president trump signs an executive order declaring a national emergency. it addresses what his administration says are threats to communication networks from some foreign companies. the us commerce department said it's adding huawei technologies to its so—called "entity list", which will make it much more difficult for the telecom giant to buy parts and components from us companies. the leaders of france and new zealand have launched an initiative to curb extremism and violence online following the christchurch killings. five of the world's biggest tech companies have already agreed to implement new measures. and this story is getting a lot of attention on bbc.com... two window cleaners have been rescued from a metal basket which was swinging out of control near the top of a 50—storey building in oklahoma. reports said the crane at the devon tower was unstable and the incident took place in high winds. that's all for now. stay with bbc news. now on bbc news, as part of mental

health awareness week, stephen sackur speaks to former arsenal and england footballer, tony adams, on hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. many of us, when we were kids, dreamed of being a professional footballer, a star of the world's most popular game with adulation and riches on tap. for a tiny few, the dream comes true but then reality bites. professional sport is a brutal business that can chew up young lives. my guest is tony adams, former arsenal and england footballer, who fought his own battles with addiction and mental illness and went on to help other top players do just the same. is elite sport is honest about the vulnerability of its stars?

tony adams, welcome to hardtalk. great to be here, mate. i want to begin by taking about yourself as a kid, a kid obsessed with football. i want to talk to you about, not the physical attributes that made you successful, but the mental side of yourself as a kid that gave you the strength to make it in foot all. as a kid that gave you the strength to make it in football. well, to be honest with you, it was my first escape. i didn't really deal with my thoughts and feelings asa kid. it was my first drug of choice, football. you know, i didn't really have to deal with any of the — oh the, ah, any of the stuff at school that normal kids go

through, you know. and i had panic attacks in the classroom and i always remember the book going round the class and sitting there kind of going, ugh, i couldn't put..i couldn't verbalise it at that stage. you didn't want to read? i was like frightened to death, you know. it was going through there and because i'm in such a mess i think i said ‘weally‘ instead of ‘really‘ and everybody laughed and everyone laughed at me. and that pain, you know. and normal people seemed to — normal kids seemed to deal with it. but i couldn't. it felt very uncomfortable and i ran to the football pitch. interesting. so you were not a happy kid in many ways and football and the football pitch was where you could find happiness, contentment, leave your troubles. correct. absolutely that. you know, there was another situation with a couple of girls, i'm about 14, 15, highlight you where i was at that time in my life. and i remember i was doing 100 headers on my head because i don't have to think and feel then, if you're doing 100 headers. one, two, three, four... and she went past, she went, "i want to go out with you." and i went, "ahh."

so i remember putting the ball down and we walked around the block. she kissed me on the corner and then she went, "i don't want to go out with you no more." and you're like ah! but what i did, i picked the ball back up and away i went again, you know. and football was the thing that i run away to. i had little reality, i didn't face anything as a kid. all my thoughts and feelings, we weren't a family that discussed it at dinner. your dad was a roofer. he was a tough guy who did a tough, physical job. i think he was that generation. and me mum, you know, she cooked for him. and they were together because he didn't knock about. and they were together because he didn't knock her about. in the east end of london, you know, the old woman was getting a good hiding, type of stuff, you know — it was the situation. and he didn't do that. and he went out and he worked and he got some money and my mum went "hallelujah, he's got the job. and he's kind of 0k." but thoughts and feelings was never discussed.

