their final battle against the so—called islamic state group in the tiny pocket of territory it still holds near the iraqi border. the announcement comes just days after president trump said the end of the self—declared is caliphate could soon be announced. us senator elizabeth warren has formally launched her bid to stand for the white house in 2020, with a speech in which she promised to tackle economic inequality. shejoins a growing list of democrats keen to take on republican president donald trump in 2020. seven men have been sentenced to life in prison for terror attacks in tunisia that left nearly 60 people dead. the attacks in 2015 were claimed by the islamic state group. the first one hit tunis‘ bardo museum. the second targeted tourists at a beach resort. now on bbc news, click. this week: extreme weather predictions.

0n the mend with vr. and... # slam it to the left if you're having a good time. # shake it to the right if ya know that you feel fine. uh... the last four years have been the hottest on record. the climate is changing. average global temperatures are rising. as we continue to release more c02 into the atmosphere, scientists are repeating their warning that humanity faces extremely difficult decisions about our future. if we choose to reduce the risks from a changing climate, that will require reducing our carbon dioxide emissions over the coming decades.

and the implications to that are fundamental transformations to society about how we generate our electricity, how we travel around, what diet we have. and those are the difficult choices that, as a global community, we have to take. professor ed hawkins has summarised the average global temperatures in this simple graphic, with 1850 on the left and the present day on the right. what you see from 1850 up to 2018 is that global temperatures over that time have risen by about one degree with lots of variations from year to year. these rising temperatures will lead to more and more extreme weather. and it certainly has been extreme recently. australia has just suffered its hottest month on record with wildfires in the south, floods in the north and temperatures of nearly 50 celsius. at the same time, the us is being gripped by a vortex of polar air. here, temperatures have dropped to nearly —50.

injapan, severe and unpredictable weather events happen yearly, making precise weather information critical for disaster preparedness. typhoons can bring transportation to a standstill with highways being closed and aeroplanes and trains halted. 2018 saw particularly violent weather. lastjuly, the city of kumagaya hit record temperatures of a1.1dc and in the same summer, heavy downpours led to floods and mudslides that left 225 dead. over 8 million people were urged to evacuate. monitoring rainfall is hard and relies heavily on whether radar systems which you don't find everywhere and which only —— monitoring rainfall is hard and relies heavily on weather radar systems which you don't find everywhere and which only have a certain range. at weathernews here injapan,

a new system is training artificial intelligence to work out rainfall from satellite images instead, allowing for rainfall approximations across the globe. this is the world's largest weather provider. it has 3,000 weather monitoring sensors and two satellites. it broadcasts rolling weather reports from its office in chiba city. but weather forecasting relies on having as many sources of data as possible, so the company also gets its information from its customers. every day, users of the weathernews app chat about the weather and upload 20,000 photos of their current weather conditions. using a combination of more ai and human moderators, these photos and texts are turned into real—time weather data. a kind of cloud sourcing, if you will. as well as providing weather forecasts for us ordinaries, weathernews also provides bespoke services for airlines, for example, to do with areas of turbulence on the flight path and the best ways to avoid those — whether you go over or under them —

and also, interestingly, the best times during the flight to serve the airline meal, when it's not so bumpy that you end up with all your food on your lap. however, the biggest business is collecting readings from ships and then advising them on the best trans—ocean routes to avoid the worst of the weather. weathernews told us that they can save a large cargo vessel up to 5 million yen in fuel per trip. but this place doesn'tjust deal with weather prediction. it now provides a potentially lifesaving service for another type of extreme event. the 2011 tsunami claimed more than 18,000 lives in japan. but it was found that the collision detection radar on a japanese coastguard vesseljust off the coast of fukushima had actually detected the oncoming wave. believe it or not, radar systems had never before been used to detect tsunamis.

we have installed 28 radars along the coast, all overjapan. these radars can detect a sea level difference of between three and ten metres at a distance of 20km. if we can detect a tsunami so we have a space to evacuate for ten or 15 minutes. so that's very much valuable time for the people to evacuate. and as well as warnings about what's going to happen in the immediate future, weathernews is also looking to take advantage of longer term predictions, too. as the climate changes, some are spotting new shipping opportunities. as the arctic ice recedes, a new route is becoming more accessible. it's becoming possible to transport goods by ship from japan to europe through the vilkitsky strait in the arctic ocean, rather than going all the way around africa. in order to make that route safer, weathernews has released one

of the only satellites that can photograph the arctic, to provide more accurate sea ice information. and then there's the special service that they provide for convenience stores, where they will advise a store what to order in based on tomorrow's weather. for example, if it's going to be hot, more ice cream. it is going to be really hot, more sorbet. and the extreme heat is a worry for next year's tokyo 0lympics. discussions are under way to start the race at dawn to try and prevent deaths from the intense heat. here at weathernews, they're working on a system that will predict the best places for spectators to find a shade and breeze. the amount of data required to predict even tomorrow's weather is enormous, but for a commercial operation like weathernews, finding new ways to use that data means new services and ultimately new income for a very expensive business. hello and welcome

