hello, this is bbc news. we'll be taking a look at tomorrow morning's papers in a moment

with our guests. anger and confusion for thousands of a—level and gcse students in england, as the exam regulator withdraws its guidance on appealing against grades, hours after publishing it. lancashire police say two bodies have been found by the coastguard, during the search for two teenagers. the department of health and social care neither confirms nor denies reports that there's to be a shake—up of public health england. an enormous crowd of opposition supporters gathers in the centre of the belarussian capital minsk, to protest last weekend's disputed election.

hello and welcome to our look ahead to what the papers with me are andy silvester, deputy editor of city am, and the journalist and author yasmin alibhai—brown. tomorrow's front pages. the metro leads on the angry student protests outside downing street, after the controversy over a—level exam results. the ‘i' reports on the two legal challenges, launched by students, against the statitistical model used by the exam regulator, quual, to calculate the results. the daily telegraph claims that some quual board members want to ditch the algorithm, putting them at odds with the education secretary gavin williamson, who supports it the guardian reports on the criticism from both

conservative and labour mps, with headteachers calling for a scotland—style solution of using teachers‘ assessments. the daily mail says the prime minister is facing calls to delay this thursday's gcse results by two weeks, so as to avoid a repeat and allow those grades to be revised the times says borisjohnson is being warned the times says boris johnson is being warned by mps in his own party that they will go on the warpath unless there is a satisfactory solution to the a—level fiasco. the financial times says the government is considering state—backed loans for companies in debt, as a way of rescuing the high street. so, let's begin. let's start off, yasmin and andy, we start with the metro. yasmin, do you wa nt to start with the metro. yasmin, do you want to kick us off, people power? yes, what can one say? ijust feel

so sorry yes, what can one say? ijust feel so sorry for young people in our country. a—levels is your turning point in life and. it is the point at which your future is decided and so at which your future is decided and so they were out protesting, not that that will do them any good, but what i think they need to know is that most people in this country, whatever your political colour, are deeply upset and alarmed at this fiasco. this betrayal of the young. yes, there does seem to be agreement that something has gone very, very wrong. andy? yes, absolutely, i suppose it is not always the most challenging thing to find some teenagers angry about a tory government, but there is anger as you said has gone far more widespread thanjust you said has gone far more widespread than just to the usual suspects, both in politics and across the country. this evening, there has even been a letter from there has even been a letter from the headmaster of eton to the parents and pupils that saying they

are not very happy. you do wonder really, if you are in the centre of government, what, for the last two weeks, it could have happened after, this happened in scotland, there was widespread anger when a similar situation occurred and it is difficult to shake the suspicion that rather than seeing this train wreck coming, nobody seems to have noticed until thursday morning that this was going to be a problem. yasmin, you said it is not going to get them anything, do you really think that the attention that they are getting will not change mr williamson or the prime minister's mines? i think it will have two. the thing that brought nick clegg down from being one of the most popular politicians in this country was when he turned, he kind of betrayed the student population on student fees, he was never forgiven.

student population on student fees, he was neverforgiven. even student population on student fees, he was never forgiven. even tories, high tories, would not forgive... by the way, where is borisjohnson? at nicola sturgeon got up and said sorry. where is borisjohnson? this whole thing is happening and it is a catastrophe, where is he? what is he doing? he is on none of these papers. gavin williamson, not a very bright button in the box, i do have to say at. we are in trouble. we are going to turn to the front page of the daily telegraph are andy, and there seems to be a bit of a split forming between quual and gavin williamson. yes, it is basically that some members of the quual board are now moving towards a essentially believing the least bad option so to speak is to go with a full u—turn, call it what you want, of using pretty great, but it is essentially a full u—turn as we saw in scotland. that put those board members at odds with the education secretary. as though it sounds like

the easiest solution, that does then become a real problem of universities whose typically over offer places based on the predicted grades, working on the theory that some people will not get those grades. so you would have universities over capacity if you are to take that approach. put it this way, number ten downing st at least, maybe not the department for education, but certainly number ten would be quite pleased with that telegraph front page because as yasmin alluded to, it puts the blame sort of in a regulator and a government minister rather than really asking about what downing street was doing and the tabs on this policy. what did you make of the algorithm, yasmin?” this policy. what did you make of the algorithm, yasmin? i do not understand how this happened. this is not a normal period in our history. we are going through the most extraordinary situation. this is going to be the year when we have

