patchy rain developing across eastern parts of england, outbreaks of rain and lots of cloud in the morning, the rain tending to ease in the afternoon for northern areas, turning brighter but towards wales and the south—west, keeping it going it could be heavy and thundery, and it really is going to be chilly, temperatures 1a or 15 quite widely. the weather front pulls apart, most of it continuing south towards iberia, this ridge of high pressure building and we have a weak weather front on the scene bringing us this band of cloud which could produce one or two showers but dry on the whole, some sunshine as well and it will feel a lot warmer, especially for central and eastern parts of england where temperatures could be up to 20 degrees. but wet and windy weather arriving in north—west later, that is on the weather fronts there and it will turn wet and windy across northern areas overnight, around an area of low pressure which contains remnants of ex hurricane dorian, no longer a hurricane but it will bring wet and windy weather overnight and through wednesday it sweeps towards southern parts of england, becoming light

and patchy and behind it we get more sunshine arriving, some showers across scotland but temperatures higher for all of us.

hello this is bbc news, the headlines. after her resignation from the cabinet and the conservative whip — amber rudd attacks borisjohnson's handling of brexit. there's not enough work going into actually getting a deal, which is, i think, is not what the prime minister signed up to try to do, and secondly, the expulsion of 21 of my colleagues who are good moderate conservatives. british airways pilots prepare to go on strike — for the first time in the airline's history. another day of anger in hong kong as radical pro—democracy protesters attack a metro station. peace talks between the taliban and the us are called off — president trump blames a deadly attack in the afghan capital, kabul. ships and aircraft evacuate thousands of people from islands in the bahamas worst hit

by hurricane dorian — aid agencies say the situation is ‘desperate‘. now on bbc news, david shukman reports on the battle to preserve the world's largest rainforest in amazon under threat. the amazon rainforest is the largest in the world, home to an incredible variety of life. but suddenly, it is all at risk. the clearing of the trees is accelerating, and scientists are warning about the danger of irreversible loss. it's never going to come back again. we are never going to be able to build an amazon. it's going to be gone forever. brazil has a new president, and he wants to develop the amazon, and he is encouraging his supporters to exploit it.

so the people who live inside the forest fear that their days may be numbered. a gentle view of the field and forest in the amazon, but this region is now the scene of a struggle over land and a battle for survival. this is the home of uru—eu—wau—wau, a tiny band ofjust 120. they are one of many indigenous groups that have lived in the rainforest for centuries. the uru—eu—wau—wau are meant to be protected in special reserves, but they feel the new government

of brazil is against them. one of the elders of the group describes the rituals of getting ready for war. a crucial task is preparing weapons. the wood for the arrows comes from particular trees, the feathers from special birds. he has dark memories of the first contacts with the outside world. in the middle of the last century, settlers and loggers advanced into the forest and fought the indigenous people for territory. his wife, boreha, was wounded as a young girl. an attack left her with scars

and killed her family. there's been a long and violent history here, and boreha says she is now worried once more. here, they are making an ink to use as a war paint. a fruit is grated to get at thejuice, a process given special meaning now, as the risks of an attack seem to grow. the pulp is squeezed and the liquid is mixed with charcoal. everything they hear from the president about their way of life sounds hostile.

adorning themselves with the paint is more than just tradition. it's because of a real sense of needing to be on guard. so they patrol what is meant to be their protected area. but they discover incursions. this track was carved out to steal timber or create new farmland. miners often break in, as well. sights like this are painful, because this is home, where they gather food and hunt. previous governments saw indigenous people as guardians of the amazon.

but now, their whole future is uncertain. the youngest generation may not grow up amid these trees, given the negative attitude of the new president, jair bolsonaro.

we use our drone to get a view of the dark green edge of the reserve. farmland presses right up against it, and president bolsonaro says farmers should be allowed inside. in his view, indigenous people have too much land. his election heralded a right—wing agenda, in favour of agriculture and of guns. he thrills his supporters with talk of opening up the amazon. since he came to office, bullets were fired at the sign marking the land of the uru—eu—wau—wau.

tensions are escalating. up the road, we get talking to some localfarmers, and they say exactly the kind of things the president says — that the system of forest reserves for indigenous people is wrong, and that farmers need more land. with the president on their side, farmers and loggers feel a new freedom to clear trees. we found this vast area of bare earth and dead trunks. huge tracts of forest

are being wiped out. my footsteps and distant birdsong are the only sounds. it is tragic to see this close—up. to bring these trees down to the ground, theyjust knock them over with a bulldozer. this is happening all over the amazon to create new farmland, and the result is that the great forest has never been under such pressure. many trees have already made way for agriculture, nearly 18% of the forest, and the president is now pushing for much more aggressive development. we are guided to this tiny clearing to see where illegal loggers were at work. this kind of wood fetches a high price on the black market.

