Swedish police investigate suspected water pump sabotage
Water supply was not impacted, Patrik Johansson, unit manager at Region Gotland's water and sewage department, told Aftonbladet newspaper and SVT, Sweden's national broadcaster. Susanne Bjergegaard-Pettersson, Gotland's head of water and sewage, told Aftonbladet, which first reported the incident, that the water pumps draw from a lake that supplies large parts of the island.The BBC has contacted Bjergegaard-Pettersson for more information.Gotland is a large island in the Baltic Sea that sits to the east of mainland Sweden and west of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
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BBC News
9 hours ago
- BBC News
Evin prison: Iran's detainees in 'unbearable' conditions after Israeli strikes
One month on from deadly Israeli air strikes on a notorious Iranian prison during the war between the two countries, inmates say they are being kept under unbearable and inhumane conditions after being moved to other promises by the authorities, some of those transferred from Evin Prison in Tehran say they continue to face difficulties such as overcrowded cells, lack of beds and air conditioning, limited number of toilets and showers, and insect BBC has received accounts from the family members of prisoners moved from Evin, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity out of concern for the safety of themselves and the targeted Evin on 23 June. According to the Iranian authorities, the attack killed 80 people, including five prisoners, 41 prison staff and 13 military conscripts. The prison held thousands of men and women, including prominent political dissidents, human rights defenders, journalists and dual and foreign nationals, as well as members of religious and ethnic minorities. All inmates were subsequently moved out and sent to other prisons following the videos and satellite imagery confirm damage to several buildings within the complex, including the medical clinic, the visitor centre, the prosecutor's office and an administrative the attack, the Israeli military described the prison as "a symbol of oppression for the Iranian people". It said it carried out the strikes in a "precise manner to mitigate harm to civilians" imprisoned has labelled the attack a "war crime". Israel's military also said that Evin was used for "intelligence operations against Israel, including counter-espionage". It did not comment further when asked to provide evidence for the International said on Tuesday that, following an in-depth investigation, the attack constituted "a serious violation of international humanitarian law and must be criminally investigated as war crimes"."Under international humanitarian law, a prison or place of detention is presumed a civilian object and there is no credible evidence in this case that Evin prison constituted a lawful military objective," it added. Through his family members, one political prisoner who was sent to the Greater Tehran Central Penitentiary, also known as Fashafouyeh Prison, said that fellow inmates told him conditions there were inhumane even before Evin detainees were said that the prison was in such a remote and dangerous area outside the capital that his wife had not been able to visit him since he moved to Evin, which is in an accessible, residential area in north Tehran, Fashafouyeh is located 20 miles (32km) south of Tehran, in a desert with nothing around it but a road, according to the family prisoner told his family that many inmates were still sleeping on the floor at Fashafouyeh in overcrowded cells without air conditioning, although the authorities have said repeatedly that they will improve the situation.A video from inside the prison, which has been verified by the BBC, shows a cell crowded with prisoners lying on beds and on the floor. At one point, a group affiliated with the authorities came to the prison to film a video intended to show that prisoners were doing well, but other inmates began chanting "death to the dictator" - a popular protest slogan among Iranian opposition groups directed at the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - and stopped them from filming, the family of the prisoner of inmates in Fashafouyeh said that political prisoners were now staying in the same cell as those accused or convicted of violent crimes. This is a tactic that rights groups say Iran uses to intimidate political prisoners and is against the United Nations' rules on the treatment of political detainee transferred to Fashafouyeh described his cell to his family as being unbearable due to lack of hygiene, with bedbugs and cockroaches all around, adding that the prison lacks basic amenities even compared to Evin. Human Rights Watch has previously accused the Iranian