understated - you probably didn't want to get your house burgled!
"Who I am when I was 17 is who I am today, so not much has changed.
"You've got to add a bit of flavour. It's needed now and again, but it's got to be real because I don't take boxing as an act. This is way of expressing myself and being true to myself and there are kids watching so you've got to be mindful.
"If I was to be that type of person - loud and trashing tables - after a fight, I would still continue to be that way. What I notice about fighters is they act a certain way and once the fight has started they are hugging each other and are quiet.
"I'm just trying to be myself on camera, in the ring, outside of the ring and off camera."
Asked about being very accessible, Joshua says: "It's part of boxing. It is good to lock yourself away but I'm a man of the people, it's no bother. As long as it doesn't make me late for training, I've no problem speaking to 100 people.
"I'm in the same flat that I've been in since 2011 - it's been a long time. I think I'll be one of those guys who will learn the piano, the violin, bungee jump and do all the things I didn't do when I was fighting.
"When I'm not fighting, I try to take a holiday and experience things, but when I'm fighting the simple life has worked and I don't try and change it."
"I was on the complete opposite end of healthy living before boxing, it's got me strong," he said.
"I'm a superhero to my little cousins. It's what it does for my family and my surname Joshua.
"People are proud to wear that name and I'm representing my family. It is nice to have kids supporting you. It's reaching out to a wider audience.
"I'm just a normal person. You have your good days, your bad days, you have road rage, everyone goes through it.
"You've just got to live by the job you do and if that's what comes with it I'd rather choose winning over anything."
• None Wladimir Klitschko: Anthony Joshua will be 'facing Mount Everest' for heavyweight title
• None Quiz: Which heavyweight champion are you?
Joshua on the state of British boxing
Joshua, who turned professional after winning gold at London 2012, said: "When I first turned professional, no-one would touch me sponsorship-wise and no-one was really backing boxing.
"I say look at the characters of the sport, look at the individuals, get behind the gloves."
He praised fellow Brits Tyson Fury, who won the heavyweight title with a win over Klitschko in November 2015, Dillian Whyte, the WBC International heavyweight title holder, former British and Commonwealth heavyweight title holder David Price and Dereck Chisora, who challenged for the WBC heavyweight title in 2012.
"As I've been in the game, Fury won, Dillian, myself, Chisora the likes of Price, up-and-coming heavyweights and lighter weights - it's definitely brought more attention."
Asked if he was worried about his mum watching his fights, Joshua answers: "No, no, no, definitely not. Because she's proud, she's happy and I look after her so I think that's the main thing.
"I've got a son and I definitely wouldn't want him to fight because of those reasons, his health, it's tough.
"I did it quietly. When I first started fighting, I didn't tell my family. It was just about me and what I wanted to do.
"My mum has always seen the positive light of fighting rather than the health issues and I've always been on the road to winning and glory.
"She's had a few tough times and a few scares when I've lost as an amateur, but we bounce back, and for all the good times she's forgot about the bad times we've had."
Get all the latest boxing news leading up to the Joshua-Klitschko fight, sent straight to your device with notifications in the BBC Sport app. Find out more here.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/boxing/39709199
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What is superfoetation? - BBC News
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2017-04-25
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It's when someone conceives and then gets pregnant again between two weeks and a month later.
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Newsbeat
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We're as confused as these guys...
A British woman's revealed she fell pregnant with twins, then conceived while carrying them and gave birth to triplets.
It's called superfoetation - when someone conceives then conceives again between two weeks and a month later.
It's extremely rare in humans. This is only the sixth time it's happened in 100 years.
Fertility expert Professor Simon Fishel says: "It ought not to happen, but it does."
"The first case was reported in 1865 and there have been odd ones every now and again over the decade."
Most of us assume that once a woman becomes pregnant then that's it, but not according to the man who delivered the first IVF baby in 1978.
"Evolution is designed, especially in women, that they don't release another egg," he says.
"If they ever did then it shouldn't be fertilised because the sperm shouldn't be able to get through.
"Even if that happens the lining of the womb would be unable to accept another embryo as changes have taken place while the foetus is growing in there."
It is remarkable for superfoetation to occur, but there's not always a happy ending.
"There have been cases where the other foetus has died in the womb as one could stop growing and have to be delivered early," says the professor.
One of the questions raised is how the foetuses will cope in the womb and whether they will end up competing at feeding time.
"It depends on the quality of the placenta, that is the most important thing for nutrition and development of the growing baby," Prof Fishel adds.
"If the placenta develops normally then it's fine but if the placenta fuses then that can cause problem. In the superfoetation situation we've seen here, it's worked fine."
It's claimed it's more prevalent in animals such as rodents, rabbits, horses and sheep.
Although rare in humans these miracle births do happen and sometimes can be even more extreme.
"There was a case in Rome some time ago where they estimated it was about three to four months difference," says Prof Fishel.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/articles/39692070
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World Championship 2017: Ding Junhui takes charge against Ronnie O'Sullivan - BBC Sport
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2017-04-26
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Ding Junhui dominates the second session of his World Championship quarter-final with Ronnie O'Sullivan to take a 10-6 lead.
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Last updated on .From the section Snooker
World number four Ding Junhui dominated the second session of his World Championship quarter-final with Ronnie O'Sullivan to take a 10-6 lead.
Having shared eight frames in the opening session, the pair began Tuesday evening by winning a frame each.
But breaks of 64, 65, 120, 59 and 56 ensured China's Ding took complete control of the 25-frame match.
However, a typically rapid 104 break stopped the rot for five-time winner O'Sullivan and gave him hope.
It was another two hours of gripping entertainment that maintained the trend of a break of at least 50 in every frame.
In the other game to resume on Tuesday evening, Scotland's John Higgins stormed into an 11-5 lead against 25-year-old Kyren Wilson.
The afternoon session saw reigning champion Mark Selby build a 6-2 lead over Hong Kong's Marco Fu, while Barry Hawkins is 5-3 ahead against Scottish qualifier Stephen Maguire.
Ding, 30, has not beaten world number 12 O'Sullivan in a ranking event since his 9-6 victory in the Northern Ireland Trophy in 2006.
There is a strong possibility of that run coming to an end at the Crucible after his stunning display on Tuesday evening, which began with a frame-winning 63 clearance in the ninth.
O'Sullivan came from behind to win the next but was unable to repeat the feat in frame 11 as Ding seized control.
Storming into a 7-5 lead before the interval, he resumed with a 120 break and went on to stretch his lead to 10-5 with a 58 in frame 15.
O'Sullivan, though, produced a defiant rapid-fire 104 in the final frame to give himself a chance of matching Stephen Hendry's record of playing in 12 World Championship semi-finals.
World number 14 Wilson had levelled from 2-0 down in the morning, helped by a 92 break, but damaged his cue tip and, after a brief stoppage for repairs, saw four-time Crucible champion Higgins open up a 5-3 lead with breaks of 62 and 59.
The Scot began the evening with a 129 and, after the next two were shared, added breaks of 74 and 135 either side of the interval to lead 9-4.
Wilson responded well with a 97 but Higgins won the last two to leave himself two frames from victory at 11-5.
World number eight Fu has got used to doing things the hard way at this year's tournament, having fought back from 7-2 down to beat Luca Brecel and recovered from 4-1 behind to see off Neil Robertson.
There seemed little chance of a comeback when he trailed world number one Selby 5-0, the Leicester man finding some of his best form to compile breaks of 80, 72 and 94.
Fu went more than an hour without potting a ball before taking a scrappy sixth frame and making it 5-2 with a stylish break of 60.
But Selby got Fu in a fuddle on the final red and went on to take a four-frame advantage at 6-2. They resume on Wednesday.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/snooker/39708569
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Reality Check: Have we seen record numbers of jobs? - BBC News
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2017-04-26
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The prime minister says the record number of jobs is evidence of her strong leadership.
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UK Politics
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The claim: There is a record number of jobs in the UK.
Reality Check verdict: The number of jobs in the UK is indeed at a record level as are the numbers of people employed and the proportion of those aged between 16 and 64 who are in work.
Prime Minister Theresa May has been speaking to a Conservative rally in south Wales.
She claimed that the evidence for her strong leadership could be seen, among other things, in the "record number of jobs".
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggest that between December 2016 and February 2017 there were 31.84 million people in work.
The figure is actually a touch below the one for November to January, but the difference is well within the margin of error.
The November to January figure was indeed a record number, but with a growing population the employment rate is probably more relevant.
The employment rate for those aged between 16 and 64 was 74.6% in the latest figures, which is also the highest since comparable records began, in 1971.
That picture was not uniform across the UK though, with Wales, where the prime minister was speaking, having a 73% employment rate between December and February.
Only north-east of England, the West Midlands and Northern Ireland have lower rates.
While those are the figures everyone usually reports, they are not, strictly speaking, the same as there being a record number of jobs, because one employed person can have more than one job.
The ONS also releases figures for workforce jobs, which are collected from businesses rather than workers.
That suggests there were 34.62 million jobs in December 2016, the highest since comparable records began in 1958.
