this is bbc news. i'm lukwesa burak. the former us president donald trump says he will be arrested on tuesday, calling on his supporters to protest. it's not yet clear what charges, if any, he is facing. his lawyer says the former presidents claim is based on media reports. pakistan's former prime minister imran khan attends court on corruption charges, which he says are politically motivated. the court say the here and couldn't take place because of mr khan says the charges are politically motivated. on the ninth anniversary of russia's

illegal annex president this was his first visit since ordering a full—scale invasion of ukraine 13 months ago. now bbc news. it's the media show. my guest today has covered some of the most defining stories of our time. gary younge briefly became part of nelson mandela's entourage, joined revellers as president obama was elected, and has covered much else too — gay marriage, brexit, the windrush scandal, and the black lives matter movement. gary left full—time journalism at the guardian in 2020 to become professor of sociology at the university of manchester. although he continues to write articles for various publications and books. his new one is a collection of his journalism called dispatches from the diaspora. gary younge, welcome to the media show.

let's go back to some of where it all began. you studied french and russian at heriot—watt university in edinburgh, and then in your final year you received a scott trust bursary from the guardian to study journalism. and i think you were quite clear at that point that you wanted to be a columnist. why? because i had been very politically involved and my entry into writing was partly because i'd studied languages and studied to be an interpreter and i like to to manipulate words, but it was also because i had been very involved politically, almost precociously, and that i thought i had things to say. and what i didn't realise at the time was the degree to which reporting, running out and talking to people, finding out, all of that, is the nuts and bolts of everything, including column writing. so as someone who hadn't done an awful lot ofjournalism and heriot—watt didn't

have a student newspaper for the first couple of years i was there, my sense of being a journalist was about writing my thoughts and, of course, because i was 21 or 22 i also assumed that everybody would be interested in my thoughts, which, when i look back at it now is a little bit fanciful. well, i don't know, it does show a certain kind of confidence, which i really like, and reading your book it made me wonder how much was your mum's influence. a lot of it had to do with my mum and my upbringing. my mum was born in barbados, came to britain as a 19—year—old, was first a nurse and then became a teacher. had three kids, then my dad left when i was 15 months old. i was the youngest. and so she had this project. we were her project. we were her kids, first of all. she used to pad around the living room with me on herfeet and play

young gifted and black by bob and marcia and say "look, they're playing our song." and it was this kind of —— this act of hope and belief that, this is the early 1970s, britain is in a pretty dark place, and also literally because there were kind of blackouts and things, but also racially and otherwise. and my mum had this sense that, well, we're just going to have to imagine the world that you are going to live in, and we're going to have to imagine a place in your world that we have no evidence of. you get your education, and then you make your choices. and if you want to be a columnist, be a columnist! you know, that would have been so far removed from anything we would even have imagined at that time. and the notion that you can make a living writing was actually not something that occurred to me until very late. 0k. let's fast forward a bit

from then, but presumably at this point you're still not making much money writing, 1994, you were sent by the guardian to south africa to govern the country's first democratic elections. why did they choose you and what was it like to be a witness to such historic change? well, they chose me because they were... first of all, i had got a bursary from the guardian so i was known. and i was — when i... when i interviewed for the bursary i talked about my work in the anti—apartheid movement to alan rusbridger, who would then become the editor. and it was a kind of typical liberal dilemma. they knew that there were stories that white journalists couldn't get in south africa in the run—up to the elections, but they hadn't employed enough black journalists that they wanted to send, actually, barely any that they want to send. so they looked around for someone who was young,

cheap, and black to send them to see what was out there. and i was the youngest, cheapest, blackest thing in the office. so out i went. but then south africa is actually quite a difficult place to navigate if you can't drive, and so i would get lifts from people, and i ended up getting a lift with a tv crew who were doing an official account of mandela. they dropped me at a gas station and said, there are some others coming through to pick you up," and they were mandela's bodyguards. and, frankly, i amused them and made it my business to amuse them. i had been involved in the anti—apartheid movement, i had studied in the soviet union, as had they. they would let me drive around with them. and so i stumbled onto this kind of front row seat and it was the most stunning thing to be around. now, bearing in mind i had been involved in the anti—apartheid movement, i had picketed the south african embassy

with my mum, aged 18, when apartheid was still going on. and so to be in some ramshackle stadium in the middle of nowhere, because that's where apartheid put black people, and to see kind of old toothless women and young barefoot children dancing around, waiting and the cavalcade coming up and seeing it kicking up the dust tens of miles away, and the cheering starting and the waving and the screaming, and the ululating, and them mandela arrives and just to be in that moment and to be 25 and to just kind of think "wow, wow." it was incredible. and how did the piece go down? the correspondent at the time, david beresford, a lovely man who unfortunately died not so long ago, he said, "it's all here, but it's alljumbled up."

