when they police and then eventually when they moved in fast enough, the raptor units, as they are called, they went in to try and grab as many protesters as they could and at that stage the activists fled from the scene and now it is kind of, as i say, returned a sort of normal here except that you can see still much of the debris of a political crisis now in its fourth month strewn all over the area. now it's time for a look at the weather with helen willetts. hello. although we had a sunshine to start in the east of the uk, it is all change today with these weather fronts sat across the country with thundery showers followed by more persistent rain and yet more showers. the far north—east of scotland might escape, mostly dry and fine, but there are showers to come here which could be thundery

with this band of rain following, stretching through northern ireland to the south—east and brighter skies following but more showers potentially. the concern is we could have up to 30 millimetres of rain and localised flooding. still warm but not as warm as it has been. the rain comes into scotland overnight and dries up for a time behind but it will still be relatively mild, a bit misty and murky first thing. we then have the next band knocking on the doors in the south—west, wales and northern ireland. but elsewhere, when the mist and rain clears, it should be a fairly decent day. more on the website. hello, this is bbc news with ben brown. the headlines... jeremy corbyn says he'd serve a full term as prime minister if labour won the next general election and plays down criticism of his leadership from a senior aide. labour sets out plans to replace ofsted

with a new school inspection system, saying it's not for for purpose. thomas cook is holding emergency talks as it tries to agree a rescue deal to prevent it from going bust. it's feared the company's collapse could leave thouands of british tourists stranded. hong kong police have stormed into a shopping mall where demonstrators had gathered to demand a boycott of companies they say are ‘pro—beijing'. click is next on the bbc news channel and this week nick kwek heads across the atlantic to investigate whether technology companies bear responsibility for the opiod crisis in the us. and just a warning to viewers, this programme contains people who have been affected by drug abuse. this week: a crisis sweeping america, a public health emergency. can technology help prevent drug overdoses and fight the opioid epidemic?

police radio: a request for an ambulance at manchester... it's a shell gas station. the patient is in the bathroom, he has overdosed. a 35—year—old male, he is not conscious, he is not breathing, overdose... america is facing the worst public health crisis in its history. it's a horseman of the apocalypse, and it's the one named death. 70,000 of its citizens are dying every year from drug overdoses. i'm not doing nothing except sticking a needle in my arm,

every day, all day long. it's a waste of everything. around three quarters of those are the results of opioid addiction. it is the number one killer of americans under 50 and it has reduced the average life expectancy. we go out on these types of crawls over and over and over again, all day long. can you get up? by the end of this programme, three lives will have been lost due to opioid overdoses. it's a crisis widely blamed on the over—prescribing of pain medication. the addictive nature of which has left many of those turning to the street when their prescription dries up. i was 16 years old and got my wisdom teeth out. and they prescribed vicodin, and i was like, what is this miracle? these things are amazing. in the end, i ended up being an everyday user.

now synthetic opiods like fentanyl, 50 times strong than heroin, and carfentanyl, which can be thousands of times stronger, are being imported in bulk from china and cut in with heroin. it's not heroin that's killing our people, it's fentanyl. it's an issue affecting every corner of society. layla, wake up. again, fentanyl, driving up into new hampshire, to pollute our communities. president trump has declared it a national public health emergency. we will end this terrible menace. we will smash the grip of addiction. last year, the food and drug administration and congress pointed the finger at the tech giants for fuelling the epidemic by not removing adverts for the illicit sale of opioids on their platforms. america is in the middle of one of the worst epidemics it has ever experienced, with this drug epidemic, but your platform is still being used to circumvent the law and allow people to buy highly addictive drugs

without a prescription. what we need to do was build more ai tools that can proactively... you said before you would take them down, and you haven't. the gentleman's time is expired. well, his questioning was up, but we've got a whole programme. and we have given nick the whole show to investigate this. i've spent the last few months looking at this hugely pressing issue which is sweeping america, but what is important is it isn't just an american issue. we are beginning to see the full extent of this here in the uk on our shores, where one quarter of us are being prescribed potentially addictive medication. but in the states, i wanted to look at whether technology companies are really contributing to the recent rise in opiod overdoses, or, as technology companies, if their inherent nimbleness — ability to innovate, could provide a solution to the epidemic. 0k. and nick's first port of call was an online forensics lab in the south of the usa. at the university of alabama at birmingham, gary warner and his students monitor

for illegal activity online. so, some of these students are investigating terrorism, some are working on financial crimes. their pioneering expertise in computerforensics has helped the fbi, the secret service and now, facebook, the virtual home of more than half of americans. they realised they have a problem with drugs being sold on the platform. we've been working to eliminate terrorism from their platform for some time. and i think we've taken the same approach. they said "what can you do to help this?" they flag thousands of websites to law officials which they believe advertise illegal drugs. i browse social media for people who sell drugs on social media. they usually comment on drug users‘ posts. in the comments section there will usually be someone trying to sell them drugs. just one of us alone would find thousands of accounts every day involved in some way, hundreds of different websites we go through.

