mr rajoy has announced elections in the autonomous region for 21 december. spain's senate earlier voted in favour of direct rule from madrid. but catalan separatists say the independence law their parliament passed means they no longer fall under spanish jurisdiction. a little later we've got newswatch — but now on bbc news, it's time for click. going into space has long been the dream of many a sci—fi fan and for one bbc presenter that dream is about to come true.

in a world first for the broadcast industry, spencer kelly, who fronts the bbc technology programme click, has been accepted by nasa to visit and report from the international space station. during his stay on board, he will present several episodes of click. kelly, who says he has always harboured ambitions to leave planet earth, will test how the latest technology performs in zero gravity. he says he's looking forward to the months of training ahead of him. that's not...that‘s not true. i'm so sorry. that shouldn't be on the autocue. that's my christmas fantasy list. it's fake news! we are fighting the fake news. it's fake, phoney. fake. the fake media tried to stop... everyone‘s using the term these days. the problem is, it now seems to mean anything from actual lies to something you simply don't agree with. and the tech world is anguishing over how to sort fact from fiction, from opinion, from satire, from highly skewed and misleading headlines.

and as a result, fact checking organisations are now working to counter the fake news effect. the first draft coalition operates around the world and in germany it's working alongside journalists from a group to help improve online transparency. in the run—up to the recent election here, they published a daily newsletter, investigating the most popular stories on social media, suspected of being false or highly misleading. you look at an incident in a video, but then when you're trying to get verification you're looking largely away from the main incident and into the background. is what's being claimed in the captioned description in this video what is actually being seen in the video? one which showed a couple of maybe not traditional northern europeans, a couple of dark skinned guys, waving their passports. this was claimed to be smug immigrants trampling all over german people's feelings. the tweets said they were insulting local germans and provoking them. using simple tools such as reverse

image searches to verify the original sources of videos and in this case a facility called ‘watch frame by frame‘, the journalists were able to identify the street name. the thing that helped me is there is a police officer walking through the video, back here. after locating the police squad in question they were able to get an eyewitness account of what happened, notjust in front of the camera but also behind. actually we discovered that behind the camera there are like 100 people insulting these three to four guys in the first place. they were if anything just reacting. the problem is that anything can look believable when it's published

online and there is an ongoing debate about whether the platforms on which the stories are published should be the ones to police them. making sure that quality content and qualityjournalism is on top is a big mission. so that's why we work very closely with fact checking organisations and media organisations around the world. just a couple of months ago we changed our ads policy around misleading news websites. wheoever ends up fighting the rising tide of fake news, one things for certain — ultimately we're going to need an automated fact—checking system. back in the uk, a stone's throw away from westminster, lies full fact. this is an organisation that first came to the public attention around the time of the eu referendum. these guys have some pretty interesting fact checking tools. in this session of prime minister's questions, the group is verifying claims

using a mixture of manual and automated fact checking. using a combination of ai and machine learning, the algorithm will perform calculations and check facts with primary sources. eventually it could be used in a scenario such as this. there are 10,000 more training places available for nurses in the nhs, but the right honourable gentleman... yeah, see, that's not right. that's an ambition for 2020, but it's currently not true. how cool would it be to debunk claims like that on the spot? gdp is rising. it's kind of like shazam for facts. nurses are using food banks. the tool that i'm most excited about is the speech to text checking. so it's when somebody is talking live and it takes you in real time to the primary sources. so if a journalist is in a press

conference or if they are interviewing someone, they can see straightaway if there's something that the person in front of them has said is true or false, which is particularly cool. i so want that. i so want that! have you used it in anger yet? i haven't used it in anger yet. all right. how ready is it? it's ready now, but it can only do one sentence at a time. do you think public figures will have to change the way they behave? there's no debate that can really happen without eventually hitting on numbers and the point at which you hit numbers it's important that they're correct and not being manipulated. that's the place we are starting from and the world we want to create. 12,000 creatives under one roof, all geared up to find out what's

