case with aljazeera. press freedoms worldwide have worsened since then. unfortunately i do not see an improvement since then. we know from organisations that track this, like the committee for the protection ofjournalists, that the number ofjournalists in prison if they highest it has been. demonstrably it is not getting better. we have to keep fighting each case and hope we can affect positive change. now it's time for a look at the weather. we have called front pushing the show for spurning some rain to scotla nd show for spurning some rain to scotland and northern ireland but the weakening all the while land by the weakening all the while land by the time it reaches northern england arejust a strip the time it reaches northern england are just a strip of cloud pushing into wales. cloud developing towards the bristol channel. clear skies are lowering the temperature to tip away, a chilly night with the temperature in the countryside down

to two or three. blustery in the north west of scotland but continuing to feed and a number of showers behind the cold front, not just showers but called a moving its way across the country. the temperature coming down a degree or two, still feeling bulky with the sunshine coming out if you're wrote of the brisk winds. when is continuing to drive showers down and a few sting into the irish sea to affect north—west england and the north of wales but otherwise lots of dry weather in england and wales. hello this is bbc news. the headlines: powerful aftershocks have continued to hit the indonesian island of sulawesi, following an earthquake and tsunami which killed hundreds of people yesterday. rescuers say hundreds more have been injured and dozens are still missing. theresa may arrives for the conservative conference in birmingham as the party apologises for a breach in security of the official conference app that revealed the contact details

of senior politicians. a warning from the business secretary that a no—deal brexit could jeopardise britain's status as a world leader in the car industry. facebook has reset tens of millions of accounts after discovering its worst ever security breach. it's not clear whether any profiles were misused or who was responsible. three men — including a police officer — have been seriously injured after they were attacked by two dogs in a garden in leeds. now it's time for witness. hello and welcome to witness.

in this programme we will hear from five witnesses about their involvement in extraordinary moments in 20th century history. we will hear one woman's recollection of operation market garden, the allies attempt to take holland using pa ratroopers at the end of the second world war. head to russia for a story about the soviet union's efforts to ban booze, find out about the murder of anti—apartheid campaigner steve biko, and hearfrom a former prisoner of war who built the bridge over the river kwai at the end of the second world war. but we start with an individual who created one of the world's most widely used fitness programmes, couch to 5k. in 1996 to get over a bad relationship break—up josh clark started running. after a few weeks, having caught the bug, he decided to create a plan to help get other people running and he put it on his website.

little did he know where it would take him. i had never had particular success with this. i always thought it was for someone else, but when i would go to a gym or try running, i was met with defeat. i guess that is not for me, i am not that kind of person. in my early 20s i had a bad break—up and in that moment i had a lot of excess energy and ijust started running. it was something i had never enjoyed and i didn't enjoy it then. i remember putting on my shoes and going out the door and instantly thinking, why am i doing this? after running for a few weeks the discomfort of it and the pain and the slowness all sort of faded away and i began to realise this was something that could actually

feel really good and rewarding. meditative even. part of what i created in that period was a schedule called couch to 5k which was intended to help people who had never gone running before to start running. one of the things i really wanted to do was basically figure out how do you avoid the painful dreary horrible ramp up that i went through, the idea that you have to go through a wall of discomfort in order to start running. i had a theory that maybe you could do it in a gentler way, a way that you could see some of those rewards of running much sooner. and so i wrote couch to 5k with that in mind, how do you gradually startjogging from zero and become a runner in nine weeks? but i had what turned out to be a really lucky instinct about how this stuff works,

but interval training, where basically you run for 60 seconds and then walk for 90 seconds, or as it turns out that is actually there is a lot of science behind that to show how that works for introducing new kind of stress and ability into the body. at the same time i was creating a website, so i was telling everybody. i was telling my friends, my family, strangers on the internet about how to run, the things i have learned about running and the benefits of it. but i have to say it wasn't until really the mid—2000s that suddenly the thing began to blow up. i created some community forums for this website and that started to grow people, so it wasn't necessarily the schedule that grew, it was the community that grew around the programme and that grew kind of outside of me. i think it continued to this

point there are many, many communities of couch to 5k around the world. i don't have hard numbers for how many people use couch to 5k, but i estimate it has to be into the millions or tens of millions from nearly every country. anybody can run. we do it all the time as kids. we used to run untiljust the point of exhaustion, laughing the whole time. you can recapture that spirit. that ability is within almost all of us. i'm still trying to get my wife and our daughter to be runners but i'm working on that. i am working on them. our next film takes us back to 191m and the second world war. the allies wanted to speed up the end of the conflict through operation market garden.

