02/10/2012 BBC News at One

Police investigating the abduction of a five-year old girl in Mid-

Wales say there were no signs of a struggle.

Friends who were playing with April Jones yesterday evening say they

saw her climb into the driver's side of a van.

Clearly, it would be every family's nightmare to suffer a child going

missing in the circumstances. The teacher who ran away with his

pupil Megan Stammers tells a court in France that he's willing to

return to the UK. Six people are arrested after 37

people are killed in a boat collision in Hong Kong.

The Ryder cup is back on European soil as it arrives at Heathrow with

The British inventor who is able to run a car on liquid air - his ideas

could transform the power industry. Later on BBC London:

The Surrey head teacher of the two children thought to have been

killed by their father speaks of the shock of their deaths.

And Hammersmith and Fulham's radical plans to remove tenants

from council houses after five Good a friend and welcome to the

BBC News At One. Police investigating the abduction

of a five-year-old girl in Mid- Wales have been given more

information about the moment that she disappeared last night. They

say that April Jones was last seen getting into the driver's side of a

grave than at about 7pm. She had been playing with friends near her

home in Machynlleth. Hundreds of volunteers have spent the night

searching the area for her. April Jones, seen here in the

purple coat she was wearing when she went out to play yesterday

evening. But the five-year-old never came home. Where she is now

remains a mystery. The children she was with say they

saw her get into a vehicle on the road outside her home.

They describe it as a small van, small in the front and large at the

back. That could be interpreted as something similar to a Ford Connect

van, something like a Land Rover. Also, April got into the driver's

side. It may be that she got in with the driver. Of course, that

could mean it is a left-hand-drive vehicle. Clearly, it would be every

family's nightmare to suffer a child going missing in these

circumstances. We have got dedicated, trained officers

providing support to April. We have staff with the family from the

outset. This morning, the police resumed

the search of the town in the countryside. Once again, the local

community has rallied to their support.

Have you got a car? Hundreds have volunteered to take

part in the searches. They are being co-ordinated at the local

leisure centre. Many were also here last night.

Others heard the news this morning and have travelled from up to 60

miles away to help. Nothing has ever happened like this

before here. We are a bit complacent. We think nothing here

will happen. Tragically, it has. We were on Twitter and Facebook,

and I particularly sore and a lead from a gentleman who lives in

Machynlleth. -- are particularly sore and alert.

With no sign of -- April, panic is growing. The next few hours could

prove critical. We will come back to that story

later. Lawyers for the radical Muslim

cleric Abu Hamza are in court arguing he needs to have his

medical condition examined before he can be extradited to the US to

face charges of terrorism. Last week, the European Court of Human

Rights rejected an appeal from his lawyers. Our home affairs

correspondent is at the High Court. Firstly, this argument about his

health. Yes, Abu Hamza has a number of his abilities. He has lost both

his arms and is blind in one eye. What is lawyers arguing is that

because, they say, his medal -- medical condition has deteriorated,

he should have a scan. They say it clear that the medical opinion is

that a scan is necessary, and if it were to show he was unfit to plead,

it would be a wrong thing to extradite him. They say his health

has worsened. They claim sleep deprivation, and what they say is

the unrelenting, harsh environment in which he is being held.

This legal action has been going on for years. Is this the last ditch

attempt? Yes. In fact, this hearing involves

Abu Hamza and four other terrorist suspects wanted by Americans. It

had both hands up's case, ministers have been desperate to get him out

of the UK. -- in Abu Hamza's case. This is the last lap of that

marathon. This hearing may go on into tomorrow, and we are not sure

when we will get a decision. The maths teacher who ran away to

France with a 15-year-old schoolgirl has told a court in

France that he is willing to return to the UK to explain himself to the

authorities. He appeared in court in Bordeaux this morning for the

extradition proceedings. He was arrested on suspicion of child

abduction on Friday. Matt Price was in court.

