across the south. so not much rain across the south. sunshine follows across scotland, but colder air moving in, temperatures ran seven in the afternoon, otherwise 8—10 , that is your weather.

hello, this is bbc news. the headlines the foreign secretary says the government is "listening" to conservative mps who're unhappy with the latest coronavirus restrictions for england. having a vote on the regulations in january, with a sunset in february if that doesn't pass again, i think, is the right combination of accountability and transparency, with taking the measures that the public need now. the french formula 1 driver romain grosjean escapes a huge crash at the bahrain grand prix, which saw his car split in two and catch fire. this is bbc news the headlines at 11.00. the foreign secretary says

the eu's chief negotiatior the government is "listening" michel barnier continues talks to conservative mps who're unhappy in london over a post—brexit trade with the latest coronavirus deal — but fishing is restrictions for england. having a vote on the regulations still a sticking point. in january, with a sunset in february if that doesn't sources at the arcadia group — pass again, i think, is the right which owns high street brands combination of accountability and transparency, with taking the including topshop and miss selfridge measures that the public need now. — downplay hopes of a last—minute rescue of sir philip green's clothing empire. the french formula one driver and the man behind romain grosjean escapes a huge crash at the bahrain grand prix, the mask of darth vader — weightlifter—turned—actor dave prowse has died which saw his car split in two at the age of 85. and erupt into flames. the race has now restarted. lewis hamilton tweeted that he was grateful grosjean was safe and it was a reminder that now on bbc news, drivers put their lives a special women—focussed edition of witness history, the bbc‘s ciru muriuki in nairobi brings us five moments from the recent past as told to us by the women who were there. hello, i'm ciru muriuki, and thanks forjoining me here at the arboretum in kenya's capital nairobi for this special edition of witness history celebrating some extraordinary women. coming up, we will hear

about the fight for equal religious rights for women at the western wall injerusalem... ..how the american space agency nasa first allowed women to take an active part in its missions in the 1970s... ..and the campaign to make the contraceptive pill available in japan. but first, we go to sri lanka in 1960, when sirimavo bandaranaike was elected the world's first female prime minister. mrs bandaranaike entered politics after the assassination of her husband. witness history has been speaking to her eldest daughter sunethra about her mother's remarkable political achievement. you are the first woman prime minister in the world. does this have any effect? do you think it makes your influence less strong or more strong? i should say more strong. do you think women would be more capable of solving the problems of the world than men are so far? that's left to be seen.

my mother was incredible. she shed her reticence, her shyness, she came forward and on every political platform she spoke. my father was prime minister first from 1956 to 59, of sri lanka or ceylon, as it was known then. sadly, his enemies assassinated him. my mother had no intention whatever of going into politics. her three children were fatherless, and she wanted to devote all her time to bringing them up. but there was such a pressure from the party and the people in general that finally she agreed, because she was convinced that it was her duty. my mother's party won the election in 1960, but right—wing forces started saying

the nastiest possible things. running down women, how can she lead a political party? but she was utterly unruffled. she said, "don't worry about it." she carried on. as for us, we three felt, my god, we have lost our father to politics. now are we going to lose our mother as well? but she never forgot that she was a mother. she took on the mantle of the world's first woman prime minister very comfortably. she took to it like a duck to water. i myself was quite amazed how she became passionately fond of the international scene. she played a very important role there. the first woman premier of mrs sirimavo bandaranaike of ceylon.

