one another in the company of our children and close friends. have that love and commitment given legal recognition that better reflects the life we value. we have shared much ivy life we value. we have shared much joy in supporting each other through the strains of life and loss. confidence and belief in our own agency, against all odds we succeeded in a legal battle against the government. then they did what we asked for a long. not many people can say that. but we both know that with everything gained, some things risk being lost. through this long journey and hard—fought battle, my mental health has suffered, our ability to be civil to one another has been tested and crucially missed out on an important moment to state what we mean to each other, not just in the eyes of others. we are grateful to and wish to thank everyone who has supported us on thisjourney. so we can everyone who has supported us on this journey. so we can finally do incite a one another what we mean to each other in private. thousands of others across the country will be forming several partnerships in the coming decade. what began as a personal and she has become so much more than that. that is now a space for new, modern possibilities, people to express their love and commitment to one another. the urgent need to reform cohabitation laws so social policy keeps up with modern life in britain has been brought into greater focus and we have helped to create a space for deeper discussion to give legal recognition to other types of personal caring relationships such as those between friends, siblings and parents. there is no social script to sever partnership and you can do whatever feels right to you, some will want to celebrate with an elaborate ceremony and by party but the beauty is that you can form them at minimal cost and without fanfare. charlie, i hope you and i and our children enjoy many years of simile partners life together. i love you. cheering. now it's time for a look at the weather with simon king. thanks, simon. a quiet end to the decade. lots of dry weather out there today. this is the scene from north yorkshire. just a short time ago. one or two showers in south—west england. elsewhere, though, that is where you will have the best of the sunshine. temperatures between 4—6d in central stockton —— scotland. if you're heading out this evening, the cloud will extend its way further north and east. maybe some fog development for some of us as well, but it is dry for many of us to take us but it is dry for many of us to take us into the new year. tomorrow will bea us into the new year. tomorrow will be a drier day for most of the uk, lots of cloud around, temperatures between seven and nine celsius. hello this is bbc news. the headlines: military aircraft and vessels are helping rescue efforts in australia as thousands of people seek refuge on the beach and in boats. a crew battling the fires in new south wales recorded the moment when their truck was overrun — they sheltered inside as the front passed through. former nissan boss carlos ghosn flees to lebanon, despite being under house arrest in tokyo on financial misconduct charges. the national living wage is to rise in april by 6.2% — four times the rate of inflation. auckland is the first major city to welcome in the new year 2020 with a huge fireworks display. now on bbc news, a special programme featuring five women photographers who have offered glimpses into rarely seen lives in through the lens' photography has the ability to shine a spotlight, giving us an insight into people and places we would never otherwise have seen. in this programme, i'm going to introduce you to five remarkable female photographers working today who have captured worlds that are rarely documented, exploring hidden lives around the globe. coming up, a photographer who befriended saudi women, offering a glimpse behind the closed doors of their homes. and the jordanian—american whose images revealed the lives of palestinians in gaza and the west bank through moments of dark humour. but first, let's meet elina shenshoiva. she looked at how residents of norilsk adapted to living in one of the world's most isolated cities, 400 kilometres north of the arctic circle, where each winter the sun does not rise for two months. you have a feeling that they will appear, but it never comes. norilsk is a city situated above the polar circle in russian siberia. it is one of the most northern cities in the world with a population of 180,000 people. my mother, she lived above the polar circle during her youth and she told me lots of stories about it and i was really interested to explore, to understand how it is to live with the polar night or polar day. and how it is actually the life, in these latitudes. i chose norilsk because it has an interesting history. it is situated in a kind of isolation, because it has no ground links with other cities of russia. it is a very extreme place. for me, the main idea was to talk about the adaptation to this environment, to this climate. almost in every building we can find a solarium and people go quite often there. it is not a luxury, it is very common and something that people need. when there are stronger snowstorms, columns of buses are organised twice a day and workers are brought to the mines or the