to the suspected chemical weapons attack in syria, that no final decision has been taken on military strikes. earlier, president trump tweeted a warning to russia — the syrian government's main backer — that it should get ready because "nice, new, smart missiles" were coming. britain's prime minister theresa may has summoned her cabinet for a special meeting on thursday to discuss the government's response. kuwait airways has stopped flights to beirut out of concern for the safety of aircraft in the skies around lebanon. at least 250 people have died when a military plane crashed in algeria. state tv is reporting that the aircraft came down shortly after take off near the capital algiers. it's believed most of the dead are army personnel and their families. there were some deaths on the ground. now on bbc news — click. this week, we're talking sg,

the latest mobile network tech, starring robot hands, robot feet and a robo worm. welcome to bournemouth on the south coast of the united kingdom, famous for sandy beaches, seaside amusements... and having the worst ag mobile reception in the uk. i hate it. it's not good in anywhere, really. it's very, very temperamental and really, it's really not good. well, there's some good news.

56, the next generation of mobile network, is coming. but it's notjust about your phone. sg promises to enable self—driving cars, smart cities and the whole internet of things as every machine starts talking to every other machine. this week, the first stage of bidding to become a 56 operator in the uk ended with ee, 3, 02 and vodafone splashing out more than £1.3 billion for the privilege. now, to date, no standards have been agreed, but we do have a rough idea of what 56 should look like. so, let's get you 56 ready. five things you need to know about 56. one — yes, 56 will be much, much faster than ag. hd movies can be downloaded in seconds rather than minutes with speeds 10 to 100 times faster than ag. two — unlike ag masts

which broadcast in all directions, 5g antennas will send concentrated beams directly to your device. three — 5g is all about superquick response times and that's crucial for things like self—driving cars, which will use the tech to communicate with each other at high speeds. four — it's a new wave. 5g will use a part of the radio frequency spectrum that's never been used before, meaning it will broadcast on shorter millimetre waves. that means more data for all those devices. but there is a problem. these waves can't travel through buildings or even rain. five — the solution is new masts and lots of them. but the good news is that they only need be tiny. these mini masts will need to be much closer together and they'll act like a relay team transmitting

signals around buildings. 5g projects are still being trialled, and the kinks in the technology are still being worked out. but lara lewington has been to see what is claimed to be the world's first public 5g testbed. the trial taking place here in bristol's millennium square aims to give the public an idea of what 5g could make possible. this communal virtual reality experience shows streaming of high—bandwidth content on many devices all at once, all on one network with no time lag or drop out. dancing in unison, we played a game involving chasing moving stars. these demos couldn't be in full 5g because current smart phones can't oblige, but every other element is there, with these 5g new radios throughout the area transmitting signal. the team here anticipate 5g to be a network of networks, combining the best elements of conductivity we have now with millimetre or extremely high frequency waves, plus the potential to tap into wi—fi networks and li—fi connections,

particularly when we're on the move. imagine, for instance, that you are having wi—fi network or you are having ag network, while you are travelling on the train, you go under the tunnel, nothing of this works, and then in the tunnel, you install li—fi network, we are demonstrating is future of connectivity, then actually your connection automatically, without you realising, in a similar way, is going to switch from your ag network or your 5g network to this li—fi network. we've talked a lot on this programme about the possibilities for smart homes, connected transport and of course, smart cities, and 5g could provide the catalyst for more of them to actually come into play. this prototype aims to display one way that 5g could be used

within a smart city. now, what you can see on top of this cycle helmet is a 360 camera, a raspberry pi, which is doing the work, and a battery pack right here. the idea is someone cycling throughout the city would be constantly picking up pictures and they would be fed through a 5g network, so if there was any problem, that could be found immediately and dealt with without delay. and if we can rely on that low latency, then it's game changing. when it comes to robotic surgery, a split second could mean the difference between life and death. or it could be used to create realities that seem almost impossible, like anyone being able to shoot a goal like messi via a 5g connected robot leg, off course. using 5g technology ultra low latency technology, i'm able to transmit action and reaction. i am able to transmit touch. so for the first time, we will be able to transmit engineering skills, musical skills, football skills, medical skills, and suddenly, we will build an internet which will allow us

to democratise labour the very same way as the internet has democratised knowledge and information. for most of us, though, we just want better connection, and the networks seem keen to manage our expectations beyond that. the average person on the street will see 5g as a way to get them a much better smartphone experience, it will give them faster data connections, lower latency. but it's important to remember that we're right at the start of the 5g journey and we need to look ahead over the next decade to understand what new applications beyond smart phones will start to appear as the technology matures and becomes more widespread. south korea, the us, the uae and china seem to be leading the way with commercial launches expected later this year. but in the meantime, smart phone manufacturers will be working on bringing us the 5g compatible devices that we need for whenever the time comes. that was lara in bristol.