stealing rare timber is nothing new here in the amazon, but under the new government, it's never been so easy. the agencies meant to stop this kind of thing from happening are incredibly overstretched, and the president wants to weaken the legal protections for the forest. to make the timber less valuable, environment officials cut into the logs so they can't be turned into planks. but they can't talk about their work, because they've been banned from speaking to the media. so yourjob, protecting the forests, must be very difficult, is it? you are trying to save the forest. so we have to meet this official in secret, his face hidden and voice changed. he says the government is trying to cover up the loss of the forest.

and the scale of the deforestation he describes is so vast that it is hard to visualise. up here, at the top of this 50—metre—high observation tower, the view is just phenomenal, out over what looks like a great ocean of green. this is the canopy of the largest rainforest in the world. the problem is that more and more of it is being chopped down. it is hard to believe, but an area the size of a football pitch is being cleared every single minute. what that means is that forest that would cover more than 2,000 pitches is just vanishing every day,

and the signs are that this rate of devastation could accelerate. the biggest single reason the forests are cleared is to create pasture for cattle. they are grazing on land that used to be forest. brazilian beef is in big demand all over the world, and the president's vision for boosting exports has delighted farmers like vanderley wegner, who says other countries cut their forests down long ago. during our time in the amazon, we keep hearing that only brazil can decide what to do with the forest.

but the trees store so much carbon that the more of them are cut down, the more we lose one of the very few things holding up a rise in global temperatures, so what happens here matters far beyond brazil. so my name is erika berenguer. i am a scientist, even though i don't wear a white coat. so i work in the amazon, this beautiful forest, and i am from brazil. erika is a researcher based at the university of oxford. she has studied the trees of the amazon for the past ten years, and she has always loved them. for me it is really important because the amazon cannot speak up, the trees can't speak up, they cannot say that they are worth it, and they have a value, they are really important. so i have made it as my life, i have made to study them, understand them, understand the forest and be able to speak up

about its importance. erika has got to know the forest very well. and she guides me through a stretch of it that is constantly under assault, from loggers and invaders. so you have become used to seeing a thriving forest, what's it like when you see the opposite, the forest cleared? it is very sad, it's very very sad. because emotionally, i know everything i am losing, the connection is not there anymore, the life, but also i know how much biodiversity we are losing, how much it is contributing to climate change, so both rationally and emotionally it's really difficult. here is one of the biggest trees in this stretch of forest. that is just immense, isn't it. yeah. it is a really beautiful brazil nut. and you can see how far it stands above everybody else. how tall do you reckon that is? oh, it is about a0 metres, yeah, i would say 120 feet.

that is a long way up. laughs. yeah, it is. it probably took centuries to get to this size and also that tall. they fight for the sun. they love the sun. yeah. the challenge for scientists is to get accurate measurement of the forest. and this is one way to do that. speaks in own language. erika waits down on the ground. she's asking for samples of wood. her assistant, way up above, cuts away a few branches and throws them down. what she is trying to find out is the flow of carbon in the forest.

so when we are in the forest like this and want to know how much carbon is stored, you have to measure the diameter of all trees, so you know its size. so this one for example is... 15.6 centimetres, and once we do it... we paint the tree... she has followed the growth of the same batch of trees year after year, to assess the role they play in the climate. they are helping us forfree, to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and put it in the forest and lock it up in here. it's the sheer size of the forest that makes it significant. we have used graphics to show how the countless leaves absorb carbon dioxide. that's the gas heating up the planet. as human activity keeps adding more and more carbon dioxide to the air,

magnificent trees like this pull a lot of it in. but chop it down and burn it, and all the carbon that has been stored inside over the many years is suddenly released back to the atmosphere. which of course, increases the speed of global warming. so erika's research is all the more urgent. in this lab she studies the wood collected from the forest to work out how much carbon the amazon holds. in these bags here we have lots of little bits of wood that come from different forests, and what we do is that we collect the wood from the forest, put them in these big oven dryers behind me to remove the moisture, so they become super dry, pop them on the stale, half of the weight here pop them on the scale, half of the weight here on the scale is actually carbon. this is really important to help us understand how much carbon

the amazon is removing from the air, from the atmosphere and locking up in vegetation. so we can understand the importance of the amazon to fight climate change. the latest science is revealing about the amazon's store of carbon. it is the equivalent of america burning fossil fuels for nearly a century. 97 years of the us fossil fuel emissions, that is how much carbon there is in this place, because a big tree might store three tons of carbon, four tons of carbon, it's a lot of carbon. the rich greens of the forest have another vital role as well. they form the most vibrant habitat on earth. home to an extraordinary tenth of all species in the natural world. some of them unnerving, others adorable.