it is a lot to look at. i look at the worst parts of the internet, like, that is ourjob. we are paid to do that. 'research chemicals' is a term they use. research chemical websites are selling the bulk fentanyl. it is really people looking for an individual doses on social media. what is on your screen there? i have a lethal dose of fentanyl compared to a penny. it's two miligrams — is enough to kill a grown man. what we are seeing is a lot of people are buying is a painkiller. they are going to a site that looks like an online pharmacy, not realising that it's not a legitimate pharmacy and buying the drugs without a prescription. they're having very successful dealings that way. and the problem is when you get it, it isn't a properly regulated drug. you don't know where it came from. when you buy a product online without a proper prescription from an illicit pharmacy, you are really rolling the dice with your own safety. you have been doing this line

of work for a few years now. how much of this is work and how much of this is personal? so, yeah. well... sighs yeah, we'll go there. 0k. um... i lost my daughter to heroin. she was, um... she was a troubled kid and she got involved with heroin and she actually committed suicide when she was high one night. she was 19. um... if this lab can help... somebody else not lose their little girl, or their son, that is a worthwhile cause. wow. yeah, when i asked gary that question, i didn't actually know how close he was to that issue. him losing his daughter. but what i found was a lot of people drawn to this line of work are personally connected. they have had families that have gone through that.

0k. right. so, we've established social media makes it easier for people to find drugs. i'm assuming gary warner's lab could do more thanjust flag posts to facebook? users searching for drugs in america now on facebook are redirected automatically to government run support websites. but, as gary's team told me, with a lot of these adverts appearing in people's comment sections or private, closed groups, they are not actively searching for drugs. these links might appear and they may be redirected to websites that sell the drugs. but with up to 500,000 comments being posted to facebook per second, and for people to just create new profiles to oversize drugs online once their old ones are shut down, it is kind of an impossible task to keep up. theyjust come up under a different name after being shut down, but i'm not sure if it's one person

or a scam or a big organisation. they'll have about 15 so different accounts. and, run by the same person because they have the same phone numbers. people used to sell viagra on facebook. get rid of the word viagra and variance of it, and people said oh, i guess i can sell viagra on facebook and they quit. the criminals, drug dealers and users, are all getting very creative with how can i describe my product i'm seeking or selling in a way that gets around the censors. they have 0's in places of 0's. there has been like a keyword arms race. whatever terms we put in, they come up with other ones. it keeps going. how many have you got? we have 1,695 keywords.

and that is an older list, it needs to be updated. they say they should just hire more content moderators. no, if you had an infinite number of content moderators, you would almost need one for every person on facebook. they have to go for it in an algorithmic way. gary's team are developing software to automatically scour the web for fentanyl, a tool previously used the homeland security investigations. we go visit one of these sites, five fentanyl pills between $200—980. we didn't look for that, we found it by the bing magic still giving us a list of sites that scored high for fentanyl keywords. the average user experience, it is harder to find drugs than ever on these online platforms, but it is still possible. and even if we multiply the amount of money we spent, it will still be possible because that is how facebook‘s scale works. not only facebook, twitter has also come under fire for advertising

illegal drugs for sale. —— not removing the posts that advertise illegal drugs for sale. we don't need to have our social media promoting the use of illegal drugs to our children and family. i agree with you that this is unacceptable and we will act. lauren culbertson is head of twitter‘s public policy. we have taken down thousands of tweets and that number is growing by the day. as well as deleting tweets, twitter has partnered with the drug enforcement administration on takeback days, when americans can safely deposit their unwanted opioid medication. they created a pill emoji and spread the word through hashtags. we are working on a search prompt where people would be directed towards services and we should be there soon. twitter has championed freedom of speech,

and doesn't want to get too heavy—handed with censorship. how much has it had to change its policy with regard to the opioid crisis? illegal activity has always been against our terms of service. we enforce that. content moderation is really tricky and you have to strike the right balance. while we want to enforce against illegal drug sales, we also want to make sure we aren't overcorrecting in censoring the people who are talking about the opioid crisis. and this is the problem they always hit, isn't it? the idea they might start accidentally censoring useful conversations as well? google is facing a similarconundrum. they've been under pressure by the government to do more here. they could be potentially masking life—saving information in the guise of advice or information. but tech companies are doing some good things? for the last dea drop

day, and the next one is happening next month, google updated its maps project, to include locations where people can safely dispose of unwanted medication or drugs. amazon has updated alexa so users searching for information about the opioid epidemic, the result they received back, because you only get one answer on smart speakers, it provides the best information. more from nick after the latest tech news with lara. hello, and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week a former google engineer who worked with the us military programme project maven, calls for laws to ban killer robots from war zones before they cause mass atrocities. american researchers claim an algorithm to spot twitter bullies has 90% accuracy.

