the venezuelan govenment says explosive drones were flown towards a military event attended by president maduro. shortly afterwards, the president broadcast to the nation to say he was well, and that neighbouring colombia's president was behind the attack. there has been no reponse so far from bogota. the former brazilian president, luiz lula da silva, has been nominated by his party to run in october's presidential elections, despite serving a jail sentence for corruption. he's currently leading most opinion polls in brazil, but it's uncertain whether the electoral court will allow him to stand. the us first lady has come out in support of the basketball star lebron james, a day after her husband, the president, questioned the nba player's intelligence on twitter. james had criticised mr trump, calling him "divisive". melania trump issued a statement saying he is doing good things for the next generation. two—thirds of plastic food containers which we put

in our recycling bins ends up being buried or burned, and that's because they can't be recycled. according to the local government association of england and wales, the combination of plastics used in many yoghurt pots and ready—meal trays can't properly be processed. matt cole has the story. plastic isn't meant to end up here, choking the seas and the life in it. but despite a growing public awareness of the need to recycle, councils say their efforts are being undermined by manufacturers. it's at sites like these across the country that the recycling process begins. mountains of rubbish needing separating into what can and can't be reused. now, when it comes to plastic, well, there are bottles like this, fairly easy to separate and recycle. but what about these? plastic fruit punnets containing mixed materials. that's not so easy. and then there's these. black plastic microwave trays. the sensors in recycling sorting machines can't detect the black, and as a consequence,

problems with things like this, that means two thirds of plastics just end up being thrown away. most ends up in landfill or is incinerated, but that's more expensive for councils and taxpayers. it's very confusing. i washed up black things for ages because i didn't want them hanging around smelling before i went and put them into recycling, and then heard that black was not — you know, you can't do it. to be honest, ijust look at it and go plastics going in there. and i think that's what a lot of people do. the choice of packaging to present their product is seen as crucial by some manufacturers. but now there are calls for change. black plastic cannot be recycled currently, and so we're saying that actually, black plastic should be banned completely and manufacturers should be made to use plastics that can be recycled. another solution could be to vary the current flat rate paid by manufacturers to help recycling costs, charging extra

for more difficult materials. i think what we need to do is drive designers and manufacturers and brand retailers to go towards those types of packs which are more easily recycled, because these ones yield secondary material which can be used again. the government acknowledges more work is needed, but says it is working with manufacturers to improve recycling rates. matt cole, bbc news. now on bbc news, it's time for talking books. hello, and welcome to talking books, with me, gavin esler. we're in london where it's no exaggeration to say, some 30 years ago, the food was pretty terrible. nowadays, it's home to plenty of michelin starred restaurants. one of those responsible for this transformation is the restauranteur

and author, rick stein. i'm going to meet him to find out how his love of simple ingredients and travel informs his writing and his cooking. in restaurant kitchens, everything's all prepped up before you start. this is a way of cooking fish which i really like, which is actually cooking it under the salamander. it's quite a sort of pure way of cooking. so there we go. rick stein, hello and welcome. you have, as i say, written a lot of books. do you find the act of writing quite difficult? because you did at first, didn't you, the very first one you did? yeah, my very first book was called english seafood cookery and i called myself richard stein, because "rick" sounded a bit racy, a bit american. was it difficult to write that one? yes, it was, because now i have people helping me cook recipes, so the books i do now, i work with a girl called portia, and we talk food all day long, we cook together and then i write up the recipes, but in those days,

i did everything myself, and the only way i could test the recipes, really, we used to have these literary lunches of seafood, which is when i had a load of recipes i'd just got down for the book and get, actually, the waiting staff in, to sort of try the recipes and see what they said. but it's also difficult because of the sort of discipline of writing. it took me about two years. as i then discovered, the only way to do it is to do a little bit each day, particularly when i did the autobiography, you just have to say i'm going to do 1,000 words a day and you end up doing 500. and the other thing i sort of realised after a while is it does not matter what you write down the first time. i always thinks it's a bit like plasterers, you come and you do the first coat and it looks rough because you know you're going to come back and do the second one. and that, to my way of thinking, that's the way to do it. because, once you've got it down on paper, it sort of assumes a life