The number of people working part-time has risen considerably since 2010, although it has been relatively stable for the past couple of years.
The vast majority (85%) of UK workers are employees rather than being self-employed, but since 2008, 40% of the overall increase in the workforce has been down to a growth in the number of people who are self-employed.
Some of this shift will be down to people working in the so-called "gig economy" - that is, people in fairly insecure work such as driving cabs or delivering takeaways.
Because these changes have been so recent and rapid, there is no breakdown in the official statistics, which means we can't say how much of the increase in self-employment is down to insecure working and how much to entrepreneurship.
Think tank the New Economics Foundation published research in December, which suggested that in London the gig economy had grown by almost three-quarters since 2010.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39710052
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The people who know what colour you'll like in 2019 - BBC News
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2017-04-26
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Working out what colour is going to be popular in future is crucial for industries across the world.
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Business
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As director of colour at WGSN Jane Monnington Boddy's remit is to know what colours will be in demand in the future
Korean retailers don't mind you taking lots of photos in their shops, says Jane Monnington Boddy.
For Mrs Monnington Boddy that's a good thing. Before her trip to Asia last month she bought a new iPhone 7 with the biggest memory available.
It wasn't so she could take loads of holiday snaps, but so that she could record the kind of things people on the other side of the world were buying, wearing, watching and doing.
Mrs Monnington Boddy works at WGSN, a London-based company that offers information on current and future trends in fashion, interior design and lifestyle. "Know what's next" is its tagline.
As director of colour Mrs Monnington Boddy's specific remit is to know precisely what colours will be in demand in the future.
In her week-long work trip she attended Seoul Fashion Week, Hong Kong's Art Basel art fair, as well as several other exhibitions.
All the time she was carefully gathering information: taking photos, recording videos and taking lots and lots of notes.
It is these kind of regular trips and her industry experience that help the 45-year-old to work out the next big colours.
"I think about where colour has been, what's popular and take that into consideration when I think about where it will go in the future," she says.
Pink has become hugely popular for both men and women
Twice a year she takes part in the company's trend summit days where team members from across the world, including Brazil, the US and China, get together to share information.
"At the end of it you feel like your head's going to explode," she says. But it is these gatherings that form the basis of the firm's six-monthly predictions on the key upcoming trends.
Currently she is working on the firm's colour forecasts for spring/summer 2019. These will be announced in June, giving firms enough time to fire up their production lines.
One trend she's followed closely is that of pink. Once seen as a hue just for small girls, it has now become popular for both men and women.
"It takes a long time to become a colour that hits the masses and makes retailers a lot of money," she says.
While working out what colour is going to be popular in future may seem like a niche pursuit, it's actually big business.
Every industry around the world uses colour. Manufacturers of cars, vacuum cleaners, phones, toothbrushes, coffee machines and other household goods all have to choose a colour range for their products.
Getting it right can help boost sales. Apple iPhones, KitchenAid mixers, Beats headphones, Kate Spade and The Cambridge Satchel Company have all used colour to make themselves stand out from competitors.
Some companies have even trademarked the branding colour they use, protecting themselves from would be copycat rivals in the same industry.
Manufacturing firm 3M's canary yellow post-it notes and Tiffany's egg blue box colour, for example, have all been trademarked.
"Every colour conveys its own message and meaning," says Pantone's Laurie Pressman
"To sell something you have to first get someone's attention. Colour helps to clarify a product's identity," says Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute, which provides colour consulting services for brands and products, as well as trend forecasts.
Popular colours often reflect what's happening culturally and socially, she says.
The growth of the sharing economy, in which people rent beds, cars and other assets directly from one another, means lighter colours such as pale blues could come into fashion.
"Sharing means lightness, you don't want to be bogged down so you're not looking at a heavy palette."
Colours such as brown, which a couple of decades ago was linked to the earth and dirt but is now associated with coffee and chocolate, reflects the growth of those industries, she says.
Pantone chose "greenery" as its 2017 colour of the year
Pantone is best known for its colour standards which provide a unique identifying number for each shade.
These numbers mean firms can clearly communicate the precise shade of the particular colour they want to their suppliers.
Pantone also provides formulations for manufacturers to make sure the correct shade can be reproduced consistently in different materials.
"Making sure the colours are easily achievable is critically important," says Ms Pressman.
What the colour is called also matters. "Peasoup" was almost chosen as the firm's 2017 colour of the year instead of "greenery", but Ms Pressman said it wouldn't have created the right feeling.
"Every colour conveys its own message and meaning," she says.
But can colour really make you feel something?
How a colour makes you feel can differ according to what country you're from
Recent research found that ice hockey teams wearing darker-coloured tops were more likely to be penalised for aggressive fouls. One possible conclusion is that referees had an unconscious bias against darker colours, linking them to the idea of a "black sheep" and bad behaviour.
Another study found wearing the colour red could increase the probability of winning sporting contests.
But it's hard to find any large-scale scientific studies proving a direct link between colour and behaviour. This is because perceptions of colour are subjective, differing according to your own personal experiences and culture.
In China, red is a happy or lucky colour, but in the UK it's typically linked to anger or power.
Yet anecdotally at least certain colours are associated with particular feelings. Looking at a bright colour such as yellow can make us feel more cheerful, even if it's fleetingly, while blue is often seen as a calming, reassuring colour.
Grey became popular in the aftermath of the financial crisis
Mark Woodman, a product consultant and a former president of US-based colour forecasting trade body Color Marketing Group (CMG), says the money firms invest in getting the right colour for their products prove it is important.
He has consulted on colour for paint manufacturers, a medical office equipment company, a porcelain manufacturer and even a company that makes the springy shred material used in gift bags and boxes.
"Colours have to connect with the zeitgeist of the times and that is what we work so hard at discerning," he says.
He points out how the "vast movement of grey" began to emerge after the 2008 financial crisis.
Similarly during the 2012 US presidential election, undecided and neutral states began to be identified as purple by the media - a blend of the Democratic blue and Republican red colours. The result was that the colour became more popular.
"Colours have to make sense to the living environment," he says.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39693181
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World Championship 2017: Mark Selby, John Higgins reach semis - BBC Sport
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2017-04-26
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Mark Selby twice hits tournament high breaks to crush Marco Fu 13-3 and reach the World Championship semi-finals with a session to spare.
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Last updated on .From the section Snooker
Mark Selby twice hit tournament high breaks to crush Marco Fu 13-3 and reach the World Championship semi-finals with a session to spare.
Resuming with a 6-2 advantage, Selby hit back-to-back tons of 139 and 132 in winning five frames in a row.
World number eight Fu stopped the rot but reigning champion Selby scored a breathtaking 143 to go 12-6 ahead.
And he took the session's final frame to book a last-four meeting with either Ronnie O'Sullivan or Ding Junhui.
Four-time champion John Higgins wrapped up a 13-6 win over world number 14 Kyren Wilson to reach his first Crucible semi-final since 2011.
World number one Selby had said he was yet to find his form at this year's tournament, but was at his majestic best as he destroyed the Hong Kong man.
He said he played "more or less faultless snooker" in a repeat of one of last year's Crucible semi-finals.
"From start to finish there were only one or two balls I missed that I should have got," said the Leicester man.
"I was confident and focused and I think it showed. I didn't really give much of a chance. If you do finish with a session to spare it's great to have that extra rest."
Selby's five-frame burst to stretch his lead to 11-2 saw two breaks of 50-plus to go with the two tons.
But, after Fu took his only frame of the day, there was better to come, with a ridiculous clearance of 143 featuring increasingly outlandish pots as he began to lose control of the cueball in the 80s.
"It was a good break because I was never in position," he said. "I kept potting silly balls from nowhere. It was a freaky break.
"If I carry on playing like that I will have a chance in the tournament. To carry on playing like that will be difficult but I know my game is there."
Selby finished off with an effortless 65, his tenth break of more than 50 in the match.
Higgins has eyes on number five
Scotland's Higgins, 41, led Wilson 11-5 after dominating the first session from the moment 25-year-old Wilson damaged his cue tip with the scores level at 3-3.
He was at his unflappable best in building his lead and claimed two of three error-strewn frames on the resumption to seal victory.
Higgins, who will play 2013 runner-up Hawkins or Maguire in the last four, remains on course for a fifth Crucible title.
His calm demeanour and shot selection stood out on the opening day and he got over the line following a scrappy morning's play which saw Wilson continue his all-out attacking strategy.
"Kyren was desperately unlucky to split his tip at 3-3," said the world number six. "That is a big moment during the game.
"He was going for a lot and I was just trying to stay calm. He loves to go for his shots and you can't blame him. But when they are not going in it can be difficult.
"I can't wait to play in the one-table set-up. I am buzzing to get back to that. I believe I can win it again."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/snooker/39720225
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France says City at risk post-Brexit - BBC News
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2017-04-26
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The French finance minister tells the BBC that euro-denominated financial services activity will need to move to the continent.
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Business
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One of the most important sectors at the heart of the Brexit negotiations will be financial services.