the tool from binghampton university could help social media platforms track down abuse. and a robot surgeon is being launched into the nhs before an international rollout. flexible bots have joints similarto human arms. they will help specialists complete operations using just a few small incisions rather than one big one. the us air force is adding smart gloves to its vr plane maintenance and operations training. the aim is to help staff really get hands—on. made by bebop sensors, these gloves use powerful haptic feedback tech which lets users feel vr interactions with a six milisecond response time. and finally, this slippery underwater robot is actually meant to be rather scary, if you're a mosquito fish, that is. made to look like a predator, it aims to frighten and tire out the invasive pests which wreak havoc

on native wildlife around the world. so far, nick, you've been looking at how social media is basically clearing up its own mess and policing the online sales of opioids on social media platforms. but there are new ways that new technology is able to help with the opioid crisis, too. the first thing i wanted to look at was are there any solutions out there that can stop people from dying right now? like safe consumption sites. that's places that people can go to inject themselves with drugs they have got hold of elsewhere and use them under the supervision of healthcare professionals so that in the event that they do overdose, staff can step in. they're not currently open in the us because some question the ethics behind them, they might not want them opening up in their neighbourhoods. but there are ongoing legal battles to start them up there. the one that we visited, in vancouver, canada, called insight, has been open for 15

years and to date, not a single person has died there. and that centre has been actually been the training ground for a new smartphone system that tries to replicate the human supervisor but using technology. let's take a look. over in seattle, researchers are developing an app called second chance that utilises the microphone and speaker to automatically detect people on the brink of overdose. the fundamental problem with opioid overdose is that people die alone or they die with bystanders who are unable to recognise and help them. when people experience an overdose, they have dangerous breathing and so the software is able to convert the phone into a breathing monitor. it does that by using the microphone and the speaker and it turns it into a sort of a short—range sonar.

like a dolphin or a submarine, it is able to send out tones that cannot be here heard by you or i but the reflections of those tones can be heard by the microphone and those can be used to identify breathing pattern. the app will alert emergency services of the user's location when it detects dangerously low breathing, so they can report to the scene. how effective is it? it was 97% sensitive for people who had experienced this dangerous type of breathing. we think that using a device that most people already have is a way to reduce stigma. it doesn't identify you as having opioid use disorder because everybody carries a phone. the other thing that people often don't realise is that people with opioid use disorder, it's like a disease and they still want to be safe when they are engaging in these high—risk behaviours.

well, hopefully this is an app that you never have to use. hopefully addicts will come off the drugs before that happens. what have you seen that might help in rehab and recovery? one of the problems that people face, once they come out of rehab, it is hard for them to stick to some sort of recovery plan. there is an app out there called we connect which diarises people's day so they can set routines and goals to achieve them. when they can achieve the goals, they can receive amazon gift vouchers so it incentivises them to keep on track. the app also acts as a monitoring tool for clinicians to keep tabs on their patients. so it lets them know where their patients are, how they're doing, if they really have checked in to the local clinic, if they really have gone to their therapy sessions and also how likely their patients are to relapse so they can intervene sooner. another app involves people videoing themselves taking their treatment medication so they don't need

to physically go to their doctors for directly observed therapy. they send the recordings through the app and those are then verified by a healthcare worker who also monitors their progress. the start—up is also looking at rewarding users but with some cash. over and above all of this, there is a question on whether or not people will actually use these apps. when i spoke to one man in rehab, he thought otherwise. me be in full swing addiction, pulling out an app and using it, that is probably a pipe dream. i want something that is automatic that i don't have to do on my own and if that's the case, man, that's really cool. if you look at app retention in health care apps and especially mental health apps, it's abysmal. you're looking at a retention rate of about 5% at best after 60 days. so what's happening is you're asking people to take effort to do something that they're already struggling doing, so take effort to engage in something. the centre on addiction has

conducted a study with cornell tech, on how the way in which we use our phones can signify how susceptible we are to addiction and how likely we are to relapse. we found that sensation seeking is highly correlated with how often someone touches their mobile phone. it's correlated with the way in which people charge their battery, in terms of the day, whether they plug it in during the day at one time, like at night, or if they charge it randomly throughout the day at different periods. so, understanding these behavioural patterns is going to provide an opportunity for us to intervene with just—in—time interventions, without someone having to do anything. we know that people disclose way more information to digital platforms than to humans, so people disclose more drug use, hiv status. women disclose more sexual partners to a digital platform than to a human and men disclose fewer sexual