next from the outfit that literally invented photoshopping. the answer — ai as we've never known it before. take this image of denver, where an entire neighbourhood is expunged in a flash and replaced with something more aesthetically pleasing. instead of just trying to fill in the area with surrounding pixels, the software can now extract meaning from the image and make a smart substitute from its library of 100 million other pictures. a similar principle is at play here. the plaster now intelligently removed as the software can understand the protrusion in the middle of a person's face is a nose. and say you wanted to remove something or someone from a video. right now you could try it frame by painstaking frame. the chances are the result would look crude. but this demo is real. a research project we may well see in a future version of adobe's products. in this era of fake news, the implications of being able to easily fool your audience are of course potentially troublesome, but adobe is more interested in the creative potential of ai. we are trying to reimagine the entire creative process so you can create

the way you want to. machines can see patterns and possibilities that we may not be able to see immediately. adobe says ai should allow creatives more time for artistic expression and to be creative rather than doing boring and repetitive tasks. they say the entire creative process should be way more efficient and ai could potentially even second—guess our next moves. the tech also understands 3d, so you don't have to be an artist to easily design and iterate. few people would argue that al is fantastic in terms of creating efficiencies in our work flows, but is there a danger that an over reliance on our machines instead of amplifying the creative process could eventually end up supplanting it? i actually don't think so. creatives are distracted by all of the things that take multiple steps, make them suddenly move out of a right brain mode into a sort of procedural left brain mode. i don't think ai

takes anything away. i think it ends up being this news at your elbow. i think it ends up being this muse at your elbow. and that's the prevailing view amongst creatives here, keen to embrace the possibilities offered up in an ai world. were on our way to see her film, a movie, but not as we know it, in virtual reality. this is 60, this is 6880. we are in. there are people down there, people down there wearing the vr headsets. it is a virtual relative film, it is super exciting. but right now you can only enjoy the comfort of your own home. it is not a social experience, we wa nt to it is not a social experience, we want to bring people together so

that you can enjoy vr with your friends and family, your partner. do i need popcorn? is everyone ready to go? let's do this. showtime. scary, suburbia. i'm looking down, i don't have any legs are anything, i'm not a person. i have been directed, oh goodness, that is it down in the drain. i'm penny wise, the dancing clown. all scream and laugh a bit unnerving. i want to go home! the thing has appeared in front of me. we've got a collection of films five to ten minutes each and we're

showing them back—to—back in a ao—minute montage. it's not the first vr cinema pop—up and none of the hardware the guys are using is cutting—edge either. but they have created a custom piece of software to link all the movie clips together and play them in sync across all the headsets via bluetooth so people can have that shared cinema experience of being shocked all at the same time. is this alljust a novelty? it feels like i'm in a nightclub in glasgow. that's horrendous. woah, ok, that's enough. actually it was quite fun to bring a group of friends together. not that i have any here. you can go out and have a shared experience, another group is coming in right now? right now. 0k. masters of turnaround. we'd better be on our way. that's it for the shortcut of click this week. the full version is up on

high player. we are also on facebook and twitter. thank you for watching. —— iplayer. hello and welcome to newswatch. the new series of blue planet starts on sunday — good news for viewers, but is it news as such? theresa may's shoes make another appearance during her report on her news conference from brussels. why? and should bbc news be interested in what president macron‘s dog did in the fireplace of the elysee palace? what exactly is going on in the negotiations over the uk's departure from the european union? that can be hard to discern but damian grammaticas last friday was trying to get some answers. enter the man who sits in the negotiation room. your recommendation today is significant progress.

sorry, we are going to work... it's michel barnier who the uk has to satisfy first. today, he was here to brief eu leaders on how negotiations had progressed. i'm sorry, but i don't want to answer your question now. i'm sorry, let me work, please. david roberts was troubled by that encounter and got in touch with us to explain why. and another aspect of that summit reporter at the end of last week caught the attention of a number of viewers — a shot of some shoes during a clip of theresa may's news conference. nobody need be concerned

for the current budget plan, that they would have to either pay in more or receive less as a result of the uk leaving, and we will honour the commitments we made during our membership. mrs worrall was watching this and left us this telephone message. there is an important article with theresa may and about the european union. and halfway through, bizarrely, we shot to a picture of her shoes. why? at no other point in the news that i've watched any day this week have we had that. suddenly, a shot of her shoes. what is going on? mel hunt from york e—mailed us on the same subject, asking: we put that point to bbc news

and they told us this: