this is bbc world news, the headlines. america's political elite has paid tribute to us senator, john mccain, at a service in washington. former presidents, george w bush and barack obama, addressed the congregation. mr mccain's daughter, meghan, said they were mourning the passing of american greatness. far—right demonstrators have been marching through chemnitz, the german city which experienced an outbreak of xenophobic violence after the death of a german—cuban man blamed on immigrants. there were minor clashes between the protesters and left—wing counter—demonstrators. palestinian leaders have condemned america's decision to stop funding the un agency that helps palestinian refugees. a spokesman for president mahmoud abbas called the decision a flagrant assault against the palestinian people. the case of jailed british—iranian woman, nazanin zaghari—ratcliffe, is to be raised by a british minister, during a visit to tehran. nazanin is serving a five—year prison term after she was convicted of spying — charges she denies. at ten o'clock kate silverton

will be here with a full round up of the days news. first — human endeavour... most people remember alex zanardi as a formula 1 driver. he suffered a horrific crash and lost both of his legs but he took to hand cycling and made headlines in london and rio at the paralympics, he won two gold medals and became a superstar. when i had my accident,

somehow or another, alex zanardi rang me a couple of times, he'd been through something similar and gave me a bit of advice. now i know his story and what he went through and how he has coped with it, and what he's achieved, it's pretty impressive and when people ask me who motivated me, he is definitely one of those people. meet alex zanardi, a global superstar. from racing car to para—cycling champion, this man is always on a mission. today the veteran is on his way to meet britain's billy monger, fondly known in racing circles as billy whiz. this is a special day, it is their first meeting. there is my man. how are you doing. good to see you.

it's nice to finally meet you. sorry if i don't get up but i'm sure you understand my issue. i do, definitely. billy monger's talent was well— known even at primary school. at the age of nine he was featured on blue peter. how fast were you going? 55 miles per hour. 17 and a star of formula 4, he is tipped by many to be the next lewis hamilton. one of britain's most talented racing drivers was competing at donington park when he collided with a stationary car in front of him at 120 miles per hour. airlifted to the queens medical centre in nottingham, his lower legs were removed during surgery. teenager billy monger has driven a racing car for the first time since losing both his legs in a crash. well done yesterday. thank you, it was really cool. not only is billy back driving,

the 19—year—old sensation is competing in british formula three and returned to the podium, finishing third at spa this season. i saw that you are drinking out of your sockets. yes, this one. i will go and introduce myself. i'll introduce you to my sister. i am jennie. this is bonny. nice to meet you, i am alex. and i am jennie. i'm presenting and i'm delighted that we've finally got you to together. i have some of my coaches and i ask them to bring up a normal bicycle but with an electrical assisting model. maybe he could try to see where it is at all. mario is the boss, gianni is like his assistant. the wrong way around. i can tell that you haven't

worn one so long. you love exercising so much on the bicycle. let's go this way, thank you. i tried. it is possible to push. you get stuck in the middle, in between. what are your first impressions of meeting alex? he's a character, really positive, really engaging. just talking to him, you get the impression that he has already been through a lot and he knows the right sort of things to do and not to do. he is creeping back up. maybe it's a good idea while you are going down,

there is a vast section where i can maybe try to impress him a little bit. we are now going at 80 kilometres an hour. he is basically luging. running on a bit of adrenaline, i think so. it's different to racing but it's not, it's the same thing in a different way. you have met some pretty amazing people in your life, especially since the accident. lewis hamilton. lewis has been really good to me. i love the fact that so many people got in touch with me, people i didn't even know, people like

lewis who i never spoke to before. he was someone always looked up to. to get that support from them was really cool. and yes, alex isjust another one of those, the guys that i'm now looking to for motivation, to keep the pushing on. things are looking bleak for zanardi, who is fighting for his life in hospital in berlin. billy was only two years old when alex zanardi crashed 13 laps from the end of the american memorial kart race in germany. two years later alex returned to finish those 13 laps of that fateful race.

he continued on to become a successful touring car driver for bmw. i'd very much like to get the two of you to talk about your accidents with each other. do you remember losing consciousness? i was ui'icoi'iscious in the car about 45 minutes and then they realised how serious my injuries were and that was the point where they put me into an induced coma and i can't remember anything from that point onwards, to about three days into my time in hospital and by that point, the amputations had already happened in everything. but they just completed the amputations or you amputated at the hospital? i'm not too sure, they didn't

complete the amputations, but i think looking back on it, it was easy, the fact that i didn't have to make that decision for myself. it was a situation where i woke up and it happened, there was no going back. for me, it was much, much easier than having any part. i'm not a doctor. those guys, they know what is best for you. i feel very familiar in these words in the sense that it's been the same to me, although when i woke up, i felt i was full of drugs. so that was a big filter all the pain. when i was told by my wife what happened, she was very pragmatic and got straight to the point.

