now we are increasingly seeing old people and children. police in australia say they've made one of their biggest ever drug busts, seizing cocaine worth one billion us dollars. the british government is preparing to announce where the uk's first carbon capture power station will be built — but will the technology make a difference? and the ceremony injerusalem to consecrate the oil that will be used to anoint king charles during his coronation in may. with the oscars a week away, we hear from some of those involved in the nominated british film living. for me, the concept wasn't a remake of this kurosawa film, it was this thing with bill in it. i didn't feel daunted or oppressed by the original film or by the situation, ijust felt that i was very fortunate. you're watching bbc news. now it's time for witness

history: lgbt special. hello. i'm ben boulos. thanks forjoining me at the queer british museum in london for this edition of witness history. i'll bring you important moments from the past as told by the people who were there. in this episode, we're focusing on lgbt history, stories about lesbian, gay and trans people from all over the world. coming up: we hear how lesbian activists broke through bbc security to stage a protest on live tv. plus, the fight for lgbt rights in uganda where being gay was punishable by death. how the balkans war inspired a groundbreaking film about trans sex workers. and the fight to use the word �*0lympics�* for the very first gay games. but first to san francisco, and the aids memorial that

would make headlines all over the world. activist cleve jones was living there in the 19805 when a mysterious disease started killing his friends. the suffering he saw inspired him to create one of the world's biggest ever arts projects. i talked about this idea for a whole year and everybody the suffering he saw inspired him to create one of the world's biggest ever arts projects. i talked about this idea for a whole year and everybody told me it was the stupidest thing they'd ever heard of. but i ignored them and kept going and found people who shared the vision, and it ended up becoming, i believe, the world's largest community arts project ever. newsreader: a quilt _ commemorating 40,000 people who've died from aids has gone on display in washington. quilts traditionally were made from castoffs, taking scraps of fabric and are of different colours and different textures and sewing them into something that is warm and comforting.

behind all of those horrendous statistics were actual human beings that were part of families and communities and neighbourhoods. in the early 19705, i was one of many thousands of young gay and lesbian kids who got here any way we could. of course, at that time, it was still a felony to be gay in this country, so we lived under a great deal of repression and fear. i think this idea that gays are going to take over city government, it's... i think it's amusing when i hear that. there were a few blocks within the city where we could be completely free and be ourselves, and that meant you could hold hands with your partner, you could kiss. it was incredibly exciting. reporter: in 1981, american doctors were baffled - by a bizarre disease. within six years, aids has spread to 71 countries and infected up to 10

million people. we're filming this interview at a restaurant called catch at the corner of castro and market street. i was living just a couple of blocks here when i read those first stories about this new disease. that was the summer of 1982. by the fall of 1985, almost everyone i knew was dead or dying. people began to get skinny. we saw people die all around us. on one block in my neighbourhood, everybody died in the span of two years. ultimately, over 20,000 gay men would die in this neighbourhood. i actually acquired the virus in the winter of 1978, 1979. i did not begin to show signs of that infection until 1992. i got very, very sick very, very quickly and came close to dying in 1994 before i got access to one of the very

first clinical trials. i miss my friends. i miss them a lot. i barely passed high school biology, but i understood clearly that there was no such thing as a gay virus, and that what we were experiencing here was going to be experienced by all sorts of different kinds of people all around the planet. i remember one day exclaiming in rage to my friends, you know, if this was a meadow with a thousand corpses rotting in the sun, then people would look at this, they would see it. so each panel is three feet by six feet — the approximate size of a grave — and that was deliberate. once people could see what i was talking about, then they kind of got the power of it. by october 11 of 1987, they were placed on a national mall in washington, dc, and ended up on the front page of just about every

newspaper in the world. this quilt is a pretty extraordinary testament to what we went through, and it's a place that's known for its monuments, they're made out of stone and steel, and we took a monument there that was made of cloth and thread and sewn by ordinary americans and people from all over this planet who love someone who died of aids and wanted them to be remembered. it was that simple and that amazing. clevejones and the story of the aids memorial quilt. now to 1988, and the moment lesbian activists invaded a bbc tv studio live on air. they were protesting against the introduction of new uk laws to limit lgbt rights. booan temple was one of those demonstrators. announcer: six o'clock news from the bbc with sue lawleyl and nicholas witchell. inaudible. in the house of lords,

a vote is taking place now on a challenge to the... shouting. stop section 28! we're protesting about rights for lesbian and gay people. in general, britain was quite a hostile environment in the 19805 for the lgbt community. about 75% of people when surveyed said that it was mostly or always wrong to be gay. simply by walking down the street, if somebody identified you as lesbian or gay, you could get abuse and you could be violently attacked just for being. there was a sort of catalyst moment where a book was published about a girl who lived with her two dads, and it kicked off a moral panic in parliament. section 28 banned local authorities from promoting homosexuality. the second part of it banned the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality in schools. basically it meant the closing down of services. so young people became very vulnerable particularly, and schools couldn't protect people from being bullied. all kinds of groups all over

the country began to protest. reporter: actor ian mckellen| was at the head of a procession which stretched nearly two miles. a group of lesbians chained themselves to buckingham palace gates dressed as suffragettes. a group of lesbians abseiled into the house of lords. through all of the campaigning prior to the enactment, we can not get the media to understand what the impact was going to be on our community, on our children. so, really, the only thing left was to actually be the news by being on the news. we met outside television centre, we managed to get through the security. the whole thing was timing, really. laughs. and as soon as the lights changed, we barged in to the studio. the whole place went mad, i got smacked to the ground by i don't know how many people. one of our members managed to handcuff herself to a camera and the other one got behind the newsdesk where she was quite violently subdued by nicholas witchell,

who's since apologised. sue lawley carried on trying to read the news. and i do apologise if you're hearing quite a lot of noise in this studio at the moment. i'm afraid that we have rather been invaded. laughs. in the footage, it's all got rather muffled and you can hear little muffled shouts of, "stop section 28!" and eventually we were all arrested. it did get huge media coverage. you know, the headlines were all about �*loony lesbians�*. but over time and beyond that, i've heard from quite a lot of people what it meant to them as young lgbt people in their own home, knowing they were gay but maybe not even out, and just felt...just felt a little bit empowered by it. so here we are at television centre again 30 years later. clearly, things are a lot better than they were in the 1980s, but it hasn't completely changed, and there are very dangerous and serious pockets of homophobia. i'm glad we did it.

the fact we're here today means the story's been remembered. booan temple and the lesbian protest at the bbc. our next film is about the struggle for safety and acceptance in uganda. in 2009, ugandan mps tried to make acts of homosexuality punishable by imprisonment and even death. homophobia was rife with tabloid papers printing the names and addresses of gay people. many feared for their lives, including the activist victor mukasa. uganda already has a law that can be used as homosexuality, but the new backbench bill goes much further. the penalty for gay sex could be death. i got death threats, my children got death threats. the story of lgbt activism was lonely sometimes, but i felt that we are notjust

going to be buried like this. reporter: in a country where biblical values i are deeply ingrained, homosexuality is generally deplored. my family was a very conservative family, staunch catholic family. me being the first—born girl there. i had issues with gender identity. i transgressed gender unintentionally from the time i started being aware of my existence. they bought me a very nice yellow dress and i went and changed, i put football shorts — ifelt more comfortable that way. and then when i came out, my father was in the hallway and he gave me a slap and said, "go back and dress up appropriately." and then i put on that yellow dress and i coiled inside, i felt like i was different now, i wasn't proud anymore, i wasn't happy anymore. i fought against my sexual orientation for so many years.

i was on my own because my family didn't want anything to do with me at that point and, eventually, i was homeless. so i felt that i needed to hear from this thing that is causing me suffering, and so i took myself to churches. reject sodomy! reject perversion! they were praying for me. and then as they're praying, i started taking — and then as they're praying, they started taking — stripping me off. it was my clothes making me a man, so they stripped me naked. and they started to lay their hands on me, and these are boys and their pastor, they laid hands in particular on my genital area because they say that was the centre of it all. and that is when i felt that it is torture. but i said, "this is who i am."

inside me, ifelt it was ok to be the way that i was, and that god was not mad at me. last year, under the headline �*hang them', a tabloid magazine published the names and addresses of 100 gay men and lesbians. the effects of that publication were major. they were horrible. a lot of people during that period lostjobs, were evicted from homes, killed. shouting and cheering. lawyers and activists had challenged the antihomosexuality act on the grounds that it violated human rights. my children know me as daddy and they call me daddy. they don't say, "hey, trans daddy! "hey, former lesbian trans daddy." you know, they call me daddy. it shouldn't matter, but it matters now that i identify as a transgender man

because that is the beginning of a conversation about what transgender is. not for me, because i have survived, but the people who are still struggling to come out or to even ask for what they need. so then it matters. victor mukasa and the fight for lgbt rights in uganda. remember, you can watch witness history every month on the bbc news channel, or you can catch up on all our films, along with more than 2,000 radio programmes in our online archive. just search for bbc witness history. now to the 1990s, and how a chance encounter with a trans sex worker inspired the serbian film director zelimir zilnik to make a groundbreaking film. marble ass celebrated the lives of the lgbt community in belgrade and made a star out of the trans actor merlinka. this piece does contain some outdated language which you might find offensive.

now, the situation is so weird, and so upside down, we have a feeling that we are free to just show ourselves as we feel. i was heading towards a railway station, a woman approached me and said i know you from the press, i am interested

to spend some nice time with me? i said let me go, i have a train in ten minutes, and she said you are too old so you are afraid of women, and i said no, just let me go now, and then she pulled the wig off and i saw it was a friend of mine, who i metjust ten years ago, and i was surprised. that is something that i never expected to see in belgrade, i thought if a man went in women's clothes, he would be attacked and beaten up on the street. we are a patriarchal society.

i was very satisfied that we have now the possibility to become friends with these people who have been suppressed, so we have had the feeling that we are somehow helping some idea of free expression. the atmosphere was like in a stove full of anger but also interest. and then the audience burst, some people had been shouting, this is not belgrade, so we went on stage,