to do something different for the kids taking exams, teachers note that pupils. but it is, i have to say, within some sections of the tory party, certainly in downing street, such a loathing of continuous assessment and teachers views that they brought in this algorithm and we can see what it has done. what is interesting though, four oxford colleges now, and i think cambridge is going to go the same way, feel that the only immoral thing they can do is to go by the predicted results and they will take these people is. —— the only immoral thing. other universities are going to do this, but there will still be lots and lots of pupils who predicted... the gap is enormous, and as ever, the privately educated come out on top. this may turn out

to be the biggest mistake gavin williamson ever made. you cannot palm it on to quual, like public health england is now being blamed for the failures of covid—i9. they have got to get a grip. 0k, for the failures of covid—i9. they have got to get a grip. ok, so they are talking of a u—turn —— talk of a u—turn, to return to the front page of the daily mail, the? of what is going to happen on thursday. yes, this is the gcses, looking at whether it would make sense to delay gcse results so they can look again at the algorithm and get ahead of these problems rather than, as they have shown this weekend, with guidance allegedly being published and then not being published, with tweets at 930 saying they were still working on saying this and the department for education, frankly press office is not always been the most helpful of what is going on, clearly looking ahead to thursday and whether or not they're going to

annoy another tranche of the parents. the one thing i disagree with jasmine parents. the one thing i disagree withjasmine on as i think the tories cannot regather a certain degree of, i would not say credit, but get out of it, with teflon nonstick, as if they turn quickly and come out with clear guidance, clear advice on how you can do the appeals process and work with universities to deliver at this quickly, if they do not do that, i am afraid it plays into a wider narrative which is taking hold in a lot of different newspapers, in particular, about the widespread competence of the government and whether, as britain unlocks for a knock—down, whether at the right decisions have been made at the right time. when you contrast with some of our european partners, that does not always looked like it is the case. little cost, isn't it? if we turn to the i, potentially another cost, because we are starting to see legal action that is being taken, so it does make you wonder about gavin williamson's defiance in trying to avoid grade

inflation at all costs, but it could cost them in the courts. yes, and i think there's going to be a number of legal challenges and judicial review. but, you know, ithink, it is this idea of a shambolic government, unless they get a grip, thatis government, unless they get a grip, that is now beginning to grow. i knew the tories were ruthless, work for the privileged, all of that, i never knew they could be this incompetent. andy? that is the shock at. it is an unprecedented situation, nobody in government expected injanuary situation, nobody in government expected in january that they would have to be dealing with this, but it does appear, on a number of issues, that the government has not seen at things coming you have seen ministers fidgeting in their chair when they are confronted on things like marcus rashford's free school

meals campaign and you should think you should be able to get ahead of this. novel of people do believe in the conservative party, not as a great warmth of the party, but because they trust them to run it slightly better than the other lot and that is a real problem for the conservative party if that view changes. —— a number of people do believe in the party. talking to another story about the quarantine of migrantsi another story about the quarantine of migrants i have been a total defender of migrants who turn up in whatever way because they are desperate and all of that, but i absolutely agree that the quarantine arrangements have to be very good, very thorough, for the sake of the migrants, many are young, some are children, and for the sake of this country. we have to ensure that wherever they are housed, in whatever capacity, the quarantine rules are

whatever capacity, the quarantine rules a re really whatever capacity, the quarantine rules are really strictly observed. i think to hear this may come as a bit of a surprise or shock for some people, but this is a matter of national health and the health of the migrants, so it has not been done well, partly because we are in a very desperate situation in all sorts of ways, but we have to absolutely ensure safety. andy? yes, the policy from backbench tories and the policy from backbench tories and the home affairs select committee said that we should use cruise ships which they are doing work on at them and it should be used to house migrants to ensure these quarantines exist. i completely agree with jasmine and no one would disagree that quarantines need to be enforced properly. i suppose the one thing you would look at is all of the quarantines that are in place for people coming back from france, spain, etc is nominally people doing it themselves because enforcement is

frankly next to no. -- predominantly people doing it themselves jasmine, i know you would like to pick up on that, but can we do that at 11:30pm? that's it for the papers this hour. andy and yasmin will be back at ii.30pm for another look at the papers. next, it's time for click. welcome. this week we will bring you up—to—date with one of the most important parts of the technology world, a place which is a long way from silicon valley both

geographically and culturally, a place that is now challenging the west's tech dominance. i am talking about china. this is tiananmen square in beijing. when i first went to china nearly 15 years ago, it was already clear that a mighty dragon was awakening and the next technology superpower was rearing its head. fast forward to 2020 and chinese companies have broken into the west in a big way. probably the best—known of these tiktok and huawei. and they have both drawn criticism to say the least. but tiktok is now under pressure from us regulators and may be banned by the white house. i set a date of around september 15th, at which point it will be out of business in the united states. but over in china, social media has

