by a us drone strike. crowds chanted "death to america" as qasem soleimani's coffin travelled through iraqi cities on its way to iran. in the capital baghdad rockets landed near the us embassy. the premier of new south wales warns that australia is in what she called "unchartered territory" after the worst night of bushfires since they started two months ago. temperatures have nudged 50 degrees celcius in some parts with winds spreading the fires and making their paths even more unpredictable. the death toll from the new year flooding in indonesia hasjumped to 60 with fears growing about the possibility of more torrential rain. tens of thousands in jakarta are still unable to return to their waterlogged homes after some of the worst flooding in years hit the enormous capital region. now on bbc news, click.

this week... spotting a face, a ticket to space and a drag race. it can only be the finest tech from click in 2019. hello, welcome and a very happy new year. 2020 always sounded like the future, didn't it? whereas now that it is here i guess it's not. we are going to get stuck into the new year next week but first we are going to take you on a trip back through 2019. it was the year that we celebrated our ioooth show with an interactive episode online, where you could choose your own path through.

imagine if everything that you watched was interactive and if you could change your experiences depending on your mood, your desires or even how much time you had. if you go online at the address that is on screen now you will find a special version of this programme that is interactive. you get to choose which tech stories you get to hear about and in how much detail. as you watch, you'll be given options to dive deeper, or may be to look at things from a different perspective, or maybe to skip on entirely. i tried out nasa's next moon buggy. by the way, we are on a slight incline right now. and we visited taiwan to see how green technology was helping to clean up the environment. i think 2019 was a year when many of us regarded technology with a healthy degree of scepticism. instead of just openly welcoming tech advantages we worried about data privacy,

about the management of social media sites and online security. it was a year when the police around the world stepped up their use of facial recognition technology. and while, yes, it could help track down criminals, as the police here in the uk discovered, big brother is not everyone‘s cup of tea. police cameras in an east london street, everyone gets scanned. if you refuse, here's what can happen. this man didn't want to be caught by the police camera so covered his face. police stopped him, they photographed him anyway, an argument followed. how would you like if you were on the street and someone photographed you? what is your suspicion?

the fact he walked past.... i would do the same. it gives us ground... no, it doesn't. the police said this was disorderly behaviour is that gave them a fine. i walk past like that, it's a cold day as well. as i've done that the police officer has asked me to come to him so i've got my back—up. said i don't want my face on on anything. if i want to cover my face, i will cover my face. i have now got a £90 fine. look at that. thanks, lads. look at that. well done. he was caught up in the last of ten trials carried out by the metropolitan police. there were three arrests from facial

recognition on this day alone but the trials prove controversial. 0pponents claim they are taking place in a legal vacuum. there is nothing in uk law that has the words facial recognition. there is no legal basis for the police to be using facial recognition. there are no legal limitations on how they can use it, no policy, no regulation. this is a free for all. we are reviewing all capabilities and absolutely the technology is there for body worn or smaller devices to be fitted with facial recognition technology, as cctv. so absolutely we will look at that but the right safeguards and reviews learning has to be put around that. and it turns out that warning was timely because a few months later it emerged that's facial recognition technology was being used to identify members of the public without their knowledge or consent at the london kings cross station estate and it was with the help of london's metropolitan police. the owners of that area and the police have since apologised and the scheme was scrapped but there are still no laws in the uk specifically relating

to how facial recognition cameras should be used. now, what is your top technology of 2019? the one that we think really came of age this year and really started to take off was electric cars. for the first time, if you were thinking of getting a new car, you probably at least considered getting an all electric one. so we did a whole show on them. and to prove how quick they can go, we raced one against a lamborghini. now, both cars are in their fastest set ups and whatever happens today we recommend you don't try this at home. we have several safety measures in operation. first of all, johnny is a professional racing instructor. he does this day in, day out to scare the living daylights out of members of the public. in the passenger seat will be mark probably screaming his head off. and who can we get to give one of the finest sports cars a run for its money?

it is only top gear's the stig. i'm sorry, he wasn't available so i'm standing in. is that 0k? drivers, start your engines. ready... as the passenger here myjob is to observe and report. whoa! i did break a bit early but i've so clearly won. i'm no expert but that was no contest.