well, here in bournemouth, ag is somewhat underwhelming to say the least. so we've been asking people what they think about the arrival of 5g. perhaps there are lots of exciting things that we don't know about, in which case i say bring it on, bring it to bournemouth first. it doesn't light any fires for me! i can see it being useful for me in about ten years, when i catch up with the rest of society. i still think about...is in 36? 3g for me soon, and i'll be pleased with that. so, a bit ofa mixed reception for 5g so far here. nevertheless, the local authority is aiming to make bournemouth one of the first places globally to deploy 5g and become the first smart city — technically smart town — in the uk. heading up the implementation of 5g is ruth spencer, who took me on a tour to show me some of the new cabling and potential antenna sites that will underpin what will be a radical new infrastructure. ag to 5g is going to be a massive

step change in infrastructure. so, for example, in ag, what you would have had before is big masts, quite long—distance parts... covering a large area. whereas with 5g, particularly in urban areas like this, you'll need lots of small cells very close together. that's a massive infrastructure challenge, isn't it, if you need lots and lots of masts to cover a city. i think what we're trying to do at the moment is understand how cost—effective that it is going to be to deploy at this kind of level. it sounds like a massive ask. is it realistic? it is a big undertaking. but the potential that 5g is going to unlock is going to be completely transformative. now, the problem is the 5g signal is very fragile,

easily blocked by trees and buildings and that means that ruth's team has had to produce really detailed surveys of where the antenna need to be. whenever you put a new building up, it interferes with the 5g array of signals that you've got. so that's a problem. yes, yeah, it's a challenge that definitely needs to be looked at. so with the map and planning software that we've been developing, we need to start considering how do we update those tools and how do we update the maps that we're looking at in order to plan those networks. but it's the potential that may make the investment worth it, as 5g will be the backbone of all those futuristic technologies that we've been long promised. so 5g isn't necessarily about getting better signal on your phone or faster data speeds on your phone. it's about machine—to—machine communication. in machines, in advanced manufacturing, in robotics. so it becomes much more about the opportunity 5g will bring around productivity, as well as the ability to deliver services. for 5g to work, serious investment and new infrastructure is needed,

so could it be that some cities will be flush with transformative technology, while other places will be left behind? i get the sense we might be about to see the beginnings of a new digital divide where some areas have 5g and some areas don't. for example, rural areas where there's a small population, so itjust might not be worth it. but does that mean they miss out? whilst 5g is likely to be rolled out at a millimetre wave level in cities, there's still the opportunity for rural areas to really benefit from 5g in other areas, like farming, connected autonomous tractors, for example, and you would need some 5g infrastructure to support that, but you would need something different in a city. it's about understanding what's needed for users in which locations and what's needed for infrastructure in which locations. we're talking about autonomous vehicles being able

to take you anywhere. but if it turns out they need a 5g network, and you roll into a city for ynulathnommsskhfilfi so one of the areas that connected autonomous vehicles are looking at is where they will be deployed and what their use will be, so, for example, in the early stages, maybe you'd be looking at connected autonomous vehicles across motorways, for example, for covering long distances, with freight or that sort of thing, and then it will evolve. hello, and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that the facebook scandal rumbled on. the beleaguered social network has said that the data of up to 87 million people may have been improperly shared, many more than previously disclosed. it also revealed that most of facebook‘s 2 billion users may have had their data scraped from profiles using now disabled

malicious search techniques. a gun attack on youtube‘s headquarters in california left three people wounded. reports in us media say that the female suspect was motivated by anger, at her belief youtube was filtering her videos and reducing the money she could make. researchers at mit have developed a new technology that allows people to use speech recognition without actually needing to speak. it uses electrodes that scan the jaw and face for signals produced when the wearer thinks about verbalising words, so now you can look a bit daft in public instead of just sounding it. an advert for the htc uii smart phone featuring diver tom daley has caused a splash with authorities in the uk. the ad, in which the 0lympian was shown taking selfies in a swimming pool, has been banned after the advertising watchdog said that if customers used the phone in a similarfashion, they'd likely damage it. and finally, in russia, the inaugural test flight of a postal delivery drove was more 0mg than ups after it was destroyed shortly after take—off.