to the week in tech. it was the week that uber launched a boat service in mumbai to beat the city's notoriously bad traffic. sportswear brand puma started searching for people test its new self—lacing shoes. and 230 new emojis were approved for universal use, with dozens of new accessibility—themed icons including wheelchair users, prosthetic limbs and service dogs. there are also new food and animal emojis and a drop of blood to represent menstruation. it was also the week that reddit, the so—called front page of the internet, was reportedly raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. chinese company tencent is said to be leading the funding round, which could see reddit valued at almost $3 billion. a police trial using facial recognition in the uk has seen one man charged and sent to prison. the met police were using the technology over two days in east london.

another person was fined £90 for verbally abusing the officers after trying to avoid the cameras. apex legends is being called the first real battle royale challenger for fortnite after being played by over1 million people in the first eight hours of its release. the game, from electronic arts and respawn, was also the most watched game on twitch. and finally, saudi arabian citizen and humanoid robot sophia now has a little baby sister that you can take home, thanks to a successful kickstarter campaign. hanson robotics hopes sales will encourage girls to explore careers in robotics and coding. worried about bots sending e—mails from your account? use this easy method to be notified quickly if they get in. add a fake e—mail address to your contacts. if a mass mail goes out,

you will get an undelivered message for the fake address. and then we recommend changing your password. last year, tiktok was the world's fourth most downloaded app, topping instagram and snapchat. the company behind it is now valued at $75 billion — that's more than uber. but if you still haven't heard about it, don't worry, i will fill you in. the bulk of the users are in china and most of them are in their teens or 20s and they seem to be doing things like this. excuse me a moment. so now i'll need to use a filter to make my hair ginger. 0oh, red doesn't seem to be an option.

shall i be green spice? i'm sustainable spice. let's go with that — that's very 2019. let's go! # slam it to the left if you're having a good time. # shake it to the right if you know that you feel fine. what am i doing? you can lip sync to your heart's content, although it's better if you know the words. as well as use stickers, filters, or add a spot of augmented reality. 0ryou can simply post what you wish. but if you're struggling to see the point in all this, well, millions would disagree. we have seen this app grow since chinese tech firm bytedance bought its predecessor, musical.ly. and now, according to research by the south china morning post, it has 500 million active users. with1 million fans, british comedian laura uses it to post sketches and has become involved with hosting events for the company as her followers have flourished. what i like most about tiktok, it's short, it's concise, it's easy to use, but there's

all these different features, you can duet, you can react, react to other people's videos, and i think the big appeal is you can copy other people's soundbites, so i can do a sketch using another comedian‘s voice , if that makes sense, and people can do the same with mine. hi, what can i get for you today? they have some famous voices there, some old vine people there. lots of different soundbites to choose. vine may have died a death but clearly, other platforms like this are thriving. but on the flipside, this is just another compelling app taking our eyes away from well, the real world. and that's a distraction that the uk government this week highlighted to parents. they released new guidelines on screen time, including banning devices at that time and mealtimes. —— devices at bedtime and mealtimes. meanwhile, the appetite for these apps seems to be growing. you've just have to hope they'll be used sensibly. lucky, i've only got one fan. that was sustainable spice

and i don't feel the need to say anything more about that piece so we'll move on. now, we've been banging on about virtual reality for an age and while it's failed to ignite the imagination of consumers — i mean, how many vr headsets do you own, for goodness sake? — it has started to catch on in areas like simulation, training and healthca re. marc cieslak has been to sheffield to investigate. so let's make sure it's tight. that's it, yep. keep your grip in your right hand. yes, got it! so, what i see, there's different types of games and the game that i was playing was a bow and arrow one. and you have a bow in front of you and you need to pick it up and get that arrow behind you and thenjust let it go and it shoots and pops it. here at sheffield's children's hospital, they're trailing some

surprising therapeutic technology. with certain kinds of injuries, exercise can be a vital part of rehabilitation, ultimately leading to the patient getting better sooner. the problem is getting children to perform these exercises isn't always easy. right back. ooh. most of our kids have quite a long—term condition that they need to carry on doing their exercises for sometimes several years. remmeber, keep the tight grip on the right. yep! they're doing the same things day in, day out, it gets really boring, no—one wants to do it, sometimes it's painful, it'sjust not really fun, they want to be outside doing things with their friends. which arm is the injury again? is it the left arm or the right arm? making use of virtual reality, researchers from sheffield hallam university

