eastern coasts cooler with the breeze off the sea but where we have sunshine, lots of it again with temperatures close to 30. hello, this is bbc news. the headlines: firefighters tackling a huge blaze which is ravaging moorland across lancashire have said they are launching a "large scale attack" on the flames. a major incident was declared when two fires merged into one as a result of increasing wind speed. a young girl has died after she was reportedly thrown from an inflatable on a beach in norfolk. an investigation has been launched to establish the circumstances surrounding the incident. 30 conservative mps have written a letter demanding theresa may gets tough with the eu over brexit negotiations, while the head of the nhs in england has revealed that the health service is preparing for the possibility of there being no deal. polls have opened across mexico with extra security measures in place after a campaign marred by the worst political violence in decades. since campaigning began last september, more than 130 candidates and political workers have been killed. people who rent their homes could be

given more security under government proposals to introduce a minimum tenancy term of three years in a move ministers will help renters put down more roots in their communities. and new research suggests seven out of ten council leaders in england believe income tax needs to be raised to ease the crisis in funding in adult social care. people who book their holidays online will be protected under new eu rules which come into force today — until now, trips booked via websites did not have the same protection as traditional package holidays. let me bring you some breaking news. the tennis champion andy murray has announced he is withdrawing from wimbledon because of his continued attem pts wimbledon because of his continued atte m pts to wimbledon because of his continued attempts to recover from wimbledon because of his continued attempts to recoverfrom hip surgery. attempts to recoverfrom hip surgery. the former champion has made that announcement. you may recall that there was hope that he

might be able to get back for the wimbledon fortnight, which begins tomorrow, but he was signalling all we can do it he was having doubts given his problems with his hip. so sad news for tennis fans. no andy murray at wimbledon this year. now, it's time for witness with rebecca jones. hello and welcome to witness, with me, rebecca jones. i'm here at the british library to guide you through another five extraordinary moments from recent history. we'll meet a survivor of an australian town which was devastated by asbestos. we'll talk to an architect tasked with replacing the twin towers after 9/11.

we have the colonel who fought for gay rights in israel's military. and we'll hear how the world cup disappeared in 1966, and how it was found by one man and his dog. but we start with a spy scandal and a diplomatic row between london and moscow. sound familiar? well, this one took place in the 1970s, in the midst of the cold war, and resulted in 90 soviet officials being expelled from britain. we've been hearing an inside account of the affair from george walden, who was then on the soviet desk in britain's foreign office. at london's heathrow airport, someone, somewhere has got a list. on it, 90 names, russians, men and women — considered by the security services of this country to have had some part in activities organised by the russian intelligence service.

espionage on a massive scale. every country has its intelligence services. some of them, to put it delicately, are more active than others. and in the case of the soviet union, their offensive intelligence services were way, way beyond anyone else's. we were getting increasingly fed up simply with the volume of soviet intelligence officers who were being stuffed into the embassy and the trade delegation in london. i recall at the time the security services, mi5, telling me that they couldn't actually keep an eye on such massive numbers of people. and i learnt, to my surprise, that it took about nine security men to follow one soviet espionage officer. and so we were on a losing game. we didn't know because of the sheer numbers, really, what they were up to.

this man agreed to talk about his experiences with the kgb. he's british and we'll call him jim walker. he's a research scientist in the field of nuclear energy and, some time ago, he was at a conference. there, too, a party of russians. he talked particularly to one russian, a man he came to know as victor, a soviet diplomat. the soviet intelligence agents, with which the embassy and the trade delegation were stuffed at the time, were approaching large numbers of people, really, in order to recruit them as agents. this film, shot as it happened, shows victor — the soviet diplomat — collecting intelligence materialfrom a dead letter box, after an elaborate series of instructions. well, relations between the west and the east

were not good at the time. there was still, underneath, quite a lot of mistrust and suspicion as to what the soviets were up to. and, of course, that spilled over in this spy affair. the whole thing was obviously brought forward by the defection at the beginning of august of a senior kgb official, now named as 0leg lyalin. his information made it plain that something had to be done. the important thing about 0leg lyalin, the defector, was that he dotted the is and crossed the ts, and so we realised that there were even more soviet intelligence officers masquerading as diplomats than we'd previously thought. and he gave us a pretty good idea of the scope of their activities, which was very large. the reason these men had to go was simply that their organisation had outgrown the resources of our organisation, whose job it was to deal with them. the russians were given two weeks

