China establishes 'air-defence zone' over East China Sea

The Senkaku/Diaoyu islands have been a source of tension between China and Japan for decades

China has demarcated an "air-defence identification zone" over an area of the East China Sea, covering islands that are also claimed by Japan.

China's Defence Ministry said aircraft entering the zone must obey its rules or face "emergency defensive measures".

The islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, are a source of rising tension between the countries.

Japan lodged a strong protest over what it said was an "escalation".

"Setting up such airspace unilaterally escalates the situations surrounding Senkaku islands and has danger of leading to an unexpected situation," Japan's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Taiwan, which also claims the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, expressed regret at the move and promised that the military would take measure to protect national security.

'No specific target'

In its statement, the Chinese Defence Ministry said aircraft must report a flight plan, "maintain two-way radio communications", and "respond in a timely and accurate manner" to identification inquiries.

"China's armed forces will adopt defensive emergency measures to respond to aircraft that do not co-operate in the identification or refuse to follow the instructions," said the statement.

It said the zone came into effect from 10:00 local time (02:00GMT) on Saturday.

State news agency Xinhua showed a map on its website covering a wide area of the East China Sea, including regions very close to South Korea and Japan.

Responding to questions about the zone on an official state website, a defence ministry spokesman, Yang Yujun, said China set up the area "with the aim of safeguarding state sovereignty, territorial land and air security, and maintaining flight order".

"It is not directed against any specific country or target," he said, adding that China "has always respected the freedom of over-flight in accordance with international law".

"Normal flights by international airliners in the East China Sea Air Defence Identification Zone will not be affected in any way."

The islands have been a source of tension between China and Japan for decades.

In 2012, the Japanese government bought three of the islands from their Japanese owner, sparking mass protests in Chinese cities.

Since then, Chinese ships have repeatedly sailed in and out of what Japan says are its territorial waters.

In September this year, Japan said it would shoot down unmanned aircraft in Japanese airspace after an unmanned Chinese drone flew close to the disputed islands.

China said that any attempt by Japan to shoot down Chinese aircraft would constitute "an act of war".

Last month Japan's defence minister, Itsunori Onodera, said China's behaviour over the disputed East China Sea islands was jeopardising peace.

BBC World Service East Asia editor Charles Scanlon says the confrontation over the small chain of uninhabited islands is made more intractable by conflicting claims for potentially rich energy resources on the sea bed.

But the issue has now become a nationalist touchstone in both countries, making it hard for either side to be seen to back down, he says.

JFK anniversary: The myth and reality

The assassination of John F Kennedy means that we all get to decide how his story should have ended, and thus plot an alternative trajectory for the country he so fleetingly led. The events in Dallas exactly 50 years ago made JFK as much a myth as a man, one of history's most endlessly malleable figures.

He was a politician "cut down in his prime", in the words of the well-worn narrative, whom Americans and others around the world could mould into the president they yearned him to be.

For those who continue to idolise him, he is the charismatic leader, tempered by his personal experience of war, who would have extricated America from the horror of Vietnam. The liberal-minded reformer who would have dismantled segregation and repaired the country's racial breach. The visionary who might have saved America from the long national nightmare of Watergate, and also its central villain, Richard Nixon, whom he had defeated in the 1960 election.

For them, the wounds of Dallas have yet to heal.

To his detractors, however, Kennedy was a playboy president, who enlarged America's involvement in Vietnam, regarded civil rights cynically as a political problem to manage rather than a moral issue to champion and whose presidency is almost as noteworthy for its 1,000 nights as its 1,000 days.

Perhaps Dallas even saved him from a lifetime of tawdry tabloid headlines, and the lurid details being made public of his affairs with Hollywood starlets, like Marilyn Monroe, and the Mafia moll, Judith Campbell Exner.

Killed at the age of just 46, having become America's youngest elected president less than three years earlier, few other historical figures have attracted so many "what ifs".

Consider the black-and-white photo (below) that emerged during the 1992 presidential campaign, which showed the young Bill Clinton meeting Kennedy on the lawns of the White House in 1963.

It was a huge boon for the Clinton campaign, for it looked almost as if Kennedy was handing the torch to the next generation of Democratic leaders, and that the Arkansan's success was somehow preordained.

But in the 1995 novel Idlewild, the name of New York's international airport before it became a memorial to the slain president, the author Mark Lawson imagined an alternate history. With Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe living to see old age, the Clinton campaign tries its damnedest to suppress the photo out of fear of associating their candidate with a disgraced former president.

Certainly, it is hard to visualise Kennedy as a presidential pensioner. And given our rapacious appetite for scandal, he would unquestionably have become the target of character assassins in the media - a far cry from the early 60s when his peccadilloes went unreported.

