this is bbc news, i'm lewis vaughanjones. the headlines at 6:00... care home residents in england will be allowed to have one person visit them regularly from the 8th of march, as easing of lockdown measures start to be revealed. number ten says reuniting families and allowing people to have more social contact will be an "absolute priority" in easing lockdown after schools reopen. prince charles has visited the king edward vii hospital in central london where his father the duke of edinburgh is being treated. a court in russia upholds a decision to jail opposition leader, alexei navalny, forjust over two—and—a—half years and finds him guilty of a further charge. president biden declares a major disaster in texas — as he unlocks federal funds for a state paralysed by a severe freeze and a huge powerfailure.

and a 21—year—old briton has become the youngest woman to row solo across the atlantic. jasmine harrison rowed from the canary islands to antigua injust over 70 days. good afternoon. care home residents in england will be allowed to choose one person to visit them regularly from march eighth, in the first confirmed easing of lockdown. they will be able to meet indoors and be allowed to hold hands — but visitors must wear personal protective equipment and be tested before going into a home. the announcement comes ahead of the prime minister revealing his road map

for easing lockdown on monday. 0ur health correspondent anna collinson has more. a moment of relief during a dark year for 83—year—old barbara abrams. this is the closest her family have been allowed to get to her while visiting her care home in stockport because of covid restrictions. that lack of physical contact has been really difficult for us. my poor mum. her health both physically and mentally has really deteriorated, particularly in the last... since christmas. i think that was like the straw that broke the camel's back. but now, a sign of hope. from the 8th of march, care home residents in england will be allowed to pick one person to visit them regularly indoors. with the government preparing to reveal its road map for easing lockdown on monday, this announcement has been called the first step to getting back to where we want to be. there are some rules. it has to be the same visitor every time, holding hands is allowed, but there can be no kissing or hugging. the visitor must be tested before entering the home and they must wear ppe while inside.

it's welcome news for many families, but too late for those who have lost loved ones during the pandemic. we have tried everything we possibly can and what you have to remember is people in our services have very complex healthcare needs. and so therefore, our primary duty has always been, through all the guidance we get, to keep them safe and to keep our staff safe. from early march, residents in scottish care homes will be allowed two visitors. in northern ireland and wales, the advice varies between individual homes. scientists say a slow and steady approach is needed. there are some families who haven't seen their loved ones in care homes since march. so i really welcome that announcement. i would say we still have to be cautious, let's not forget the the nhs has treated over 100,000 severely ill patients in the last month and we still have almost 20,000 people in hospital. jill has two siblings and says it's unlikely she'll be the chosen visitor because she lives the furthest away,

but she doesn't mind. it's wonderful that one of us will be able to go in and hold her hand and that will make a whole difference to us as a whole whole family. anna collinson, bbc news. let's have a look at the latest government figures now, and there were 10,406 new infections recorded in the latest 24—hour period. an average of 11,224 new cases were recorded per day in the last week — 18,462 people are in hospital with coronavirus across the uk. in the last 2a hours, 445 deaths have been recorded, that's people who died within 28 days of a positive covid test. on average, 494 deaths were announced every day in the past week. the total number of people who've died is 120,365. more than 370,000 people had their first dose of one of the approved covid—19 vaccines

in the latest 24 hour period. taking the total who've now had theirfirstjab, to over 17.2 million people. the russian opposition leader alexei navalny was back in court today — to appeal against the prison sentence he'd received earlier this month. the appeal was rejected; mr navalny will go to prison for two and a half years. the jailing of russia's most prominent opposition activist has been condemned outside of russia, and could lead to a new round of western sanctions against moscow. 0ur moscow correspondent steve rosenberg reports. back in court. the kremlin�*s most vocal critic, russia's most famous prisoner. alexei navalny tried to be upbeat. but his appeal was rejected. the result? two and a half years in prison for fraud and parole violations — charges widely seen as politically motivated. this was mr navalny a month ago, flying home after recovering in germany from being poisoned in siberia.