of its own. and i think half the thing about writing is just thinking this is no good. my thoughts are just crazy. but what actually — the first book i did, the cookery book, it won a prize, it won a food prize — it was the glenfiddich award at the time — and i couldn't believe that i won a prize for it because itjust never occurred to me that a) anybody would be interested about a small fish restaurant in padstow, and b) anybody would be interested in me, and c) i couldn't write anyway. i think what i learnt then was that, of course they'd be interested, because the next generation's coming on, and you are endlessly, the industry, the literature, and books and everything, notjust books, but film, always needs younger people coming up. and that's what i didn't get at the time. i thought, "why me?" and i'm sure a lot of young people feel the same way. your autobiography, under a mackerel sky, you better explain the title first. well, i didn't come up with it.

it was actually someone at ebury books, one of the editors, but i thought it was such a good one because, when my father died, and i left england rather hurriedly, i was walking out of a pub in notting hill gate, and there was a mackerel sky and i put it in the book, and a mackerel sky is a sign of sort of big change ahead, which indeed was the case for me. i didn't name it that, but it's just the best name as far as i'm concerned, because obviously a lot of it is about my life as a seafood cook, so it worked a treat. the thing that really struck me about your book was how rootless you were at first. you just didn't really know who you were. there's a great quote right at the start from james thurber, "all men should strive to learn before they die what they're running from and to, and why." i love james thurber, and those fables. the book was called further fables of our time, itjust has these little bits...

i think a lot of comedians are highly intelligent and highly thoughtful people and, obviously, he was a great writer. but really it is, and i think life is a bit of a quest to find out who you are, and what you're doing and why. and i think, certainly in my case, because i had quite an upsetting experience when my father committed suicide, when i was 17, 18, i sort of feel i've been on the run ever since. if something like that happens in your family, you are a bit apt to go off the rails, but also work a bit harder than anybody else to try and prove you are somebody because it's such a sot of confidence zapper, i think. maybe we could get a reading from you of the start of the book, or when you're talking about... in many ways it was a happy childhood, quite a privileged childhood, in fact, but you write very movingly. and perhaps you could read a little

bit of how your mother protected you from some of the things that were going on. yeah. "my mother spent much of my childhood trying to hide the worst from me..." this was about my father's illness. "i merely knew that my father was someone that i was scared of. most of the time, i was uneasy in his presence. years later i did a television programme on manic depression with stephen fry. stephen, who is himself bipolar, said in that programme, that in his depressive stage, he felt completely useless. i think that's how my father must have felt. most of my life, i've had to fight against a creeping conviction that i might be completely useless too. and at such times, i can understand that my father wouldn't have wanted me to be like him. but the result was that he could be very tough on me." that's taken quite a lot of time to work through. also, my mother was very good after my father's death about it. when you think of somebody being incredibly low, you just think, i am so ordinary, such a complete non—person,

i don't want my darling son to be like me. nowadays, we are more familiar with — some of the taboos have been broken about talking about mental illness. it certainly was not true when you were a child. was that difficult to write? i suppose not because he's dead. i've been very lucky that all my family have been very supportive, my brothers and my sister, in me saying things like that because i think they all feel the same way about it. he's dead, my mother's dead, and i think it's — i've never felt that i shouldn't say because everybody, there is probably not a family in this world that hasn't got some skeleton in the cupboard, but something that they'd rather people not know about, but i think it's important that the people do know about it, that we all suffer,

in some way, somebody with mental illness, probably. i'm sort of writing about life, not writing about specific circumstances. you go through some of the jobs you did, really menialjobs. you were sweeping up, literally sweeping up, onion, then there's another passage perhaps you could read too of how you found out what had happened to your father and, again, this is very, very moving. i suppose, ijust — at the time, i wanted to experience what it was like doing quite sort of tough and boring manual labour. i'd been reading a lot of hemingway at the time i think. all the time i was that age, i was pitying myself, saying, how would i cope in this or that situation? "i was sweeping the road outside the natural history museum, when my flatmate tim drove up in his land rover. ‘i think you should get in‘, he said in a tight voice. he then told me that my father had died. i often think i have no memory for detail, but i can remember every colour, every hue of that moment.