It was only last Friday that Jeremy Forrest and Megan Stammers were

walking hand-in-hand through this beautiful French city, apparently

planning their future here together. As you said, he was arrested. She

was put into child-protection. Today, the latest twist in the

story unfolded in the court house behind me. As Jeremy Forrest faces

extradition hearing, here comes this report. It contains some

fluffed a degree. -- some flash photography.

The maths teacher was brought to court in Bordeaux, not to decide

his guilt or otherwise, but to work out whether the French authorities

would agree to extradite him. They hid him from view as best they

could. In court, he looked fairly relaxed. He said he would not try

to stop his extradition. He has agreed to be extradited back

to the UK. We look forward to the story emerging from England. He is

very appreciative of the support and assistance given to him by his

family, and in the Tickler, his parents. Naturally, Jeremy is most

concern about the impact of this episode on all those affected.

That, presumably, means Megan Stammers in particular. Jeremy

Forrest and the schoolgirl had been missing for over a week. They had

last been spotted on a cross- Channel ferry. She flew home from

Bordeaux on Saturday, leaving Jeremy Forrest behind in a French

prison. The judges will return to court on Thursday to deliver their

ruling. They are expected to allow the extradition. Jeremy Forrest

could be back by Thursday evening to face questioning and possible

charges. The expectation really is that

those judges will rule in favour of this expedition. There are a number

of flights from Bordeaux to Gatwick, to the south of London, which the

airport at Megan Stammers flew into on Saturday. Again, the expectation

is that he would certainly be won on -- on one of those flights. It

would be up to Sussex Police to decide where this case now then

goes. The Labour leader Ed Miliband will

make what is billed as a highly personal speech to the Labour Party

conference in Manchester today. He will describe how he has been

shaped by his family background and comprehensive school education. Is

expected to set out how he would shake up vocational qualifications

for those who don't go to university. Our political

correspondent reports. To come up with new policies,

Labour's leader has learned some lessons from his old school.

Haverstock Comprehensive has close links with local companies.

We work in partnership with the school to provide fair access to

business. We provide work experience opportunities, mentoring

programmes. Ed Miliband will say he would stand

up for the forgotten 50% of people who don't go to university. He

would ensure that children stay in school until the age of 18, but

would introduce a new qualification to give less academic pupils

experience of the world of work. That is what we are concentrating

on, is how we have a new deal for the forgotten 50%, with better

technical education, a strong emphasis on literacy and numeracy,

with work experience in bedded in this curriculum between the ages of

16 and 18. But the Conservatives say the reforms would devalue the

exam system and that the government has already improved young people's

skills. Ed Miliband pledges to go further and would compel private

companies that want government contracts to provide proper

training for staff. When it Miliband takes to the state,

he has to do more than simply set out policy ideas. After two years

leading his party, he is still an unknown quantity to many voters. He

will have to do more to protect his own personality and convince us he

really is a potential Prime Minister.

He will tell us more about his family life today, and imply that

his upbringing was less privileged than David Cameron's. Although he

was visible on the streets of Manchester, how easy was he to

recognise? Ed Miliband? No. Delegates are

queuing up to hear him speak this afternoon, but his challenge is to

be heard by less committed voters. In a few hours, the Welsh

government will publish its spending plans for the next year.

Its draft budget will reveal how ministers propose to divide up

almost �15 billion between departments. Labour only holds half

of the seats in the Assembly so it will have to do a deal with another

party to secure a majority. An inquest into the death of a 25-

year-old man who died in police custody has heard that he pleaded

with officers not to hit him. Jacob Michael was arrested after a

struggle at his home in August last year in which police used pepper

spray to subdue him. Ed Thomas reports.

The final moments of Jacob Michael's life were captured on

CCTV. The inquest into his death were shown these pictures. The

court was told police used pepper spray and battens to arrest him.

He says, I'm sorry, at least four times before he is taken away.

The jury was told that the 25-year- old had been drinking and taking

cocaine. He became agitated and rang police after telling his

father he had been threatened with a gun.

