on the democrats running the impeachment inquiry. without offering any evidence, he called adam schiff — who chairs the house intelligence committee — a "low—life" who should be investigated for treason. mr schiff said the trump administration was doing everything it could to frustrate the inquiry. european negotiators are already pushing back, unofficially, against the british government's new brexit proposals, just presented by prime minister borisjohnson. briefings from diplomats in brussels are focusing on concerns that the british proposal does not resolve the issue of the irish border, which could threaten both the peace process and the eu's single market. at least seven people have been killed as a vintage world war ii bomber crashed in connecticut. the boeing b—17, known as the "flying fortress", was attempting an emergency landing at bradley international airport, between boston and new york.

proposed new laws on domestic abuse are a ‘once—in—a—generation opportunity‘ to help victims. that was theresa may's message in her first speech in the commons, since resigning as prime minister. mrs may's government introduced the domestic abuse bill injuly, but its progress was delayed when borisjohnson suspended parliament. during the debate the labour mp rosie duffield shared her own experience of domestic abuse, as our political correspondent jessica parker reports. a loving partner shouldn't take away your choice of clothes. it is adverts and campaigns like this about domestic abuse that are aimed at helping victims. domestic abuse bill, second reading... today, mps debated legislation with cross—party support. mrs theresa may. and, in herfirst commons speech since stepping down as prime minister, she said it is a landmark bill. but, of course, passing the legislation is only one step. this is about changing the attitude that people take to domestic abuse. rosie duffield.

but it was this mp, who shared her personal experiences of being in an abusive relationship, that had the greatest impact. it starts slowly. a few emotional knocks, alternated with romantic gushes and promises of everlasting love, so you are left reeling, confused, spinning around in an ever—changing but always hyper—alert state. she described a pattern of threats, criticism, control and financial abuse. and the slow but sure disappearance of any kindness, respect, or loving behaviour. you get to the stage where you're afraid to go home. after 15 hours at work, you spend another hour on the phone to your mum or a close friend, trembling, a shadow of your usual self. you answer the phone and the sheer nastiness and rage tells you not to go home at all. and, having got out of the relationship, this message for others. so, if anyone is watching and needs

a friend, please reach out if it's safe to do so, and please talk to any of us, because we'll be there and we'll hold your hand. hear, hear. colleagues showing their support. one mp later said that, through that speech, she will have saved lives. jessica parker, bbc news. now on bbc news: click. this week — smash hits, smash hits, and extreme mic testing. yes! theme music thursday was bbc music day, an annual celebration of the power of music to change lives, with 2,000 events across the uk and 100 broadcasts on tv,

radio, and digital. but it's important to remember that not everyone experiences sound in the same way. for example, this week is international week of the deaf. so we met twins hermon and heroda berhane. now, they're both deaf, and although they love dancing and they love going to deaf raves, there's obviously a lot about music which they don't experience — until now. we joined them when they tried on a prototype shirt which can turn music into a whole—body experience.

the beautiful rolling hills of the south downs in sussex. something which i'm about to see from a whole new perspective. up there. i'll be filming myself while i'm up there, but the most important thing for today is this microphone, which i'll be taking up with me. why? tell you what. let's go back to the beginning. if you've ever tried to record sound outside or even if you've tried making a phone call on a breezy day, you will know that wind is the enemy. even the slightest breeze causes turbulence on the mic,

which you hear as a pretty deafening roar. now, the best way to solve this problem is to stop the wind from getting to the mic by using a big, soft bit of material like this. something which we in the trade call a fluffy or a dougal — or a dead cat. the bigger the fluffy, the better the wind is blocked out, but there are times when a large microphone just isn't convenient. like, for example, when you're doing backflips through a snowy street or travelling at speed over not very much snow. energy drink maker and extreme sports nuts red bull wanted to record their athletes up close and personal, so they asked a hearing aid, headphone, and microphone designers jabra to make something small, light, and cable—free to stick in places where there's no room for a big fluffy. jabra's research into noise cancellation and sound enhancement goes on here at their

headquarters in copenhagen. and this is where the x mic was born. because they need to test their devices in lots of different audio conditions they have different rooms with different acoustic characteristics. this is the anechoic chamber, which is completely acoustically dead. this is the reverb chamber where they test noise cancellation is. and this is the wind tunnel, where we currently have a breeze of two metres per second. but if we increase that to eight metres per second you should start to hear a lot of rumbling on my microphone here, which will be quite unpleasant to listen to. and if we take it all the way up to 15 metres per second, my guess is that you will really struggling to hear what i am saying... inaudible. if we switch to the x mic audio, i'm hoping you should still be able to hear what i'm actually saying. all right.

