tonight at ten, the remaining covid restrictions in england are set to be lifted, at the end of this month, four weeks earlier than planned. it would end two years of regulations, including self—isolation for anyone testing positive. it is my expectation that we will be able to end the last domestic restrictions — including the legal requirement to self—isolate if you test positive — a full month early. but the annoucement of the changes was far from being a well thought out strategy, according to labour. some throwaway remarks at the start of prime minister's questions were more about digging the prime minister out of a political hole than dealing with the serious challenge facing the country. during the day, another image emerges of a gathering in downing street during lockdown. the police say they'll now review the decision not to investigate that event,

and they also say they'll be sending questionnaires to more than 50 people, about the lockdown parties. also tonight... the west ham player filmed kicking his cat is said to be extremely remorseful. the rspca has now seized two cats from his home. a man who murdered his fiancee in 2016 has now been convicted of killing his wife, six years earlier. and a discovery in a french cave shows that the modern human arrived in europe thousands of years earlier than previously thought. and coming up in sport on the bbc news channel. looking to win the club world cup for the first time in their history. romelu lukaku helps chelsea into the final. good evening. the remaining covid restrictions

in england are now set to be lifted at the end of this month — four weeks earlier than previously planned. the shortened timescale was announced by borisjohnson, who said it depended on the current downward trend continuing, but he fully expected that to be the case. it would end the rule that anyone testing positive for covid, or showing symptoms, should self—isolate. the prime minister also said he intended to set out a new strategy for living with covid within weeks. but scientists have warned that the disease still poses a risk, especially to the vulnerable and the unvaccinated. our health editor hugh pym has more details. it another big step in the journey from life in the pandemic to something like normal, the final restrictions in england, including the need to isolate after a positive test, ending perhaps osuna is

february the 21st. the prime minister headed to the commons to make an announcement, with an eye perhaps future at his backbench mps, pulling forward an end to restrictions which had been planned for march. provided the current encouraging trends in the data continue, it is my expectation we will be able to end the last domestic restrictions — including the legal requirement to isolate if you test positive — a full month early. later labour gave their reaction. the fact we had no notice this was coming, no sense it was coming, suggests some throwaway remarks at the start of prime minister's questions were more about digging the prime minister out of a political hole than dealing with the serious challenge facing the country. in manchester, where daily case rates have been coming down, people we spoke to seemed positive about the end of covert restrictions —— covid restrictions. if you are going to get it, you are going to get it, it is that simple.

everybody is at a stage where we know the risk and we have to get on with the rest of our lives. i love that we have lots of our- freedom back and i want to enjoy it, but i think it is still important to be cautious. _ the office for national statistics survey suggest that 3.3 million people in the uk had the virus last week, up a bit on the previous week. case rates varied around the uk, wales was the only nation to see a decrease. but hospital admissions have been falling, with the omicron variant proving less severe than initially anticipated, and the continued take—up of booster jabs. i don't think this is a scientific decision, though. i think it is clear the rates are still very, very high, especially in some sectors of the community, particularly children and people who look after children, parents and teachers. another scientist said the decision was, on balance, reasonable, although he had concerns about the

vulnerable, like rachel, who say she is not happy about the news. she says she is much more likely to stay indoors. she had a kidney transplant and her immune system is compromised. she is worried about picking up the virus from her family. i know they will carry on to protect themselves and they'll do tests if they can get them, but you do not know who they are mixing with and stood next to in supermarkets. the paranoia i had is starting to come again, because who can i trust? while england heads towards life without restrictions, scotland, wales and northern ireland are moving at different speeds. they will publish their own plans in due course on life after covid. hugh pym, bbc news. earlier this evening, detectives investigating alleged breaches of covid regulations in downing street and whitehall said they will be there and making contact with more than 50 people to get their version of events. our political correspondent damian