to leave when the expulsions were announced on september 24th. today's sailing means that they've gone almost a week early. looking back on it from today's perspective, i very much think that it was the best thing to do, because respect for us from the soviet side went up, i think. although they didn't like it, but it certainly went up. they dealt with us more seriously after that, they took us more seriously. george walden. now a devastating story about a town that was effectively wiped out by asbestos. wittenoom, in western australia, grew up around an asbestos mine in the 1940s, but little did the residents know at the time that asbestos was lethal and could cause lung diseases and cancer. bronwen duke lived in the town as a child and is one of the few members of her family who is still alive.

people were warned, but they didn't take it seriously until people started to die. i lost both parents, both grandparents, my brother, three uncles, about four cousins that i can think of — and that's just the immediate family, in my world. i was born in 1958, in the far north of western australia, in the pilbara, in a little town called wittenoom. the blue asbestos mine was the genesis of the town. asbestos is a naturalfibre that's encased in rocks. they would extract the asbestos out of the mine and the mill would actually then bag it and ready for shipment. and it was sent to places around the world for the various things that they use asbestos for. fire—resisting, sound—insulating product known as asbestos is a piece of rock. the practical uses of

asbestos are very numerous. at least 18,000 articles are made of it, ranging from packing for steam engines and linings for friction services to bulkheads for aeroplanes. there were a lot of immigrants that came into australia after the second world war and a lot of them were just looking forjobs, and there were jobs to be had in wittenoom. my dad was one of them. he was the jack of all trades. he used to drive the bus to take the guys from town to the mine every day. my mum and her sisters all met their husbands up there. it had all the elements of a normal country town. they used to have race days and there would be balls, and all sorts of social activities that everyone was involved in. but my parents weren't aware of the dangers at all. i don't think a lot of the people in the town were aware of the dangers. asbestos fibres get into the lungs and those fibres can cause

asbestosis or mesothelioma. it encases the lung in cancer and prevents it from breathing. in wittenoom, the asbestos wasn't confined to the mine. asbestos was used in gardens, it was used on driveways, it was used on the roads. it was literally everywhere. and if you went out to play, as all small children do, you're playing in asbestos. one of the flying doctors flew into town and said, as soon as he got there, he said, we have to close this, this has to stop. well, the mine was very profitable, so it was decided that that wasn't the case. it was 1966 before they actually closed the mines. but people had started to die. we left when my dad got sick. we now know, in actualfact, that he had asbestosis at that time. it's almost like having an asthma

attack, where you can't breathe and you're fighting to catch your breath. my mum and my brother died from mesothelioma. it is a extremely harrowing disease, to see someone dying from mesothelioma. there's just hundreds of people from wittenoom that i know of that have gone with mesothelioma or asbestosis. none of my family that's in that photo are alive. they're all gone, every one of them. there's no compensation for taking away your parents or your family. there's no justice in that at all. nothing. money doesn't bring them back. money doesn't compensate for their death, or what you miss. bronwen duke, on the tragedy of wittenoom. next, we're off to israel and the story of uzi even, a former israeli intelligence colonel. it was uzi who, in the 1990s, led the battle for equal rights

for gay and lesbian soldiers in israel's military. ijoined the military and i served in the formal service and then as a reserve officer for almost 20 years. i was up to the level of colonel in intelligence. the law at the time was that if you are known to be gay, you cannot have access to classified information, because of the belief that they were prone to extortion. the atmosphere in israel was such that you didn't talk about gays, like something to be ashamed of. i had to live like that, in the shadows. it's not a pleasant way of living. being in the closet is very difficult. in 1982, in a standard

security clearance check, people came here and asked about how i lived here. at the time, i had a lover with me, living together. and that was enough to cause an avalanche of events that ended in my being demoted to a low—ranking clerical position. no reasons were given. it was like a slap in the face, until i decided it's time to fight back. in 1993, yael dayan, who was a member of parliament, decided to organise the first debate in the knesset about gay issues. and i was the main speaker, and i was very apprehensive. i didn't know how people would react. up to that time, no single gay person of high social ranking would come out and say,

i am gay, look. the main message of my speech was that — we want to be the same as you. we don't demand anything that you don't have. we want to be allowed to contribute in the military and other parts of this society. i was called to the prime minister's office, yitzhak rabin. they asked me, what do you want? i said, i want that what happened to me will not happen again. so we started negotiating with the military experts, and we took a very short time because three months after i started my campaign, the law was signed by the chief of staff of the israeli military.