been evolving in a different way. earlier this year, before the pandemic took hold, stephen beckett went to beijing to meet some of the major players in the chinese social media landscape. china, with its huge population of over 1.3 billion people has plenty of room for social ideas. and the competition is intense. these are the head offices of kuaishou, they're one of the biggest social networks here, they've got over 200 million active users, but unless you're in china, you probably haven't heard of it. kuaishou has made a name for itself by targeting china's relatively—untapped rural population, and that's a lot of people — around 40% don't live in cities. and that has led to a platform where the stars aren't necessarily what you'd expect. kuaishou's secret sauce is the options it gives streamers to make their streams pay. translation: i'm a professional musician. i also give lectures via kuaishou in my spare time,

which teach people how to play the chinese sorna. i try to popularise chinese traditional music and knowledge. between sales of recorded lessons, purchases of virtual gifts during livestreams, he says he makes around £15,000 a month, and that is after kuaishou takes their 25% commission. but kuaishou's 200 million users isn't quite so impressive when you compare it to china's social titan tencent, and their so—called mega app wechat. and now wechat is becoming a daily part of life, thanks to something called mini—programs. translation: wechat mini-programs are an app that doesn't require you to download and install, they are sub—applications within the wechat ecosystem, and a new tool developed by wechat. many programmes allow third parties to add new features to wechat on demand. it's a bit like having the entire app store already on your phone.

the idea is that you can pretty much do everything you could ever want on your phone without ever closing wechat. these vending machines are set up to use wechat‘s new facial pay feature. the idea is you opt into it in the app and once you've done that, you can use your face to buy anything from these machines. it basically links your face to your face to your wechat account and your government id. but, is the convenience worth the possible cost to privacy? in 2016, amnesty international awarded the parent company of wechat, tencent, zero out of 100 for their privacy practices. i think there's a common perception that people in china don't care about their privacy, and that perception is completely false. the government over the last few years has been trying to roll out its own cybersecurity regulations and trying to educate consumers about the dangers of data being lost or leaked. wechat‘s privacy policy says it will provide the chinese government access to much of what you do in the app when legally required, including the things you type and data like your location. it's hard to deny that social

apps in china have taken on a life of their own, if not outpacing, then going in new directions to competitors in the west. the big question is whether more chinese apps can follow tiktok in going global, despite the concerns around privacy and censorship. that was stephen beckett's view of china. and since the explosion of tiktok in the west, other apps have been springing up to try and compete. and chris fox has been looking at some of the alternatives that are available. if you can't get enough of short, hyper—edited videos, luckily there are plenty of apps that have cottoned on to the format. this is triller, which i think is fair to say, has taken a bit of inspiration from tiktok. you can record clips with special effects and share them onto an endless scrolling feed of content. triller seems to have done quite well out of all this uncertainty, at the start of august, it topped the app store charts on both ios and android and has

managed to attract some big—name tiktok stars and celebrities over to its platform, including mike tyson and magician dynamo. another app offering a similar experience is byte, which has also been popping in and out of the app store top download charts. like tiktok, it offers you creative effects for your videos, although it is trailing behind triller, it's been downloaded over 1 million times on google play, whereas triller has had more than ten million. tiktok‘s biggest competition may come from instagram reels, instagram's newly—launched rival. it has incorporated many of tiktok‘s core features, including that endlessly—scrolling feed of short videos. just in the past few weeks, mark zuckerberg has appeared at a congressional hearing about big tech companies using their power to neutralise the competition. isn't ripping off tiktok essentially doing that? there is innovation everywhere and people are constantly

inspired by what they see. it's no longer a surprise to see a feed in a mobile social product, that wasn't the case until facebook brought that to scale. we brought stories to instagram in 2016. and give full credit to snap for inventing that format, but evolved it from there. so what is instagram bringing to the table with this format, that makes it different to tiktok? i think the ability to be discovered is unique to reels. i think in instagram, historically, if you had a large follower base it was easier to kind of get bigger. this is now a product specifically designed to help creators find an audience. now, to be fair to tiktok, i think the idea that you never know what video is going to go viral or who get discovered is what draws people to tiktok. it's certainly not unique to instagram reels, but i think companies are seeing tiktok has refined a winning formula and they want a piece of the action.

