hello, i'm lewis vaughanjones. welcome to outside source. in atlanta, georgia... the funeral of civil rights icon and congressman john lewis. he kept on getting on board buses and sitting at lunch counters. got his mug shot taken again and again. marched again and again on a mission to change america. meanwhile the current president of the united states suggests on twitter that the november election be delayed. katty kay will help us make sense of that. the hong kong authorities disqualify 12 pro—democracy candidates from running

in upcoming elections. today we are seeing the results of being relentless of the oppression that this regime is starting. and new figures show england has had the highest level of excess deaths in europe. welcome. we start in the us at the funeral of civil rights pioneerjohn lewis in atlanta, georgia. it was held at the ebenezer baptist church where his friend and fellow activist matin luther king once preached. john lewis was the son of an alabama farmer who was arrested dozens of times for civil rights activism. then in 1986, he was elected to represent the state of georgia in congress where he continued to serve until he died just under two weeks ago. three former presidents were at his funeral. one of them, america's first black president, barack obama, gave this eulogy. we had not yet reached that blessed

destination where we are judged by the content of our character. he knew from his own life that progress is fragile, that we have to be vigilant against the darker currents of this country's history. of our own history. but there were pools of violence and hatred and despair that can violence and hatred and despair that ca n always violence and hatred and despair that can always rise again. connor may be gone, but today, we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of black americans. george wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and

batons against peaceful demonstrators. applause we may no longer have to guess the number of jellybea ns in we may no longer have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar we may no longer have to guess the number ofjellybeans in a jar in order to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations and targeting minorities and students with restrictive id laws and attacking our bowling rights with surgical precision, —— voting rights. even undermining the postal service in a run up to an election. it will be dependent on mailing ballot so people don't get sick.

barack obama speaking there. katty kay is live in washington. amazing tribute to a remarkable man. what significance do you think this has, given the timing of all this? significance do you think this has, given the timing of all thi57m significance do you think this has, given the timing of all this? it was partly a funeral eulogy to somebody who was a civil rights icon. everyone who spoke remembered him very fondly. president obama talked about his bravery as just a 20—year—old in taking on what he called the infrastructure of oppression of segregation and racism in this country. it was also interesting that president obama used the occasion to be very political, much more political than you would think that a —— in a funeral usually don't eulogy. warned about people and leaders who are trying to stop people from voting. there's a lot of concern amongst democrats that minorities in this country have their voting rights suppressed.

there's also concerned because of covid the middle of a pandemic that this election is going to be decided through mail in voting. there are some concerns that the president is trying to undermine the postal service as well as the moment. i was struck by how intensely political this was. it was very much about the election, and the formal president —— former president made direct categorical appeals saying to people they have to vote. it's important to carry on the work ofjohn lewis. they have to vote. it's important to carry on the work ofjohn lewis. on that theme of voting and the election, i just want to bring that theme of voting and the election, ijust want to bring in a tweet. one president who did not attend was the current one, donald trump. instead, this morning he tweeted this:

it's interesting. the president does not have the power to choose the date of the election. what is going on there? no. back to 1845, a little bit of a history lesson, a law that states on the first tuesday after the first monday of the month of november, every four years, there will be an election. so it's in law. what it would take to change that is congress and the house of representatives is held by democrats. they won't agree to that. more interestingly, you've had quite a slew of republicans, even die—hard rest of —— die—hard supporters like ted cruz, they've all come out, even mitch mcconnell, the leader of the senate have come out and said since

that tweet, this is not happening. this election will be held on november three. that the law. it's not going to be delayed. one republican suggested the president was just joking, republican suggested the president wasjustjoking, but again, because the president is not doing very well at the polls in the moment, the economy is in a bad shape, covid is rampant in many parts of the country, there are concerns that the president would try to delay the election or change the result or challenge the result in some way so people pounced on this. but, you're right, you we can't do it. it's a tweet, not law. the election will be held under american law on november three. a tweet not a law, something to live what by. well, president trump's tweet came shortly after news that the us economy suffered its biggest contraction on record. it shrank by 9.5% in the three months from april to june. the historic fall shows

the impact of coronavirus with many restaurants, shops and factories shutting during lockdown. we've also had the latest weekly unemployment numbers. another 1.4 million people lost theirjobs and filed for unemployment benefits. here's samira hussain on the economic damage behind those numbers. if you look at any sector, if you look at trade we saw the trade was down. if you look at how much people were investing in their businesses. that was down. and most crucially, we've seen if you look at consumer spending, while that has really taken a beating. don't forget america's gdp remains going back remains heavily on peoples spending. so people need to go out and spend money. but the harsh measures put in place to protect people from the coronavirus pandemic welt that meant that people were at home and they weren't out shopping. and that had a really severe impact on the overall gdp number.

