robert mueller, with interfering in the 2016 presidential election. mr mueller‘s office linked the group to an internet agency that allegedly churned out online posts aimed at boosting president trump's prospects. mr trump has met survivors of wednesday's high school gun attack in florida, in which seventeen people were killed. during visits to a hospital and sheriff's office in the miami suburb of parkland, he praised emergency workers and medical staff for their response, describing the shooting as very sad. brazil's president has signed a decree authorising the army to supervise all anti—crime operations in the state of rio de janeiro. michel temer said organised crime was spreading like a cancer in the country. now on bbc news — inside out. there is something nasty on a race

that can cause problems. vehicles are being damaged and in some cases people are being seriously hurt in the cause of all this misery is the humble pothole. here is martin friend. potholes are the bugbear of every road user and it seems there are more now than ever. they are the cause of a big spike in breakdowns this time of year. you can't make it out now, but at this very spot five years ago there was a massive pothole on the road.

it was a dangerous pothole, over four inches deeps of it if you keep it in the car, you could hear the flood. people were trying to avoid it because obviously they didn't wa nt to it because obviously they didn't want to damage their vehicles, but we have heavy goods vehicles coming, very dangerous. i reported it to the council and nothing happened. i reported it to the police and it was repaired within two hours. i needed to make sure i could do everything i could to make sure no one was injured. that's what started your passion to rid the roads of potholes? i thought someone has to stand up. we spend an awful lot of money on our taxes and get a decreasing quality of roads, someone needed to make a stand so i started with a small social media campaign. mark has become an expert in road construction. he has been nicknamed mr pothole. mark reckons there are so many potholes close to where he lives, it's almost an epidemic. inside out has come up with a challenge.

we will find out how many potholes there are within a 15 minute drive from his house. i will be timing him. this is a lovely one you will go over. you really feel that. as we come round this bend, you see there are more. there is a massive cluster, you can feel them, day in, day out. i can really feel it in my seat. it's quite uncomfortable. this feels more like rallying. i'm going to avoid these ones because i don't want to damage my tire. you can have a blow out is later when you don't notice the damage, that can be really dangerous. this one is more like a paddling pool. getting on for a swimming pool. that is at least three and a half. four inches deep. is that one of the

deepest you have seen? no. i have seen over a foot deep. a nice one forming there, just outside. over there and extremely rough patch breaking up quite considerably. everywhere you look there are potholes? there are some craters you could hit your car with if you went down. we will find out later how mark got on with his challenge. of course, car and lorry drivers aren't the only users of our roads. potholes might be a nuisance for motorists spot for cyclists, they are much scarier and more dangerous. these members of a local cycling club say they are always trying to dodge and avoid potholes. they claim the roads in northamptonshire are some of the worst. it can be quite scary

because there are so many potholes we spend so much time looking out for them that it does spoil the enjoyment of the cycle ride itself. have you yourself had any accidents? i have been sent off by a pothole on a roundabout in northampton, i was making a turn, my narrow front wheel got caught in the pothole, fetched me off. lots of traffic about. fortunately a man working on the road stopped the traffic so i could get up and get away. as a cyclist you must see potholes in the road all the time. do you report them? we do. they do not always get fixed. i feel aggrieved about that because having bothered to report it and give a location, we would expect some follow—up action. this is hawthorn road in northampton. a pothole repair team busy at work.

the plan is to do longer lasting repairs across the county, but only the worst potholes get filled. in northamptonshire we are not able to fix every pothole that is reported to us or picked up on our inspections. what constitutes a pothole is a whole that is 15 millimetres deep and about a foot wide and is really a risk to the public. if it is slightly less than that it won't get filled. it would not meet the criteria. we constantly monitor the network of roads and paths to look at these potholes and we will fix them if they are a safety defect. something smaller could be a hazard on the road even though it does not meet your criteria for size? we are unable to fill those at the moment. again it's about using our budget to the best of our ability. as is so often the case, it boils down to money. there is just not enough to fix all the potholes. so who is responsible?

