hello, welcome, you're watching bbc news. our main headlines: pope francis has urged iraq's different religious communities to join together in a journey towards peace. his call comes at the start of the first—ever papal visit to the country, where he's also called for an end to violence and extremism. the un's special envoy on myanmar has told the security council that democracy must be restored to the country. christine schraner said anti—coup demonstrators were beginning to lose faith in the united nations. protests against last month's military takeover have been met by an increasingly violent response by the military and security forces. more details have emerged of the duchess of sussex's interview with oprah winfrey in a newly leased clip. meghan says she feels liberated now that she feels she can speak for herself again and she jested life with prince harry within the royal family was not what she expected. —— and she suggested. green spaces are known to

improve health and wellbeing, and for many people, gardens have been a real help during the pandemic. and it seems the uk is getting greener. the royal horticultural society says a0 square miles of new trees, flowers and grass has been created across the uk over the last five years. tim muffett reports. that garden has got me through what has been a really challenging three years. when camilla added plants to her front garden in sheffield, the effects were far—reaching. four years ago, my front garden was in really bad shape, so it had been used pretty much as a builders�* yard. and at the same time, my mum was diagnosed with cancer, so we had a pretty rough time as a family. being able to go outside and just make everything a little bit better i think was one of the few things that i could do at that time. the uk's front gardens are getting greener, according

to the royal horticultural society. its research suggests that plant cover has increased by almost a0 square miles over the past five years. what's been really lovely is seeing how people respond to the garden, because, you know, we're a little street, so you see people walking up and down, and if somebody stops and smiles then that's, yeah, that's very much the reward. in woking, another front garden with plants instead of paving. when i come home, i feel good about arriving at my own door. and because it changes every day, you get involved, you get interested in what's going on. neighbours stop to talk, sol know more people in my road. compared to 2015, it's thought more than one million more front gardens in the uk now contain only greenery, so why the big change? well, in 2008, paving or concreting over a front garden did become more difficult. since then, you've needed

planning permission to do that for an area over five square metres. gardens max your physical, mental, and social well—being. with the covid—19 impact, i think people are recognising the health benefits. the royal horticultural society's garden in wisley. it's notjust home to thousands of beautiful plants — a lot of research goes on here. there's a new science centre being built. we've just recently done a study where we put two tiny planters and a tree in a salford street, and we measured cortisol — which is a stress hormone. we found a 6% decrease in stress, which is equivalent to eight mindfulness sessions. a new season is approaching, and for many, a new sense of optimism. there's a growing appreciation, it seems, for the power of nature. tim muffett, bbc news.

and it's lovely to see. that's it from me, james is here at the top of the hour. now on bbc news, this month, witness history comes to you from sydney australia. my colleague shaimaa khalil, brings us stories of women in history. a warning this programme contains images some viewers may find upsetting. hello, i'm shaimaa khalil, and thanks forjoining me here in sydney, australia for this special edition of witness history, celebrating some incredible stories featuring women. coming up, we'll hear from a firefighter who battled one of this country's worst ever natural disasters. we'll hear how greece fought to get its parthenon marbles back from britain. plus, the birth of a new language in nicaragua. and why 1980s new york artists dressed in gorilla masks. but first, during the vietnam war in the 1960s, american forces sprayed toxic chemicals

on the south of vietnam to clearjungle areas. the effects have lasted for decades, with generations of suffering death, deformity, miscarriages and cancer. witness history has been speaking to dr nguyen thi ngoc phuong, who pioneered research into the impact of agent orange. decades ago, american forces sprayed huge amounts of agent orange over vietnam. it was meant to strip trees bare, exposing enemy positions, but it also contained dioxin, one of the most poisonous substances ever created. in 1965, i was a young medical student in saigon city. i liked very much to be an obstetrician and gynaecologist, so i took care of women

and newborn babies. i saw in the hospital an increase of the birth defects. it was horrible for me, a very horrible for me, to see two, three times a week deformed babies or deformed children. i cried, cried with the mothers of the baby. and i cannot eat for many days. the figures are startling. in this one hospital, 158 deformed babies were born dead last year. statistically, that's three times what doctors here believe should be the average. i didn't know the cause at that time, but later, in 1976, i read about the toxic chemicals used in