i want to pick up on something is the idea of the pick—up in the economy and the second half of the year. a lot of the congress and even president donald trump and members of this administration had said that look, we are going to see it's pretty difficult in the first six months of this year. but in the second half of the year everyone is expecting that rebound. but as we see the number of cases rising so dramatically, a lot of states are rolling back those reopening measures, and that is putting this potentialfor a rebound in the second half of the year really in jeopardy. part of america's response to the coronavirus outbreak was a huge economic relief package agreed by congress in march, but that will run out this week and congress have yet to agree an extention. here's an economist from the brookings institution to explain why further support is needed. we seem to be running an experiment and seeing how dysfunctional our just in time of crisis. as you know the congress expanded the safety net early in march.

as a result of the covid crisis. and now a lot of those programmes particularly in extra unemployment check of $600 a week that people are getting is expiring. and congress is unable to come to term fully met terms with an expansion. congress has so far been reluctant at least the republicans to expand the food stamp safety. state local governments are cutting back because their revenues are down. and they are spending on essential public health and public safety has lapsed. so they're cutting other things. we don't have a strong safety net in the us as most european countries do. we've discovered how frayed it is. we are lucky that we got as much out of congress as we did in march. this would be a lot worse if we hadn't had the temporary repairs to the safety net in march. but now some of those repairs have worn off. and we are seeing a lot of people

fall through the cracks. caddy, what happens next with this legislation? where do we go from there —— katty? legislation? where do we go from there -- katty? it doesn't look like congress is anywhere close to the legislation at the moment. you have the current head of the american federal reserve saying congress has to do something and spend more money because people are about to run out of money in their pockets. one of the key planks of that rescue package that was agreed back in march was that americans who are unemployed got an extra $600 a week in their pocket. that runs out on friday. from next week on, they won't get that extra $600. they will be able to pay their mortgages or rent or bills or any extra services. that all has a cascading effects down the economy, and if congress can agree to help those people carry

on helping those people, it looks like things are going to get quite worse here. certainly there will be a lot more pain amongst people who are doing well already. 33% is a huge amount of attraction in the american economy. other economies have suffered come up that the next biggest is germany. that only declined by 10% during the same period. this is a huge shock to the american economy. congress doesn't seem american economy. congress doesn't seem to be able to get its political act together to agree on a stimulus package that would keep the safety net in place until the economy gets back on its feet. thanks, katty. stay with us on outside source, still to come: we look at excess deaths across europe. new figures show england recorded the highest rate, followed by the uk as a whole. taiwan's first popularly elected president lee dung hway has died, aged 97. he served as leader from 1988

to 2000 and is credited with turning taiwan into a democracy. mr lee had been in hospital for the last six months, and was suffering from multiple organ failure. but there hadn't been much information about his condition so his death came as a shock to the people of taiwan. cindy sui is in taipei. his legacy survives to his day —— this day. even though his predecessor is credited with paving the way for democracy, it was president hwey who made it a reality. he carried out a number of political reforms that enable taiwan to reform the parliament and allow for a long time...

this is outside source live from the bbc newsroom. the funeral of civil rights icon and congressmanjohn lewis hasjust finished in atlanta, georgia. to hong kong next. the government there has disqualified 12 pro—democracy candidates from upcoming legislative council elections — that's hong kong's mini—parliament. it says the candidates were not fit to run for office. unsurprisingly, the candidates themselves see it differently. here's one of them. when the national security law was passed, i said that one country to system is finished. today we are seeing the results of being relentless that this regime is starting. one country two systems is the policy which up till now has given hong kong a high degree of autonomy from mainland china. the man that you just heard,

dennis kwok, is an elected member of the legislative council, for the civic party. the party is considered relatively moderate. but four of its lawmakers, who you see here, are among those disqualified. the others you see here, many are prominent activists, like lester shum and joshua wong. lester shum was elected as a district councillor last november, as part of a pro—democracy party surge in those elections. they took 17 out of 18 districts. and there's some suggestion that might be a calculation here. joshua wong tweeted: i was just disqualified from legco election, despite being the biggest winner in #hk primaries. gwyneth ho is another candidate who's been disqualified — she spoke to the bbc. the hong kong government is denying people who are running and going to vote, they are denying them the

