police and protesters clash outside the parliament building in the the lebanese capital, beirut, as grief turns to anger after tuesday's explosion in the city. people there accuse the lebanese government of negligence and say corruption and mismanagement led to the deadly blast, which killed more than a 130 people. france's president is the first foreign leader to visit the country since the disaster. he was mobbed people pleading for help and asking that those responsible face justice. emmanuel macron called for a "profound change" in lebanon's leadershio and an international investigation. the state of new york is suing the powerful gun lobby, the national rifle association, with the intention of dissolving it. state attorney general letitia james accused the organisation of financial mismanagement. the nra has called the lawsuit "baseless and desperate" the coroner at the

inquest into the death of the television presenter, caroline flack, has ruled that the a0 year—old took her own life the day after finding out that she would definitely be prosecuted. the former love island and x factor host was found dead at her home in february. she'd been due to stand trial for assaulting her boyfriend, which she'd denied. our correspondent, helena wilkinson, reports. a much loved and hugely popular television presenter, but with herfame came intense interest in her private life that all became too difficult to bear. caroline flack was found dead in her london flat in february. the coroner today said she was entirely satisfied she had acted to take her own life. the presenter was facing trial, accused of assaulting her boyfriend, lewis burton. she pleaded not guilty in court in december, the day before it emerged she tried

to take her life. the inquest heard, since her arrest and up until she died, she was distressed, devastated and hounded by sections of the media. her last months were spent in hiding. in her conclusion, the coroner, mary hassell, said that for some it seems caroline flack had a charmed life, but the more famous she got, the more mentally distressed she became. she said her trauma was played out in the national press and that was incredibly distressing for her. enter the flack... the former love island host was initially going to be cautioned by the crown prosecution service but the police appealed the cps decision and she was charged with assault. in a statement, the cps said... caroline flack‘s mother told the inquest her daughter had been seriously let down

by the authorities. she said she knows nothing will bring her back but wants people to know what a kind, lovely and generous person she was. helena wilkinson, bbc news, east london. now on bbc news, philippa thomas hears from people around the world about their extraordinary experiences during the pandemic and how covid—i9 has changed their lives. welcome to coronavirus: your stories, a programme about how covid—i9 is affecting the lives of people around the world. i am philippa thomas and this week we are hearing inside stories from scientists, some of them directly involved in the fight against the virus, others using ingenious methods to carry out their research while working from home.

later, we will hear what it is like to be leading one of the global teams trying to develop a vaccine, we will find out how students learning online with the uk's open universities can remotely conduct experiments, program robots, even point a telescope to the stars from a spanish island. and we start with two young research scientists who answered the call for expert volunteers as the uk faced its own pandemic emergency. abigail perrin and jessica olsen both work at the renowned francis crick institute, here in london. my normaljob is looking after malaria parasites and working out how they live and grow in human red blood cells. so, i think, in early march time, there were lots of e—mails flying around various channels asking for people who had experience working with infectious diseases and who had the necessary training to handle potentially infectious samples.

and myself and my colleagues here at the crick, who had that experience, have been helping with the first step in virus testing, which isjust to make the samples we receive from patients and other people who are tested, safe to go upstairs to the fifth floor of the building, to actually have a coronavirus test. that sounds pretty crucial. jessica olsen, you also answered the call for volunteers. tell us what have you been doing to help with covid—i9 and where your skills came from. so usually, at the crick, i work in a team where we produce genetically edited animals and cell lines to the rest of the laboratories to study human disease and human development and the functionality of genes. and so when the call came out in march,

i put my hand up because prior to working at the crick, i was a biomedical scientist at the royal marsden, and actually began my career in new zealand in a virology lab, which i loved, and so when the testing started, because the crick is a research facility, they needed people with the appropriate clinical accreditation to release those patient results to the patients and that is where i am steep in. jessica, what did your family back in new zealand think about the fact that you're stepping up to the front as it where? i think they were very proud of me. my specific part of the pipeline is at the very end so often, i'm staying up in the evening till 10:30 at night, waiting for the last results to go out to the patients. it has been a time that's been — a lot of late nights put in. but at the same time it's been rewarding work to do. both of you — but i'll askjessica first — i suppose, this is work that's going to have to continue. i mean, only this week we have been hearing about the fact

that the uk's test and trace system still needs to come up to scratch — there is a lot more work to be done. yes, yes, and since march we have not stopped. we are constantly improving the service that we give and kind of keeping the longevity of it going, in case there is that resurgence, which seems to be happening and that's something that we are planning to do for as long as it is needed. and abi, how has it made you feel, the fact that we are all now talking about science and there's perhaps a newfound respect for scientists as well? well, i would love to see that continue. i think we have gone through a strange few years where there has been quite a lack of trust in science and evidence and i hope that in this time, showing that scientists can come together, pull their skills and do something valuable for local communities as well more globally, and might restore a bit of trust in science. we live in very uncertain times and the best way to combat

