it's emerged that a dam that collapsed in laos killing at least 20 people developed a fault the day before the accident. the south korean firm, helping build the hydro—power station, said workers unsuccessfully tried to repair the damage and did make attempts to evacuate the area. pakistan is going to the polls in a national election. it's a battle between the party of the former cricketer imran khan and supporters of the jailed former prime minister nawaz sharif. cyclists competing in the tour de france found themselves caught up in a protest by farmers. police sprayed tear gas to disperse the protesters, but it ended up blowing in the face of the riders and the race was briefly halted. the teams eventually got underway again. that's all. stay with bbc world news. now on bbc news, hardtalk‘s stephen sackur speaks to forensic anthropolgist, sue black.

welcome to a special edition of hardtalk from the hay festival in wales. today i am joined by an audience to meet a specialist in death. for many of us, the hardest subject of all to think and talk about. yet for sue black it is the very business of her life. she is a professor of forensic anthropology whose ability to read the clues and stories in human remains has made her a world—renowned investigator. so what does she see when she looks death in the face? sue black, a very warm welcome to hardtalk. how is it that you have found yourself engaging with death in a way that so few

of us can imagine? for many of us it is something we shy away from, something we find very difficult. and yet you confront it head—on. why do you think that is? i think it's because i don't confront it. it is not an adversary. it is somebody who walks with you your entire life. my grandmother came from a tiny village on the west coast called glenelg and she had, as a west coaster, one of those people who believed in second sight and the world beyond. for her, death was always her companion, someone she would talk with, someone she felt she knew. she passed that on to me as a child. she would talk to me, as a child, about her friend death. my maiden name was gunn and my name is susan margaret which is sm gunn, so i became known as submachine. and my father was known as a great shot. so from a very early age, i would be gutting rabbits

and plucking pheasants that my father had shot, because my mother wouldn't do it. that didn't faze me at all. so the physical reality of flesh, of dead bodies, albeit not human ones, was with you from an early age? then there was a time in your girlhood when you volunteered to work as a butcher's assistant. i did not volunteer. my father was a presbyterian scot and he asked me when i was 12 years old, what i was going to do for a job. i thought he meant a job when i was an adult, but what he really meant was what i was going to do now. he expected me to have a job because he expected me to pay half my income to my mother for my board and lodging. that was my responsibility as a child. i hope my children hear this. mine didn't do it either. my friend, susan, got me a job in a farm shop selling carrots and i hated it. so i went across the yard into the butcher shop and loved it. absolutely loved it. you have written an extraordinary

book about your life and career and you say "i was up to your elbows in muscle, bone, blood and viscera". you clearly, in a way, relished that. i loved it. if you go into a butcher shop, it is the most wonderfully clean and precise place. a butcher knows exactly where to place his blade to cut out a piece of meat. there is precision and art to it and and then he lays it out as something that i think is almost poetic. i knew that i was not going to be squeamish about things because...it is always cold in a butcher shop and we used to look forward to the vanscoming up from the abattoir, particularly on the days when liver was being delivered because the liver was always warm and your hands were always cold so you could warm your hands, and use the cow blood to get your own going. if you are going to do that, then you will never ever be squeamish. i think we are already getting a picture that you were quite an unusual girl. possibly.

my friends all had jobs in pharmacies and clothes shops and things like that. they thought it was a bit weird. you took your interest further and in your academic life you found yourself dissecting human bodies and that was a part of your training as a forensic anthropologist. you have written very interestingly about that and i would like to tease it out with you. you said that eventually anatomy imprints itself on your soul and when you have gone through this period of learning, of dissecting bodies and learning about the bone structure, the nervous system, everything, taking it apart and really feeling it, you say that you eventually consider yourself forever a member of a privileged elite. what do you mean by that? everybody interacts with the people around them on an external surface. you interact with somebody‘s face or body, their hands from the outside. we are given a rare,

rare opportunity to interact with people on the inside as well as on the outside. and when you make that first cut into human skin with a scalpel it is an incredible rubicon. you can never cross it again, the first time you make that cut. did you find that difficult? that first cut into a human body. i was terrified. i can remember my hands doing this and it is no accident that when you dissect you start on the chest because you don't know how deep to cut and there is a big bone sits under there so you cannot make too many mistakes. i realised by the time i had made the first cut... i had not caught my breath at all. i was so scared i would do something wrong and klaxons would sound somewhere and someone would call me a fraud and haul me out. and nothing happened. but what an amazing world when you can peel away the skin and you can see what is underneath and each one of those cells and tissue work together, pretty well in harmony every single day of our lives, to keep us alive.

