22/10/2016 Reporters

Now on BBC News, it's time for Reporters.

Hello, welcome to Reporters.

I'm David Eades.

From here in the BBC Newsroom, we send out correspondents to bring

you the best stories from across the globe.

In this week's programme.

The battle for Mosul.

Orla Guerin joins Kurdish forces as they try to retake the last major

stronghold of so-called Islamic state in Iraq.

We're now at a distance of about 300 metres

from the nearest IS positions.

But this is really just the first stage of what is expected

to be a long battle.

How old are you?

16?

As tensions rise at the Jungle camp in Calais, Ed Thomas hears

from the children stranded there, hoping to reach Britain.

Disaster struck suddenly this morning.

50 years after the Aberfan disaster in Wales, Hugh Edwards reports

on the story of the community's long fight for truth and justice.

Is this the start of a new space race?

Rare access to the launch of China's longest manned space mission.

There it is.

You stole away the life of an exceptional being.

The love of my life, the mother of my son.

And the preciousness of grief.

Almost a year after losing his wife in the Paris attacks,

survivor Antoine Leiris finds a means of escape

in writing about her loss.

The long-awaited siege of Mosul began this week as thousands

of Iraqi and Kurdish forces attacked the last major stronghold controlled

by so-called Islamic State in Iraq.

The assault got underway more than two years after IS forces took

control of the city.

The Iraqi Prime Minister said the hour of victory had arrived.

But there were concerns for many thousands of civilians fleeing

the fighting with no safe routes out of the city.

Orla Guerin was with Kurdish forces, the peshmerga, north-east

of Mosul as the first wave of attacks began.

At first light, the advance on so-called Islamic State.

Zero-hour had finally come, bringing an offensive that

could decide the fate of the extremists and,

ultimately, of Iraq itself.

We joined Peshmerga fighters from the autonomous Kurdish region.

Their name means "those who face death", and they were ready

to kill and die today.

GUNSHOTS

Well, the offensive is now well under way.

The Kurdish forces have been moving forwards steadily, and we've been

advancing with them.

We're now at a distance of about 300 metres

from the nearest IS positions.

But this is really just the first stage of what is expected

to be a long battle.

It could take months to drive the IS fighters from the city

of Mosul.

GUNSHOTS

First, they have to be flushed out of the villages up ahead.

There were only a handful of IS remaining, but the Peshmerga

weren't taking any chances.

Here's what happened when one attacker approached

with a suspected car bomb.

GUNSHOTS

Before he could reach them, his vehicle exploded.

IS attempted at least three more suicide and truck bomb attacks

but the Kurds pressed on, with help from air strikes

by the US-led coalition.

The Peshmerga say they are fighting a global battle.

"We have a powerful enemy.

They are not just fighting the Kurds or the Shia", says this Colonel.

"They are fighting the whole world.

We want to defeat them for everyone's sake."

And this is the territory they took from the enemy today,

about 80 square miles.

Any civilians were already long gone.

There was little enough resistance here, but it will be a very

different picture inside Mosul.

The Kurds are supposed to clear a path to the city,

not go inside it.

But as they drive out IS, they've been adding to their territory

and what they've captured they intend to keep.

Just one of the ways in which the battle for Mosul

could spell the end of Iraq.

Orla Guerin, BBC News.

Well, it's now little more than two weeks to go until America goes

to the polls, and attention is focusing on the so-called

millennials, that generation who entered adulthood

at the start of this century.

Now, those are people who get to vote for the first time,

and many of them have said they'd sooner die than vote for either

of the two main parties.

Well, the BBC's Jane O'Brien has gone to the battle ground state

of North Carolina to find out more.

The climate has gone to dips and valleys.

Of course, but never such a small period of time, right?

A chance encounter between a young Trump supporter and a group

of environmental activists prompts an energetic exchange

at North Carolina State University.

Wait, wait, wait.

You just said there is a major consensus.

Those 3%.

Raised sea level.

But unlike the increasingly ugly national debate, this discussion

is remarkable for its civility.

