good evening. i'm lizzie greenwood hughes, here with your latest sports news. and we're starting with everton because after a poor season on the pitch problems could be brewing off it for the club. they've been referred to an independent commission by the premier league over an alleged breach of financial fair play rules. the league didn't reveal the specifics of everton�*s rule breach, but the club have posted financial losses in recent seasons. they've denied any wrongdoing adding "they're prepared to robustly defend" their position. girlfriend stop the pain they egg released a statement earlier that didn't give a lot of detail, back in may last year, two other clubs

brindley and leads wrote to the premier league to question every ten�*s finances, at the time tamimi remember that they were involved in an almighty relegation struggle and everton ultimately stayed up among those huge celebrations that you could see at goodison park. but what the other clubs were questioning was that everton had posted losses of £370 million over a three—year period. and under primarily rules, clubs are only allowed to post losses of £105 million over a three—year period. now everton insisted they had complied with the rules. they said that a large amount of their losses were caused by covid and that those could be written off. everton had issued a statement saying that they strongly contested the allegations and say they are entirely confident that they remain compliant with the financial rules and they will robustly defend their position. the case will now be heard by an independent commission if everton are found guilty, they could

face a fine, they could even face a points deduction, but as i say, everton insists they've done nothing wrong. a 20—year—old man has been arrested after leeds united had to close their elland road stadium "following reports of a security threat". leeds had to send staff home and close the club's offices and shop "on the advice of the police". it's thought the closure was due to a threat posted on social media. luckily it's the international break and scotland and wales both get their qualification campaigns for euro 2024 under way tomorrow. scotland face cyprus at hampden park. and there was some good news for scotland ahead of that match, as their manager steve clark has agreed to extend his stay in charge for another 3 years. clarke took over from alex mcleish in 2019 and led the side to the euro finals the following year although they did fail to qualify for last year's world cup. it's always nice when your work is recognised. i think it is good that

the people above me, my bosses are understanding what we are trying to do. i think for the players, i've always preached continuity with squad selection, continuity, continuity. and if that involves me that that is great. we can all be moving forward together. wales meanwhile are in croatia but they'll be without their nottingham forest forward brennanjohnson. he hasn't travelled with the squad because of an injury something that hasn't impressed the manager rob page. it's very special to be in that changing _ it's very special to be in that changing room and play fair country, whatever_ changing room and play fair country, whatever country you play for. you shouldn't _ whatever country you play for. you shouldn't take that for granted. like i_ shouldn't take that for granted. like i said, people responsible for him as_ like i said, people responsible for him as well— like i said, people responsible for him as well shouldn't take that for granted _ him as well shouldn't take that for granted and should appreciate and respect _ granted and should appreciate and respect that as well. there's been plenty of qualification action tonight most notably in paris as france got their campaign off to an emphatic start. the world cup runners up beat the netherlands 4 0 on a night to rememberfor kylian mbappe. in his first game as captain he was also amongst the goal—scorers, scoring twice. netherlands�* preperations

for the game had been hampered though with five players sent home because of a virus in the squad. and one other football story goodison park hosted its first merseyside derby in the women's super league and it ended in a one all draw played in front of a crowd of more than 22 thousand fans. everton won 3—0 at anfield earlier this season but it was much closer this time, this was liverpool's equaliser scored by katie stengel. both sides had a goal disallowed in the second half. everton remain sixth with liverpool eighth. england's matt wallace is the man to catch at the halfway stage of the latest pga tour in the dominican republic he has a one shot lead heading into the weekend. meanwhile rory mcilroy has made it three wins from three at the world matchplay event. he beat america's keegan bradley three and two to move into the knockout stages.