a paratroop drop into holland. the final objective was a bridge in arnhem where a young woman watched the parachute coming down. now in her 90s, she recalls those terrifying few days. it was to clear a corridor of a dutch river, over 1000 troop carriers and 500 others took part in this, the greatest airborne operation ever undertaken. it looked like falling stars or something. all black, the things in the air. altogether 4600 aircraft were involved in the action. altogether 10,000 men of the first british airborne division the red devils... we were excited of course. we thought we would be freed.

i was 19 years old when the germans invaded. it was a very difficult time in the netherlands. we hated them, from the moment we saw them. my brother was taken prisoner by the germans and they took him to germany. my father had to go away and the germans wanted to take him too. we had not much food any more. they took our home, or normal life was absolutely devastated. the allied plan was that the paras would take the bridges in arnhem and the second army would come and help them and so they would make another attack on germany from arnhem.

never before had troops landed openly so far behind enemy lines. never before had the they landed on this scale. we could hear the fighting, sometimes it was very near to us. you couldn't go out. there was too much shooting. thank god we had enough provision for six people. more in the cellar than upstairs i must say. we were so hopeful that we would be freed. we started to worry after three days already, some of the noise and shooting went far away. the second army failed to come over the river. everybody did their best but the germans fought like lions i must say. of the 10,000 men who landed more

than 7500 were taken prisoner or lost their lives. less than one quarter came back in safety over the river after nine of the most gallant and exhausting days of the war. after the fighting we had to leave the city and we didn't know where to go. we had to take what we had with this, because on the signs it says leave arnhem and if you are still there at four o'clock in the afternoon you will be shot. many years i was too busy to think about that. now i am living here all alone and there is more time to think. i put all these happenings in a little book for my grandchildren. my great—grandchildren. it is good that my family and children know how terrible it was, what we went through.

an extraordinary moment in history. after nelson mandela was jailed, a man called steve biko emerged as one of the key leaders in the anti—apartheid movement in south africa. in 1977 he was picked up by the police and thrown into jail. three weeks later he was dead. in this moving film his friend peterjones, who was arrested at the same time, back at the events surrounding his friends death. i miss my friend steve biko and i am forever in his debt. steve biko is one of the people that originated the new generation of young political minded black people. the black consciousness movement.

we believe that in our country, those people will have the same status before the law and they will have the same political rights before the law. the apartheid government ensured that there was no resistance against its doctrines and against its policies. there was a roadblock and they then searched the car. they found an identity document which was mine. they then said who is peterjones? i said that was me. they said oh, and who are you, big man? is that steve? he said, i am steve biko. we were locked up together in one cell. the next morning we started getting an uneasy feeling because there were now more police and in a convoy of three cars we sped towards port elizabeth. in port elizabeth was

the headquarters of the security police for that region. the building has been converted into a block of flats. steve biko was being brought to his death along this very corridor, and the man poised to fill the void left behind after mandela wasjailed. we were taken up to the fifth floor and we were manacled each to a separate window. one of the senior police, a major, came in and said, now i can confirm that you are officially being detained under section six of the terrorism act. that is the act in which you literally disappear. they separated us. i can only had a chance to shout steve's name and that was the last time i saw steve alive. three weeks and three days later i had just heard a lot of commotion.

many, many people singing protest songs, the cell next to mine was being filled with many people. then young men told me that they have just returned from the funeral of steve biko. and that was the first time i heard about the death of steve biko. i went to my mat that was my bed and i just sat there. with... to me it was like a huge hole in my soul, just an inconsolability which even today would make me weep at unexpected moments. the police said the leader

of the black consciousness movement had lost his life by accident when his head struck a wall when he was being restrained. steve biko's family believe he was thrown at the wall quite deliberately by the police officers. steve biko's death and the brutality of it highlighted like no other event at the time the extent to which the apartheid regime would go to protect itself. 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 1000 radio programmes. just go to the online archive. now, a former british prisoner of war describes how he survived sickness, starvation and brutality

as the japanese forced allied prisoners to build a railway bridge over the river kwai over the second world war. it looks like an ordinary bridge but the past makes it a symbol of the suffering of human heroism. the japanese wanted to build this railway through thailand up 700 miles to jungle, through rocks and we were the means. we left civilisation and entered another world, for almost four years as it turned out in the end. at that time they hated the people

that did that for them. in fact if you had a rifle you would have shot the lot. i was in place called tamacan where we built the bridge over the river kwai. we would be on these chanting, japanese up to ten. you would do that all the time then. wracked with malaria and dysentery, tropical ulcers and dying

of cholera, two starving prisoners dragged themselves each day from the camps to under the burning sun. if they flagged for a moment there would be guards, for many death was happy release. i had dirt, splinters from these in my leg. the scar started to break down. it would turn into a big ulcer. major arthur moon of the australian medics put me on a bamboo table and without anaesthetic he cut up my leg and he pulled out a great big tendon. and of course that saved my life. a man on the one next to me, he was covered with these ulcers, terrible he was.