the funding of roads is split between central and local government. basically the government pays for all motor ways and a roads, that's about 90% of the roads we use. they are the responsibility of local authorities. why do we see so many potholes on our roads? the simple answer is weather. we have had one of the harshest winters we have had for a long time, prolonged cold patches, rain, snow, wind, you name it. do you have any idea exactly how many potholes there are in northamptonshire? in terms of how many there are in existence, i know how many we fill, roughly speaking. 47,000, thereabouts in an average year. the government told us it will have given northamptonshire county council more than £97 million for highway

maintenance between 2015 and 2021. plus a bit extra from a special pothole fund, but the council say that is still not enough. what have the government told you when you say we need more money? they appreciate that but as with all these things they say there is only so much money. we have had £1.1 million from the pothole fund this year, possibly a similar amount last year but a drop in the ocean compared to what we need. the council is now tackling the biggest cash crisis faced by any council in the country for the last two decades. potholes won't be a priority. we are trying to maintain them at their current level, we are doing a rather good job of that. they won't deteriorate but they won't necessarily improve. we were asked mark to record a number of potholes on a five—minute drive from his home. are you disappointed

by what you found? yes, we need government to invest in our roads. it's all right putting in new infrastructure but we need to maintain the roads we use day in day out that drive this economy. mark has finished his 15 minute challenge, how did you get on, how many potholes did you find? over 75. wow. i thought you would say 20 or 30. that's an incredible amount. were you surprised? not really. i can see how roads are deteriorating. it's notjust here, it's across the whole country. there are potholes everywhere. everywhere you can see, some had been left for such a long time, someone will get killed. they have some fantastic old trains here, the east anglia and railway museum. 2018 is the 17th anniversary of the creation of british rail.

-- 70th. 0ur railways were originally private companies. then 70 years ago there were nationalised and became british railways. in 1994, john major's government privatised them again. i am looking back at the history of rail to see what lessons we can learn for the east coast line today. this station closed to passengers in 1968, now the mid norfolk railway is a tourist attraction and proof that railways are still very popular. i am going to discover how our railways have been affected by nationalisation and in turn privatisation. once there were 120 private lines, by the 1940s these have

become four big companies which were nationalised. why were the railways nationalised in the first place? after the second world war, railways are hugely worn out. we don't have any money. there are big railway companies, great western, southern, lms and lner, two of them are particularly struggling, lms mostly, they will go bankrupt. one reason for nationalisation is to stop that happening. in 1994 it was all change again, and the government privatised british rail. but one line has struggled to make money for its owners and with price tags and delays, have been the cause of misery for commuters. this line, the east coast main line which runs through peterborough has been in a state of change for years. it's been run by several private companies and has been

nationalised twice so far. are our railways still in the state of flux, and can they get back on track. cat hobbs runs a campaign calling for the renationalisation of the railways. the idea of having a market is that you have swashbuckling entrepreneurs who are taking risks. that does not really work if the private sector just takes all the profit and the public sector takes the risk. last week the transport secretary announced that he's coast franchise currently run by virgin and stagecoach has failed, and will end early. this is what you expect in a competitive franchise system, private businesses risk substantial amounts of their own capital and if they fail to live up to their targets they lose out, not the taxpayer. this has happened before. in 2009, national express walked away from the same franchise, a government owned company stepped in, run by michael holden. we spend a lot of time investing in people and in systems,

but also on the trains and stations themselves. if you can make these coast main line work, why couldn't the private sector? they were struggling for cash because there weren't generating enough revenue from the business to pay the premium due to the government. they did not have the money to do what is needed. it's the same story again this month. would the line be better run if it was nationalised? you can run railways successfully in either the public or private sector, you pay your money and take your choice. governments generally speaking not good at running things. my view is that the government ought to set the sense of direction and vision, if you like, for the industry, then leave it to professional people to get on and deliver that vision over a period of 20 years or so. 20 years gives time for long—term investment and planning. the east coast has had four operators, including the government operator in the last 20

years since privatisation. before that, a brand for almost 50 years under british rail. once upon a time, british rail was the jewel in the crown of our national transport system. though there are some who don't remember it like that. charles swift spent his working life on the railways, based in peterborough. he started at lner when he was 15 years old in 1945, three years before nationalisation. when it went from lner and it was run privately into nationalisation did it feel differently straightaway? no, it had to work its way. for several years after, when we were first nationalised, we still had the same, then we started getting a different type of management in. people that started to tell you what you should be doing when they did not even know what the hell they were doing themselves. people then eventually wanted to get off the job. to be quite honest, i was quite

happy to get away at the end of the day because there were not supervisors that had been railway drivers and things like that. you had someone coming from outside to do the job. people did get a bit peed off with the red tape and things like that. there is still a romantic view of the glory days of railways, partly because it was a way of life for the 600,000 people who worked on them. doreen foster worked at lner in peterborough in the 1940s. i love trains. 0fany kind. mostly steam trains, for grandad he was a driver. they used to go down to the loco shed, years ago. there was a job going at the lner savings bank, so i applied for it and got it. did you notice a real difference in the way things had run? pre—nationalisation and post—nationalisation once everything became british rail?