Leaving aside the counter-factuals, even the facts of Kennedy's career are widely misunderstood.

His victory in the 1960 presidential election was not contingent on the phantom ballots of dead voters in Chicago spirited up by the city's then mayor Richard J Daley. Kennedy would have beaten Vice-President Richard Nixon even without Illinois in his column.

It is also worth remembering that the polls suggested strongly that President Dwight Eisenhower would easily have won a third term had not the US constitution restricted him to two.

It pained Kennedy that he did not beat Nixon more convincingly - his hair's breadth victory margin in the popular vote was just 112,827 votes - and that the electorate did not love him more.

Back then, Kennedy was not regarded as a passionate liberal. Nor did he ever become one.

Rather, he was a calculating pragmatist, famed for his cool detachment and emotional aloofness, who tried to straddle the divide which then existed in the Democratic party between northern progressives and southern segregationists.

When southerners backed his bid to become the vice-presidential nominee at the 1956 Democratic convention, Kennedy said that for the rest of his life he'd be singing "Dixie", a great anthem of the states of the old Confederate south where segregation still prevailed.

When Lyndon Johnson emerged as his main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, he positioned himself as more of a reformer. From his first run for office in 1946 to his last in 1960, he did whatever was politically necessary to win.

Colleagues on Capitol Hill, where Kennedy had served for 14 years as a congressman and senator, regarded him as wholly unqualified for the presidency. Lyndon Johnson, the famed Master of the Senate, was especially withering, describing his junior colleague as a "young whippersnapper, malaria-ridden and yellow, sickly, sickly".

Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's widow, regarded him as a lightweight, an apologist for Joe McCarthy, the head of the communist witch-hunt, and a stooge of his father, Joe Kennedy.

The New Frontier, rather than being a carefully thought-out programme, was a slogan designed to revive memories of the New Deal. JFK was no FDR. But it is the style of the Kennedy years that we recall as much as their substance.

JFK's Camelot - a phrase shrewdly introduced by Jackie Kennedy in her first interview after her husband's death - was staggeringly beautiful, and more than met the visual demands of the television age. After Harry Truman and Eisenhower, the Kennedys brought some much-needed glamour to the White House.

Partly because of his celebrity and youth, Kennedy is seen as the leader who ushered in American modernity.

But much of his modern-day appeal is explained by the fact that he also recalls a more innocent time: the post-war, pre-Dallas phase when America was animated by a sense of possibility before the pessimism of the late-Sixties and Seventies took hold.

It was also a less violent time, of course, when US presidents could still be driven through the streets of even hostile cities in an open-top limousine. Multiple shootings were a rarity. Most Americans would not have understood what was meant by the term "terrorism."

Scholars have not been so easily seduced by the style and iconography of the Kennedy years. Indeed, with no other president is there such a wide discrepancy between his public and academic reputation. In terms of domestic legislation, his record of achievement was relatively meagre.

On civil rights, he was a bystander for the first two-and-half years of his presidency, and had never wanted to lead the great social revolution of his age because he feared it would split the Democratic Party. His reckless womanising unquestionably distracted him from the affairs of state.

Having boosted America's involvement in Vietnam in the early part of his presidency, he called for a reduction in the number of military advisors before his death. But we simply do not know whether this would have led to a wider withdrawal or whether he would have escalated the war.

Kennedy, after all, was a Cold Warrior who had promised that America would bear any cost in its defence of freedom.

Nikita Khrushchev, who regarded him as a novice, also needled. Unimpressed with Kennedy at their first summit meeting in Vienna in 1961, and also the botched handling of the Bay of Pigs debacle the same year, the Soviets were emboldened to build the Berlin Wall and position nuclear warheads in Cuba.

Kennedy's speeches could be brilliant, and inspired thousands to enter public service, not just in America but also around the world. That may be his greatest legacy, hard though it is to measure.

His inaugural address, where he challenged Americans not to ask what the country could do for them but what they could do for their country, ranks amongst the best. He is one of the few US presidents most of us can quote, even if it is just four words: "Ich bin ein Berliner."

At times, however, his rhetoric was considered inadequate. James Meredith, whose determination to register as the first black student at University of Mississippi led to one of the climactic battles of the civil rights era, submitted his application in anger at Kennedy's failure during his inaugural address to denounce the evil of segregation.

The creation of the Peace Corps. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The space programme. The peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile crisis, when the world came perilously close to nuclear annihilation. All are positive entries in the historical ledger.

By his time of his death, he was also becoming a more serious and substantial figure - a truly grown-up president.

However, the historical inventory includes major negatives. On healthcare, it took the legislative skills of Lyndon Johnson to enact Medicare providing coverage for the elderly. On civil rights, his early inaction as president led white segregationists to believe they could prolong segregation, and prompted black protesters to adopt more provocative tactics and make more radical demands.

