pope francis has denounced those who seek to instil fear of migrants for political propaganda, on a visit to a migrant camp on the greek island of lesbos. he called on europe to shoulder its responsibilities to overcome what he called a complex global problem. more than twenty countries have joined an urgent demand for the taliban leadership in afghanistan to honour its promises over the safety of state workers and soldiers. there have been over one hundred allegations of summary executions and reprisals since the taliban regained control in august. us politicians have payed tribute to the former republican senator and presidential candidate, bob dole who's died — at the age of 98. mr dole, survived serious injuries in the second world war and became one of the longest serving republican leaders in the senate.

now on bbc news, it's time for dateline london. hello, welcome to the programme which brings together some of the uk's best—known columnists, bbc specialists and the correspondents who write, blog and broadcast to audiences back home from the dateline london. this week, omicron, a chilling gift for the season of giving. why, when it comes to abortion, it remains the age of trump, and james bond's boss on the danger of china for smaller countries. joining us on the programme, janet daley who moved from the united states to london back in the 1960s and is now a columnist with the sunday telegraph. stephanie baker is with bloomberg media. and in the studio is celia

hatton, celia is the bbc�*s asia—pacific editor. welcome to all of you, it's lovely to see you again. and good to have you with us as well for the programme. now, when we discussed omicron last weekend it had onlyjust been confirmed as a variant of concern. first identified by doctors in south africa, president cyril ramaphosa told his countrymen at the weekend that in one province new cases had risen from 500 a day to1,600. stephanie, the message from the white house at least earlier in the week from joe biden was "don't panic", but then he, like leaders across the globe, has had to announce restrictions, the latest on friday evening came from ireland where for example nightclubs are now being closed and people are being restricted in the number of families that can be in their households at one time. how would you characterise the global response to this latest, only the latest variant of covid? well everyone is panicking. the markets tanked and that was a sign of the real panic. the reality is we have very little real—world data

to cause us panic. yes, there are reports coming out of south africa that are worrisome, in particular the reports today that shows the rate of reinfection for people who had covid previously is higher with omicron than with delta and that case numbers are shooting up in south africa but i think it is hard to extrapolate from that. south africa has a relatively young population and a low vaccination rate. on the positive side hospitalisations have not shot up as much as some doctors thought they would. i think the real question is how well will the vaccines perform and we got two different reads on that this week with the moderna ceo sounding quite pessimistic about how well the vaccines would hold up, and then pfizer and oxford sounding more upbeat, particularly on how the vaccines would prevent severe illness and hospitalisation, and i think that is the real question for me, is does this

turn out to cause more severe disease or if cases are mild, then this is indeed manageable. the end gain here, as various scientists have told me over the last year and a half, is that covid—19 morphs into something resembling the common cold. there are four coronaviruses that cause the common cold, viruses do sometimes mutate to be less virulent rather than more virulent, they want to infect more hosts, so that is the real question and the omicron variant has hopefully spurred more people to get vaccinated, and that is the real tragedy here, is that two years after covid emerged in china, a year after vaccines went into arms, we still have pockets of unvaccinated people in wealthy countries where vaccines are plentiful because they don't believe the science and governments and pharmaceutical companies are not doing enough to get vaccines out across the world so that variants like this don't keep cropping up and prolonging the pandemic any further.

celia, the unvaccinated, the hosts as it were that we all become if we don't have a vaccine although we can still carry it even if we do, how are governments in asia—pacific dealing with that? we know how china deals with it, pretty prospectively but what about more liberal governments? how are they coping with the unvaccinated? it's really interesting to see how democracies in different parts of the world deal with this new challenge, and let's use japan as an example. back in may, japan had less than 1% of its population vaccinated, and many people were predicting huge problems, because so many people injapan at the time were expressing scepticism around getting vaccines. however, now we see that around 78% of the population is fully vaccinated. it's incredible, they've kind of leapt over many other countries. how have they done it?