the greyness of the sky, the blue—green of the land rover, the darker green of its seats, the coat i was wearing, a brown raincoat, short and, i thought, italian—looking, which i had worn with such swagger at school with the blue scarf, which meant i'd been awarded my colours for rugby. the coat was showing its age and i had tied it round with a bit of parcel twine to keep out the wind on london's streets." that's quite not a bad bit of writing, is it? basically, i was just thinking, if somebody was to analyse that, and basically what i'm doing is using the slight patheticness of me to outline how i actually felt underneath. you discovered that your father had jumped off a cliff, and then, in a curious way, did that liberate you to go off and do the hemingway thing, be the macho guy, going off to australia? i suppose in some sense it liberated me, yes. but — i was awfully confused.

i still think, even at my age now, that was the making of me and partly because i did it on my own. if you're on your own, then there's a lot of times when you're going to feel incredibly lonely, but there are also times when you so crave, as a result of the loneliness and the craving to find other people, that you do make lots of friends. sometimes that didn't work out too well but other times, it really did. i think as a right of passage, it's not a bad one to be able to cope as a 19—year—old and realise you can. as you can see, i'm the clumsiest cook known to man, which i think is why some people quite like me cooking because i'm sort of more like them. you're relatable. yeah. this is what chefs do, right, that's coriander, but rather than chop it like you or i would, they slice it neatly. half the time, i say i don't want that, it looks too bloody smart. there's a lovely passage again,

in this book, in which you say, "all the cooking i've ever done since is, in some way, an attempt to recapture some of the flavours of the cooking at home when i was a boy. pollock fish cakes, dazzling fresh mackerel, just put under the grill with a sprig of fennel, are the best i've ever eaten." i mean, throughout your books, it's simple food simply done, but in a way which is elaborate in the taste. is that a fair kind of summary? it is. i just think that for so many people, if you've had a nice childhood, it is recreating childhood memories in so many things that you do, in my case with food. that's why i've always tried to keep everything i do, fish cooking, simple. a) because my mother cooked things simple and i've always been quite supportive of british cuisine, even when everybody thought it was the worst in the world. i was doing some filming in france

once — this is about ten years ago — and this girl said, "you eat a lot of boiled meats in england, don't you?" isaid, "no!" but i think it's sort of, really it's about simple cooking of really excellent ingredients. that's basically what i have done all my life. one of the interesting things you also say in your autobiography is, your mother was a great cook, but, for instance, you write about making bouillabaise and how hard it was to get the ingredients, you say, "the olive oil perhaps from the chemist. is that where you got it? yes. everybody of my generation, the only way you could get was to unblock your airwaves. —— years. no wonder the french thought we ate boiled meat. hake is a fish if you go to western europe, france or spain, you eat a lot of it.

in the uk we catch it but we sell it abroad. i always get a bit amused, because a lot of cornish people think the spanish have got all of our hake quota and nicking our hake, especially around cornwall, there is lots there, especially in the irish sea. we don't eat it anyway, so don't be so dog in the manger about it! it's extraordinary to me. it's a member of the cod family and very much like cod, a bit softer than cod but it comes in nice, thick steaks. if anything i think it's a bit tastier than cod. for the spanish it's their favourite fish. we are very conservative in our taste. need somebody to come along and change it. one of the things — you say this repeatedly in a number of your books — the test is, would i cook this at home? and i think that is why people like your books. because it's not "please stir this risotto for the next 25 minutes." it's something that we would actually do. and the tips are just as important as the recipes. that's very nice of you to say that. i think it is absolutely right, because sometimes when you look

at cookery books you think, christ, who's going to bother with that, you know? and that was very much the case in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and a lot of chefs came along with tremendous reputations and just put the recipes they used in their kitchens in books, you know? fortunately everybody has become a lot, you know, the processes have become a lot more simple, because half the time nobody would cook them anyway. most kitchens have got every stock known to man in the fridge, and everything all prepped up, so you've got onions, tomatoes, everything chopped up and ready to go. you want to think of a new recipe, you just get it out of the fridge and off you go. i love those sort of books where it's like "meals in ten and a half minutes." you think, for whom? yes, exactly. you also wrote "i sort of liked cooking and i sort of didn't." what was the "didn't" bit? i didn't really like the hours.

