this is bbc news, the headlines: campaigners in hong kong are promising to continue — after a week of mass protests forced the government to suspend a bill allowing extraditions to mainland china. the government had argued the proposed bill would plug legal loopholes and prevent the city becoming a safe haven for overseas criminals. saudi arabia blames iran for the attacks on two tankers in the gulf and says it's prepared this is bbc news — i'm reged ahmad. our top stories: campaigners in hong kong promise to continue demonstrations — after a week of mass protests force to defend its interests. the government to suspend a bill allowing extraditions to china. nazanin zaghari—ratcliffe, the british—iranian woman being held in prison in iran, has started a hunger strike to demand her unconditional release. three years ago she was arersted and subsequently sentenced to five saudi arabia blames iran for the attacks on two tankers in the gulf and says it's prepared years in prison for allegedly trying to defend its interests. to topple the iranian government — a charge she denies. the british—iranian mother jailed in iran for alleged spying, begins a new hunger strike in protest at her imprisonment.

almost 600 more homes have been evacuated due to serious a holy mass in hard hats — flooding at wainfleet a roman catholic service is held at notre dame cathedral in paris for the first time since a devastating fire. and the worlds of film and opera pay tribute to franco zeffirelli — one the 20th century‘s most creative in lincolnshire. two months of rain has fallen there in just two days. the raf was deployed, after fears that repairs to banks of the river steeping were giving way. from wainfleet, luxmy gopal sent this report. from the air, you can see the vast extent of the flood waters, the river steeping swollen after two months of rain fell in two days. more flooding is expected, and around 600 homes have been evacuated. this is the second time rebecca and jodie have had to move. you've got where all the electrics have to dry out, because you can't put them back on. so it is finding the emergency accommodation that you are going to be setting basically a new home

up, when you know your home's underwater. and it's so hard. sorry. the environment agency says the river could breach at points where its flood defences are vulnerable. an raf chinook has returned today to help shore up the bank. it's this stretch of the river steeping that's expected to burst its banks, and that's why the raf chinook behind me has been flying back and forth with bags of sand and gravel to try to plug any breach. volunteers have travelled for miles to help the flood—defence operations. been out for the past three days, we've just had to rescue a 97—year—old lady. as i say, we'rejust dropping sand bags off, rescuing people, knocking on the door, making sure we can... dropping sandbags, just basically helping people, doing what we can do. emergency crews will continue to monitor the river levels, but for now residents don't know when they or their families, four—legged or otherwise, will be able to return home. luxmy gopal, bbc news, wainfleet. now on bbc news, talking books.

internationally acclaimed writer fatima bhutto talks to george alagiah about how politics, family tragedy and intrigue have helped shaped her writing. hello and welcome to talking books at hay festival in wales. every year the festival brings together writers, policymakers, thinkers and artists, all of them to stimulate debate. today i will be talking to fatima bhutto. she is no stranger to conflict and controversy coming as she does from a high—profile political dynasty in pakistan. her latest book the runaways follows the story of three young people and asks why each of them from very

different backgrounds ends up joining the jihadi cause. the thing aboutjournalism, where ever you do it, is that you can do the how it happened, when it happened, who did it, if you like, there is cctv cameras, all of that, but there is one question thatjournalists find much more difficult and that is the why. and i am happy to say that my guest today, fatima bhutto, that is a question she has tried to answer in her latest book, the runaways. it follows a number of young people who come from very different backgrounds but all of them end up in the same place, associated

with thejihadi cause if i can put it that way. and in the runaways, fatima explores what happens, what goes on in their minds, what drives them towards this thing, so, fatima, welcome. thank you. there are a number of characters, from very different backgrounds, i wonder if you will talk a little about them and introduce them to us. the ones you meet immediately in the book are sonny, who is born to an indian origin family, but grows up in portsmouth, and his father left lucknow to give his son a better life in england and sonny doesn't quite see it as a better life, he doesn't really belong in portsmouth and he is constantly being made to feel as though he belongs somewhere else, he just doesn't know where that place might be.

and there is monty who lives in karachi in pakistan, in my city, and monty's father is an industrialist, his parents are incredibly wealthy, he goes to an american school, he lives in the best neighbourhood and he has no real reason to question the world around him and all his privilege until he meets a young woman in his last year of school. and then there is anita rose who also lives in karachi but on the other side of the city and she lives in one of the largest slum settlements in karachi and her mother is a single mother, she is someone who goes around the houses of rich women to massage their very tired bodies, and anita is cut out of her city. she is cast out of the periphery and so those are the three main characters but as the story progresses, others come along with them.

you have rich, poor, east, west. i am interested in sonny because he is from portsmouth and that is where i went to school. i wonder if you willjust read, there is a passage there that describes portsmouth and what it is that sonny is running away from. yes. sonny went for long walks circling portsmouth, trying to find refuge in what appeared to him to be only a wasteland. a town of forgotten people. why hadn't he passed it in india with his own people? why hadn't he stayed with that friend of his who sonny had to hear about all the time, instead of coming here where there were nobodies? sonny walked everywhere. kilometres along the muddy southsea seafront, around the modern glass university buildings, betrayed by the shabbiness of their designs and even around fratton park where the islamic

looking pump a flag, star and crescent moon was posted confidently from every window pane and shop. after a home game, the streets around the stadium were littered with greasy tissues dropped from burger trucks and cans of 1664 lager spilled out of the bins like teenage bedroom drawers stuffed too quickly and shut. cops in bright yellow fluoro vests walked behind the closed streets. the clip clop of their horses not far behind. men with potbellies and closely cropped, salt—and—pepper hair, aquamarine tattoos, fuzzy and out of focus, the ink bleeding

on their sun—grizzled skin leaned into you as you walked by, " extra tickets? " they both solicited and offered. "extra tickets?" sonny dug his hands into his jacket pocket and kept his eyes on the tarmac. the tingling at the back of his throat itching for a fight and the anxiety in his chest desperate to avoid it. how long must a man walk through this city with no armour? his body was a naked wound in those days and his heart beat ferociously beneath his breast,

so aware was he of being unprotected, so alone and so afraid. on the kerb, yellow and orange clumps of vomit clung to the grass. thank you. apologies to portsmouth. that is after a football game if it helps. this is interesting because you have got apparently young men who are english in lots and lots of ways, playing cricket and yet they feel alienated and sonny is one of those. he is in the place but he is not of the place. how has that happened? it happens everywhere. it happens in the dehumanising way we treat anyone who seems foreign or other. there was a story in the new york times just a while back about a lot of these young women and children who are left in these camps in syria and the headline was, is an isis child a child ora time bomb? how can a child to be a time bomb? it feels increasingly that it is only muslim children that can be described as time bombs or it might be brown bodies or... this is sonny himself who is telling himself that he does not really belong, isn't it, rather than

they were saying to sonny, you are an outsider. there is quite a bit of that before, so sonny is born in britain, he is educated in britain and he feels british but he is constantly being reminded and lectured of what it means to be british as though he might not know. and on the one hand his father, who has migrated over, is desperate to fit in and wants very much to be a part of the fabric and sonny feels constantly pushed further and further and further away. i think it is an experience of not one wound or one humiliation but hundreds of humiliations and even i feel that. i am not a migrant but i travel a lot in the world and i feel increasingly wounded actually

in the way in which people will talk about the world in front of me. very interesting. i will come on to that. there is sonny, he doesn't feel he belongs but then there is anita who as you said earlier lives in the slums in karachi. she also doesn't belong, she is in her own country, she is of the soil and yet she doesn't belong. what is driving her? the runaways is a book set upon a backdrop of ferocious inequality, burning inequality and when we talk about radicalism, somehow that doesn't factor into the conversation and anita was a way of talking about how specific instances of powerlessness, and they are not only political, they might be economic, can aggravate and weaponise feelings of being an outsider. during the times of the raj, karachi was divided into white town and blacktown and that's what they called it. the white town was where the raj administrators lived, the electricity, the water and all of it, and then the blacktown was where the natives lived and those were crowded, dislocated and cut off and karachi is a city still like that today. anita does not live on the part where you have lights or you have running water or you have clean water, she is very much on the edge of that and on the edge

of that is a young girl wanting to belong but never being allowed the space. let's go back to what you just said because i am finding it hard to accept that you can feel an outsider. for all i see, you are a woman who is incredibly comfortable with herself and the world, you've got a slight american accent, there must be many places you feel at home. i was born in kabul, i grew up in damascus and i have a pakistani passport. you haven't lived life until you have been with me at an airport. it doesn't matter where i was educated or what my accent is, at the moment there is a checkpoint or border, that is it, i am suspect.