this really is maxing out the wind tunnel and even the prototype x mic is struggling. but, obviously, it's still doing a lot better than our mic. part of the secret is in the soft, fluffy fabric, part is in the round shape which reduces turbulence, and parties in the digital signal processing — dsp — algorithms which subtract the windows from the recording as it's being made. what we've done is we've learned through years and years of testing what is wind frequency and what is other sound frequency. and then we set those dsp algorithms to make sure we block out the frequencies that we believe are wind, what frequency range do we want to block out and what we want to keep and let through? so the x mic mark i has done 0k, but not brilliantly in the wind tunnel. but how will the mark ii do in the wild?

we'll find out a bit later when i can finally get my amateur backside off the hill. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that facebook said it would not fact check politicians. the social media giants says posts by politicians are newsworthy and should be seen and heard. amazon announced that alexa will soon be able to bring the voices of samuel ljackson and other celebrities into your home. their speech will be computer—generated based on voice recordings provided by the stars. and the port of antwerp has unveiled a hybrid hydrogen—diesel tugboat to replace the gas—guzzling diesel—only ones usually used to guide container ships. remember boston dynamics‘ spot the dog? a bot that can climb hills,

pick up objects, and open doors and is now available to rent for less than the cost of a car. though you may not be able to use it to do the school run. but he's also shared the headlines this week with the company's gymnast bot. atlas does handstands, rolls, and jumps that could rival an acrobat. and, finally, in other robot news, could these shape—shifting creations provide a whole host of useful tasks? shape bots are controlled by a central computer and camera trackers and hope to protect you from hot drink spills on tabletops, create moving 3—d maps, and more. that's all very well, but i'm still waiting for a robot to be able to just do my laundry and cook dinner. sound is something that's around all of us all the time. when we identify those sounds

as signifying danger, we've evolved to recognise those sounds and react to them. in the modern world, we have become ever more used to isolating ourselves from the world around us. for most people, recognising those sounds is something we do every single day, but getting devices to recognise different sounds is something that has traditionally been challenging. now, one uk—based company claims to have cracked that problem. audio analytic has developed a new technology to recognise a wide range of sounds that can then be used as a trigger for a number of different actions. now, what this technology does is it uses software—based artificial intelligence to identify and recognise everyday sounds. and it can be integrated into a number of products. i'll show you a couple of examples of how it might work. one common application is in headphones. walking down the street for example,

there is an angry dog nearby. barking. speaker: caution, there is a dog nearby. increasing transparency. so what it would do in that situation, it would recognise a dog barking, lower the music or cut it out altogether in your headphones and warn you there is a dog nearby. another application it would have is in smart speakers, most of us have these things around the home now, and it can be arranged to listen passively for things like a baby crying. baby crying. fundamentally, sound recognition is very different from speech recognition, and we have had to come in and solve some of those fundamental differences. baby crying sounds very different to another baby crying. there is a huge diversity from when they are six months old through to when they're two years old. but all of that we refer to as "baby cry", so there is some commonality, and we need to teach those machines that commonality. but as we know, ai can only ever be

as good as the training data it works with. so they have to capture these sounds live. naturally, we wanted to witness this firsthand. and what better way to start than with a couple of very good dogs. this is an anechoic chamber, or in this case, a semi—anechoic chamber. it is designed to absorb sound. we are here to record these two beauties, hopefully barking on demand. barking. these waveforms i can see on this screen are the representations of what is coming off the microphones in there. and in the middle is the actual dog bark threshold that the system is listening for. and when it identifies them, you should hear it activate. speaker: hey monty, i can hear you barking. as it is late and you are home alone, i am going to alert your owner, turn on the lights and place onjazz, because i know how much you like it. nice. but dogs, as good as they are, are only the beginning.