wow, and i can tell you that lara hasn't stopped bragging about that race since. now 2019 was the year when many more manufacturers join the electric party. better infrastructure, decent driving ranges and guarantees on battery life all added to the mood music. so dan simmons went to the frankfurt motor show to catch the electric bus. to catch the electric buzz. there was really only one big question for the big execs of huge german car companies, the world's biggest motor show. why are they ten years behind tesla in offering us an all electric car? we are not each time the fastest of the earliest but if we come, we come very strong. tesla, a company that has been solely focused on electric vehicle production. you have to give them credit for blazing the trail. electric may only represent less than 3% of all new car sales last year but vw have taken a close look

at them and reckons it's the future. well, it is obviously not real. these cool designs... each one brings out some concept ideas. interestingly on the volkswagen stand they were all electric. the real car they were launching was the ids. a sort of electric golf. with a 205 to 340 mile range, depending on the exact model. with prices starting from a competitive 30,000 euros. and a first from vw, they will guarantee the battery for eight years, meaning that if it loses more than a quarter of its full charge when new, they will replace it. audi hasn't done much in the way of electric for the past ten years either, although now they have this. sorry, that's another concept car. now, they have this. they've started with the popular

style family suv but at more than £70,000, can many families afford it? yeah, i think there is this perception in the market that you have to pay more for the electric version of the same vehicle as you would for the gas or diesel. at least you can see that we are going into allot lower segment in order to make electrification more affordable. there are not many families who could afford 90,000 euros for a car? sure there are. but surely some things will never lose the roar of a combustion engine. now, when land rover decide to make the defender electric, well, then you know there is a trend going on. it also updates its own software over the air. and then there were the sports cars. this was porsche‘s first

all electric car and it shifts. 0—62 in 3.2 seconds. with a range of up to 279 miles and a guarantee on that battery. ok, it's £115,000 but that's a 12k saving on its petrol equivalent, the 9/11 actual turbo. good value maybe but i have a feeling that it is that vw that will turn out to be super competitive as an entry model for most. that was dan playing with the everyday and the not so everyday. now, from electric to self driving cars. for the past couple of years or so they have been tested on the roads of arizona, usa. but in 2018, things went badly wrong when one of them failed to stop and killed a pedestrian. last year, i visited the state to find out how the locals felt about living with autonomous vehicles.

in chandler there is the same mix of excitement and concern about self driving cars that we have seen everywhere. the differences, for these people, it is happening right in front of them, right now. it's big money saying, hey, listen, this is cool, this is new. i'm sure you would like this because you see it and it is fascinating. at the same time you're costing people theirjobs and people who are taking over families. this is something you'd would see on tv as a kid in old 905 movies of self driving cars and the fact that it is actually here and at our fingertips i think it is incredible. drivers are going to lose their jobs, cab drivers will lose theirjobs and not only will they lose theirjobs, i promise you they're going to try and figure out a way to make machines great these cars so they are not going to let

humans create the cars. do i trust the machine with my children's lives? i don't know if i could do that or not. and last year, the fears of the community became a reality. but the number of accidents involving self driving cars is very low, for the millions of miles of testing that have taken place. testing continues both in the states and elsewhere around the world. but most experts agree we are still quite a few years away from seeing the widespread use of cars that can safely drive themselves. not least because the legal framework to allow it is still being thrashed out. now, another big development in tech this year has been the long—awaited arrival of 56.

has it changed your life yet? well, among other things, sg promises to connect everything all of the time. and when i say everything, i mean everything. in this idyllic patch of british countryside the birds are cheerfully singing and the cows are peacefully grazing. but look closer and you will see there is something very different about these cows, linking them to a unique experiment. this dairy farm in somerset is one of the first test—beds for 56 in the uk. the cows are wearing sensors and all the data is being sent to the cloud and back to the farmer who can make decisions based on this data. almost every task on this farm can be automated. these cows are queueing up patiently to be robotically milked. this system allows the cow to choose how many times a day and at what time it wants

to be milked. the robot picks up on how much milk is coming from each of the cow's udders and can control the sensitivity of the milk in as well. the cows here come and go as they please with little human interaction with their movements. so one of these cows has just taken itself for a massage. 56, it could change the life of cows forever. and from one minor miracle to the promise of another now. space travel for ordinary folk like us. last autumn, mark was invited to new mexico in the states to see the world's first commercial spaceport. it's a little after 7am and i'm heading into the desert in new mexico about 20 miles past a place called truth 0r consequences.