he was delirious and he was full of maggots. i remember him dying next to me. i can see the flies coming out of his mouth then. the whole length was built in the incredible time of only 14 months. every mile of the railway cost 400 human lives. every fourth sleeper represents the death of a man. of the allied prisoners more than 16,000 died, but the asians no one knows for certain but the estimate is nearly 100,000 dead. you never give up because you want to survive, it was as simple as that. you always had in the back of your mind that sometime you would be free. for our final story we head to the soviet union in 1985.

worried about the effects of alcoholism the communist authorities brought down restrictions on the sale of alcohol. however within a few years the soviet economy had begun to fall apart. and so had the alcohol ban. witness talks to alexander sutko, a former communist advisor. there used to be just one image of the soviet worker and this was it. young, efficient and above all sober. but now there is another. other sleep and halfway to dipsomania. translation: a quarter of all workers would have a glass of vodka before going to work. this was widespread among our working class. the russians call alcohol the green snake and opening time the hour of the wolf. but the two together and the results can be disastrous. translation: i saw clearly that

in a country where a quarter of all workers are alcoholics this country survives by killing its own people. that was very clear to me. the state makes billions in alcohol tax as the state has ordered its people to sober up. translation: as someone who spoke to gorbachev often i can tell that he didn't understand what the ussr was about. of all the soviet freedoms, only one was always there. the freedom to drink. all russians love vodka. for years ambulances have patrolled city streets taking people to special drying out centres. but medical facilities

are now to be improved. the authorities say they will fight this ugly phenomenon in and remove it from soviet life. translation: as part of the campaign, alcohol sales were limited to the period from 2pm to 7pm. many wine shops were closed and most importantly only one bottle of vodka was sold per person. so if you had a birthday party you had to show your passport to prove that it was really your birthday. by about 1988, 1989, it became clear that the campaign was damaging. the soviet system simply collapsed.

millions of people lost theirjobs. in the soviet days, if a worker had a drink before going to work, at least there was some restraint on him in the workplace. with the collapse of the ussr there were no social structures any more and the alcoholic had nothing holding him back. gorbachev didn't understand that. that is all from witness this month here at the british library. we will be back next month with more first—hand accounts of extraordinary moments in history. but now, from me and the rest of the witness team, goodbye. hello, there. it has been quite

today but not in the mediterranean where we have had low pressure and a red weather warning in force across much of greece. torrential rain and we are seeing reports of severe flooding already and the rain will continue tonight throughout. but the weather has been quiet for most of us. weather has been quiet for most of us. we've had a lot of sunshine through the day though we do have a cold front, this streak of cloud continues to work southwards and the

front will continue to weaken into a lump of cloud. so quite a bit of cloud across central portions of the uk but in the south, with clear clive —— clear skies, down to two celsius in the coldest spots of the country. here is the week called front, the strip of cloud working through wales and central england. behind the cold front, the air turns cooler, temperatures down a few degrees and it will stay gusting across north—western parts of the country as well. brisk northwesterly winds bring showers into north and west of scotland. across england and wales, we start of cloudy and sunshine through the afternoon and in the south where we start of sunny, cloud will develop. the cardboard spread out across england and wales as we go through the day. monday, we've got a ridge of high

pressure into the north and west and for most of us it will be a chilly start the day again on monday at a fair bit of sunshine. through the afternoon, the cloud will thicken and we will start to see some rain getting into the western isles, the highlands, and the northern isles as well. temperatures, nine or 10 degrees in the north. further south, 15 degrees with some sunshine. cool but there is still strength in the september sun. in the week ahead, it will be pretty cloudy, rain at times across the north and west of the country. goodbye. this is bbc world news today. i'm samantha simmonds. our top stories: with nearly 400 people known to have died in one city alone, indonesia warns the death toll from friday's earthquake and tsunami could rise to thousands. rescue efforts are under way but emergency services have not yet reached the quake's epicentre at donggala, home to 300,000 people. china reports a surge

in the number of people infected with hiv and aids, up 14% in one year. 50 million facebook users have their accounts hacked — mark zuckerberg among them. how far does the breach go this time? hello and welcome to world news today. strong aftershocks have continued to hit the indonesian island