15 of us and then people started throwing eggs on us and paper and said stop, stop! i am asking the audience are there any transvestite, gay and lesbian people, i said come here on the stage, and about 400 people came on the stage, so it was an explosion, an unexpected explosion! magda and herfriends, they mostly have boosted and also encouraged the people to come out. serbia's first lgbt film.

our final witness is sarah wedell lewin steen, one of the founders of the first gay games, launched in california in 1982, the event attracted athletes from all over the world, but it was not plain sailing, and a row with united states olympic committee nearly scuppered the whole thing. when we marched in, we had all of these people on both sides of the stadium clapping for us, we all cried, we all cried. may i welcome you, athletes and spectators from all over the world, to the first gay games. tom medel was the founder of the gay games, an athlete in the 1968 mexico olympic games. a lot of the men and women in the olympics at the time were in the closet, they did not want to come out. if they did, they got

harassed in the locker rooms and what tom wanted was for everyone to be part of the games and at the time i was a bigwig in women's softball. when i met tom, it was a kindred feeling, it's like love at first sight the way it is supposed to be. he had the same feminist values that i had, he didn't ask for my help, he said i needed my help. we didn't have very much money, so we hustled. we were trying to do as many fundraisers and raises much money as possible to put on the sports, to get the medals, and about six weeks before we were putting on the games, we were running like crazy and we got hit from the lawsuit, objecting to the word olympics, saying they owned it. i never saw them owning the word, so they were suing us, but we found the police

olympics, firemen olympics, i didn't see them suing las vegas over the poker olympics. we had to get the word olympic up everything we had done, that was devastating to us, all i had time for was get your butt into gear, come into the office and start crossing off everything. it is with greatjoy that i am here to celebrate the opening of the first international gay athletic olympics games. opening ceremonies for gay, i still get tears... we had no idea how many people were buying tickets and having all of our athletes marching in, the balloons, everything, a0 years later, it still runs through my mind. we played yesterday sacramento

yesterday and we beat them 3—0. how do you feel about the gay games overall? i love it, i've never felt so at home, in a long time, it's nice to put your arm around your girlfriend or whatever, it's really nice and comfortable. every sport facility was full, packed, and every day that went by, it got more packed. what was the most memorable moment? to feel that you are unified, everybody is for everybody else. we had about 365 athletes. it took away the stereotypes and made them athletes. tom was a wonderful human being which is why i asked him to have a child with me, i wanted to have a child. we worked on getting pregnant right away and i got pregnant right away. when i look at my daughter, she will be 38, she happened because of the gay games.

the amazing family behind the first gay games. and that's all for this edition of witness history, here in the queer britain museum in london. we will be back with more first—hand accounts from extraordinary moments from the past, but for now, me and the rest of the witness history team, goodbye. hello there. it is daintily through the rest of the weekend but there is colder weather to come early next week. today we hang on to cloud the

rest of the day. if you see sunshine, you will be perhaps one of the lucky few but if you like showers for scotland coming into eastern parts of england, many other areas may well be dry but there will be a lot of cloud and the temperatures are much when i have been over the past few days. we keep cloudy skies for much of the country overnight, and only a few more showers arriving as well. if the cloud breaks, we will see a touch of frost but for the most part, temperatures by early sunday morning will be a chilly two or three degrees. expect a good deal of cloud tomorrow, maybe a few more showers breaking up through the day as well but we could see something a bit brighter with sunshine for a while across central, southern scotland, perhaps even into northern ireland on in the north of england. winds will be like during tomorrow but temperatures will be a shade lower, typically at sixes and sevens. next week will feel colder, stronger wind will arrive and will bring the risk

of snow and ice as well. we will have a northerly wind strengthening early next week, air coming all the way down from the arctic will push its way southwards across the uk and bring with it that wintry chill as well. the cold air starts to arrive in northern parts of scotland on sunday night following the weather front there, and on that by front we have a mixture of rain, sleet, and snow, that will move across scotland away from northern ireland on monday, into northern england and north wales. to the south, temperatures about 9 degrees but to the north it is colder and the showers are turning the wintry. by tuesday, this is what is left of the weather front across southern parts of england, otherwise we will have sunshine, you can see the snow showers coming in on the one —— the wind from the arctic. many parts of the country may well be dry with some sunshine, temperatures at four or 5 degrees but when you factor in the strength of the wind it will feel significantly colder. and we've got the risk of some snow and ice as well, widespread frost as we head

into next week. most of the snow and ice expected to be across northern and eastern parts of scotland and the north—east of england, and that could lead potentially to some travel disruption. goodbye.

welcome to bbc news. ukrainian and russian forces are fighting in the northern suburbs of the city of bakhmut — which has been battered by seven months of fighting. oleksandr marchenko, the deputy mayor, confirmed the street clashes, but said the russians haven't taken control. western analysts say the scene has been set for ukrainian forces to carry out a fighting withdrawal. a british defence ministry update said ukrainian soldiers are digging new trenches west of the city and are being reinforced by elite troops.

the capture of bakhmut would be the first russian victory of note