the $20,000 drone hexacopter, which was adorned with russia post branding, smashed unceremoniously into a wall in front of onlookers. 0uch. over the last few weeks we have been looking a lot at how you may be working in the future, on building sites, in factories and even in the doctor's surgery. you know the story — robots, jobs, us on the scrapheap, repeat. in the retail space, amazon is driving a lot of the changes. for them, automating the picking process is as critical as automating the delivery process. every year they hold the amazon robotics challenge, and this year it was won by a team from brisbane in australia. we went to meet the brains behind the bots. 16 teams from around the globe went bot to bot injapan. the goal — to build a custom droid that can identify common objects,

pick them up and sort them out in record time. scooping the $80,000 grand prize were these guys, from the australian centre for robotic vision at the queensland university of technology. and when i got an invite for a private tour of their laboratory, i expected the customary conservative welcome from the usual studious scholars. robot: 0k. let's go and see cartman. after you. how fitting that an award—winning robot should have its own bot butler. all of these robots require some degree of specialist knowledge. so if a particular specialist is not there on the day it is really hard to get the robot to operate. whereas, pepper, anyone can pull pepper out and start running the robot. if you want to see cartman in action, select an item on my screen.

let's go for the marbles. hey, ca rtman, please fetch the marbles. a robot is telling another robot how to be a robot. cartman has three axes of movement and works like an arcade crane claw. but, he has two hands. a suction grip and a pincer. he chooses which one to use depending on what item he needs to pick. there are many different ideas that we brainstormed and prototyped and engineered and finally this is what we came up with. this is the one that won the challenge. not very compact, is it? cartman sees what he is doing by a depth—sensing camera which helps him visualise 3—d models of objects. you can see that the sponges are sticking out further than the marbles, for example. with that information the robot then decides what to pick and where. he is able to identify and learn products and add new ones as well. his discerning eye is critical. in the amazon case they get so many new objects every day that they cannot have just a library

of all possible objects ever. the vendor puts a new sticker on an object, or the boxes changed shape and it becomes a new object and you need to train the system to understand that this is the new object, and this is how to pick it up. the team now looking beyond the warehouse walls. it is not about picking items from a shelf, but from a branch. meet harvey, the pepper—picking harvester. we grow a lot of capsicums in queensland. we grow over 80% of australia's capsciums and we export a lot as well. we have a big agricultural industry here in australia and one of the things we want to improve is automating that technology and improving the performance and efficiencies. he has also so got two arms in one and a special camera to see what is in front of him. he knows when a fruit is ripe

and uses an electric saw to cut it from the stem — or as it's known to only people in this room, the peduncle. it also uses a state—of—the—art deep learning system to detect the peduncle. this is hard because it's green on green. through the deep learning system there's a background neural network, a deep neural network. what you get is activations and we visualise this using a heat map. what that gives us is an area of interest where it chooses the peduncle. once you spot the pepper, getting around the leaves can be fiddly business. this is a new camera system that comprises of nine different camera lenses at different depths to give the impression of a human looking around leaves. it is powered by nine individual raspberry pis and is 3d printed, so it is cheap to produce.

harvey is a proof of concept at the moment. the team is yet to prove how commercially viable a robot like this is. but he could reduce crop waste by helping farmers to harvest more at peak times. the other value we see in harvey is notjust harvesting the fruit but being a full crop management system. what this allows it to do is to detect fruit, detect the grade of the fruit and inform the grower what's on his plant in real—time. this can then tell the grower where to send it. make contracts and sell this fruit before it is even harvested. thank you very much, pepper. it has been a lovely tour. i think it is time for me to go. we should say farewell here. namaste. spencer: brilliant. that was nick in brisbane. one question that comes out of the automation ofjobs is what does this mean for us? will we all be out of work or will a new raft ofjobs be created? this is what our panel of academic experts predict. i don't see anything to suggest

that there will be mass unemployment over the forthcoming decade due to technology. there is no reason to believe that the quantity ofjobs is going to be a problem in the future. what is a big problem, i believe, is that some workers will suffer from downgrading as they lose their jobs. we need to find solutions for that. firstly, people will need to retrain. traditionally we have this idea that you go to university for maybe three years and in your mid—205 you are sorted and you work some sort of the job for the rest of your life. i think we will be continually reskilling and retraining. we need to be prepared for that.

