that same day, a man strongly associated with brexit and equally divisive was in the news again talking about an encounter that he had had with president putin of russia. he sort of, he threatened me at one point and said, you know, boris, i don't want to hurt you, but with a missile, it would only take a minute or something like that, you know. you know, jolly. a spokesman for the kremlin denied mrjohnson�*s account, saying there had been no threats to use missiles. translation: what mr| johnson said is not true. more specifically, it's a lie. the clip had emerged in a bbc documentary series about president putin, and despite that denial from the kremlin, joseph mackenzie felt the bbc hadn't treated boris johnson's allegation with sufficient scepticism. "the word alleged was notable by its absence in this report,

on tuesday, news bulletins revisited a long—running and distressing investigation into the hillsborough stadium disaster. almost 3a years after the hillsborough disaster, police forces in england and wales have issued an apology for the way officers treated the families of the victims, and they have promised a cultural change. having watched the report that followed, viewer heather lunt sent us this response. some viewers contacted us this week about a report on the cost of living, which featured recently on the six and the ten o'clock news.

it was introduced like this. rising prices are affecting everyone, but it's being felt more in the north than the south of the country. that's according to new research. the centre for cities think tank says the impact of the cost of living crisis is significantly higher in blackburn and burnley, for example, than in cambridge and london. it says the disparity was down to the higher proportion of poorly insulated housing in the north and the fact that workers in the north tend to earn lower wages and so spend more of their income on essentials like food and heating. all those references to "the north" annoyed steven tate, who wrote in from roswell in midlothian.

the state of the economy has been in the headlines this week. on tuesday, the international monetary fund downgraded the uk's growth forecast for this year. but also in the spotlight has been the bbc�*s own reporting of economics. the international monetary fund has predicted that the uk economy will shrink and perform worse than all other major economies, including russia this year, as the cost of living continues to hit households. while the report into the bbc�*s coverage of taxation, public expenditure, government borrowing and government debt was commissioned by the bbc itself. it was the first of a series of reviews assessing whether due impartiality is being achieved across the corporation's output. it made some striking findings. although the report's authors, the journalist michael blastland and the economist sir andrew dilnot found plenty to applaud, they also concluded that too manyjournalists lack an understanding of basic economics, and they said there were risks to impartiality from presenting

a narrow range of views. those criticisms struck a chord with a number of viewers, such asjeff kay, who wrote... peter underwood thought... and jacob aron added... nobody from the bbc was available to discuss the review�*s findings, although it did tell us that the corporation's board has asked the executive team for an action plan to address the challenges it lays out. but i am pleased to say that i'm joined on the line from oxford by one of the review�*s co—authors, sir andrew dilnot. so what were your key findings?

did anything surprise you? so our key findings were, well, firist of all, i say that we spoke we spoke to a very large number of people both inside and outside the organisation. and we deliberately spoke to people who we thought would be critical as well as supportive, but without exception, everyone we spoke to said what a great thing they thought bbc was, how lucky we were to live in a country where such an organisation existed, even those who had serious concerns about particular aspects of what the journalism had been in this area. so that's the important thing to say first. like any assessment, it's easy to focus just on the negatives, but there was a lot of positive. the areas where we had concern were not that it seemed that overall the bbc�*s output in this area was biased either to the right or to the left, but that there were areas where we thought the coverage wasn't impartial between the arguments that should have been in play. we thought there are a few reasons for that. i said one reason seemed to us to be

that politics seems to be driving the news agenda, and that's in many ways entirely legitimate — politics is a terribly important thing — but we thought there were a number of cases where it would have been better for an economics correspondent to have been talking about the economic issue that had become a political issue, rather than asking our extremely skilled politics correspondents to talk about something on which they're not expert, and we did find talking to a lot of the bbc�*s journalists that there's quite a lot of anxiety about how prepared and skilled journalists are to talk about economics, not amongst the economics correspondents, but amongst the broader area. so one area we were worried about was politics driving the agenda and political correspondents rather than specialists talking about economics. that was one important area. a second was that perhaps related to that, it seems as though the framing of a debate that...that particularly politicians use can easily be accepted.

