welcome to bbc news, broadcasting to viewers forward by mps as alternatives in north america to the prime minister's brexit deal. and around the globe. my name is duncan golestani. earlier, theresa may our top stories: promised to step down if her deal is approved. she hopes it will be given a third no brexit breakthrough. vote before the end of the week. british mps reject a range the plane manufacturer, boeing, has unveiled changes of options to end the deadlock. to software on the 737 max model, to remind ourselves which has crashed twice what we've decided to do. in the past six months. nothing! it's designed to make it easier for pilots to override the anti—stall system, theresa may still hopes which is believed to have to push her deal through malfunctioned on the lion air flight with a promise to step which crashed last october. down as prime minister, but key allies refuse to back her. in myanmar, the army has been holding its annual parade boeing says it's modifying in the face of widespread the software in its 737 max planes international condemnation following two deadly crashes, of its campaign against the rohingya people in rakhine but insists the aircraft is safe. state. and a show of strength from myanmar‘s military, now on bbc news: click looks at the latest in anti—drone technology to see what companies

and airports are doing to prevent disruption on the runways. this week: coding friendly drones, downing rogue drones and diy health checks in blue domes? drones could transform our skies as we know them, making deliveries, watching over us and even saving lives. but as recent flight disruptions have taught us, there are also possible downsides from unwanted ones.

last december, here at gatwick airport, chaos ensued. after reports of repeated drone sightings, 1,000 flights were disrupted, 140,000 passengers affected, and all of this was said to add up to a cost of £50 million. soon after, there was a similar scare at heathrow, as well as at newark airport in the us. but how do we take down problem drones safely? well, dan simmons has been to the netherlands, where the national police force is sponsoring a competition that hopes to find new ways of doing just that. in a hangar in the middle of nowhere in the netherlands, an epic air battle is about to commence. nine teams from across europe

and america are trying to smash each other out of the sky and grab the 30,000 euros top prize and the title drone clash 2019 champions. all they have to do is down the opposition‘s queen drone. we've got a countdown! but the organisers have not made it easy. this is one of the arenas that one of the teams will start from. blue and red are the colours. they will leave their queen in here, and that is what the opposing team will have to try to knock out, but they will leave their queen here, their fighter drones will come through what is being called ‘the corridor of death, doom and destruction‘. look, a tesla coil behind me, waiting to knock out one of those fighter drones that gets too close. c02 gas pumps here firing at those drones. as they come around the corner, they've got to get past this tennis ball machine which is going to fire balls. there is going to be a man

with a gun that fires a net through this hole to try to take out those drones if they come round. lights will be flashing to try to blind the pilots. but once they get down this corridor of doom, death and destruction, they get to their opponent's arena and a chance to take out the queen. with all this destruction of kit going on, it's perhaps surprising no—one has called the cops, but that's because they are the ones sponsoring the event. in this contest, we hope to come across new creative ideas that we can adapt and use in our police matters. do you have your own ability to bring a drone down? i will not go in detail about the abilities that we have. we have some abilities, but it's not enough for us for the long run. actually, we were hoping to see new strategies to help us bringing drones down,

but i did see also new threats because perhaps you noticed there are a lot of drones that carry some kind of ball around them, and with some of the measures we take, it's attacking the rotors. the rotors are now protected by these balls, so it actually poses us with another problem. enter a sideshow that involves this tiny drone. tell me what this is. this is one of the micro drones flying around — don't crash — and also the public can try to hack these very tiny drones and can hack into the system and try to take it over. so if one falls on our heads... you know it is successful. three years ago, the dutch police introduced their own solution to downing problem drones — trained eagles. but the programme ended a year later, as the birds couldn't be on hand quickly enough nor be relied upon to cleanly snatch a drone from the skies, rather than causing it to fall —

which could be a problem for anyone below. back in the theatre of battle, and some teams were getting a hammering. most have three or four face—offs, so quick repairs were needed. so we're just fixing our drones. they got a little bit mangled in the past competition. yeah, this is actually already flattened again. how do you flatten them when they've been mangled? she stands on them. you stand on them? our primary strategy was to use brute force, which is why we have this gigantic machine. if, like, motors get hit, it can fly without. so for example, if six gets damaged, it can still fly, which we thought was amazing. however, as you can see right now, it is missing stabilisation, this is quite broken. a lot of the other drones, they have a big mesh around them to protect the propellers and these willjust go in there and get tangled in the propellers. these ones are good for the balls as well, because they will hang

in one of the corner of the balls and just pull it down. but perhaps overall, the event showed that the human flying skills on show were often the deciding factor. it looks so easy because they are so adept at it. but your brain does somersaults and you flick it around and it comes back the other way and it's all bonkers and the speed with which those drones, they are flying over my head now, the speed with which they make decisions and flips and reverse isjust nuts! this is an airborne version of robot wars! my kids know nothing of robot wars but they will know about this. both my boys have got drones and so, aerial battling drones? it doesn't get any better! there is a tesla coil in there, for god's sake! 0n the fringes of the battlefield, companies in the growing business of taking down drones were showing off their solutions. this system is already operating at a norwegian airport. it tracks and then identifies drones as a threat, before jamming the frequencies used to control them.