have developed a system that they think will make children more likely to perform rehabilitation exercises by disguising their treatment as play. this version of the project is for upper arm injuries, primarily. the injuries that are normally from burns or an accident that they had from a fall. remember to swap hands, that's it. remember to look up as well and see where you're at. so how did you hurt yourself? i burned myself with a cooker lighter. i scarred my arm and my belly. we arrived at the decision to make the two games the scenarios of climbing and archery. based off talking to occupational the kind of movement they needed the patients to do. one of the motions that they needed to do was reaching behind your back and, kind of, a lot of upper arm movements. and so i thought, i wonder if archery would work. because there's a quiver behind your back. you do the same motion of reaching behind to grab your arrow and then you get the added bonus of pulling back the bowstring and then we looked at things like climbing and we thought that was a natural fit as well because there

was a lot of overhead motion, so you're really reaching out. the climbing. it feels...it feels realistic. while harry is being treated for burns, emily here has an entirely different issue. emily's got a hereditary multiple exostoses. so it's like a hereditary disease that she's picked up from my husband, my husband's side of the family. so it means that she has extra bone growth. let's go for a higher one. well, it's really fun, because you're not seeing, like, stuff that you usually see every day, like you're seeing a whole new kind of world in it. if you have a big imagination, then it definitely makes it bigger. it's kind of a bit more playing than exercising, even though you are still doing your exercises, like, it's fun as well. do you need a break or anything like that? is your arm tired — or? no, it's fine. she didn't find it easy. whereas before she would have given things up very easily.

but she wanted to keep going. she wanted to pop another balloon. yes, got it! and she wanted to reach that next thing. but she's just been an absolute trooper. she just has a smile on her face every day. so it kind of encourages me to be positive. there we go. we've had kids come in who can only get their arms up to here and they come in straightaway and they're picking the arrows up and getting full range of movement and not even noticing. and then when we've interviewed them after they've said that they didn't even notice any pain. so it's been a big shock to me how well actually it has worked to do what we needed it to do. now, i don't have an injury, but i'm going to give this vr setup a go and see what's it like when i put the headset on and what it feels and plays like. here we go. as a vr experience, it really does the thing, because it's really quite fun. after playing for a little bit, as well, you can understand how, when the children are playing this, they get so wrapped up

in the experience that they forget that this is actually helping them recover. this project was born out of work ivan and his team had already created, which used vr to help distract burns victims as a form of pain management. it's early days for this technology, but they hope it could have a wide variety of healthcare applications. looking at other aspects such as pain reduction for burns, we're doing some work with amputees, learning how to use a prosthetic arm. so it's a lot of experience—based training. and we have a couple of other projects that we're currently just looking at — around, kind of, stroke and chronic pain as well. but the final word goes to emily. she might be a fan of the vr, but i do wonder if she'll be pleased to get the external fixator on her arm removed. will you be pleased to get that off?

yes. it's quite annoying. brilliant. that was marc cieslak in sheffield. now, this weekend is one of the biggest dates in the british movie calendar. the bafta film awards are taking place at london's royal albert hall. and what better way to celebrate than by chatting to one of those nominated in the best visual effects category for their work on fantastic beasts: the crimes of grindelwald. i can't move against grindelwald. it has to be you. technically you can do just about anything these days. so i think more of ourjob, at what we're set the challenge by bothjo rowling's scripts and by david yates is is to creatively push the envelope and use the technology to aid that. we had some very specific things thatjo had written in the script, but we also had, like, newt's hospital, where it was maybe a bit, a few were more background creatures that we could go on some of the same journeys

that we did with the case. but one of the key creatures was the zouwu, you know, it was fairly specifically written as like a chinese tiger—like creature. one of the animation artists built it and animated it and got it moving. and then, really, it was a voyage of discovering of working out how it would move, how it would look, what its tail would be made of, et cetera, et cetera. in the script, it described it as it runs 1000 miles a day. tim and i were like, my god, wow, how are we going to describe that, how are we going to show that? so we came up with the idea that maybe it could magically leap and then time — distort space—time and land in a different space. so it could cover a large distance very quickly. you know, it's over a year's work forjust that one moment in terms of concept and working out how on earth to do it. nagini. the moment has come to take our rightful place. nagini appearing when

we read the script — we went, oh my god, nagini's a woman in this film, not a snake. we had to come up with an authentic way to turn a woman into a long tube. how would we do that to make it feel real. we came up with the idea that, really, maybe she's almost consumed by the snake, rather than physically extending out. you recall her being wrapped in her own coils, disappearing and and then coming out as a snake. so we had a contortionist. claudia kim who played nagini, we showed her what we were planning and what she acted the first portion of the shot, then we had another contortionist in there who was, you know, dressed in a matching costume and she did the first portion of the shot, so it's for real — she bent over backwards and put her head through her own legs. got shot elements of claudia kim kind of pushing herself along