we're into the business end of the first women's premier league and there's been a moment of history for england bowler issy wong ——the women's six nations rugby championship gets under way tomorrow with wales v ireland, then mulitple champions england take on scotland who've lost their past nine test matches and have been thrashed by england in all of their previous six nations encounters... but scotland are now professional and its expected to be a lot closer this time. it's the second year the women's tournament has stood alone from the men's hugely increasing its popularity with the hope a new world record attendance could be set when england play france in their final match at twickenham. the fact that we can come on and stand on our own two feet, the amazing amount of tickets we've sold for the last game i think it's phenomenal, the amount of media attention, just everything shining a light on us. getting our names on the back of our shirts. ijust think we are breaking away and out of the shadows of the main, and i think it's great for the women's game. staying with rugby and there was one game in the premiership tonight

and a potentially big win for newcastle who beat gloucester 17 points to 12 to distance themselves from the bottom of the table although there's no relegation this season. but it was a useful win for the falcons who had a player sent off afterjust 16 minutes. there have been three games in rugby league's super league. top side warrington thrashed strugglers castleford 38—nil. wigan produced a late comeback to beat salford 2016. the warriors were eight points behind with just over ten minutes left but two late tries, including this one from toby king, swung the game in their favour. in the other match bottom club wakefield lost heavily to hull kr. and that's all the sport for now. it seems extraordinary. witness gasps. whoa! rumbling boom. did you hear that?

unidentified flying objects, talk about aliens, high—tech spying and high—altitude balloons. the united states sent the message to china that if you invade our sovereignty, we'll shoot it down. us militaryjets firing expensive missiles at objects which end up being no real threat. it might all sound like something out of a sci—fi novel, but there are some serious issues here. the big question is, how much of a security threat are balloons? so everyone's been talking about balloons lately. there are lots of different theories and speculation flying around. i'm going to try and break all this

down to what we actually know and talk to a couple of experts about why we've seen this reaction from the americans and a row with china. but let's recap first. how did this crisis start? for those of you who think this mightjust be the moon, it is not the moon. the moon is off to my right. i can see it. people of montana started posting about something strange in the sky. airspace had to be closed, and soon us officials had to explain what this really was. we know that it's a surveillance balloon and i'm not going to be able to be more specific than that. china responded by saying it was just a weather balloon that had been blown off course. the us military said they couldn't shoot it down for fear of causing debris or damage below, so it was only when it drifted across america and out over the atlantic that they eventually shot it down. the spotting of the first balloon led north american air defense, norad, to adjust their radar settings. domestic political pressure may have played a part. this is the atrocity that's

happening here to america. and if we don't speak stronger, china will continue to do this. scramble some more f—22 raptors, throw some lead in that sucker. trump wanted to nuke a hurricane. you guys won't even throw a dart at a balloon? there was outcry in america as to why a massive spy balloon had not been spotted and shot down earlier. but that meant in the next few days, they were now seeing many more of what were described not as balloons, but objects. if anything enters into our airspace, whether we know what it is or not, we will monitor it and we'll take appropriate action. one was seen over alaska and shot down near a place called deadhorse on february 10th. the next day, another object was shot down over the yukon in canada. and then on february 12th, a strange octagonal object was shot down by fighters over lake huron. these were lower and smaller than the first balloon, but they could have got in the way of civilian airliners. there seemed to be things in the sky everywhere. at the same time, china

began accusing the us of flying its own high—altitude balloons into chinese airspace without beijing's permission — on more than ten occasions in the last year, they said. translation: it is also common for us balloons to illegally enterl the airspace of other countries. since last year alone, us high—altitude balloons have illegally flown over china's airspace more than ten times without any approval from relevant chinese authorities. the first thing for the us to do is introspect itself and change its course instead of slandering and inciting confrontation. amid growing speculation about what's going on and after one military official refused to rule anything out, on february 13th, amid growing speculation about what's going on and after one military official refused to rule anything out, on february 13th, the us decided it needed to clarify one thing. these objects were not aliens. i know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no, again, no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns. maybe this is the point

to address the ufo issue. they exist. they're actually called unidentified aerial phenomena now, and there are hundreds of reports from us pilots about them which get catalogued. they get investigated, not so much because they might be extraterrestrials or aliens, but because the us fears they might be some new technology from another country. and many of those reports may, in fact, have been balloons or similar objects. it's now emerged that the other three unidentified objects shot down between february 10th and 12th were all, to use the jargon, benign. in other words, perhaps weather balloons or research balloons, but not spy balloons. so what do we know about the original spy balloon? it was huge — 200 feet tall and helium—filled. there were solar panels to provide power and sensors and instruments along the bottom. it also had some ability to be manoeuvred and guided, although only limited. it was flying at about 60,000 feet.