grammaticas is at westminster. police saying they are continuing investigations at a pace, what is your take on what has been happening today? i your take on what has been happening toda ? ~ , , ., your take on what has been happening toda ? ~ , ,., , today? i think this is a significant development. — today? i think this is a significant development, it _ today? i think this is a significant development, it is _ today? i think this is a significant development, it is the _ today? i think this is a significant development, it is the special. development, it is the special inquiry team of the metropolitan police who say they have identified more than 50 individuals they believe took part in parties, events in downing street and whitehall, they will each be sent a letter with a legal questionnaire, being told they will have to answer truthfully and within seven days. remember they are investigating 12 parties. we know boris johnson are investigating 12 parties. we know borisjohnson was at least a couple of those, it is likely he may be among the recipients of this. police say anyone they believe has breached covid regulations without reasonable excuse will face a fixed penalty notice, that is a significant development. at the same time police are looking at another party because of a picture published

by de niro, it was a zoom chris powell ebay qc borisjohnson in the picture, three of his staff, one has tinsel, one has a party had —— because of a picture published in the mirror, it was a zoom christmas party. there is an open bottle of sparkling wine and police are wondering whether to agitate to the list. downing street said the prime minister dropped by that event, it came as he was announcing his intention to lift restrictions to the commons and for all of his intention to rally his mps and show he is moving things on, these revelations and investigations mean his political problems endure. thank ou for the his political problems endure. thank you for the latest _ his political problems endure. thank you for the latest at _ his political problems endure. thank you for the latest at westminster, jamie and jurassic is. —— damian grammaticas. the rspca says it's seized two cats belonging to the west ham footabller kurt zouma, after footage was posted on social

media showing him kicking and slapping one of them. the player has been fined two weeks' wages by his club, and the sportswear firm adidas has ended its deal with the player. one of west ham's sponsors has also suspended its contract with the club. west ham says zouma is extremely remorseful about his actions, as our sports correspondent natalie pirks reports. it baffles me, the decision to play him. this is such a serious case of animal cruelty. it was a man kicking and slapping a defenceless, fragile animal. - the chorus of condemnation grows ever louder. fans in the london stadium made their feelings known from the moment kurt zouma touched the ball last night. booing. but with the defender playing, west ham won the match and kept a clean sheet. i'm a human being and i'm also a great animal lover, so i understand how people feel. but again, as i said, i'm the football manager here, and i have to find a way of getting the results here. and kurt zouma is one of the key players to us. the video, which we've decided not to fully show, is upsetting.

zouma can be seen kicking his cat across the kitchen while his brotherfilms, laughing. zouma also slaps the cat in the face in front of one of his children. the player has since apologised. last night is far from the first time that football's moral compass has been tested. west ham today says that kurt zouma has been fined the maximum amount they can, that's two weeks' wages and the money has been given to animal charities. they also say that he is fully cooperating with the rspca, who now have his two cats. but that's not enough for some. zouma has been dropped by his personal boot sponsor, adidas, and the health insurance firm vitality says it is hugely disappointed by the judgment shown by west ham and it has suspended sponsorship of the club with immediate effect. footballers are commodities that can be bought and sold. therefore that has to be taken into consideration. ultimately, this is a non—football matter and if kurt zouma was a lorry driver or a carpet fitter or an architect, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

the french international learned swiftly that this is a nation of animal lovers. former footballer ian wright called zouma "a coward." gary lineker called west ham's decision to play him "tone deaf." and wildlife presenter chris packham said, "animal abuse must never be sidelined at the expense of entertainment." it seems west ham fans agree. everyone expected him not to be in the team, in the squad, the stadium for last night's game. when the starting xi was announced an hour before the game and he was there, there was a lot of shock. it brings the club into more disrepute. essex police says it is investigating and working with the rspca. zouma's cats have been taken to the vets and will remain in rspca care while the investigation continues. natalie pirks, bbc news. the mayor of london, sadiq khan, has cast further doubt on the future of the metropolitan police commissioner, dame cressida dick. he says she has "days and weeks"

