this is bbc news — the headlines: president donald trump has described impeachment proceedings against him as an attempted coup by democrats — accusing them of declaring war on america's democracy. on the specific charges of abuse of power and obstruction of congress the president said the first was a baseless invention, the second preposterous and dangerous. taiwan's foreign minister, joseph wu, has argued that the island requires additional support from democratic allies to stand up to increased diplomatic and economic pressure from communist china. in a bbc interview, mr wu said the world was waking up to the rising threat from beijing. a court in tokyo has ordered a television presenter to pay damages to a woman who accused him of rape. shiori ito was seeking compensation from noriyuki yamaguchi in a civil case, alleging that he raped her after inviting her to dinner to discuss a job opportunity in 2015.

now on bbc news it's 22 years since a british driver broke the sound barrier and the world land—speed record by driving a car across an american desert at 763mph. today, the same man is trying to smash his own record with a new car, the bloodhound — this time, in africa. andrew harding has been following his progress. well, the thing about the land speed record is it is the last of the amateur corinthian sports. it is done purely for the love, the fascination of it. some people argue, well, the old cars are no more, but forget it is a car, we are pushing the boundaries of engineering to its absolute limit. every day i go, why are we doing this? it may be the last land speed record as we know it. this is a story about stubbornness and ingenuity,

and yes, about speed, too. it is the story of a quest to design and build the world's fastest car, and then to find a place flat enough, long enough, to actually drive it. there are not many spots on this particular planet suitable for racing faster than the speed of sound. you can't just pick a straight stretch of road. at 500, 700, 900 miles an hour, the wheels would rip apart mere tarmac, which is why we have come to a remote corner of south africa, close to the borders of botswana and namibia, to a place called the hakskeen pan, on the southern edge of the giant kalahari desert. so here we are, we have come to the hakskeen pan. beautiful, flat, miles and miles of dried mud, this lake bed, surrounded by these low,

dark, red—brown hills. a stunningly beautiful place. we are 800 metres above sea level here, a lake bed of mud and salt that floods briefly, once every year or two, and those white tents on the lake edge, well, think of them as ground control.

there is something a bit mission—to—mars—like about this whole project. imagine trying to do something as complicated as this in a climate like this. today, it is about 35 degrees centigrade. yesterday it was touching a0. but there they are. inside the tent, a quiet frenzy. at the centre of it, the bloodhound, flown out in pieces from the uk and now being reassembled. the aim, this year, to test the car at speeds beyond 600mph. yeah, we have got a whole range of people, and that is key, it is getting the right people, but you have got formula i mechanics, you have got aviation engineers, military, non—military, fabrication, welding, milling, you know, all the skills we need to keep this car going. yeah, it is satisfying to be part of a project that is this unique. you know, there is not many people on the planet doing this sort of thing. lam in heaven, doing what i want to do. fiddling around, trying to make things work.

yeah, fiddling around, trying to make things work, helping the lads out if things do not work, making things for them. as for the driver, if you could invent someone with the right credentials to steer the bloodhound towards i,000mph, andy green might be what you would end up with. 0xford mathematician, raf fighter pilot, a character of almost fanatical focus. i am guessing you are not a superstitious person. you would be guessing right. you don't have any rituals? yeah, good preparation. that is always a ritual that has worked for me in the past. but behind that cool exterior lurks a fire and a salesman. bloodhound is the first high—speed straight—line racing car of the digital age. we can now tell a story that nobody has managed to tell before in a way that nobody has told it. the youtube generation, the power of the internet, we can actually share the engineering adventure and the fascination of the science and technology with a global audience, literally conduct an engineering experiment, how to build a supersonic car, how to try and get it up toi,000mph, and share that with the biggest online audience in history, and inspire generations of young

people around the world about the science and technology that is going to build their low carbon world of the future. green is not new to this unusual business. that is him, back in 1995, being selected to drive another british vehicle, the thrust supersonic car. two years later, thrust ssc accelerated across the black rock desert in nevada, usa. at the time, no—one had ever broken the sound barrier in a car. 0h! you could hear the team's tension. then they listened out for the sound of success. boom! a sonic boom. green had been clocked going 763mph, a new world record, set in 1997 and still unbeaten. but for how much longer? today, green has what he insists

is a significantly faster car. this is where i operate the carfrom. as the driver, i am looking after the steering, monitoring the engines, the electronics, the hydraulics, the brakes, the parachutes, everything is controlled from in there. that is the nerve centre of the car. when i am driving it, it feels unbelievably fast. the ground just gets faster and faster and faster through 300, 400, 500mph, and it just keeps coming. the wheels are made from solid aluminium. they are designed to rotate 170 times a second and survive forces of 50,000 times the force of gravity at the wheel rim. the reason we have to use solid wheels, there is no kind of rubber tyre ever created that will survive that kind of load. the only way to reach 1,000mph is to use the best technology from everywhere we can find it, including the jet engine. the car is powered by a combination of a jet engine this year, and jet and rocket next year.