i noticed in no time at all the way she was carrying herself with a great sense of authority, when she used to walk into cabinet meetings she had files clutched like that in her left arm, and walked with her head held high. she came across in a very strong way. when she was negotiating one—to—one with leaders of other countries, i have never, ever seen her losing her temper. she would get angry, but in a very calm, stern manner. she would say what she had to say, which was far more effective. she was very proud of her second daughter, my sister, chandrika. my mother could see that she was a born leader. wearing a peacock blue sari, the new president took her oath of office in all three

of the country's main languages. she was overjoyed when my sister became the president of sri lanka. she saw the legacy that her husband left behind, which she took on from there, the mantle had now fallen on her daughter, chandrika. the world's first woman prime minister, sirimavo bandaranaike of sri lanka, has died at the age of 84. mrs bandaranaike had been voting in the island's general election. her daughter is the current president. being the world's first female prime minister was very important to her. she felt very proud that she had done it. do you hope to see more women in politics? yes, i hope to. sunethra bandara naike there remembering her mother, what a remarkable story. next we go to japan, where women had to wait until 1999 to get the right to control the number of children they had

using the oral contraceptive pill. now, in contrast, a male impotence drug viagra was approved for use injapan injust six months, and legalised before the pill for women. witness history has been speaking to yoriko madoka, who has made it her life's work to fight for the right of japanese women to access contraception. translation. the reason i started pushing for the legalisation of the pill was because before i became an mp i ran what i called a happy divorce class for women. i was not a professional counsellor or anything, i was a journalist. but i volunteered to help people going through a divorce. many women wanted to talk a lot about their abortions. divorce and abortion are actually closely related. if you have good communication with your husband you can say, "i don't want to have sex today,"

or "i'd like to use "contraception." but many women told me they were not having any conversations like that with their husbands at all. so they ended up becoming pregnant and not wanting to be, and so then having abortions, and this would not be just once, but twice, even three times. it puts a lot of stress on the marriage. i thought, women have got to be able to control their own reproduction, not rely on men for contraception. women should be able to decide when they want children. but japanese women have been taught for generations that it is better to know nothing about sex or even about their own bodies. it was all conceited, shameful. even now, some women don't believe contraception is a female issue.

in the ‘80s, i became an mp and changing the law to allow the contraceptive pill became my big issue. i could not understand why it still wasn't allowed. so i approach the health minister, i said, it's time to legalise the pill. but he told me, "ms madoka, "the pill is allowed in western countries, "not here because the body of a japanese woman is "different to a western woman." and i wanted to say, "are you crazy?" then in the late ‘90s, viagra arrived, the pill to cure impotency in men. it was approved injapan withinjust six months. that made us women angry.

of course, the japanese parliament is dominated by men, that's why medication for impotency was approved straightaway and why we had to fight for decades for the pill. japan's population is shrinking. the birth rate is among the lowest in the world. translation: the government says we have a low birth rate, and we need to have more babies, but the japanese system still doesn't support women to have babies. it's directly related. people don't want to more children because they can't afford them. education is so expensive. i went into politics because i wanted to change the law so that a woman can live

the life she wants. can marry who she loves, and raise the children she wants to have, and be financially independent. there still are not enough women in politics, but better representation is the only way to make sure women's issues get addressed. yoriko madoka there talking about why we need women in politics. next we go back to the 1980s, when a group ofjewish feminists started campaigning for the right to pray as openly asjewish men at one ofjudaism's holiest sites, the western wall injerusalem. witness history spoke to annette hoffman, one of the founders of the so—called women of the wall. singing. i have been the chauffeur more times than i would like to think of, taking women of the wall

to emergency room. and of course endless eggs, water thrown at women of the wall. when israel took over east jerusalem, they built a partition between men and women at the wall. the partition is not equal. men are encouraged to explore alljewish expressions.

what some people allow themselves to say about us, and to us is quite shocking. wrap them in their prayer shawl and bury them alive. and we are being called nazis by otherjewish people. and when we went to court it would be 1a years later when we will receive a verdict. the court felt that our issue is so complex that it rocks thejewish world as we know it. cheering.

we won three out of our four strategic goals. women can wear a prayer shawl now at the wall, i won't say it's a pleasure, but you can do it. i am waiting for the day when young girls going to be reading the torah, wearing her prayer shawl praying out loud and she will say to me, hey, old lady, it's always been this way. one of the founding members of the women of the wall. remember you can watch witness history every month of on the bbc news channel or catch up on our films with more than 1000 video programmes and online archive. we go back to the 1970s, when nasa put women at the forefront of one of its missions for the first time.