the defoliants and herbicides in vietnam during the wartime. agent orange is blamed, named for the orange bands around the drums, a defoliant containing deadly dioxin. the result then was a dead landscape. the result today, based on research at this saigon hospital and in america, is human tragedy. minute traces of toxic chemicals are being found in the uterus of pregnant women, even now, years after spraying stopped. we carried out many studies. 4.8 million people in vietnam were exposed to the toxic chemicals. dioxin can get into the human body through the respiratory tract or through the food chain. incidents of birth defects,

the miscarriages, the foetal death in utero and cancer were more than four times higher among the exposed people. and the american veterans are also victims of the spraying. but dioxin, it can change the dna, so that it can be transmitted into many generations later. we have already the fourth generation now affected. but we can detect very early the birth defects and cancers. i hope that in the future,

in ten more years, we can have a very small incidents of birth defects like in the other countries. dr nguyen thi ngoc phuong in vietnam. here in australia, the heat can be unbearable. and in 2009, the state of victoria experienced what at the time were the worst bushfires the country had ever seen. nicki lund is one of the firefighters who drove towards the flames. helplessness. .. ..not being up to do anything. it's been called australia's worst ever natural disaster, fires that swept through victoria's bushland communities so fast and with such fury, warnings couldn't always keep pace with the blaze. thousands had to flee in desperation, abandoning homes to be

engulfed by flames. 173 other people never made it, the death toll from this australian tragedy. the fires started from a failed conductor on a murrindindi fire pole. the fires were bad because we'd been in drought for so long. on black saturday, the temperatures were 47 degrees and quite windy. we were all on high alert, obviously, and all on standby. so i was actually at home, and my captain called me at about 2:30pm in the afternoon and asked me to come down to the station. when we were travelling along the buxton marysville road, along the ridge line, i can see huge plumes of smoke. at that particular time, we were unaware of what was actually happening and the intensity of the fire. when we arrived in kings road, we had fires on both sides of us. the two fires on both sides were drawing to each other, so it was at that point

that our truck driver got out of the truck, to then alert us that he would like us to get back onto the truck and leave because the circumstances were changing quite rapidly. we had flames leaping up alongside of our trucks, we had our fog nozzles and sprays out the sides of our trucks, we had ourfire blankets covering us to protect us from the radiant heat and the embers that were flying around everywhere. we were screaming at each other, trying to communicate, because the sound of the fire was like jet engines. nothing can describe what it was like. and the skyjust... everything just turned dark. we took the best route that we could because trees were falling down around us everywhere and headed straight for gallipoli oval, which is where everyone took refuge. we had 360—degree fires burning around us. everything was burning, absolutely everything. things were exploding,

gas bottles were exploding, the petrol station was exploding, and then we watched everything burned. your training kicks in and you do what you're trained to do. and at that particular time, believe it or not, i was not scared. it was not until afterwards, when we were on the oval and you actually had time to reflect, that i actually stopped and thought, "i was so close to losing my life." there were still local community there, and they were all coming to us and asking for our help and asking for bottles of water that we had on our trucks — because everybody�*s lungs were just like as if they were burned from the heat in the air. and we could see the magnitude of the loss of property that was taking place before our eyes.

at that point in time, we didn't know the loss of life. the impact that it's had on the communities themselves and the people, and the loss of life and the loss of our wildlife, has been tremendous. it's been huge. there was nothing anybody could have done. it wouldn't matter how many trucks or how many personnel. absolute freak of nature. nicki lund, who's now a captain at her local fire brigade. up next, a story with roots stretching back 2,500 years, but which for some still represents a continuing source of pain. in 1983, the greek minister of culture, melina mercouri, formally requested that britain returned the parthenon marbles which had been taken from athens 200 years earlier. witness history spoke to her colleague, victoria solomonides.

the parthenon is the chief remaining monument of ancient athens at the highest point of its history, the fifth century bc. in 1799, the 7th earl of elgin was appointed british ambassador to constantinople. lord elgin was dispatched to the ottoman empire, of which greece had long been a part. he was now able to indulge a fashionable interest in classical souvenir hunting.