the new law starts with the words, the israeli defence forces do not discriminate gays in their recruitment, in their placement, or in their ranks. it was quite revolutionary. in 2004, i was the first openly gay member of parliament to be elected, which created a lot of uproar. nowadays, i live openly as a public figure, if you want. i have a husband, who is with me. i have an adopted son, who is also gay. everybody around me knows i'm gay, so i feel at peace with my environment. was it worth it? for me, yes. the pioneering uzi even. remember, you can watch witness every month on the bbc news channel, or you can catch up on all our films — along with more than a thousand radio programmes —

in our online archive. now we head to new york. after the 9/11 terror attacks, the city was left with a gaping hole in its skyline where the world trade center once stood. in 2006, reconstruction work began. tj gottesdiener was one of the architects who designed a new skyscraper for the site. most of the people around simply can't understand what happened. people are just standing around, talking at each other, nodding their heads. screaming. oh, my god! we've got to go! oh, my god! 0n the day of 9/11, i was actually not in new york, i was in hong kong. i'd gone there for a client meeting. it was evening when the news broke. over here!

get here, get here! don't go in that building. come here, come here.... screaming. this is incredible. i've never seen anything like this. it was very, very unsettling for us. a lot of concern about the people, what was happening, the office — which is right next to the site, my family. it was, uh... it was a day i regret not being in new york. it was a tragic scene. there was a lot of recovery necessary at this site. we felt challenged. at the heart of manhattan, there's still a huge gap, to be filled by one of nine competing designs, offered by a who's who of global architecture. larry silverstein won the rights to be the landlord of the site. he called us up and said, please come over, i want your help.

my role was kind of acting as the organiser, leader, putting the team together, dealing with architects, engineers, clients, contractors. one of the most important things that we wanted to do was to repair the hole in the sky, the tear in the sky. what do i mean by that? new york city is known for its skyscrapers. it's known for the empire state building. the chrysler building. and it was known for the twin towers. the trade center. and that was gone. and people realised that lower manhattan looked differently without it. the original design of the trade center was a square — 200 feet by 200 feet in plan — and that's the footprint of the new design.

the original trade center rose to a height of 1,363 feet above grade. and that's the height of the design of one world trade center at the parapet, at the glass and metal parapet. as the project was completed, and even today, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. i think that we've really done a fantasticjob of making it, the building, feel very approachable. very democratic, almost. it's got these light glass fins on it. in evening, it glows with the light emanating from inside of it. you feel like you can go right up to it and want to be next to it and want to almost touch it. this is a project that i never leave behind. i come to work, get out of the subway and i can see the building.

i look out the window here and i can see the building. it never leaves me. the new york architect tj gottesdiener. and finally, an unusual story about the world cup. back in 1966, england were hosting the tournament, but shortly before the event was due to begin, the world cup trophy itself was stolen — from a display in central london. remarkably, it was one man and his dog who came to the rescue. we were told when the cup went in here that the most stringent security precautions were being taken to protect it. today, somehow, they failed. it was top news. and in the morning, the papers, it was headlines, "world cup stolen". and then some critics saying the best police force in the world had lost the cup. we found out that the security was very sparse. there was one 70—odd—year—old guard

looking after it and he had gone to his dinner break. i'm afraid i regret at this present moment, i am unable to make any real form of statement. i must ask you to appreciate the amount of pressure that i have been under. once i have had a chance to gather my somewhat scattered wits, then i will indeed talk with you and give you everything that i can possibly can. but the general feeling that people had — that the police weren't going to find this cup. i took my dog, pickles, out for a walk and he scooted round the front of the house and he went over to the front of my neighbour's car. and he was sniffing around, so i walked over to put the lead on him and i noticed there was a package on the floor, wrapped in newspaper. very tightly bound with

