at ending the partial shut down of the us government as a "a total waste of time". democrats again refused to approve funding plans for a border wall with mexico. they say the president threw a temper tantrum and walked out. australian police have arrested a 48—year—old man over suspicious packages mailed to foreign embassies and consulates. they say 38 items were sent to the missions of countries including the us, uk, and south korea. the suspect is charged with sending dangerous articles through the postal service. the contents have not been identified. opposition candidate felix tshisekedi has been declared the provisional winner of the presidential election in the democratic republic of congo. the result could lead to the country's first democratic transfer of power since independence from belgium in 1960. but vote tallies by the catholic church have put rival martin fayulu ahead. now on bbc news — it's time for click.

music plays. yeah, we did all that and more last year, and this week we're going to look back at some of our favourite moments, and also look ahead to what we might expect from 2019 — which doesn't quite roll off the tongue yet, does it? 2018 was a great year for sports — the world cup, formula one and of course, cycling's tour de

france, and we delved into the technology behind them all. this year's tour de france is taking place amongst the same beautiful mountains as always. but there's a big difference this year. technology and data is playing more of a role than ever before. cycling is becoming increasingly data—driven. and for good reason. masses of data can be collected. and in a sport of fine margins and superhuman endurance those insights are the key to energy efficiency, strategy, and gains. we look at many things, we look at heart rate, at power data, their maximum powers and their altitude and elevation gain. so we look at that and we see how the riders are building and we leverage that data to try to build them to be better and stronger in stage races. but how is the data collected and transmitted 7 that's where these devices come in.

the sensors on the bike send real—time location data to a nearby vehicle, which then beams it up to a following helicopter. it's then sent to the data truck for real—time analytics. the data truck is where data is analysed, enriched, and visualised for broadcasters and teams. there's even enough data for machine learning algorithms to get to work. the depth of data analytics produced from simply a gps device is staggering. contextual data such as 3—d maps, weather, gradient and rider information is also added to bring the data to life. during the race, riders wear earpieces, and following close behind them is the data car, where the team analyst is dissecting the data and feeding them live information. and so what happens in here, it's quite an important place, isn't it? imagine if you have a comms office

when you're trying to fly a rocket to the moon, and just feel like we're that place in nasa where all the details come in and they come in from all directions, and then we send out one message to the riders. hundreds of datasets are analysed, from competitor tactics to live course conditions. so we analyse all the climbs, the gradients of the climbs, the road surfaces, the width of the road, any road furniture, anything — you know, coming round a blind corner and there's a pedestrian crossing, all of these sorts of things we try to find. on the tour de france, with restrictions and sponsorship deals we don't get any heart rate power data, but we do get location, which is absolutely crucial, because we can make decisions much, much quicker. we are in the race. this is happening, this is live. what are we saying to the riders? come on, serge, you have got 250 more metres, hard. around the next corner, the hairpin, it flattens off at 250 metres. you'll get some respite. we have drinks in 400m. so you're getting hot, cool down, take your drinks, and we've only got ten kilometres to the finish. good lad. keep fighting.

yeah, nice. so i can see, automatically, that the psychological impact of that is huge. meanwhile, this lot are busy practising at speed. over 250 of these of trials take place ahead of the season. they make it look easy. but inevitably, it's not, as i can tell you firsthand. oh, no. so loud, and it's meant to be so quick. but i clearly wasn't. meanwhile, spence is already living life in the fast lane. thank you, lara, and by the way, this is how you really do it. laughter. this year, mercedes has got its pit stop down to an incredible 1.85 seconds.

now, that is quicker than it takes to say 1.85 seconds. it's a finely tuned operation that the engineers practice over and over in the days before each race. it's a bit of a ballet. the ergonomics are quite important. there are 20 odd people around the car to do a job in two seconds. you start banging into people you lose half a second, a second, then the strategists can't get their numbers right and you don't get the position you need. the human element to this ultrafast manoeuvre is accompanied by technology individually developed by each team. even the hydraulically powered wheel guns are a closely guarded secret. and i hear they're quite expensive. they are expensive, and they have a life because they're under an enormous amount of pressure, so we're changing internal a great deal. do i hear about £30,000 each? i wouldn't know the exact cost, but that sounds quite low to me. we are going into

mercedes‘ garage is now. keeping the pit crews safe is of utmost importance. these lights let the crew know if the cars have become electrified, stopping them from getting more than a nasty shock. at this year's world cup finals in russia, data is set to play a bigger role than ever before. like it or not, data is already an integral part of modern football. you can't watch a televised game without being bombarded by all kinds of statistics. for the first time, fifa are providing an all—in—one technical package allowing coaching staff and analysts to communicate throughout matches in real time. the snappily titled electronic performance and tracking system, or epts, will provide data on player metrics, such as distances run, speed, and positional information.