these uncertain times is with evidence, and we can learn a lot from studying the world around us and i hope that, during this pandemic, that's become more obvious. it's actually been quite a nice wake—up call from scientists that perhaps we are a little bit more adaptable than we sometimes give ourselves credit for because we usually focus on a really specific area of science and actually most of the people who worked on this testing pipeline at the crick have very little background in virology but, in just a few short weeks, we combined all our expertise to manage to put this together in a way that's been really effective and i hope that, we as scientist, learn from that. in this time, when we're seeing scientists who usually work on completely different things, applying their skills to coronavirus, we can learn that we can expand our horizons and use our skills and our training to apply ourselves to lots of different problems.

and if i canjump in, i think it has been a time when science has been put in a positive light, and scientists have had the chance to communicate in a way that is digestible to the general public, and it is kind of, i think, for me specifically, you know, my friends have started talking about pcr as if it's an everyday terminology and i think it is that awareness that was able to be given to the general public at a time like this has been quite positive. just talking about dealing with the unexpected, i want to put to both of you the idea — do you think, as experts, it was possible to see a pandemic coming? do you think there should have been more done to listen to voices from science? i sort of reacted a bit when you described us as experts because most of us do not feel like an expert, most of the time.

these are massive, complicated global problems, with lots of different types of science that's needed to solve them. whilst we may be more expert in science than the average person, actually these are really complex problems, we all need to work together to solve them. perhaps, abigail, we all need to learn to be more comfortable with uncertainty which involves a certain humility? i think that is what being a scientist has taught me more than anything is that there is so much we do not know. we just need to become a bit more comfortable questioning what we think we know, and using that uncertainty in a positive way. jessica, on that matter of uncertainty, here i am as a member of the media and the media often deals in headlines, but as a scientist, you are especially aware of the complexity of things and the uncertainty of things. i wonder, what you think about that tension between headlines

and complicated realities? yeah, i mean, it is definitely there, and i think that is one thing that we can probably all collaborate a bit better on, having been through this pandemic, is going more for the facts and really working together as media and scientists to get accurate information out to the public so that they become aware of the situation without being scared of the situation. scientific researchers, jessica olsen and abigail perrin of the francis crick institute here in london. now, if we talk about remote ways of working or of learning, the uk—based open university probably got there first. it has just celebrated its 50th year and now has about 168,000 students across europe and beyond. and part of what the ou does is called the open stem initiative. it allows remote

access to all sorts of things, whether chemistry experiments, robotic engineering, even the ability to operate a telescope to look at the stars from a spanish island. i have been talking to the director of the open stem lab, helen lockett. in the early days, with the open university, we would have delivered distance learning through home experiment kits, so students would have been be sent kits through the post, they would use that kit to do engineering or chemistry experiments that way from home. but of course, technology has moved on and our courses have got much larger. so for the last 10 years or so we have developed these remote and virtual laboratories called open stem labs. i remember those kids because that is how my father took his degree. so he used to have chemistry equipment and geology samples arriving through the letterbox, on a regular basis, but now of course you seem to have the kind of learning, the kind of techniques that are just right for lockdown. as soon as covid—19 came along,

we've had a huge number of inquiries from other universities who are unable to do their conventional way of using labs face—to—face, where usually students would go into a classroom and be in a larger group of students with a tutor, and that's just not been possible under lockdown, whereas oui’ remote laboratories, students sit at home, they use their laptop, and they're connecting to real equipment from home, so that might be telescopes or microscopes, or electronics equipment. really any kind of scientific or engineering experiment. i'm going to have to pick up right away and you saying "telescopes" — what do you mean? well, the open university has an observatory on the island of tenerife, one of the canary islands, and we have fully autonomous robotic telescopes that are there and a student can sit from home and, as part of their astronomy course, they connect to those telescopes, choose where to observe in the sky and take imagery using the telescope. it is really amazing. i understand students are able to do experiments using microscopes —

very specific and delicate equipment. that's right. we have real remote microscopes. so the microscopes sit on our campus at milton keynes, and students can connect to those from home. so a student might be studying the eye of a fruit fly, sitting at home, controlling a real electron microscope sitting in a laboratory elsewhere, and looking at a real fly in tiny, tiny scale. and there are a lot of areas of innovation which draw a lot of interest now. i'm thinking about robotics, for example. are you able to actually programme robots from home? so we have done a little bit of that. we have some robots and that's something we are building up. we do something called lab class that works quite well, so a tutor will be sitting in a central laboratory and demonstrating a robot and students at home are interacting with that lab class from home learning about robotics that way. now, you said at the beginning of our conversation something about the interest you have been getting. where have the calls been coming from? what kind of countries? well, all over the uk,