he was arrested on arrival. that sparked nationwide protests, but the russian authorities were in no mood to listen. and there's been a cold response here to international criticism. this week, the kremlin rejected a ruling by the european court of human rights that mr navalny should be freed. as for talk of more western sanctions, the kremlin has been exploiting that to its own benefit. in vladimir putin's russia, this is how it works. western criticism over the jailing of mr navalny, western pressure, western sanctions, the kremlin takes that and holds it up to the russian people, and says, "look, we told you so, the west has got it in for russia." in other words, the authorities try to use this to bolster their claim that this is a country under siege. and that is precisely the message

in the russian state media. basically, the west is not interested in navalny. the west is just willing to see russia destroyed. and that's the major idea that we have in russia. blaming the west is an attempt to distract attention from problems here? we are not... yes, of course, we have our problems. but they cannot be even compared with the problems that you have. the kremlin will be hoping that this problem of a rival and a challenger has been dealt with once and for all. steve rosenberg, bbc news, moscow. the prince of wales has been to the hospital in london where his father — the duke of edinburgh — is currently being treated after feeling unwell. prince charles arrived this afternoon. his father was admitted to the king edward the seventh hospital on tuesday evening, as a precautionary measure.

0ur royal correspondent, daniela relph gave us this update from outside the hospital. the prince of wales, the duke of edinburgh's eldest son, arrived here at around 3.20 this afternoon, entering via a rear entrance at the hospital. we understand he had been driven from his highgrove estate in gloucestershire, a journey of around 90 miles, to central london. he spentjust over half an hour inside the hospital with his father, before leaving. now, this is a private hospital. its covid guidelines state that visits from family should only be made in exceptional circumstances. the duke of edinburgh is heading into his fifth night in the hospital here. but this afternoon, buckingham palace has reiterated its statement from earlier in the week, which says the duke of edinburgh is being kept in hospital out of an abundance of caution and he is in good spirits. the foreign secretary, dominic raab, has said the shooting of protesters in myanmar is beyond the pale. emergency services said at least two people have been killed and others injured during protests in the city of mandalay. witnesses say police used live ammunition to disperse the crowd. protests are continuing over this month's arrest of the elected leader, aung san suu kyi, in a military coup which has drawn

international condemnation. for more on the situation in mandalay, here's soe win than, editor of bbc burmese. two people died from injuries they received when the security troops fired at the protesters. there were clashes all day. they started off in the shipyard in mandalay where the workers, the shipyard workers, are striking and the security troops turned up and asked them to leave the port. and then they broke onto a ship and they asked the shipyard workers to leave the ship and when they refused, there were clashes. the other protesters joined in and support of the workers and there was a standoff. police started to fire tear gas and rubber bullets, initially. we saw people running around in the background. the footage has come from mandalay showing that people were running around, they were hiding. loud gunshots, gunfire, were heard in the background. after that, we saw several injured people carried on stretchers and whatever else was around.

people were carrying the wounded. two people died. at least 20 people were injured, and some of them were quite serious. president biden says he'll sign a major disaster declaration for texas as the full extent of the crisis caused by a severe freeze and a huge power failure becomes clear. it would pave the way for more us federal funds to be spent on relief efforts. nearly 60 deaths have been attributed to cold weather that has swept down across the us this week. on friday, about 180,000 homes and businesses in texas still had no electricity, the bbc�*s lebo diseko reports from dallas. after days battling to find power, texans are now struggling to get clean water. 13 million people, around half

the state, are being told to boil what comes out of their taps, some even resorting to heating snow to drink. whoo! awesome! but in any crisis there are helpers like allen — he has brought hundreds of bottles of water for his local community. super important, it really is, this takes the burden off of me having to get out and drive around. so i appreciate this, i really, really do. it has been a gruelling few days for allen, who has dealt with power outages and now has no food at home. i was very cold, and every time i would get out of my car and go back in just to have somewhere to lay down, i had to decide, do i want to be uncomfortable in my car in the warmth or go into a cold home and lay in a comfortable bed? today, i am going to do this water and then after the water, i am going to check and see what type of food people lost and see what i can do to replace their food.