to show him she can tackle problems within the force, and restore public trust. the comments follow a highly critical report which found evidence of racism, sexism and misogyny in parts of the force. the met has apologised, but nine of the 12 officers involved in sending offensive messages are still in the force. our home affairs correspondent tom symonds reports. it's been nearly a year. the devastating murder of sarah everard by a serving police officer was a crisis for the met. we have been rocked. then, week after week, with accusation after accusation, a picture emerged of a police force with a culture problem, headed by a commissioner some believe can't fix it. now the mayor of london has ramped up the pressure. my expectation is that the next time i see her i want to see what her response is to the examples not of one officer, of 1a officers being involved in racist,

sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, anti—semitic, islamophobic and the like behaviour, and secondly, what her plans are to win back the trust and confidence that has been knocked and shattered as a consequence. appalling behaviour recently revealed at charing cross police station appears to have pushed the mayor into demanding quicker change. he wants answers, he said there, the next time he sees the commissioner. and here they are feeling the pressure. i'm told there was a meeting last week between dame cressida dick and the mayor of london. the met�*s plans for a review were discussed. sadiq khan's reaction? "we can't wait for your review. we need urgent, wide—ranging action." but can change happen in weeks? the met�*s review will take all year. perhaps it starts with mid—ranking officers. leroy logan used to be one and says it is about dealing with toxic attitudes openly expressed. they put it on social media,

whatsapp groups, and it spread, that's how it has been picked up. i'm not hearing supervisors coming out and saying, "we caught this person, we dealt with them." the commissioner is the ethical leader of the force, appointed by the home secretary, but if the mayor no longer backed her, she would almost certainly have to go. tom symonds, bbc news, at new scotland yard. a man who's already serving a life sentence for murdering his fiancee in 2016 has been told he'll never be freed, after being found guilty of murdering his first wife, six years earlier. when ian stewart was sentenced for killing his fiancee, the author helen bailey, police began investigating the death of his first wife, diane stewart, and found new evidence, as our correspondent jo black reports. i am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of your late wife, diane stewart. you're joking?! (bleep) this is the moment serving

prisoner ian stewart is taken from jail so he can be arrested and questioned for another crime. murdering his wife, diane. have you got nothing better to do than make things up? we can discuss this at thorpe wood police station. she died back in 2010, and stewart was able to to fool medical professionals by suggesting she died during the course of an epileptic fit. because he went undetected, he then went on to murder another woman in 2016. the body of his fiancee, the author helen bailey, was discovered in a cesspit. it was this crime that made detectives re—examine diane stewart's death here in bassingbourne. ian stewart said that he went to the supermarket, and when he returned to the family home here, he said he found his wife had collapsed in the garden. tell me exactly what's happened. my wife has had a fit. ithink... she is in the garden. in this 999 call, he describes finding his wife not breathing and unresponsive. he's told to try and resuscitate her. one, two...

is that fast enough? diane stewart took regular medication for epilepsy and hadn't had a fit for nearly 20 years. her body was cremated, but she donated her brain to medical research. years later, that brain tissue would become crucial evidence in this trial, with some scientists suggesting her death was caused by a prolonged restriction of her breathing from an outside source. without that, we wouldn't have been able to secure a conviction and, yes, i was very pleased that we were able to take that away and do further examination. in police interviews, ian stewart refused to answer any questions about his wife's death. the court heard he inherited £96,000 from diane stewart's estate, and two years later he met author helen bailey on a bereavement website. they planned to get married but, in 2016, he secretly drugged her, suffocated her, dumped her body in a pit below their garage in a plot to inherit her fortune. ian stewart has been described as manipulating, controlling and a narcissist, a man we now know was a danger

to the women he formed relationships with. jo black, bbc news. the peace agreement that binds together bosnia—herzegovina is under growing threat. we have a special report tonight on a part of europe that experienced immense suffering during the conflict of the 1990s. bosnia was devastated during that war, which followed the disintegration of the state of yugoslavia. tens of thousands of people were killed, hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes in a process of ethnic cleansing, and rape was widely used as a weapon of war. an international deal ended the fighting in 1995, but the tensions continued. the dayton accords split bosnia into two regions, the federation of bosnia

and herzegovina, and the bosnian—serb republic. since then, during years of economic stagnation, corruption and political turmoil, leaders on all sides have used the divisions of the past to cling to power. but now, the bosnian serb leader milorad dodik, is threatening to break up the state, denying well established evidence that his side committed genocide during the war of the 90s. the bbc�*sjeremy bowen reported on the bosnian war, and in this extended report he's returned to see how the present is still haunted by the past. the war left open wounds on every side in bosnia. srebrenica's genocide is the deepest. more than 8000 men and boys, bosniak muslims, were massacred in a few days injuly 1995 by serb soldiers.

