into thursday, the skies will night, into thursday, the skies will clear and it will be a cold night. ice may be a problem first thing in the morning so if you are travelling on thursday, bear that in mind. and across the country, you can see the temperatures are around freezing or below. on thursday we are between weather systems, won over scandinavia and more lining up in the atlantic. we are in this window of better weather, quiet zone. there is some rain forecast to reach the southern tip of cornwall by the time we get to i think at least midday on thursday. weather fronts will line up thursday. weather fronts will line up in the atlantic and low pressure moving in. an increasing jet stream as well. the run—up to the new year is looking more windy and turbulent. those temperatures as a result of the atlantic air pushing it will be rising as. this is bbc news, our latest headlines. a british woman accused of smuggling drugs into egypt has been sentenced to three years in jail.

laura plummer, who's 33 and from hull, was arrested in october with tablets of the painkiller tramadol. her family say they are planning to appeal the sentence. the universities minister, jojohnson, has given his clearest warning yet that academic institutions must protect free speech. he says universities must "open minds, not close them", and students should have the resilience to take part in frank discussions. the boxing day sales are under way with millions of shoppers hitting the high streets as they hunt for bargains. meanwhile, a bbc survey has suggested that online shopping and early black friday deals have made the post christmas sales less appealing. a police officer and a 61—year—old woman died in a crash on christmas day. the 46—year—old officer was responding to an incident when the marked bmw 3 series he was driving was in collision with a citroen c3 on the a57 in sheffield. now on bbc news, rebecca jones reveals the inside stories

of world—changing events from photographers in new york, london and paris. that's in through the lens — images of the eras that defined society. hello and welcome to our series through the lens, marking the 70th anniversary of magnum photos, with me, rebecca jones. i'm here at the southbank centre in london and i'll be introducing you to six of the agency's greatest photographers, who'll be telling us how they recorded history in the making. we'll hear from chris steele—perkins, whose pictures captured the highs and lows of britain under margaret thatcher. elliott erwitt, who photographed many of the cold war leaders. and bruce davidson, whose images of the us‘s civil rights movement still resonate today. first, let's meet david hurn.

as a young man, he was at the heart of london in the ‘60s, he captured the glamour and the grit of britain in an era of liberation and at the height of beatlemania. for the first time in the history of, let's call it communication, everybody loves one medium. suddenly, everybody loves photography. my approach has always been that i really don't like to set up pictures or anything. i see myselfjust as an observer of the eccentricities of life. what i call the exotic the mundane, you know. so i spend most of my time trying to get some kind of relationship between the extraordinary following of fans they had and the beatles themselves, and ijust think this is charming.

i mean, there's paul, he's on the train and this delightful old lady. it is obvious that she's talking to somebody saying, "look who this is!" she's suddenly seen this megastar and my guess is that it's a major thing in her life. i'm sure with great tenderness she would talk about this moment to herfriends for ages and ages and ages. when she met paul, probably, you know? i like memory, i like emotion, i like love, you know, i like passion. this picture was taken in the isle of wight pop festival. bob dylan was there and joni mitchell was there and the doors were there and the band was there. people at those sorts of events seemed to lose their inhibitions, in a way. out of nowhere, somebody seemed to be able to get this sort of foam thing,

you know, and you just need somebody spraying foam around for everybody else to take their clothes off and all sort of hug each other amongst the foam. i love seeing people that like each other. i don't care if they only like each otherfor ten minutes. the sort of things that i love photographing are the things that quite a lot of other people do that i wouldn't under normal circumstances ever dream of doing. queen charlotte's balljust absolutely fascinated me. i mean, there were all these young girls, almost like a cattle market, being shoved around for all blokes to look at. it was obviously all to do with, you know, meeting the right blokes, et cetera. here we have four people, two pairs. all they're doing, as far as i can

see, is talking to each other, but they all have this, what i would think, was an exaggerated gesture. it's the gesture that comes from holding a cigarette, and i think this is a nice picture. it has authorship, i think. i'm basically, bizarrely, a rather shy person, but this lovely thing about the camera is that you hide behind it, so that if anybody... normally, if you are shy, and somebody talks to you... but if you have a camera, you have an excuse to be there. god, it's been a fun life. it's been a fun life. and, uh, i've loved every minute of it, you know? david hurn, who observed the eccentricities of britain in the ‘60s. america in the 19605 was dominated by the issue of race.