At the beginning of the 60s, a more peaceful transition towards a more equitable society looked possible. By the time of his death, even his promise of the most far-reaching civil rights bill in history could not quell black unrest.

Much of the coverage surrounding the 50th anniversary of his assassination is similar in reverential tone to the period following his death, when eulogies understandably lapsed into idolatry.

But one of the reasons why so many words have been penned - adding to the 40,000 books weighing down library shelves for decades - is because we are still trying to pinpoint the essence of the man.

For all his easy charm, he could be frustratingly enigmatic. Even close friends often found it difficult to divine his true motivations and character. When two of his dearest pals, Kenny O'Donnell and Dave Powers, published a joint memoir, they rather aptly entitled it "Johnny, we hardly knew ye".

In a survey of the Kennedy historiography, New York Times editor Jill Abramson complained that, for all the books that have been written, no author has yet produced a superlative biography on JFK, partly because he remains so elusive.

It helps explains his continuing fascination. Fifty years after the trauma of Dallas, we are still trying to evaluate precisely who he was.

In late-1963, as he prepared to seek re-election, my sense is that Kennedy was still in the process of making that determination himself.

No siblings: A side-effect of China's one-child policy

What's it like to grow up in a world where no-one has brothers or sisters? Are siblings really that important? Researchers have been asking those questions for years - and China, with its famous one-child policy, has been a good place to look for an answer.

Chinese families used to have an average of four children each, but life changed radically in 1979, when a law was introduced dictating that most parents could only have one child. Last week, we learned that the policy will now be relaxed, after being enforced across the world's most populous country for more than a generation.

"On the township roads, there are slogans written on flamboyant red banners, telling people to have fewer children and raise more pigs," says art photographer Fan Shi San, recalling a recent trip to the impoverished province of Gansu. Fan, himself an only child, takes photographs of single children alongside their "phantom" brothers or sisters - the siblings they never had.

"Most of my audiences don't realise they have a special identity," he explains, noting that many parents even stopped questioning why they couldn't have more than one child and forgot that things had ever been different.

Fan Shi San's Two of Us project imagines a sibling for an only child

In 1979, when the policy was first unveiled, the new rules were a major adjustment for those accustomed to large families. But children growing up under the policy were unaware of this. And in the early years, the parents of most new single children came from large families - so instead of siblings the children were able to forge close relationships with cousins.

Since 1997, sociologist Vanessa Fong of Amherst College in Massachusetts has followed a group of 2,273 Chinese "singletons" as she calls them. Every year, she interviews and surveys between 600 and 1,300 of the original group so she can track how their lives have been affected by growing up without siblings.

To begin with, the very notion of "sibling" was a hard one for the children to grasp - a task made more difficult by the Chinese tendency to use the term for "brother" or "sister" when talking about cousins.

Even when the children were in their teens, she would have to explain the difference to this group of people that had never encountered genetic siblings.

"They'd say, 'Well, yes, I have many brothers and sisters.' And I'd say, 'How did that happen? Most people have no siblings.' And they'd say, 'Oh, I'm talking about my aunts' children'."

The first singletons born under the one-child policy experienced other changes, too, apart from the absence of brothers and sisters.

"Every family suddenly had a huge amount of discretionary income to invest in education and also in consumption," Fong explains. The resources that had been spread among several children in past generations were now focused on one child.

The result - China's new singletons were more educated than generations before them. And Chinese education costs soared overnight. In the past, parents would usually choose just one of their children to progress in school. But after the one-child policy came into practice, each single child shouldered this focused pressure from two parents.

Ge Yang, a 32-year-old woman who grew up in Beijing, says the unflinching, relentless attention she received from her father, a driver, and her mother, an accountant, altered the course of her life.

"If my parents had had other children, they would have paid less attention to me, in which case I might have spent more time and energy doing things that interest me. Chinese parents of my parents' generation like to plan life for their children," she explains.

Ge now works as a pharmaceutical sales representative, a solid middle-class job. But things might have been different, she says, if she had had siblings to share the burden of her parents' expectations. She might have chosen a different career, or moved away from Beijing.

"I think if I had another chance, I might choose to work in the tourism industry, or live in another city," she muses.

"But as a single child, I have the responsibility to look after my parents. I couldn't leave my city. I need to be with them. This is something I cannot change."

Nonetheless, she sees her singleton status in a positive light.

"As an only child, I have my parents' love all to myself," she says firmly. "I don't want to share my parents with others."

But what about Little Emperor Syndrome - the notion that China's children would grow up spoiled and self-centred.