the jet engine we have is the rolls—royce ej—200, the eurofighter typhoon engine, the most high—powered, sophisticated, and most importantly for me, the safestjet engine in the history of military aviation. yes, you heard that right. powered by a fighter plane's jet engine, and next year, by a rocket, too, in the slot below, briefly providing more thrust than an aircraft carrier. so, as you get faster, the main force you are fighting against is the drag. the drag is proportional to the square of the speed, which means it gets more and more of a problem, and in order for this car to get a lot faster than the previous car that had two jet engines, you need more power, you need more thrust, and the way to get that is to add a rocket into the car. so why race it here, why africa? well, for a start, the old salt flats in the nevada desert are getting worn

out through overuse. there is a small handful of places where you can actually try and attempt the outright world land speed record. typically, north america, the bonneville salt flats and the black rock desert are where it has all happened for the last four or five decades but we wanted to see if there was actually somewhere better. now, we were very lucky, we got the support of swansea university, to actually search the whole globe, for the first time ever, to actually do a full geo remote sensing survey to try and find a place that was flat enough and long enough, and also flooded regularly, to actually repair and heal the surface, so it remained a smooth, dry lake bed. how many places like that were there in the world of 10—15 miles in length? and swansea produced a map of all the places that might be viable. we then spent a lot of time with google earth and a lot of time looking at notjust the surface itself, the weather factors,

but also all the other bits, how do you get there, what is the geopolitical situation like? by the time we had been through all that, we finished up with a list of a couple of dozen that i went to visit. this was the best place i saw anywhere in the world. but the best place in the world still needed a little tidying up. more than a little. the flat mud of the hakskeen pan still had some rocks in it. every single one of these has been dug out by hand by one of the local people. every single one of these was embedded and stuck in the surface, so it is notjust a case of walking along and picking them up, they have gone along with tools, dug each bit out, put it in a bucket, which goes into a wheelbarrow, which

goes out into a pile, which gets picked up by a tipper truck, which then gets brought here to one of 25, 30 different piles, all the way around hakskeen pan, of debris like this. having measured and estimated, this is one of the small piles. there is something like 16,000 tonnes of stones, that is 16 million kilogrammes of this stuff, that has been picked up. some big chunks. an awful lot of it dug out by hand, year after year, out here in the burning sun, as they prepare the world's best ever straight—line racing track. the sheer physical effort and the belief to keep on doing this, that one day the desert would be good enough and that bloodhound would be here, it has been a truly extraordinary thing to watch, and when bloodhound achieves the world land speed record, so much of the credit is going to go to the local communities, and to the northern cape government for having that belief and creating this amazing racetrack. with a clear track, the tests can finally begin. one of those who helped remove the rocks, ricardo botha, is now a safety marshal. marshall 6 to control. i spotted something on the track.

the bloodhound can cope with dust, but anything bigger, rubbish, or perhaps a dead animal, could spell disaster. between that and that cone. what? both sides. it is white, it looks like white paper or something. right. it really does make me nervous because if i am making a wrong call it can mean the run can be stopped or anything could happen. one piece, two more pieces. ricardo was right. two pieces of paper are removed. moments later, andy green roars past. that was awesome, mate, that was awesome, really. just the banging sound, the parachute, the slowing down, everything is awesome.

there is something bewitching about watching the bloodhound. for ricardo, being part of this project is not simply a welcome job, it's changed his life. maybe even saved it. i was involved in the gangs, drugs, theft, housebreaking, everything that is illegal, you can say. yes, i have been injail once, yeah, for 20 months, because of some attempted theft out of a motor vehicle. those days are gone now. ricardo left cape town and went to live in this remote village, a slower pace of life now, except when the bloodhound is on the track. so you have been involved closely with the whole process of the bloodhound project. what do you think of the whole idea of trying to go crazily fast in a car? from my point of view, it is a mad man's work, but in reality, i think that is what pushes you, do it. it is nice to be part of a big project like that. i love to work with the guys.