bruce davidson chronicled the civil rights movement and accompanied black protesters on the 50 mile walk between selma and montgomery, in alabama. in orderfor me to make meaningful photographs, i had to be close, and that's what i did. i was doing high fashion pictures for vogue magazine. i come to feel that i can no longer do fashion. that was not where the world was for me at that time. it was important for someone to document what was happening in the south and step into that world. whenever i heard there was a march in birmingham, i would jump on a plane and be down there, on my own, i wasn't sponsored by anybody. i didn't have a motor scooter or anything. when i lifted my camera to take a picture, i lost maybe 15 or 20 feet,

maybe more, and i have to run to catch up, but i was in good shape in those days. this is an important picture, it shows two hefty cops from birmingham arresting a young woman. you can see that they're twisting her arm. in the background there's — surprise! excitement! damn the defiant, but i didn't focus on that. that was just happenstance. that young man, who i haven't been able to find, it was his idea to put "vote'" on his head and it was a very powerful image. it was also a very dangerous image for him because the national guard was alongside, they were in the woods waiting for anything to happen, and they couldn't be trusted. the police couldn't be trusted.

so he was showing off that which the whole mark was really about, and he survived and the image survived. i was privileged to photograph john lewis when he stepped into the bus to ride to jackson, mississippi, from montgomery, alabama. he was a famous civil rights leader and a congressman now. this is an important picture in a way because it was the beginning of 1961 freedom bus rides. the previous bus was burnt and people were arrested and beaten and they set the bus on fire. i photographed people who voted for the first time in their life and they were in their 70s, and that was very moving. towards the end of the selma march, people could vote and they'd vote, they could get a good education. if you get a good education you can get a good job and a good life, so that was the beginning of opening a door to the new world.

i'm an outsider on the inside, but you're never completely on the inside, but you can make an attempt to see and be part of another life. many of the issues bruce davidson documented are still making headlines today. as are those captured in the photos of elliott erwitt. he's the child of russian parents who emigrated to the us. in the 19505 and ‘60s, he travelled to the soviet union and to cuba. the pictures he took there revealed the personalities and the tensions of the cold war. the picture was taken in 1959, i was in moscow. nixon, who was vice—president at the time, was on a state visit to the soviet union and so i took the opportunity ofjoining the press corps that followed him around. they were grandstanding,

nixon and khrushchev. they were just sort of playing for their audience. nixon was saying that, "we americans eat meat while you russians eat cabbage." it was just a way of nixon saying that we're well off and rich and you're miserable and poor. the russians have two parades a year where they display their might. may day, which is the worker's day, and the revolution. i happened to be there for the latter one. i was well positioned by virtue of going through three rings of security, together with a soviet tv group. somehow i blended in — i must have been badly dressed or something. sportswomen was one of the pictures taken there.

at the beginning of the parade they display their military might and then they have the spontaneous worker's parade. the spontaneous parade, it generally lasted five hours. nothing spontaneous about it, of course. in 1964, i went to cuba for about a week or ten days that i spent it in havana. i spent it with fidel castro and che guevara. it was fascinating. fidel castro, he liked to be photographed, like any celebrity i think. i could sort of compare them to cowboys. they were affable, pleasant, interesting and very photogenic, as you will see, especially che. i would say he was the marilyn monroe of the period.