in a usual environment, when you jam the drone, it will either start hovering, it will go back to his sender, back to his operator, or it will go down eventually on the battery. it can also jam the global positioning system. the drone will start hovering around, will start flying around, because it doesn't know where it is and eventually, it will go down also on its battery. this beast, still in research, is the drone catcher. it makes use of radar systems already in the field to get its targets‘ real—time 3d co—ordinates before automatically flying to the area and lining up its prey. we shoot the net over the drone. we can carry it away with a wire and we can drop it down with a parachute. and then, there is this. the gun emits a powerful electromagnetic beam, knocking out the commander control, video link and gps frequencies used by the drone.

strict regulations in europe mean it can't be used here, but its dutch makers told me they are doing good business with governments in the middle east. back in the arena, and the final was under way. in the end, it came down to brute force and battery power, with belgium's team slunse flying away with the 30k prize. the dutch authorities certainly have a more entertaining way of learning how to down rogue drones than standing around and scratching their heads. dan there looking at some serious ideas as to how to take drones out the sky, as well as those that seem to turn it into a sport. but, of course, initially, we need to be sure if there actually is a drone present. and, if so, exactly where it is. this electromagnetic spectrum tracking technology has just been deployed at gatwick. so, everything that emits an electro

frequency or radio frequency, it will be able to see and detect. it will know whether it's a drone or whether it's something else. so, how exactly does the setup work? you have two devices talking to each other? exactly. so, you have two sensors, each of them are getting a bearing on the drone itself. they get the bearing by the angle of arrival of the signal from the drone to the particular sensor. and by comparing the two directions, you can triangulate the exact position of the drone at any one time. so, at this point now, if a similar incident happened to what took place at gatwick, how much of a difference could your technology make to the outcome? we believe it will make a significant difference. number one is that you would know categorically if there was a drone there or not. certainly, a drone emitting characteristic signals. and number two, you would know where the controller was and be able to take action appropriately.

and what are your plans to roll this out elsewhere? the technology has already being rolled out. we have a lot of interest in the uk and globally — not only from our airports but also a number of other organisations and situations, from stadia to private individuals looking for privacy. ok, but for now, you think we've got a system that could make a difference? from now, we've got a system that makes a tremendous difference. hi, and welcome to the week in tech. this week, transport group stagecoach tested out a full—size driverless bus for the first time in the uk. google unveiled the new gaming platform, stadia. more on that soon. and on the flipside, the company is being fined £1.28 billion from the eu for blocking online rival search advertisers. it was also the week mit's csail unveiled a robot that it's been kind of keeping in the dark.

their kpam system allows the robotic arm to precisely pick up and place objects it's never seen before by mapping out key points on it so the bot‘s algorithms can work out how best to handle it. social networking site myspace — remember them? — announced they lost 12 years worth of music uploads. a message on its website says any photos, videos and audio files uploaded more than three years ago may not longer be available. the company says the mistake is due to a server migration project. and finally, are you good at art? yeah? well, i'm not. but nvidia has developed an ai to make you into a master artiste. it is called gaugan, a neural network which is trained on over1 million images and what it does is takes your pencil strokes and colour fills and transforms them into bits of nature almost instantly.

now, that is a work of art! the boss of google is the first to admit that he is no gamer, but who can argue with a man who speaks this kind of hard truth to americans? and for those of you who are wondering what cricket is, it's kind of like baseball, but better. laughter. if sundar pichai is as smart about gaming as he is about sport, he is surely onto a winner with this latest launch. google stadia is a streaming—only games platform. they have promised console quality titles all delivered via internet connection. that means no discs, no downloads and all accessible through just about any of your devices. what's important here is that google thinks it's found a way around some of the huge problems that have faced game streaming services in the past, such as high latency rates that cause lag.