crucially, each of the 32 countries competing in the tournament will be provided with two tablets, one for a data analyst in the stands, who will be able to communicate with the second device user, on the bench, possibly a coach or an assistant manager. level one. lucy staniforth is captain of sunderland ladies and was shortlisted for the women's fa goal of the year. cheering. the game realism is spot—on. the defenders close to me, it was — i felt real pressure. even just fine—tuning little skills. i think some of my touches went outside the box. i was not happy with that. so even that competitive edge, and sort of working on that, it's all good. another incredible development is being able to put yourself in any

position in any game. obviously where raheem is, given that he's a fast player anyway, he has the advantage. as the ball‘s coming in the defender would have to turn their hips and try to clear it that way, i suppose. lucy is watching a real match that took place between man city and monaco. she can place herself in any position on the pitch, in the stands, on the roof, and even become the manager. right now i have a clear view of what went wrong in terms of the leftback‘s positioning. you see more detail on the players‘ position than you would watching match video? yeah, i think so. because you're on their level. and i think that there's so much value in actually appreciating what they — the picture that they saw. and after a year of great sporting stories, you can see exactly how my ball skills have improved. it's the last minute of the world cup final and this penalty will win it.

can he handle the pressure? here he goes. applause. right, off to japan now, one of the most exciting places that we travel to every year, well, because we don't know what we're going to find there. yes, robots. of course, robots, but not just robots. you know what it's like, you're stuck behind a car and you can't overtake because, well, you just can't see beyond that vehicle. well, this car might be able to help you. it's fitted with a demonstration of a new technology called xtravue, and it means that you can see through the car ahead using its camera rather than yours. the vision at makers valeo is that the live stream from cameras on our cars will be available

to everyone within a certain area. the forthcoming 56 cell network will make this tech more workable. imagine not having to guess what it could possibly be that's holding you up. lucky escape. now, another thing that may be of interest to japan's ageing population are these. they may look like normal glasses, but if i press the touch sensor on the side, you may have seen a little flash, and what that was was liquid crystals inside the glasses shifting orientation and changing the focus, meaning it's easier to see things close up, just like bifocals. now, the upside to these is you can then turn them off, and it goes back to your regular prescription. this could be one of the standout technologies of ceatec this year, the ability to detect cancer through a urine sample. and hitachi are saying they can detect cancer in its early stages — and tell you what type it is. so it works for breast—cancer, lung cancer, for bowel cancer, and also for some childhood cancers,

paediatric cancers. initial tests look very positive. they've only had a small sample at the moment, so more testing needs to be done. how long will this take to get into surgeries will be the question everybody‘s asking. such important development. injapan we're thinking one or two years to get through the formal stages of acceptance by the government. in other countries, like the united states, if hitachi decides to do some testing there, this could be available to the public within 3—4 months, certainly by the summer of next year. advances in mass spectrometry and machine learning has made the biomarkers in urine that change with cancer more easy to detect. and, it's hoped, as reliable as a blood test. now, obviously, it needs a whole lab set up to do the testing at the moment, but the future,

maybe five or ten years down the road, well, hitachi are already talking to a toilet manufacturer to put the testing element of this technology into toilets. so we could get a situation where every time we go for a pee we could get a result to test and check for any early stages of cancer. but then it got slightly more bizarre. now, something you might not expect to see at a tech show is a bonsai tree. or should i say a ‘bons—ai'. the tree, or maybe it's just a fancy pot, will automatically move towards light, let you know if needs water, and even offer wise words and advice to its owners. "i find out what the world needs, then i go ahead and invent it." at least, that's what thomas edison said. look up and see how natural these skylights look. up until now, if we wanted a fake window, the fitting would contain either a blue light or blue glass or perspex. there is actually no blue light behind here. it's just two white leds each side,

with suspended diffusers, mitsubishi described them as, in between to replicate the way that natural light comes through the atmosphere. they won't give us any more information, and they say it's about two to five years away before something like this could be installed in our homes, hospitals or even the underground, to give us a little bit of extra natural light. it's almost like i'm expecting to see outside. incidentally, that alarmingly realistic fake window clip turned out to be one of the most watched tech stories on the whole of the bbc website in 2018, so clearly it's shone a light on something. anyway, back in august, we sent nick kwek to france to meet a man with a mode of transport that

we've obsessed over for the last 30 years, but we've never had a chance to ride until now. and it's not this one. that's right, spen. i've popped down to provence to poke about a frenchman's garage. we are in our office, our workshop. it's where we do all research and development. a formerjet ski world champion, franky zapata has been at the forefront of water—powered vehicles for decades. he has been beavering away over the years on several airborne inventions. i started with this prototype in 2011, then we built the real one. two years after, i get the idea of the hover board. and then we got the idea to create the flyride. so this product is self—balancing. you just press the trigger, and you fly.

but recently, he has developed a penchant for rocket fuel. this bad boy has five jet engines packed tightly together, to blast franky off into the stratosphere. well, maybe not that high, but it can reach a top speed of 110 mph. you have a plan b for everything. you have plan a, plan b and plan c for the electronics, and you have plan a and plan b for the stabilisation, and you can lose an engine. so if one of these five engines blows, then... it's still flying. you can lose two engines, and it will still be flying. the explosion will be contained by kevlar protection. the explosion? if it explodes. it can hold someone weighing up to 100 kilograms at 500 feet for six minutes. at $250,000 a pop, surely frank's quids in there. it's not something we plan to sell.

why not? if i tried this today, what would happen? with this one today, you would kill yourself. and, from tech from the movies to the tech in the movies, sir peterjackson marked the 100th anniversary of the end of the first world war by giving film from the era a new lease of life. they shall not grow old is a new documentary film about the first world war, directed by academy award winner sir peterjackson. using audio recorded in the 1960s and ‘70s, veterans of the western front recollect their wartime experiences. you knew what was going on within your vision. beyond that, you hadn't got a clue. these stories are told over footage from the war, which has been painstakingly restored, colourised and converted into 3—d by jackson's team at wingnut films in new zealand.

audio has been added in places, but the film develops entirely from the soldiers‘ perspective, in their own words. their stories are told in an imaginative and startling way. the film flips from the patriotic fervour of vetera ns‘ accou nts of their enlistment to war to the brutal and shocking realities of day—to—day life and death in the trenches. some of these stories are told in a surprisingly matter—of—fact way. you lived like tramps. you didn‘t polish any buttons. you wore any uniform bits that you liked, and nobody worried. all that they were concerned with was that you were fit to fight. peterjackson and his team trawled through over 600 hours of audio and 100 hours of filmed footage provided by the imperial war museum‘s archive in order to construct the film. vfx wizardry smooths the movements of the images, removing any jerky pictures. it‘s a very, very unusual method of storytelling.

yes. that struck me straightaway. it feels different to almost any war documentary i‘ve seen in the past. the brief that they gave me was — on the surface, it was very simple and very wide open. itjust said you can do anything you want, but we‘d like you to use our archive film in a way that is unusual. so the first idea i had was, well, i‘ll get them to send me some 2k scanned material, like three or four minutes, send it to new zealand where we‘ve got our big visual effects department. because i thought, how well can we restore this film? and that blew me away. we were able to restore it way better than i ever thought we could. 2018 was a big deal for us on click, too, as we took our live show outside of the uk for the first time — all the way to new delhi, in india. it was certainly one of the highlights of the year for me. are you well? and for him.

but 2018 really does belong to the robot. there were these... cute, huh? ..these. .. this is fusion, my new robot backpack. fist bump. ..and this. david attenborough impersonation: deep in the heart of boston‘s jungle of cables, something stirs. it is a cheetah, and it‘s off for a prowl. we‘re starting to see walking robots like this trotting out of labs all around the world. now, the important skill here is not that they can walk

a particular route autonomously. they‘re usually controlled manually, using games controllers. no, the amazing skill here is that they can walk and balance as competently as we can, even on the most unforgiving of terrain. ok, see, that‘s impressive. ok, that slipped, lost its balance, and regained its balance. that‘s the important thing. whoa! how hard is this to do? very, very hard. people might not know this, because we move our body very easily, but we have to make sure that — know that we have actually three times more neurons the muscles. so we have about 700 muscles, and we‘re trying to mimic that

using only a motor. it‘s still pretty darn hard. how close are we to robots like this being of practical use, and what do we still need to get right? so i think we‘re pretty close in terms of mobility, like walking around, walking up stairs, and then turn. the harder challenge is still using arms. like, if i send this to power plants where some radioactive activity is going on, we don‘t know if it‘s sensorfailure or real radioactivity, and to get there you have to open doors, and opening doors is not a simple thing. you have to use your arms, and so on, and that‘s where the autonomous control fails very, very easily. so how does the cheetah compared to the robots that seem to make all the headlines lately, those from the stable of boston dynamics? our lab is much younger. we‘ve been only doing this for six or seven years, so our software is pretty new. but i think our hardware is actually better. we‘re the first ones to use electronic motors to make these kinds of dynamic motors,

and boston dynamics primarily use hydraulics, which is highly inefficient. after we showed our robots, other companies started using electronic motors. so i think, eventually, motor—based machines are going to be much more useful, safe and cheap and easy to maintain. but our electric motors are very different from the electric motors you can find in a factory. those electric motors cannot actually handle impact, cannot conserve energy. but ours are for landing, and jumping, and can do quite dynamic stuff. they certainly can, as demonstrated by this exclusive look at a previously unseen manoeuvre. you can‘t hear it, but our cameraman swore then. that wasn‘t pretty. yeah, but the thing is, it recovered and it stayed upright, and i know people that couldn‘t handle the recovery there like that.

and this year, we‘re going to do it all over again. next week we‘ll be in las vegas, and the world‘s biggest tech expo, ces, to kick off 2019 with a look at what‘s coming, from the car world to smarter homes and gadgets galore. we would love you to join us as we try and bring you the highlights of 2019 before they happen. so wish us luck, and we‘ll see you in vegas, baby. hello.

our weather prospects are still looking comparatively quiet through the next few days. if anything, our major shift will be to rather more cloudy weather. today, though, some slightly milder air making a return to our shores for some, but not actually in the most traditional way that we see milder air arriving. normally it comes sweeping up from the south—west off the atlantic. at the moment we have high pressure, and our milder air will be toppling in to the north of it, behind a warmer weather front which is sinking its way south. so first thing, still very chilly with a frost across southernmost counties of england. this line of cloud here just about marks out the warm weather front.

to the rear of it, quite a lot of cloud through the course of the day, butjust slightly milder weather than we saw through midweek. so top temperatres in double figures for belfast. we‘re going to struggle at around 6 or 7 in the likes of cardiff and london. and we will struggle throughout the day, i think, to see much in the way of sunshine. overnight thursday into friday, that weather front slides away into the continent. plenty of cloud around, and we sit in the relatively milder air. so our map is green for first thing friday, rather than seeing that blue as we will do to the south first thing thursday. temperatures — well, they‘re down the lower end of single figures, but essentially frost—free to get friday under way. another day offering us quite a lot of cloud. we have got a northerly breeze, but remember it‘s tipped around that area of high pressure, so instead of actually coming straight from the arctic, it‘s been modified by the atlantic. hence things will start to get milder, actually, as that northerly breeze drags the milder airfurther south. so, for the weekend, our temperatures making a return closer to average. it could be quite windy through the weekend, actually, as areas of low pressure try to erode this high. the isobars become increasingly tighter packed. much of the rain will fizzle out before it sinks too far south, i think, across the uk.

greatest chance of any significant rain probably for northern ireland and scotland, but quite cloudy on saturday. as i said, it will be a windy day as well and temperatures more typically average values for the time of year, perhaps 10—12 degrees. some brightness, hopefully, across eastern counties. similar picture again for saturday, the high still sitting to the south—west. this low tumbling over the top of it, bringing some rain in briefly, i think, to scotland, northern ireland, perhaps some patchy rain for northern england. if anything, perhaps sunday the slightly brighter day of the two. and again, temperatures a little more favourable than we‘ve had in recent days — back into double figures for most of us. welcome to bbc news — broadcasting to viewers in north america and around the globe. my name is mike embley. our top stories: president trump calls a meeting with democrats to end the government

shutdown "a total waste of time" as both sides dig in. again, we saw a temper tantrum, because he could not get his way and he just walked out of the meeting. because he could not get his way and he just walked out of the meetinglj think he just walked out of the meeting.” think the president made his position very clear today, that they will be no deal without a wall. provisional results show opposition leader felix tshisekedi‘s won the presidential election in the democratic republic of congo. in australia, police investigating dozens of suspicious packages sent to foreign embassies arrest a 49—year—old man.