international condemnation as russia grants recognition to two breakaway regions of ukraine and announces they are sending peacekeeping troops there. the un is meeting to discuss the situation. the impact on the markets has been immediate. tokyo stocks are slumping and oil prices are on the rise. cause for celebration in colombia, as the country's highest court decriminalises abortion up to 2a weeks of pregnancy. activists argued illegal abortions risked lives.

now on bbc news, we follow the oystermen of the river fal estuary, as they battle to save their precarious way of life. yeah, the wind has gone now. there is not a lot of wind so we work two dredges at the minute. we've had more bad years than good years. it is just a different problem every day. i won't be going if we can't get a living. you know, just ticking over is no good. january 2021, it stopped dead. i think the fishermen were promised the unpromisable. if we lost the export market, then beneficiary would be under serious trouble. worst case scenario is we stop

the business, we stop buying. if two or three things go wrong, the whole show can collapse. to see our oyster fishery collapse would be devastating. we'll put the big jib up now because there is not enough wind. that's cool. i'll give you a hand there. make sure there are no twists in it. my name is les angel. all right? i am an oyster fisherman the fal. i was about 15, i suppose,

when i started fishing. my great grandfather was an oyster fisherman in the fal. yes, that is one of our native oysters, one of our good oysters. that will be all right for london. £3, £2 or £3 for an oyster like that. cheap. too cheap. it's a good life, but it is not easy. otherjobs are a lot easier than oystering, you are working nonstop for six hours. no dredges over the side until nine o'clock. and all dredges must be in by three o'clock.

six hours is long when you have been pulling dredges. for me, anyhow. a lot of oystermen sufferfrom bad backs. pulling and bending over. it soon loses its romantic bit. we get some good days and some bad days, you know. if you can stick the bad days, the good days are a bonus. lots of people can't stand the bad days. this is one of our queens. queen scallops. mainly always go to france, you know. which is a shame, really, because they are nice to eat. but that's the problem — french and europeans like all the fish, british don't like fish, only fish and chips. cod and chips, innit?

as long as you get a day's pay, i'm happy. sometimes, you do very well. not that often, lately. that's the way it goes. i bring it in every six months so we can do the maintenance on it. that's not looking too bad. no, it's looking all right. you go in on the spring tide. as you come in, you put your legs down, bolt them in, put your ropes up, make sure

they are all level, and she'll sit on the beach. i'm dannyjuul, i am an oyster fisherman from falmouth. got a dustpan here, have we? have we got a dustpan here? what's that? isaid, have... it doesn't matter, i found it. yeah, we get on all right. we fight a bit. all kiss and make up, you know what it is like. les is always right. i'm always wrong, put it that way. we have a bit of a ding—dong, but nothing too bad. nearly went over the side once! we have good days and bad days, just like the fishing. sometimes, he wants to go one way, sometimes i want to go the other way.

some people can't get a living out of it now, especially when you only work for six months and you've got to find another job. beach is full up now, you can't get up on here for boats. fewer people are going oystering, and theyjust leave them on the beach, and hope they don't rot out. after christmas, when brexit came in, they changed the rules, so that affected us, it stopped us fishing for two months. this is the first year i haven't been out in january or february. yeah, basically stopped, completely.

i've been selling to france for 34 years, built some fantastic relationships with customers. one day, i was doing a personal delivery to a customer, he pulls out a black book, and he said, this is my grandfather's black purchase oyster book, showed me the page, and it was my great grandfather's name on the book in 1908. my great grandfather sold oysters to his grandfather. so, that wasjust incredible. my name is martin laity, and i live in a small fishing

village in cornwall called flushing. and i am an oyster and shellfish merchant. it is a greatjob, yeah, it is very different to anything else in the country, we are very unique, you know. when the season kicks off, you've got this feeling that you really don't know what it is going to bring. it is completely wild fishery, you have to just take what mother nature gives you. we are in an era now where sustainability and stuff is the buzzword but, you know, we have been living and breathing this for generations, you know? i walk down the street in my own village and get all the old people coming up to me, saying, how are the boys getting on with the season this year? you tell them, yeah, not doing too bad, a lot more oysters,