It was widely feared, but a number of studies - including many conducted by Chinese researchers - have failed to turn up any nasty personality traits among those who grew up in China's one-child families. There's no real evidence that China's singletons are any different than other children, they argue.

But other studies contend that China's singletons are different. A study of only children in Beijing released by a group of Australian researchers this year used a series of games and surveys to test behavioural traits. The study attempted to unveil the subjects' real personalities by using games tied to real financial rewards, explains University of Melbourne economist Nisvan Erkal.

"What we found was that people born after the policy, and who are single children because of the policy are significantly less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk averse and less competitive," he says. "From the surveys, we find they are also more pessimistic and less conscientious."

Those born in the later stages of the one-child policy will provide researchers with even richer material. While children born in the 1970s and 1980s were usually surrounded by large extended families, those born more recently will typically have been born to parents who were single children themselves. With fewer cousins, aunts and uncles in the mix, children grow up in much smaller families than before.

An increasing tendency for people to move home for the sake of a job also makes it more likely single children will grow up without close ties to their grandparents, or even childhood friends, notes the sociologist, Vanessa Fong.

"China has changed a lot, so relationships are not as intimate as before," she explains. "In previous generations, people were not able to move to other cities or other countries. Now, there is a lot more migration, both within China and between China and other countries."

Ge understands that concern. Her three-year-old daughter is experiencing a much different childhood than the generations before her.

"My child will have very few stable friends. She will have many new friends as she grows up, but she will have very few long-term friends who grow up together," she ays.

Under the new relaxation of the one-child policy, Ge and her husband qualify for a second child. However, she knocks down that idea with a quick wave of her hand. A second child would be too expensive, she explains, if she wants to be able to afford a good lifestyle.

"It is not that we don't want to raise more children, it is that we cannot create that many opportunities for them. If I cannot create that much opportunity for my children, I think that my children will feel lost in competition against other children," she says.

Although the one-child policy is still in place for many in China, it is possible that one day in the not-too-distant future, China's one-child generation will become a chapter in the country's history books.

But even when that happens, the ultimate verdict as to whether China's singletons were hurt by the policy, or benefited from it, may still be the subject of debate.

Y chromosome: Why men contribute so little

Scientists have practically obliterated the ultimate symbol of maleness in DNA, the Y chromosome, and believe they may be able to do away with it completely.

They condensed all the genetic information normally found on a mouse's Y chromosome to just two genes.

Their study, in the journal Science, showed the male mice could still father babies, albeit needing advanced IVF.

The team in Hawaii argues that the findings could one day help infertile men with a damaged Y chromosome.

DNA is bundled into chromosomes.

In most mammals, including humans, one pair act as the sex chromosomes.

Inherit an X and Y from your parents and you turn out male, get a pair of Xs and the result is female.

Two genes 'enough'

"The Y chromosome is a symbol of maleness," lead researcher Professor Monika Ward told the BBC.

In mice, the Y chromosome normally contains 14 distinct genes, with some present in up to a hundred copies.

The team at the University of Hawaii showed that genetically modified mice with a Y chromosome consisting of just two genes would develop normally and could even have babies of their own.

Prof Ward commented: "These mice are normally infertile, but we show it is possible to get live offspring when the Y chromosome is limited to just two genes by using assisted reproduction."

The mice could only produce rudimentary sperm. But they could have offspring with the help of an advanced form of IVF, called round spermatid injection, which involves injecting genetic information from the early sperm into an egg.

The resulting pups were healthy and lived a normal lifespan.

Reproduction still possible

The two necessary genes were Sry, which kick-starts the process of producing a male as an embryo develops, and Eif2s3y, which is involved in the first steps of sperm production.

However, Prof Ward argues it "may be possible to eliminate the Y chromosome" if the role of these genes could be reproduced in a different way, but added a world without men would be "crazy" and "science fiction".

"But on a practical level it shows that after large deletions of the Y chromosome it is still possible to reproduce, which potentially gives hope to men with these large deletions," she added.

The genes which were discarded are likely to be involved in the production of healthy sperm.

Dr Chris Tyler-Smith, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said: "This is a great step forward in understanding basic biology.

"But it is important to bear in mind that other mouse Y genes are needed for natural reproduction in mice and as the authors carefully emphasise, the conclusions cannot be applied directly to humans because humans don't have a direct equivalent of one of the key genes."

Dr Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said: "This is a very interesting paper, trying to both unravel the genes responsible for sperm production and also shed light on the function of the Y-chromosome.

"The experiments are elegant and seem to show that in the mouse sperm production can be achieved when only two genes from the Y-chromosomes are present.

"Whilst this is of limited use in understanding human fertility, this kind of work is important if we are to unravel to complexities of how genes control fertility."