but it was not into space. instead women were put under water to see how scientists would cope in a confined environment, a they were labelled aquanauts. this is one of the underwater pioneers. she's been telling about this forging away for women in an industry dominated by men. the women's team was under tremendous pressure to perform. the role of women in undersea research was going to depend an awful lot on how well we did. we knew that we were in a glass fishbowl and everybody was watching us. you have to go back to the 1960s when the space programme was in full gear. nasa was trying to plan ahead in terms of how to send humans into space for longer wages voyages. the best they could do for an extreme environment on earth was to use the undersea environment. the department of the interior in nasa with general electric

designed this programme to help nasa study human beings under isolation. they designed text type two, which they opened up to working research scientists to submit proposals for projects that would specifically benefit from extended working time underwater. some of the nasa guys really did not want a women's mission, that did not think we were capable of doing the work. we were going to prove them wrong, we were like, "no, 2we are going to do this and do as good "of a job or a betterjob "as the guys can do." we did have that chip on our shoulder. the training for going into the mission was pretty intense. we had to learn how to use rebreathers, these extra lectures, and on top of that we had to do these social activities because of the publicity. emotionally we just wanted to do what we are supposed to do, we are supposed to be aquanauts, can we just go down and get

our projects under way? our mission was 1a days long. we probably spent six to eight hours a day underwater. like living in a tiny little apartment, but you had this great undersea outdoors. the underwater habitat had these big lights all around the top, so it illuminated the reef all illuminated the reef around us. these fish really reflect the light, they are like gigantic scale silver dollars and they would come right up to these bubble windows that we had and it would be this big eye looking in at you. it was the most amazing thing. there were times where we got along just fine, and there were times where there was tension. and people were sort of trying to avoid each other as much as you could in such little space. they had cameras in each of the four rooms that could see what we were doing.

in contrast to the men's group, you know, we were a little self—conscious about not being observed when we were in the shower, and there was no shower curtain when we first went down there. so during the training mission we said no, we need a shower curtain here. by the time the mission was over we were all ready to come back. we were looking forward to getting a pina colada or something. one of the major findings was that having visual communication between the land, control people and the astronauts or in our case aquanauts was very important. we found that when we can actually see each other and talking to each other that that made a difference in terms of people getting along, and the behavioural analysis showed we had less time in leisure and more time on work than the men's teams did.

the sense of becoming more one with the underwater world was the thing that i loved. a remarkable story about breaking barriers. for a final film we're staying with space exploration. since that first underwater experiment in 1970 nasa has sent dozens of women in space. including katherine sullivan, in 1990 she was one of the crew members of the discovery shuttle mission that put into orbit one of the most remarkable scientific instruments of all time, the hubble space telescope. she believes that changed the way we see the universe. hubble matters on a number of planes, the scientific, the astronomical and cosmological advances that it has delivered are legendary. fundamentally changing our understanding of black holes. showing us many dimensions we never knew before of how stars form, how the big gas clouds

are nurseries of stars. i imagine astronomers have been dreaming since they first looked at the stars about some way to get rid of all these pesky clouds in the turbulent atmosphere. so that's really what hubble was about, so if you could put a really high performing telescope above all of that it really opened great doors to astronomy. we launched on april 24th and with a few hiccups and bumps got hubble deployed on day two of the mission, and then as planned returned to earth on the fifth day. t—6, five, four, three, two, one and lift off. special discovery with the hubble space telescope. 0ur window on the universe. space shuttle launches were an amazing experience. you had five engines running at the same time as you lifted off the pad, it's turbulent, it's combustible, it's really a shaking kind of ride.