authorities of using threats of torture and indefinite imprisonment, along with lengthy interrogations and the denial of medical care for detainees. Iran has rejected these Evin has long drawn condemnation from human rights groups over alleged torture and threats, conditions at Fashafouyeh had been "underreported", prisoners told the Iranian journalist Mehdi Mahmoodian, who was also transferred from Evin to Fashafouyeh, said in a letter published on his Instagram page that due to the non-political nature of prisoners who were held there, they had been "long forgotten" and subjected to "years of humiliation, neglect, and oppression" because "they have no voice". Fariba Kamalabadi, a 62-year-old Baha'i detainee who was transferred from Evin to Qarchak Prison, south of the capital, has said that she "would rather have died in the attack than be transferred to such a prison".Iran's minority Baha'i community has long faced systematic discrimination and persecution, denied constitutional recognition and basic rights like education, public employment and religious freedom, because the Islamic Republic does not recognise it as a religion."Fariba has to live in Qarchak in an overcrowded cell, where it is so cramped that people have to take turns to eat food around the table, and then return to their beds afterwards because of the lack of space", said her daughter, Alhan Taefi, who lives in the UK. "Some of the roughly 60 prisoners who have been transferred from Evin with her are elderly women, and they do not receive proper medical care. There are flies everywhere in the cell. Her son-in-law and grandchildren, who are six and nine, were allowed to visit her in Evin but have not been granted permission to visit her yet, as they are not considered immediate family."The BBC has contacted the Iranian embassy in London for comment on the conditions of prisoners who have been transferred from Evin. Civilian deaths In the month since the strikes, the BBC has verified the deaths of seven civilians related to the attack on Evin, including a five-year-old boy, a doctor, and a members of Mehrangiz Imenpour, 61, a painter and mother of two who lived near the prison complex, told the BBC that she was "caught in the tragedy" of the attack. She left home to use a cash machine and happened to be walking on a street adjacent to the prison's visitor centre as Israel struck the complex, a family member said. She was killed by the impact of the children are devastated, a relative recounted to the BBC."When two states engage in a conflict, people are the ones who pay the price. Both states are guilty, both are responsible, and both must be held to account", the relative said. Additional reporting by Shayan Sardarizadeh, BBC Verify
Telegraph
15 hours ago
- Telegraph
Jimmy McGovern's new drama Unforgivable proves he is TV's best writer
'This is my third time working with Jimmy,' says Anna Friel. 'And I've never finished a script that I've been offered without crying.' She's talking about Jimmy McGovern, the writer of Cracker, Hillsborough and Accused, who for the past four decades has been delivering dramas of great emotional power and moral seriousness, staking a claim as the pre-eminent TV writer of our time. No one writes with such acute insight into the lives of ordinary people – and the hopes and struggles behind closed doors. From searing dramas, such as Priest, The Lakes and Hearts and Minds, he has gone on to campaigning works such as Common, Anthony and Time, splintering prejudice, demanding justice and a fairer country. In an age in which our screens have been hijacked by cosy crime and fantasy, as viewers escape into stories about the conspicuous wealth of the spoilt rich while everyone else's living standards fall, McGovern never gives up on realism or humanity. That he can still draw audiences to such subjects says everything about his gift for storytelling. Friel first worked with McGovern on The Street (2006-2009), which explored the lives of people on a single Manchester street, then later on Broken (2017), playing a woman who conceals her mother's death for financial reasons. In his new one-off drama for BBC Two, Unforgivable, the 75-year-old examines paedophilia – a crime of which he was himself a victim as a boy at a Catholic school. Friel plays the sister of a man who has abused his nephew – her son – and hates him for it. 'I'm writing a drama now that's about a sex offender,' McGovern told me himself in 2023. 'And I ask the question, is his sin forgivable, too? Does he not deserve the right to start all over again?' McGovern's answer to that question left its first preview audience stunned into silence, Friel reports. 