the ground and turning her head up, matching kind of what we had done, which was then glued together with a full cg version of the human character and a full cg snake. so, again, all in all it was about 1k months worth of work for that one moment on film. i don't think you have seen a woman pull into a wall and turn into a snake before. so, really, it's trying how to get those moments over, feeling as grounded and real as possible. we wanted it to feel as if how it would feel if you were physically they are, rather than feeling like an effect. i think that is what the technology gives us, the ability to do that. the wizarding and non—wizarding worlds have been at peace for over a century. grindelwald wants to see that peace destroyed. fa ntastic stuff. and,of course, we wish all of the bafta nominees or the best of luck for the big night. next week we'll have more awards contenders for you as we continue our deep dive into the world of visual effects. and before we go,

for this week — this. it may not be as graceful as a figure skater or as fast as a speed skater, but unlike many people, this robot taught itself how to skate on ice. at the computational robotics lab at eth zurich, professor stelian coros and his team developed a modular robot with 3—d printed parts. each leg can be built for any type of locomotion — from walking to rolling to ice skating — and each robot can have any number of legs. they then wrote algorithms that described the physics for each type of movement and terrain. the only thing we tell it is how one ice skate behaves on ice. in particular, the fact that it's free to move in the direction of the blade and it has high friction forces in that direction. after this, the robot figures out entirely on its own how to move on ice. using this machine learning approach, different robots can learn to autonomously navigate any terrain.

researchers hope this will lead to affordable, easy—to—design robots that can be used for search and rescue operations, to inspect dangerous sites, and even for deliveries too difficult to reach areas. i envisioned a moment in the not too distant future where it will be as easy to create robots as it is to currently make structures out of lego blocks, for example. i think this is a really exciting motor skill that we would like robots to learn, not necessarily because it's useful, but rather because it combines are many different challenges into one beautiful performance. very, very cool. and that's it for this week. don't forget that we live all over social media. so wherever you are you'll find us, instagram, twitter, facebook, youtube, we will be there waiting for you. thanks for watching. and we'll see you soon. well, the weather is in the process

of calming down after all of that storminess we've had in the last few days. and as storm erik pulls away out into the norwegian sea, behind it, it leaves a legacy of changeable weather. we have got some rain out there right now. it's pretty damp across some central and southern parts of the uk, brought by this area of cloud here. this is a weather front which will be sliding across southern and central parts of the uk. all of this cloud here to the north, actually, that's the remnants of storm erik that we've had in the last couple of days. so here's the forecast through the early hours. bits and pieces of rain across central and southern areas

of the uk. clear for scotland and much of northern and north—eastern england there. in fact, a touch of frost first thing on sunday morning, and pretty chilly in belfast, as well, around 2 degrees at 6:00am. so what can we expect then on sunday? well, the morning is looking cloudy and damp for many of us across the southern half of the uk. but this weather front will be swiftly moving away towards the east, so the weather will improve. but it's going to be a slow process for places like lincolnshire and east anglia. some of that rain could last into lunchtime. now, notice how all the while it's sunny across eastern and central scotland. beautiful day, i think, for edinburgh, for newcastle, aberdeen too. but showers are expected to push into northern ireland by the time we get to lunchtime, and then these showers will sweep across other parts of the uk later on sunday, so hence the mixed bag on sunday. now, as we head into monday, high pressure starts to build from spain and portugal. in fact, it's going to establish itself across much of western europe, which means that the weather will start

to settle down from monday onwards, and any weather fronts that do come close to our neighbourhood will actually be diverted towards the north. so this is where all the weather fronts will go. we are in this window of much drier weather. temperatures of 10 degrees on monday in london, and it's relatively mild. you can see how the jet stream actually meanders around the uk, in fact, at times even north of iceland, into scandinavia. and to the south of that, that's where we start to see the high pressure building, and with the winds blowing around in a clockwise fashion, the warmer air will be reaching the uk. so the summary for the week ahead is a lot of dry weather out, or at least mainly dry. there might be some sports of rain in north—western scotland. mild by day, but the nights with the clearer skies will be chilly, and there might be some fog around too. bye— bye. this is bbc world news. i'm reged ahmad. our top stories: is this their final battle? kurdish fighters in north—eastern

syria launch a major assault against what remains of the islamic state group. elizabeth warren makes it official — launching her bid for the white house — promising to champion ordinary, working people. prosecutors are appealing against the acquittal of 27 suspects in tunisia's 2015 terror attacks. seven men were jailed for life. the queen's husband, the duke of edinburgh, surrenders his driving licencejust weeks after a crash that injured two women.