the space here can be used to record anonymous range of sounds, ranging from the dramatic... siren wails. to the more low—key. bell rings. there is no shortcuts to this, it is literally, you have to have the data set. we have to go and collect all the data, so we have the world's largest collection of audio data, 15 million audio event files, that help us train the technology itself. and of course we couldn't leave without taking a sledgehammer to some windows. glass smashing. all in the name of technology, of course. that was paul. i'm back at the south downs hills where it's time to test thejabra x mic mk ii, designed to reduce noise in extreme

sports and record high quality audio straight onto this tiny device. i am pitting it against the best professional mike we have that is even vaguely portable, in that it cabled to a zoom recorder and stuffed into my pocket. exactly what you don't need in extreme sports. and for a more realistic comparison, i'll also record sound on my phone and my gopro. now all i have to do is run, run, run like the wind! yeah! laughs. ahh, wow! so we are up, and the wind is definitely blowing in my face. we are flying at about 25 mph at the moment, so it's time to see what all the mikes sound like. loud wind noise.

try to put your left knee over your right knee, squeezing it round... oh, wow. although you can hear my voice on my phone and the gopro, the wind noise is pretty intrusive. it would certainly blast out the subtleties that jabra was specifically asked to capture. so, how about our high—quality mic with all its cables, versus the relatively small x mic, with no cables and on—board recording? so at the moment i have no idea what these two microphones are actually recording, but what we'll do when you watch this is we will switch from this normal mic to the jabra x mic... wind noise cuts out. ..and i will guess that you will instantly hear the difference — you should hear something that is a lot clearer, and with very little roar of the wind noise. although my voice is pretty clear in both recordings, the background wind is definitely reduced. so much so in fact that we can hear jess all the way behind me,

telling me about paragliding in the himalayas. what is paragliding 12,000 feet like, is it a different experience? yeah, everything isjust a bit more full on in the mountains. wind noise increases. so the developments in the weather, and your understanding the clouds... wind noise cuts out. and just loads of amazing birds, huge, massive vultures and the like. interestingly, the x mic is not going on general sale. instead, jabra are using it as r & d for its existing, more down—to—earth products. if we can get a microphone to work at 100 kilometres an hour down a ski slope, you can bet that in an office, noisy office, you can make a very good phone call without any noise disturbances. well, i am about to cause a disturbance in this freshly ploughed field. so wish me luck. all right, we are about to land, are we? we are going to come in to land. we will come with nice speed,

and like a bird landing on a branch, just before we touch down, i pull the brakes and... yes, yes. i smashed it without smashing it, which is brilliant! easy landing, easy landing, very good. the ziggo dome, amsterdam. performing here is the legendary sir elton john, currently on his farewell tour. but he has added a little something extra to each night and it is called peex. it is a device that allows you to mix live music as it is being played in front of you. boost the volume of instruments, listen to nothing but elton‘s voice, but how does it work? # benny and thejets... first of all the music is recorded onto peex‘s system where it breaks down the 95 channels of audio coming from the stage into five different

musical categories. those five mixes are then sent all the way here to the back of the hall and sent out again as radio waves by these transmitters. but to make sure that everyone gets a signal, five more transmitters have been permanently installed above the stage. and a tiny microphone on the device listens to what is being played on stage, so it can sync up with the mix that your device is being sent, so when you adjust the levels, it will be in real time. people have paid a lot of money for concert tickets, and people in the funny seats, if you can give them better quality sound, it will make everybody happy. right, elton is about to start performing. let's see how this thing fares. full band plays. guitar only. organ only.