honey, this is more than enough! thank you. it is clear allen is making a huge difference to his community, bringing supplies like water and even electricity generators. but temperatures are expected to triple in the coming days and that could bring new problems — melted ice coming through already damaged pipes could cause flooding. that could see precious supply dwindle even further. officials say some areas in the state could completely run out in the coming days. residents are being asked to ration the little utilities they already have. it has been a long, cold week in the us. several states in this country have been brought to their knees by the severe winter storms. it's too early to definitively link this weather to global warming, but what is clear is that the us needs to be better prepared for a changing climate. leboo diseko, bbc news, dalls, texas. earlier my colleague

reeta chakrabarti spoke to brian greene the president and ceo of the houston foodbank. she asked him how the freeze had impacted his foodbank�*s operation. well, it has certainly impacted everyone in the houston area, and most of texas. but low income families the most. this was not only a situation where you have the power cut off, you probably lost your water, you might have had water damage from burst pipes. but low income families are not only dealing with not having water, that is safe to drink, we have to get that, but the economic cost and the fact they have been cut off from the food supply for several days. we are ramping up as much as we possibly can. you are speaking to us from where, it looks like a warehouse? this is houston food bank. one of the feeding america food banks, where we get surplus food and distribute it out. in the united states alone, there are literally billions of pounds of this. global networking food banks across the world, this is what we do.

we use this resource to help families in need. it looks absolutely huge from the little that i can see. clearly there are a lot of families dependent on you, or partly dependent on you. are you able to get the food to the families that need it at the moment? we do the best we can. we are serving many tens of thousands, probably in the neighbourhood of 80,000 or 90,000 families just this week. the need is great. but these are the supplies we can get. the toughest thing to get at the moment is water. we have several tractor—trailer loads coming and going out each day, to go along with the supplies. that is what the need is looking like. how about actually getting the food supplies to you, has that been disrupted or is it ok? there were a couple of days where the road traffic had come to a standstill. so we were cut off then. but, no, the roads are flowing good. we are able to get the supplies in. we are pulling in probably in the neighbourhood of 20 tractor—trailer loads each day,

so we can get that out. presumably this is the first time you have seen weather of such an extreme nature? i wish! actually, we have had hurricanes here, hurricane harvey really knocked us. this is a different style. we have not dealt with a big freeze like this before, and i don't think texas was ready for something of this magnitude as a freeze. we have had disasters before and we are responding the way that we learned to do. the headlines on bbc news... care home residents in england will be allowed to have one person visit them regularly from the 8th of march, as easing of lockdown measures start to be revealed. number ten says reuniting families and allowing people to have more social contact will be an "absolute priority" in easing lockdown after schools reopen. prince charles has visited the king edward vii hospital in central london where his father the duke of edinburgh

is being treated. doctors say ambulance handover delays in england during the surge in covid cases over christmas led to secondary victims in the community. the royal college of emergency medicine says people died dr faye kirkland, who is also a working gp, has this report. the first call to 999 was at ten... it's there. 10:25. rose says it was her worst nightmare. then another call to 999. while working a ngiht shift as a nurse this christmas, her teenage children called to say their father was suddenly unwell. it is literally five minutes to the hospital. of course, now he could not move, that was the challenging thing. the family called 999 four times before an ambulance arrived, three hours after the first call. i can't really expect that an ambulance can take such a long time,

having been sounded by children. forget about the person who was sick, the fact was that the children were in the house alone with their dad, who was unwell. robert, seen here celebrating four days earlier on boxing day, died of a stroke before the ambulance arrived. such call—outs should take around 18 minutes. that week, the time it took for ambulances to hand over patients rose sharply with the spread of the kent variant, meaning for some patients there was no ambulance free to respond to their calls. he was frightened and getting sicker and sicker by the minute. angela templeman waited for more than six hours for her partner's ambulance. by the time it arrived, an existing surgical wound had started to break them. you do not know what to do in that situation, you have done everything you can — phoned, called, the gp has said you have to go to hospital and you are too sick to go