the feeling which emerged was joy. to have lost my legs and that moment was the last of my problems because i was so happy to be alive. to know the worst was already behind me was like, wow, so ijust told daniela listen, darling, it's ok, the doctors said i'm not dying and that is enough. i thought, if other people have done it, i can do it. it won't be easy but i can do it. since i'm an optimist, i also thought i can actually add a little bit more. and he did. former f1 driver alex zanardi claims gold on the 15th

anniversary of losing his legs in a crash. you wake up and they tell you the worst is behind you and from that point onwards, i very rarely thought about my accident afterwards. if anything, i was curious. there was on—board footage, i saw that. it was important to have a quick look at that city can push it under the carpet and forget about it. you never fully forget when an accident like that happens but in order to move forward, for me that's fine, i had to fully understand what i have been through. curious. i was curious to watch the footage of my accident. i was not afraid of it but i guess this is down to the way we are and you can't make sure what kind of reaction we have in particular

circumstances and i saw what happened to me, i would join the club of those saying wow, hats off to him, i would not be able to do what he does but it's not true because we are amazing, marvellous machines and sometimes we are capable of surprising ourselves with the reaction we didn't think we could bring in a particular circumstance, but we do. he is a very, very positive young man. the first thing was to work out how to use a clutch with his hand. if i was going to go through everything i had to go through, i didn't want to adjust my ambitions and dreams to assume what everyone wanted me to do. when i was just recovering, it didn't take me long to realise that is the way wanted to go.

i'm glad you can all be out here today. a big round of applause, everyone. when it comes to that rehabilitation process, it must hurt. you are smiling. it does hurt but every step is a step forward. you know that the following day will be better so you move on. actually, to a certain degree, the suffering gives you a right measure of the value of what you're doing. i remember during the course of my rehabilitation, i was starting to work with these strange things and i had to go to the toilet and ijust passed in front of the restaurant so i take advantage, so i went in and while i was doing my business i realised it was

the first time i was taking a leak standing since after the accident. i said, wow, this is a special moment. even before you start doing physio on the legs, i did a lot of training staff to build as much strength as i could because you are in a wheelchair and your wounds are recovering and you can't train in the way he wants to train. you can't start walking and getting better at it. until you've recovered yourself. i've been lucky my rehabilitation that i've been able to meet a lot of soldiers. they've been a big source of inspiration, not so much what they can do physically but of their mental attitude. when it came to the licence, tell me what you had to do. ignorance is what scares you the most. everybody was basically sure that if they allowed me to drive, i would have a big accident, hurting myself and possibly hurting other people is that they were just looking

for an excuse to say no, you can't. i lost my legs, not my head. but finally i passed every test and they gave me the green light and i got my licence. what alex did to get the perception of other people, to change, has helped me a lot, especially. when i asked the question of why i could not raise a single seat, they didn't have an answer. there are always going to be people who are concerned that you arejumping back into a car and you're not going to be safe, not just to yourself that other people so i had to prove that i was capable of driving the car in a safe manner and that i was able to get out of the car with a did have an incident,

so that if it was on fire or anything like that, i would be as safe as any of the other drivers and also making sure that the controls are viewed as safe from the fia, make sure they are up to a level that they were happy with. i bump into people who told me that life is a beautiful thing matter what. i bumped into this gentleman who had a coffee with and i did not ask why he was there. he was normal. and when he was holding his baby, his daughter, and the baby and he said "no, alex, i'm just very happy, that's why i am crying." i asked what he was talking about. he said "my baby was born with no legs and when i came here the first time, they told me that we had to wait until she was four days old before they could give her prosthetic legs," and so today was that day.

and the prosthetic technician asked "how about the shoes?" he said he was the happiest man in the planet because he bought his daughter her shoes that day. still, to this day, i think how can you not learn the lesson into something like this, right? how can you complain? this is the marvellous aspect of us all as individuals. we can't fly. we don't have the strength of some animals. we don't have the sense of some animals. but somehow with our intelligence we've been able to run this planet. we are all limited to different degrees. the fact that you are certificated as disabled because you have lost something does not stop you to do things in an alternative way and to display your talent if you think you have some, or if you think you have enough to get the job done. i think billy is a typical case of somebody very sure that he can

have a career in motor sports. and i've always been a big fan of him and now that i've met him, i'm even more convinced even more convinced it's a good idea to be a fan. the idea is to lie on this block. you are kind of ready to go. change gear. to downshift, you push to upshift. downshift, upshift. can you push your brother up? you've got it.

obviously this journey has been a journey for him over the past year, but also for you. it's never easy but when you see him out there smiling, it goes away for a while. when the accident happened, you were there that day and you went out to be with him? yes. mum was in a bit of a state so i was kind of the only one that was half with it that could go and keep him calm. that is a big responsibility, even just as a brother or sister. yeah, but it needed to be done, so i knew that... we — you — everyone who saw the footage knew it was bad. i had to deal with it in the moment and do what was best to him.

