this is bbc news — the headlines: 18 million people in and around london are entering a new lockdown — to help curb a variant of the coronavirus that spreads very quickly — though it's not thought to be more deadly. the prime minister said he made the decision with a heavy heart so close to christmas. president trump has dismissed allegations that russia was behind a major cyber espionage attack that penetrated several us government agencies, as well as organisations around the world. mr trump alleged on twitter that the attack wasn't as bad as reported in what he called the fake news media. a uk government source has warned there won't be a post—brexit trade deal unless there's a "substantial shift" from the eu. a senior brussels source insisted it was in both sides‘ interests to reach a fair deal. there are less than two weeks until the transition period ends. the retail and hospitality sectors have faced unprecedented challenges this year because of the pandemic,

and today's announcement that all non—essential shops will have to close in areas moving into tierfour, is a further blow to retailers, on the last weekend before christmas. here's our business correspondent, katy austin. there were plenty of people shopping in london's oxford street this afternoon and shoppers queued to enter this department store in high wycombe while they still could. nonessential stores in england's tier 4 areas must close from tomorrow along with beauty businesses and gyms. it is a blow for this men's clothes shop in kent. it is devastating, awful. yeah, because we got another five days, i think, of trading, up to christmas when, yeah, we would take a lot of money potentially. and we won't take a penny. this weekend, the last before christmas, would normally be one of the busiest, if not the busiest, weekends of the year for retailers. just today, more

areas of england have moved into the tier 3 level of restrictions, meaning shops staying open, while hospitality and entertainment venues closed, apart from takeaways. many retailers have stepped up their online offering but the industry group said shutting under tier 4 would still have severe consequences. previous lockdowns have meant that store sales have fallen by between 1.5, to £2 billion a week. and that obviously is going to be even greater at this time of year. so it is vital that future support is targeted to those businesses by government that have been most affected. trains will keep running for essential travel during the christmas period. people who cannot use pre—booked tickets can get a refund, voucher or rebook forfree. businesses say they understand the need to protect public health but for struggling firms, more bad news

is hard to stomach. katie austin, bbc news. now it's time for guatemala's lost world. located in northern guatemala, the mayan biosphere reserve is the largest rainforest north of the amazon and one of the world's most important hotspots for biodiversity. it also was once the heart of the maya civilisation. today, hundreds of houses, fortifications, temples and other structures lie hidden beneath the jungle. i like this part. but some archaeologists are determined to change that. they've devoted their careers to getting the jungle to give up its secrets, and new technology has revealed that, despite decades of work, they have only begun to scratch the surface.

there's a deep hole, and that's where they're digging right now. car labours. don't let me down. the maya city of holmul has been an obsession of archaeologist francisco estrada belli's for the last 20 years. he calls it the gift that keeps on giving. let's try not to get stuck. yeah. in recent years, his work has been aided by the use of lidar, a technology currently transforming archaeology. i've come to holmul, on the border with belize, to learn more about what estrada belli has discovered.

this was one of the most populous places on earth a thousand years ago, if you think about it. we're already estimating eight to 11 million people in an area of 9000 km2. and yet they were using very sustainable practices so they could do this for 2000 years. and so, you started excavating... ..in homul in 2000. that was my first season, yeah. it was very adventurous. we worked for two weeks, and then it started raining. we didn't have any cars and the roads were all flooded, so we got on out on horses. the city of holmul dates back to 800 bc. it was abandoned 1,700 years later. one of its mysteries that estrada belli has been trying to solve — its empty tomb.

i think i know why they abandoned it, because the date of the building matches with a guy who was supposed to be from here, being sacrificed at tikal, year 748. and after that, pretty much all monumental construction stopped here. so, tell me what that would have meant. so, tikal was defeating its archenemy, the snake kingdom, and they already defeated the actual snake kings. now they were going after its former allies. this is historical archaeology. we don'tjust talk about processes any more and theories, we talk about specific events, specific people. we need a description. and yet, this tomb was almost destroyed before estrada belli, or another archaeologist,

were able to discover it. and here is the tomb chamber. wow. looters came and dug a hole right behind this doorway. and they missed by the structure by 27 metres, i'll show you. that's the corner image of one of the dead kings. you can imagine what they would have done. they would have said, oh, my gosh, there is definitely something behind this and just blast through it. it is all there and it goes for eight metres that way and another five this way has been damaged on purpose by the ancient maya. nothing else, really, is damaged. ltd his face, the necklace, a

little ceremonial head. the maya believed everyone had a soul, including images. when they were burying someone, they would let the soul out by killing the image. that's the god of the underworld. and he is holding something. he's holding a hieroglyphic. two syllables. two words, really. 0ne means the first, and one means the food. so he's holding the first of it and he's offering it to him. i love the faces on this. so that's the eye? he's got blue under the eyes. he's tired. laughter. he's been up all night. he's the god of the night sky. and this is the vessel of the snake kings.