in a car, with me. so we had to sit and wait and it was just so frightening. nobody would listen. graham was taken to intensive care with sepsis and is now recovering at home. bbc news has learned ambulance waiting times outside hospitals in some parts of england rose dramatically over the festive period. freedom of information requests show waiting times in london rose by 63% for the two weeks over the christmas period. and by 48% in the west midlands. it is clear that covid is creating a whole bunch not only of covid victims but also secondary victims. the body which represents emergency care doctors said treating patients in the back of ambulances during the pandemic could have been avoided. i think it was preventable. if you run a system on fumes basically you are going to have problems. the idea patients call for help, have been taken in an ambulance and a paramedic hasjudged this is a person who is seriously ill who needs to go to hospital, and they get to hospital and the whole system designed to help them is unable —

i think that is absolutely ghastly. nhs england said services work together to free up capacity despite a significant increase in the number of patients with coronavirus. faye kirkland, bbc news. hsbc says it's reviewing its procedures for fraud victims after a bbc investigation revealed one victim was kept on hold for 20 hours before they were able to speak to someone. 82—year—old richard had £8,500 stolen. hsbc has apologised for richard's "prolonged" wait and refunded the money. it says any delay in getting through to its scam helpline will be taken into account when it investigates future scams. hsbc says it's reviewing the information given to fraud victims on its website after the investigation by radio 4's money box. earlier i spoke to reporter dan whitworth and lynn edmonds, whose father richard,

was the fraud victim. i could not believe we could not get through. my husband tried so many different numbers. we tried to go online. thinking there has to be another way to get through. remind us briefly what happen for him to need to call. dad realised that he was a victim of a scam late on thursday night. he looked into it himself and he thought that he had done all the relevant things by stopping the credit cards. he got through to me on friday night. he said, "oh, yes i'm a victim of scam, but everything is ok, i think it is all sorted." it was not until we actually started talking to him properly that we realised my dad was possibly a little confused and had actually not got the right department involved. we were trying to keep him calm and not overly worry him,

but still thinking time was of the essence and we really need to get onto this now. so we said we really need to start making phone calls. that is when we started. it was only 20 hours later did you got through to someone. dan, you have been doing a little bit of investigating into this, what have you found? lynn got in touch with us and along with her husband, steve, and her father, richard. they spent a long, long time on the phone trying to get through to someone. we put this to hsbc and we said "hey, what is going on?" in the first instance, hsbc apologised for the prolonged wait and when they were able to help they refunded the money. they refunded the £8,500 which had been stolen by criminals. hsbc said we are aware we have longer wait times and we would like and that is primarily because they said, they are getting

a lot more calls about fraud as is reflected across the rest of the industry. i did a simple thing, a completely unscientific test. i called the other big banks and i called them at the same time just after nine o'clock on a weekday and every single one, i got through to them in a matter of minutes. i got through to a real person all except for hsbc where i was kept hold for seven hours across three calls. and each of those calls ended up getting cut off. a very similar experience to lynne. 20 hours for you, seven hours. what do you make of all this and what would you like to see happen or change now? we have had such a tearful, hard time through this whole week. it has got to be changed. it needs to be changed now. they are saying it is because of covid. i fully sympathise with that. it is almost two years now with covid.

they need to have more people involved if they realise there is a problem. can ijust ask you one question, because i know lots of people watching are always worried about falling for these kind of incidences in the first place. can you talk us through really simply what happened with your father? he was contacted by phone by a scamming company saying that they could help him with his computer. they used a certain name... they had some information on him, could they go through this to help them. they just softly, softly, but over a fairly long time, got a lot of information out of him. they called him back several times and left messages. they were that convincing that they got information out of him. it is really frightening, isn't it, how convincing they can be.

that must be really worrying for you especially with covid restrictions. exactly, he is over 400 miles away. we even spoke to the police about it and said, can we come up? what can we do in that situation, you feel terribly helpless. dan, you did your investigations, trying to get a hold of someone is difficult enough. fraud is really difficult to spot, isn't it? it is. and it is worth saying that her father has got first—hand experience of this. i have done lots of reporting on fraud cases. the criminals who do this, are brutally ruthless and efficient at theirjob. they prey on people's vulnerabilities. they will not let you go. once you are stuck in their web as with richard, they will call you back, they will not let you go. and the phrase falling victim to it it is not falling victim. criminals make these people victims.