US remembers Kennedy 50 years after assassination

The US is marking 50 years since President John F Kennedy was killed by an assassin's bullet in Dallas, Texas.

The city, which has long struggled with the legacy of the assassination, hosts a series of official events on Friday.

Kennedy, who served less than three years, is often ranked among the nation's most revered presidents.

Just 46 when he died, he is praised for his youthful vigour, his leadership through the Cuban missile crisis and his vision to put a man on the Moon.

But he is also remembered for ordering one of the most disastrous episodes of the Cold War, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of communist Cuba by a CIA-trained paramilitary force of Cuban exiles.

Kennedy's family members laid a wreath on his grave at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington DC on Friday. His wife Jackie and two of their children are also buried there.

President Barack Obama issued a proclamation for flags to be flown at half mast at the White House, US Capitol and other government buildings.

"Today, we honour his memory and celebrate his enduring imprint on American history," he said.

Mr Obama will also meet with leaders of the Kennedy-established Peace Corps programme.

Among official events in Dallas on Friday, the city's symphony orchestra will perform, Mayor Michael Rawlings will give a speech, and bells will toll at the minute of Kennedy's death.

Only 5,000 people will be able attend the ceremonies in Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was shot. But video feeds of the events will be piped to special screens set up throughout the downtown area.

Elsewhere, a wreath laying ceremony was planned in the German capital Berlin where Kennedy gave his Cold War-era "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in June 1963.

Those events and others conclude a week of tributes to the slain American leader.

Kennedy, a Democrat, was part of one of the most prominent US political dynasties of the 20th Century.

His father, Joseph, was a wealthy businessman who served in senior positions in the government of President Franklin Roosevelt, including as ambassador to Britain.

Two of his brothers later served as US senators and ran for president. One of them, Robert, was himself assassinated in 1968.

John Kennedy's daughter Caroline is now the US ambassador to Japan.

Shots rang out

On 22 November 1963, Kennedy and his wife travelled to Dallas for early campaigning ahead of the following year's election.

Crowds of supporters lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the couple. As the presidential motorcade entered Dealey Plaza at around 12:30 local time (18:30 GMT), Kennedy's convertible passed the Texas School Book Depository.

Gunshots rang out across the plaza. Bullets struck the president in the head and neck. Half an hour later, Kennedy was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

He was the fourth US president assassinated while in office, but the first to have his death captured on film.

Soon after, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president aboard Air Force One.

Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine Corps veteran and Soviet defector employed at the depository at the time, was arrested in connection with the shooting.

On 24 November 1963, he was scheduled to be transferred from police headquarters to a county jail when he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner.

Official inquiries have determined Oswald alone was responsible for the assassination, but Kennedy's murder has provided endless fodder for conspiracy theorists.

Members of one such group plan to wear T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan "50 years in denial is enough" near Dealey Plaza on Friday.

'Look of horror'

The events of that November plunged the nation into mourning, and many Americans still recall where they were when they heard the news.

Texan Daniel Kendrick, who as a teenager witnessed the shooting, told the BBC he had been preparing to approach the motorcade in the hope of shaking the president's hand when Kennedy's "head just exploded".

"I saw the look on Jackie Kennedy's face," he recalled. "She turned and looked straight at me with a look of horror on her face. That really freaked me out. I had to run."

Historian Robert Dallek said Kennedy's popularity endured in part because Americans have been so disappointed in his successors.

"People want a better life in this country," he said. "They want to think their children are going to do better. And they associate this with Kennedy's youth, his promise, possibility."

The BBC's Nick Bryant reports on a day that changed America forever

Undercover soldiers 'killed unarmed civilians in Belfast'

Soldiers from an undercover unit used by the British army in Northern Ireland killed unarmed civilians, former members have told BBC One's Panorama.

Speaking publicly for the first time, the ex-members of the Military Reaction Force (MRF), which was disbanded in 1973, said they had been tasked with "hunting down" IRA members in Belfast.

The former soldiers said they believed the unit had saved many lives.

The Ministry of Defence said it had referred the disclosures to police.

The details have emerged a day after Northern Ireland's attorney general, John Larkin, suggested ending any prosecutions over Troubles-related killings that took place before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

The proposal has been criticised by groups representing relatives of victims.

Panorama has been told the MRF consisted of about 40 men handpicked from across the British army.

'Surveillance from gutters'

Before it was disbanded 40 years ago, after 18 months, plain-clothes soldiers carried out round-the-clock patrols of west Belfast - the heartland of the IRA - in unmarked cars.

Three former members of the unit, who agreed to be interviewed on condition their identities were disguised, said they had posed as Belfast City Council road sweepers, dustmen and even "meths drinkers", carrying out surveillance from street gutters.