As Mark Carney said, London is "effectively, the investment banker for Europe" and the City is the financial capital of the European Union.
Nearly 80% of foreign exchange trading and 30% of all bank lending in the EU flows through the UK.
How much that will change after Britain leaves the European Union is a matter of increasingly tense debate.
In the UK, very senior figures within the financial services sector argue that it is "nonsensical" to argue that after Brexit, large amounts of euro-denominated trading should move on to the continent.
They point out that significant amounts of dollar-trading are executed through London - and neither the EU nor the UK has a single-market agreement with the US.
Many on the continent of Europe see it differently, saying that financial oversight will only be possible if euro-trading valued in trillions of pounds a year is put under the direct jurisdiction of European Union-based regulators.
The biggest sector seen at risk is euro-denominated clearing, the billions of pounds worth of derivatives products traded every day to insure companies, for example, against interest rate changes, currency fluctuations and inflation risk.
Michel Sapin, the French finance minister, told the BBC that it was a question of control.
"I believe that there is an issue of sovereignty and security of European monetary markets and therefore the majority of the clearing houses cannot remain in London," he told me.
"There will be movement, there will be a displacement and actually many of the financial institutions are already preparing themselves towards that."
Many believe that if the trading moves, jobs will move as well.
"I don't see how it could be a good thing for the City," Mr Sapin said.
"The City will remain a large financial centre, will remain important for Europe as well as for the rest of the world.
"But the security of the monetary system is something that's of vital importance for any given country or any given groupings of countries - such as the case of the eurozone countries."
Hundreds of billions of pounds of trades will be at stake.
At the moment, the two sides - the UK and the EU - appear a long way apart.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39716951
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Serena Williams: World number one revealed pregnancy news by accident - BBC Sport
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2017-04-26
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Serena Williams says she revealed her pregnancy on social media by accident, after mistakenly uploading a photograph on Snapchat.
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Last updated on .From the section Tennis
Serena Williams says she revealed her pregnancy by accident, after mistakenly uploading a photograph on Snapchat.
The 23-time Grand Slam winner posted a picture on the social media app, posing in a mirror with the message: "20 weeks", before deleting it, with her publicist later confirming the news.
Williams, 35, said she took photographs every week to track the pregnancy.
"I was just saving them [for myself]" she said. "I've been so good about it, but this was the one time it slipped."
• None How can you win a Grand Slam when you're pregnant?
The world number one, who is due to give birth in the autumn, said she discovered she was pregnant just two days before the Australian Open in January.
The American went on to beat sister Venus in the final and win her an Open-era record 23rd Grand Slam singles title.
"It wasn't very easy," she said. "You hear all these stories about people when they're pregnant - they get sick, they get really tired, really stressed out.
"I had to really take all that energy and put it in a paper bag, so to say, and throw it away.
"Pregnant or not, no-one knew and I was supposed to win that tournament. Every time I play, I'm expected to win. If I don't win, it's actually much bigger news."
Williams, who is taking maternity leave for the rest of the 2017 season, said there was no change to her plan to return to the tour as a mother next year.
"I definitely plan on coming back. I'm not done yet," said Williams, who credited 36-year-old sister Venus for inspiration.
"If she's still playing, I know I can play. This [motherhood] is just a new part of my life. My baby's going to be in the stands and hopefully cheering for me."
On Tuesday, Williams called Ilie Nastase's comments about her unborn child "racist".
Nastase, a former world number one and two-time Grand Slam winner, was heard speculating whether Williams' child would be "chocolate with milk?" at a news conference before Romania's Fed Cup tie with Great Britain last week.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/tennis/39716319
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Joey Barton: 18-month ban adds more controversy to complex career - BBC Sport
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2017-04-26
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A player as controversial and contradictory as Joey Barton was never going to leave the game quietly - Phil McNulty reflects on a career now seemingly at an end.
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Joey Barton was never destined to leave football by going quietly into the sunset - so it should come as no surprise that one of the game's most complex, contradictory and divisive personalities has effectively been forced into retirement by an 18-month Football Association suspension for betting offences.
The 34-year-old has travelled a troubled and tempestuous road since emerging as a talented youngster at Manchester City, earning one England cap and a career full of headlines while also playing for Newcastle United, Queen's Park Rangers, Marseille, Rangers and Burnley.
The headline on Barton's personal website reads: "Footballer. Question Time Guest. Philosophy Student. Future Coach. Fluent French Speaker. What Has Become Of Me?"
Many will wonder what will be become of Barton after his ban, £30,000 fine and warning about his future conduct after accepting he placed 1,260 bets on matches between 26 March 2006 and 13 May 2016.
What is certain is that it is highly unlikely football has heard the last of an outspoken controversialist who mixes intelligence with a self-destructive streak that has too often disguised a player of genuine talent.
Barton comes from the same Huyton area of Merseyside that produced former Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard - a tough, uncompromising part of the world that shapes characters.
He survived rejection by his beloved Everton to emerge at Manchester City, where his ability after making his debut against Bolton Wanderers on 5 April 2003 made him stand out.
Barton's constant courting of controversy, however, often overshadowed what he offered the team. It was a strand that has run through his career.
He picked up his first red card in an FA Cup fourth-round tie at Tottenham in 2004 and later demonstrated his rebellious streak by storming away from the stadium after being dropped by then City manager Kevin Keegan for a game against Southampton.
The more serious problems came off the field when he was fined six weeks' wages, with two weeks suspended, for stubbing a cigar out in the eye of young team-mate Jamie Tandy at City's Christmas party. Tandy later sued Barton and won £65,000 in damages.
Barton was also fined eight weeks' wages after being found guilty of gross misconduct following a confrontation with a teenage Everton fan at the team hotel in Bangkok on a pre-season tour in summer 2005.
In May 2007 he was suspended by City after a training ground altercation left team-mate Ousmane Dabo needing hospital treatment. He was charged with assault, receiving a four-month suspended jail sentence on 1 July 2008 as well as being ordered to perform 200 hours of community service and pay £3,000 in compensation to Dabo. He was also banned for 12 matches, six suspended, by the FA and fined £25,000.
Barton made his one England appearance while at City, a 12-minute appearance as a substitute against Spain in February 2007. He was linked with a recall in 2011 but then-manager Fabio Capello wrote him off, saying: "He is a good but dangerous player because you could end up 10 v 11."
It was the old, old story. The talent was obvious. The temperament too risky.
Barton joined Newcastle United in June 2007 for £5.8m but was arrested on 27 December 2007 after an incident in Liverpool city centre. He was charged with common assault and affray, and subsequently jailed for six months on 20 May 2008 after admitting the charges.
He served 77 days of his prison term and also continued to suffer on-field disciplinary problems, drawing heavy criticism from then-Newcastle manager Alan Shearer after being sent off for a late challenge on Liverpool's Xabi Alonso in May 2009 as the Magpies fought for their Premier League life.
Barton was suspended by the club and the misery was compounded by Newcastle's subsequent relegation.
He stayed with Newcastle but his career on Tyneside concluded amid acrimony in August 2011 after contract talks broke down and Barton aired his frustrations on social media, tweeting: "Somewhere in those high echelons of NUFC they have decided I am persona non grata."
Barton then joined QPR but an unfulfilling spell - which included a sending-off at former club City on the day the hosts won the Premier League so dramatically in 2012 - ended with a loan move to Marseille in France.
QPR were relegated in his absence, but even far afield Barton could not escape controversy, receiving a two-match suspended ban for likening Paris St-Germain defender Thiago Silva to an "overweight ladyboy" on Twitter.
Barton's first spell at Burnley was an unqualified success as they won promotion to the Premier League and he was included in the 2016 PFA Championship team of the year, but a short stint in Scotland at Rangers turned into a nightmare.
He was suspended for three weeks following a training-ground row with team-mate Andy Halliday after a 5-1 loss at Celtic and his contract was terminated in November.
Now, after his latest collision with authority, it is hard to see him back on the field again.
Barton's reputation is as contrary as it is controversial - listen to interviews and an eloquent, thoughtful character can be detected amid the outspoken statements that have attracted such adverse publicity.
There were those at Manchester City, in particular, eager to highlight this other side of Barton. They spoke about an individual with very obvious personal issues who also had a softer side, as well as a bright and intelligent manner at odds with the public perception of an unsavoury, ill-disciplined individual.
Barton's reputation as a midfield enforcer on the field often obscured the natural gifts that saw him represent his country and command much interest when he came on the transfer market.
The man regarded as too dangerous to play for England reported from Rio during the 2014 World Cup, penning an article for his website on 'Social Media, Protest, And The Pacification Of The Favelas'.
Even to those of us who do not know him personally, it is clear there is much more to Barton than meets the public eye.
He was invited to appear on the BBC's flagship political programme Question Time in May 2014, although he admitted first-night nerves led to him being accused of sexism when he likened choosing a political party to making a choice "between four really ugly girls".
It was a sign of his status as someone with something to say that he was asked to be a panellist and an indication that Barton was always keen to operate on a broader front than simply football.