i never did. you know, i had my sister who lived in london, in my main years that i was cooking, and much of the time there was only two or three other people in the kitchen. iwas thinking, god, you know, she lives in islington, and there were parties every weekend, and i was always stuck in the kitchen. that's what i didn't like. my older sisterjaney, who sadly died in the mid—1980s, she said to me, when i would be saying to her it was so boring to spend every winter in padstow, she said, there's no substitute for really good fresh fish and people will end up beating a path to your door. and they did. the other thing that runs through your book and your career is your love of cornwall. you are really rooted in that place. every time i come down the hill into padstow and look across the estuary i think, "this is where i want to be." i think it is very human that as much as i believe i would love

to spend all my life there, i would get bored. but as a place to spend most of my childhood and most of my adult life, it's just my spiritual home, really. it's very difficult to sort of put your finger on what's so special about it. i suppose it's always because it's this peninsula jutting out into the atlantic, it's a bit cut off from the rest of the world and we all like to think of it as being cut off. we like this idea that you keep still bumping into cornish people who have never been across the tamar, the river that separates cornwall from devon. i mean, that's really good. it's lovely, in this sort of mad world that people still feel so rooted in such a place. and the fact that although i have lived there for over a0 years, i will never be considered a local. you know, no chance of that. did you find the business side of it quite tricky?

because there is a lot of, you know, those people who love to create in the kitchen, and then actually making the finances add up and being able to pay your way is a different skill, isn't it? i think i was sort of lucky, because i originally opened the building, the seafood restaurant, as a nightclub. i bought it with a friend of mine, my best friend johnny, off a guy who had been running it as a nightclub. a nightclub in padstow, i might have said this in the book, is like an opera house in the middle of the amazon. certainly in the ‘705. we were a couple of nice boys in our early 20s, we couldn't run it properly and it was closed down, really, because it was declared an unruly house or something like that and the police took away our licenses, the booze licence. i was faced with imminent bankruptcy and the restaurant was the only thing i could do and my fear at the time was of going bust again. we didn't go bust because my mother and his mother bailed us out. but it is a salutary lesson, for anybody who has gone bankrupt, it's such a terrible thing to happen to you.

i thought, i am never going to let that happen again. so i have always been first and foremost about making profit and that has always stuck with me. i am not particularly good at figures but i know that if you keep piling lobster on a plate for your customerjust because you like your customer, it's not going to happen. how have our tastes changed? the french person who said we all eat boiled meat, and over—boiled cabbage is the other thing, they have certainly changed. that is why when you write books about mexico and india and travelling in europe, they sell, because of what the british are more open to now.

yes, it is really down to a mix, i think, of obviously much cheaper travel and available travel, but also a rise in, sort of — i would put it, for want of another word, leisurejournalism. when i started cooking in the late ‘70s there were not many restaurants in the uk, and not many journalists writing about food. and all activities, whether it is what you are doing in your home or whatever, has become part of everybody‘s life. and everybody likes to cook. what i always find extraordinary is, why wouldn't anybody like to cook? it's what we have to do every day. everybody likes sex, why wouldn't we like food too? it's bleeding obvious. let me take you up on that. do you sometimes wonder whether the more cookery programmes there are, the more books written about cookery, the less we actually cook, because we're spending all our time watching you on tv and

ordering takeaway pizza? ithink... i mean, i know it's a question, but you are actually stating something which i think is fairly true. that is a problem. but there are certainly more people cooking now. one of the problems is, it is a bit like being a teacher, you have to keep one step ahead of your students. but i think that's great. people are so, sort of, when you talk to people who are really into cooking, it's a lovely thing. also, my second or third book came out, i first did the penguin one, when the second one came out, i remember a guy coming up to me in a restaurant, in the conservatory at the front of the restaurant, saying it changed his life. he said, "i would have never thought of cooking before." he saw my first series and he said he loved cooking now. i think for me that was a tremendous gratification, that a lot of men started thinking it was ok to cook. you do say in one of your books that recipes are also designed to use

