13/08/2014 Newsnight

David Cameron insists there will be no military intervention to tackle

ISIS and no recall of Parliament, but is the Islamic state threat

growing by the day and fatally undermining Iraq?

I have been talking to senior Kurds about exactly what they need to

defeat the forces of the Islamic state.

We will discuss this with a former special forces officer

If you were having a heart attack, would you prefer to be injected

A new experiment will see 8,000 people unwittingly given a sea

You are not very hot, only at times. Sometimes I knew exactly what you

are going to say most of the time. The other times... The other times

No-one messed with the characters Lauren Bacall played

But why are those parts for women few and far between?

And as NASA suspends collaboration with Russia,

is space exploration an unexpected victim of the Ukraine crisis?

Earlier today a team of US special forces landed on Mount Sinjar in

Iraq to look at the options for rescuing an unknown number of

Yazidis who remain stranded. David Cameron insisted there would be no

military intervention in Iraq and no recall of Parliament. Britain will

contribute to the humanitarian operation, but what will that

involve. The BBC's siege purity correspondent Frank Gardner is here.

Have we got any idea what they will be given? There are a number of

tasks that have to be done. One is the immediate aid and rescue to get

these thousands of refugees out of danger and to somewhere safe. They

will have to be housed and somebody will have to do something about

Islamic state. The immediate priority according to the Government

today was the rescue package for those refugees. This is what David

Cameron had to say. The first thing is to deal with this

desperate humanitarian situation with people who are exposed,

starving, dying of thirst on this mountainside and getting

them to a place of safety. Yes, of course we should continue to

support the Kurds and in terms of the ammunition they are getting

Britain is going to be playing a role in helping to get that to them.

We have heard that the SAS are already on the ground. We get so

many conflicting figures about what is happening on Mount Sinjar and who

is there. I have just got off the phone to the man who is coordinating

this whole humanitarian rescue effort. It is his first interview

with the broadcast media. He tells me there are 300,000 displaced

people, including 50,000 questions. 300,000? 300,000 overall that are in

need of rescuing. This is a massive operation. Britain is sending

slightly mixed signals.