well mostly because politicians in japan, public figures in injapan all expressed a very strong statement that it was your duty to become vaccinated, you would put others at risk and it seems that many people injapan have really responded to this social pressure, the idea that you really were putting others out if you didn't get vaccinated. couple that with a shortage at first injapan, so many people were concerned about getting their vaccine, they rushed to get their vaccine and now we see these really high vaccination rates. go over to singapore where they have just come out this week to say if you are unvaccinated by choice, you are going to have to pay your medical bills if you get covid. if you get hospitalised or covid? absolutely, or in indonesia they have said vaccination is mandatory and if you are not vaccinated we are going to fine you and withdraw social services, so we are seeing this range of responses across the region. some of them are still dealing with unvaccinated but in some countries really they are getting quite a strong response. janet, we are getting some

similar restrictions to a degree anyway in some european countries, france and austria and now angela merkel is saying the unvaccinated will be restricted from quite a lot of social activities. what is the moral dilemma here? is itjustified for a majority to impose its will on a minority in this way? are there circumstances where that is defensible? this may evoke some unfortunate memories of some pretty hideous persecution of minorities in those countries in the past, but i think there's an even larger and wider question here and that is we seem to have accepted in western democracies that the freedoms and the personal liberties that we have all taken for granted as part of our sort of constitutional heritage are conditional. that governments can take them away. being complicit with this by choice is one thing, that is a perfectly admirable, socially responsible thing to do but when governments can issue edicts, whether it's something relatively trivial

like mask wearing or something much more serious like grandparents not being able to see the grandchildren or saying it's illegal to have a sexual relationship with somebody outside your own household, this is going way further than the anything east german stasi ever imposed and i think we have to think about this very carefully. i'm not a covid sceptic and i'm not even perhaps a lockdown sceptic, this is a tremendous unprecedented move to limit civil liberties and make them contingent on government permission. the interference in personal life and family life and even among social events among friends is quite extraordinary, and i think we have now set this precedent and it is going to be very hard to reverse. when does this end? viruses mutate all the time. whenever there is a mutant variation is that going

to cause the government automatically to resume these repressive measures? this is a very dangerous political moment. how doesjoe biden respond to that kind of critique? because after all he is actually imposing a vaccination requirement specifically for example on federal workers? on federal workers and on companies that has been challenged in congress, recently one of the democratic senatorsjoe manchin has said he would come out against that mandate for vaccines for larger companies. i think the uk is an outlier compared to western europe and the us which have far more stringent restrictions both on vaccines and mask—wearing. i think vaccine mandates are inevitable, given the tremendous losses that the pandemic has caused on both the economy, mental health, education, i think requiring vaccine in the public square, so to speak, whether

that is the workplace, schools, public transportation, shops, what have you, i think that is inevitable. getting vaccination rates up is the only way to end this pandemic and i do question this notion that you can walk around as a sort of walking vector of a deadly disease because you don't believe the science, why should that be allowed when you have publicly funded healthcare systems where you all pay in, itjust doesn't seem fair. i know we will return to this subject again so we will leave it for now and i think that is a really fascinating debate and it will become more timely as more countries go down this route. now, he is one of the world's best travelled characters, wherever you live chances are you've seen at least one james bond movie. 007, i'm sorry to disappoint you, is fictional. m, his boss though, is not.

this week m, or richard moore, who is the head of mi6, the uk's foreign intelligence service, made a rare appearance in public. he warned of china's debt traps and data traps, as he put it, designed to get smaller countries through its economic policies on the hook. not everyone is passive, though. concern about chinese influence lies behind the recent violence in the solomon islands. what has been happening there, celia? it's a very complex story that goes back decades but basically the solomon islands for some time has really been struggling with grinding poverty, ethnic tensions, we've had protests break out a few times over the years. back in 2019, though, the government in the capital made a decision, a unilateral decision to switch the solomon islands�* ties from taiwan over to mainland china, and some of the people on one of the solomon islands�* most populous island, malaita, really took offence to this. they felt that because that island in particular, because it's very christian,

many people in taiwan are christian, they have a real loyalty to people in taiwan, they felt that taiwan stuck with them for the 36 years where they had diplomatic ties, and so they criticised the government for making this change. and they say no, china has promised us to build a stadium, to build roads and bridges. what does that have to do with not recognising taiwan any more? it is such a simple thing, it seems. exactly, it is seemingly simple but this week violence really erupted because people on the island of malaita say we really haven't seen the benefits of that switch. and so you could say that china has interfered in this and drove these divisions, however the united states has also fuelled some tension. back during the trump administration, $25 million was earmarked, specifically for the island of malaita, and some say fuelling independence desires, and so that money hasn't been given yet however, there has been some