i had this experience of being at an airport, i won't say which one, very recently just after the runaways came out and i was asked, "what do you do?" i said, "i am a writer." i was asked, "do your books advocate violence?" i thought, why are you asking me that? the only reason i can think of is because of where i come from. do you think your characters, are they running away, as is the title, running away from something or are they running to something? i think it is both. in the case let's say of sonny, he is running away from something but at the same time, the reason that young people i think are drawn to those kinds of radical movements is not because those young people are backwards and it's not because they are violent or retrogressive, it's because the message is designed to be seductive. it says to people who don't fit in, we have a world that you will be kings of. you don't fit in there, they don't want you there,

we want you and we need you and here you not only belong you will have power. that is a lie but i think it is a very seductive message and people are running away and toward something at the same time. when you say they are running to something, what i find interesting about that is you might think because they are running towards a supposedly islamist cause, that this is something about faith perhaps, about belief, but actually, it struck me reading through the runaways that it's more of an infatuation rather than faith. is that fair? that is very fair. i don't think radicalism has anything to do with religion and if we look at the real world, a lot of the most recent runaways, by their own admission, know nothing about islam, they have no actual grounding or study in islam. so it's a bait and switch. religion is always a reason given but there was a set of leaked documents that found that they had assessed their recruits and they found that 70% of them had a basic or below understanding of religion. that is an incredible number.

and one of the other characters, the richest of the two karachi characters, again with him, it is not really faith or belief that takes him to iraq. no. i think monty, he has no question, he has no battle against the world. he understands there is something profoundly unequal and unfair about the way in which he lives, but the way he questions it is wrong, but he has no religious background, he has no desire to go and fight. he is seduced really into going out. can we look at his life because we concentrate on sonny and his idea that he couldn't belong and somehow britain is a divided country and sonny is part

of the have nots, but it is clear actually that monty, when he needs to go to the poor part of town, he has no idea how to get there. this is where monty is going to look for leila, another character, at the other end of the city. he had never driven leila home. always dropped her off at school and handed her 100 rupees to catch a rickshaw back. the dirty, cramped streets were alien to him and every gully was teeming with apartment buildings crowding each other for space as they rose messily into the sky. he thought gulshan would look like his neighbourhood, tidy bungalows, but he had never been that far in karachi before. he kept his eyes on the road, careful not to meet the glances of men who bent down to peer into his silver audi, staining the windows

with their greasy fingerprints. so you can have these two sides even in a place like pakistan. i think pakistan is a country filled with those conditions. which is why, and this is going to sound personal and in a sense it is but i have to ask you, might not some of the characters in this book, the ones in pakistan, point the finger at you and say, well, yourfamily is part of the problem or people like you. monty's life is a life i know very well because i was born into the same privilege as monty and i did live in a house with running water and electricity and high gates and high walls but at the same time, i was also raised by a father who taught me to throw rocks at those walls and to question them. and so i would say that yes, there are parts of my family that

are a problem, parts of which exacerbated the inequality of the country but i would also say there are members of my family that didn't, that imagined something more just and more equal for the country. how difficult is it for you to talk about your family in these terms? your aunt was benazir bhutto who was prime minister, your grandfather was president of the country. i mean, it is a family that has seen huge conflict and suffering. how difficult is it for you to talk about it? well, it is difficult but i think it is urgent also to talk about it. i think it is impossible to live in a young country like pakistan and not acknowledge, notjust the dreams that we have as a country but also the failures and the lessons of those failures.

my experience of it is slightly unusual i suppose because i grew up in syria, so i did have a part of my life that had nothing to do with my family and where my family wasn't a shadow always there. but you have written about in songs of blood and sword and i imagine you would say you are being very honest in it, others have found that book is very problematic in the way it points fingers and i was looking at a review, he called it an act of literary vengeance. that is interesting because i wrote songs of blood and sword about my father's assassination and my father was killed outside of our home, so i wrote about that. now, the men who i believe killed my father and who, by their own admission, were standing on the road are in positions of power today. they have led police commission, police reforms, commissions on police reforms, they have been elected to federal office, i say they have been elected, they have placed themselves in the highest office of the land, so i understand that they would be uncomfortable with the subject of songs of blood and sword because it certainly points a finger.