lots of universities saying our labs are closed and could you tell us, what could we do to allow students to do practical work from home? we have had inquiries from as far as australia, from india, yeah, countries across the world, really. it has been quite hard for us to cope with the demand. i know from conversations i've had with other universities, notjust in the uk but internationally that funding, that finance is a big issue now for the future. for students and for lecturers, the universities themselves. do you feel that remote learning is going to have to play a much bigger part from now on? well, i think it is interesting that initially we thought that universities would only be interested in the short—term, in switching to a remote site model. i think, as you say, that they've seen potentially it could be useful in the future, because students — you could have smaller laboratories, you could use your equipment more efficiently. so actually, it might be that blended model, might work into the future,

that it might give a better experience for some students than they would get in the traditional model. and just a final thought. have you felt that professionally you've been in the right place at the right time? it's certainly been an interesting time. i think we feel incredibly lucky that our distance learning model that the open university has really protected us from the covid crisis perhaps much more than other universities, we've still faced lots of challenges. but things like the remote labs, even when our campus was completely closed, the staff could login remotely, they could monitor the equipment, they could fix problems from home. and we managed to keep the vast majority of our remote experimentation running through this period. helen lockett, a key early adopter of research methods now likely to be followed by many more scientists internationally. you are watching ‘coronavirus: your stories', a programme about how covid—19 is changing lives around the world. i'm philippa thomas. and this week, we're getting inside stories from scientists. next, we look at the search for a vaccine. the world health organization is warning there may never be a silver bullet to beat this coronavirus.

but hopes for some level of vaccine protection are strong, with teams around the world working at unprecedented speed, with great intensity, to try to establish successful formulas. one of those teams is that the wistar biomedical institute in pennsylvania, working with the us company inovio and with groups from korea and china, to australia, to canada, to the british nhs. the wistar—inovio vaccine is a synthetic dna—based vaccine, a new type that isn't based on the live material that copies it, essentially fooling our immune system into believing covid—19 is present and needs to be repelled. the aim is to inject an artificially created version of covid's viral protein into the body as genetic information. that, it's hoped, will stimulate our immune systems to create their own defences against the virus that can do so much harm.

leading this particular effort is doctor david weiner, he's the executive director of wistar‘s vaccine and immunotherapies centre. he's worked before in the fight against deadly viruses from sars and mers to zika. but he's been talking to me about how this one feels very different. he talks to us about how this one is different. since it's happened upon us so fast and we're really learning on the fly, we're essentially building the aeroplane to control this while we're trying to take—off and control it. and that's an enormous challenge. we didn't know much about its background, where it came from, and then how to protect against it. but we are learning a lot, we've made enormous progress. i want to talk about your family. because i think you also have personal reasons to hope that this works, that mitigation and a vaccine is brought to the fore very quickly. your daughter's a doctor, yes?

my daughter is a physician's assistant at the mayo clinic and she's in emergency medicine. and i'm very proud of her. and so she's of course been seeing patients with a significant amount of disease. and, yeah, so, that's a very important thing and a very big — we think about a lot, of course. and i also have a family member who is immunosuppressed, so we have a lot of personal concerns that way, but i think every family does. we all are seeing people we know who are getting sick, etc, with this disease. it's important to say though i'm speaking to you in pennsylvania, this is a global effort. you have testing in south korea and you're working with scientists across borders. that's correct. this is really a much larger effort than just us. we're only a part of the programme. the programme is funded originally by cepi,

the coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations, which is really a global reach programme. it has funding from the department of defense and supported by other us agencies and also by the bill & melinda gates foundation. and of course there has a company lead, which is how cepi has set up the programme, which is a pennsylvania—california company, inovio. and of course we have collaborations across the globe, for example, public health england. i'm going to ask you to explain very much in layman's terms what kind of vaccine you're working on. because i'm sure many of our audience know there are different kinds, depending on whether you're essentially injecting live material or not. so, our vaccine approach is an approach we have worked on for several decades now, which is the idea of delivering nucleic acids, dna, dna

and you've also heard of rna vaccines, are both nucleic acid—type approaches. these are non—live pieces of basically, encoded information, and this is a new concept in vaccine development. and these are non—live, they don't grow, they can't spread, they are delivered locally — in the case of the dnas into, — in this, in sars—cov—2 — the skin. and at the local site, is where the instructions that tell our ? the cells of our body, to produce a single virus protein that's been designed in a lab on a computer. and that viral protein is a copy of the spike antigen. this spike is the antigen that the virus uses to attach to our cells, particularly our lung cells and many others, to get into it and cause the infection. so if we can create a replica of that inside a person's body, that would be a foreign