but it's thought that these kinds of balloons can go up to twice that altitude. and to really understand why they're so useful to china, we need to look at a weather map. wind speeds vary hugely depending on how high up you are. and at the altitude where this balloon was flying, there is a very stable and predictable wind pattern between china and north america. so what are the balloons actually being used for? the answer is espionage. they carry sensors to collect signals and data as they fly over locations. us officials are analysing the wreckage they recovered from the sea in order to try and understand what exactly those sensors do and what china was after. you don't need to get into specifics, just, did we know what they're trying to collect, yes or no? yes, sir. we understand that this is part of a broader suite of operations that china is undertaking... so we knew what they were looking for. sir, we i think we should talk about this more explicitly in the classified session. but, yes, sir, we understand that this is part of the broader

suite of operations that china's undertaking to try and get a better understanding of us. .. i got it. i mean, there's all sorts of suites of operations we have with what's going on in outer space. but the question is, did we know what that balloon was trying to gather? do we know what information it was trying to gather from the united states? it didn't fly over us by accident. it was intentional. do we know what the chinese communist government was looking for? senator, we have some very good guesses about that. and we are learning more as we exploit the contents of the balloon and the payload itself — 0k. what might the chinese be trying to find out? lee hudson covers defence and aerospace for politico. lee, what were these balloons doing, particularly these chinese spy balloons? so it seems, according to the us intel community, that they were gathering not only images, but electronic warfare signals, which means that could be anything from cellphone communication and other types

of data, because they were flying over an intercontinental ballistic missile site, over montana, which the us military typically tries to protect. people at first thought, why balloons? but i guess your point is that there are things balloons offer that satellites and other techniques might not. it can be hard to distinguish where a balloon is coming from. for example, a satellite or a drone, you could say it's coming from x country's military, but with a balloon, it's more benign. and so beijing tried to say that it was being used for meteorological purposes. a bit of deniability about what they're really up to, you mean? what do we know about the chinese balloon programme, then? so we know that they have been doing this throughout the world, that a lot of these are connected. and this instance with the united states has made the us at least look into the programme more.

and so we've gathered information that this has been going on for a while. and do we know if other countries have spy balloon programmes as well? yes. i mean, the united states has one. 0k. so that's a prime example. the united states has balloons off the east coast that are run by customs and border control, that they use for counter—drug interdiction. so they're looking towards south america. does the us think that they were taking pictures but also collecting some kind of signals as they flew over some of the military sites? yes, absolutely. and i think what we're still trying to figure out is whether us intelligence was able to block those signals from transmitting back to china. that's still a question mark that many have, because if the united states was able to jam those signals, then maybe they weren't

as lucky in their attempt. there's a long history going back more than two centuries of using balloons in surveillance, but they still have value today. the altitude they're flying at means they can do things satellites can't do, loitering longer over targets and also collecting signals, because they're in the atmosphere rather than in space. the chinese programme which the first spy balloon belonged to, us officials say, is run by the people's liberation army, and it's been running for years, with at least three balloons over us airspace during the previous trump administration. but both the us and china may have been keeping quiet about what was going on. that's normal for espionage, but now everyone is looking for these balloons. i want people to know that we'll do whatever it takes to keep the country safe. we have something called the quick reaction alert force, which involves typhoon planes which are kept on 24/7 readiness

to police our airspace, which is incredibly important. so what are the challenges in dealing with these balloons? we're going to bring back our graphic for this part. flying a spy plane lower in the atmosphere would be seen as an aggressive act and much more deliberate than just releasing a balloon into the wind. and meanwhile, a satellite up in space is not seen as such a problem. but balloons are in a kind of grey area in between — and harder to spot. they also pose particular challenges to the military in working out how to take them down. i suspect there's probably a desire to find a way to deflate any potential future ambitions for using these things on a larger scale, excuse the horrible pun. professorjustin bronk is the senior research fellow for air power and technology in the military sciences team at rusi, a think—tank. justin, how does the military deal with balloons? i mean, how do theyjudge whether they're a threat or not?