melina mercouri, actress and greek minister of culture and sciences, says that the elgin marbles — or the parthenon marbles, as the greeks call them — are a symbol of freedom, and she wants them back where she says they belong, in greece. melina became the voice of the marbles. in other words, the marbles that had been silent for all these centuries finally found their voice. this is a moral issue more than a legal issue. but you're saying that he was a thief? oh, yes, he was. everybody knows that when lord elgin had taken those marbles, we were under occupation by the turks. and it's not the greeks that has given the permission. surely the point is that lord elgin got permission from... from the turks, and not from the greeks! in 1983, i was serving as culture attache at the embassy of greece

in london, and it was part of my brief to work with the minister of culture. melina mercouri, the greek film star who's now her country's - minister of culture, _ has come here to demand the return of the elgin marbles. so we go through the side entrance, she's received by the director of the museum, and then we move to the duveen galleries. there's a hush around her — and all hell breaks loose. already, she's confronted the museum's director, dr david wilson. no, i don't want to ruin the british museum, i want my marbles back! yes, you want your- marbles and other people want their marbles. do you think the elgin marbles should go back to greece? no, idon't, no. no, idon't, really. i mean, isympathise with their claim to some

extent, but, i mean, on the other hand, i do think elgin rescued them when they were just about on the verge of extinction. yes, not only the elgin marbles. i think that all national treasure should go back to their nation of origin and not remainjust the plunder of empires, whether they be american or english or whatever. no, i don't. i think they are very well preserved in the british. museum, and everybody can see them from all over the world. i the press was full of articles, and teachers read them and teachers took the issue to the classroom. and i have in my collection essays written by primary schoolchildren and little designs for the return of the sculptures. how long are you going to continue your campaign? 0h, every day, even on sunday, until they come back.

when asked when would it be that the marbles come back, she replied, "i don't know when the marbles will come back. i may not be alive at the time, but when they do, i will be reborn." victoria solomonides, friend of melina mercouri. remember, you can catch witness history every month on the bbc news channel, or you can catch up on all ourfilms — along with more than 2,000 radio programmes — in our online archive. just go to... now, we go to the 1980s, when deaf people in nicaragua were first enrolled in schools. there, they invented a sign language which of their own. linguistjudy shepard—kegl was there to document this, providing a unique insight into our understanding of how humans communicate.

my little linguist brain, looking at them signing to each other, was going, "ok. oh, this is what's happening, this is that rule, this is what's happening with the grammar," and i realised, "whoa, we are seeing the emergence of a language." this was something that needed to be documented. prior to the 1980s, deaf people were very isolated in nicaragua. all they had was a handful of gestures, something like "i want to eat" or "i feel sick" or "i have to go to the bathroom" — i mean, just gestures that were used in the family. in the early 1980s, with a new focus on education for everyone, deaf people were brought into schools, but no one really knew a whole lot about how to teach them.

the school brought in teachers from east germany to try to teach the students to lip—read, but it was a dismal failure, as they simply didn't understand what was going on. however, between the students themselves, something startling had begun to happen. they were finding their own way to communicate. they suddenly had the need to communicate. the students had started signing to each other, and their signing developed so fast that it was soon too complicated for the teachers to follow by guesswork. the expert they were sent was american linguistjudy kegl. what i asked them was, "what do you want? what do you want here in the school? what do you need?" and their answer was, "we need to understand what those deaf kids are talking about." when i first went down, i saw communication that was very hard for me as a linguist to get a handle on.

when you looked for what the sentence structure was, each person was different. there was a lot of variability. but there was one very dominant language user named mayela. interpreter: we're all deaf here and we've - grown up together. as you can see, we're all good friends... and as i watched her, i saw the sort of full—blown consistency, the facial expression, the rhythm, the assurance of being understood. and the same was true for all the kids around her, and i realised, "whoa!" the emergence of new languages is not unknown, but it's never been the case that someone has actually been able to film, document and follow the process of what the human brain is doing with language. we devised a simple task using a minute and a half long nonverbal cartoon — no words — and looked at how anyone who was deaf would recount the contents of that cartoon.

what we found was that the younger kids had a lot more of a grammatical repertoire to use, to allow them to give a lot more richness and visual detail. that was the indication that this is a language coming into being. among linguists, there's a debate about whether language is nature or nurture. i believe that it is nature, but it needs company. you need to have that reason to use language, which is why the deaf people left in their homes don't get the triggers that have them develop language. they remaining languageless. we did not go in and make it happen. we documented something that was happening. if we did anything, we shared a respect for the complexity and the value of the language that they gave birth to. they did the rest.