it did not seem the same. it wasn't the family atmosphere. even within the standard perspective, would anyone want to turn the clock back to the times when british rail was known for jokes about its sandwiches? no. we can't go back to the 1970s and i don't think we would want to. i think we need to learn the lesson about the past and make something fit for the modern time. british rail was underinvested in. where does the money come from? we don't have to buy back the tracks, we already have national rail. the rolling stock would be pretty expensive? that is least, it is owned by private companies, government can buy trains directly and that will be much more efficient. right now railways are we blame game, everyone can blame everyone else. the dft, the train company, rolling stock companies, actually if you run the system as one integrated system, you would not have those problems. if push came to shove and we decided to buy back the franchises,

do you think it's something we could afford or should afford? i think it would be a very bad idea and if the treasury was involved in the decision—making after the next election, i think they would stay, do you want to spend as much money buying the trains back would you prefer to spend it on improving the nhs and i think it's obvious what the answer to that would be. giles‘s long history as a train driver has given him at strong views about re—nationalising the railways. they talk about putting the railways back under the government or nationalising them again, it's the biggest load of codswallop i've ever come across because it would not work. there is not the affinity, railwaymen went to work. they went half an hour before the start of work and it would be half an hour after they finished when they would go home. they loved the job. of any lessons from history that the troubled east coast line

can learn from today? we really do need to learn or decide if our railways are a service or there to make a profit. when which railways, people complained about the money being spent on it. now it's privatised, people complain about the amount of money they have to spend on the train ticket. people really need to make a proper decision about what we want from our railway system. it is now thought that 1% of the british population is gendered nonconforming. more people every year are seeking treatment to change their gender. sophie has been to meet the parents who support their children who are desperate to change. what colour are we going to do next?

do you want to go a bit darker next time? yeah. for cheerleading, can i have my hair in a ponytail then curled at the back? if you want to, darling. emma lives in bedfordshire with her three children. her eldest daughter is keira, who used to be a boy. keira was more, i want to dress up as a girl. she was practising with make up. wanting to grow her hair. i actually spoke to a sexual health officer, she said i think actually you know, you have got a little girl trapped in a boy's body. at the time, emma thought it was a phase. but as the years went by, she realised it was than that. keira, when she was a boy and was lucas, she was very quiet, very timid. looking back it's because she was so uncomfortable in herself as a boy. she did not want to go and face people and do anything. when she transitioned and became keira, something clicked overnight

in her and she is more confident. she knows what she wants and she is sticking to her guns. and she is still only 13. is this your room? wow. wonderful. a year ago, keira ditched the boys clothes and went shopping for a whole new wardrobe. i said, you can choose what you like. she said, whatever i like? i said yeah, if you want girls close, go and use them and her whole face lit up. where is the sparklyjacket? this. that's her favourite. that is really, really nice. do they do this in a size 12?! i want one. from that day on, she wanted to be known to the world as keira. although keira looks like a girl, she won't be able to have surgery

to change a physical form until she's an adult. until then, she will be offered medication to delay puberty. this will give her time to decide what she wants to do. do you ever worry about her future? of course, absolutely i do. we have things coming up like hormone blockers. puberty kicking in, what effect that will have on her mental health overall. that's what concerns me. a lot of transgender children do try to commit suicide and self harm. that's due to lack of support from family or for how they feel about their bodies. although there are organisations that can help parents deal with the challenges of bringing up a transgender child, emma has decided to find some local support. this woman lives 30 minutes away in hertfordshire. her son dexter is now seven.

i think it was around two and a half, that he started to protest about wearing knickers and wearing girl's clothes. the terminology used was, i feel a boy. he would say that. ifeel a boy and point to his heart. by five and a half, dexter had realised he was not meant to be a little girl. i'm not a girl. i'm a boy. he came running in from the garden one day and said, "i've got it, mummy," and i said, "got what?" "i am dexter, mummy." "i am dexter. " i said, "awesome, love that name." he ran back out into the garden and carried on playing. emma and keira have arrived in st albans. many parents feel quite alone when raising a transgender child.