'He's a writer that can take your breath away.' McGovern admitted this week that he thought the BBC would say no to the drama, which airs on Thursday, and that he had worried about a backlash from people who may think it offered a sympathetic view of child abusers. 'To be honest with you, it was so controversial, I think the BBC sat on it for a year,' says his long-time executive producer Colin McKeown. 'People always think that if Jimmy drops a betting slip, it will get produced. That isn't true. The journey of all the projects is always difficult, and it's always an awful lot of persuasion.' Much depends on McGovern 'being passionate enough to want to overcome the hurdles', McKeown insists. The producer has worked with McGovern since his very earliest days in television, writing on Channel 4's Brookside – the Liverpool soap created by Grange Hill supremo Phil Redmond. Redmond recalls they were on the hunt for 'really authentic Scouse voices', and McGovern's name was mentioned – he was Liverpool-born, had had three children in his early twenties, and was working as an English teacher at a city comprehensive; he had also begun writing plays for the Liverpool Playhouse. 'Right away you could see a grasp and understanding of dialogue, passion, a really good narrative,' McKeown, who helped launch Brookside, says. Redmond met McGovern in a pub – 'the aptly named Slaughter House', he recalls. 'Jimmy was Jimmy. He had that great sense of truth and justice… we talked a bit about the times when none of us had any money, and we survived. I just immediately knew this was a guy who would not be afraid to talk about life the way it is. I liked his humour, his empathy, his compassion. He also had that touch of sentimentality, which he tries to hide. 'I knew as soon as his first script came in that he had something,' he adds. From 1982 to 1989, McGovern would write 86 episodes of the show, not without clashes. 'Trying to get Jimmy to bottle what he had within the television regulations, that was a challenge,' Redmond says. 'We had a few ding dongs as we went along.' The classic one, he notes, was sparked by McGovern's anger towards the government of Margaret Thatcher. 'He couldn't even mention her name in the room before he'd start shaking.' McGovern, he recalls, 'wrote this fantastic, impassioned monologue' for one of the characters about the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War in 1982. 'I said, you can't have that... it's too political.' It was too close to a general election, he believed, and could fall foul of electoral regulations. McGovern, though, wouldn't let it lie. 'He'd be doing a comedy [sequence] with [Michael Starke's perennial ne'er-do-well] Sinbad or something, and suddenly Sinbad would say, 'This reminds me of the Falklands War'. My red pen would go through it.' The saga went on for three years, until the show sent four of its characters away on a trip to Torquay. McGovern had discovered an interesting geographical feature just off the coast. 'And in the screenplay one of them turns round and says, 'D'you know what that rock's called? Thatcher's Rock. … Do you remember the Falklands?'' Redmond laughs. He let him have it. 'That's what I used to love about him: that Scouse tenacity and resilience.' Friel, of course, also shot to fame on Brookside, joining at 16 as Beth Jordache, a role that encompassed not only British TV's first primetime lesbian kiss but also a prison sentence for Beth, for her part in hiding her abusive father's body under the patio in the show's most talked-about storyline. She and McGovern did not cross paths on the show – he'd departed four years earlier – but she has vivid memories of watching Cracker (his 1993 post-Brookside breakthrough) at home with her parents. 'It's wonderful drama. He's still, to this day, one of my very, very, favourite writers. And I think he's one of Britain's most important writers.' And the wheel has come full circle, she notes. 'My daughter Grace has just turned 20; she's at Bristol University, and one of the things she had to break down as part of the film course was Cracker. It's now on university courses – because it was so groundbreaking.' Gwyneth Hughes, who wrote the campaigning drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office that aired last January, also remembers 'weeping buckets' watching Cracker while staying with a friend, and her 'helpless shuddering sobs' when Christopher Eccleston's DCI Bilborough was killed at the beginning of the second series. 'I'm a policeman's daughter,' she explains. McGovern's ability to tap into the feelings of his audience is a key facet of his talent, which he used with unflinching emotional force in his 1996 drama about the Hillsborough disaster, in which 97 Liverpool fans were killed. 'He is so socially aware, it hurts,' says the writer of The Responder, Tony Schumacher, who was later mentored by McGovern. Again and again, McGovern has taken on dramas around single issues, while putting his characters first, without resorting to proselytising sermons. 