brought—in products, from mayonnaise to chilli sauce. has your view of that changed, how you make stuff? it has, really, because when i first did the first book, it was harder to get things. but i remember in the very first book i did a lengthy recipe for making your own puff pastry. and when i finally had to sort of write, "you can actually get really good puff pastry in the supermarket," i thought, i don't really want to be saying this. it wasn'tjust me. i remember delia smith doing a book about cutting corners and buying things, and i think it'sjust that we've all changed. in the early days you had to make everything yourself but now, you know, because the supply of good quality — notjust fresh produce, but things like stocks and sauces — is so advanced and it's so easy to get good sauces, so why not bring

them into a good recipe? do you have a sense of mission about these books? i'm afraid so! you're an evangelist? iam. i think if you care for something you end up being a bit of an evangelist anyway, because you're just saying, "why can't they see this?" do you sometimes think, looking back at your books, tv presenting, the business that you run, all the people that you give work to, all the other people you give pleasure to for your books, we're sitting here by the river thames, on a beautiful day, the rootless kid who didn't really know what he was doing and was sweeping the streets — you have come quite a long way. yeah, i suppose so. but i sort of... i think the problem is that you sort of think somebody‘s going to find you out. you're a bluffer, really? yeah, in some curious way. on that happy note, i think we will leave it. rick stein, thank you very much.

it has been really nice, gavin. it's really nice being interviewed by somebody who knows how to do it properly. look at that. i'd be happy to eat that. hello. if you had the sunshine on saturday, there is more to come on sunday. like saturday, though, there will be more cloud once again across northern ireland and scotland and, at times, more on that in a moment. some patchy rain for a time across the western start of scotland. some

bright sunny spells the northern ireland even though there is a lot of cloud. but the lion's share of sunshine once again across england and wales. some fairweather cloud developing through the day. highs of 15 to 19 celsius for scotland. 21 for northern ireland. mid to high 20s celsius for much of england and wales, and getting close to 30 celsius for east anglia and south—east england. for many, it is a fine evening to come on sunday, with late spells of sunshine and clear skies overnight. but further north and west, i'm sure you can see, the cloud increasing, outbreaks of rain coming into scotland, northern ireland and slowly sinking its way south and eastwards. temperatures a little higher than they will have been on sunday night. 13 to 17 celsius the overnight low on monday morning. so this is how we start the new working week, holding on to high pressure. the heat and the sunshine across much of england and wales. further north and west that front really starting to make inroads, increasing the cloud and bringing further rain through monday morning across northern ireland and into scotland. behind that, you can see there is some fresher air trying to sink its way south—eastwards. but it is going to take its time to get across to much of england and wales, probably not until wednesday or thursday that we start to see a noticeable dip in temperature. for monday morning in

a little bit more detail — further cloud and rain for northern ireland and scotland. some of that rain just perhaps getting into the far north of england through monday morning. but elsewhere, further south, it's going to stay dry and again, there will be plenty of sunshine. in fact, temperatures even higher again on monday, parts of east anglia and south—east england exceeding 30 celsius. notice the contrast as you head further north and west, the high teens to early 20 celsius so quite some contrast. that theme continues really for scotla nd, northern ireland, and the far north of england. it will be cooler here. there will be some showery rain at times through tuesday and wednesday but many places largely dry, particularly across northern england. head further south and east and, yes, we are hanging good morning — welcome to breakfast with tina daheley and victoria fritz. 0ur headlines today: adults in england will automatically become organ donors unless they opt out, under plans unveiled today. the government says it could save 700 lives a year. police investigating

the disappearance of a midwife from staffordshire find a body and arrest three people. more than 700 firefighters battle a major wildfire in portugal, as southern europe continues to swelter in near record temperatures. against all the odds, ireland are into the hockey world cup final after beating spain on penalties.