Barton was a guest of the Oxford Union in March 2014, where he was invited to debate philosophy, football and social media at the university. His appearance was later described as "inspirational" by students.
And he can be a character who, for all the lurid publicity, draws loyalty and affection - as demonstrated by Burnley manager Sean Dyche's willingness to take him back into the fold at Turf Moor.
Dyche prides himself on a tight-knit, trouble free, well-disciplined dressing room, so it was testimony to his high regard for Barton that he welcomed him back this season despite the player leaving Turf Moor for that ill-fated spell at Rangers following promotion back into the Premier League.
Only last week Barton displayed his enthusiasm for engaging in community work on the club's behalf, spending time with patients at the local Pendleside Hospice.
Barton, for all the noise surrounding him, was seen as a leader and a mature, experienced voice at Burnley during their promotion season. It was a far cry from undergoing anger management in 2005 and also completing a programme of behavioural management at the Sporting Chance clinic, set up to help troubled sportsmen and women.
If Barton the man is a mass of contradictions, the same could be said of some of his opinions.
Barton was embarrassed earlier this season when he dived theatrically after a clash with Matt Rhead at Turf Moor as Burnley slumped out of the FA Cup to non-league Lincoln City.
He soon found himself reminded of his own former stance on the subject via a tweet from February 2013 that had stated: "Players who roll around when nobody touches them should be subsequently banned. I hate cheats. Authorities should address it."
British boxer Carl Frampton tweeted that Barton should have been "embarrassed and ashamed".
Barton is also prepared to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, often at the risk of ridicule, as when he recently questioned the current praise of Chelsea's Professional Footballers' Association Player of the Year N'Golo Kante.
He said of a player on course for a second successive title with Chelsea after Leicester's triumph last season, and enjoying successes Barton could only dream about: "At the moment, in England, people only swear by N'Golo Kante. It's the fashion.
"For pundits he's the best midfield player in the world. Oh, he's very good but I played against him three weeks ago and that's not the case. He's a fantastic destroyer in a phenomenal team but not a creator."
So what has become of Joey Barton?
Barton has divided opinion throughout his career - and he was at it again in what was effectively his retirement statement when he said: "If the FA is serious about tackling gambling, I would urge it to reconsider its own dependence on the gambling industry."
He was referring to the links between betting chain Ladbrokes and the FA Cup.
It was a view that, yet again, polarised feelings. Was Barton making a valid point or simply trying to absolve himself from blame for breaking clear FA rules?
If this is the end of Barton's career, it is one that will be remembered with distaste by many and yet he creates interest to such an extent that he has 3.25 million followers on Twitter. He has achieved notoriety, but also plenty of interest, with his opinions on sport, politics and society and the occasional dabble in homespun philosophy.
He is prepared to lay bare his own shortcomings with gambling in his most recent statement and yet is regarded by his many detractors as someone simply excusing himself for more wrongdoing.
For all his faults - and his timeline of trouble hints at many - Barton is an intelligent, but clearly flawed man.
Will there yet be more chapters in Barton's contrary, controversial, eventful story?
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39724535
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Kelly Sotherton: British athlete feels third Olympic medal gives career 'more meaning' - BBC Sport
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2017-04-26
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Kelly Sotherton feels her career has "more meaning" after she is upgraded to a three-time Olympic medallist following retrospective drug tests.
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Last updated on .From the section Athletics
Kelly Sotherton feels her career has "more meaning" after she was upgraded to a three-time Olympic medallist following retrospective drug tests.
Sotherton, who won heptathlon bronze in 2004, has been given third for the same event in Beijing 2008 after Tatyana Chernova tested positive for a steroid.
In November, the Briton was moved up to bronze in the 2008 4x400m relay after Belarus and Russia's disqualifications.
"Until now I felt my career could have been better," she told BBC Sport.
"I left Beijing in tears because I thought I had failed. But I am a lot happier now because I feel my career has more meaning to it and I am worthy.
"I would swap all three medals for a gold, obviously, but to win three Olympic medals, regardless of what colour they are, is an achievement and I feel very happy about that."
'It isn't just about me'
Sotherton, 40, retired five years ago after failing to recover from a back problem in time to qualify for the heptathlon at London 2012.
She initially finished fifth in the heptathlon in Beijing but climbed to third after the previously announced doping ban of Ukrainian Lyudmila Blonska was followed by that of Russia's Chernova.
After finding out she was to become a three-time Olympic medallist, Sotherton posted an emotional video on social media showing her reaction.
"I am happy but obviously at the same time disappointed to have missed nine years as a three-time Olympic medallist," she said. "You feel all of the emotions in a space of a minute.
"All of my friends and family saw my emotions so they have been emotional when they have messaged me.
"It isn't just about me, it is about the people who support me and were around me at the time. They are happy because they feel like they have won that bronze as well."
'Massive steps made but still more to do'
More than 100 athletes have had positive results in re-tests conducted by the IOC of samples taken during the London 2012 and Beijing 2008 Olympics.
Sotherton's compatriot, Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, belatedly won the 2011 World heptathlon title last year when Chernova was similarly stripped of gold for doping.
The 31-year-old, who retired last year and is due to receive her gold medal from Daegu in a special ceremony at the World Championships in London in August, said: "We have made massive steps to becoming a cleaner sport in the past year but there's a lot that needs to be done.
"It's not something that's going to happen in a short amount of time.
"Hopefully we have a fantastic World Championships and we don't have this case of three, four or five years down the line where people are having medals stripped off them.
"I hope as we continue with our sport over the next few years it just gets better and better."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/39713814
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Bolivar goalkeeper scores spectacular goal from own area - BBC Sport
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2017-04-26
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Bolivar goalkeeper Matias Dituro scores a spectacular goal from inside his own area against San Jose de Oruro in the Bolivian top flight.
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Bolivar goalkeeper Matias Dituro scores a spectacular goal from inside his own area against San Jose de Oruro in the Bolivian top flight.
Available to UK users only.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39717794
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How to make everyone hate you on email - BBC News
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2017-04-26
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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When email goes wrong... how it can irritate and annoy everyone in the office.
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Business
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Stop before you copy your boss into that email.
It's not going to make you look good - it's going to make everyone else in the office distrust you.
That's the finding of research into the pernicious "cc effect", carried out by a professor of management studies at Cambridge University's Judge Business School.
David De Cremer has looked into the emotional undergrowth of office email traffic.
When people keep copying in a manager, it doesn't create "transparency", says Prof De Cremer, but feeds a "culture of fear".
But what about the other unspoken evils of office email clogging up your inbox?
If I keep emailing they'll know I'm still here at work
Where are you sending that email?
What makes you think I'm an attention seeker?
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39704997
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Meeting an organ trafficker who preys on Syrian refugees - BBC News
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2017-04-26
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Abu Jaafar's job is to find people desperate enough to give up parts of their body for money.
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Magazine
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There's a glint of pride in Abu Jaafar's eyes as he explains what he does for a living.
He used to work as a security guard in a pub but then he met a group which trades in organs. His job is to find people desperate enough to give up parts of their body for money, and the influx of refugees from Syria to Lebanon has created many opportunities.
"I do exploit people," he says, though he points out that many could easily have died at home in Syria, and that giving up an organ is nothing by comparison to the horrors they have already experienced.
"I'm exploiting them," he says, "and they're benefitting."
His base is a small coffee shop in one of the crowded suburbs of southern Beirut, a dilapidated building covered by a plastic tarpaulin.
This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. "I know what I'm doing is illegal, but I'm helping people, that's how I see it."
At the back, a room behind a rusty partition is stuffed with old furniture and has budgerigars singing in cages in each corner.
From here he has arranged the sale of organs from about 30 refugees in the last three years, he says.
"They usually ask for kidneys, yet I can still find and facilitate other organs", he says.
"They once asked for an eye, and I was able to acquire a client willing to sell his eye.
"I took a picture of the eye and sent it to the guys by Whatsapp for confirmation. I then delivered the client."
The narrow streets in which he operates are crammed with refugees. Around one in four people in Lebanon today have fled the conflict across the border in Syria.
Most aren't allowed to work under Lebanese law, and many families barely get by.
Among the most desperate are Palestinians who were already considered refugees in Syria, and so are not eligible to be re-registered by the UN refugee agency when they arrive in Lebanon. They live in overcrowded camps and receive very little aid.
Almost as vulnerable are those who arrived from Syria after May 2015, when the Lebanese government asked the UN to stop registering new refugees.
"Those who are not registered as refugees are struggling," Abu Jaafar says. "What can they do? They are desperate and they have no other means to survive but to sell their organs."
Some refugees beg on the streets - particularly children. Young boys shine shoes, dodge between cars in traffic jams to sell chewing gum or tissues through the windows, or end up exploited as child labour. Others turn to prostitution.
But selling an organ is one way to make money quickly.
Once Abu Jaafar has found a willing candidate he drives them, blindfolded, to a hidden location on a designated day.
Sometimes the doctors operate in rented houses, transformed into temporary clinics, where the donors undergo basic blood tests before surgery.