on her 73rd birthday, this woman went to the graves of her sons in the cemetery where more than 6000 of the genocide's victims are buried. she says she wants reconciliation, but the local serbs scare her. translation: they make a lot of noise. _ they want to provoke fear. sometimes i'm afraid to spend the night in my house, but i have to. i have nowhere else to go. most of the world accepts genocide happened here, but srebrenica is in republika srpska, where denial of that genocide is in the political mainstream. in 1995 dutch un troops could not protect terrified bosniak civilians who'd crowded into these concrete sheds at their base.

they stood aside as serb forces separated the men and the boys from the women and took them away to kill them. the genocide in srebrenica was also the culmination of a catastrophic failure by the outside world to stop the war, to end the killing in bosnia, and you can understand if you come to a place like this why people are nervous again about the prospects of those old forces, of nationalism and ethnic hatred, being weaponised by unscrupulous politicians. this is milorad dodik, the bosnian serb leader. troops chant. injanuary he led a parade through banja luka, his capital. he is talking about turning these paramilitary police into a bosnian serb army.

it's part of a series of threats dodik has made to separate from the rest of bosnia since he rejected a new law banning genocide denial. in bosnia, many people suspect leaders of all sides play on fears of new violence to secure their own power. that's dangerous in a fragile country where world leaders are still heroes. serb nationalists venerate general ratko mladic, now serving life for genocide. dodik wouldn't meet the bbc, so we spoke to disabled serb war veterans in banja luka. they wanted reconciliation. for them, that means acceptance that they were also victims, unfairly condemned for fighting for theirfamilies and their old commander. translation: ratko mladic is sentenced, he is in jail, i but he is still our hero. i don't understand why they can't just accept this.

they say it's only serbs who committed genocide in this country, no one else, it's only the serbs who were killing people. we are not that kind of people. translation: if politicians fail to get an agreement, _ it will be ordinary people again who will feel the pain. and if a war does happen, the people will never come back from it. we didn't come back from the last one. bosnia's economy never recovered and every piece of war damage connects to someone's nightmare. shrapnel hit these homes in besieged sarajevo on a snowy saturday in 1994 after a brief ceasefire tempted children out to play. i arrived after shells from the serb side killed six of them. archive footage: the children were killed at about half past one on a housing estate less than a mile from the front line.

the past holds the present hostage — not just the survivors, who bear physical scars, but a country's mental trauma. one positive, today's parents don't want to put their children through a repeat of their own suffering. every anniversary, they commemorate the children who were killed in the snow. it's never easy. this year the talk of new violence made it worse. this man's seven—year—old son died in his arms. translation: now dodik claims there was no genocide, - none of it happened. that should stop. they should put in sanctions. he is trying to fool the entire world. translation: half of bosnia has moved out, no matter— if they are bosniak, croat or serb. everything's empty, and not just because of money, it's injustice, unfairness.

young people on all sides in bosnia want more than graves and memories. their leaders have failed to create a better present and future. sinking back into the past should be unthinkable. jeremy bowen, bbc news, sarajevo. the charity commission is looking into the accounts of the foundation set up by the family of the world war ii veteran captain sir tom moore. accounts published by the captain tom foundation show that in its first year it spent more than £200,000 on running costs a nd co nsulta nts. it gave out £160,000 to charities in grants. the commission started looking into the foundation almost a year ago. the foundation says it's working closely with the regulator and welcomes its input.