to help with this, there is an optional stadia controller which connects independently to the internet to minimise any delay between you pressing a button and something happening in the game. how are you confident that that is going to work when there is potentially millions of people all playing at once? so, our vision was always to make sure that we could deliver the quality and vision of the game developer all the way to the gamer in their home. and so, we have put some incredible technology and hardware and software and services in our data centre to make sure that happens and that means we can deliver up to ak, 60 frames per second, hdr and surround sound, which are the latest, greatest audio and visual technologies that gamers expect, but we are doing it streaming. google hasn't yet confirmed how it plans to sell this to gamers. most people expect a subscription model. think of it like a netflix or video games. it sounds really good

and interesting on paper. i love especially their whole conversation about wanting to expand gaming's accessibility to a wider audience and on paper it sounds like this could do that. that said, i think there are a lot of questions left as to whether in execution this is actually going to be the answer. google‘s announcement has definitely been the talking point of this year's gdc because, if they manage to pull it off, it's going to change this industry forever. that may not be a good thing. if it does end up being a subscription model, there could be a huge impact on how games companies make their money. some people are already predicting that we may start to see an even greater number of in—game payments to make up for that loss revenue. then there is the issue of having to pay for a fast enough internet connection to make it work. with advancements that we're making in compression

algorithms all the time, it means we can increase the quality without necessarily increasing the bandwidth requirements. google announced partnerships with ubisoft and its software, the maker of doom, but if the company is going to entice hard—core gamers away from xbox or playstation they are going to need more than that. today was about showing our vision to the developer community, here at gdc. we wanted them to see the capabilities of our platform and start thinking about how they could bring their creativity and technology... do you have more of them on board? 0h, absolutely. how many more? well, i am not going to share that with you today. but we will be back in the summer... aaa, aaa publishers... totally. we started with ubisoft bringing their absolute latest game, day and date, to our platform back in october. and i think that gives you a pretty strong indication of our direction of travel. phil told me the company will announce the launch date and possibly even how much it will all cost at the e3 gaming show, in june.

that was dave lee in san francisco. now, in some parts of the world it has become pretty commonplace for kids to learn to code, but for those with vision problems, it is still fairly inaccessible so we sent paul carter to find out what some of the big tech companies are doing to try and open up coding to children who are blind or partially sighted. and then what happens? i'm just having a word with this naughty pod. oh, yes. it's trying to run away. this is eight—year—old ellie. like many other children her age, she is learning how to code. she also happens to be blind. do you have it on the one you want to happen first? yeah. ellie is using a physical, tactile coding language called codejumper. developed by microsoft, it is a block—based modular system consisting of a series of pods. each of which contains a single line of code,

making up a story, a poem or in this case, a song. # row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, life is but a dream...# coding is, by its nature, a visual medium and often requires being able to see the whole picture. what makes code jumper unique is that it allows blind and partially sighted children to have an overview of their code with their hands. the woman leading the project is cecily morrison, a computer scientist at microsoft's cambridge research laboratory, who herself has a blind son. for blind and no—vision children specifically, the technologies that were available were not accessible to them, so many children now learn programming, starting at the age of seven, with block—base languages. the other aspect that we should not forget about is that we created this to be available to children

regardless of their level of vision so that means that it is available to children who are blind with no vision, it's equally available for children who are sighted. that is one of the things that we were very aware of, is that we did not want to create a technology that isolated the blind or low—vision child at the back of the class, in a different classroom, doing their own thing. we wanted something they could engage with other children, and code together. but codejumper is only one solution to the issue of getting children with visual impairments to coding. some of you are new to apple ipad accessibility and coding so today we're going to run a session... at linden lodge, a school for children with sensory impairments in south london, i went to see how apple have been working with the royal national institute of blind people, to increase access to its own popular coding education app, called swift playgrounds. apple is using its suite of accessibility tools already built into its i0s devices such

as voice—over, high contrast and large text in conjunction with much more old school assistive tech. it says go here, go here, go here. and that is where it is. they have created braille and tactile maps for each level of the app so blind children can navigate the whole screen area with their hands. there's clearly still a role for tactile maps and for images, and diagrams. yeah, i think it is a healthy kind of dynamic mix of old and new and perhaps some experimentation as well. the children here are using swift playground to create code that will make a small drone fly. you know, it is incredible. i think it's a moment when kids will say things like, "i did not think i would ever be able to do this." "this is awesome," "i want to do this for a career." that is fantastic,