This CCTV from outside his house shows police arriving. Inside,

there was a struggle. Next, you see him run out. The

officers chased him, and again, there's a scuffle. What happens

next is not covered by the cameras. Today, his mother Christine told

the inquest what she sought after more officers arrived. She said he

put his hands up and said, please, don't, I haven't done anything, and

that they were constantly hitting him with their buttons.

It then takes four officers to carry him into the holding cell.

Inside, look at the two officers at the top of the picture. Both stand

on his leg. 45 minutes after Jacob Michael rang for the police, he was

pronounced dead in hospital. Christine Michael, his mother, told

the court she knew he was taking cocaine, and that he had been taken

to hospital on a couple of occasions after he started to panic.

The coroner asked people to question whether anything could be

done to prevent the death. The time is coming up to a quarter

past one. Our top story: Police investigating the abduction of a

five-year-old girl in Mid-Wales says she was last seen climbing

into the driver's side of a van. And coming up: Downloading films in

just minutes - super-fast mobile services could be widely available

in the UK by next summer. Later on BBC London: An interview

with a woman involved with the undercover police officer, Mark

Kennedy. And soldiering on - the West End

play inspired by time recovering in Woolwich Barracks hospital.

One of the world's natural wonders is disappearing. More than half of

Australia's Great barrier Reef has been lost in the past 25 years

after being hit by cyclones, affected by a coral bleaching and

destroyed by some of its own native species.

It is the world's large coral reef system, an unrivalled marine dual

funding 2.5000 Covenantors of Australia. -- 2,500 kilometres.

Cyclones account for nearly 50% of the destruction. A further 40% has

been damaged by a crown of thorns starfish, a species that eats the

Coral. Around 10% of the damage has been

done by bleaching, which is caused by rising water temperatures and

increased acidity. The result is a global climate change.

If nothing else changes, the outlook is bad. People will -- the

paper we have published suggests that with the same conditions over

the next 10 years, we would see another 50% reduction. These

changes are happening before the major impacts of climate change.

The Australian government says it is spending millions to protect the

reef. But the UN says that unless more is done, the reef risks losing

its World Heritage status. That would turn this not only into an

ecological disaster but a financial The reef has been scanned by Google,

but are these pictures about to go from being an up to date window on

an aquatic masterpiece to a collective for an archive of a

Now, Europe's triumphant Ryder Cup team flew into Heathrow this

morning, their captain paid tribute to his team for their extraordinary

victory after one of the greatest comebacks ever in sporting history.

I am very pleased to say he joins me now from Heathrow, good

afternoon, you must have spent the last few days celebrating, how are

you feeling? I am feeling a little tired, but OK, so the! It was the

most extraordinary comeback, what you put it down to? Well, I put it

down to extraordinary men that they achieved something unbelievable. I

think it will go down into the history books of the Ryder Cup. We

came back from four points down, but they believed, they believed it

was possible. We knew it was done before, even though it was done by

the home team, but and we knew it was going to be more difficult this

time, but the die is believed -- the dye is believed when Ian

Poulter won that point on the 18th, I think that was a change of

momentum, and they believed on that. What is it, do you think, about the

Ryder Cup that produces these extraordinary nail-biting finishes?

Well, actually, the format is great, I think, matchplay, it is different

to what the play pretty much a week in and week out, but at the same

time you have 24 of the best players in the world playing

against each other, and the difference is there, and that is

why the matches are so close. have had messages of

congratulations from all around the world, I am sure, and one very

special one for you today. Yes, actually, the King of Spain gave me

a phone call to congratulate me and tell me that he was really happy

that our lot of his friends from all around the world have been

calling him to congratulate him on this wonderful victory, so it was a

nice touch, yeah. Would you say this is your proudest moment in

golf? Well, I would say it is the best moment of my life as a golf

professional. I know I have won a couple of major events, but you

know how special this event is, how close it is to my heart, and, you

know, that is why it is ranked number one now. Wonderful to talk

to you, very many congratulations At least 37 people, including five

children, are now known to have died when two boats collided in

Hong Kong last night. One of the boats, which had been hired for a

party, was carrying more than 120 people when it sank. Richard Galpin

reports. Throughout the night, the search

continued for survivors from the stricken boat. Within minutes of

the collision, it had started singing, with more than 120 people

on board. They had been going to watch a firework display in a

harbour. Survivors brought onshore described how they had been trapped

inside the boat, breaking windows so they could swim to the surface.