protein now in a person. their immune system seeing it as foreign. they would respond in two ways: one, they would generate antibodies — the molecules that bind to viruses and directly inactivate them and prevent them from entering cells, and two, one of the real important features of this approach is it's very good at generating t cell responses in humans. and t cell responses are the kind of the navy seals of the immune system, they patrol the body and clear sites that are infected. and so they find virus hiding within cells, replicating within cells, and destroy those cells which are now corrupted. and by doing that they then can then help clear infection. doctor weiner, your work is always important. but with this virus and the response to it, do you feel more of a sense of urgency, of intensity, than ever before? i think all of us involved, and all of us at home feel the urgency. i think our families feel the urgency. ourfamilies' whole

life are changed. our friends' lives are changed. and as you know, there are multiple vaccine types being moved forward. it's likely to take several different important successes, not one vaccine, but likely several, to meet the different populations that will need it. it's likely to take several different to have more rapid global distribution. i think by working together like this, we will get through this. so, what you think when you see headlines about the race for a vaccine? well, ithink, you know, we are very used to thinking about things as a race that way, a race this way, but if one of the problems with one winner in this case is that one platform, or sort of, you know, would be the only platform that would be available for a while for production. and so that would mean while

you have x, you wouldn't have y. and so not having y would mean many people are waiting for that y. in addition, vaccines have different properties. there are some vaccines that we manufacture for older populations, there are some vaccines we manufacture for children, so those can have different properties of the cover. everyone — we might want a spectrum. i hear what you're saying. the more winners, the better, in this particular circumstance. i do have to ask you, though, isn't there, as an academic, is there something of a sense of competition, something of a streak of determination to get your particular vaccine out there as well as one of the frontrunners? i think we're gonna follow the science on every one of these, and we're very dedicated to advancing our platform as fast and as safe as possible. we have, i think, everyone is dedicated to getting out platforms that can help, that can be tested on different populations, and that can be put together as a global effort to get us out of our houses.

doing what you do, doctor weiner, isn't it hard to switch off at the end of the day? this is such intense work. and you're now under something of a spotlight? this is a very intense project and all of us are really working 21w. we could probably go to sleep thinking about it, we wake up thinking about it, so it is an all—engrossing project that is very different than the way things were before. doctor david weiner, ending this week's edition of personal stories from scientists pursuing their research in the face of this deadly pandemic. i'm philippa thomas. thank you forjoining us for ‘coronavirus: your stories'. hello. friday brings some weather deja vu, with temperatures soaring once again.

one week on from well, last friday, this is how it looked at the start of the day. the uk was set to record its third—highest temperature on record. so, here we go again this friday. heat surging up from the south. not everybody‘s going to get it, but the hottest area — around london — could reach 36 celsius. and unlike last friday, this is the start of several days of heat, so for parts of england and perhaps wales, the start of a heat wave. but, again, not everybody will get it. this weather front for northern ireland, into scotland, will bring some outbreaks of rain and keep temperatures into the low 20s. pretty warm and muggy start to friday. and some cloud around, a lot of sunshine from the word go through central and eastern england. but for northern ireland and scotland, here comes the rain. maybe some heavy and thundery bursts pushing eastwards during the day. i think parts of the east and south—east of scotland will stay largely dry until the evening. there may well be some misty low cloud hanging on towards some western coasts of england and wales. could be a bit drizzly in places here, but for the bulk of england and wales, it'll be sunny, though the cloud increasing in southern england may just bring the odd sharp

shower later in the day. but, really, it's about those temperatures in england and wales. very warm to hot. parts of the midlands, eastern and south—east england in excess of 30 celsius, and exceptionally hot in the hottest parts of south—east england, where, of course, after such a very warm to hot day, it'll be very warm overnight and into saturday morning through a large part of england and wales. even where you have clear skies, difficult for sleeping. but as that weather front has pushed on and cleared away from scotland and northern ireland, some cooler, fresher air here, and some actuallyjust dip into single figures as saturday begins. high pressure in control on saturday. that means a lot of fine weather to start the weekend. plenty of sunshine. bit of a breeze just kicking in towards some of these north sea coasts will actually take temperatures back down a bit from friday. even where it was so very hot, you may not be quite as hot on saturday, not so much, i think, as many people would notice. it is still very warm to hot across a large part of england and wales. overnight and into sunday for england and wales, the growing chance of seeing a few showers and thunderstorms

break out, but many places will still stay dry and have a fine sunday. quite a range of temperatures across the uk, but it's those hottest parts of england and wales that will see the heat continue into the start of the week.

this is bbc news. i'm lewis vaughan jones, with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. police and protesters clash on the streets of beirut as grief turns to anger following tuesday's explosion. france's president calls for "profound change" from lebanon's leadership and an international investigation as he visits the damage—hit capital. taking aim at the national rifle association. new york's attorney general accuses the group of fraud and attempts to disband it. a landslide at the ballot box in sri lanka, but the ruling party's win sees little celebrations among human rights campaigners. and as italy struggles to draw back the tourists,