they are so wonderful, it's so full of life, so full... just so beautiful, and to lose it... it's never going to come back again. we're never going to be able to build an amazon. it's going to be gone forever. so once it is gone isjust gone, we can't rebuild it. field by field, this whole region is being transformed. it has triggered a barrage of international criticism of brazil. our research shows how easily and rapidly trees can be wiped out. and the brazilian government is now saying to the outside world: "pay us to keep the forest."

in the meantime, the onslaught on the trees continues. and it can be dangerous asking awkward questions. as i hearfrom thisjournalist and charity worker, gabriel 0shida, as we travel through land that was forest. the landscape we're driving through looks very charming, with small fields, very rattly road, but a few cows, a few trees — but what is actually going on here behind the scenes, what is it really like? even though it looks quiet and peaceful, this area is quite dangerous. this is like a wild west movie. so people are around carrying weapons, and people are doing whatever they want, they can invade new territories, i myself have already been threatened here.

actually i have received death threats in this region, made by illegal loggers. what effect has there been from the election of president bolsonaro? after bolsonaro got elected, we can clearly see that these guys here, these invaders, these land grabbers, they feel much more confident about what they are doing. and they feel that now they have the law on their side, and now they have, they can do whatever they want because our presidency will support them. so indigenous people in the forest, like the uru—eu—wau—wau now face a lot more pressure. so this is the forest of the uru—eu—wau—wau? i show them the view of space, of what they are experiencing everyday on the ground. with all this farmland all around you, and you are about there, just in that little corner.

so you have farms, deforested land, right next to you. and while we are with them, we hear a very depressing fact. that the uru—eu—wau—wau have had such a troubled experience with the outside world, that to describe white people and invaders, they have just a single word. "tapuya" means invader but also white people. that is the only thing they knew. they didn't know there were white people who could be friends with them. because in the past they were always having battles and conflicts against white people. so now they don't have this word, one single word for white people and invaders, which is tapuya. the fate of these people hangs in the balance. the children here are learning traditional skills, and they have rights under brazilian law. but they are outnumbered

and powerful forces are circling outside.

hello there. we have sunshine, wind, rain and even tropical air heading our way next week. today the weather has been very pleasant, we had a few showers yesterday across kent, no sign of those today. indeed we have been enjoying some healthy spells of sunshine. after a really cold start in the north—east of scotland we have seen some blue skies here as well for a while. there is more cloud coming in from the north—west, this weather front waits in the wings to bring rain overnight tonight. a fine end to the day with sunshine around but the cloud continues to thicken across scotland and northern ireland. turning wetter overnight and the rain spills into wales and western parts of england, could be quite heavy. more cloud tonight, not anywhere near as cold as last night, except perhaps across east anglia when we have clear skies for longer. tomorrow a messy day, the weather front bringing rain, not one of the weather fronts sweeping across, no wind to move it, instead it drifts south.

patchy rain developing across eastern parts of england, outbreaks of rain and lots of cloud in the morning, the rain tending to ease in the afternoon for northern areas, turning brighter but towards wales and the south—west, keeping it going it could be heavy and thundery, and it really is going to be chilly, temperatures 1a or 15 quite widely. the weather front pulls apart, most of it continuing south towards iberia, this ridge of high pressure building and we have a weak weather front on the scene bringing us this band of cloud which could produce one or two showers but dry on the whole, some sunshine as well and it will feel a lot warmer, especially for central and eastern parts of england where temperatures could be up to 20 degrees. but wet and windy weather arriving in north—west later, that is on the weather fronts there and it will turn wet and windy

across northern areas overnight, around an area of low pressure which contains remnants of ex hurricane dorian, no longer a hurricane but it will bring wet and windy weather overnight and through wednesday it sweeps towards southern parts of england, becoming light and patchy and behind it we get more sunshine arriving, some showers across scotland but temperatures higher for all of us.

this is bbc news — i'm shaun ley. the headlines at five: after resigning from the cabinet and the conservative whip — amber rudd attacks borisjohnson's handling of brexit. there's not enough work going into actually getting a deal, which is, i think, is not what the prime minister signed up to try to do, and secondly, the expulsion of 21 of my colleagues who are good moderate conservatives. british airways pilots prepare to go on strike — for the first time in the airline's history. another day of anger in hong kong — as radical pro—democracy protesters attack a metro station. peace talks between the taliban and the us are called off — president trump blames a deadly attack in the afghan capital, kabul. ships and aircraft evacuate thousands of people from islands in the bahamas worst hit by hurricane dorian —