in my panic attack at school, they're not going to talk to me about that. what i did was put it in a box and buried it as deep as i could. i am just thinking about the arc of your life and we'll get to the football in a minute, but we know you have, more than most professional sportspeople, you have been very reflective about your upbringing, your background, everything that builds you up as a person that was going on in your head, notjust your physical prowess. and ijust wonder whether you can relate to something we heard in this studio from an australian writer recently, a guy called tim winton, who was writing about what he calls toxic masculinity. he said this to us, he said, "boys and men lead impoverished lives. they have such diminished access to language to express their strong feelings. ‘cause we all have strong feelings, but when you're boy they take away your licence to express them." can you relate to that? no, absolute. and he's very articulate man and he's expressed it probably better than i can. in my simple terms it was like i had the inability to speak to people to tell them how it was. it's all about thoughts and feelings for me. i was in an environment

where it was a weakness if you showed any signs of saying, oh, i'm feeling a bit vulnerable today, i'm not so good today. a football dressing room you simply cannot do that. you just can't do that. you've got a person waiting in the wings with the same set of skills as you waiting to take yourjob. just imagine you now, you've got another interviewer down the road, outside this studio going, "right, if you actually make a mess of this interview..." he's in and you're out. the pressure, there are certain pressures in all industries, but those are the ones where football, for instance, i agree with the guy, masculinity, you know, the kind of fight, fight, fight, never give in, these kind of tools, don't show weakness, you know. it is you or them, isn't it? so there you were as a 17—year—old, make your debut for arsenal. you proceeded then to play for two decades for the team you loved from childhood. and you also, of course, played for england for more

than 60 times. you know you were at the top of the tree. but through much of that you were, frankly, drinking your way through life. off the planet, yeah. in such a chaotic state. your marriage fell apart. you were doing things that ended up humiliating you, you ended up briefly in prison because you drank while driving. yeah. you were a mess. laughter. thank you! yeah, my drinking career and my football career ran with side—by—side. the first time i picked it up, i picked it up at 17, and i drank for effect. i never liked the taste — which is the insanity. if i drank brandy i would be sick straight up so i used to put it in the guinness to keep it down. i tried to be a good drinker, but i wasn't. i was a complete mess, as you said. at the start, iwas man, 17, 18, i9, 20, football was enough for me. it was just weekends. it was a progressive illness for me. saturday night into sunday. all of a sudden midweek, it creeps up over the years. certainly if i was injured or holidays, you know, off periods, i was absolutely smashed, because i didn't have football.

i was either drunk or i was playing football. how could you continue at the elite level of football doing that your body? there were a lot of heavy drinkers in the game which masked quite a lot of my behaviour. there was a period where we won the league in ‘91 and, weirdly, it coincided, i didn't win another league title until i sobered up. so from ‘91 until ‘96 when i sobered up i could get up for cup games, we won the european cup winners cup, but i couldn't do it over the course of the season. so it was having a physiological effect on me that was slowly dragging me down, alongside my football. and, you know, pretty much the year of ‘96 took that away from me. you've been very open about this over many years. he wrote a memoir when you left the game. you wrote a memoir when you left the game. and you've since written another book about sobering up and how life has taken you since football.

but, as times have changed, people have become more concerned about things like, this phrase, duty of care. and ijust wonder, when you reflect now, looking back at the way you were, the way arsenal football club was, the way the england management work, how could it be that coaches, managers, fellow professionals who were alongside you could allow this to continue? because they knew what you were doing, many of them, but theyjust turned a blind eye. well, not all of them, you know. there were some that, when you've got the illness you're either in denial — go away, i haven't got a problem — minimisation — i don't drink like him — orjustification, you know — you'd drink if you had a wife like me or a life like me. so that's the kind of three issues. and other people didn't understand. i didn't understand, so why would they understand? and there was a big, huge drinking culture in the game at that point as well. so a lot of it was normalised and accepted and it was pushed

towards certain coaches and staff, actually camaraderie, and the non—addicts, some of my teammates, you know, they bonded over it and stuff. i just stayed there for three days after. no question, you were not the only addict in the game. you are not the only addict in professional football or indeed other elite sports as well. but you did something which very few others have done. you confronted it. you were very honest about it. you wrote your own account of it. but, perhaps more importantly, you decided to do something else to help, to intervene, to help others who were in a similar place yourself. you set up this foundation, sporting chance. just tell me what you think is different about you that allowed you to confront it. there's a really interesting question. you're good at this. well, there's a guy outside ready to get myjob so i have to be. um, i don't know, i don't know why me. but thank god it was. alcohol give me a good hiding.

this illness of addiction — it took me down and destroyed my life. it took everything away from me. it's a great remover. and it destroyed me mentally until i got to the place where we talk about in recovery, the jumping off point. i didn't know how to kill myself, but i didn't know how to live. you know, i was at that kind of — ahhh — that point. and, thank the lord, i found a therapist and started going into therapy, i went to aa. and during this period of coming to, the first two years of my recovery, i was getting phone calls up and down the land from footballers and stuff saying, "tone, i'm in a real mess, i'm in a mess, help," kind of stuff. and i'm not a psychotherapist, i'm not a counsellor, i'm not an expert in the field. i've just got my set of experiences. so i was sharing them with them and i wasn't helping, i don't think. and i have got a set way that i got well, you know, through therapy, through i—to—i therapy,

through going to aa meetings. and i kind of said, well, first of all i was going to set up a foundation and put money into it and then pay for people to go through the other residential clinics out there. then i thought to myself, actually, is this working? do i have to treat it holistically? the physical side of the illness, do i need to address that? and my clinic does. we have 12 small therapies that run alongside... you have helped hundreds. thousands of professional sports people. we did 900 last year in 2018. and when you look at the younger footballers and others who are reaching out to sporting chance, you know, in their late teams and early 20s, is it still drink which is haunting them or is it other addictions? no, it has changed. it's changed. the levels, you kind of insinuated towards it earlier about alcohol,

you know, how was i able to play at such a level and drink alcohol? well, they can't today. the physical levels needed to play professional premier league football is huge. the physical demands also intense. exactly, so they can't drink. if they do, the off periods again or injury time is the time that they still do pick up. but if it's not drink so much what is it? it's gambling. the new kiddy on the block, the big one at the moment is gambling. they have all swapped their addiction. it's always been a little bit of porn as well, it kind of leans into it. they're all gaming. but 70% now, throughjust the charity, through the clinic, is gambling addicts. and they've really changed their drug of choice. let me get personal with you then. because your first memoir was very much about the crash and burn of addiction during your playing career. and you said the pitch was basically your escape, it was the place you could be free from all the troubles in your life. you no longer have that.

and it seems to me that if football was your addiction, to a certain extent, weaning yourself away from playing must have been incredibly hard. yeah, there's harder than the drink, to be honest with you. it's been part of my life since i was five years old, watching my dad over the hackney marshes. it's my life. if — i don't get drinking dreams today, i do get a few football dreams. you know, i think i'm still running across the park. it's a grieving process, like any loss. i gave up 17 years ago. i did choose to retire, which is very rare in our game. people go on maybe too long. do you have to say to yourself, as a footballer, i need to come to terms with the fact that the best years of my life, the biggest buzzes, the most adrenaline, the most glory and excitement i am ever going to have are between the ages of 18 and 33 and i will never live that best life again? do you have to say that yourself? i have got acceptance today. the average career is only 5—6 years, pfa figures.

it's not the 18—33. 99% dropout at 21. every boy that's signed at 16. 90% of epl clubs, 99 now it's gone up, dropout of the system by 21. there's this huge fallout. some of them never have careers. i was lucky enough that i did everything that i wanted to do. i got six years sober, two doubles when i was sober. it was easy, game, physically, mentally, emotionally. i get all that. do i say to myself? of course i would love to play football. the physical, emotional, andmental buzz that you get the physical, emotional, and mental buzz that you get from that i'm never gong to get again. thank you for reminding me. i'm 17 years without it. this is hardtalk and i've got to dig into these areas that are hard for you. post—football you went into management. it seems to me that decided football could still give you some of that buzz and you tried to manage in the uk with wycombe, with portsmouth, you went to azerbaijan, you went to china, you went all over the world looking for that management success, but it never really came.