scientists in oxfordshire say they've made a major breakthrough in their quest to develop practical nuclear fusion, the energy process that powers the stars. researchers broke their own world record for the amount of energy extracted by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen. they hope that in future fusion will be able to provide a reliable source of low—carbon power. a discovery in a cave in france shows that modern man arrived in europe some 12,000 years earlier than previously thought. in a paper published in the journal science advances, researchers described finding fossilized remains of homo sapiens, the species to which all modern human beings belong, along side those of neanderthals, an extinct species of archaic humans, whose disappearance remains a hotly debated issue. our science correspondent pallab ghosh has the story.

sifting through ancient remains, archaeologists have been scrabbling in the french heat, looking for clues to our own history. and they've discovered that the very first modern humans to have arrived in western europe came thousands of years earlier than previously thought. we are now able to demonstrate that homo sapiens arrived 12,000 years before expected, and this population were then replaced after that by other neanderthal populations, and this rewrites literally all of our books on history. neanderthals had been living in europe for hundreds of thousands of years. the current theory is that homo sapiens arrived from africa around 42,000 years ago, and shortly after that the neanderthals went extinct. but now it appears that some of our species arrived 511,000 years ago — that's thousands of years earlier, and it means both homo sapiens and neanderthals may have lived on the same continent for much, much longer than previously thought before modern humans eventually gained the upper hand.

scientists have been studying fossils for more than 100 years to find out why neanderthals went extinct and we survived. until now, the view was that we came along and quickly overwhelmed them. but the new evidence suggests that the two species lived in europe for thousands of years, suggesting the relationship wasn't that brutal and there were more complex reasons for why the neanderthals died out. well, the neanderthal�*s got these typical neanderthal features — a longer, lower brain case, big brow ridge over the eyes. the interaction of the two species, published in the journal science advances, are an important part of our own history. it wasn't an overnight takeover by modern humans. so, in some cases, neanderthals had the advantage. at other times, modern humans had the advantage. so it was more finely balanced. was there a single thing that our species had that meant that

the neanderthals didn't survive? we don't know the answer, but i think it's organisational, probably more than anything, that we were networking better, our social groups were larger, we were storing knowledge better and we built on that knowledge more effectively than the neanderthals were doing. the discovery that the two species could have coexisted for thousands of years means that scientists will have to develop new theories for why neanderthals died out and our kind survived. pallab ghosh, bbc news. that's it. now on bbc one, time for the news where you are. have a very good night. hello. well, some of you will be starting thursday reasonably dry and sunny. it will be quite a wild spell through the day in parts of scotland. overnight, this area of low pressure moves into scotland, bringing severe gales across the west as we start the day. gusts of wind initially gale force,

but could get up to 70 around mph as we go through the morning. south of that, we'll see some clear spells and 1—2 showers, risk of ice as temperatures are only a few degrees above freezing. mildest in the south, but even here, colder than in recent mornings, cloud outbreaks of rain sweeping away the last of that milder air. lingering longest in the channel islands, then it's sunny for the rest of the day from mid—morning onwards. continuing to see showers further north, but that wild and windy weather with blizzards in the hills in scotland transfers eastwards into the afternoon. the strongest of the winds during the second half of the day down those eastern parts of scotland and into northeast england, gales here — and that will add to the chill as we go through thursday. could feel subzero across parts of northern and eastern scotland — but for all, temperatures down on recent days, and the coldest night of the week will follow. bye— bye.

this is bbc news, the headlines... i'm lu kwesa i'm lukwesa burak. remaining covid restrictions are now set to be lifted england at the end of february — four weeks earlier than previously planned. the shortened timsecale was announced by borisjohnson, who said it depended on the current downward trend continuing. meanwhile, police are to review a decision not to investigate one of the downing street parties, after an image surfaced showing prime minister borisjohnson near a bottle of wine. police in southern india have made 15 arrests after violent protests over moves to ban islamic headscarves from colleges. the state of karnataka has shut down all high schools and colleges for three days. canadian police have threatened to arrest lorry drivers — on strike.