Many thought they would die. This is the other boat involved in the

collision, a ferry which suffered much less damage. Today the

authorities announced the arrest of the crews of both boats.

TRANSLATION: When they are operating the vessels, they have to

make sure they are safe. In the course of the operation, we suspect

that somebody did not fulfil their responsibility, and that is why we

made the arrest. In daylight, the rescue operation has been easier,

but it is still not clear if everyone has been recovered. No-one

knows how many passengers were on board. Already, relatives have been

coming to the city's more to identify those killed in what has

been Hong Kong's worst tragedy since the 1990s. Amongst the dead,

at least five children. The relatives will want answers about

how the boats managed to collide with such catastrophic consequences.

Super-fast mobile services which will allow you to download films in

just minutes and access fast internet services on the move could

be widely available to millions of people in the UK by next summer if

talks later today are successful. The telecoms regulator, Ofcom, is

promising to speed up the arrival of O G phone networks to end the

threat of legal action by some mobile operators. -- 4G. Rory

Cellan-Jones is here. The issue is that one operator is being allowed

to introduce this a while before the others. That is right,

Everything Everywhere was given permission to go ahead using its

existing network to turn it into 4G. It will be launching probably in

the next few weeks. Its rivals were furious about that. They have

threatened to derail the process by going to court, and they have

demanded that the regulator act to speed up the 4G auction and allow

them to get ahead with their services, and it looks like a deal

has been done and that will happen. That is what we are expecting today.

So 4G would be widely available by next summer probably. What

difference will it make to people? There is a tremendous difference in

speed. I have done a test recently, and it was 10 times as fast on a 4G

network as it is on an existing 3G network. That will enable all the

operators to roll out new services, and it will provide a lot more

capacity, and the hope will be that in some parts of the country which

do not get much of a fixed broadband connection, they might

even be able to use their mobile phones as their primary way of

connecting to the internet, but it is supposed to provide a great

contribution to the economy overall. Now, he started out as a typical

garden shed inventor, but it seems that Peter Dearman may have found

an answer to one of the planet's biggest problems, our energy

supplies in the future. He has developed a system that uses liquid

air to power engines, and now some of the UK's top engineers are

trying to see if it could be used to store energy from wind farms on

a large scale. Environment analyst Take a bucket of liquid air,

chilled to minus 190 Celsius. Allow it to warm and turn back into a gas.

If you fix a tune, the liquidator will expand and rush up the tuned

to turn a motor. It has been developed by a lone inventor, Peter

Dearman. This is the smallest one, I just use this for demonstrating

to people, to show then the technology, and then I went up to a

bench prototype, and then I thought, well, I had better do a car,

because that is more impressive. That is when I did the car. And he

hears, fuelling the car with liquid air again. -- here he is. It runs

around the streets of Bishop's Stortford in Hertfordshire. He has

been working on the idea of liquid air motors for more than 40 years.

His laboratory is his garage. It is strewn with liquid air motors.

is the first one, which was a modified lawnmower engine. Now this

backyard gadget man is being taken increasingly seriously by the

Especially since a power station in Slough came up with another use for

cold liquid air. Storing energy from electricity produced by wind

farms in the middle of the night. In the coming decades, we have

plans in the UK to bring large amounts of wind generated

electricity on to our system, and the challenge there is that the

wind only blows at certain times of day, and we need to be able to

store that electricity four times when the wind is not blowing.

liquid air system may offer one option for that power storage.

There is another innovation here, the liquid at process is kick-

started by waste heat from the industrial plants next door, heat

that would otherwise sail up the chimney. In a power-hungry world,

we need all the inventiveness we Now, more on our top story, police

investigating the abduction of a five-year-old girl in mid-Wales

have been giving more information about the moment that he

disappeared last night. Jon Brain is in Machynlleth, where she lives.