concern that really, what is going on in the solomon islands is really tensions between the us and china being played out on a very small scale. i just want to pick up on that thought. before i bring injanet, stephanie, we've talked on this programme before about joe biden needing to develop a china strategy. there was a time, and a lot of these countries where they looked to beijing, they looked to washington, we are seeing a bit more independence, we had former japanese prime minister shinzo abe saying "hang on, don't touch taiwan orjapan will cause you trouble", but does the biden white house get any clearer about its approach to handling china? well, you know, they had these talks a couple of weeks ago, a virtual summit between joe biden and president xi and that was meant to ease tensions and the fact that the talks lasted for more than three hours was seen

as a good sign, but i don't think that anyone believes there is any real thaw between washington and beijing happening right now, there are still huge different is over human rights, both in hong kong and with the uyghur muslims, they raised issues, tensions in the south china sea as well as the taiwan strait, and indeed after those talks president xi warned that any encouragement of independence, taiwan's independence, would be playing with fire. i see us relations with china kind of evolving. in the spring, you had two senior biden officials describe their approach to china as moving from one of engagement into one of competition, they seem to be moving back towards engagement i think to put up what the national security adviser jake sullivan calls guard rails to make sure that there's no miscommunication that would cause any, you know, unnecessary conflict.

so, they seem to be trying to engage more. biden really wants to engage with china from a position of strength and, indeed, that was — competing with china was part of his sales pitch for the infrastructure spending bill that he signed, indeed, on the day that he met virtually with president xi. you know, his approach has been to cajole allies into backing the us approach to counter china and that seems to be coming into focus and succeeding, but i think the big issue facing both countries is climate change and the biden administration doesn't seem to be prioritising climate change in its dealings with china, which is surprising. they did sign thatjoint statement at cop26 but i don't think anyone believes that is really going to lead to any meaningful, new cuts in emissions by china and without that, we will not

get to 1.5 degrees global warming targets. and that's clearly one area where engagement, janet, is of value, in terms of kind of the bigger objectives thatjoe biden has. but what about this relationship with countries like the solomon islands — these debt traps, as m was putting it. i mean, we see it in lots of parts of the world, don't we? we see it in africa, we see it in the caribbean — i remember going to dominica, a tiny island — and talking to locals there who are very resentful — they loved the free sports stadium they'd been by the chinese, they quite liked the new roads but boy, did they resent the fact that the roads were being built by chinese workers, not by locals. yeah, it's important- to remember this really is not at all like the cold war. this isn't ideological. china is not a communist country in any sense thatj marx would understand. it has huge disparities - of wealth, it has a super—rich bourgeoisie now, who are ferocious consumers, - and it is a very, very active i player in the world markets. what it's after is real, - old—fashioned, dirty imperial conquest of territory -

and economic domination. and its theft of intellectual properties is notorious, . it has no—holds—barred competition with the l united states and the major. capitalist powers, so we're not talking about an - aetiological stand—off. —— talking about an. ideological stand—off. china isn't not going around trying to convert what usedl to be called third world l countries to communism. what it wants - is to buy them up. and it wants to buy up, i very often, their mineral supplies particularly — i lithium, as we known — we've heard so much about — so this has to be confronted. in a completely different way. it's almost a kind of return . to the 19th century or the very earliest 20th century — i this is either impending first world war- than anything else. so trying to counter. the chinese position, the chinese offer, as it were, with argument is going - to get you nowhere. this is a realjust - straightforward battle for world domination - and i think — i don't think joe biden's caught that yet. chuckling.

doyou—soin—in— do you, i mean, in some ways, you may say "well, look, that's fine" but why on earth is the head of m16 that worried about china? shouldn't he be more — isn't russia more of an immediate threat to the uk than china? russia is an immediate i threat in terms of europe, particularly, because they're about to invade ukraine, - i think. but it's — it's- the long—term threat. china wants to be the number one power economically- and militarily and in terms . of territory and they are now actively going out and claiming | bits of the world that they say| they have a territoriali right to — as is russia, too, but on a rather more local scale — i so it's not fine. it's just that you — - you have to confront it in the way, you know, - kind of down and dirty, really. i mean, you have to confront it in the way that we would have i confronted an enemy before the nuclear age and before. the age of ideology. don't try to stroke a dragon. just in terms of the — this response, then.