it is nothing short of a miracle. let's get to what it means to be a forensic anthropologist. it seems to me that something really interestingly different about what you do from the pathologist who, we know, they look at the dead body and tries to figure out how it died, the process of death and what led to it. you are not so much about what led to the death, you are about the identity of the person who is now dead and you are using the remains, the corpse, to work backward and form a picture of the identity of that person. how important is it to you to see it as something in a positive sense? it is positive. what we have to do is we have to try and realign the dead body with the identity that person had while they were alive. if you can imagine a police investigation where you have a body and you do not know who that person is, then you do not know

which family to go and talk to, which friend, how to piece together the information that has led to that death. most of us will die in a hospital ora hospice, in our car, or we will carry something that tells you who we are. but when you are found without that information it is important. we cannot investigate a murder until we know who you are. you say you can't investigate a murder and earlier i called you an investigator. despite your science training and your skills in anatomy and forensics, do you see yourself at heart to be an investigator? only in terms of the evidence in front of us. we do not investigate the crime. that is the responsibility of the police. we will interrogate and investigate the evidence placed before us and the evidence may well be the human body. if you have somebody where body parts are found because of dismemberment, we will identify which is which body part, do they belong to the same person? that is the first investigation.

then we have to identify what implement may have been used to cut that body into pieces. was the body on its back or on its front when the limb was removed? was that a knife, a saw? these questions all lead you through the investigative process. when it comes to the court, we do not investigate there. that is the job of the lawyer. we do not find somebody guilty, that is the job of the jury. everyone in the process has an role to play and we just work with the evidence. it is a question of looking sometimes for the tiniest clues. if we go into some of the, to an outsider, extraordinarily difficult cases you have had to deal with. 1999 for example and you've been called in to go to kosovo to help with the investigation into alleged war crimes and you found yourself in a village where, allegedly, well, the evidence pointed to, a0 people including children had been gunned down and massacred in one particular place and by the time you got there,

what was left? they had been taken to an outhouse and they had been separated into two rooms and a gunman had stood at the door of each room and had sprayed the room with kalashnikov fire and their accomplices stood at the window,they had thrown in straw and petrol and they torched the building. so when we arrived there, probably about six or seven months later, what you had in the two rooms are co—mingled remains. very badly decomposed because you had 28, 30 degree heat. you had partially burnt remains, more or less covered by the tiles that have fallen from the roof and the wild roaming packs of dogs view this as a food source so the bodies will have been partly pulled apart and separated by the dogs as well. so that is what you find.

a boiling mass of maggots, partly buried, partly burnt and partly dispersed by animals. were you able to use your skills in identifying those individuals? some. what you have... we had this myth that dna solves everything. it often does not. you need a sample with which to compare that dna. we generally didn't for these individuals. what we would do is, we were in these white teletubby suits that make you look a lot fatter than even i am and you have black plastic wellie boots on and you have a face mask and you have double layer gloves in 28 degrees heat and you literally will go through the floor with your fingertips until you find the first bit of body or bone and you start to create the outline of that individual. you'll lift that individual. generally by this point, most of the soft tissue has gone so you are looking at bone and identifying that it is a male, what age, what potential height, is there anything about them

in terms of their dentition or a disease they had or a broken bone that they have had that might help their family identify them. are they still wearing some clothing? is there something in the pocket? you have described this as one of the greatest experiences of your life doing this and i am struggling to relate to that because it just sounds like a vision of hell to me. i can see why it would be a vision of hell and certainly i have never done anything on that sort of scale before. most of the work that i have done within the uk has been on single burials or a single murder. so the scale of it was an enormous education for me. but also knowing that this was going to an international criminal court meant that even in the most adverse of circumstances we still had to be able to work to the standards that were always expected, so the challenge was to make sure that our standards did not slip. do you see it as an act of humanity?

in the end we are talking about human beings who have, in the case of kosovo but in other crime scenes that you have worked on, human beings who have suffered from the most terrible crimes. from evil, if we can put that way. do you see yourself as restoring something? we have to be careful. when you are out there as a scientist you are expected to be objective. it is not yourjob to be emotional about it, it is not yourjob to be involved. you have no guilt, it is not your responsibility. you have a job to do. do you have anger? you can't, it is not your place. this is aboutjustice and justice will determine who is guilty, who is innocent. myjob is not to judge anybody, myjob is to gather evidence, analyse evidence, present evidence and let someone else decide on guilt. if you allow yourself to become emotionally involved in these

situations, you become a less effective objective scientist and you may well be called to court in the hague and you have to stand there with all clear conscience saying i believe this is my opinion, not i desperately want to get him and put away for the rest of his life. that is not ourjob. you need to fight against it.. if that is in you, you have to fight against it. going back to my point about humanity, has it coloured your view of what we human beings are really like and what we are really capable of? i think we have always known what the human is capable of. but what i find is that in these horrendous circumstances and they really are truly awful, there is always wonderful humanity. so you might have a widow who has lost her husband, her children, her entire family. and when you come along to exhumethe grave, she is still there with you offering a cup of tea. her way of expressing her thanks for what you are doing.