string all the way up. so curiosity, obviously, i bent down, picked it up, and i tore a bit of the newspaper off and i saw brazil, west germany. i thought... being a football fan and all the publicity going on about the cup, my heart started thumping — bang! — against my chest. it's the world cup! i thought, i'll take it up to the police station. ijumped in the car. i've got these slacks on and a top and these slippers. i can remember pushing the doors open and going straight through, and there's a sergeant standing behind the big polished desk and i say to him, i think i've found the world cup. and his boss comes and he says, right, take him up to scotland yard. then suddenly, it dawns on me that i am number—one suspect. after a couple of days, the police come down and question me again. after that, it stopped and now i became a witness

when the prosecution was brought against the guys that stole it. it's all a bit bewildering for pickles, but for the suddenly world—famous pooch, there's more glamour to follow. the national sporting club honoured the stolen trophy finders, david corbett and pickles. henry cooper uncovered a special treat for pickles, but it's turkey or nothing these days. the champ had something to impress david corbett, though — a cheque for £1,000, presented by the club to pickles and his owner. after the game, when we had won the cup, we were invited to the reception in london. and we drove up to the hotel. the road was completely blocked with people and it had a sort of big balcony out the side and the team were up there. we went up with them and bobby moore picked him up and showed him to the crowd. waaay! it was really, really exciting for me.

i think it was really exciting for the whole country. it was through pickles that my life changed. and he helped me buy this house. and he is buried out in my garden, and on nice summer nights, i go out there with a nice glass of wine and have a little talk to him. cheers, thanks, pics. the remarkable story of dave corbett and pickles, an unlikely world cup hero. and that's all from witness this month, here at the british library. we'll be back next month with more first—hand accounts of extraordinary moments in history. but for now, from me and the rest of the witness team, bye—bye. for most, the heat and the sunshine continues.

for a large swathe of the country, there has barely been a cloud in the sky this afternoon. this was cumbria not so long ago. but equally, some of us have been seeing some welcome rain in places. devon saw some heavy and persistent rain this afternoon. that starts to pull away northwards, but it also comes with a warning from the met office for thunderstorms generated by this area of low pressure. that warning extends across areas of southern england in parts of wales. thunderstorms may push eastwards towards the home counties and london this evening. this is where the rain has been in the last few hours. also more cloud for northern ireland and north—west scotland. here, the rain is pushing eastwards this evening. you can see from the orange colours where the highest temperatures have been. porthmadog and london have reached 31 celsius this afternoon. wea k always

weak always cooler along eastern coasts. allow for some local thunderstorms this evening and overnight across south—west england and wales, pushing their way towards the home counties and london. some patchy rain pushing eastwards across scotland, but tending to fizzle out. for most, it's a dry and clear night but quite muggy and humid across central and southern parts of england. here is the setup for the new working week. much of the country is under the influence of an area of high pressure. easterly wind still. this low pressure from france may push a few showers towards the south—west of england, but they will be quite scattered. while we need the rain, many places will stay largely dry. a bit more cloud across central and eastern parts of scotland tomorrow, but it should be mainly dry. more sunshine for northern ireland tomorrow. again, you can see where the highest temperatures will be across much of england and wales. temperatures across southern england will get close to 30 celsius. still quite cool

for eastern coasts. the eastern coast of scotland was the temperature is not much higher than 15 or 16 celsius. the warmth will stay with us for the week. we have light winds as wimbledon starts on monday, so it's looking dry, with plenty of sunshine. and still on the warm side, if not hot across central and southern england. somewhat cooler for northern ireland and scotland. this is bbc news. the headlines. dozens of fire crews continue to tackle an aggressive moorland fire near bolton. lancashire fire brigade say they expect the blaze to continue for days. a major incident has been declared. it is a dangerous area at the moment. in terms of public safety, the advice would be to simply stay off anywhere around the moorland of winter hill. a young girl has died after she was reportedly thrown from an inflatable on a beach in norfolk.

an investigation has been launched to etablish the circumstances surrounding the incident. the head of nhs england says extensive planning is under way to prepare the health service for a no—deal brexit. at the start of a crunch week for brexit, 30 conservative mps demand the prime minister takes a tough line with eu negotiators. the communities secretary, says he is "confident" cabinet will agree a common position later this week. i think there is no doubt that there is strong views on either side and that is what i would expect as we lead into the discussions on friday.