i mean, we are seeing some more voices — i mentioned shinzo abe. is there more confidence, do you think, in the region now among political leaders in saying to china "hang on. "stop and think about what you were doing"? well, i think when it comes to taiwan, there's a lot of anxiety in the region at the moment. you know, for years, we saw the key players in that triangle — we saw the us, china and taiwan basically all want to keep the status quo. but in recent years, they've all altered their behaviour. china has become more assertive, its built up its military. the united states has certainly changed its taiwan policy. you know, trump — donald trump's famous first phone call, foreign phone call, was to tsai ing—wen, to the — to taiwan's president, and biden hasn't really changed that policy significantly since. and then, of course, we have taiwan, which has refused to accept beijing's offer of a one country two systems. tsai ing—wen has been very clear that she thinks that — that — that taiwan is an independent state and so,

i think that other countries in the region are watching these changes and behaviour and they're adapting themselves and so, i think that that's why presumablyjapan wants to increase the cost to china. if china really wants to invade or even impose a blockade on taiwan, well, japan is starting to speak up now. everything has a price. thank you very much. now, donald trump may turn out to have been america's most important president since ronald reagan. president reagan passed more, and more long—lasting, legislation. both men appointed to the supreme court those they believed to be conservatives — it's the trump justices, though, rather than the reagan ones who turn out to be more ideological consistent, decisively tilting the court in their direction. wednesday arguments on abortion could be one of america's most important days in court for many a long year. janet, remind us first of all what the status quo is in terms of abortion and what significance we should attach to some of the things that were being said on wednesday? well, it is quite astonishing i that all these years after roe

versus wade and all of these i years after what seemed to be a general acceptance. of the idea of a right — not — not necessarily a right to abortion but a right not l to have abortion made illegal — it's quite complex _ constitutionally — - that that should be under such heated dispute. i mean, countries — - traditional catholic countries like ireland have legalisedl abortion without really very much fuss in recent years. and not very long ago — 20 years ago or so — - they were actually - prohibiting a teenage — young teenage girl who| had become pregnant — from travelling to the uk to have an abortion. - i mean, it's — it's gone very quickly, that kind| of social revolution. but in america, there's — - this is much — goes back way before trump, it goes - back even before reagan. it's a cultural totem now, i i mean, this totemic issue of abortion — it isn't even. limited to certain religions or — or certain kind -

of faith—based arguments. it's a rebellion against l what is considered to be a cosmopolitan liberal elite imposing their values - on the great mass of _ the population who, you know, reject those values. i mean, it's — it's — - i cannot see any solution to this, frankly. i can't. i mean, what you are implying isjudicial activism, _ which has been, you know, i a subject for a very long time. franklin roosevelt packed the supreme court — - he added justices to - the supreme court in order to get his new deal legislation through, so the idea that- supreme courtjustices have political power is not - new and they are there - to interpret the constitution but, of course, they interpret it in the terms of their own. political beliefs and that's inevitable, i think. - that creates a paradox, doesn't it, stephanie? because in a sense, the big critique wasjudicial activism had come from the liberals, it had come from the left. they had created all these new rights that weren't

envisaged by the constitution. now it seems some of the rights they created, conservatives think actually could be uncreated because they — they shouldn't have been created by courts in the first place. yeah, it's a — it's false dichotomy now. it doesn't — it doesn't really work any more and, in fact, what you see are conservatives pushing their own brand ofjudicial activism — particularly over the past 10—20 years — through this well—oiled machine called the federalist society which they've used to stack the court with conservative judges, and they want to overturn a precedent which is roe v wade that has been established, so it's all been turned upside down. i mean, we are seeing, as you indicated, the long arm of the trump presidency here because he has transformed this court with — by appointing three justices who sounded a very different tune on wednesday than they did during their confirmation hearings in the senate. brett kavanaugh and amy coney

barrett, the two of the trump nominees to the court, you know, during their senate confirmation hearings, brett kavanaugh said he viewed roe v wade as settled law and an established precedent that couldn't be overturned and, again, amy coney barrett made similar kinds of noises about she would not use her personal views to interpret the law. and what they said on wednesday was very much about well, brett kavanaugh said "why should abortion be an issue for the supreme court?", indicating he thought that the states — it should be kicked back to the individual states to handle. in reality, what you have — by all indications, the conservative majority will roll back roe v wade. we don't know how they will explain it, how far they will go but already, you have more than 20 us states that have abortion laws on their books that would get triggered should