plants by these buses. polar night, it comes very slowly. one moment you understand that there is no more daylight. for me, it is very important to see sun for a good mood. so for me, one moment, it starts to be very hard and heavy, i felt psychologically not good. after two months, i even started to have, like, this feeling, kind of a panic that the sun will never come back. polar days are very beautiful times. people are so happy. they work often until late, just enjoying this warm weather and beautiful golden light. it is hard, sometimes, to sleep. because lots of people are not used to sleeping when there is daylight. it is quite contradictory, because the conditions of climate are quite extreme, but people are so friendly and so joyful, they have a very wonderful sense of humour. i was surprised to meet several young people who told me that for them, norilsk, it is their zone of comfort, because they have everything, actually. they have long vacations. good salaries. regular salaries. but from the other side, there are lots of people who are dreaming to go away from norilsk and to live in a more comfortable region. for me, photography is like a tool, like a key to go to some places, to meet certain people, and without being a photographer i could not actually be there. elena chernyshova, whose images show what it is like to live in one of the coldest cities on earth. sometimes culture, rather than geography, can mean certain groups are harder to reach. during 2009 and 2010, olivia arthur spent time in saudi arabia, photographing scenes at parties and in a beach town, away from the eyes of the religious police. they have this very strong conservative islamic influence, as well as what has come with, you know, obviously the oil money. originally i went to saudi arabia to teach a workshop for young women. women i met there invited me to do houses to meet their families. isaid, can i make a picture of you in your house, at your home? something you are totally comfortable with. for some of them that they would be totally covered, others were ok to be photographed if i didn't show theirfaces. i started making friends. i hung out with them and, through them, met other girls. i stayed in a women's hostel one night, which is kind of a fascinating place, a whole apartment block for women who study or work in the city, but whose family are not there. so we hung out together, i showed them my work, they saw the sort of thing i was doing. they said, that's great, we would love to be in your pictures, but you couldn't photograph us unless we are wearing our abayas. so i said, ok. it must have been one o'clock in the morning, they all put on their abayas and niqab on. they sat around and started making a pretend tea party. i hadn't asked them to do that, but in a way, we were just playing. it was fun. i took these pictures and they started playing around. there's this one. then there's a girl who has a black goldfish. she stands there with her goldfish bowl and she says, look, my goldfish has an abaya too! they kind of laughed. they weren't laughing at themselves, we were just having fun. and at the end they said to me, thanks for that, that was great, we really enjoyed it. that was a great honour for me, that they would trust me and let me into their worlds and i took that very seriously and i tried to understand their desire for privacy and what that meant. what they were ok with me showing, what they weren't ok with me showing. sometimes i take pictures and later the girls asked me not to show theirfaces. i make prints and photograph them under a bright light. that's great, one of them says, but can't you show a bit more of her eyes so that people can see how beautiful she is? it was a curious place, like a beach town, a little bit out ofjeddah, about half—an—hour away. lots of people go there on the weekend. it is privately—owned, which means the rules of saudi society somehow don't exist, and that for me was very confusing. you can wear what you like, women can drive cars, women can ride bikes. you can swim in a bikini. some people are also swimming in an abaya, because they don't want to swim ina bikini. so this place captured a lot of the contradictions. i didn't really want to say life in this country is this way, or it is this way, it is one particular thing, because i realise it is way more complicated than that and that i didn't really have a proper insight, or i had only some glimpses. so what i tried to do was really give people my experience, just to help to explain to the viewer the stuff that was hidden, and also the kind of contradictory nature of it all. "she comes up to us in a cafe. do you want to come to a dj party? i'm shocked. no, my friend tells me, it is one of those all—girls parties. they have them in weddings, they're legal. at the party, the lights flick on every five minutes to make sure nobody is misbehaving." in a way, laughing at myself for not understanding or not being able to make sense of what was going on around me sort of brings a lightness into what is, in parts, quite a heavy story. that was what my experience was. it was not about women complaining about their lives. it was about, look, we are having fun, we are making the most of our lives in this space that we're given. photography is intrusive, and these people are