no, i was only manager at a certain level. what i was doing in the last 17 was travelling, we having experiences, working in seven different countries in the last 17 years. and in all different departments of the football industry, sports direct, i was vice president of the chinese company. and i was just having experiences out there to find out what i was like, and what i did like, the coaching, the managing, all the differentjobs that go into football. and in some of them i went, yeah, i quite like that. i never get, like you said, i never get that physical buzz alongside it. i never get onto the green turf again. but coaching and managing, does get you, coaching in particular, gets you a little bit closer to the grass, which i quite like. i was struck in the book by your honesty about how you described when you were in china so far away from family and you had a breakdown. this is only two or three years ago.

you sobbed — and this is quoting from the book — "sobbed like a baby. i was beset by panic attacks, a bout of depression. i had never had it like this before and it came as a huge overwhelming shock. it was terrifying and i was paralysed." it was. and after 19 years without a drink, emotionally and mentally — you said i was lucky enough to have a life today and i thought i would be dead at 30 so this is all a bonus to me. but i was sitting there and thinking that i have the world, got a a peaceful head, loving heart and a wonderful family, beautiful everything and i was sitting there and the fun had gone out of life. i had stress with my stents, i had a couple of stents put in, a main artery, my main artery was 99% closed. i came this close to death without dying. and that trauma frightened the life out of me, and it came out about two years after when i was sitting in china.

because of the stress, the ptsd, whatever, post—traumatic stress disorder, because of the heart thing, two years later i was thinking i don't want to die. i have such a great life today and it put the fear of god into me. let me ask you — because you are more reflective, i think, than many footballers choose to be, notjust about the game but about life, i want to ask you about the state of your sport today. there are several things. one is the extreme amount of money that is in football today, particularly in the uk game because of the strength of the premier league. they have a tv deal worth over 9 billion pounds. you never had an agent but players today are earning up to £30,000 or £a00,000 a week and the agents involved in their transfers are pulling in tens of millions for each move. is money in your view, the different scale

of money, corroding football? the four richest men in football are agents, so it says a lot about the game. 50% of footballers within three years of retirement are still skint even though they earned that amount of money. and 50% of them get divorced which obviously takes half for a start. money is um... i think the gambling and i want to get into that because as i said earlier, they've changed their drug of choice and many of them... there's 36 gambling companies are attached to the clubs. gambling companies sponsor football in a big way. and because there is money around i think they have targeted footballers. you get percentages if you get more kids on board, more mentors and it is really a dangerous road that they going down.

they need to detach over the next three or four years and pull the sponsorship out of football. the gambling out of football. we have spoken about toxic masculinity and you spoke about dressing room codes where speaking from the heart was a difficult thing to do and showing vulnerability. let me ask you a simple but complex question in football, did you ever play alongside gay footballers? i think so. there are a couple. i did not...i never see people, my colleagues as black or white or what country they came from, i saw footballers. the point is that in the british game there has never been a footballer who felt able to come out while still playing professional football at the top level in england. i think we're close. do you? i think society has changed. there are many issues coming out there and i think we are, i think we are more accepting and it has happened in other sports and football is a little slower

to go in this respect and i think we are very close. another issue that is topical in the professional game today, is racism and the degree to which black players are for the first time are really, rather than keeping their heads down and bearing the abuse from the terraces, they say we can not and will not accept this anymore and after that international where the english players were abused in the montenegro there was real debate about whether players, frankly for their own mental health, should walk off the field rather than accept this sort of abuse. how do you feel? it is going back to, really, when i played, when i first started it was horrific. you had bananas, they used to throw carrots at me regular because i was known as the donkey and stuff. but a black player for arsenal, he had terrible abuse and so many black players in that era had been

abused but they were just programmed in a way to ignore it because there was nothing they could do. is something changing? it is a reflection of society. football does not stand outside it and they mirror it and i think we are tackling it in society. it has its element and individuals at times who have not covered themselves in glory but...and the same in football. it is a reflection of, and, listen, i do not condone any of it. it is up to the association, even like the gambling and stuff, it will fall back to the fa, the governing body and then probably governmental to step in in this situation to pull the players out of position of where they have to make those decisions. i understand what you are saying is that it is not a decision for players. but if you were the captain of arsenal today and playing in a big game and your black