But surveillance was just one part of their work.

One of the soldiers said they had also fired on suspected IRA members.

He described their mission as "to draw out the IRA and to minimise their activities... if they needed shooting, they'd be shot".

Another former member of the unit said: "We never wore uniform - very few people knew what rank anyone was anyway.

"We were hunting down hardcore baby-killers, terrorists, people that would kill you without even thinking about it."

A third former MRF soldier said: "If you had a player who was a well-known shooter who carried out quite a lot of assassinations... then he had to be taken out.

"[They were] killers themselves, and they had no mercy for anybody."

In 1972 there were more than 10,600 shootings in Northern Ireland. It is not possible to say how many the unit was involved in.

The MRF's operational records have been destroyed and its former members refused to incriminate themselves or their comrades in specific incidents when interviewed by Panorama.

But they admitted shooting and killing unarmed civilians.

When asked if on occasion the MRF would make an assumption that someone had a weapon, even if they could not see one, one of the former soldiers replied "occasionally".

'Targets taken down'

"We didn't go around town blasting, shooting all over the place like you see on the TV, we were going down there and finding, looking for our targets, finding them and taking them down," he said.

"We may not have seen a weapon, but there more than likely would have been weapons there in a vigilante patrol."

Panorama has identified 10 unarmed civilians shot, according to witnesses, by the MRF:

• Brothers John and Gerry Conway, on the way to their fruit stall in Belfast city centre on 15 April 1972
• Aiden McAloon and Eugene Devlin, in a taxi taking them home from a disco on 12 May 1972
• Joe Smith, Hugh Kenny, Patrick Murray and Tommy Shaw, on Glen Road on 22 June 1972
• Daniel Rooney and Brendan Brennan, on the Falls Road on 27 September 1972

Patricia McVeigh told the BBC she believed her father, Patrick McVeigh, had been shot in the back and killed by plain clothes soldiers on 12 May 1972 and said she wanted justice for him.

"He was an innocent man, he had every right to be on the street walking home. He didn't deserve to die like this," she said.

Her solicitor Padraig O'Muirigh said he was considering civil action against the Ministry of Defence in light of Panorama's revelations.

The MoD refused to say whether soldiers involved in specific shootings had been members of the MRF.

It said it had referred allegations that MRF soldiers shot unarmed men to police in Northern Ireland.

But the members of the MRF who Panorama interviewed said their actions had ultimately helped bring about the IRA's decision to lay down arms.

Gen Sir Mike Jackson, the former head of the British army, and a young paratrooper captain in 1972, said he had known little of the unit's activities at the time, but admired the bravery of soldiers involved in undercover work.

He said: "That takes a lot of courage and it's a cold courage. It's not the courage of hot blood [used by] soldiers in a firefight.

"You know if you are discovered, a pretty gruesome fate may well await you - torture followed by murder."

Panorama has learnt a Ministry of Defence review concluded the MRF had "no provision for detailed command and control".

Forty years later and families and victims are still looking for answers as to who carried out shootings.

Former detectives are reviewing all of the deaths in Northern Ireland during the conflict as part of the Historical Enquiries Team set up following the peace process.

Around 11% of the 3,260 deaths being reviewed were the responsibility of the state.

Briton 'doing his duty' by fighting for group linked to al-Qaeda in Syria

A British man in Syria has told the BBC why he is fighting for a group linked to al-Qaeda.

Ifthekar Jaman, 23, from Southsea, Hampshire, told Newsnight the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) was engaged in a jihad to establish a state based on Islamic religious law.

He said it was his "duty" because Muslims were "being slaughtered".

Mr Jaman, whose family come from Bangladesh, is believed to have left the UK in spring of this year.

His exact location inside Syria is unclear. Newsnight managed to speak to him via an internet video call, with the help of his brother in the UK.

'Good deed'

"I am ISIS. This is the group I am with. We are trying to establish the law of God, the law of Allah," he said.

"This is the duty on me... all these people are suffering. Muslims are being slaughtered."

Meanwhile, the Foreign Office said it was looking into reports in the Times newspaper that four Britons had been killed in Syria in recent weeks while fighting against government forces.

In a statement, it said: "The UK has advised against all travel to Syria. Anyone who does travel is putting themselves in considerable danger.

"And moderate Syrians have been explicit that they want aid, not foreign fighters. The best way for the public to help is to donate to registered charities that have ongoing relief operations."

Mr Jaman's brother, Mustakim, said his family understood the reasons for joining the jihad - a holy war or struggle, to establish a caliphate, a state based on Sharia, Islamic religious law - in Syria.

He said: "If he dies in his cause, then he's not died in vain, has he? He's doing a good deed."

Mustakim Jaman said he had watched his brother become radicalised over a long period of time.