it's a difficult one. so in terms of dealing with them, first of all, there's the immediate question of what altitude are they at and what speed are they drifting at, because the primary means for militaries to detect flying objects is radar. and radar works essentially by bouncing energy off objects and reading the returns. but in order to not get endless false returns if you're looking for something like aircraft or missiles, which would be the normal military things that they're trying to track, they will filter out and drop anything that is moving outside of a given range of speeds. so this is why military radars, for example, are able to, most of the time, disregard things like clutter from the ground, reflections from trees and reflections from birds, clouds, depending on the frequency of the radar — because those objects are moving relatively slowly or stationary, and so the radar will simply filter them out. the wider you make those kind of velocity gates in terms of what the radar is looking

at and what it's disregarding, the more clutter you'll have to deal with, and so the better processing you'll require in order to get usable results for military purposes. what's happened since the chinese spy balloon incident in the us is that the us appear to have reprogrammed a lot of their surveillance radars for air defence purposes with much, much wider velocity gates. so they're suddenly seeing a lot of sort of floating objects, of which there are many that are not spy balloons. you know, weather balloons, research balloons, just hobbyists putting cameras up on high—altitude balloons. but they just weren't seeing those before. and so now, having opened up the velocity gate, they're now having to try and classify and potentially intercept a lot more things that they just weren't noticing before. make no mistake, if any object presents a threat to the safety

and security of the american people, i will take it down. well, i think we need to focus on the real issue here, which is the impact all of this has had on an already fragile and fraught us—china relationship. i mean, the united states has long had this sense of inviolability. they haven't had to fight on their own territory since the end of the us civil war. and to discover that they are not as inviolate as they thought they were is a big deal culturally and, if you like, semiotically for the us population, and i think this is what is at stake here. it's quite clear that china has messed up. you know, somebody somewhere should have realised that this programme was ongoing at a time when both china and the united states were keen, bordering on desperate, to put a floor beneath a rapidly deteriorating relationship. nobody seemed to think

that the discovery of one of these balloons, airships, dirigibles, call it what you will, might derail this. when the news first came out, the chinese response was to say that, you know, the united states is making a fuss about nothing. the commentators, newspapers plundered the cliche book to talk about this. and this, i think, is indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding by china of what this means. nigel inkster is the former director of operations and intelligence at mi6. he says international law is clear that countries can act to remove flying objects like balloons from their airspace. it may be that these balloons or something like them have overflown the uk at very high altitude and nobody has noticed them. you know, if the uk wanted to shoot one of these objects down,

under international law, it would be entirely within its rights to do so. but i think there will need to be a degree of political consideration applied to this. after all, the united kingdom is not the united states. we're not a global superpower. but with this increased vigilance, could we see countries shooting down more objects which pose no threat? yeah, it is difficult, especially because a lot of more kind of amateur—type balloons that are floating around may not have filed any flight plans or got any permission. and so there may be very little awareness of exactly what's up there, most of which is entirely harmless. it does pose a challenge, doesn't it, because you've gotjets flying up to try and look and see what they are, which sounds like it's quite difficult for them, and then firing $100,000 missiles to shoot them down, which seems to be the only available option.