It was great talking to you.

Millennials say they are sick of the tone and the personality

driven politics of the presidential campaign.

Young Trump supporters in particular say the allegations of sexual

misconduct are beside the point.

While I might not agree with everything, I know

what he says, and I know what he thinks.

I've reached a point where I've just desensitised myself to this kind

of sleaze and all that kind of stuff.

I'm not going to throw away my vote just because of that.

Because we have more important issues to get to.

Those issues are much more important than some of the questionable

and unacceptable things that he has said.

An estimated 69.2 million millennials are eligible to vote

this year, making 18 to 35 year-olds a potentially decisive force.

But they are also notoriously difficult to motivate.

Even though they almost equal the number of baby boomers,

they are much less likely to vote.

So early voting starts next Thursday, and then it goes

until November five.

19-year-old Tamira is heading a nonpartisan effort to get students

to register to vote.

She backed Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and now

supports Hillary Clinton.

But admits her age group are generally unhappy

with the choice.

There's a pessimistic attitude with this election, I think.

And I can say both for Hillary and Trump there's a bit of fear,

having to choose between one or the other.

It's not that exciting for millennials but I think

an urgency more than ever.

And even in this hyper partisan atmosphere, there are still some

millennials who are undecided.

In the recent debates and everything, we spent so much

time on them attacking each other about history issues,

personal issues and things like that.

But I'm more interested in the policy of things and their

views on different standpoint.

Hillary Clinton has edged ahead in North Carolina,

which Barack Obama won in 2008, buoyed by a wave of young voters.

But interest in this election has waned significantly,

and the polls show that many millennials are too disillusioned

to bother with any candidate.

Jane O'Brien, BBC News, North Carolina.

Campaigners are calling on the British government to speed

up a programme to resettle hundreds of unaccompanied children stranded

in Calais at the migrant camp known as the Jungle.

Small groups have been allowed into the UK,

but with the camp due to be demolished, there is

growing concern for those who are still living there.

Ed Thomas has spent the last week at the camp

and he sent this report.

Life in Calais.

The rush to escape the panic and the tear gas.

REPORTER: How old are you?

16.

16-years-old, and like many, a teenager alone, looking

for a way out.

Tear gas is being fired all around.

Some of the children trying to get in those trucks were as young

as 14 or 15.

These are the images that make many in Britain nervous.

Mohammed says he has no family in the UK,

but refuses to stay in France.

But you should be in a school.

School in the UK.

But hundreds of teenagers here say they do have relatives in the UK

and are now stranded in Calais.

Like these brothers, Jamshed and Jamal.

They are 14 and 16 and say they left Afghanistan six months ago.

Jamshed says he is sad and wants to be with his father

and cousin in England.

Jamal tells us he is desperate.

"We have given our names in, we don't know what to do," he says.

"We are children."

If their family links are proven, the British Government has promised

to reunite teenagers in days.

Charities here says some accompanied children have

been sexually abused.

Others beaten.

All of honourable to people traffickers.

One girl who didn't want to go on camera broke down

as she told us how her friends were raped and stabbed.

The charity Safe Passage UK estimates that 147 children have

gone missing from this camp this year alone, and three have been

killed trying to get to the UK.

We filmed this young girl in the middle with her back to us.

She'd just arrived.

We watched her with a much older man walk from tent to tent.

A child alone with strangers.

I don't have family here, just me.

I have family in the UK.

So what next for kids like Hasan?

He's 13 and British officials are now in Calais speaking

to children like him.

But still he waits.

When did you last go to school, how long ago?

One-year.

A year ago?

Yes.

Time is running out.

Soon, this camp will be demolished.

But first, Britain and France must agree who will care

for the children of Calais.

Ed Thomas, BBC News.

Now, this week, the people of Aberfan in south Wales had

to relive the terrible events of half a century ago

when a mountain of coal waste collapsed onto the village school.

That claimed the lives of 116 children and 28 adults.

The scale of the disaster made headlines around the world

and people gave very generously to support this

shattered community.