and he said, "you've spent too long and you can't see it any more." he sent me out for a drink and he said,"you're just going to have to stay up all night and just kind of, you know, whip it into shape." and so i did, and by the time ifound it, i couldn't really see what i'd done. and the piece was going through the system at the guardian and i managed to get a kind of connection from a computer and i started seeing all these notes coming through from colleagues, and then alan rusbridger, the deputy editor, and peter preston, which was a big moment, all sort of saying this is a wonderful piece and well done and, you know... relief. i wanted to start crying, it was just very, very relief of which there are no words. you have met some pretty incredible people in your career, not least, how did you end up getting drunk in maya angelou's limousine? for that we have la traffic to thank. and i had 45 minutes with her.

when the 45 minutes were over, she said, "just hang back." and then she took me for lunch and then she had something to do so she got me a room in the hotel so i could sleep, and then we went to her event, and then on the way back from the event there was this huge la trafficjam. the whole place was like a big car park and we were in her limo and she said, she had this kind of purring voice, she said, "would you like some whisky, mr younge?" and i said, "ooh, yeah, please, that would be nice," and her assistant said, "do you want ice and stuff, ms angelou?" and she said, "a little bit of ice and a lot of stuff." and so these huge whiskeys came out, and then there was more whisky, and then there was more. it was a big trafficjam. by the time i'd got out of the car, i was pretty hammered and i think she was too, although she was in better shape than i was, she could drink me under the table.

and ijust thought, you know, i don't need many days like this in my life, one day this will carry me on for quite a long time. you moved to america in 1996. you ended up spending more than half your career working there for the guardian. was it initially difficult as an outsider to understand what made that country tick? it was. for some things it always was, to be honest. guns. i've never quite understood, although, you know, i got further than i was at the beginning. and, you know, in a way, as a foreign correspondent, not understanding is a bit of a gift, really, because then you can go and find out. but it was like anthropology, really, you could kind of prod around and it would work quite well in moments of kind of where other american journalists might not want to go, you know,

having steak with a bunch of trump republicans, and it would be, you know... "funny, why do you think that?" and it would be my mo for an awful lot of interviews. but as time goes on — my wife is american and i had two kids there — you become invested and it stops being anthropology and it starts... you've got skin in the game. and you start thinking, "that's my kids you're talking about." "that's my neighbourhood you are talking about." even if it's not directly your neighbourhood. you start knowing people who don't have health care as friends, knowing people who are undocumented and can't go to their parents�* funeral. and then it stops becoming interesting, perse, and becomes quite personal. you covered so many important stories while you were in america, the iraq war, the election of president obama, occupy wall

street, the tea party. but i think reporting on hurricane katrina over the course of the years stands out for you. why is that? i felt that in that moment the contradictions of america's kind of race and class were laid bare. that there were all sorts of ways in which they could be finessed. anybody who tries hard enough can do this or that and, you know, the civil rights era was a long time ago, even though it wasn't, and we have equality now and so on. obama was known by this stage, but there was no sense that he would ever be president, it would be a really weird idea then. and so to see who could escape and who couldn't escape and why they couldn't escape, is a public disaster so you have a public response, but this was a private response — a privatised response. so if you didn't have a car,

if you didn't have the money for a motel, and it came at the end of the month, if you hadn't been paid, you couldn't go. and so to see that all washed up, and then to see the response —— there is a moment where michael brown, the head of the federal emergency management says, "we're seeing people that we didn't know existed." and i thought never a truer word has been said. it was hard with the book, because it's an anthology, you have to kind of pick a piece and go with it. and i actually went to new orleans several times over a couple of years after katrina, and it was very hard to pick one. it was such a devastating occurrence, and it was one of those moments where you couldn'tjust gloss over it. and so kind of the american media in that moment kind of discovered race and class in a way that teenagers kind of discover sex, you know,

it was kind of careless and urgent and just a little bit too eager. i wanted do speak specifically on race, because in 2015 you wrote in yourfarewell piece to america about a period of protracted regional conflict that you witnessed including murder of unarmed black men, trayvon martin, eric garner. what was that experience like for you reporting on those stories? there's a really interesting thing that happened with black lives matter in particular, which was that it wasn't, and it hasn't been, that more black people were being killed by the police. it was that, for whatever reason, partly it's new technology we can take pictures and distribute and amplify, people were paying attention in a way they hadn't before. and it problematised an adage that i learned atjournalism school, which was, "when a dog bites