president trump's focus on banning tiktok has stolen most of the headlines, but it's his targeting of wechat that could have an even bigger and more profound impact on us—china relations. that's because wechat, that came onto the scene in 2011, has morphed into a colossus. it's less of an app and more like an operating system. here's kris, a chinese student studying in london explaining what it is. you can find out where have hospitals, where have restaurants, anything like that. you can find movie tickets. i have come for business and i'm selling things on it. wechat has become so big, so much a part of everyday life, it has become totally essential to its more than 1 billion users. this is winnie, originally from malaysia, who has lived in london for ten years. how would you describe it to you, how important is it? it's part of my life.

old people like my mum only know how to send a message, similar in whatsapp, but wechat is easy for them. if i didn't have wechat, my mum would cry. it is the family connection, home feeling. if i don't have this, i feel lonely. tencent, the owner of wechat, won't say how many users it has outside of china, but it's thought to run into the tens of millions. it, along with other chinese apps, has caught the attention of the us authorities. president trump has mentioned impending action on tiktok, and for good reason. tiktok is a very different beast to wechat. to start with, tiktok says it doesn't hold any of its data inside china and it would never give that data to the chinese government. many security experts, though, believe it is wechat that holds a much greater security risk. this is the former chief security officer for yahoo and facebook. alex stamos. wechat is one of the most

popular messaging apps in the world, used by the entire chinese diaspora and people run entire companies on wechat, they have incredibly sensitive communication, they probably do things which could open them up to blackmail and so those are the apps i would start with before an app like tiktok, which is mostly dancing teens. wechat has long been criticised for censoring users in china. then a canadian analytics company, citizen lab, looked into how wechat moderated its users outside of china. we find routinely that topics related to perennial taboo issues like tiananmen square, hong kong, falun gong, anything to do with tibet or the dalai lama, those are pretty routinely censored. data to security isn't the only reason trump has decided to ban wechat. it is far more political than that. and to be honest it is hard to look past the fact that these tech companies have

been sucked into a wider geopolitical battle between two superpowers. and that's it for the short cut of click for this week. there is so much more in the full—length version which is waiting for you right now on iplayer. next week, we're going to be looking at another hugely important topic — the technology being used to fight climate change. until then, you can keep up with us on social media, on youtube, facebook, instagram and twitter @bbcclick. thanks for watching, and we'll see you soon. hello, there. we have seen some very lively thunderstorms across parts

of england and wales during sunday afternoon and some of them really have been spectacular. take a look at this waterspout which was spotted out to sea off the coast of portishead in north somerset, some really spectacular weather watcher pictures have been coming in from that. today we have seen low pressure across the near continent, so a lot of cloud but hiding in this cloud we have seen some big thunderstorms and those storms started off across western parts of norfolk, western parts of suffolk and essex, worked into hertfordshire, cambridge and are continuing to work into lincolnshire and across the midlands. eventually will reach wales. the thing with these storms is they are bringing torrential rain. in bedford, we had 28 millimetres of rain in the space ofjust one hour. we could see 30 or a0 millimetres of rain in the most intense of these downpours. so there is the risk of seeing some flash flooding from the storms. the northern limit of the storms probably getting really into merseyside, cheshire, north wales as well. temperatures overnight, 15 to 16 for many of us and quite murky, mist and fog patches around some

of our coast and hills and the odd patch of drizzle. but for monday, really, we have more unsettled weather to come. an area of low pressure is going to be drifting northwards, so although you might start off with some bright skies, even a bit of morning sunshine, we are looking at some further, heavy thundery showers and notice there is some rain drifting further north with this time, also affecting northern ireland and scotland, where it has been mainly dry over recent days. tuesday, we have more of those showers to come. again, some are slow moving, heavy and thundery, perhaps some of the heaviest ones working across northern england and scotland by this stage, but nowhere is immune from seeing the odd downpour. bit of sunshine between those showers, temperatures are still widely getting into the low to mid 20s and are still feeling slightly on the humid side, but we are going to see some changes towards the middle of the week. low pressure comes in off the atlantic and as these weather fronts move across the country, eventually it will introduce some fresher air. should be a dry start to the day for many of us on wednesday, but cloud and rain will spread in across england, wales

and northern ireland as we had through wednesday afternoon, leaving the best of the dry and sunny weather in scotland. temperatures for most of us into the low 20s, but it will be quite windy, especially for wales and south—west england. and really, towards the end of the week on the weekend, it stays quite unsettled, it will turn quite a bit fresher.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. in belarus — huge crowds fill the streets in one of the biggest protests yet against the president. but alexander lukashenko remains defiant — telling his supporters he won't give up his country, after a week of demonstrations against his contested re—election. student activists stage more anti—government rallies in bangkok, demanding political change and reforms to the monarchy. and — as the democratic party prepare to hold their