they are ruthless. if you ever get and this applies to anyone, if you ever get unsolicited calls, e—mails, text, just hang up and call your bank back on a number you trust. it really is worth hammering home that point. the criminals who do that, they will exploit people and their vulnerabilities. it is always best to be cautious. thank you both for coming on. we have some pictures coming into the building here of barcelona, the fifth night of protests on the streets of the city. this is all in relation to a spanish wrapper, called pablo hasel, a communist rapper, he has beenjailed because

of his lyrics and comments. last night there were stones being thrown, shops and banks were looted. eight police officers were injured. we can also take you to madrid. protests going on there as well. they are protesting against his jailing. so, he was found guilty of these offences of glorifying terrorism in his lyrics, of defaming the monarchy, threatening a witness in court. and he was sentenced. and they have come out onto the streets, night after night now, to protest against that sentence. they say this is a freedom of expression case. they have been out with signs saying free pablo. when he was sentenced, before he was jailed, he barricaded himself inside a university. police relatively quickly picked him up and to jail. he is serving that sentence right now. many international groups

have condemned it, amnesty international have criticised this. but there are now, you can see, it is relatively calm. previous nights it has been a lot more violent and problematic. but as things stand in madrid, and as we saw earlier in barcelona, relatively peaceful protests as things stand in the early evening in spain. protests on the street over the jailing of pablo hasel the street over the jailing of pablo hasel, a catalan communist rapper. they're one of the most recognisable couples in the world but it seems the seven year marriage of kim kardashian and kanye west is over. the reality tv star is reported to have filed for divorce from her rapper husband. 0ur north america correspondent david willis has the latest from los angeles — and his report contains some flashing images. it was a made—for—tv marriage, the rapper and the reality star. the union of two people uniquely gifted in the art of self—promotion.

kim kardashian west! both destined to strike an improbable alliance with another star of reality television, although politics was, it's thought, just one source of disagreement. she a democrat... i love this guy right here! he, an increasingly vocal conservative, seen here sporting a "make america great again" hat in the oval office before going on to announce an ill—fated run for president. that led in july last year to a barrage of worrisome tweets, including one in which kanye west likened his mother—in—law to the north korean dictator kimjong—un, and even accused herfamily of trying to lock him up. it is being reported - that kim had been over the marriage for a long time, but she felt that last year- was not the right time to file for divorce, - because kanye, in her mind and in that of a lot - of the public, was struggling.

both are said to be worth more than $1 billion — he through music and fashion lines, she as a tv star and entrepreneur. it is thought the couple has a prenuptial agreement which neither side plans to contest. neither side has commented on the divorce, but kim kardashian is expected to discuss it later this year, where else than on her own reality tv show? david willis, bbc news, los angeles. princess eugenie and jack brooksbank have named their son august philip hawke brooksbank. the couple released this photograph with their baby boy, who was born at the portland hospital in central london on the 9th of february. sharing the photo on instagram, princess eugenie said it was taken by their midwife and she thanked well—wishers for their messages. he is 11th in line to the throne — though will move down to 12th upon the birth of prince harry and meghan�*s child.

hudson—0doi it's just a bit more than your lockdown run. it tookjasmine harrison, 70 days, three hours and 48 minutes to row solo across the atlantic ocean. this makes the 21—year—old swimming teacher the youngest woman to row solo across the atlantic ocean. originally from thirsk in north yorkshire, she set off on her 3,000—milejourney from la gomera in the canary islands in december. she docked in antigua earlier today. two women in florida have been caught trying to dupe health authorities into giving them a coronavirus vaccine by dressing up as grannies. the state's department of health said the pair arrived at a vaccine centre wearing bonnets, gloves and glasses to try and disguise themselves but were caught because they'd confused their dates of birth. they were given a trespassing warning and thrown out of the vaccination centre with a warning not to return. now it's time for a look

at the weather with ben rich.