desperately private. but at the same time, there would be girls that you would say, show our world, show people our lives are not as bad as they think they are. olivia arthur, whose friendships with young saudi women granted her access to private spaces where cameras are usually shunned. tanya habjouqa was born injordan and raised between there and texas. her images offer a nuanced look at those living in the occupied territories, finding a unique entry point into one of the most narrated places on the planet. don't replicate exactly what is happening in the news. find your way in that no—one else can tell. and go deeper. i am working on a place that is one of the most hyper—narrated places on earth. if you look at the coverage there versus anywhere else, the coverage is vast. but i'm bored by the majority of it and it doesn't represent the place that i know. and so i try to find the intimate. i try to find a unique entry point into any story, and i always try to go under, over, side door, around the corner. because i am not interested in reproducing what has already been done and said, because what is the point? it needs to be something that has more than one dimension. suddenly i was not a journalist coming in and out. palestine was home and i was the one sitting at checkpoints and experiencing this as reality, watching sometimes operatic scenes of ridiculousness and humour, to bypass orjust survive these situations. i started to look differently and think, what story do i want to tell? and that was occupied pleasures. there had been a wedding, i missed it, there was a woman who had come in in a wedding dress and had the wedding party because she had not been given permission to access gaza because of the blockade. and so i went and found her. she was not there. the husband was. he started telling me about his love story. he described finding her — i ran to her, i kissed her, it was like a bollywood movie. and then he paused and he said the most sobering, sombre thing. he said, you know, no matter what they do to us, we will always find a way to live, to love, to laugh. we didn't make it in time, they were going to their favourite spot, there were some roman ruins, it is an area settlers often try to come to discourage them. and they say that they love to go specifically to that spot for that reason, and that they looked at yoga as inner resistance. the parkour boys, they lived in one of the refugee camps and the things that they could do, it was beautiful. flying, deftly using these ugly walls as a springboard of freedom. he lit a cigarette and turned. he knew the joke that was being played and he was playing at it. and it's wonderful. humour in the middle east, it's just as prevalent, and ethnic humour is — it allows you surprising places. whether you are dealing withjews, armenians, lebanese, black humour is very endemic to the region as a survival coping mechanism. so i succeed if it leaves you just slightly doubting your assumptions. i was born injordan and raised in texas. that is where my critique of mainstream journalism came from. going betweenjordan and texas. i went from going from how do you survive this, what is your take on it? there is black humour is something more obvious, i wanted something more personal, and how one occupies their minds to circumvent this reality and also simultaneously refused to let suffering be the definition of their existence. tanya habjouqa, who found that dark humour allowed her into surprising places. in 1973, she was a teacher when general augusto pinochet overthrew the chilean government and established a dictatorship. although targeted by the police, she defied the curfew to document marginalised communities persecuted by the regime. this brutal military way of activity, you work in metaphors, you work differently, and a way to avoid them, you know? at the end of the regime, with the coup, i had to stop my teaching at schools which was my work at the time. i had to work like a freelance photographer. in those days there weren't many women photographers. you had to be very brave to do that. things were complicated because of the curfew. i had very young children, and a baby. the only way to do my things was to start investigating the street by myself. it was a way also to do sort of political resistance, but it was very scary because the police was always after hours. was always after us. that experience helped me a lot to move around and do sort out places to work, sort of, alibis, you know? and confronting the police that was heavy on us, you know, photographers in the street. of course, my house had been searched. so i knew what you had to hide and how, you know. adam's apple was a long essay, it took me four years to finish it. i was very interested in prostitution in general. i met men prostitutes, you know, transvestites. they were extremely keen on photography. they loved it. and that was fantastic, how they received me. in the first thing i did was meet the mother of two of them. i got very close to her, in fact i dedicate the whole work to her, and i say this "we made a book, you know after four years, a book that of course was censored." the subject was like underground, you know, my friend claudia, we went with them south to escape persecution. we stayed with them for a week in a brothel