Skip to main content

tv   The Papers  BBC News  February 16, 2019 10:30pm-11:01pm GMT

10:30 pm
area of north—west scotland. an area of cloud and patchy rain for east anglia and south—east england on what will be another frost free nights. for monday, quite windy gci’oss nights. for monday, quite windy across northern scotland, blustery elsewhere. showers could be heavy with hail and thunder especially in western scotland and north—west england and still could be a bit dampfor england and still could be a bit damp for parts of east anglia and south—east england with some patchy rain. asa south—east england with some patchy rain. as a week goes on, unsettled to the north and west of the uk but still mild and getting milder later in the week. hello, this is bbc news with vicki young. we'll be taking a look at tomorrow morning's papers in a moment with henry mance and anne ashworth. first, the headlines. the regional airline flybmi has announced this evening that it has suspended all flights and is filing for administration. thejustice secretary has said the government's main priority has the funeral of the footballer emiliano sala, who died last month in a plane crash, has taken place in his native argentina.
10:31 pm
a 27—year—old man has appeared in court charged with the murders of three elderly men in exeter. and thousands of criminals in england and wales will be tagged with gps trackers to allow authorities to trace them 2a hours a day. hello and welcome to our look ahead to what the the papers will be bringing us tomorrow. with me are henry mance, political correspondent at the financial times and anne ashworth, associate editor of the times. many of tomorrow's front pages are already in. the sunday times claims that britain's richest man and prominent brexiteer sirjim ratcliffe is working on a tax exile plan which could save him billions of pounds. the us is warning european governments to take back jihadists captured in syria — or risk a surge of terror attacks.
10:32 pm
that's in the sunday telegraph. according to the observer, the home office is selling the services of its immigration officials to private companies, as part of the hostile environment strategy. the mail on sunday reports on labour's deepening anti—semitism row. and the sunday express says brexiteers are furious over a plan by the eu to send food aid to feed britain's poor, in the event of a no—deal brexit. so, a varied set of front pages. let's see what our reviewers make of it all. will reviewers make of it all. start with the sunday tele and will start with the sunday telegraph and that story which seems to be a warning from america saying to britain and other allies that you have to take back captured fighters or risk a wave of terror. are they suggesting they are put on trial?
10:33 pm
yes, that is exactly what they want. it is an alarming headline, 800 men ready to commit terror attacks. countries like britain don't really wa nt to ta ke countries like britain don't really want to take them back, we don't wa nt want to take them back, we don't want them on trial at the old bailey, if you think of the associates ofjihadi john, the one who did the beheadings, we haven't wa nted who did the beheadings, we haven't wanted to put them on trial, we try to re m ove wanted to put them on trial, we try to remove their british citizenship, a couple of them are going on trial in the us but i think that is probably not a scale. the kurds, who are holding these people, they don't wa nt to are holding these people, they don't want to hold them indefinitely. it seems a bit far—fetched that these people are suddenly going to find their way to freedom and then to the us and then commit terror attacks. these are people who are known, their identities are clear. but it isa dilemma, their identities are clear. but it is a dilemma, what to do with them. that is the dilemma, what to do with them, whether they are british citizens, do you take away their citizenship or do you let them come
10:34 pm
back here and prosecute them?m citizenship or do you let them come back here and prosecute them? it is interesting how we deal with the aftermath of the disintegration of isis has come to like this week following the shamima begum story that the hugely apparent disagreement through —— between say javid and david gold about how her entry to the uk could be handled, whether we should welcome this woman back or whether we should bar her from our shores, message to be little thinking going on as to how we would deal with people who have gone tojoin isis, about 800 britons we nt gone tojoin isis, about 800 britons went tojoin gone tojoin isis, about 800 britons went to join isis, gone tojoin isis, about 800 britons went tojoin isis, and what happens when they want to come back. i think at the end of last year, the american backed kurds were warning the americans that they wanted to get rid of all the isis fighters they were holding and maybe america is now beginning to panic as to exactly how and what will be done with these people. there seems to be
10:35 pm
a suggestion in the story that some of them would seek to go to america. i cannot imagine how they would get past american immigration. there are some slightly cloudy issues here. but it is something we are going to have to face. it will be interesting as to whether the politicians here have thought about it, given as you say there is a difference of emphasis between cabinets even how to deal with the teenager who went over there, you wonder if they have thought this through. the trump administration are thinking about it in the us, that is clear, and they see the political benefit talking up the isis thread which is not the case here. if you were a uk politician, you might say, could the us get their act together in syria and that might help or at least have and that might help or at least have a consistent policy in syria that might help solve the problem. also, wasn't there an issue that the kurds willjust hand wasn't there an issue that the kurds will just hand these
10:36 pm
wasn't there an issue that the kurds willjust hand these people over to the syrian regime, asad's forces, rather than try and send them back to their homes in europe and the us. we've got a whole region of the world which we might be thinking the problems are less than they were but in fact the problem isjust going to shift through —— to our own shores and it is something we need to tackle. because the instability doesn't go away. let's move to the sunday times and the richest man with the uk to save billions as the headline there. the centres around the planet brexiteer sirjim ratcliffe who, according to the newspaper, is planning a tax exile. this guy is worth £21 billion. he might be saving up to 4 billion in tax. the most interesting thing about this is theresa may, it was about this is theresa may, it was about chief executives, people who run companies and had nothing in
10:37 pm
common with the people as they employed and down the street from, who were seen as part of the course for the brexit road. jim ratcliffe is exactly one of those and he is now, we are led to believe, in discussions with pwc, the accountancy firm, for a way to find accountancy firm, for a way to find a route to lower taxes for his company which does things like fuels and packaging and fertilisers, unglamorous stuff that makes a lot of money, and i think people will be outraged if they read about someone taking that amount away from the tax. that is the point, money taken out of the treasury and the public services, potentially. this is a really good splash in the trade because it raises so many questions. ratcliffe is one of the most prominent brexiteers. he has also been very critical of environmental laws within the eu but also the role of the accountants in this who seem to be ina
10:38 pm
of the accountants in this who seem to be in a massive quandary about this advice they have given. as to whether they should actually be given it. because if they are seen to be encouraging avoidance on this level, will they get the public sector contracts that they need? they have referred the issue as to whether they should actually tell him to go ahead with this manoeuvre to their own kind of in—house kind of organisation which decides on these things. there are so many things in here. but this is the most extraordinary thing, he is not only going to save money for his company, he is also going to save a huge amount of money for himself because he will be paying very beneficial tax breaks of monaco. i am baffled by monaco, it doesn't seem that agreeable a place to live. maybe it is if you are going to save billions of pounds. let's move to meghan markle, taking aim at male, pale,
10:39 pm
stale universities. we knew she would be a breath of fresh air in many ways and she seems to have lent her support to those campaigners who think the syllabuses and the curricula at universities need to be widened out, they need to include a broader range of authors. in the past, there has been concerned that they would take off aristotle and plato from the system and only having female authors. that is not the case but it is a question about dating the curriculum to perhaps bring in subjects that were not considered relevant or sufficient —— sufficiently serious. we are told that when meghan markle went to an event at city university, she was shown pictures of the professors at the british universities, and she said, oh, my god, because she was so surprised that they were pale, male, and stale. she didn't use those words presumably? anyway, this is
10:40 pm
not something that the queen or prince charles and prince philip said. again, another good talking point front page story, this is the kind of thing that gets people debating around the kitchen table, in coffee shops, as to whether she is right that academia still dominated by men, white men at that, and may be the syllabus is too concentrated on what my millennial colleagues call dead white european males. the fact that she is so outspoken, it is completely different to anything we have seen in the past, really. we have had outburst from senior royals and inappropriate things from prince philip but her speaking out like this is interesting. it is interesting also against the background of the sensitivity over the weight she is being treated on social media and her obvious pain at this treatment and the cluny, george
10:41 pm
clooney intervened in the week to say that she was being pursued in the same way as the late princess of wales. now, ijust wonderwhether this is yet another intervention on megan's part that will make a lot of people very angry and anti her. because people are poisonous about heron because people are poisonous about her on social media. let's move on to the observer and their story here is how the home office, they say, is hiring out staff to hand migrants. i think they are talking there about selling the services of their own immigration officials to private companies. what you make of that one? yeah, i found this a story that may be is less outrageous than the headline suggests. obviously the home office has a responsibility for weeding out people that shouldn't be in this country and to try and work out who has the right to be here.
10:42 pm
this is about a particular arrangement they may have with organisations such as the nhs. the nhs hire someone, how does it know that the person has the right to be here? does it need access to particular databases? here? does it need access to particular data bases? the question is also —— always how you implement these things. the expert here are saying if you get this wrong, people won't come forward, they won't even try to use the nhs because they are so scared and that is bad for the spread of infectious diseases, etc etc. but i feel the home office trying to work out who is correctly in the country is not something which is all that most people will find offensive. it also seems to be civil services working in any branch of government. it mayjust be me, i'm struggling to find where they are working for private businesses. and it is also an issue that possibly the home office would be able to substantiate your right to be in the uk, that that would be the
10:43 pm
official proof. let's go to our final story. angus as ministers speech holds china visit. —— anger. we were told there wasn't any date for this at all, it was not necessary in a diary, but... the funny thing is is if philip hammond had visited china, it would not have been a front page story but the fact that he is not visiting china has become a front—page story and this is because on monday, the defence secretary said britain would take on countries that flout international law and it was sending an aircraft carrier to the pacific and both of these statements were seen as swipes at china, and the china do not take these criticisms well. we are told a high—level meeting that philip hammond had intended to have was cancelled and effectively the trip then imploded, there is no point in going unless you can meet senior people. the idea was they would talk
10:44 pm
about trade. this is serious because they could have been trade negotiations. remember the pain they could have been trade negotiations. rememberthe pain is that the coalition government went to establish closer links with china, and those links, whether or not you approve of them and the chinese regime, were going to be very important, post brexit. i would say this will be another example of quite a feature between cabinet members. i'm sure that philip hammond is most unhappy at gavin williamson is rather strange intervention. we are going to be sending gunboats, sabre rattling at a time when he needs to be not. gavin williamson famously said russia could go and weigh and shut up, so by those standards this is quite diplomatic. —— go away and shut up. that's it for the papers this hour. henry mance and anne ashworth will be back at 11.30pm
10:45 pm
for another look at the papers. next on bbc news, it's click. massive attack's teardrop plays. it is pretty far out there, but it really suits the music and what they're about, i think. in his birmingham studio, artist harley davies is painting a unique work that is much, much more than meets the eye. it's mind—blowing to think that, when you consider how much data there must be out there.
10:46 pm
it's interesting for the future, i'd say. the artwork is the album cover of the hugely popular and influential mezzanine album by massive attack. and to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the band agreed to have this music encoded in dna and then added to several spray paint cans. it means harley's painting will hold thousands of copies of the album and to find out how, i have come here to a lab in zurich to meet one of the pioneers of using genetic code to store data. and so here's the freezer where we keep the dna. right, ok, this is where the magic happens. exactly. so in here. it comes in an enormous box, all really cold. and you buy in dna? we buy in the dna. dr grass has encoded the music already to be sequenced into the dna. that work is done by one of several companies now offering genetic code to order.
10:47 pm
so they make the dna in the sequence that encodes for the album. so we have the sequence of a, c, t and g and so they take a and then the other c and the other t so that will encode for, i don't know, 0010 or something like that. and then you have to make — because the album is much more than just a few zeros and ones — you have to make a lot of those dna sequences. so the whole album is distributed over the tubes, so there is no particular order. it starts at the beginning and at the end and so, every tube contains a million different short dna sequences and every sequence has a number stored in it to tell us where it sits in the overall picture of the album. so inside this tube is effectively about the equivalent of one of the tracks on the album. and how much does this cost? 50 megabytes, $1,000 per megabytes.
10:48 pm
that's about $15,000 to store the album. it's a lot but you only have to do that once and then you can make enormous amounts of copies of it, because one key advantage of dna, i think, over all storage technologies we have, that essentially for free — nearly for free — you can make billions of copies. i don't know if you see it, it's a very small blob. oh, wow, ok. so that — there's an opaque section at the end of this tube. in there, there's billions of very, very small glass particles and in the glass particles, we have encapsulated the dna. so we have grown glass around — we've directed glass to grow around the dna. and it protects the dna. very similar to what you know from amber. right, and the amber is protecting it from decaying for potentially millions of years. exactly.
10:49 pm
and here, for millions of years, in our dna in the glass, for probably 1,000 years, it protects the album from decaying. so you can still hopefully play it in 1,000 years. how many copies of the album are inside here then? just the one? no, so we put a million copies inside. even if you don't spray with the whole can, you certainly have a copy of the album in there. so harley's picture paints much more than a thousand words. it's not only the first album cover artwork to actually include the album. a painting this size could store enough data to hold every album, picture, photo, book and recording, audio and film ever created in the history of mankind. so how can we read the information? well, that's one fly in the amber at the moment. this machine takes 17 hours to do it. it's come down from about a week but still, imagine pressing play and waiting that long.
10:50 pm
so we may be several years away from dna being practicalfor storage but at least it will hang around for thousands of years, and in a format we'll always recognise when we see it. or hear it. a few weeks ago, we visited the amazon spheres — part of the tech giant's headquarters in seattle. we met the people behind its voice recognition tool, alexa, and saw what else we'll be talking to soon. as the tech gets better, it could, one day, become the way that we interact with our devices. now, that prompted this question from a viewer: thanks, simon, that's a really
10:51 pm
good pointand, yeah, apple homepod gives some control to deaf users through the use of a touchpad, but nowhere near enough to really use it. google's assistant can control a smart device by typing requests on a smartphone, and the captions feature is available on the versions of alexa with a screen — news, weather and timers can be activated with tap. all of this is quite basic, so abhishek singh has decided to show them how it could be done. he's created a simple algorithm to do this. the camera sees what he signs and turns it into text that alexa can understand and respond to. now, it only does a few words but the point is to inspire the big
10:52 pm
companies into action. last month, google released a couple of new accessibility apps for deaf users who use its android devices, and lara and click trainee maddie have been putting them to the test. i lost my hearing when i was seven and about a year after that, i got a cochlear implant which has helped me a lot, but even now in certain situations, i find it really hard to hear. so when i'm in noisy cafes or at a dinner party, my hearing is not the best. we've deliberately come to a coffee shop where there's real, everyday noise all around us to demonstrate these. maddie here has been testing them in various different environments. we are going to start off with google live transcribe. and it does what it says, instantly and simply creating a script of your conversation. it can do so in 70 languages and dialects — with quite impressive
10:53 pm
accuracy, it seems. yeah, it seems to do really, really well with people talking. with one or two people talking, it works really well. obviously, the further away you get from it, the worse it gets, and the closer you get, the more accurate it becomes. so the underlying technology is automatic speech recognition technology and what that is is that's a way of us taking all sorts of known speech from recordings and basically training algorithms on top of it so that it learns all of the nuances, all of the context that we understand as people. we also have here google's sound amplifier app. you need to attach a pair of headphones to the device and from there, it can turn up the volume on different elements of what you're listening to. so it may be the quieter background noise that you want to make louder, while keeping the main sounds you are listening to at the time,
10:54 pm
which could be some music, at the same volume. now, how useful did you find this was, maddie? i thought it was quite cool that you could play music and still hear stuff from the outside world at the same time. the phone's microphone picks up the ambient sound and, from there, machine learning and artificial intelligence isolate the elements. that could make it possible to, say, make speech louder and the sound of an air—conditioning unit quieter. people with worse hearing, it would be much more useful because it just boosts that noise around you. so when you're less comfortable with your hearing, it gives you that little bit of security, that you could have that little bit of extra volume. it took be a good 30 minutes, just focusing on the app, playing with all the toggles, because it builds into the settings on your phone, so it took me a while to find the right settings for me. these are what i would call accessibility first applications, in that we're not taking an existing product and making it more accessible.
10:55 pm
we're making, in both cases, the real world more accessible using these technologies that exist on a smartphone and in the cloud today. the big game—changer was back in 2014, when the first hearing aids with the ability to communicate with an iphone came out. that then opened up a lot of possibilities because you've not just got the processing power of the hearing aid, you've got the processing power of the smartphone as well. apple added similar functionality to their airpods last year, with live listen allowing you to place your phone or ipad near the sound you want amplified. and now starkey, one of the leading hearing aid brands, will be adding full detection and a virtual assistant to their device that already features live translation and activity tracking. a live translation feature is promised, along with activity tracking, and an app to host a whole lot of data. it looks at your constant communication with other people and therefore, its measuring how much social
10:56 pm
interaction you're having. and there are also sensors inside the hearing aid, so motion sensors inside the hearing aid, which are looking at how much movement you've got. there has been found to be a relationship between cognitive decline and hearing health. but when it comes to google's latest releases, even if they're not proving quite perfect yet, they do harness the power of the fiercest weapon most of us have on us all the time. and that's it for the shortcut of click for this week. the full—length version is up on iplayer, waiting for you right now. and don't forget, we also live across social media — instagram, youtube, facebook and twitter. thank you very much for watching and we will see you soon. cloudy skies for many of us today
10:57 pm
after the recent sunshine but for england and wales, the cloud there is will tend to clear away into the north say. some patchy rain initially but they will be heavy at first developing later in the night. it will be an increasingly windy night out there but a milder night starting in double figures in northern ireland. this area of cloud and some outbreaks of rain easter sunday goes on. plenty of sunshine across central and eastern areas. notice what rain is left from this weather system tends to fade away as it travels east across the uk. behind the rain, things brighten up again, the wales, western scotland.
10:58 pm
it is going to be windy, cuts in western scotland coming up to 1a or 50 miles an hour. it is going to be mild, vertically across eastern areas, but we will get to see some sunshine. this is bbc news. i'm vicki young. the headlines at 11: the regional airline flybmi suspends all its flights and says it's filing for administration. the government says its main priority has to be the safety of the public, when considering the case of shamima begum. the funeral of footballer emiliano sala, who was killed in a plane crash, takes place in argentina. a 27—year—old man appears in court, charged with the murders of three elderly men in exeter. and at 11:30pm, we'll be taking an in—depth look at the papers with our reviewers, henry mance and anne ashworth. stay with us for that.
10:59 pm
11:00 pm

49 Views

info Stream Only

Uploaded by TV Archive on