thank you very much. thank you. the only way that you can get to space today is with the russians and they are currently charging nasa around $80 million a ticket. spaceport america is the new home of virgin galactic, the company founded by billionaire sir richard branson to take paying customers on 90 minute flights to the edge of space. the spaceport‘s exterior is the product of british architects. eventually five spaceships and two carrier aircraft will reside in the hangar. passengers will also receive three days‘s training here before blasting off into the upper atmosphere. and spaceship from base you are go...

it's also home to mission control, where all flight operations are monitored for blue prom. are monitored for blue from. this is the very first time that a tv crew has been allowed to film inside this room. when do you think virgin galactic is going to be putting paying customers up into space? what is the date? right now we think we can start commercial operations next year. the world of course has bigger problems to solve than just trying to get us off of it. in 2019, green issues and sustainability came to the fore. extinction rebellion, greta thunburg and the uk's commitment to become carbon neutral by 2050. last year, i met up with the first scientist to suggest that as well as stopping emitting

greenhouse gases, we might be able to use technology to pull them back out of the atmosphere. it's called the artificial tree. the air passes through these filters, which are made of a very special material because the c02 actually clings to this material as the air passes over it. now once these filters are saturated with carbon dioxide, this whole thing moves down into a container of water, where this particular material releases the c02 into the sealed container. and then, congratulations, you have captured yourself some c02 here. this is the brainchild of this man here at the aptly named negative emission station. we realise this is a waste management problem, it was very clear to me in the early 90s that sometime in the 21st century we will have to stop.

he was the first scientist back in 1999 to publish a scientific paper suggesting carbon capture from the air was a feasible way of combating climate change. and once you have captured the carbon, the next problem is what you're going to do with it. we can use the c02 to create drinks like beer or soda or whatever. we can also use c02 for fuel production. there are also currently studies ongoing to see if we can somehow use the c02 as a building material. yet, in the future, we may be able to lock c02 into concrete. climate change is getting ever more urgent and so the work to combat it is getting ever more important. isn't that right, alexa? yes, it is, spencer. you've been quite popular as well have a new? i have.

responding to everything we ask you to do. i'm always listening to you, spencer. not so good to reacting to other sounds like dogs barking or alarms. i'm sure, maybe, i am. yeah, thanks, alexa. paul carter earlier in the year went to see a british company that is teaching voice assistance some new tricks. so these waveforms here that i can see on the 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 listing for. and when it identifies them we should hear it and act on it. hey, marty, i can hear you barking.

as it is late and you're home alone, i'm going to let your owner know. i'm going to put on somejazz as i know how much you like it. but dogs are only the beginning. the space here can be used to record an enormous range of sounds from dramatic... to the more low—key. so there is no short cut to this sort of thing, you have to have the data sets. so we have had to go out and collect those data. so we have the world's largest collection of audio data, 15 million event files that help us train that technology itself. and of course we couldn't leave without taking a sledgehammer to some windows. smashing! now, lara has been actually busy of the last year and when we asked her to pick her highlights from 2019 she chose this next film. like many of us, she has been worried about how the big tech companies are using our data to target us with ads, decide what we see on social media or even possibly influence how we might vote.