yeah. even the highest flying military jets, things like the f—22 or the british typhoon, which can operate significantly above 50,000 feet, which is typically where fast jets tend to stop in terms of going higher, f—22, typhoon can operate up to 60,000 feet or even a little above. it's tricky being up there. there are considerations around pilot life support and pressurisation of the cockpit. typically, aircraft are designed to operate at really extreme altitudes above that, like the u—2 spy plane or the 71 blackbird, again, spy plane. crews would wear kind of spacesuits, full pressure suits, and most jet fighters aren't equipped for that. also, where there have been previous examples of weather balloons, for example, or surveillance balloons from the us side that have kind of got lost or cables have broken, where fighters have tried to shoot them down at lower altitudes using cheaper gunnery, you've had instances where hundreds or even thousands of cannon

rounds have gone straight through the balloon, not gone off, in the sense that the rounds haven't exploded because the skin of the balloon is too insubstantial to trigger the fuse. and so they've just put tiny holes in them, which doesn't really cause them to leak at any particularly significant rate, and they've just continued. and of course, if it's over a civilian area or, say, the continental united states, a large area, you have to be very careful where you're firing cannon rounds because those will still come down somewhere. it is a difficult thing to solve with military equipment that isn't designed for it. does that mean we're going to have to look at new ways of defending or dealing with balloons, airships, otherthings flying at this altitude? because it sounds like it's possible we might see more in the future. it's not a technology of the past, but one that many countries look like they're developing. it may be that there will be more interest in certainly tracking

the use of balloons and potentially developing more specialised capabilities to shoot them down more predictably or with lower cost. the flip side is that, you know, this is not a new technology, and spy balloons are something that have been used significantly by most powers over the years. particularly during the cold war, they were played around with. there are difficulties with them, which is that it's harder to control exactly where they go, even if they have limited propulsion systems on board. so while balloons are a niche, they're probably not revolutionary in that sense. mm. it's more a political challenge and also something that you wouldn't necessarily want to have no answer to in case someone started getting much more creative with what they might try and then do if you had no answer to it, and just let it go unchallenged. so what are the security risks? in one word, escalation. spying happens all the time, but the first rule of espionage is don't get caught, because when you do, it can turn into a problem. the us learnt this

a couple of times. there was a major incident in 1960 where soviet air defences shot down an american spy plane flying at high altitude within its territory during the cold war. and more recently, in 2001, a us surveillance plane which was flying on the edge of chinese territory was forced to land in china after colliding with a jet watching it closely. that led to a tricky crisis. back then, relations were not that bad. they're much worse today. as we made clear last week, if china threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. and we did. cheering and applause. translation: this - behaviour is unimaginable and borders on hysteria. it is 100% an abuse of force. it is a clear violation of international practice. if the rhetoric grows and both the us and china feel they need

to act tough and shoot things down near their airspace, then tensions will grow and there could be dangerous mistakes. so are these balloons a real security threat to you and me? they may not be in themselves, but how countries react or overreact to them could have real consequences. we're already seeing that what's essentially a tool of espionage could significantly increase tensions between the world's two most powerful countries and maybe even spark a crisis. and there's the risk that a lot more innocent balloons could get shot out of the skies by fighterjets. hello there. part one of the weekend looks likely

again to be another day of sunny spells and scattered showers for many, not as widespread as those we had on friday. and in fact, across southern england and southern wales, we will see some drier interludes into the afternoon, showers stretching from east anglia up through northern england towards northern ireland. brighter spells but cooler in scotland, so 5—8 degrees celisus, 10—14 celsius further south. move into the early hours of sunday morning, there's some wet weather to come again with more persistent rain from this area of low pressure as it drifts its way steadily eastwards. that will clear away first thing across southern england on sunday to leave brighter skies, a cooler feel for all, and some of those showers above 200 metres turning wintry once again in the far north of scotland. top temperatures on sunday afternoon, 4—11 celsius. that's it. take care.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. gwyneth paltrow insists she didn't engage in any risky behaviour as she takes the stand in a case sparked by a skiing accident 7 years ago. king charles' state visit to france postponed as protests against president macron's pension reforms continue. the united states and canada pledge to stand together against authoritarian regimes, as president biden says china �*hasn't yet�* delivered arms to russia. the price of dissent in russia: how a child's drawing sparked

a police investigation, a criminal case — and a family torn apart.