a lot more queens than last year, oh, more queens again, i'll have to have some of them. and i'll say, yes, i'll drop you down a feed, you know? and it isjust great, it is intertwined in the network of the community, for sure. we make a pretty good team, really. he's 18 years myjunior so, you know, it is his turn to throw the bags around, i have done my bit, so it's good. every day is a busy day here, start early, work hard, finish late, try and get all the little jobs done in between. i've been on the phone chasing parcels, doing accounts,

invoicing people, so a bit of everything in this game, really. january 1st in 2021. bang, brexit comes along. it is gone, just gone, you know. it stopped dead. january to february 2021 were the first months possibly in the last 200 years during a season that there were no oysterfishing boats on the fal, so it is times that haven't been seen, you know? we've got over 50, 60 guys on the books, they are all self—employed fishermen, and we are their biggest buyer. during the season, we are the ones paying them

week in week out for the catch. we found out we aren't going to be able to buy queen scallops off you guys or oysters to export. i had to get all the men around for a meeting just to sort of say, look, really sorry, but there is nothing we can do about it — if we can't get the stuff across the border, you know, we can't buy it off you. there's no point in catching it if you can't get rid of it because we are just basically killing stuff. i don't agree with that so we just basically stopped. i'd say, don't go fishing, we can't sell it, - we can't get it out. it wasn't nice because you know it was the time of year- when people need to work most. even if you had done everything, every single thing, and done all your due diligence, whenjanuary 1st came, no—one was ready, no—one was ready.

basically, two months and we do the boats up, to get everything ready for dredging season. and, then, we find otherjobs, do a bit of everything, really. right? we are just making up some windows, fitting work benches. yeah? yeah. right, lovely.

the new paperwork is monumental. you know, we are going to burn a tonne of paper and trees to do this. it just seems madness. there were the two pieces of paper that we needed before brexit. and this, this, this, allthis, isjust a part of what is needed now. the declaration. so, this is an export declaration. i've lost count of the number of pages. how many pages! 12 pages, that isjust one simple document. we'll be here for half—an—hour. this is the simplest form of all the export procedures. not only have you got to deal with the workload by the added costs for every different stage, it all adds up and it makes it quite tight. ending in france. it could potentially be 15,000 euros a week in customs clearance charges for a small

business exporting 25 consignments a week. "what office of transit in france do you want to add?" it is insane. it is an insane amount of money. purification at this point in the export process is just totally pointless. it knocks two days off the shelf life, it devalues it as a result, it is a lot of unnecessary work, and it is only going to be done the other side anyway. purification means an extra 48—hour delay minimum to get that product away. so, potentially, it is a four day cycle, compared to a four hour cycle to get stuff out and ready for market. how likely do think that it is going to be

that we can't get past brexit and we can't carry on? i think the odds are stacked against us, in a big way, and i think we are a flick of a switch away from it. you know? two or three things go wrong, the whole show can collapse, i think. very easily. worst—case scenario is we can't afford to make ends meet, we stop the business, stop buying. to see our oyster fishery collapse would be devastating. it is such a beautiful and also a very modern thing, in the sense of its sustainability, and, you know, it spans all fashions and generations and centuries to keep going. and to lose that, you know, it is like losing a national treasure, really. and a national treasure i am not willing to lose.

a dredge has got to fish properly. if there are holes in it or anything that catches up, little rings that have gone in, they won't fish so good, so at the start of the season you want them in pristine condition, you know? we've pulled up some strange things out in the fishing boat, yeah. when you fish, the mesh lays on the sea bed, the net fills up, we pull it up, shake it out, anything on the sea bed we'll catch. it's mainly sunglasses. everyone is out on the boat and

it will come off their heads. i've had false teeth, bags. cannonballs, onion bottles. phallic symbols, i don't really want to go into that but, yeah, we've caught a few strange things, yeah. i caught a £20 note, it was wrapped around a piece of seaweed, you know? so, that was good. but i did give £10 to my mate so he was happy as well. we want to get on with the job, you know? growing oysters, selling them, you know, keep the fishery going, keep the boats going.