and so in the summer she joined two of click‘s production crew in a unique theatre experience to make us all think twice. we have been instructed to go to a pub near london bridge where we are delivered a message. we need you, sarah needs you. keep your phone to hand and await further instructions, josh. are you sarah? yes. do you know josh? yes. we are told about secret mine shifting experience where we give up our memories. memory deletion basically. and you don't remember because it is a procedure you had done. i went behind the scenes with one of the creators to learn what is going on here. we get sent their name and e—mail by the ticketing divider. we can run a data enrichment on that person. it will start to pull up things like related people, my personal e—mail address, anything that could be relevant. even if we don't know

exactly how it is relevant. from that point we can start curating the imagery. i'm looking for the dossier they created on you. as the show unfolds, tension builds until the big reveal. the dossier on you. concocted from your online life. i have no idea what we are confining these files. what is this? wow. wow, my old boss from years ago. i am really careful about not putting anything personal online, yet still what they found surprised me. my first thought was that if you put my name into a search engine you would find far more relevant and meaningful information than the pictures that are hear. that's true but at the same time you would know where

that came from and it would lose a little bit of mystery. delete the information in the cells, get rid of it all. 0k, everybody out now. you need to go. go. give me the memory sticks because if i don't have them then he will. it has been a pretty intense experience but the thing that it has really left me with is i want to hold onto my data. the show has really stuck with me. yet a few weeks on, has my behaviour change? has my behaviour changed? of course not, i really want my online life to be easy, so i'm still handing over my data left right and centre. but maybe i'm just yet to be struck by what that means in the real world. that was lara, i wonder whether she is contemplating less data sharing for her new years‘s resolution. those were the big moments and big things from 2019. who knows what 2020 will bring? well, to get an idea, next week we're going to be at the world's biggest tech expo in las vegas and we hope you can be there with us.

hold on tight, this right does not stop. we will see you there. good morning. once again there will be some sunnier breaks across parts of the country through today, but for many of you it's going to be a fairly cloudy day like yesterday, bringing just the odd, fleeting shower in the west. the breeze starting to pick up, signs of something much windier next week. but with that light wind through the night and into the morning, clearest of the skies across eastern areas, this is where they could be a touch of frost around. further west, cloud too thick, the wind coming in from the south—west and a fairly mild start here. we will see fleeting, light showers in the west and more persistent rain in the hebrides, spreading into the highlands to 0rkney and shetland, introducing milder weather here compared with yesterday.

and the breeze will be picking up elsewhere, but for the best of the breaks, east of wales, the midlands, best favoured. same too to the north—east of mainland scotland and across the board, cloud or sunshine, temperatures around eight to 12 degrees. we finish today with heavy rain in the north of scotland. that clears away. other than a few showers in the west, most will have a dry and mild night to take us through sunday night into monday. of course, the return to work for many of you after the christmas break, butjust look what is waiting in the wings, our weather is set to return to a very lively note as we go into next week. a pretty active jet stream blowing across the atlantic and each little dip in this jet stream will see subsequent areas of low pressure develop. the first one spreads northwards across iceland as we go through into monday, spreading its weather fronts southwards and eastwards into the uk and ireland and with it, strong to gale force winds. the wettest weather to begin with is across ireland on monday morning, spreading into much of scotland during the day, into wales, western part of england during the afternoon.

many parts of central and eastern england will stay dry throughout monday and there could be some spells of hazy sunshine at times and brighter weather to finish with in northern ireland. temperatures across the board roughly around nine to 11 degrees once more. but as we head into monday night, an even more potent area of low pressure will start to arrive from the north. this one, much larger as well, so the extent of the stronger winds will be greater too. a very windy day across the board. best of any dry weather to the south and east, a few showers here and there. but heavy rain across the north and west of scotland and at times, in northern ireland. it's here we'll see the strongest of the winds — could touch 60, 70 80 mph in north west scotland. but winds elsewhere could cause some travel disruption and they will be bringing in some exceptionally mild air. could peak at at 16 celsius around the moray firth. 15 degrees, northern ireland and the north—east of wales too. even though we have the mild air, it may not feel like it in the winds and those winds could be pretty disruptive. stay tuned to the forecast.

this is bbc world news. i'm maryam moshiri. our top stories: rockets land near the us embassy in the iraqi capital — just hours after thousands across the countryjoined a funeral procession for assassinated iranian general qasem soleimani. australia suffers one of the worst bushfire days of the season as temperatures nudge 50 celsius and strong winds whip up the flames. this is what the firefighters are dreading, because it fans these blazes, making them unstoppable, but it also spreads those embers, making the fire behaviour quite unpredictable. 00:00:00,000 --> 4294966103:13:29,430 in indonesia jumps—effie—