there be any rollback or change to roe v wade and in effect, you would have abortion outlawed or severely curtailed in more than half of the united states if the us go — if the supreme court goes ahead and does this. it - this - this is an earthquake. this is huge if they go ahead with it. this is the case they've been waiting for for years and there's huge pressure on those conservatives that have joined the court recently by, you know, organisations like the federalist society, to hold their ground because some of the decisions in the past couple of years on abortion cases didn't go their way so the all — all... stephanie... ..a huge focus on all how this goes down... crosstalk. we are gonna have to wait — we are gonna have to wait for a while for the actual judgement to come out. just, celia, in the last minute we have left, there is an argument for it, isn't it? this has come about because of a law in mississippi that was being debated. we have another law in texas that's been introduced that curtails the the rights apparently established by roe. i mean, this is, in the end, a matterfor elected politicians, isn't it?

not for, you know, a bunch of nine elder people who were elected by nobody and can be got rid of nobody because they could die in office. let's turn our attention to the elected politicians in the united states. many argue that elected politicians, those branches of government, they are too polarised to really govern effectively. therefore, the us supreme court is stepping in to make the decisions that the us senate, the us congress, the white house are unable to solve. and an interesting thought — the us congress has never made a law, as far as i'm aware, on abortion — it's left it to the judges and to the states, which is an interesting question itself. janet daley, stephanie baker and celia, thank you — celia hatton. thank you all very much for being with us. thank you for being with us for dateline this week. we're back same time next week — dojoin us then. goodbye.

hello there. it was cold over the weekend. some areas saw quite a bit of rain and we had some snow over northern hills. similar story as we start the new week. we've got a frontal system working its way in from the atlantic. that's going to bring another round of rain and hill snow. you can see it here showing up on that pressure chart. it will be very wet across northern ireland, parts of scotland, western england and wales to start this morning. quite quickly, though, it will brighten up across northern ireland with sunshine and showers. but this band of rain will continue its journey eastwards through the day, eventually crossing most of england. we'll see some snow over the pennines as well. there could be a bit of a hang back of the rain for east anglia in the far south—east, otherwise it brightens up for many of us with some good spells of sunshine. most of the showers will be in the north and the west, some of these heavy and frequent, and there will be some wintriness over the high ground. a cold day to come — we could see nine or ten degrees in the far south—west.

it stays breezy with blustery showers, wintry on the hills through monday night. then it turns a little bit drier, but clear and cold for many of us. and then in the south—west, we start to see an area of wet and very windy weather pushing up across ireland and then into irish sea coasts. now, it's all tied in with this — the second named storm of the season — named storm barra by the irish met service because it's ireland that will see the biggest impacts from this storm through the course of tuesday. but across the rest of the uk, we'll see gusts widely 50mph, more than that near exposed coasts in the south and the west. that, mixed in with the heavy rain and also some hill snow, is likely to cause some disruption, even some damage. so, it starts very wet, very windy indeed across western areas — damaging gusts of wind. this area of rain pushes eastwards into the cold air, so likely to see some significant snow over the pennines, certainly across the scottish hills. and some of this rain, really, will be quite heavy, so a pretty atrocious—looking day, i think, for tuesday. stay tuned to the forecast — details may change. as we move out of tuesday into wednesday, storm barra begins to weaken and it sits

across the uk, we think, as it does weaken. still be quite a windy day, i think, on wednesday — not as windy as tuesday, but a blustery one nonetheless with showers or longer spells of rain. these will be wintry over the higher ground as the air�*s still cold, and we'll see gales across south—western areas, too, and it's going to feel chilly — those temperatures in single digits across the board.

this is bbc news. welcome if you're watching here in the uk or around the globe. i'm david eades. our top stories: pope francis warns europe against narrow self—interest over the treatment of migrants as he pays a visit to the greek island of lesbos. translation: let us not let our see transformed _ translation: let us not let our see transformed into _ translation: let us not let our see transformed into a _ see transformed into a dissolute sea of death. us politicians pay tribute to the former republican senator and presidential candidate, bob dole, who's died at the age of 98. japan goes on a hydrogen drive in a bid to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050. but what fuel is being used to produce the hydrogen? we have a special report. and, taking it to the brink — lewis hamilton beats max verstappen in a chaotic,