But, as Hugh Edwards reports, the families of Aberfan had to fight

for decades to get justice.

ARCHIVE FOOTAGE: We are now returning to the newsroom.

Disaster struck suddenly this morning at the small Welsh

coal-mining village of Aberfan near Merthyr Tydfil.

At 9.15 on the last morning of lessons before half-time,

Pantglas Junior School was buried underneath a mountain of coal waste.

The scale of the loss, 116 children and 28 adults,

is still difficult to comprehend half a century later.

What happened at Aberfan was one of the greatest disasters

in the modern history of Wales, indeed the modern history

of the United Kingdom.

And it's important to get one thing clear.

This was no freak of nature.

It was a man-made disaster, it was entirely foreseeable, and it

happened because of a combination of negligence, arrogance,

and incompetence.

One of those who survived the disaster, her life

still overshadowed by the events of 50 years ago, is Gaynor Madgwick.

She was eight at the time and lost her brother Carl and sister

Marilyn on that day.

She has since written a book about her experiences.

We met in the Memorial Garden on the site of the old school in Aberfan.

The ceiling of the school had come in and it landed on half

the children and I had a radiator which had come off the wall

and literally landed on my lap.

I just remember looking at another friend of ours who had literally

tried to climb up through the roof, which was on top of the children.

And she said, I'm going to get help, I'm going to get help.

You know.

She was only eight, bless her.

I was whisked away in the ambulance to Saint Tydfil's hospital.

And I remained there, isolated, I feel,

for over three months.

And it was then in the evening time that I was told that my brother

and my sister had died.

And all my friends had died as well.

Within weeks of the disaster, an official tribunal was set up

under the Welsh judge, Edmund Davies, and it

started in robust fashion.

I should hate to think that anybody would connect me with any

whitewashing exercise.

But getting straight answers from the National Coal Board,

the public body which owned the mines, proved a very different

matter.

The chairman of the National Coal Board was Lord Robens,

and he denied any responsibility for the disaster and kept

on insisting that it could not have been foreseen.

We have our normal procedures for ensuring that pits are safe,

but I'm bound to say that we have no procedure that tells us

that there is a spring deep down under a mountain.

This is the site of the old Merthyr Vale colliery.

This is where coal waste was put in trams and then sent

across the valley and piled high on the mountains opposite.

And those tips used to dominate the landscape.

And there was plenty of evidence, based on previous incidents,

that piling this waste on wet mountainsides was an exceptionally

risky and dangerous thing to do.

And yet those warnings were ignored.

By the time the report was published, the National Coal

Board had been forced to admit that the disaster was foreseeable.

It was blamed unequivocally for what had happened.

But no one was disciplined or sacked.

I only wish that Lord Robens was here today.

They should have been sent to jail, lost their jobs.

But the battle was far from over.

There were still coal tips above Aberfan and people quite

naturally wanted them gone.

But no one was ready to pay, not the government,

not the Coal Board.

The families lobbied the Welsh Office in

Cardiff, demanding help.

What they got instead from the Welsh Secretary

George Thomas, was a bill.

He wanted the local community to use their charity fund

to make a contribution.

Of course they will pay what they can afford.

But the scheme will depend on what they pay.

It took 30 years for the people of Aberfan to regain

the money they had lost.

It was finally repaid by the Welsh Government and today

the gardens and memorials of the village have been restored,

giving the families the sense of justice that they surely deserve.

Collectively, we have been able for 50 years to get

through it as a family.

I have always said Aberfan is a family.

We've shared our thoughts and feelings, so many good things

have come out of Aberfan and you have to think

like that, you know.

They are courageous, courageous people.

They may have been late into space but, boy,

are they catching up.

China has put two more astronauts into orbit as it looks

to build its own space station 2020.

The launch and indeed the wider programme

is a huge of national pride.

Billions is being spent on it.

So how long before China is a match for the Americans and the Russians?

Well, they are also talking of a manned mission to the moon,

possibly Mars as well.