what did you feel in that moment when you realise that? when i saw it, i thought, well, my careerjust made a big turn. jackpot! estrada belli was lucky to find this freeze. the jungle doesn't make for a specially easy archaeology. 100 years ago, an archaeologist from harvard first came to holmul and discovered these temples, but he missed the oldest carving which dates all the way back to 350 bc. the notes were rather incomplete because the archaeologist died shortly after working here, by a mysterious disease that he contracted here. he returned with a massive sore on his nose which never healed. that is what happens with this bug. he neverfinished his reports when he died. it was actually published by one of his friends at harvard.

posthumously. they forgot to mention this tunnel, and they had found the window. so, we kept digging and there is this massive carving explaining what the temple is all about. so are these beetles still around? yes. no great! it's called the assassin bugs. i'm glad we are going in now. welcome to the underworld. it even made a sound. turn the light on. watch your step. we're going to walk around the exterior and go to the front. and this is the front of the building. whoa! god, it's a lot bigger than i was expecting. yeah, it's all perfectly preserved. wow.

..for 2,400 years. what you have is a massive head of the monster with the mouth open. here inside the mouth of this monster is the face of an old man. and even today the maya in guatemala that worshipped the old man, it has the same wrinkles, but the teeth like that. it's the image of the god of the underworld. it's not going to change. jungle creatures and diseases are just two of the problems that archaeologists have had to face. but historically, the bigger threats to the rain forest and its archaeology have been logging and looting. this is l diablo. yes, this is of the devil. we don't know why they choose that name. it's an early classic building, between 300 a.d. to 680.

wow. we're going to try to see the earliest version of this building. what was it used for? killing and the sort. are dangerously steep. maybe more fitting is that its king who ruled in the fourth century ad was buried with the remains of six sacrificed children. two metres below here, that's where we found the tomb, two metres away. so i'm standing on top of a king's tomb? yes, from 370—380 ad. but no one is in their any more? no, we moved it. we found it, the chamber was completely sealed. we still felt the cold breeze and the smell, like something was

put into a process. when we found the first king, u nfortu nately, looters can come in. they're really well organised and can take everything. one day we hired a group of guards to protect it, but it didn't work because some of them tried too. i confronted one of them took his gun shot. at the time, i think i was a good liar. i thought this is a computer. we have internet, which we don't have, and we are filming everything. that's when it stopped. another major challenge for the maya biosphere reserve

is illegal logging. 0ften tied to drug trafficking. when the jungle is cleared, it doesn't just affect the animals in the rain forest, but the maya sites, which are often irretrievably damaged. loot the sites where the marijuana was growing and then collected to harvest. the name put it on small plates to go to the us. —— plains. several illegal activities are still going on in guatemala. illegal logging, which is not a problem here specifically, but in other parts of this region, it's a big problem. drug trafficking. we're fortunate here in holmul. they cut the forest

and airstrip from columbia, to go across from mexico and there from the us. and they burnt all the forest in the process. whereas this area has done much better because it was given concession to local communities for sustainable logging. in the last 20 years, the local communities have stopped the drug trafficking, the land invasions, the deforestation, and that's why sites like this are still covered by forest. we think what we have in place here works much better because the local communities are empowered and have an incentive to protect the forest. which is the sustainable logging. for as long as they can continue, they will protect the forest. this man is vice president of the arbol verde concession which has been given to local residents for sustainable logging.

like logging might seem an anathema to the forest, it turns out that concessions like these can have quite the opposite effect. by being run with strict adherence to sustainable management principles. community concessions like this one have actually predicted the reserve.

one of the biggest challenges to archaeologists in the maya biosphere reserve isn't logging or even looting. it's a fact that it's extremely difficult to find or identify structures in a jungle as thick and wild as this one. and that's where a technology that's relatively new to archaeology, lidar, has been transformative. so, this hill is supposedly a pyramid. they think it might be may be as big as the great pyramid, the mundo perdido, it's definitely steep. it looks like a hill.

so, it's pretty amazing that they're able to find that out through lidar. we're right here. 0nly10% of tikal has actually been excavated and discovered? this feels very indiana jones. lidar is a type of remote sensing technology that's used to create extraordinarily detailed 3d maps and representations. in the reserve, lidar is being employed in two ways,

from air craft to create topological maps, and from hand—held scanners to build better 3d models of a particular site or structure. the process of beaming lasers from aircraft, is the initiative of the foundation for mayan cultural and natural heritage. it's amazing. probably a classic structure. it's massive. this is one of the bigger temples of tikal. what is lidar exactly? what makes it such a great tool? it really strips off the forest canopy with billions of laser beams that map individually its return, every time they hit something on the surface. that will give tremendous use

for the rain forests and the biomass. and you said billions of laser beams. how many billions of laser beams? i think our first data said 60 billion returns. so, it's an incredible amount of data. how long did it take to collect that? only a couple of weeks. it was something like eight flights. 2100 km2 of area is covered in that amount of time. you obviously have a great appreciation for an understanding how sophisticated the mayans were. but did the lidar increase that understanding? yes, the lidar showed without any doubt that we totally underestimated their engineering capabilities in terms of landscape, modifications to make the land for sustainable to irrigation, bringing water to places to cultivate, to stop erosion.