he seemed to be in a good mood, as i remember. he even gave me a box of cigars, which i did not bring into the united states because it was prohibited. i regret the box of cigars. well, he was a charming man, i mean, apart from what he did or didn't do. as many people who have doubtful backgrounds and doubtful histories, face—to—face they can be quite charming and accessible and interesting. i didn't speak so much, i listened more. i mean, photographers shouldn't get in the way of things. i hope that i was an observer rather than a participant. elliott erwitt

remembering the cold war. don't forget, you can catch up on the whole series at bbc.com/throughthelens. now, can you imagine taking pictures of one of the most charismatic figures of the 20th century? well, thomas hoepker did just that when he was assigned to photograph muhammad ali in 1966. you have days where nothing happens and days that are full of surprises. i was working at the magazine in germany. one day the editor—in—chief came, he asked us — would you like to meet a very interesting person in the usa, his name is muhammad ali and he's a fantastic boxer. we had no idea about boxing. it was almost impossible to do interviews with him. sometimes we went in the morning,

but he did not show up. you could not anticipate anything. he was a surprise every day. we flew over to louisville and he was in the gym and we went to the gym, it was dark and suddenly he saw us standing there. "oh, you're there", and he did this to my camera and the gong comes on for the second round and he went back and punched the ball. so i only click and click and i had two pictures and these were the best pictures i ever took of him. you have to be very ready for surprises with him. he could be a different person from one moment to the other. one day he said, "ok, i'll show you the city." and then we came to the chicago river and there was a little bridge and i said, "could you go up there", and without telling him he just took

off his shirt and then i said to him, "jump." and hejumped from the bridge down, and click, another click, only one. then, "ok, let's go somewhere else and have something to eat." we drove around again in chicago and suddenly he said, "let's stop here, i want to go to the bakery, they have wonderful cookies." so he went inside and it took him quite a while. and an hour later, close to the bakery, he said, "let me get a couple more." so he went inside and this time i said, something is strange here. so i went into the bakery and i saw him in there and then i understood because there was the baker's daughter. he was flirting very heavily,

so it was not the cookies, it was the young, very pretty lady. the funny thing is that i visited ali four years later, so i came to this house and we sat down and i took some pictures of him and suddenly the door opened and his wife came in. and who was the wife? she was the baker's daughter, which i had photographed a couple of years before. thomas hoepker on the unforgettable world heavyweight boxing champion, muhammad ali. in the same year, costa manos stumbled upon the funeral of a young american soldier who'd been killed in vietnam. one of the photographs he took went on to become a poster, and an emblem of the anti—war movement. i think to be a good photographer you have to know what you're looking for.

the year was 1966, i was travelling around the south on an assignment for a japanese magazine to photograph southern landscapes, that was my assignment. i'm out in the countryside and in the south there are these flat fields that are cotton fields, and i look and there is this church, a wooden church, unpainted wood. what was different was that there was a brown army bus parked in front of it. i drive up to the church, park behind the bus and i go around to the back of the church and they were going to have a funeral there. and all the people were there and they were waiting for the body of this soldier, who was killed in vietnam, to be brought to the church for the funeral. i talked to the boy's grandmother and so i said, "is it ok to take pictures?" she said, "sure, sure, sure."

this was a moment when the bus carrying the honour guard, which was the soldiers who are carrying the coffin, and the coffin and the ambulance, the hearse, they brought the coffin from the hearse to the burial site. that is just a symbolic picture, showing the situation with the soldiers, they were called an honour guard, and they've brought the boy's body to the church cemetery. the picture of the lady crying became iconic. it became an anti—war poster in europe, and it was a big poster that was all over europe. that was a time when people were protesting against the war and this became a real protest picture. it's a historical picture because it's a specific moment in that war that shows how it touched ordinary people. i don't know who the little boy is, to be honest with you, and it was never identified in the article. i assume that he is either a cousin

or a close friend who knew this boy who was killed, and that's the way it affected him. that's what i saw and i photographed what i saw, and the pictures speak for themselves, i think. it was all over in about a half an hour, they came with the casket, they had a service. this is a moment that happened once and never happened before, will never happen again, and that's that kind of picture i think, and a very touching story, to appear at that time when people were tired of the vietnam war, and all these boys being killed. costa manos on his heartbreaking images of grief. chris steele—perkins is probably best known for his documentary pictures of life in britain. in the 19805 he produced a range of photographs

which captured the nation under the conservative prime minister margaret thatcher, pointing his camera at every section of society. photography is about history, demarcating a period and a time. the wolverhampton set of pictures was actually done for the sunday times magazine, and the whole idea was to go back to wolverhampton, ten years after enoch powell had given his famous, as it was yet to be known, "rivers of blood" speech, and go and look at the asian and afro—caribbean community up in wolverhampton and see whether they were actually drinking each other‘s blood or not. there was a church club which seemed to cater quite well for local kids, they could go down there and play their own music, hang out.