"a man that's not a story, but when a man bites a dog "that is a story." and i started to think during that time, you know, sometimes, actually, news asks who owns these dogs? and why do the same people keep getting bitten, and what can we do to control these dogs? that actually, black people had been living with this for decades, and it wasn't news because the people who decide what's news decided that it wasn't newsworthy. that was a failure ofjournalism? i think it was absolutely a failure of news journalism. and for reasons, i'm not entirely sure why, it became news. and you don't have to be black to get this, but if you are black, not to your son who was big for his age...

in terms of your fear of what might happen to your son personally? yeah, it was a good example of it is no longer anthropology. there was an incident in the park nearby where my son was having a water fight with other kids and he splashed this woman, who was white, and she started screaming at him. i went up to her and asked, "why are you screaming at my son?" and then she started screaming at me, and i asked her to stop screaming at me and she said, "who are you? you are nobody! that is who you are!" i stood back thinking ok, ok, ok, this is where we are. i had literally flown up from ferguson that morning. you left america i think a year before trump was elected and we have seen more polarisation in the country since. do you think the media had a role to play in exacerbating those divisions in america? certainly, if we look at fox news or nbc or the way in which you have cable

television, kind of amplifying division in a range of ways, then to that extent, certainly, yes. beyond that, i think that the kind of divisions are true. i think the divisions would be there anyway. i think there is a racial and economic fault line and the racial fault line is that white people will be a minority, probably with in the next decade or maybe a little bit more, and you can see they are really feeling that in places like arizona, new mexico, and struggling to... some of them are struggling to get their heads around that. and then an economic fault line because wages have been stagnant for kind of half a century. poverty was a really serious, serious problem for an awful lot of people.

so, you put those two things together and you have the ingredients for division, whether the media have been responsible or not. but the media was able to amplify, particularly tv media, amplify and exaggerate, to the point where people knew different facts about the world and, so, having a conversation with someone was difficult because you say it is tuesday and they say it is wednesday, and, well, that is difficult to sort your calendars out if that is what you are dealing with. you talk about tv, i mean, you did continue to report from america in tv documentaries and in 2017, an clip of you interviewing the american white supremacist richard spencer, for channel 4, went viral. you are really proud of your racism, aren't you? you're really proud to be a bigot? i'm proud to be a white man. that's different from being proud to be a bigot.

if africans had never existed, world history would be almost exactly the same because we are the genius that drives it. crosstalk. how do you deny that? sorry? how can you really deny that? you are talking nonsense! how am i talking nonsense? you'll never be an englishman. you don't get to tell me what i will be. i do, actually. my name is richard spencer. "my name is richard spencer and i approve this message?" did you agonise over whether interviewing spencer gave him a platform and how did you reach that decision? i did agonise about it, and agonised after it because i think it's important not to give oxygen to people like that. my view was he already had oxygen, and doing that documentary, there were several people who i refused to interview that they wanted me to interview, from the ku klux klan and just random bigots,

but he, because of his... because of being in the alt—right and his connection to steve bannon, and steve bannon�*s connection to trump, i thought there was a legitimate reason. my aim in interviewing him, the first question i ask is, "you want a white ethnostate. "what is that? " "and why do you want it?" my aim was to be tough but to allow him to speak, but he quickly descended into a range of insults, and this thing ofjust telling me i'm not english, which... ijust kept telling him that is not your call, actually. that decision making process, it feels like a part of an ongoing debate of what the role of a journalist is and potentially it feels generational now that people, i hate to say, of our age, but older journalists tend

to think along those lines and perhaps younger ones are saying you should not give these people a platform at all? there is a challenging balance, i think, because, and this was the very beginning of my media career, i was working for yorkshire television on a magazine programme called the world this week. i was asked, because i was employed because of my languages, to call front nationale to ask for an interview withjean—marie le pen and i refused, and i said, "they are 7% in the polls. "this is titilation. "you can do it. "i will not do it. i was an intern and i said i understand you can fire me for insubordination. but i will not do it. did they fire you? no, they didn't because the stakes were so low for everybody. i was an intern. i could go and get an internship somewhere else. they were barely paying me. but my view was... my view would be now,