do you remember the first time that you saw him post—accident, after that day? yeah, when he wasjust in the hospital bed. not nice. but it was nice to know that he was still there. that's all that really mattered at that point. i bet your mum — this was not an easy thing to accept and to have gone through. she still does not like the racing but she knows that it makes him happy, so she let's him get on with it. as long as he's happy, she is happy. the first time that he got back into the car, after he got his licence, that could not have been comfortable for anyone. i was relieved to see him back. everyone was nervous. everyone had that. i'm sure billy had that. just to see his face when he was back in the car and to see him back in the environment was so nice after all the stuff he had been through. it was nice to see him back there. what do you think today has meant to him and to you?

i think it has been a long time coming to meet alex and just seeing them together is so funny, because i can see so many similarities in them, even nothing to do with the injury, it just them to talking about racing. a long journey ahead of for both of them, then. nothing will separate them, when you see them. when you see them on the motorcycles, they're just gone. you will always be linked by the fact that you've had these horrible life—changing injuries, yet neither of you just sat there and said that you will let this overtake you. you have bad days, but like you say, you need to not let it overtake you, to be honest. just meeting him and chatting with him and taking what i can from his experiences is enough to know that today was an awesome day. what he's been able to do isjust amazing to me — how fast and rapidly he has

been able to recover — mentally speaking, especially — from what has happened. it really let us imagine that the future is quite bright for this kid, and he isn't a surprise us all with these things. and i really wish him the best because i see a little bit of myself in his story and what he is going through at the moment. i really hope that he is going to be able to turn that into an opportunity and not to see this into the — "the" — opportunity. because this is also a dangerous aspect of being a superstarjust because something happened to you for which everybody tells you your special, the danger is also to end up thinking that that is your role in life. no. his role is to carry on, to do what he wants, to try to achieve what he loves,

and never be happy with it, because life is a beautiful thing, but we only have one opportunity. the clock is ticking, so you have to take every opportunity to add things to live. not being anxious to add, but when you can, why not? hello. the first day of september brought some time for many but not for all and it is a similar story for all and it is a similar story for the second day. sunday will bring a lot of dry weather but the brightest conditions will be found in the east, further west, more in the way of cloud and that is because weather fronts will try to push on from the atlantic, more of a breeze in the north—west. further east, you're closer to this area of high pressure and that is where we will see the best of the sunshine through sunday. quite a lot of sunshine for a east anglia and the selfies, a lwa ys a east anglia and the selfies, always more cloud further west, drizzle and more persistent rain in ireland. away from this north—west corner, just about everywhere, into

the 20s, the middle 20s, across the south—east. suddenly made into monday, this rain, this frontal system monday, this rain, this frontal syste m m oves monday, this rain, this frontal system moves south and east but behind that, there is cooler and fresher air working men, behind that, there is cooler and fresherairworking men, head behind that, there is cooler and fresher air working men, head of it, still in the warm air across the south—east corner, split fortunes on monday, affecting parts of scotland, north—east england, wales, the midlands, patchy rain and ahead of it, sunny spells and patchy cloud of still some warmth, behind the weather front, some sunny spells as well, but these temperatures really taking a tumble. the weather from will hang around as a move that of andy into tuesday. for the north—west of the uk, has high—pressure musing, mist and fog developing with light winds in place. during the day, any mist and fog that develop should tend to clear and we will see sunny spells, a lwa ys clear and we will see sunny spells, always more cloud from our weather from further south and in the

south—east corner, those temperatures will get lower. over the near continent there will be u nsettled the near continent there will be unsettled weather and there is a small chance that as we get into wednesday, a few showers copied into the south—east corner, a lot of uncertainty about that. most areas will be under the influence of an area of high pressure, early mist and fog which will tend to clear to give some spells of sunshine, a week weather front into the northwest. by this stage, very few spots into the 20s. high pressure is still with us moving out of wet and stay into thursday, any unsettled weather will move into the near continent and that should return to continental europe moving after these, thursday again, early mist and fog, then we will see some spells of sunshine, patchy cloud as well, but by this stage, the winds are coming down from the north—west, not particularly warm, 15—20d at best. what about further ahead, looking towards next week in, the jet stream

will be bending a long way north allowing high pressure to take charge, but i want you to look at this little piece of the jet stream. there is a chance tax weekend that this piece of the jet stream could break off michael completely and be left spinning here over scandinavia. what that would do is form an area of low pressure to the use of the uk at mile high pressure would still be in charge to the west, low pressure might come close enough to make things unsettled in the use pop when we get a weather setup like this, it tends to be high levels of uncertainty. mexican will be dry with sunshine and there is a chance of more unsettled weather in the east. what does the rest of september have in store, we will keep you posted. past presidents from both sides of the political divide pay tribute to the american senatorjohn mccain. it was an emotional memorial service, and one that also saw implicit criticism of president trump, who was not invited. america does not boast because it has no need to.

the america ofjohn mccain has no need to be made great again because america was always great. calls for a second referendum on brexit are dismissed out of hand by the prime minister, who says it would be a gross betrayal of our democracy. another day of disruption for passengers on northern rail networks, following an ongoing dispute over the role of guards on trains. and: eight wickets fall, to leave the fourth test between england and india finely poised.