i have neverfound a horrendous situation in the world that has an absence of some humanity somewhere. and that is what you need to look for. that is what really reassures us of what humans are genuinely capable of. and you cannot concentrate on the negative. i wonder if you have ever been just overwhelmed by the scale of something that you have had to face. i'm thinking of the tsunami, for example, that many of us remember how awful it was to hear that news at the end of 2004, that this tsunami had destroyed so many coastal areas in asia, from sri lanka, thailand, indonesia, catching holidaymakers and local people and hundreds of thousands of people died. you were called, i think you decided to send yourself, even before you were called, you went to thailand to help the victim identification effort. it was so overwhelming. it was.

the country was not ready for it, and it was no disrespect to them at all that they couldn't cope with the enormity of the scale of the death. and what people were doing was they were collecting bodies and they were putting them on the back of flatbed trucks, and they were driving them into the cities and leaving these bodies at the temples. and of course, the temples weren't the right place for this at all, so all they could do was lay the bodies out in rows. and so in searing heat you would have these bodies that in front of you were rows upon rows, just decomposing in the heat, as you almost watch them, bloating to the point that the skin would break. and we had, as you can imagine, just flies everywhere, maggots everywhere, rats everywhere. it was really — if there was a hell on earth, it was those early days in thailand in particular. and it is nobody‘s fault, they simply weren't expecting that kind and magnitude of an incident. let me change tack a little bit

and talk to you about crime. and here we are at a festival devoted to literature, and crime fiction is a huge thing, and i know you have become friends with a fellow scot, val mcdermid, who is a great crime writer but she writes a lot in great detail about violent crime, and you have, i believe, offered her some advice. and i wonder whether sometimes you fear that you run the risk of feeding a somewhat voyeuristic tendency in us, to want to know about how to dismember a body, what happens to a body as it sort of erodes the time. we are sort of intrigued, we are repelled, but are you feeding of voyeurism in all of us? it is definitely there. there is no doubt that we all like a good murder mystery, because we feel comfortable, we feel secure, because it is remote. so we like to be slightly scared by crime. and if people are going to be scared

by crime, i would rather they be scared by true crime than by absolute and utter fictional crime that makes things totally unbelievable. so in your view it is important, if you are talking about how our body is to be dismembered, you think it is important to get the detail right of how difficult it is. absolutely, because so few people will become a dismemberer, ever. the chances that what i am doing is educating them is extremely slim. but those people who read forensic novels are probably more forensically aware than any part of the public has ever been before. and they can quickly smell out something that doesn't sound right. so what i have is a huge amount of respect for the crime writers who actually go away and research what is it really like, so that what they are doing is they are respecting their readers, to say this is reality. i have notjust made this up, this is actually how it would be. and i have respect for that. you have written a book which is full of extraordinary stories, and you describe so many countless experiences you have had with death.

but what you don't do, and i don't know whether you feel like doing it now, is share your own feelings about what happens after death. if, when you have looked at all of these dead bodies, it makes you more or less convinced that there is nothing else, or whether you believe, having seen so much death, there is an afterlife? i have no idea. but when i get there, i suspect i won't come back to tell you. and so, as far as i'm aware, no one has ever genuinely come back. now, i know that we have people who die in the operating theatre and are brought back by medical life, but there comes a point beyond which you don't come back. we don't have zombies. i have spent my entire life with the dead, and i have never seen a ghost in my life. you have never been spooked by... no, the living spook me.

the living are weird. the dead don't move. when you put them down, they stay there, and they don't get up and try and eat you. but you are being so coldly rational about it. but it is rational! so i had a lovely conversation before we came in here with patsy, and she told me, what we are worried about — what happened before we were born? no! well, why should we worry about the other end either? somebody switched on a light to give us life, and someone will switch it off at the end of the day, but why should we worry? well, let's not get into why should we worry, but ijust don't know whether it's possible for you to apply the same rationality and logic, for example, to your own loved ones. because we have all, in this room, experienced, probably most of us, if not all of us, experienced the death within our own families. and i just wonder whether, when you experience death within your own family, and i know you have lost both of your parents, whether your feelings upon viewing their dead bodies has been different from the feelings you took with you to kosovo or to thailand

or to those major police investigations you have worked on? my parents, bless them, gave me the opportunity to find out if i could answer that question. and so my mother died healthy to death within six weeks, and my father took a long time to die because of alzheimer's. and what was hard was their dying. their death wasn't hard. and then being dead wasn't hard. it was watching what they went through in the dying process. so, whether that was painful, whether it was protracted, whether they were somewhere that they never wanted to be. but when death came the both of them, it was an absolute and utter release, for them and everybody. and being dead, they were a lot smaller than they were in life. they looked very small, very shrunken, but they were gone, and there was something... but is that a metaphorical