universities will have to play a role in training notjust the young students but throughout your career as we grow older. we will be working for much longer. what does that mean for education and training? across sectors from schools to workplace training? are our systems preparing people for a workplace where there will be automation and there will be artificially intelligent systems and how can we improve ourselves as learners? these will be vital skills in the workplace of the future. so let's use al to help us be smarter ourselves. i certainly think that is preferable to worrying about whether artificial intelligence will replace us. who wants to be stuck in the same job for the rest of their life? that is something we should embrace, the chance to do new things. we need to move away from a system that relies

on students memorising information. that is what we have computers to do very effectively. what we need to move more towards is a curriculum that encourages activities such as collaborative problem—solving. we need to realise that reskilling is not going to be the solution to everything. the best solution i know goes to wage insurance. that is being applied in the us for workers who lose out to import competition. if you can show that yourjob was lost due to globalisation, the government will give you assurance that you will not earn less than this amount if you find a newjob.

we should apply that to technology as well. you may say, well should ai pay tax if it is working and taking tax on data because this is what is being exploited. what i do not think people realise is that they are giving up huge amounts of data for free. and ownership of that data is going to lead to ownership of work. in some ways, data is the new oil. who owns the oil rigs will have the power in this game. that does serve as an effective mode for those companies against new entrants. maybe this is something we want to think about as a society, in our industrial policy. maybe we want to think about ways we can continue to support innovation even when so much

of the value in an industry is trapped in data sets owned by big tech players. within european research councils there is an extensive discussion about trying to push for what they call responsible innovation. encourage engineers and scientists to think more responsibly about the processes of automation, to engage with us users, not just as consumers but as workers. a good future of work is one in which people can achieve work together. that is it for us in bournemouth. don't forget we live on facebook and on twitter as bbcclick. this may be the worst place in the country for ag, but it is one of the best for fish and chips and that is where

we are going now. hello. there is a change on the way, something brighter and significantly warmer in ourforecasts. but that change will be slow, will be gradual. so on thursday, for many, it's going to be another cloudy day. mostly dry, though. you can see from the satellite picture what's going on. we've got an area of low pressure down here to the south, areas of cloud being flung around it, and this little area of slightly thicker cloud here has been producing some outbreaks of patchy rain and drizzle, which will continue to drift northwards and westwards during

thursday morning. generally we start the day with a lot of cloud, some mist, and murk, and drizzle, some hill fog, and most places will stay disappointingly grey as the day goes on. but there will be exceptions. here's a closer look at thursday afternoon. the north—west of scotland should do very nicely for sunshine, could well get to 12 degrees there in stornoway. more cloud lapping onto the coast of aberdeenshire and down into north—east england, with some spots of rain and drizzle. northern ireland likely to stay quite cloudy, as will much of north—west england, the midlands and wales. but, for the south—west of wales, certainly the south—west of england, should see something a bit brighter. and things may brighten up a little bit towards the south—east, as well, later in the day. during thursday evening, some showers are likely to trundle in towards the south—east of england. could be the odd rumble of thunder with these. they then edge northwards as we go on through the night into the early hours of friday. with all that cloud around, and the misty, murky, drizzly conditions, it is not going to get cold — 5—9 degrees the overnight lows. now, friday's weather setup is essentially the same one that we've had for much of this week — high pressure anchored

across scandinavia, low pressure down south, throwing this frontal system northwards. we're going to see some showery rain across northern england and scotland during friday. something drierfollowing on from the south, albeit generally quite cloudy, although if the skies do brighten across southern parts of england and south wales late in the day, that could just spark off the odd hefty shower later on. those temperatures, if anything, beginning to climb a little bit. could get to 15 degrees there in london, and not quite as chilly by this stage along those north sea coasts, that trend of things getting slowly but surely warmer continues as we go on through the weekend. it won't be wall—to—wall sunshine, but i think there will be some brighter spells. equally, a little bit of showery rain at times. so, for the weekend, then, warming up slowly but surely. some sunshine, equally the chance for some showers, but let me show you what happens next week. because we develop this southerly wind, and that is expected to waft some really warm air

in our direction. we could well get into the low to possibly mid—20s. that will feel like spring. welcome to bbc news, broadcasting to viewers in north america and around the globe. my name is mike embley. our top stories: white house officials say there's no final decision yet on military strikes against syria. the president, though, says the missiles are coming. britain's prime minister summons her cabinet for a special meeting to discuss the uk's response. in other news, more than 250 people are killed when a military plane crashes in algeria. the daughter of a former spy — poisoned in the uk last month — has rejected an offer of help from moscow. and facebook founder mark zuckerberg admits even his own personal details were accessed in a high—profile data breach.