"Once the operation is done I bring them back," he says.
"I keep looking after them for almost a week until they remove the stitches. The moment they lose the stitches we don't care what happens to them any longer.
"I don't really care if the client dies, I got what I wanted. It's not my problem what happens next as long as the client got paid."
His most recent client was a 17-year-old boy who left Syria after his father and brothers were killed there.
He's been in Lebanon for three years with no work and mounting debt, struggling to support his mother and five sisters.
So, through Abu Jaafar, he agreed to sell his right kidney for $8,000 (£6,250).
Two days later, clearly in pain despite taking tablets, he was alternately lying down and sitting up on a tattered sofa, trying to get comfortable.
His face was covered in a sheen of sweat and blood had seeped through his bandages.
Abu Jaafar won't reveal how much he made from the deal. He says he doesn't know what happens to the organs after they have been removed, but he thinks they're exported.
Across the Middle East there's a shortage of organs for transplant, because of cultural and religious objections to organ donation. Most families prefer immediate burial.
But Abu Jaafar claims there are at least seven other brokers like him operating across Lebanon.
"Business is booming," he says. "It's growing and not decreasing. It definitely boomed after the Syrian migration to Lebanon."
He knows what he does is against the law but doesn't fear the authorities. In fact he is brazen about it. His phone number is spray-painted on the walls near his home.
In his neighbourhood, he is both respected and feared. As he walks around people stop to joke and argue with him.
He has a handgun tucked under his leg as we talk.
"I know that what I am doing is illegal but I am helping people", he says.
"That's how I perceive it. The client is using the money to seek a better life for himself and his family.
"He's able to buy a car and work as a taxi driver or even travel to another country.
"I am helping those people and I don't care about the law."
In fact, he says, it's the law that lets many refugees down by restricting access to work and aid.
"I am not forcing anyone to undertake the operation," he says. "I am only facilitating based on someone's request."
He lights a cigarette and raises an eyebrow.
"How much for your eye?" he asks.
Abu Jaafar is not his real name - he would only agree to talk to the BBC on condition of anonymity.
Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-39272511
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Would visiting Parliament inspire you to vote? - BBC News
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2017-04-26
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Two women who don't like politics paid a visit to Parliament, but did it convince them to vote?
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UK Politics
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This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Can you convince people to vote in one day?
With a general election weeks away, figures suggest voter apathy remains unchanged. Two women who don't like politics paid a visit to Parliament, but did it convince them to vote?
"I feel like politicians make decisions for people they don't know anything about," says LaTifah Atkinson, a 26-year-old woman from north London.
She is a university graduate who runs her own business. She has never voted.
"I currently don't vote because I don't understand what I'm voting for," she says.
Fellow businesswoman, Chiara Stone, a 36-year-old mother of two, is also disaffected by politics.
She says MPs are not worth what they earn.
"I don't think we feel Parliament does represent us because we don't understand how it works," she says.
She is not alone. A third of people eligible to vote didn't cast a vote in the last general election.
According to new parliamentary research, two-thirds of people aged 18 to 34 feel they know little or nothing about Parliament.
Beyond the act of voting, the British public are "no more politically engaged this year than last" - despite last year's EU referendum - it suggests.
The BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme took LaTifah and Chiara to Parliament for a day. It turned out to be the day Theresa May sought to call a general election.
Iain Duncan Smith said the Commons can be a "bear pit"
First stop was the House of Commons, for a tour with veteran Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith and a seat to watch that day's debate.
Both women said the infighting, the hustle and bustle, and even the way MPs addressed each other left them confused and alienated.
"You don't really have much faith in them when they are in the House of Commons having a debate and they look bored," she added.
"How am I supposed to be interested if you look obviously bored and you're scrolling through your Twitter feed in the debate?"
"I think it is in Parliament's interests to get more people voting," Chiara added.
"And I think if you want to get more people voting then you need to make it accessible for them in this modern age.
"I think the problem is that so much of it is steeped in so much tradition and history, which is quite British, but then you also have to move with the times."
After that, the pair were able to sit down with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
"Do you feel Parliament represents you?" he asked.
"I suppose no, we don't really think it represents us," Chiara said.
He told LaTifah: "You've had a housing issue, that's a political decision. It's a political decision to build council housing, or not. It's a political decision to regulate rents, or not.
Mr Corbyn has been an MP for 34 years. But for new MPs, joining the Commons can be just as overwhelming as visiting on a day trip.
The SNP's Hannah Bardell - one of Westminster's newest MPs who joined the Commons in 2015 - says even new MPs can be left in a daze by the workings of Parliament.
"It was quite intimidating and quite emotional. I spent a lot of time getting lost," she says of her first few days.
"This place is designed to intimidate you and I think a lot of us just thought, 'No, we're not going to be intimidated, we're here to do a job and do our best.'"
The SNP's Hannah Bardell is one of Parliament's newest MPs
The final stop was a trip to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee to hear business leaders give evidence about the impact of Brexit.
"We've had sessions talking about the film industry, to people in television and today we were talking to people in the fashion industry," Tory MP Damian Collins, who chairs the committee, says.
"We can hold inquiries or hold hearings on any issue that is related to the work of that government department. What we try to do is look at the issues and then decide as a group what is the right thing to do."
"It was better than I thought it would be," LaTifah says, with Big Ben looming behind her.
"I do know who I would vote for and being here today, I can say that I would confidently vote for the first time in 26 years."
"It was massively different to how I thought it would be. I've come away now feeling that I have a good grasp of how politics works. But it is complex," Chiara added.
But she says she is still baffled by the behaviour of MPs in the Commons.
"It is just really hard to follow, all the language and the traditions they use, it didn't really make much sense."
They both said they have a great appreciation of what the role of an MP entails.
"But I also feel that it is a two-way street," LaTifah says.
"It is not just about the politicians and what happens in Parliament, it is about the public and the people doing their part as well.
"If we don't challenge MPs, they can't make changes on our behalf."
Watch the Victoria Derbyshire programme on weekdays between 09:00 and 11:00 on BBC Two and the BBC News channel.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39706755
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Moussa Dembele: Celtic striker to miss Scottish Cup final through injury - BBC Sport
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2017-04-26
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Celtic striker Moussa Dembele will miss the Scottish Cup final after picking up a hamstring injury at the weekend.
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Last updated on .From the section Football
Celtic striker Moussa Dembele will miss the Scottish Cup final against Aberdeen on 27 May through injury.
The 20-year-old suffered a hamstring problem in the first half of Sunday's semi-final win over Rangers.
The France U21 international is expected to be sidelined for up to six weeks during his recovery.
Dembele, replaced by Leigh Griffiths after 34 minutes at Hampden, has scored 32 goals in 49 appearances in his debut campaign since joining from Fulham.
Griffiths, who scored 40 last season but has been a regular on the substitutes' bench this season, has 14 goals in 36 appearances.
Celtic are seeking a domestic treble, having retained the Scottish Premiership title and beaten Aberdeen, who are second top in the league, in the League Cup final.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39714090
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Chelsea: Tottenham will feel the pressure - Eden Hazard & Gary Cahill - BBC Sport
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2017-04-26
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Chelsea's Eden Hazard and Gary Cahill say Tottenham will feel the pressure after the Blues beat Southampton to edge closer to the title.
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Last updated on .From the section Football
Tottenham will be feeling the heat after Chelsea beat Southampton 4-2 to edge closer to the Premier League title, say Blues goalscorers Eden Hazard and Gary Cahill.
The win put Antonio Conte's team seven points ahead of second-placed Spurs, who are at Crystal Palace on Wednesday.
"It's always good to play before and put pressure on them," said Hazard.
Cahill called the win a "massive step", adding: "It's the first time for a long time we've played before Tottenham."
On Tuesday, Chelsea took a fifth-minute lead when Belgium winger Hazard beat keeper Fraser Forster with a low strike, before Oriol Romeu equalised for the Saints from close range.
England centre-back Cahill, who missed Chelsea's 4-2 win over Spurs in Sunday's FA Cup semi-final, headed his side back in front just before half-time.
Spain striker Diego Costa put the result beyond doubt with two goals after the break - taking his Chelsea career league tally to 51 - before former Blues defender Ryan Bertrand scored Southampton's second in stoppage time.
Conte, whose side had been beaten twice in their past four league games, said: "We passed a big step - a big psychological step - after the defeat against Manchester United.
"We lost three points, then we had to prepare a semi-final against Tottenham, then another tough game here. Mentally we have had a really important test.
"Our answer was very good. We must be pleased."
Conte turned and applauded all four sides of Stamford Bridge as the clock ticked down on a vital night in the Premier League title race.
The pressure valve had been released after the moments of uncertainty in the past 10 days as Conte and Chelsea's players re-asserted their position at the top of the table with a comfortable win.
Chelsea's superiority - and nerve - had been questioned after a timid loss at Manchester United came so soon after a shock home defeat by Crystal Palace - but normal service was eventually restored here and they have that important seven-point advantage once more.
The mood around Stamford Bridge was not exactly triumphant, but the feelgood factor is back after the FA Cup semi-final win over Spurs and what was ultimately a comfortable dispatch of Southampton.
Chelsea have responded to being backed into a corner, not just by Jose Mourinho's Manchester United, but also by an excellent Spurs side for the first hour of that pulsating Wembley semi-final.
And much of the credit must go to Conte, who was also questioned after he was tactically outmanoeuvred by Mourinho when the Portuguese's decision to man mark Eden Hazard with Ander Herrera was a match-winning masterstroke at Old Trafford.
He rested Hazard and Diego Costa from his starting line-up at Wembley, used them when required to win that game and then started them here - with both pivotal to a win that pushes Chelsea closer to the title.
Conte has shown a sure touch from the moment he reverted to his true tactical instincts and his favoured three-man defensive system following a home loss to Liverpool and a chastening 3-0 defeat at Arsenal in September.
So it should come as no surprise that he has responded so well, and so calmly, to a couple of unexpected setbacks to restore balance at Chelsea and ease any anxiety among their supporters.
Conte can now sit back and relax on Wednesday night as Spurs take their turn in the spotlight by tackling a currently very formidable Crystal Palace side in the hostile environment of Selhurst Park.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39714476
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Joshua v Klitschko: Why Mihai Nistor won't cash in on beating a champion - BBC News
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2017-04-26
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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Mihai Nistor was the last fighter to stop Anthony Joshua - but while Joshua earns millions, Nistor remains an amateur on a modest income. Why?
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Magazine
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Mihai Nistor was the last - and only - fighter to stop world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua. But while Joshua now earns millions, Nistor survives in his Bucharest apartment, still an amateur on a modest income. Why has he spurned boxing's riches?
He sits alone on a park bench, surrounded by an endless sprawl of discoloured communist-era apartment blocks.
As the midday commuter traffic bustles around him in this crowded suburb of the Romanian capital, Mihai Nistor is barely recognised by passers-by.
It's just six years since Nistor stopped Anthony Joshua with a flurry of hard punches to the head in the third round of their fight at the European Amateur Championships in 2011 in Turkey, but since then their careers have taken starkly different paths.
This weekend Joshua will step into the ring at London's Wembley Stadium to defend his IBF world heavyweight title in a unification fight against Wladimir Klitschko.
It will be one of the biggest fights in British boxing's history, with 90,000 tickets expected to be sold, and both boxers will earn millions of pounds for a maximum 36 minutes of ring time.
Nistor, 26, will watch the fight from his couch in the modest Bucharest apartment he shares with his younger rugby player brother. He still boxes as an amateur and his salary of £1,200 ($1,500) per month is funded by the Romanian army.
But Nistor, from one of Europe's poorest and most corrupt countries, insists he doesn't dwell on the gulf between his income and Joshua's.
"I don't do this sport for money," he says. "I do it for pleasure, because you don't win if you are motivated by money," he adds.
Listen to Radio 5 live commentary from 21:00 BST and follow text updates on the BBC Sport website as Anthony Joshua takes on Wladimir Klitschko for the IBF and WBA heavyweight titles on Saturday 29 April
What also gives him pleasure are his memories of beating Joshua. "It was a special day," he recalls.
"My trainer said: 'Don't worry, Joshua is big but he'll go down quickly if you punch him correctly.' I didn't know who he was or what he was going to become… He was a good boxer, he was moving all the time and he had a strong punch."
"I beat him in 2011 and in 2012 he was an Olympic champion," Nistor adds, grinning.
Despite Nistor's technical knockout win in Turkey, where he won a bronze medal, he failed to qualify for the London 2012 Olympics - "poor judges" were to blame, he says. His old foe Joshua, on the other hand, went on to qualify and won the biggest prize in their sport - an Olympic gold.
Nistor during his defeat to Iashaish of Jordan in the 2016 Olympics
An Olympic boxing medal can lead amateurs to lucrative professional contracts. Indeed, not long after his spectacular London Olympics win, Joshua ditched his amateur vest and five years later, the 27-year-old is now a global superstar and a multi-millionaire.
However, Nistor continues fighting amongst the amateurs, surviving on his modest income. Until recently, only amateurs could box at the Olympics and he carries an undying dream of winning a gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics — despite his failed attempt to bring home a medal from Rio last year.
"I don't know what the judges were looking at," Nistor says, reflecting on his disappointing loss in Rio, where he was the only boxer to represent Romania.
"I lost the first round because of the emotion, but the second and third I won clearly," he adds.
Spending time with Nistor, he gives the impression of a boxer unsure of how to advance.
He keeps training, thinking about the big time, but he can't move past a marker, the Olympics, that many fighters - win or lose - would be only too glad to use as a stepping stone to launch a profitable professional career.
Nistor started boxing at 16 years old, and many considered it too late for him to achieve anything meaningful in the sport. However, just three months after first lacing up his gloves, he won a national heavyweight amateur title.
"I am not too talented," Nistor admits. "But I love combat and I like to work… Hard work, hard work, hard work." He repeats it like a mantra he's grown only too familiar with during his gruelling six-day-a-week training regime.
"If you don't have much talent but you work really hard, hard work will beat talent - every time," he adds.
Even now, Nistor's boxing style could be a tricky one for any current professional heavyweight boxer. Although Nistor is short for his division at just 6ft tall, he has an aggressive, relentless style and power in both hands.
Some parts of the Romanian media have nicknamed Nistor the "Tyson of Romania". With his thick-set frame and looping heavy punches - like the ones that stopped Joshua six years ago - the likeness is fitting.
"I am like Tyson because I have the power and movement," says Nistor, strolling along a congested Bucharest street, as car horns endlessly sound and locals scramble to get their lunch, paying him no attention.
Nistor is well aware that by delaying his move from the amateur to the professional code he risks missing out on some prime fighting years, but his desire to strike Olympic gold keeps on persisting.
It doesn't help, either, that he wants to remain in his home country. Nistor would probably have to move abroad to a country with a more developed boxing scene than Romania if he were ever to reach his full potential as a professional fighter.
Even now, Nistor has to regularly venture abroad to get quality sparring partners.
"It would be to America as that's where people make it in boxing, and people there love the boxers," Nistor says, matter-of-factly.
Beyond his vague indifference to follow in the footsteps of Joshua, Nistor has another strong reason to delay turning professional.
"Romania has only ever had one Olympic gold-medal boxer - Nicolae Linca at the Melbourne 1956 Olympic Games," Nistor says.
"He's my hero. I'm delaying turning professional because I want to win a gold medal in Tokyo," Nistor adds.
However, unlike Nistor, Linca never had the chance to cash in financially on his boxing abilities, because he fought during a period when Romania was a communist dictatorship.
After boxing, Linca's life was blighted by Parkinson's Disease and he died in poverty in 2006.
Nistor says that the disparity in wealth and status between him and Joshua is of little concern to him, and that he's happy with his close-knit family life, his long-term girlfriend and to have "beaten a man who won an Olympic gold medal".
Even still, Nistor believes that he could repeat his win against Joshua if the two were to fight again. "I see many imperfections in Joshua… He leaves himself too visible [to take punches]," says Nistor.
"I would study him for a month and create tactics with my coach," he adds.
The worry for Nistor, as he gets ready to watch his old rival fighting under the bright lights of worldwide stardom, is that he might never get his own shot at the big league.
Photos by Stephen McGrath except where otherwise stated
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World Championship 2017: Ronnie O'Sullivan knocked out by Ding Junhui - BBC Sport
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2017-04-26
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Five-time champion Ronnie O'Sullivan is knocked out of the World Championship, beaten 13-10 by Ding Junhui in the quarter-finals.
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Five-time champion Ronnie O'Sullivan has been knocked out of the World Championship, losing 13-10 to China's Ding Junhui in the quarter-finals.
O'Sullivan's tournament had been overshadowed by his claims that he had been bullied by snooker bosses.
But he seemed unaffected by the controversy as he scored a tournament-high break of 146 to win three from four frames and get back to 11-9, having trailed 10-6.
The pair then shared the next two frames and Ding held his nerve, scoring a classy 117 to earn a semi-final place against Mark Selby.
Selby was in sensational form to thrash Marco Fu 13-3.
The reigning champion scored 139 and 143 but it was no surprise the latter mark was beaten by O'Sullivan in a match that featured five centuries and 18 breaks of more than 50. Only one of the 23 frames did not include a half-century.
O'Sullivan, 41, who hugged his equally emotional opponent at the end, said: "It was a fantastic match and I am really pleased to be involved. I really enjoyed it. I would rather lose a good match than win an awful one.
"Ding is a special lad, a beautiful guy. He is all good; he doesn't have a bad bone in his body.
"He wants to win this title so bad. He is in a great place and I wish him all the best."
In the same way boxers collapse into each other's arms at the end and say, 'you are a great player'. That moment was very similar, regardless of whether it was a physical contest or not, it was the same mentality.
For all of the times when Ronnie O'Sullivan throws teddies out of the pram, players appreciate other great players. From Ding Junhui's perspective, getting to the final last year was a massive stepping stone. This is another part of the jigsaw puzzle and unlocks the World Championship a little further for him.
Ding has always been clinical in among the balls and he looks very strong in that department, but beating Liang Wenbo from behind, showing heart and determination, and now beating O'Sullivan, he has answered a lot of questions at the Crucible that he has not answered before.
It is a bit like a video game for Ding, he has beaten the boss but now has to go to the next level to face a bigger boss - Mark Selby.
Facing the world champion will be a bigger hurdle mentally and we cannot say how it will pan out. Selby has looked astonishing so far, if Ding beats him, then he has to play someone great in the final. He is only halfway through in sessions played.
Ding, last season's runner-up, is looking to become the first Asian player to lift the world title, and said he "played great".
"I kept my form from the first frame to the last frame and I put him under pressure," Ding said.
"I do not have a good record against him but every time I had a chance I did well. He was not in his best form but he is still good enough.
"Ronnie said I looked a different player and I looked stronger. I thank him. To beat him you have to work hard. I am more confident."
A spirited O'Sullivan comeback before the mid-session break kept alive hopes of him claiming a sixth World Championship title.
The Englishman had won a crucial final frame on Tuesday with a blistering century inside four minutes and, after taking scrappy opener, a rapid break of 97 made it three in a row to cut the gap to 10-8.
But Ding, who has often been accused of crumbling under pressure, responded with a fine 69.
O'Sullivan was in full flow, turning down the chance of a maximum by going for a pink rather than a slightly trickier black during a magnificent 146.
Only Mark Allen and Graeme Dott have ever managed a 146 at the Crucible but neither did so in the seven minutes and 32 seconds it took O'Sullivan to clear up and reduce the gap to two frames.
But Ding, 30, kept his opponent at bay in the closing stages with breaks of 87, 63 and 117 to win two of the final three frames and get over the line.
Barry Hawkins beat Stephen Maguire 13-9 to reach the last four, having made breaks of 126, 98 and 86 in the match. The 2013 finalist faces four-time champion John Higgins next.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/snooker/39723593
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Facebook baby killing: Grief and questions after shocking murder - BBC News
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2017-04-26
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https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews
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It comes after a Thai man broadcast the murder of his 11-month daughter on Facebook Live.
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Asia
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Jiranuch Trirat next to a picture of her daughter
An incident as shocking as a man murdering his 11-month-old daughter live on Facebook before killing himself was bound to provoke heated debate.
The 21-year-old man broadcast himself hanging his daughter from a half-finished building on the island of Phuket in Thailand, reportedly after ending a turbulent and sometimes violent relationship with his wife.
The man's Facebook page has received dozens of comments from Thai people outraged by the death of the little girl. Some men who have also had failed relationships have posted how they got through their problems and rebuilt bonds with their children.
Thais are accustomed to seeing violent scenes on their television news bulletins, which would be deemed unacceptable in many Western countries.
Previous shocking incidents, like appalling car accidents caused by negligent driving, have led to brief national debates, but have quickly dropped from public consciousness. But there have been some reflective responses to this incident, with a number of people urging people not to share the video.
Ms Trirat and her husband had a sometimes violent relationship, reports said
The long period of time the video remained viewable on Facebook - 24 hours - is one area the social media giant may be able to address.
Thai police were aware of the video almost immediately after the crime took place. It is not clear yet when the Thai authorities alerted Facebook.
The police now say that in future they will discuss inappropriate online content with social media companies like Facebook, YouTube or Instagram, and how to take it down quickly. But the challenge of stopping offensive and disturbing content on a medium, which is used by so many people, including two-thirds of the Thai population, is a difficult one.
The Thai military government does operate a range of censorship regimes, and blocks many thousands of websites, especially those carrying content deemed critical of the monarchy.
On the day this awful incident occurred, the Ministry of Digital Information and Economy demanded that local internet service providers (ISPs) do even more to block anti-monarchy content, and the government is believed to be trying to implement a single digital gateway which will allow it to wall Thailand off from such content.
But until now it has been wary of tampering with Facebook. A clumsy attempt to block Facebook shortly after the military had seized power in 2014 provoked a huge public outcry, and the social media giant remained unavailable for only 30 minutes.
Facebook is hugely popular with Thai people and businesses
Aside from the general popularity of Facebook for social communication, it is also used by large numbers of Thai businesses to promote their products and services.
Until now there has been little public debate over the negative sides of social media, for example hate speech, trolling and fake news, which have aggravated Thailand's bitter political polarisation. There is no law against hate speech.
So Thai society is less prepared to address issues like those thrown up by this murder-suicide.
A more fruitful area for discussion coming out of this incident might instead be the issue of domestic violence in Thailand, and the high level of suicides related to it.
The Thai Department of Mental Health reports that there are around 350 suicides a month here, a figure it says it is working to reduce.
Four times as many men than women are victims of suicide, and the highest number of those male suicides are related to relationship problems, and reactions to being criticised or insulted, or loss of face.
The department says alcohol consumption also plays a big role in encouraging these men to kill themselves, and that it is very common for them to assault others, usually family members, before they do.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39715659
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Maria Sharapova: Russian to learn French Open fate on 16 May - BBC Sport
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2017-04-26
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Former world number one Maria Sharapova will find out on 16 May if she has been given a wildcard for the French Open.
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Last updated on .From the section Tennis
Former world number one Maria Sharapova will find out on 16 May if she has been given a wildcard for the French Open.
The 30-year-old Russian's 15-month ban for using meldonium ends on Wednesday when she plays in the first round of the Stuttgart Open as a wildcard entry.
French federation president Bernard Giudicelli said he would call Sharapova before the decision is made public on Facebook at 18:00 BST.
Sharapova is a two-time winner at Roland Garros, which starts on 28 May.
Giudicelli, who said he will discuss Sharapova's wildcard with French Open tournament director Guy Forget on 15 May, added: "The tournament is bigger than the players."
The five-time Grand Slam champion practised on Wednesday morning for the first time since her ban, before her match against Italy's Roberta Vinci.
Vinci has questioned the decision to give the Russian wildcards, but it has been defended by WTA chief Steve Simon, who said it is in keeping with how former dopers are treated in other sports.
In addition to Stuttgart, Sharapova has been granted wildcards by the organisers of the events in Madrid and Rome.
She does not have a world ranking after her points expired during her suspension and would need to reach the final in Stuttgart to be eligible for French Open qualifying.
The Daily Telegraph reports that Sharapova is likely to be given a wildcard into qualifying at Roland Garros rather than the tournament's main draw.
Meanwhile, the prize money for the French Open has been increased by 12% to 36 millions euros (£30.5m).
The winners will win 2.1 million euros each, a 100,000-euro increase from 2016, with first-round losers earning 35,000 euros.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/tennis/39717053
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Chris Ofili is weaving magic - BBC News
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2017-04-26
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How the Turner Prize-winning artist has moved on from elephant dung to lyrical tapestry.
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Entertainment & Arts
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Chris Ofili's tapestry took three years to create
I know some folk think Chris Ofili has gone off the boil since his Turner Prize-winning heyday, when he was considered one of Charles Saatchi's gang of Young British Artists.
Back then, Ofili incorporated elephant dung and cut-outs from porn mags in his paintings, which upset Mayor Giuliani considerably (and the current President who called Ofili's painting, Holy Virgin Mary, "absolutely gross") when Saatchi took his Sensation show to NYC in 1999.
Nowadays, the Mancunian artist lives and works in Trinidad and produces lyrical paintings full of myth and mysticism, infused with the spirits of Henri Matisse and William Blake. El Greco-like elongations have taken the place of porn, the turquoise of the Caribbean Sea now as present as was once elephant dung.
I like his new work. I don't think he's lost form, just moved on. The core of what he does is the same, which is to mix pop culture and art history. From a technical point of view it seems to me that his sensitivity to colour has developed, and his line is more assured. The effect of moving from a modern metropolis to a rural island culture has clearly had a big impact on how he perceives and represents the world.
All of which can be seen in his latest work, a large-scale tapestry called The Caged Bird's Song (a riff on Maya Angelou's book, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings) currently hanging at the National Gallery in London, before taking up permanent residence at the Clothworkers' Company - the London Livery Company that commissioned it.
It is arranged as a triptych, with the two side panels featuring standing figures pulling back curtains to reveal a mythical world. The male figure on the right holds a cage in which a songbird is perched, while the woman on the left has a sprig of black berries clasped between her fingers drooping in anticipation of being eaten by the bird.
The central panel has two lovers sitting by a rock in front of the sea. The man plays his guitar, while the woman drinks a green potion funnelling down from a tree above her head. If she looked up she would spot a man with a bow tie (based on the footballer Mario Balotelli) hiding in the branches, pouring the elixir she is knocking back.
The tapestry was hand-woven by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, whose weavers have done a magnificent job in transposing Ofili's small watercolour painting into an enormous woollen wall-hanging. Had it been a single weaver working on the project and not four or five, it would have taken sixteen years to complete (it took just over three years).