linguistjudy shepard—kegl, who documented the emergence of a new language. for our final film, we're going undercover. in 1985, a group of anonymous women artists revolutionised the new york art scene with a campaign against sexism. dressed in gorilla masks, they fly—posted the city, demanding greater representation of women artists in galleries. the posters ignited such an argument and a dialogue — pro, con, whatever — and everyone wanted to know who we were.

back in the mid—�*80s, the museum of modern art opened an exhibition that they entitled "an international survey of painting and sculpture", with 169 artists, only 17 women and only eight artists of colour, and we had been noticing for a long time that the art world pretended to be more progressive and liberal than it really was. you know, we were artists in the new york art world, and we were afraid that our involvement with this would influence how people saw our individual work, but we quickly realised that it was a great secret of our success cos it was a delicious mystery. museumgoers and art lovers thought that museums knew best. and if you weren't in the museum, you weren't a good artist. well, it's a dirty business putting street posters up,

but we loved the street. we always wanted to be on the street, and new york had this incredible explosion of posters, flyers, art on the street, graffiti, and being part of that was very exhilarating. and we did it at night cos you're not allowed to put that stuff up. we just had something to say, we wanted to say it. the cheapest way to do it was to print up posters. and then we claimed the streets and we chose very strategic places to put them, all around the galleries, so that people couldn't help but see guerrilla girl posters. we would say provocative things in the headlines and then back it up with incontrovertible statistics.

it's hard to go into a museum now and not think about who's making the art, whether it's men, women, people of colour. we really are in the business of creating knowledge. the anonymous activists known as frida kahlo and kathe kollwitz. and that's all from this edition of witness history, featuring some incredible women. we'll be back next month with more first—hand accounts from the past. but for now, from me, shaimaa khalil, and the rest of the witness history team, goodbye.

hello. last weekend was a mainly dry weekend across the uk, with high pressure in control. and this weekend will be the same. but there is a significant difference between weekends — that word there, cold. a very different feel to things. spring in the air last weekend, 15 celsius in the sunshine. this weekend, with only a few sunny spells around, it's closer to 7 degrees. and it feels like winter's still got a bit of life left in it. but it is high pressure across us, so it is going to be mainly dry. just this one weak weather front will deliver a bit of rain into parts of scotland, especially the further north you are. there is milder air out in the atlantic. it will come our way in the week ahead, but that's not the only change coming, as i'll show you in a moment. this is how saturday begins, temperatures well below freezing. in the coldest parts, a widespread frost to start the day. some mist and fog patches around. there's the chance of catching

a shower along the north sea coast, maybe around the thames estuary early on. they'll fade, showers come into the western isles, far north of mainland scotland, one or two into the northern isles. elsewhere, variable cloud, some sunny spells and temperatures only around that 7 celsius mark. on into saturday night, then, we'll keep a few areas of cloud but also some clear spells. the rain becoming a little bit more widespread across northern scotland, with some heavier bursts around here, keeping the temperature up, whereas elsewhere, if you're clear for any period of time, your temperature will drop below freezing and there will be another frost on sunday morning. still in scotland on sunday, towards the north and northwest, some outbreaks of rain. elsewhere, well, again, it's the sort of day where if you start sunny, you're likely to cloud over. if you start with cloud, you'll eventually see a few sunny spells. a little less cold in scotland and northern ireland. and then on monday, it is again scotland most likely to see a few outbreaks of rain, but the odd spot in parts of northern england and northern ireland can't be ruled out. to the south, after a frosty

start, still a fair amount of cloud around, maybe a few early mist and fog patches. but significant weather changes on the way into midweek. goodbye, high pressure, hello, low pressure, and that does mean a change to, yes, slightly milder weather coming our way and some potentially disruptive wet and windy weather once more.

welcome to bbc news. i'm james reynolds. our top stories: pope francis begins his historic visit to iraq with an appealfor all religions to come together and work for peace. more clashes in myanmar as the united nations security council meets to decide what action to take against the generals who seized power. "a greater mass trauma than world war ii" — the head of the who says the effects of the pandemic will be felt for years to come. hello and welcome to bbc news.