teammates were being abused from the terraces and it was completely obvious and to you unacceptable, would you as captain say we are leaving the field? i wouldn't have a shadow of a doubt, if that was the necessary thing to do. it happened in our game and no—one stood up. and it kept happening. and it is not until these people take a line with it and say this is not on, you need to do things, something is wrong here, until you can get there, then i don't think you will ever change the situation. final thought, because we are out of time, but we spoke a lot about the state of football today and we also spoke about the way in which you had to navigate through an immensely pressurised existence as an elite footballer. you have sons of your own. after everything we have discussed would you say to your boys that if they have the talent they should go for it? that they should try to become professional footballers?

absolutely. it is fantastic. i had 22 unbelievable years. i would never ever discourage anybody. but the facts and the reality is that it is very, very hard because the education years for a footballer are the same as education in life and we are taking steps to make these players more aware of their thoughts and feelings. they've really turned it on its head. we are talking about it today, the issues you have brought up today about racism and gay and addiction and all this stuff is actually out there and people are talking about it. it was all shoved under the carpet in professional football. all shoved under the carpet and never spoken about. so we're getting some awareness around. the president of the fa, prince william, he is talking about it now and people are taking action. gambling needs to come out of football and people need to speak about these issues.

it is fantastic that we all are right now. tony adams, a pleasure having you on hardtalk. a pleasure, pal. hello there. the temperature hitjust shy of 26 celsius yesterday in highland scotland. it was warm for all but the 26 will be the highest in this current warm spell because temperatures and the heat are gradually going to ebb away. it will still be warm through the day ahead and feel pleasant enough but the high pressure that has been ruling the roost is drifting a little further north across scandinavia,

allowing more of an easterly breeze to pick up and it will drag in more cloud as well. the combination will lower our temperature. still through the night under the starry skies it has been chilly in some areas, could be some early morning mist and fog clear and see sea fret and sea hare in the north and a few showers potentially for the western side of scotland but perhaps later for northern ireland. for most, a dry bright warm day with hazy sunshine. we pick up a little more cloud filtering west across england and wales and a bit more of a breeze and those two together will knock the temperature down a little but still looking to reach 20 degrees in the warmth in the north and west but we will notice breeze of the north sea coast. the sun is just as strong be at 1a or 20 degrees. thursday and friday we started to pick up some rain. through the evening and overnight. initially light and patchy but through the day on friday it could turn heavy and it will blanket falling temperatures in the central and eastern areas. chilliest weather further

north under clear skies. friday looks like a cloudy day as you can see. there will be rain, thick clouds in give showery rain. making its way westwards and eventually to the eastern side of scotland so we will hold onto some sunshine in the western of scotland and northern ireland but temperatures again down another two or three degrees because not only were we have rain but the wind will be stronger still on friday. quite keen for the north sea coast. we lose the wind in the south as we go into the weekend but we do keep a cloud by then and with showers around and light winds they will be slow—moving. the devil is in the detail this weekend. the weather front will bring more persistent rain to the northern half of the country, particularly scotland and northern england, perhaps not reaching northern ireland, and then further south we lose the wind but we pick up slow—moving heavy showers. they are close to a centre of low pressure. by sunday that is almost gone

and we are just into this very slack wind regime that means we will not see much whether generally slow—moving heavy showers moving out mostly in the north as temperatures start to bounce back in the south. as always, more regional detail on our website.

welcome to newsday on the bbc. i'm rico hizon in singapore. the headlines: president trump declares a national emergency to stop us companies using any telecoms equipment from foreign companies seen as a threat. a call to action from new zealand and france to stamp out violence and extremism online. global tech giants promise to act. it is pleasing to see the statement from five major tech companies committing all of them to a set of individual actions