what have you learnt from working alongside a team like that? commitment. commitment, and if you put your mind to something, do it. don't hold back. "madman‘s work" ? perhaps. in the midday sun, the team prepares for a string of test runs, aiming to push the car over 600mph, checking the parachute that slows it down. andy, what's going through your head? preparation for the run. we're going to get the car ready, start the engine at the highest temperatures it's run, and then i'm going to

do a gentle left—hand turn. we are pointing exactly into wind at the moment, line up with the track, 500mph, double chute deployment. this is something that nobody has ever done on this desert, in this car before, which is why we are all concentrating to get it right. the bloodhound moves into position, half formula 1, half space shuttle. and it there goes. an extraordinary moment. six tonnes of car, and within 30 seconds it's going to be going at 500 mph. and then, of course, it has to slow down, which is why it needs such a long track. it will have to take about five miles to come to a stop. each run is brief and dangerous.

green battling against a crosswind to keep the car on track. at the 450, 500 point there was a big gust of crosswind, ten, 15 mph and the car actually pushed off and yawed quite heavily. as large as anything we've seen so far. you know, even in this modern, computer—driven age, there's still a lot of wind tunnel testing done and ultimately the test pilots go out and find out what the reality is, as opposed to what the computers say. so, we are still in an area where testing and development is about going out to do things rather than taking a computer prediction and building it right first time. and after every test, a post—mortem. that is only about half to two thirds a degree, so it's not a huge amount, but it has yawed into wind, so the car is actually tracking

slightly sideways up the track, which suggests coming down this bit — down this bit, i have stabilised the car in a crosswind which has appeared since further down. i corrected it, then pointed the car down the track, but of course the car is having to generate a bit of side force into the wind, so it's using the aerodynamics of the body and a little bit of the wheel grip, tracking sideways to actually offset the push. and you can physically see that in the wheel tracks. on each round, the bloodhound follows a new line, painted on the mud, by a satellite—guided tractor. sojust redoing that now, and then we are moving to line 18 and putting the short pits in that you're going to need along the way as well. yep, perfect. good. we couldn't measure the performance of the car against the 1997 black rock desert line because it was hand painted. this, being gps, we can actually look at exactly what the car's doing. so from a performance point of view

and a safety point of view, having lines marked like this is absolutely essential. have you always been obsessed with speed? do you feel that you're obsessed with speed? i'm glad you came to the second part of the question. no, i don't feel i'm obsessed with speed. i've been lucky enough to fly jet fighters for the royal air force as a career. best dayjob you could possibly ever have. i have loved every second of it. but the most satisfying jobs i've had in the royal air force have been since i stopped flying, managing operational campaigns in the middle east, out in afghanistan, and more recently, the campaign over libya, protecting hundreds of thousands of people from being shelled by pro—gaddafi forces. also, in the time that i originally trained as a mathematician and then spent a career working as a fighter pilot, developed a fascination for the science and technology of what makes aeroplanes fly, what makes things work and what makes things like fast cars go fast.

so, having something with a blank sheet of paper saying, build a car, any shape, any design you want, just needs to have four wheels, and you can go and break the land speed record. as a scientist, i find that fascinating. as a fastjet pilot, is the most intriguing challenge of how do you control the vehicle, not just fast, but safely, at these sorts of speeds and how do you manage the team and the track and everything else? so, building all of that environment so you can run a safe supersonic land speed record, that, as far as i'm concerned, as a mathematician, as a fighter pilot, is my dream job. one thing that's really struck me about this ludicrously ambitious operation is quite how precarious it feels. there is no multinational backing, no big government stepping in. instead, what you basically have are private individuals,

small companies, looking for sponsorship, hustling for backers. and you get the feeling that almost any day, this could collapse. and it nearly did collapse. one year ago, the bloodhound project ran out of money. the administrators were called in, and issued a final appeal for a new investor. it is that now once—in—a—lifetime opportunity, for the right person, the right corporate to come forward and combine it with the investment, that's the key thing, the investment it needs to give it certainty, to get it over that line. it would be great for britain. when we went under, i was hopeful that something would happen, something would change and someone would come in and go realise that we can't lose this project. but we got to the stage where i personally thought that was it, and it was a real shame and i'd even

been told the administrators were looking to break the car down and sell the components just to pay some of the debt that needed to be paid. for scrap? for scrap, yeah. the project has tried to go broke so many times, where we're struggling for bits of cash and then a new sponsor would come in, or we'd find a different way of doing things, find some support. so — it has always been up and down. the thrustssc project back in the 905 was exactly the same. so, i still had my summer of 1997 head on, that if we keep going, then one thing we can't be blamed for is giving up. we will keep going and try and find a way, right down to speaking to the bbc to say, please, please get the message out here. this was the start of december. i pitched this as, this is the world's best christmas deal. for the man who has everything, here is something that money can't buy. bloodhound land speed record car as a christmas present, and land speed record car in a couple of years' time. why wouldn't you want to do that? but then, a yorkshire businessman,