He said: "He was always trying harder and harder to practise [Islam]. He was always trying to be as strict as he can, he wanted to be the best Muslim."

A link Mr Jaman posted on his Twitter feed before he left for Syria shows he was interested in the teachings of Anwar Awlaki - an Islamic preacher killed in Yemen 2011, who encouraged his followers to attack Western targets.

'Best religion'

Mr Jaman has continued posting from Syria, and has more than 2,000 Twitter followers.

In one recent entry, he explains how he "came to answer the call of the oppressed".

MI5 says the number of British fighters in Syria is in the "low hundreds" and has expressed fears they could return home and pose a security threat.

But Mr Jaman told Newsnight he did not pose a threat to the UK - as he had no plans to return home.

He refused to say whether he thought Britain should be run by Islamic law, adding only: "It's the best religion for mankind."

In May, ISIS won control of the Syrian city of Raqqa, and marked the victory by publicly killing three men it said were Alawites, members of the same sect as President Bashar al-Assad.

Since then, activists who have fled the city say opponents of ISIS have been beaten, the sale of alcohol has been banned and women made to wear Islamic dress.

Mustakim said ISIS was not an extremist organisation.

"Terrorists don't open schools, places for educating children, they don't fund kids, they don't fund families," he said.

'Social welfare'

But Shiraz Maher, from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, part of Kings College London, said the pastoral services provided by ISIS were only part of the story.

"ISIS is an extremist group, it's part of al-Qaeda," he told Newsnight, adding that al-Qaeda "realises it needs to do social welfare, it needs to reach out to people".

"They are on the ground in Syria distributing food, making sure people have electricity to stay warm at night in their homes, making sure people are well protected well fed," Mr Maher added.

"That is something new they are exploring and really exploiting quite well on the ground in Syria right now."

Earlier this month, Andrew Parker, head of domestic intelligence service MI5, told a parliamentary hearing the Syrian conflict was attracting al-Qaeda sympathisers from the UK.

"Syria has become a very attractive place for people to go for that reason - those who support or sympathise with the al-Qaeda ideological message," Mr Parker told the Intelligence and Security Committee in London.

Their interaction with militant groups abroad was a "very important strand of the threat" the UK faced, he said.

Does doing yoga make you a Hindu?

For many people, the main concern in a yoga class is whether they are breathing correctly or their legs are aligned. But for others, there are lingering doubts about whether they should be there at all, or whether they are betraying their religion.

Farida Hamza, a Muslim woman living in the US (pictured above), had been doing yoga for two or three years when she decided she wanted to teach it.

"When I told my family and a few friends, they did not react positively," she recalls. "They were very confused as to why I wanted to do it - that it might be going against Islam."

Their suspicions about yoga are shared by many Muslims, Christians and Jews around the world and relate to yoga's history as an ancient spiritual practice with connections to Hinduism and Buddhism.

Last year, a yoga class was banned from a church hall in the UK. "Yoga is a Hindu spiritual exercise," said the priest, Father John Chandler. "Being a Catholic church we have to promote the gospel, and that's what we use our premises for." Anglican churches in the UK have taken similar decisions at one time or another. In the US, prominent pastors have called yoga "demonic".

One answer to the question of whether yoga really is a religious activity will soon be given by the Supreme Court in the country of its birth, India.

Last month, a pro-yoga group petitioned the court to make it a compulsory part of the school syllabus on health grounds - but state schools in India are avowedly secular. The court said it was uncomfortable with the idea, and will gather the views of minority groups in the coming weeks.

So is yoga fundamentally a religious activity?

"Yoga is such a broad term - that's what causes a difficulty," says Rebecca Ffrench, the co-founder YogaLondon - a yoga teacher academy - and the philosophy tutor at the school.

There are different forms of yoga, she says, some of which are more overtly religious than others. Hare Krishna monks, for example, are adherents of bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion. What most people in the West think of as yoga is properly known as hatha yoga - a path towards enlightenment that focuses on building physical and mental strength.

But what "enlightenment" means also depends on tradition. For some Hindus it is liberation from the cycle of reincarnation, but for many yoga practitioners it is a point where you achieve stillness in your mind, or understand the true nature of the world and your place in it.

Whether that is compatible with Christianity, Islam and other religions is debatable.

To those in the know, for example, the yogic asanas, or positions, retain elements of their earlier spiritual meanings - the Surya namaskar is a series of positions designed to greet Surya, the Hindu Sun God.

The Surya Namaskar or Sun Saltutations

"It's got a trace from history of a religious pathway," says Ffrench. "However, is something religious if you don't have the intention there? If I was to kneel down does that mean I'm praying - or am I just kneeling?"