hubble was bolted in the cargo bay of the shuttle and attached with an electrical connector, and the shuttle had a 50 foot long robotic arm that could grab onto the telescope at one particular specially designed point. continuing to take the arm... everyone on our crew wasreally excited about when we might get to see the first images from hubble. time dragged on and then of course the next thing we knew there was a very ashen faced press conference with very senior nasa scientific officials coming before the public to have to confess that after lots of tweaking with the telescope, they had been forced to conclude the telescope could not and would not focus properly and the reason was because this very large mirror, eight feet in diameter, 2.4 metres, was supposed to have a very particular curvature to it and it wasjust ever so slightly too flat.

at the outer edge. it was this design that was the death knell for nasa, lost its way in the woods. used to be able to put people on the moon and now can't even build a telescope. although the folks that built the mirror had messed up, they had messed up very precisely. and therefore it was possible to calculate very precisely the difference between the shape it should have had and the shape it did have. hubble was designed from the beginning to be able to take out one scientific instrument, put a new one in so they used the precision that had been built into hubble at the beginning to be able to replace the scientific box quite precisely. i can't think of any other scientific instrument ever that has become so known, so widely known and so delightfully adored, a piece of pop culture as hubble is. the astronomical team decided

to point hubble at a patch of sky that based on everything they knew, and everything they could see so far was empty. so they did that, a long exposure at this blank empty bit of sky. what came back was like a technicolor, it'sjust stunning and very richly coloured. and when you look a little more closely all of those points of light aren't, turn out to not be stars. there are thousands and thousands of galaxies. so hubble let us see way further back in time come up much fainter objects and essentially i think taught us that there nowhere that's empty in the universe. some wonderful images of space to end on there. and that's all from the special women focused addition of witness history. we will be back next month with more first—hand accounts of extraordinary stories from the past. but for now from me and the rest of the witness history team, goodbye.

this hello there. the weather has kinda stagnated between an area of high pressure. the winds haven't been strong enough to move the weather along. it is been a grey and gloomy day with mist and fog loitering in the day. north—east scotla nd loitering in the day. north—east scotland has seen some decent sunshine though, clear blue skies here in aberdeenshire and also some sunshine across parts of the south—west and across parts of wales as well. it was cold, north—east scotland, temperature struggled, just reaching a couple of degrees above freezing in places. overnight, murky weather for england and wales, mist and fog patches, visibility down to 100 metres in places, but visibility will improve across the southern plains of scotland as rain spreads and that will turn heavy for a time in western scotland. the rain

from this weather front pushing southwards on monday but it's working toward high pressure into the fronts will weaken as they move southwards. nevertheless, monday is a wet start to the day for scotland and northern ireland, rain sinking southwards across england but turning light and patchy in the south by the time it arrives. sunshine follows the main rain through across northern and central scotland, but cold air arrives, so temperatures dropping to around six oi’ seven temperatures dropping to around six or seven for northern scotland. the colder air then pushes southwards into east wales, central and eastern england as well for tuesday before milderair england as well for tuesday before milder air starts to move in off the atla ntic milder air starts to move in off the atlantic from north and west. tuesday, cold and frosty with some sunshine, east wales, centraland eastern england, perhaps eastern england, a chilly northerly wind, temperature struggling, highs of six oi’ seven, temperature struggling, highs of six or seven, further west, it will turn milder but as well as that, a lot of low cloud, some mist and hill fog patches, areas of drizzle around as well. another cold front on the waiver wednesday, another weak one as well. that pushes southwards and

then we start to draw in air coming down from polar regions. that will be moving across the uk later in the week. wednesday then, a lot of cloud, patches of light rain moving southwards and eastwards across england and wales. brightening up for scotland, northern ireland and northern england with some sunshine, blustery showers, gales across western scotland, with 50 miles an hour gusts, temperatures five to 7 degrees through the course of the afternoon. that colder air will be pushing southwards so we will all feel the chill as we head towards thursday and friday, but there will 00:27:34,165 --> 4294966103:13:29,430 be some heavy rain as well.