Steven McDonald was given rare access to the launch of China's

longest manned space mission.

Seeing this Chinese rocket take-off was every bit as powerful

as you might imagine.

And there it is.

China's latest mission into space.

This country has great ambitions, when it comes to the stars.

And there is a feeling that nothing can stop them.

It is not something a journalist is normally allowed

to experience in this country.

Our journey here began 28 hours earlier, driving through the night,

deeper into the Gobi Desert.

Visiting a Chinese space launch, meant being escorted

into a remote military zone.

On arrival we saw the preparations to catapult two astronauts

into space, where they will spend one month carrying out research.

TRANSLATION: The astronauts will work eight hours a day,

six days a week on this mission.

They will follow the same time zone as ours on earth.

But why would journalists, and especially foreign journalists

be allowed inside this top-secret facility now?

For one reason, this country is proud of its space programme.

And at a time when it is copping flak, especially

in the South China Sea, this is an image it can

present as a strong nation, and hopefully get some good

publicity out of it.

It's not often you go to a press conference

with astronauts, and I have to say it's quite exciting.

We're all here, waiting.

But if I swing around here, you can see.

This is the bubble they will appear in.

The reason they are behind glass, they do not want to get sick.

I suppose if you are blasting off to spend one month on the space

station, you would not want to do it with the flu.

TRANSLATION: Being an astronaut is my dream and my duty.

Although the job is full of challenges and risks,

I love and enjoy my work very much.

In two days' time they will be on board the space station,

orbiting the Earth.

They said they could not wait to look back down on the planet

that they normally call home.

Stephen McDonnell, BBC News, in the Gobi Desert,

north-west China.

Now, next month marks a year since the deadly attacks on Paris

where 130 people were killed, among them was Helene Muyal-Leiris.

She was in the Bataclan music Theatre.

You may remember at the time her husband, Antoine,

wrote a very moving tribute to his wife.

Well, a year later he has been telling his story

to the BBC's Damian Grammaticas.

On Friday night you stole away the life of an exceptional being.

The love of my life, the mother of my son.

But you will not have my hatred.

I do not know who you are and I don't want to know.

You are dead souls.

That was a year ago.

Today, Antoine Leiris remains defiant, dignified,

as determined not to hate.

For me it's the only way to not fall in craziness.

Not turn mad.

So I stick to it.

Yes, sometimes it's difficult, sometimes hate comes and knocks

on my door and says, "Hey, I'm there, I'm simple,

I'm easy, I'm comfortable.

You can go with me, it will be easier for you."

But I just let her out of our house and, yes, I think it was

a good choice for us.

The only choice.

But not an easy choice.

His new book is an intimate diary, how he dealt with the loss

of his wife Helene at the Bataclan.

When you close a dead person's eyes, you give them back a little

bit of life.

She looks like the woman I watch wake up each morning.

I want to lie next to her languorous body, warm her up, tell her she's

the most beautiful woman I ever met.

It was like the walls of my room when I was alone were about to fall

on me and I was like suffocating.

But writing was an open door to learn freedom.

So writing has been Antoine's escape.

A way to hold on to his wife.

She is buried in Montmartre.

The new book has a new letter.

Imagined to her from their two-year-old son, Melvin.

Papa promised me that we would come to see you tomorrow, the two of us.

OK, well, I can't wait to see you.

OK, well, I can't wait to see you tomorrow and the day

after tomorrow and all the days after that.

I miss you, mama, I love you. Melvin.

And while he holds no hate for his wife's killers,

there is one thing Antoine has refused to relinquish, his grief.

Grief is a companion for me.

It's precious.

I want to keep it with me.

Because it's a connection to your wife?

Because it's a testimony of...

like, even a physical testimony, you know.

You felt it inside you, very strongly.

It's a testimony of how I loved Helene.

Damian Grammaticas, BBC News, Paris.

Antoine Leiris, a year after the Paris attacks.

And that's it from Reporters this week.

From me, David Eades, goodbye for now.

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