thing, as well? do you feel... again, it is digging deep into difficult things, but when you saw your shrunken, dead father, did you feel that his soul... my father had gone. at that point, my father had gone. do you believe in the soul? that is, i guess, what i am getting at. i don't know, because something happen and something changed. i was there, i held his hand when he took his last breath in life, and i felt there was nothing more that i could do for him as a daughter than that. it was the most privileged place i could ever have been and it was such a gentle process for him that he decided he had had enough. he stopped drinking, he stopped eating, he turned his face to the wall and he decided he was going to die. and when he took that last breath, and the rattle that you hear when they talk about the death rattle is pretty much the fluid that goes into the lungs, that comes out with the last breath, then i knew he had gone.

and i had no trouble leaving my father's body, but i would never have left my father while he was still alive. in that last breath, something changed, but my father ceased to be, and the body that was left was not my father. it was just the vessel that he occupied for his entire life. my father had gone, he had died. is there something beyond? i don't know until they get there. but he changed. do you fear your own death? not at all. i think it is the last great adventure. you are going to do it once in a lifetime, and if you are going on a long journey, you will always prepare for that journey. why do we not prepare for dying? and i think i want to experience every single moment of it. i want to know what it is like to die. because i can't remember being born, so i would really like to know, in those last stages, this is what it feels like, this is what it sounds like, this is what it tastes like. and then presumably i will remember none of it, because i willjust die. and will you give your body

to science and dissection? absolutely, i would be a hypocrite if i didn't. so i have an organ donor card that they can use my organs to keep other people alive for as long as they are of use to anybody. i suspect by the time of 65 they are so far done that nobody is going to want them anyway. so i filled in my bequeathalform to my anatomy department, and i will hand my body to them when i die so that students can dissect. i want them to be able to gather together my bones, you have to boil them down to get rid of the fat and the muscle attached to it, and that i want them to restring me into an articulated skeleton so i can carry on living and teaching for the rest of my death. applause i've done a lot of interviews in my time, but i can't think of a more finite way of ending an interview, so i think we willjust say, sue black, it has been an enormous pleasure to have you on hardtalk. thank you very much indeed. hello.

tuesday brought significant contrast in weather conditions across the uk, with south—east england and east anglia once again having a dry and sunny day, with a top temperature of 31 in suffolk. north and west, there was a lot of cloud around, thanks to a weak weather front which brought low temperatures and patchy, light rain. if we look at the satellite picture, look at this cloud in the atlantic. this is a significant area of low pressure which is going to reach our shores by the end of the week and bring some of us significant rainfall. back to the here and now, and for the early hours of wednesday it is looking largely dry across the board.

one or two showers for western scotland. more of a breeze, too. elsewhere, dry and muggy in south and south—eastern parts of the country. then, on into wednesday, and i think generally on the whole it will be a dry and bright day for most of the uk. that sunshine up towards scotland, northern ireland, too. showers in the western isles and maybe the odd shower developing through the heat of the day across east anglia. you can see the orange colours extending further northwards and westwards, temperatures reaching the low 20s in the afternoon in scotland and northern ireland, high 20s for england and wales, with a few locations in the south—east seeing 30 or 31 degrees. into thursday, this is the peak of the heat. the heat will be spreading northwards and westwards. in fact, a good—looking day, with the odd shower developing in the afternoon from the heat in the day. more of a breeze in northern ireland and western scotland ahead of the area of low pressure as it makes inroads. notice the red and orange colours widely across england and wales. temperatures rage ranging from 32, 3a, maybe 35 somewhere in the south—east.

then the low pressure comes in, initially across western areas for northern ireland and western scotland, western parts of england and wales. and then ahead of it there will be heavy showers and thunderstorms developing, quite intense in the midlands, into northern and eastern england, perhaps with some hail mixed in as well. across the south—east, it is going to be another hot one, 33, maybe 3a celsius, turning cool and fresh further west. into the early hours of saturday, the rain, the thunderstorms, pushing on into the north sea, one or two showers following behind, but slightly cooler and fresher feel do things. and that's how the weekend is shaping up. cooler and fresher across—the—boa rd, largely dry with some good spells of sunshine, with the odd shower, and temperatures a little bit more comfortable than where they have been. this is newsday on the bbc.

i'm rico hizon in singapore. the headlines: hundreds missing, thousands homeless, as a dam collapses in southern laos. pakistan's general election gets underway in a few hours, but has the army already won? i'm babita sharma in london. also in the programme: 7a people confirmed dead in greece as wildfires rip through villages near the capital. and it is so clear how much damage areas. when you come through this town, lines up on loans, hundreds upon hundreds of cars completely destroyed. and, in the slums of mumbai, a transformation in mothers‘ health. india's success in saving the lives of pregnant women.