it's pretty mind blowing. that's how i felt. i thought they were sophisticated already, but not at the scale. one of the sites where lidar has been especially helpful is here, el zotz. lidar is the first step. it shows us everything. it gives us the footprint, but then archaeologists have to check it. they have to get there. lidar makes it so that as archaeologists, we don't have to spend all her time figuring out what's there and instead, we can focus in and excavate and addressing questions we want to. so much of our time is spent mapping and just trying to find places, and lidar showed us we weren't very good at it. a lot of sites around here were abandoned at the end of what we call the classic period. around 900,

something like that. el zotz had people living here up till the 1300s. we're probably somewhere near the old communal royal, the new spainish road that passed down through central america and supposedly was built on top of a major pre—columbian three way. but no one has actually pinpointed where that ran through. we wonder will lidar eventually reveal that for us. that will be amazing. the first king of el zotz was such an important character that a temple was created for him so he would never be forgotten. when you are here, be careful. they are supporting the roof. if you fall... for this way. so, don't fall on the sculpture.

this was all from one king? yes. for the first king. this king not only was powerful. we know about his extension of power. lidar is helping us recognise everything this king did to preserve him, his family and his legacy. the creation of a dynasty. a find like this tells you there is a king, then the lidar helps you realise what the whole context is. and how much even more there is, and how powerful he was. everything they built, we can make more sense of it. you have been coming here for 20 years and knew the area very well, but you still hadn't suspected that this

was a major mall. when you see it in the context of lidar, it makes more sense. myjob is typically two things. i think it was a 100 metre long wall, i had no idea continued for several kilometres. when you got that lidar data back and started to see all that, what'd you say? i was like oh my god, my god for hours. oh my god, look at this! oh my god, look at that! it's very humbling. you think you know what you're doing for all my career, and this thing is so much better than what any of us can do. we can do what we do in 20 years in two days. same work and it's better. the lidar shows how big the rain forest is and how many trees there are with much greater precision. which can be instrumental in conserving the rainforest.

hello. there's some more rain in the forecast over the next few days. that rain coming on top of what we already had over the last week or so. we've had so much rain that in some places flood warnings are in force. you can check the bbc websites to see if flood warnings are affecting your area. we've got low pressure in charge at the moment, sitting up to the north and feeding showers in from the west. some of these showers continue to be pretty heavy through the day on sunday, really focusing in across western areas. further east through eastern scotland and england, not as many showers. showers will become fewer and further in between for a time during sunday afternoon. at the same time this band of heavy rain will swing into northern ireland and into the far west of scotland. it will be quite blustery here as well, with gusts of 40, maybe 50 miles an hour or more in the most exposed spots. temperatures just a touch down on saturday's values for some of us. highs between 8 and 11. during sunday night we will see these heavy showers pushing

across northern areas down towards the south. loud and persistent rain will push into southern england, wales, the midlands and east anglia by the end of the night. in the southern parts, temperatures were declining as night wears on, 11 degrees in plymouth by 1:00 in the morning. a bit chillier further north. that sets us up for monday. as this frontal system continues to bring rain across parts of england and wales, some of that rain will get into southern scotland, but to the south of it, we will be feeding in some pretty mild air, whereas further north, some chilly air working its way in. so some temperature contrasts through the day on monday. rain pushing east out of eastern england, i think quite early on on monday, but some continuing across northern england, up into scotland. something a little bit brighter into northern ireland but you can see that temperature contrast, 6 degrees in glasgow, 1a in london, well above the norm for this time of year. as we head deep into the week, another area of low pressure

will bring more rain for some on wednesday. that will then start to slide away south, high pressure will build in, it will be drierjust in time for christmas, but it will also start to feel quite chilly for all of us. single digit temperatures by thursday and friday, and in most places it will be drier, with some spells of sunshine.

welcome to bbc news — i'm lewis vaughan jones. our top stories: it was a planning error and i am responsible. i don't really know how to any clearer than that. the american army general in charge of distributing covid vaccines apologises for mistakes made in supplying doses to individual states. new covid restrictions are now in place in london and surrounding areas — nearly 18 million people are affected. it is with a very heavy heart i must tell you we cannot continue with christmas as planned. in england, those living in tier 4 areas should not mix with anyone outside their own household at christmas.