today, keira's mum and dexter's mum are meeting up to offer each other support. i really feel like i have grieved, i grieved for talia, and not because i'm unhappy with you i'm left with, i love dexter to bits. it is like a loss of somebody. what do you think is the hardest thing for parents like us with transgender children? what's the hardest thing to cope with? the hardest thing is not being able to fix him, not being able to take his pain away and his anxiety away and not being able to, you know, when he's awake in the night and he says, mummy, why did you make me wrong? why don't my privates match my brain and my heart? i can't make that better and as parents, that is all you want to do. to fix everything for your kids. my biggest fear is her being bullied

or discriminated against. or for her mental health being affected because at the minute it's not. i don't care what anyone thinks, ijust don't want anyone being mean to her. there is one place in the country within the nhs which deals with a child facing gender difficulties. based in london, the tavistock sees 2000 children a year and last year they took around 300 children from the east. it's a figure that is rising all the time. today is dexter's fourth visit and even though he's only seven, his mother is worried about puberty kicking in. she does not want to let him down. for us, the thing we needed confirmation from from tavistock was, am i doing the right thing by being so accepting of him? sometimes you need the confirmation and reassurance from a professional. with dexter getting older, it's a race against time to get

in the hormones he needs to blockers female puberty. and his mother wants to know if this practice will be safe. it's fair to say that the evidence base in this area is poor. but as far as we know, this is a fully reversible treatment. as far as we know, the long—term implications in terms of health seem to be positive. as i say, we don't have full evidence. we must be realistic. at the moment, there isenormous interest in gender. we always have continued to work carefully to ensure young people and their families are fully aware of what they are undertaking and that there is time to consider that. it's about not shutting doors and making assumptions about how things will be in the future. the nhs advises time and space for a child

who is questioning their gender. while mums like emma continue to learn what it means to be transgender, children like keira and dexter can work out their true identity. let's see what is coming your way this weekend.

for most of us the weather is actually not looking too bad at all. there is certainly some sunshine on the way and skies on saturday will probably look something like this, a nice picture from a weather watcher. here's the weekend summary — so we have got some sunshine in the forecast for saturday but sunday does not look too great at least across western areas of the uk. here is the latest satellite image, we have got clouds across the country right now. but this gap in the cloud will be in place across the uk during the course of saturday. so in the short term, still some rain around across western and northern areas and even a bit of hill snow. the clearest of the weather is in east anglia and the south—east through the early area, and there's a touch of frost aound as well. just a weak weather front crossing the country first thing on saturday. by the time we get to the afternoon, on saturday, the weather would brighten up. so initially many of us will look out of that window first thing in the morning, and it will be fairly cloudy, there might be one or two spots of rain but by the time we get to the second half of the morning,

the weather is looking a lot better and the afternoon bright if not sunny, apart from the odd light shower which might develop here and there. so on balance a fine day. 6 in the north of the country, there, 11 degrees the top temperature in the south. now, the forecast for saturday night so initially a lot of clear weather, in fact it is going to stay dry all the way through saturday night into sunday in the eastern and central areas but notice how the clouds are increasing out west. there's some rain spilling across ireland, and that will be edging our way, and it's a big area of low pressure, with big weatherfronts here. you can see the rain on this weather front coming through. this is actually a warm front which means that behind it we've got some milder air coming our way. so on sunday it will start to turn very cloudy, murky, drizzly and mild across many western areas. so i think for places like cardiff, eventually the north—west of england, certainly northern ireland and western scotland, you are in for a cloudy if not damp, possibly even wet afternoon. but many central and eastern areas on sunday — this is 3 o'clock on sunday — you can see it is dry in london, in hull, in newcastle and those

temperatures creeping up to around about 11, maybe 12 degrees celsius. as far as the next few days are concerned, it looks like it may be turning colder. welcome to bbc news, broadcasting to viewers in north america and around the globe. i'm nkem ifejika. our top stories: prosecutors in the us charge thirteen russian nationals with interfering in the 2016 presidential election. donald trump visits a hospital in florida where victims of wednesday's high school shooting are being treated. battling criminal gangs in rio de janeiro. brazil's president orders the army to take over security in the state. and south africa's new president sets out his plans to end corruption, in his first state of the nation address.