right to voice their discontent. let's go into a bit more detail on why the hong kong government says it's done this. it says candidates can't be considered to be abiding by the constitutional duty required of lawmakers if they: advocate for hong kong's independence try and get foreign governments to intervene in hong kong's affairs. express "an objection in principle" to the imposition of the national security law or vote down proposals and force the government to meet political demands after securing a majority. on this last point, the bbc‘s grace tsoi writes in this piece: "then the next question is: will any opposition candidates be allowed to run in the future?" here's another of the barred candidates. i think hong kong needs a good opposition voice. because you cannotjust have legislators supporting the government all the time. we need to be critical. and we want honestly one country two system autonomy of

hong kong to be run as normal. for example, we did the past ten years after 97. but i think things have changed drastically for the past two or three years. it's nothing legislators and the council can control states. we are not told what are the rules. where are the rules, where are the red lights? red light seem to be everywhere restricting the freedom and of speech is of the legislators. and especially after national security laws passed we are very aware of all these red lines. we've mentioned the national security law a few times already. it was enacted by china, and came into force last month. hong kong was always meant to have a security law, but could never pass one because it was so unpopular, so beijing passed it instead. this bbc article outlines the main provisions of the law, but basically it criminalises acts of secession — that's breaking away from the country. and subversion, undermining the power of central government.

critics say it effectively restricts protest and freedom of speech. china says it will return stability. here's the chinese ambassador to the uk. it has nothing to do with freedom of speech, freedom of expression. that has been clearly stimulated in the national security law, that basic human rights will be fully respected. this law is only targeted on a very few criminals. the law came into effect on the 30th ofjune. the first arrests came the next day, at protests. one person was arrested for holding a flag calling for independence. then this tuesday, four students aged between 16 and 21 were arrested. they all had links to student localism, a pro—independence youth group. also this week, benny tai, a law professor who was one of the founders of the 2014 "umbrella protests", was fired from a leading hong kong university over his role in those protests.

he said this was ‘the end of academic freedom in hong kong.‘ and this is from leading commentator ian bremmer reacting to the week's events. ‘rip free speech in hong kong'. helier cheung often covers this story for outside source. good to see you. 12 people being barred from these elections, what's the significance with this? it's significant because we haven't seen such a large number of opposition candidates disqualified for. even if some of them can run, there is a question mark over whether the elections will go ahead at all. some politicians have suggested the government should postpone the elections by up to a year due to the coronavirus pandemic. they say at the public health issue, while the opposition says they want to stop them from winning a majority that they did very well in last year's district council elections. in any

case, there still some pro—democracy candidates waiting to hear back about their nominations, but some of them are also from the civic party and of them are allies. since the government has specifically said that it does not —— it's not ruling out qualifications, some believe they could be disqualified as well. more broadly, just look at the idea of protesting if you're angry you get these proposals or whatever. where does this lead people who want to oppose the authorities? where does this lead people who want to oppose the authoritie57m certainly going to be interesting to see what happens in hong kong in the weeks going forward because the opposition in parliament will be weekend, even if the elections go ahead and they when the seats. while it is still legal to protest in hong kong, journalist there have noticed people have become a lot more cautious since they say the national security law is quite vaguely defined. police have said that certain protest is —— charges are illegal. some people held up white

sheets of paper at a protest and some other protesters started chanting long live liverpool, but even then those cases, people were briefly detained by police. let's get the latest on the coronavirus. new figures show england has had the highest level of excess deaths in europe. this graph shows the numbers between the end of february and mid—june. you can see england at the top, followed by the uk as a whole and then spain. this is what we mean by excess deaths — you can see the dotted line here which represents the number of deaths we would expect based on previous years. then in red you can see the covid—19 related deaths, then in blue — that's other deaths — excess deaths. the measure is seen by many experts as the most reliable way to assess the impact of the pandemic. here's our head of statistics robert cuffe. this is different to what we hear about every day in the daily briefings. this is looking at all deaths in the uk. doesn't matter

what caused them. irrespective of the data. the patterns are really predictable. we can see that. the big increase we seen in the number of deaths during the epidemic, it's not entirely captured by the red area, the official covid—19 deaths. we see more deaths than that. by looking at all deaths, secondly, they've adjusted for age which many be seen so far don't do. countries have different age populations are because covid hit field is hardest, you need to take care of that. because of that, and it enables us to understand why as well so we saw that peak in the uk. it's not the highest. the highest was in spain. but it took the uk longer to get back to normal, and that combined with the wide spread of deaths across the uk, those of the two reasons they point to is why the uk has been so hard—hit. people in the uk with coronavirus symptoms now have to self—isolate for ten days rather than a week. it's to try to prevent a new spike in infections. and the health secretary matt hancock is warning new countries