where they were working. that's what we recorded, constantly, you know? their lives, their experience in the beginning of the dictatorship and how badly they were treated, the ones that survived, even. so, i felt very close to them and we were really good friends. you know, i have been in touch with the survivors of this project. which in fact is a very charging situation, since of them died of aids. it was a very tragic experience for the whole community. you know, i have to show people or make people learn how to look. the margin is where power looks differently. paz, for whom geography was a form of political resistance. magnum photographer diana's work is intensely personal. her mother took her to the us without telling her father. diana found him in armenia 20 years later, capturing their reunion in pictures. my mum woke me up and everything was packed. we had a tiny suitcase with us, my brother and i. and my mother said take all of your important things and we left. i never said goodbye to my father. my mom's solution to forget him was simple. she cut his image out of every photograph in ourfamily album. those holes made it harder for me to forget him. i often wondered what it would have been like to have a father. i still do. my work is often about my own family, about the past, about memory. in this project is one of the first projects that really inspired me to look inwards. to start exploring my own family history. my parents met in university in armenia. my mother had just turned 21. it's strange to look at images of them together. look so happy. so in love. all i ever knew was her disappointment. i was born in russia at a time when the soviet union collapsed and my family, like a lot of russians, became desperate overnight. my mom wanted something more for my life. she always did. she didn't have a relationship, she didn't have a family beyond my brother and i. and we left. i never thought we wouldn't see my dad again, never thought we wouldn't see my friends again, we just left. and it took me two decades to go back. so this is a suitcase that my grandfather put together of things that he had collected over the last 20 years while we were missing. so there's a shirt from my brother's future wedding. dozens of returned letters. a newspaper clipping. it's called missing point, and it's as we were taken to america by our mum and he doesn't know where, and if there is anyone who knows anything, to come forward to him. i wanted to find my father, and i was separated from him when i was seven. almost 20 years later, i wanted as an adult to know who this man was. ijust happens to be in armenia, my brother was with me and i rememberfinding his house. and we said, we were his kids and he said he didn't believe us. this was one of those days where i felt really lucky to be around my dad. we were on a boat and we were paddling together, he was teaching me. he feels close but then all of a sudden he's gone. collaborative photography gives way to better storytelling. i learned this with my father. the collaboration started not so much that he is going to take pictures, he's going to write, it's more like he's going to think with me. not everything was one story or one truth. when you have two parents, it's the basic, isn't it? when you are not given that outcome you are always trying to make up for it. when i look at my dad, i think that he is the exact person i needed in my life or relationship has really become one of love. diana markosian on finding her father and really finding their relationship. and that's all from through the lens from london. to see the rest of the series, go to bbc.com/throughthelens. we have had some fantastic photos from our weather watchers this morning fog across other areas, but also some sunshine in northern parts. this was the picture from north yorkshire, just some fair weather blood in the sky. there will be sunshine for scotland, northern england and northern ireland for the afternoon. more cloud in the south and west. showers are moving their way through the isles of scilly and into cornwall. maximum temperatures today lower than yesterday in northern parts, 4—7 in scotland, 8-10 northern parts, 4—7 in scotland, 8—10 elsewhere. if you are right at midnight, it is looking largely dry. it could be a few spots of drizzle in western areas and fog developing in the eastern and north—eastern areas, but generally some clear skies in northern england and scotland. on new year's day, a lot of clutter run, quite overcast skies with a maximum temperature of between seven and nine celsius. goodbye. this is bbc news, i'm shaun ley. the headlines at midday... thousands of people head to the beach and take to boats, seeking refuge from bush fires in australia. helicopters and the navy are deployed to help. nothing prepares you for that bearing down of a fire wall charging down on a community. massive walls of fire coming straight at you. jasper, put your blanket up. a crew battling the fires in new south wales recorded the moment when their truck was overrun , they sheltered inside as the fire front passed through. former nissan boss carlos ghosn flees to lebanon, despite being under house arrest injapan, where he was being held on charges of financial misconduct. the first civil partnerships ceremonies for heterosexual couples