so, we're off to see a local customer in my own village. tom, the chef here, he is a great old school chef, and he has come up with some great recipes and customers like it, so it is good news. morning! hello, are you all right? very well, thank you. and you? yep, very good. right, there are some mussels, five kilograms, caught from the fal a couple of days ago. good meat content in there, should be good. i'll catch up with you later. cheers _ nice big meaty mussels, they go with a coconut style curry. i've made a curry paste with loads of ginger,

chili, a little bit of lemongrass, some cumin. we work firsthand with the fishermen and we see the struggles they go through with brexit and what have you, and all the politics of it. i see martin, the stress he is going through trying to get stuff abroad, and we are trying to get people to eat local and maybe all that stuff wouldn't have to go abroad, do you know what i mean? because we have got these really passionate men that go out fishing every day and bring us all this lovely seafood. the coconut milk, and the double cream. england, as a whole, doesn't buy enough seafood for everything that is landed here. our eating habits and our traditions don't make way for mussels. we don't find an evening where we have mussels instead of fish and chips. and it is all on our doorstep.

we have got more boats out now, we've got seven or eight boats now, which is a little bit better but nothing special. here we go. shame we haven't got dan with us.— we've got nobody to argue with now. that's it. dan is off sick with a broken elbow. i think he will be back after christmas with a bit of luck.

we need to make sure we are picking out the nice—shaped ones, the ones that are easy to open. nice chunky meat in them for the customers. anything that is obviously a bit smaller, we can put back out on the beach. this local outlet is going to help get rid of a substantial amount of product, locally, more so than we have ever done before. so, i think that will help take the pressure off for the boats, the local fishery if we are struggling to shift export. obviously, if the market isn't anywhere as big as it is in europe, but it is a good connection for the people, locally, to sample what we've got.

the traditional export products that wouldn't have got a look in in the uk, people are slowly finding favour with them. carl, it is martin, are you all right? yeah. tell me, carl, when you went yesterday, how did it go? it was fairly quick, was it? yes, half an hour. that is pretty good. see you when you get back, drive safely, goodbye. so, yeah, that was one of our drivers. that phone call was the nice bit, you have gone through the huge pain barrier of getting over that. the brexit charges and the modern logistics problems are adding a big cost and that cost is the customer pays more, we make less, and the fisherman gets paid less.

the thing is, it is driving the prices down, brexit and all that, because you get more than they need, so the price isjust going down. you just aren't earning enough, you know. and with everything gone up in price... oysters haven't gone up in price like everything else has. and your catch has come down. what you think of the oyster men's expectations for this year? so, essentially, they are all nervous, like everyone else is, because we don't know how long it is going to go on for, how the market is going to react. with the added brexit stuff in the challenging times, they want to know if it is going to be on week in, week out. and, unfortunately, we are still in the position where it is a very ad hoc basis. i think if we can keep a better market open for the local stuff as well,

so if the exports do have a bit of a moment, we can help try and keep them, satisfy them, we are here and we want to keep doing it. yeah, i've got 20 bags of queens and three bags of oysters. we'll be in in about half an hour. ok, mark, all the best, cheers. keep it in because we are on our way back now. that is the end of the day. cool, right on. i look forward to doing it, i enjoy my life better when i have been oystering. my family have been active

in the fishing industry in cornwall since 1452. i don't want it all to end, my long line of connection to the oyster fishery and fishing in cornwall. not because of brexit, not on my watch, so, we are really going to fight hard to see this to the end, to make sure that future generations and members of my family can carry on fishing sustainably in cornwall.

hello, the weather is looking a little calmer and quieter for the rest of this week — no new named storms, blustery winds but the weather not as disruptive as it has been. still flood warnings in england and wales, and some in scotland, with more rain on tuesday morning initially for scotland and northern ireland, working across northern england and wales, but it will peter out in the south—east later in the day, followed by sunshine and blustery showers. temperatures between five in stornoway, to 13 in london. through tuesday night and wednesday, a ridge of high pressure building in from the

south, which will quieten down the weather across england and wales through wednesday. further rain and mountain snow for scotland and northern ireland, again quite blustery, not as windy as it has been, dry in the south with highs of 7-11.

you

welcome to bbc news. our top stories. international condemnation as russia's president putin grants recognition of two breakaway regions of east ukraine. the un security council meets to discuss the situation. today president — discuss the situation. today president putin _ discuss the situation. today president putin has - discuss the situation. today president putin has torn - discuss the situation. today j president putin has tom the president putin has torn the minsk agreement to shreds. we have been clear that we do not believe he will stop at that. the impact on the markets has been immediate and significant. tokyo stocks have slumped, oil prices are rising. cause for celebration in colombia as the country's highest court to

decriminalise abortion