This was what Farida Hamza anxiously asked herself while she was doing her yoga training, which was held in a Hindu temple.

"I felt very guilty but in the end, I had to trust that Allah understood my intentions," she wrote on her blog. "I let them know I did not want to take part in any rituals and they were so respectful of how I felt."

Yoga classes vary. While some feature the chanting of Hindu sutras, others will make vaguer references to a "life force" or "cosmic energy". A session might end with a greeting of "namaste" and a gesture of prayer. There will probably be a moment for meditation, at which point participants may be encouraged to repeat the sacred word "Om", which Buddhists and Hindus regard as a primordial sound which brought the universe into being.

But other classes may make no overt reference to spirituality at all.

That's the way things are in Iran, where yoga is very popular. It has managed to flourish in a country with Sharia law and an Islamist political system, by divesting itself of anything that could be construed as blasphemy. Yoga teachers are careful to always refer to "the sport of yoga" and are accredited by the Yoga Federation, which operates in the same way as a tennis or football organisation.

Classes tend to be slower than in the West with much discussion about the physical benefits of each position. As with other sports, yoga competitions are held, judged by specially invited international yoga teachers.

Similar prohibitions on spiritual yoga exist in Malaysia, where a 2008 fatwa - a religious ruling - resulted in a yoga ban in five states. In the capital Kuala Lumpur, the physical activity is permitted but chanting and meditation are forbidden. Clerics in the world's most populous Islamic nation - Indonesia - make a similar distinction.

Yoga has been repackaged in the US as well.

Children at nine primary schools in Encinitas, California, take part in classes twice a week based on a style of yoga called ashtanga yoga. After some parents complained - US schools, like Indian ones, are secular - the Sanskrit names for the postures were replaced with standard English names and some special child-friendly ones, such as "kangaroo" "surfer" and "washing machine". The lotus position has been rebranded "criss-cross apple sauce", the Surya namaskar has become the "opening sequence" and the organisers insist that it is all just a form of physical exercise.

Some parents remained unconvinced though, and a Christian organisation, the National Center for Law & Policy (NCLP) took up their case. In September this year, the San Diego County Superior Court ruled that although yoga's roots are religious, the modified form of the practice is fine to teach in schools.

The NCLP is appealing. Dean Broyles, the organisation's president and chief counsel sees movements like the Surya namaskar, regardless of what they're called, as "deeply symbolic rituals that express and instil religion through repetition".

The reason many people in the West think yoga is non-religious, Broyles says, is that it falls into a theological blind-spot. "Whereas Protestant Christianity focuses on words and beliefs, ashtanga yoga's focus is practice and experience," he says. Religious intentions may not be there to begin with but practising yoga might lead them to develop.

To an extent, this point of view is endorsed by Hindus themselves. The Hindu American Foundation recently ran a campaign called "Take Back Yoga". Sheetal Shah, from the organisation, says someone raised in an "exclusivist" tradition like Islam or Christianity who becomes very interested in yoga may eventually experience some conflict with their religious beliefs.

So, for American Christians who don't like the idea of yoga, there are alternatives, including PraiseMoves.

This exercise regime combines Christian worship with stretching exercises. As the class adopts a posture, they recite a verse from the Bible. In this way, bhujangasana or the cobra pose becomes the vine posture, with a corresponding verse from John 15:5. "I am the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."

"The word yoga is a Sanskrit word that means 'union with god' or 'yoke'," says Laurette Willis, the founder of PraiseMoves. "And as a Christian, it's a different yoke - Jesus said: 'My yoke is easy, my burden is light.'"

For someone who has set about drawing people away from yoga, Willis couldn't have a clearer idea of the opposition's terrain. Her mother was a yoga teacher and she started doing it when she was seven, often acting as a demonstration model for the class. She did yoga for 22 years, eventually becoming a teacher herself.

Laurette Willis in the Jars of Clay position "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us" (2 Corinthians 4:7)

But she says that on 25 February, 2001, at 10:35 in the morning, while she was working out to a video tape, God gave her the idea for PraiseMoves. She sees it as a process of redeeming or "buying back" yogic postures for God. Just as a musical scale can be used to make good or bad music, so the repertoire of positions in yoga can be put to Christian use.

Despite the similarities between PraiseMoves and a yoga class, Willis says she wants her classes to ruminate, not meditate.

"People leave yoga classes saying 'I feel so good. I feel so tranquil.' Well I believe that tranquillity is not peace - the peace that God gives - but it's almost a numbness.

"You've been told the whole time to 'Empty your mind! Empty your mind!' And what we do instead is fill your mind with the word of God."

But for some Muslims, Christians and Jews, yoga is attractive precisely because it supplies a mysticism they feel is lacking in their own religion.