Jon, police have been talking about their last known movements, she was

seen at about 7 o'clock last night playing with friends. Tell us more

about what police are saying. is right, Sophie, she was blamed on

her bicycle around the back of her home when she went missing. Some of

the children she was what reported that she got into a vehicle, a

light-coloured vehicle, possibly a small van, a 4x4, but what is

curious is that she seems to have gone in at the driver's side,

suggesting that possibly she may even have known the man or woman,

trusted them, or of course it could have been a left-handed vehicle,

but there does not appear to have been any struggle. The police are

very anxious to trace that vehicle and its driver. That does seem to

be the main line of inquiry at the moment, but they are stressing that

it is not the only line of inquiry. They have been releasing

photographs of April to encourage the public to look out further, and

there has been a huge search operation, many people just coming

out to help overnight. Well, we hear that phrase so often, a close-

knit community, it can be something of a cliche, but I think in this

case it is entirely appropriate. As you say, literally hundreds of

people from this area have turned night and this morning, just to

turn up and see what they can do to help. No-one put out an appeal to

ask them, they just came and are now taking part in searches of the

streets and countryside. This is an area with a great deal of woodland,

quite a difficult search area, so obviously the efforts of these

people are being appreciated. But with each passing hour, the

situation gets more critical. cannot imagine what the police are

going through, as the police said, the worst nightmare for any parent.

Well, yes, and that is why many people say they have turned out,

that they put themselves in that situation. We have not heard

directly from the parents yet themselves. Often, of course, you

get an appeal from the parents in this situation, but at the moment

they are still very concerned, hoping that something can be done,

people are hoping for the best, but obviously fearing the worst as well.

Thank you very much. There will be plenty more on that story on the

BBC News Channel, but right now let's look at the latest weather

Typical autumn weather continues, wild swings between heavy downpours

and sunshine, producing images like this, a double rainbow from

Hereford, and there will be more images like this across parts of

the United Kingdom this afternoon with showers continuing, some

sunshine if you are lucky, fairly dusty winds as well. This is the

rainfall picture so far, showers lining up through western Scotland,

north-west England and Wales. As the afternoon goes on, some of them

will track further east, accompanied by gusty winds. It is a

dry and bright today in the south- east, but even here the cloud and

outbreaks of rain move in later this afternoon and into this

evening. Showers pull back across south-west England this afternoon,

heavier downpours across Wales, merging to give longer spells of

rain through north-west England, and you could see Hale and rumbles

of thunder, all the while with gusty winds. More heavy rain across

Northern Ireland to end the day, and across Scotland a fair few

showers, as we saw on the rain for picture. The winds here are

relatively light compared with elsewhere. In north-east England,

quieter weather to come, but we will still see some rain for a time.

Showery start to tonight, longer spells of rain, Northern Ireland

and southern Scotland well into the night. The north-west Highlands

cold, close to freezing for some of us. To the south, gusty winds

continue, running along the south coast, but later in the night

something drier and clearer for central and eastern England,

temperatures generally around seven-12 degrees. Tomorrow may look

the same, but there are subtle differences, more sunshine between

the showers, the potential for a longer spell of rain in the south-

east. Those showers merge into one area of rain feeding through north-

west England and into North Wales. The winds ease into the afternoon,

but still low teens for the temperatures. A bit of a break on

Thursday, this bumper and the isobars quietening things down

before more showers come from the West later. A lot of uncertainty

but there is the potential from Friday and Saturday for England and

Wales to see further outbreaks of rain that could at times be quite

heavy. After that lunch on Thursday, rain on Friday, but do not take

that too literally yet, because there is a lot of uncertainty about

the Northern extent of that rainfall, and we will keep you

updated. At the moment, into the weekend, it looks like things will

A reminder of our top story, police investigating the abduction of a

five-year-old girl in mid-Wales say she was last seen climbing into the

driver's side of a ban last night. On the BBC News Channel, Ed