'I think what jumps off the page immediately with Jimmy's work is that there's never a wasted word in the script,' Friel says. 'Every single word matters and is used with impact and power. It's always straight to the point,' McKeown describes watching McGovern work as a story editor on the daytime drama series Moving On. 'He scribbled something on a script, then he buggered off to the loo. I had a look at it and he'd just crossed out, 'she tosses and turns in her sleep', and put down, 'sleep won't come'.' McGovern spent years bringing new writers through on Moving On. It was a long time later when he mentored Schumacher, but the former policeman notes that the English teacher in him was still strong. He would invite the younger man round, make him 'terrible soup' and quiz him at length about his life. Finally, weeks later, after asking him to pitch three ideas for TV shows, McGovern told him his own story should be his first show – 'and that was The Responder,' he says, 'it was my past as a bobby and everything else. 'He changed my life,' he says. McGovern, like Boys from the Blackstuff creator Alan Bleasdale before him, Schumacher believes, has become now 'part of the DNA of the city'. Redmond, meanwhile, hints at a still untapped reserve: 'Jimmy is brilliant at comedy, you know. I think he's still got a fantastic sitcom in him. He obviously gets it in the stuff he does, but if he sat down and decided to write a pure comedy, it'd be brilliant.' Unforgivable is on BBC Two on Thursday 24 July at 9pm
Daily Mirror
16 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Gregg Wallace and John Torode's MasterChef replacement favourites revealed
Gregg Wallace was axed from MasterChef following an investigation into Gregg's behaviour. John Torode was also sacked after law firm Lewis Silkin upheld a complaint that he used racist language Gregg Wallace and John Torode's 20-year run as the stars of MasterChef came to an end this month when it was revealed they were both axed from the BBC programme. Gregg, 60, initially stepped back from filming in November but has since been sacked from the show after an investigation upheld 45 out of 83 complaints against him. Not long after, co-star Torode was also sacked from MasterChef after law firm Lewis Silkin upheld a complaint that he used racist language eight years ago. While John denied the allegation and said he had "no recollection" of the incident happening, the BBC said that it takes the finding "extremely seriously". Following both stars' axes, there has been speculation on who could replace them for the future series of MasterChef. Food critic Grace Dent replaced Gregg for the Celebrity version of the show earlier this year. It is not yet known who will take on the role. According to the odds, Saturday Kitchen host Matt Tebbutt is the new 10/11 favourite to present the show. Andi Oliver is also a favourite to join the series. MasterChef could soon be serving up a "dream line-up" of presenters. Food critic Grace, Tom Kerridge and Chris Stark are also favourites to be on the show. Other names include Big Zuu, James Martin, Mel Giedroyc and Nigella Lawson. After the results of the investigation was released, John denied the allegations in a statement. He said: "Following publication of the Executive Summary of the investigation into Gregg Wallace while working on MasterChef, I am aware of speculation that I am one of the two other individuals against whom an allegation has been upheld. "For the sake of transparency, I confirm that I am the individual who is alleged to have used racial language on one occasion. The allegation is that I did so sometime in 2018 or 2019, in a social situation, and that the person I was speaking with did not believe that it was intended in a malicious way and that I apologised immediately afterwards. "I have absolutely no recollection of any of this, and I do not believe that it happened. However, I want to be clear that I've always had the view that any racial language is wholly unacceptable in any environment. "I'm shocked and saddened by the allegation as I would never wish to cause anyone any offence." As previously reported, production company Banijay said: "The legal team at Lewis Silkin that investigated the allegations relating to Gregg Wallace also substantiated an accusation of highly offensive racist language against John Torode which occurred in 2018. "This matter has been formally discussed with John Torode by Banijay UK, and whilst we note that John says he does not recall the incident, Lewis Silkin have upheld the very serious complaint. Banijay UK and the BBC are agreed that we will not renew his contract on MasterChef."