The detail is remarkable, as is the weavers' ability to capture the fluidity of a watercolour painting in wool. For the viewer, the tapestry is a celebration of nature and love. But it is also a very real celebration of a craft skill that is sadly dying out in the UK.
According to Peter Langley of The Clothworkers' Company, there are only two professional hand-weaving tapestry studios left in the UK. It'd be great if this artwork were the catalyst for a weaving renaissance.
Chris Ofili - Weaving Magic runs at the National Gallery in London from 26 April to 28 August 2017.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39710402
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Chelsea 4-2 Southampton - BBC Sport
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2017-04-26
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Diego Costa scores twice as Premier League leaders Chelsea edge closer to the title with victory over Southampton.
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Last updated on .From the section Football
Chelsea restored their lead at the top of the Premier League to seven points with a convincing win over Southampton at Stamford Bridge.
Antonio Conte's side had seen their advantage cut by Tottenham after the Blues' loss at Manchester United - but this was an emphatic response to follow on from Saturday's FA Cup semi-final win against their London rivals.
Eden Hazard and Diego Costa were both back in the starting line-up after Wembley and were key figures, the Belgian putting Chelsea ahead with a low shot after five minutes.
Former Chelsea midfielder Oriol Romeu bundled in an equaliser for Saints before Gary Cahill headed the title pace-setters back in front right on half-time, a moment that effectively decided the destination of the points.
Costa confirmed Chelsea's supremacy with a header early in the second half before scoring his second with a low shot late on.
Ryan Bertrand, another former Chelsea man, was on target in the dying seconds - but the victory was secured for Conte's men and now Spurs must respond at in-form Crystal Palace on Wednesday (20:00 BST kick-off).
Conte gets Hazard and Costa calls spot on
Conte manoeuvred his resources to perfection in the victory against Spurs at Wembley - and did it again here as Hazard and Costa made decisive contributions to a vital Chelsea win.
Conte raised eyebrows when he left his two most dangerous attackers out of his starting line-up on Saturday but used them as game-changers to great effect, deploying them as substitutes after an hour and Hazard then scoring the goal that swung the match in favour of his side.
Hazard and Costa were back from the start against Southampton and illustrated why they have been such integral components of Chelsea's rise to the top of the table this season.
The pair combined in the fifth minute for Hazard to score and Spain striker Costa was simply too strong for Bertrand when he arrived on the end of Cesc Fabregas' cross to score the third goal early in the second half.
And they were at it again soon afterwards - a neat exchange with Pedro leading to Costa getting his second and Chelsea's fourth with a powerful low drive in the closing moments.
Conte has put the Blues right back on track after their loss at Manchester United with wins in the FA Cup semi-final and here at Stamford Bridge - and his shrewd use of two of his most vital assets has helped him achieve it with a superb piece of management.
Southampton - and of course Tottenham - would have been hoping anxiety and pressure might just have played a part in a shock result at Stamford Bridge.
And for a spell those factors came into play as the Saints recovered from Chelsea's perfect start to equalise through Romeu and then exert a measure of control.
However, the hosts kept their nerve to run out comfortable winners and avoid the sort of slip-up that would have played into the hands of Spurs.
Stamford Bridge ended the game in celebratory mood and the feeling that Chelsea's equilibrium had been restored after those recent slips at home to Crystal Palace and away to Manchester United.
Mauricio Pochettino's side will have felt the door had opened when Chelsea lost at Old Trafford and the gap at the top of the table was reduced to only four points. Suddenly the pressure was on Conte and his players.
The tables have now been turned and it will be Spurs and their manager who will be feeling the heat and the need to win when they travel to in-form Crystal Palace on Wednesday.
Spurs have reeled off seven straight league wins - their best sequence since 1967 - but all the self-belief built up during that run will be required to face Sam Allardyce's rejuvenated side, who have beaten Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool in recent weeks.
They will not only have to respond to the Blues' win that restored their seven-point lead, but also to the disappointment of losing the FA Cup semi-final to their London rivals at Wembley on Saturday.
These are defining moments in the Premier League season - with a huge weekend ahead as Chelsea travel to Everton and Spurs face Arsenal in the north London derby on Sunday.
• None Costa's first strike was his 50th in the Premier League in his 85th game - only seven strikers have reached the milestone faster.
• None Hazard has scored 15 league goals this season - his best return in a single campaign in the competition.
• None Since their return to the top-flight in 2012-13, Southampton have scored more away Premier League goals at Stamford Bridge than any other side (nine).
• None Fabregas' assist for Costa's goal was his 103rd in the Premier League - second only to Manchester United legend Ryan Giggs (162).
• None Cahill has scored 26 Premier League goals - excluding penalties - the second most of any defender in the competition (after team-mate John Terry with 40).
• None Saints conceded four goals in a Premier League away game for the first time since 5 April 2014, when they lost 4-1 at eventual champions Manchester City.
• None The Blues have now failed to keep a clean sheet in their past 11 Premier League games.
The Blues are at Goodison Park to face Everton on Sunday (14:05 BST) and the Saints will be at home to struggling Hull on Saturday (15:00 BST).
• None Goal! Chelsea 4, Southampton 2. Ryan Bertrand (Southampton) header from the centre of the box to the bottom left corner. Assisted by Cédric Soares with a cross.
• None Goal! Chelsea 4, Southampton 1. Diego Costa (Chelsea) right footed shot from the centre of the box to the bottom left corner. Assisted by Pedro.
• None Attempt blocked. Nemanja Matic (Chelsea) left footed shot from outside the box is blocked. Assisted by N'Golo Kanté.
• None Attempt missed. Pedro (Chelsea) right footed shot from outside the box is close, but misses to the left. Assisted by N'Golo Kanté.
• None Attempt missed. Diego Costa (Chelsea) header from the centre of the box misses to the left. Assisted by Eden Hazard with a cross following a corner.
• None Attempt saved. N'Golo Kanté (Chelsea) right footed shot from the right side of the box is saved in the centre of the goal. Assisted by Eden Hazard.
• None Attempt blocked. Steven Davis (Southampton) right footed shot from the centre of the box is blocked. Navigate to the next page Navigate to the last page
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39625846
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Reality Check: How much will Labour's NHS plans cost? - BBC News
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2017-04-26
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Reality Check looks at how much aspects of Labour's NHS proposals could cost.
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Health
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Labour has begun setting out its plan for the NHS in England if the party wins in June.
This includes a pay increase for staff, putting into law the mandatory minimum number of staff per patient and funding training for health professionals.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Labour's shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth said the money for these pledges would be raised by increasing corporation tax.
How much will need to be raised has not yet been confirmed.
Corporation tax - the tax on companies' profits - has been cut from 28% in 2010 to 19%, and is due to come down to 17% by 2020.
Labour used official figures to calculate that between 2016-17 and 2021-22, cuts to corporation tax would amount to £64bn less in the public purse.
We are talking about the NHS in England only since health is a devolved matter and the other nations' administrations generally set their own policies.
For example, although the recommendations of pay review bodies are UK-wide, nations get to choose whether to accept them.
It is unlikely that the precise figures behind Labour's policies will be available until the party's manifesto is published, next month.
Even then, we probably will not know exactly by how much pay will be increased and what level the minimum staffing will be set at, so it's difficult to say exactly how much this all going to cost.
However, we can estimate how much various elements of the pledge might cost.
Labour said it would increase pay to a "sustainable level" and lift the pay cap currently in force that means NHS staff pay has not increased by more than 1% a year for the past six years, although many staff also get incremental pay-rises to reflect progression within their roles.
We don't know exactly what a "sustainable increase" will be.
Mr Ashworth said the decision would be taken by an independent pay review body.
Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank, has estimated that every 1% pay rise would cost £500m a year.
Labour's own estimates put it at £350m, but this excludes doctors.
When the government cut funding for health students by replacing grants with loans, it calculated this would save the Treasury £800m, so we can reasonably say reversing this cut would cost the same amount.
Labour also set out plans to introduce mandatory minimum staffing levels.
Sir Robert Francis' report into the failings at the Mid-Staffordshire Foundation Trust published in February 2013 found low levels of staffing were linked to poor care and recommended minimum safe staffing levels should be drawn up.
The Public Accounts Committee, a cross-party group of MPs responsible for overseeing government expenditure, estimated last year that the NHS was short-staffed by about 50,000. Employing this number of extra people could cost about £2-3bn depending on how many of them were nurses, doctors or in other roles.
The NHS spends about £40bn a year on front-line staff.
Another 50,000 staff would be about a 6% increase to the total number of NHS staff caring for patients, amounting to an extra £2.4bn on the pay bill.
This is a very rough estimate.
Mr Ashworth also pointed out that hiring more staff and raising their pay would help reduce the NHS's dependency on agency workers who cost the health service more than salaried employees.
In 2015, agency nurses cost, on average, an estimated £39 per hour, compared with £27 per hour for NHS staff bank nurses.
However, this is not the only way Labour has promised to spend the extra money from raising corporation tax.
Since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the party, in 2015, Labour has pledged to raise corporation tax to fund:
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39720085
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