and one example of that was that, , there seemed to be a tendency for the bbc to to agree that the national debt was something to be very worried about and that borrowing was almost a bad thing. now, that's an entirely legitimate perspective but there are other perspectives in very orthodox economics that say in certain circumstances it can be good to increase public sector borrowing. we thought that wasn't as reflected as it might have been. then there were issues like we felt that sometimes there wasn't enough attention paid to the uncertainty around things like forecasts, that there could be some interests that were missing. so a good example here is that in talking about taxation, we all easily fall into talking a lot about income tax. but income tax is just one of the taxes that we pay. the poorest third of adults don't pay any income tax at all. so changes to income tax aren't very relevant to them,

but they all pay vat, value added tax, and we see very little reference to that, despite the fact that in wales and the north east of england there's more vat paid that income tax, whereas in london there's two and a half times as much income tax paid as vat. so that's just a flavour of some of the things that we picked up on. i suppose underneath it all, andrew, i wonder if the real issue is the bbc can't win. you're trying to make some big, complicated economic ideas accessible to a very general audience in not a lot of time, maybe three minutes, if you're lucky. can the bbc win on this with broadcasting? so it's hard. it's really, really hard. and people have very high expectations of the bbc. it can't be done perfectly, but we think it can be done better than it has been done in some cases. and we think being more questioning, making sure you've got economic expertise when that's appropriate, making sure you have a good balance of contributors making the important points.

all of these things i think can help. but we do also have to recognise, and this is perhaps the one thing that i think both michael and ifound surprising when we did the work, that quite a lot of the viewers already find output in this area pretty difficult to understand, pretty inaccessible. so it's a hard, hard challenge, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't go on trying to do it as well as we can and in some cases a bit better than it has been being done. sir andrew, thank you. thank you for all your comments this week. if you want to share your opinions about what you see or hear on bbc news, on tv, radio, online and social media, do email newswatch@bbc.co.uk or you can find us on twitter @newswatchbbc. you can call us on 0370 010 6676. and do you have a look at previous interviews on our website, bbc.co.uk/newswatch. that's all from us. we'll be back to hear your thoughts about bbc news coverage again next week.

goodbye. hello. it's been quite a cloudy day for most of us today. but this weekend overall, it's actually not looking bad at all. saturday still a little overcast for most of us, but come sunday, i think the sun will be out, and it should feel quite pleasant. so here's the forecast, then — at the moment, this evening, mild air is still spreading across the uk, and will be in place across the country during the course of saturday. but after that, saturday night into sunday, a change in the wind direction, and we will see colder air establishing itself across the uk. now here's the cloud at the moment, or in the last few hours or so — you can see quite a uniform, thick sheet of cloud across the country, broken up here and there. and that's how it'll stay through the course of the evening and overnight. so just a few clear spells here and there, and actually the cloud will be thick enough across some western areas

to produce a little bit of light rain or drizzle. no frost this coming night, temperatures will range from around five celsius in lerwick, to about nine celsius in stornoway — and for most of us it'll be somewhere in between, so mild for the time of the year. here's saturday morning starts off pretty cloudy, but some glimmers of brightness already developing. notice that across northern ireland and scotland here, for a time, there will be some rain as this cold front moves in gradually from the northwest. temperatures will be around double figures, i think, right across the board. now, that rain won't last for very long — and in fact, as it makes itsjourney further south, it will mostly fizzle out by the time it reaches, say, the peak district, and also wales and the midlands. so the south of the country will not be getting rainfall tomorrow. now the big area of high pressure will stick around for a few days, it's also an intense area of high pressure — so strong, really anchoring itself across the uk, light winds. we're right in the centre of that high pressure, and you can see the winds blowing around it. so here in the centre,

with the light winds and sunny skies, it will actually feel quite pleasant. even though the temperatures are going to be a little bit lower — i think we're talking about eight celsius for most of us — it should feel fairly pleasant. now the high pressure isn't going away anywhere in a hurry — it does mean, though, that we could have some misty, foggy mornings into next week. and of course, with clear skies and light winds, that does mean a touch of frost first thing, as well, across many parts of the uk into next week.

this is bbc news. i'm lukwesa burak with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. the united states says it will provide ukraine with longer range guided rockets, as part of its latest package of military support. speaking at a summit in kyiv — european union leaders say, "ukraine's future is inside the eu" — and reject russian aggression. we are not intimidated by the kremlin. because ukraine and the eu, we are family. america's secretary of state postpones a visit to beijing, after china claims a balloon flying over us airspace is for monitoring weather. police in the uk say they believe mother of two — nicola bulley — from lancashire — who's been missing for a week,