but for me, it is a book aboutjustice in a place where you have none. does it give you the authority to write a book like the runaways to be able to say, i know about what is wrong with my country and i know why people might run away from it? i don't subscribe to the idea that i have any authority on anything because part of what is important to me as a writer and as a person is that i am always learning and the experience of living in the world and always watching it and understanding it that there are huge spaces we know nothing about and so as a writer, my interest is trying to go into those spaces and see how much i don't know, so i wouldn't say my

family gives me any authority, certainly not and i wouldn't say my experience of violence gives me any authority. the only authority i have is one of an observer and one, like everyone, as a witness. let's go back to the runaways. this is about people attracted to a movement which presumably is telling people that they are going to take islam back to its purest form, but it is littered with examples of these jihadists using the most modern techniques, i am talking about social media. i was tempted to try out some of these but i thought mi5 would be watching. i didn't actually, but it is interesting how they have mastered this.

what is interesting to me is if we look at radical movements or terror movements 20 years ago, they operated under the cover of secrecy, under the cover of darkness. radical movements today hate things like privacy because they are interested in what millennials are interested in, which is fame and celebrity and virality being seen. live leak which is something i wrote about in the book is like a youtube, an alternative youtube so they have and kittens sneezing and they have videos of chechnya and syria and iraq. given that it is a powerful tool for these people, there are attempts in various countries to stop these things. how can you? in sri lanka, which you mentioned, they had a blanket ban on social media right after the attacks but it's too late. the speed at which information travels cannot be unplugged. how do you stop whatsapp?

how do you stop twitter? when does that cross over into censorship? that is a very uncomfortable issue and also the things they think that you might stop, that have an effect don't because for me it is seeing that new york times headline that calls a child a bomb, that for me is far more radicalising than a wikileaks video. does the runaways, do you think having written it, it explains the question i put at the beginning, what drove these people to such acts? i don't think it can ever fully explain it in one book but what i hope it does is say there are certain things we don't understand about radicalism or the radicalised and that main thing for me is it is not about religion actually. it is about isolation, alienation. it is about fear and it is about pain in a lot of cases and if we are not looking

at about the causes of pain, we will not get any closer to pulling back generations of young people from falling down this trap. the good news is that radicalisation is not about religion but the bad news is that many more are vulnerable to it than we think. ladies and gentlemen, fatima bhutto. hello.

another day where we've seen some torrential rain across parts of the uk, exacerbating the flooding in places we saw earlier in the week. this was burton upon trent in staffordshire during saturday afternoon. for others, blue skies and sunshine. and it's this mixture that we'll keep as we go into sunday, our area of low pressure still slow moving to the north—west of the uk. and another frontal system working its way north and eastwards. so this will generate showers through sunday morning, initially across northern ireland, wales, south—west england, but soon extending north and east eastwards across much of the uk. now, where these showers develop they'll be heavy, they'll be thundery, they'll be slow—moving. some gusty winds as well associated with these showers. here's an idea of average wind strengths. but the gusts will be even higher. could well see some hailstones, too. meanwhile, across parts of southern and south—east england fewer showers through the afternoon, more sunshine, so 20 or 21 celsius. where we've got the frequent showers struggling to get much above 14 or 15.

and these showers merging at times to give a longer spell of rain. certainly the case as we go through sunday evening. some heavy spells of rain working across northern england, into scotland, continue across parts of northern ireland, some rain returning to wales through the early hours of monday morning. it's not a cold night for most. we're going to hold up to between 11 and 13 celsius. high single figures across rural scotland. so as we start the new week, our area of low pressure still to the north—west of the uk, generating heavy showers for scotland and northern ireland. a cold front draped across northern england and wales bringing some spells of rain through monday morning. but turning more showery as the day wears on. to the south and east of this, mainly dry, some spells of sunshine, some heavy and thundery showers across a large swathe of scotland and northern ireland. temperatures here again 14 or 15 celsius. in the sunshine, further south and east, 20, maybe 21 celsius. as we go into tuesday, briefly, we see this ridge of high pressure

across much of england and wales in southern scotland. keeping an eye on this area of low pressure, though, brings some heavy rain on tuesday into some parts of england. heavy showers along the spells of rain across northern scotland. they should ease across northern ireland tuesday. keeping an eye on this train arriving into southern counties of england later on tuesday. ahead of this, some warmth, 20 or 21 celsius for much of england and wales. we could see some heavy rain for a time, late on tuesday into wednesday. as that clears, things are looking drier and a bit warmer towards the end of the week. 00:28:35,996 --> 4294966103:13:29,430 bye— bye.