and it is contagious, other kids pick up on that and think "maybe i can do that too." "i didn't know that those tools were accessible, i'll go and see if i can create something" and then they show one of their peers and before you know it you've got lots of people interested — that is what we want to do, just kind of spread the magic, show what is possible to do and make sure that inclusion is at the heart of the development process. applause. now, recently click has been taking a look at some of the latest tech to come out of dubai and one start—up is hoping to make health checks as easy as a trip to the shops. emily bates has been to find out more. i am about to step into a new kind of health check. it requires no gp, no nurse, not even a doctor's office. these pods are being produced in the united arab emirates,

and aim to provide a full body check—up in less than ten minutes. created by start—up bodyo, the pods take a number of readings throughout the check, such as your weight, blood pressure, lean body mass and blood glucose levels. all the tests are non—invasive and you are guided through the process via an interactive display, which uses the motion sensing of an xbox connect. part of the dubai future accelerator programme, the hope is the pods will help tackle the country's obesity problem. several recent studies show over 60% of the population is overweight. well, over here, there is an endemic problem with diabetes, of course, so trying to encourage communities to take ownership of their own health journey, really, to reduce their weight and the sugar intake, to offset that against the diabetes problem which costs the economy a lot of money. the person can go inside and perform all of these tests without the need for a nurse, the assistance from a nurse or without the need

even to attend a doctor's clinic. and what that does is it raises the awareness in the community and makes the people more engaged and more concerned about monitoring their health, and also more enthusiastic about keeping track of their health in general. it is a bit surreal sitting in a bright blue pod having your blood pressure taken. this could be anywhere, so this could be in a mall, in a pharmacy. the idea is to put it in loads of accessible places so anyone can pop in and have a full body scan done, anytime. you can then choose to send your health data to an app, which can help you keep track of your results. one of the big benefits of the system is that it is user—control. so you are an end—user, you have complete control of the privacy of your data. you elect, within the programme itself, you can tick off who you want to share that data

with, whether you want to share it at all. you are in control really of your own wellness. at any time, with your doctor, you can show of course show him those measurements over some period of time, but also in the corporate set—up, in terms of they might engage with the programme and decide to have a corporate wellness effort within the company. my results did match what i expected, what will not be good is... you do not need to see that — i'm not taking my hand away. however, there was a bit of fluctuation when we repeated the tests. and without a doctor present, there is always a worry that an inaccurate result could lead to self—diagnosis. as for me, after that, i am off to the gym. emily there, in dubai. that's it for this week's show. if you want to find out

what the team get up to throughout the week, you can find us on facebook, instagram and twitter. thank you for watching. quiet on the weather front. the weather remains settled for the rest of the week but that doesn't necessarily mean the skies are clear. this is a picture from yesterday. it was pretty cloudy in the south—east. it felt quite chilly as well. 0n the other side of the country in st ives, it was beautiful. this sky could almost be in the caribbean. stunning weather there in cornwall. this is the satellite picture. the weather front is heading our way towards the north—west. high pressure not just across the uk but

across france and into parts of spain and portugal as well, many parts of western europe at the moment are in a spell of settled and dry weather. that is certainly the case across the uk through the course of the night and into early thursday. in the south, under the clear skies, temperatures will dip down close to freezing, for example cardiff will barely be above freezing. that means that under the clear skies we could see mist and fog with those dipping temperatures, particularly across the south—west of the country. 0nly patchy fog here and there, but that can still be dangerous, so take it steady if you're travelling early in the morning. elsewhere across the uk it will start off sunny and crisp, but clouds are expected to build. maybe turning quite cloudy in some areas across the south—east. temperatures will still get up to about 16 in london, 1a in newcastle, 15 in aberdeen. in stornoway, where we have winds off the atlantic, more cloud and maybe some spots of rain, only 10 or 11. friday's weather forecast, again, weather fronts just brushing the north—west of scotland, bringing outbreaks of rain,

some for the northern isles too. the vast majority of the country should at the very least have a bright day. most temperatures a degree higher — 17 in london, possibly as far north as hull. pleasantly warm for many of us come friday. friday into saturday, there is a change on the way. this weather front will be moving across the uk, and remember, fronts separate milder warm air from cold air that comes in from the north. the winds switch direction into scotland and also northern ireland. that means cold air out of the north arrives here. temperatures will drop and we could be talking only single figures across much of scotland and northern ireland, possibly even one or two wintry showers in the north. in the south, not quite so chilly. 1a degrees expected in london. come sunday, the cold front will have moved through, in fact, reaching the english channel. that means we are all in the fresh air. high pressure also over us, that means drier weather, chillier weather, temperatures on sunday only around 12 degrees. after rising at the end

of the week they're going down for the weekend. bye— bye.