could be added to the quarantine list in the coming days as parts of europe are seeing a resurgence in case numbers. this graph shows the average number of confirmed cases per million people. you can see spain's figure shooting upwards. which is why the uk government says it made the recent decision to force people arriving from spain to quarantine for 14 days. well, nowjet2, the uk's 2nd largest tour operator, says it's not sustainable to send empty planes to spain's balearic and canary islands to pick up passengers who are due to return from next week. so hundreds of british holidaymakers are being asked to cut short their holidays and come home. next, let's look at belgium. the government there says a second lockdown may be needed to prevent a resurgence. the most recent data shows 673 new cases recorded in a day. nick beake is in brussels. antwerp makes up about half of all of the new cases in belgium and that's why they've introduced

a curfew which came in overnight. it means that no one is allowed out in the street unless they going to work. they're going to work. that something they haven't taken lightly because that's the first on the been a curfew since the second world war. also they are bringing a new social distancing measures. some things have been relaxed in the last couple of weeks. are now being rolled back a little bit. in terms of the bubble, the social bubble people are allowed when they are seeing people outside of their household that's been reduced from 15 people to five people. so you get the sense here the authorities are desperate to do what they can to try and stop this quite alarming rise that we've seen in different pockets of europe over the last few weeks. from europe to the us where scientists have urged the government to reset its approach to the coronavirus pandemic. the outbreak has so far killed 150,000 people and infected 4.4 million. the johns hopkins center for health security writes in its report "unlike many countries in the world, the united states is not currently on course to get

control of this epidemic. it's time to reset." "covid—19 has reached a point in the united states where these protective actions should no longer be called a matter of individual choice, but measures of societal responsibility." also today, the us recorded one of its most high—profile deaths attributed to coronavirus. the businessperson and former contenderfor the presidency, herman cain, has died from complications of covid—19. here he is attending president trump's campaign rally in tulsa. he was diagnosed with coronavirus shortly after this event. mrcain ranforthe republican nomination for the presidency in 2011. despite a promising start, he abandoned the race after allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denied. that's it. don't forget you can get in touch with me and some of the team on twitter —

i'm @lvaughanjones this is outside source. bye—bye. hello there. i think it's fair to say that in terms of weather, july 2020 has not exactly been a headline grabber. in fact, the month so far has been slightly cooler, wetter and cloudier than normal. however, we are going to close of the month with are going to close of the month with a bit ofa are going to close of the month with a bit of a florist with someone coming up from the near continent. thursday, temperatures into the high 20s. the highs are likely to peak on friday. somewhere across central or south east england, we could see 34 degrees as a high. but not everybody has seen the sunshine or the warmth. this was the slow the end through thursday afternoon. an area of low pressure brought some cloud and outbreaks of rain through scotland and northern ireland, and that's drifting away a little. that

southerly air pushing its way steadily north, drawing things up and warming things up. it will be a relatively mild start to friday morning. you can see there will be plenty of sunshine from the word go. that sunshine will continue. there's are they going to be a cloud in the sky for many, and with that light southerly breeze and temperatures responding, a week weather front will bring some cloud. here not quite as warm with highs of 21 degrees, but we see conceit temperatures peaking at highs of 34 celsius. things are set to change it to the weekend, but it's worth bearing in nine that if you have outdoor plants or friday evening, there's a risk of acute showers —— bearing in mind. there should be few and far between, but certainly worth bearing in mind. into the start of the weekend, that low still with us and the wind direction changes slightly to more of a westerly, which means slightly fresher air coming in across the country. a risk

ofa coming in across the country. a risk of a few showers as well, but that will be the difference with the feel of the weather. temperature is not quite as high, 20 degrees in scotland. 77 fahrenheit. a similar story for the second half of the weekend, a good deal of dry weather in the forecast. a risk of a few showers and not feeling quite as warm. as we go into the working week, an area of low pressure is keeping us on our toes. level of uncertainty just where that's keeping us on our toes. level of uncertaintyjust where that's going to be sitting, but there's a risk of some rain for southern england on monday.

this is bbc world news,

the headlines barack obama has been delivering a eulogy atjohn lewis's funeral: the former president said he owed a great debt to mr. lewis. the funeral of the giant of the civil rights era drew three former american presidents and hundreds of mourners. the us economy has suffered its biggest contraction on record after the coronavirus shutdown. another 1.4 million people joined the ranks of the unemployed last week. twelve prominent opposition candidates in hong kong have been barred from standing in forthcoming elections. those disqualified include the pro—democracy activist, joshua wong, as well as incumbent lawmakers. new figures show england has had the highest level of excess deaths in europe becuase of coronavirus. while cities in spain and italy were harder hit — the virus was more widespread in england.