partners to a digital platform than a human. it is a good indication of where we are in terms of how we work with digital platforms. the theory that people open up more to technology has been tested on the outskirts of nashville where a new form of therapy is being developed to make it more effective and accessible. noah robinson is using virtual reality to better connect with his patients. get up here. all right. can you hear me? by meeting in a virtual world as digital avatars, noah's found his patients are more receptive. yeah, what are the feelings? the feelings are a little bit of, um, anger, i guess. there's some sadness. ijust feel crazy. wit‘s abusive relationship with drugs started at a young age, progressively getting worse, up to using opioids. one of the features of vr helping him make sense

of his problems is the ability to draw them out virtually, so he can better visualise and remember them. what do you think is the most likely explanation here? this is completely untrue and these and most likely all of these are going to be the ones that are the reasons why. i'm always amazed when i get here and step back and look at it all, how ludicrous it sounds in my head. and just to see it laid out, it just all makes sense. we're still in that exploratory phase but what we're seeing is that patients are able to leave their current environment which is the context of where automatic thoughts and negative emotions are occurring, and when they come into the virtual environment, they feel more regulated and it's kind of like this relief they are able to experience. it'sjust wild, you know? it immediately takes you into...i don't know, it just takes you in a different world right away. so then if i teach them how to handle their automatic negative thoughts or negative emotions when they're not actually

experiencing them, it seems like it sinks in more effectively and when they come out of the vr, they are then able to remember what i taught them and to visualise the model and things like that. when i put the mask on, i immediately calmed down because i'm in a world that's so distracting, it takes me out of the thought i've been obsessing about for 1.5 hours. it takes the thought out of my head that is a real belief system at that time and puts it on the board and i can kind of look at it. this is just the beginning of trials. so far it's a single effort and noah is yet to scientifically determine the effectiveness of his methods, but these initial sessions have proved promising. it was actually much more therapeutic for me in virtual reality than i've been in the classrooms here. eventually noah would like to roll this out so people in recovery could receive virtual therapy remotely. people going into vr on a daily basis, they're not becoming desensitised to it, it's notjust novelty, they're forming real social connections and supportive

relationships and if we can take that and translate it to the world of substance use disorders and addiction, i think we can possibly make a dent in the opioid crisis. the men here are only visitors. after a month of rehab, they're released back into the world. having something like this that they could access from home could possibly help them stay sober. i really hope it works out for them. 0k, nick, thank you so much. brilliant reporting, really interesting and i hope you found it informative and useful, too. if you've been affected by drug addiction, maybe it's you, maybe it's someone that you know, help is out there. you can talk to frank which is the nhs's confidential advice service for drug addicts and their carers. the phone number is 0300—123—6600 and the website is talktofrank.com. you can contact us through the usual social media channels for anything else. thank you very much for watching and we will see you soon.

hello, what a difference a day makes. very different weather today. yesterday there was sunshine and warmth but today it will feel cooler because we have more cloud and rain at times but by september standards, not a cool day. if you have not had showers or rain, they are not far away. we have this array of weather fronts moving north—eastward across the uk courtesy of low pressure and there systems are stacked out in the atlantic, coming our way this week. we have had some thundery downpours ahead of the main band of rain and those continue into eastern england and scotland after a fine star at then this band meanders eastwards

followed by sunny spells and showers. the concern is there is quite a lot of rain on dry ground and we could see some surface water flooding potential in northern ireland, england and wales. certainly a welcome rain for the gardens and not cold but not the 27 yesterday, just 20—23. the winds ease s0 yesterday, just 20—23. the winds ease so overnight, as the rain moves across scotland and we have clear skies elsewhere for a time, we could see some mist and fog and then more rain knocking on the door later in the night. not a cold night, the atla ntic the night. not a cold night, the atlantic winds, south—westerly winds, and with this mixed system coming in, we have tropical air, the remains of hurricane humbert oh and that means warmer air which can hold more water so it looks like it will bring us again some quite significant rain. it will push its weight into the south—west of england and wales and northern ireland but elsewhere, rain in the northern isles but when that clears,

mainland scotland and central and eastern england will be dry and bright and eastern england will be dry and brightand up eastern england will be dry and bright and up to 21 degrees so not too bad at all. through the evening and overnight, the rain will move across the rest of england into scotla nd across the rest of england into scotland with heavy showers following behind, strong and gusty winds near those showers and that process continues into tuesday. fairly settled on tuesday, very autumnal looking, of course the autumnal looking, of course the autumn equinox on monday but temperatures are still fairly respectable, into the high teens quite widely. the unsettled picture remains with us for much of the week as you can see. not necessarily cold, though. more on the website.