an engineer, stepped forward. motivated, he said not so much by the land speed record but by the thought of inspiring a new generation of engineers. this is an expensive hobby. i mean, i know it's not a hobby, but...! yeah, so far i've been paying for this, which has got quite expensive over the last few months! laughs. but yeah, my view is that i'm looking at it as a business. i guess i'm investing in the project on the basis the project has a value and therefore it will then sell that value to cover the costs. i get the money back or not, i have no idea. probably unlikely. through sponsors? yeah, sponsorship. people want their name on the side of that? yeah, yeah, that's right. but to be fair, if i don't get my money back, it's a great way to spend the kids‘s inheritance, isn't it? and is there a bit of you that can see these sort of absurdity, the monty python—esque element? every day! every day i go, why are we doing this?

but this is still an expensive gamble. and the tests aren't going smoothly. the bloodhound's alarm system warns of a potential fire on board. and it might actually be getting very hot in there. it might actually be telling us the real truth of, it's really hot in here, you need to look at the temperature shielding around that bit of the bodywork. although it's going off, it may be telling us a real piece of information that we need to look at later on. and now, a worrying delay, as the engineers decide they'll have to remove the entire jet engine. if they can't find the fault, that could be it. another all—or—nothing moment. the outside casing's melted, it's gone a bit crispy. you'd expect that at a lot higher temperature,

so i think what's happened is, there's been a bit of blowing gas coming through in here and that's what set this off. these systems guys are like, digging deep, doing things that they are desperate to do. they're going to be working late tonight. they came in late this morning. working to get this fire wire issue sorted out. tomorrow, try and get the thing put back together again. might creep into monday. but yeah, the good news is that we should be back on the money again, which is great. fault isolated and fixed, the bloodhound is ready for a final speed test. after weeks of frustration, the target is still 600 mph. success.

628 mph. 0n course for the record. now that we've got the baseline of a great car and a great surface, it's time to go faster. so, now it's time to pack up, take the car back to britain, analyse the tests, fix on the rocket and then try to find enough money to come back here to south africa to push this car to its absolute limit. so, another test completed. more lessons learned. as exciting and dramatic as all this is, you do really get the sense that this is going to be very slow, this entire project. trying to get the car and the shape

for it to break the land speed record and then maybe at some point in the future, crossing the 1,000 mph mark. realistically, world record, when? that's an interesting question. i'm reluctant to give out information in terms of where we're at. i don't think we know ourselves yet, to be honest. but certainly 18 months should be possible. there's a lot of things to consider for the next phase of the project. first of all, the main thing is funding. we need to get some more sponsors on board to take us to the next level and get some funding in place. but until we work out how much we need, then we can't really sort of do that. we're doing all this at the same time. we need to design the rocket and get that fitted and make sure we can work out how to operate the rocket safely.

the human race has always gon on to push the boundaries and some people argue, cars are no more but forget it's a car, we are pushing the boundaries of engineering to its absolute limits. is there a bit of you that wonders whether it's worthwhile? absolutely, yeah. and everyone says about this particular project, that it may be the last land speed record as we know it, you know. and so i think that's why i'm also keen to get it, because we're going to push it so far, that itjust becomes out of sensible reach in the modern world, you know. if we get that, it will stand almost forever.

hello. well, if you're out on the roads wednesday morning, this steady fog could last into the afternoon in some positing them. the midlands, and northern england in particular area risk of some thick fog patches. at the moment we are in between two systems. the wet weather here heading your way. so while we are between these weather systems, the winds are light, there's a fair bit of moisture, you can see the forming here. by the early hours of wednesday, the risk of some icy patches, temperatures in some areas around freezing or below. that's have a look at the weather than through the morning, here is that fog around the midlands and into northern england, too. eventually it should disburse because as the winds blow away, basically look at all that window and rain sweeping into western parts of the uk — heavy rain

in places and on top of that we will have gale force winds around western coasts. goodbye.

welcome to bbc news — my name's mike embley. our top stories: as the us house of representatives prepares to vote on impeaching donald trump, he lashes out, calling it an open war on democracy. taiwan's foreign minister tells the bbc the free world should stand with the island democracy — in the face of growing pressure from china. this woman wins damages in a tokyo courtroom after accusing a prominent journalist of rape. scientists say they've developed a new theory