it would be very difficult argument to say you should not interview marine le pen now when she is second, quite often, in the polls. that the politics has broken down and you have to engage with her. you're not saying interviewing someone doesn't give them a platform, you are saying they already had a platform? when they have a platform... then it is justified. well, otherwise, what will you do? never speak to them? let's take donald trump. should journalists never interview him ? he's the president. should you never interview him or should you be trying to hold him to account? so in a moment where people have power, you to hold them to account and myjudgment was that, richard spencer in this case, was moving into the realms of power. now, it is a judgment, so i think it is a very legitimate question of should you or should you not, but it was my call. in that case, it made sense.

before we end, when you look back at your career, which story, are there stories you're most proud of? the story i am most proud of is claudette colvin, who was the woman who was kicked off the bus before rosa parks in montgomery, alabama, and they were going to go with her. she was going to be the one. the one they held up as the... she was going to be the standard—bearer, but she was very dark and on the wrong side of town and then she got pregnant when she was 15, 16 and so they decided not to. it took me a couple of years to find her. she was working as a nurse's aid in the bronx and as well as it being a fascinating story, i also felt that it made some kind of contribution to our understanding, to my understanding of how the world works. gary younge, thank you for coming on the media show. thank you for having me.

hello. it's been wet through a number of places. we've already seen more rainfall than we already see in the whole of the month even though we are only halfway through march. and looking at the weather picture over the next five days, it is going to stay very unsettled with further heavy outbreaks of rain. the weather particularly what across northwestern areas of the country. no one saturday, itjust wasn't heavy downpour is that we saw but also this funnel cloud spotted over the west midlands. it looked close to being a full—blown tornado here. and that funnel cloud fell from these showers that worked their way across the west midlands and then push their way eastward across the east midlands as well. now we've got something of a change to the

weather present on sunday. mist and fog patches, high pressure with a structure for the morning, so probably the nicest part of the weekend early sunday with some sunny spells widely. out west it will cloud over. when looking at outbreaks of rain spreading into northern island that will probably reach western scotland, wales, and western scotland, wales, and western areas of england right towards the end of the day. temperatures for the most part mild, ten to 13 degrees so a little bit above average for most. through sunday night we have more rain on the cards. that rain sweeps its way into northern island, spreads to the parts of scotland, england and wales. the rain most persistent and northern island in northern and one as well. with all of that cloud around, it's going to be a frost free night, temperatures around about four to eight celsius. into the early part of the new week, low pressure is going to stay close to the northwest of the uk, pulses of fairy heavy rain and brisk winds and the forecast it well. it is a particularly unsettled looking pattern. the heaviest rain will be to the western side of the uk, and i

think for monday particularly for western areas of scotland, eastern areas of england probably not so much in the way of rain. temperatures still 13, 14 13, 1a degrees the rain been slow moving across scotland into wednesday but elsewhere we are looking at a day of sunshine and heavy thundershowers. wish showers looked be widespread, some of those heavy showers could have some hail mixed in with them as well. forthe some hail mixed in with them as well. for the most part temperatures staying at the double figures, the exception northern most areas of scotland. that's a bit cold for this time of year.

now for thursday, we've got cold air coming back in across scotland is still mild with south—westerly winds hanging on across england and wales. so there will be some rather larger temperature contrast building in later in the week. with that some of the showers in scotland could start to turn wintry, especially over the high hills. but across england, wales and northern ireland it looks like it stays mild for the most part, with temperatures still 12 to 15 degrees celsius. but again, it's unsettled. so expect some further downpours at times friday. next weekend, it looks like it stays unsettled with further bursts of rain and for the most part, temperaturesjust coming down a little bit by a few degrees, probablyjust slipping below average. but i think those rainfall totals really mounting up in the week ahead. i think march is going to be a very wet month.

hello, welcome to bbc news. our top stories: donald trump says he suspects there are plans to arrest him on tuesday. he has called on his supporters to protest. president putin visits the crimea peninsular on the ninth anniversary of russia's illegal annexation from ukraine. a deal along the export of ukrainian green from black seaports has been renewed but it is unclear for how long. serbia and kosovo reach agreement on how to normalise relations according to the eu's top diplomat. and the troubled swiss bank credit suisse is reported to be in takeover talks, could be bought by its rival, ubs.