there was a kind of rhythm to the whole thing, and you kind of tuned into that, and that's what you're after. the exact sort of compositional elements are more important in the overall composition, rather than the small details. the idea was about trying to photograph the english trying to have fun. trying to sort of show the world that they kind of had a good life. finding the oddities in people, it's almost like an act of homage rather than a kick in the midriff. i went to a lot of nightclubs, and people hanging out, and bored couples who don't speak to each other for hours, and i was photographing this way, and people were all going, there, there! i thought maybe this was a new dance, and i turn around and this fight was going on right behind me.

they are all rather well dressed up for this sort of night out, of being cool, and they end up on the floor sort of being punched in the mouth. once again, perhaps that is a metaphor for the way we live. there was the sort of tail end of national front and people like this, still sort of active in street demonstrations in britain. it felt like it needed to be covered, and for me that was about the posture and, sort of, the posturing and expression and projection that people wanted to give off. it's hard to know what people really think any more. i mean, you know, mythologies kind of creep up and cover things in the new realities. that shot of thatcher is, i found, quite ambiguous. yes, she kind of looks

startled and she kind of looks confused almost. but at the same time she is quite glamorous. and then obviously you have the parody of the people in the background who are all openmouthed and overcome by being in her presence. ifeel like i got one picture that has kind of stood the test of time, and is still ambiguous, which i like about photography, that it can be ambiguous, you know, you can read it different ways. and they're all right. chris steele—perkins on the ambiguity of photography as a historical record. and that is all from through the lens here at the southbank centre. see the rest of the series at bbc.com/throughthelens. the weather has been far more

cheerful today compared to the last few days at least across most of the uk. the weather is turning again across the south of the country. we are infor across the south of the country. we are in for rain, sleet and the possibility of snow as well, but not too much snow. don't get too excited. this is the weather front thatis excited. this is the weather front that is moving in. a wet end to the day across many southern areas of the uk. and, yes, snowfalling across the uk. and, yes, snowfalling across the welsh hills and the peak district possibly second—half of the night around the cotswolds and in towards the early hours of wednesday morning we could get wintry weather across eastern and south eastern parts of the country. we are talking about the downs and the chilterns, those sort of areas. further north clearer and colder. some areas as low as minus eight degrees celsius outside of town. a wet, cold, windy

morning across the south—east with wintry flavour to that rain, possibly sleet around. the afternoon tomorrow is looking beautiful for many of us. really cold and crisp. on the windy side, it will feel cold out there, north to north—westerly winds will be strong. temperatures barely above freezing to northern areas and we have wintry showers across the highlands as well. beautiful day for the lowlands of scotland, belfast as well. here is the following night. this is tomorrow night into thursday. the skies will clear. it will be a very cold night, ice maybe a problem first thing in the morning. finance you are travelling on thursday bare that in mind. throughout the width and breadth of the country temperatures freezing or below. thursday are in between weather systems, one over scanned neigh ya, weather systems in the atlantic. we are in this window of better

weather. rain forecast to reach the southern tip of cornwall by the time we get to midday on thursday. friday and saturday weather fronts line up in the atlantic. low pressure racing in. the run—up to the new year is looking windier, a lot more turbulent and those temperatures as a result with that atlantic air pushing in will be rising as well. bye— bye. this is bbc news. the headlines at 4pm... a woman from hull is sentenced to three years in an egyptjail for taking painkillers into the country. her sister is concerned for her safety. she is on the verge of a mental breakdown. and so is my mum. it is just horrendous. universities must protect free speech and "open minds, not close them," orface possible fines. millions of shoppers hit the high streets as they hunt for bargains in the boxing day sales.

a mum from norfolk says she's been "overwhelmed" by the international response to her capturing the perfect image on her phone — of meghan markle — alongside prince harry and the duke and duchess of cambridge. tottenham's harry kane sets a new record for the most premier league goals in a calendar year as he scores a hat—trick against southampton.