drums only. wow. that sounds great. the vocals are crisp, the guitar, you can really hear it, but because i am too close to the stage, i can't really distinguish what i'm hearing on stage and on here with the drums. so what i'm going to do is go to the back of the hall and see how it fares there. it works even better further back from the stage. to listen to the mix you make, you are given normal earphones instead of noise cancelling, so you don't lose out on hearing the atmosphere too. for people who are hard of hearing, which essentially you do have locations in the concert hall where people can come and hear, this allows them to actually be anywhere in the concert hall. peex is not for everyone. there are people who already have superior sound quality and they do not wish to have it improved, but there are people who want to experience concerts in a different way, so it is really allowing for everyone to opt how

they want to experience the concert. and that is what we found. not everyone enjoyed using it. it is an amazing system, and i even let people next to me listen to it, but it is like, you have to be very sure of yourself to use that system as an artist. laughs. the music was very loud, you have to put that even louder, so it's going to be like... like you have nails in your ear. yeah it's really good, the sound is really clear, i'm not sure eltonjohn concert is the best concert to use it out because the sound mix is really good here. you heard the atmosphere around you, but in the meantime you are isolated as well. wooo! elton! exactly, like that. so, as innovative as this kit is, it may not be for you. you mayjust want to go to a concert and experience it organically. but having the option to mix your favourite artist while they perform in front of you, this might be a new direction in live music. drums play.

omar mehtab mixing music with the maestro, brilliant. and that's it for our audio tech special. hope you enjoyed watching and listening to it, and don't forget that throughout the week you can find us on facebook, youtube, instagram and twitter at @bbcclick. thanks for watching and we will see you soon. touch down, i pull the brakes and we run forward... oh! laughs. i tried running too soon! hello there. what a changeable week of weather it's been so far. if we look back to tuesday, a typical weather watcher looked somewhat like this — threatening—looking cloud, lots of heavy rain, a disappointing day.

by wednesday, it was all change. gin—clear skies across much of the country, but a noticeable chill in the air. now, if we take a look at the satellite picture from wednesday, you can see how widespread the dry, sunny weather was. but you can also see the threatening—looking cloud behind me, a sign of what's to come into thursday. but clear skies by day at this time of year, well, they lead to chilly nights. so we're going to start off thursday morning with, yes, a chilly story. low single figures in a few places, and there could be a light frost. maybe some early morning mist and fog patches, as well. so we're in this cold air with this northerly flow, but not for long, because this deep area of low pressure sitting out in the atlantic drags up southerly winds and milder air as it moves across the country. so storm lorenzo is going to continue to drift its way north, sitting to the west of the uk. it's still going to primarily interact with ireland, and yes, it is going to bring a spell of very heavy rain. orange warnings remain in force, with gusts of winds expected in excess of 80 mph here, and we're looking at huge

storm surge too. but for northern ireland, western fringes of england and wales, we're looking at gale—force gusts of winds, 50—60 mph, and there will be some rain through northern ireland, wales and south—west england as we go through the day. elsewhere, the cloud thickening up. a little more in the way of hazy sunshine, highs of 11—17 degrees. now, that area of low pressure will continue to move its way steadily south and east across the country during friday, still bringing gale—force gusts of winds in excess of 50 mph, and it will bring with it a spell of wet weather for a time, before it gradually eases. top temperatures on friday of 10—17 celsius. now, as we move out of friday and into the weekend, things will stay relatively mild, but there's still further rain to come. not too bad a start, however, to saturday morning. we've got this brief, transient ridge of high pressure continuing to build from the west, but it won't be long before this low

starts to move in from the atlantic. again, plenty of isobars circulating around that area of low pressure. the strongest of the winds up into the north—west of the uk. so there will be a spell of wet weather around during saturday. heavy rain clearing its way east to showers on sunday. take care.

this is bbc news — welcome if you're watching here in the uk, on pbs in america or around the globe. i'm mike embley. our top stories: donald trump hits out at the democrats leading the impeachment inquiry, and has angry words for reporters at the white house. it is a whole hoax and you know who is playing into the hoax? people like you and the fake news media that we have in this country and i say, in many cases, the corrupt media. the british government publishes its new brexit plan. borisjohnson claims a deal could be done in days, but the early unofficial response from eu negotiators is not positive. at least seven people die as a vintage world war ii bomber crashes in connecticut. and, as the royal tour of southern africa ends, a row over media intrusion escalates. the duke and duchess of sussex sue a british newspaper.