us president, joe biden has arrived in the uk, on his first trip abroad since taking office. he's due to attend the g7 summit of world leaders in cornwall, where the agenda will include, covid recovery, climate change and trade. the eu has doubled down on its threat to take action against the uk — after talks about the implementation of post—brexit trading arrangements in northern ireland ended without a breakthrough. delayed border checks are due to start at the end of this month. lawyers for the russian opposition activist, alexei navalny, say they will appeal against a court ruling that in effect bans his political movement. supporters face being barred from running for public office, with parliamentary elections due to take place in september. the ruling has been condemned by britain and the united states.

now on bbc news, it's time for click. this week: the giant coming to a city near you. a giant leap for disability. and thrilling rides on giant screens. hey, hey! hey, hay! it's one of my favourite fests. we've been coming to the hay literary festival for quite a few years now, each time meeting amazing people who've written on fascinating topics.

and every so often, someone has stolen the show and stopped our world spinning. can you see it? sobs yeah! i'm sorry. the town of hay—on—wye has more bookshops than you can throw a thriller at and they are usually packed with festival—goers. and after an enforced year online in 2020, the organisers are taking tentative steps back into town. as are we. welcome to click at hay, 2020...1. ok, i said "tentative" steps. anyway, today, we're going to be talking about al, which, of course, is very big, artificial insemination. and then... next year, though. promise. but in the meantime, some of hay 21's events are being streamed from the cinema around the back of richard booth�*s beautiful bookshop. and later on, we'll bring you one of the most inspiring stories from the festival.

first, i want to tell you a tall tale from the emerald isle. a very tall tale, indeed. it's one of the most famous stories ever written. it's actually called: travels into several remote nations of the world, in four parts, by lemuel gulliver, first a surgeon and then a captain of several ships, but you probably know it better as gulliver's travels. well, well! what have we got here? 300 years after the book was written, i'm following in the footsteps of its author jonathan swift to the place that inspired him to write the novel in the first place. this is belvedere house in county westmeath, bang in the centre of ireland. so, the story goes that jonathan swift was standing about here, looking across the lake, where there is actually a place called lilliput. and he thought, "wow, those people in the distance are really small". and the rest is history.

i said, why isn't there a giant gulliver here in belvedere house? paddy dunning is a music manager and proprietor of several museums. he's rubbed shoulders with the likes of u2, rem and dame shirley bassey, and now he wants to make some icons of his own. we designed a beautiful statue in wood — larch wood — and we would build a viewing tower from the hat. and inside would be a heritage centre, a museum dedicated not just to jonathan swift, but to the writers of the county. so that was where it started. it didn't end there, though, did it? so we came up with what is the concept now, which is a statue that has a matrix skin and now, we have just launched the giant project, which is the search for 2! sites, to build 2! giants around the world. voice-over: people | of the world, welcome to the giant.

the giant will be an interactive visitor attraction centred around a huge, human—shaped moving structure with cafes, restaurants, shops and a museum to boot, literally at the boot. the project is currently being masterminded at paddy's residential recording studio, grouse lodge, and it's caught the attention of eric fraad, an opera director, music producer, movie—maker and all—round creative, who wanted to make sure that the statue could represent absolutely anybody. one of the possibilities was it's a gigantic statue, and it's androgynous and therefore, with the leds, you know, not projected but actually revealed on it, it makes it much more spectacular and transformable rather than a static image. what kind of shape did you end up going for? essentially, it is an amalgamation of the facial shape of a man,

a woman and a child. the human eye, it cheats. the human eye fills in so much that's not there. if you give it a hint, it will fill in an awful lot and that is part of what it is. chuckles. is it big enough, do you think? and bear in mind this is only a small scale concept model. it will be covered with millions and millions of pixels of addressable leds. that is all fed to controllers. the more control you have over the leds, then the greater spectral variations you can have with colour, with intensity. we've managed to get this big, massive movement up to the sky, the winning pose, so that's

a big, massive movement. these are 60—80 foot long arms that will weigh tonnes. if the giant is on the ground on top of the museum, - you'd need an acre. interestingly, somebody. in new york has been on, and they can do it on airspace, land that is really interesting. i what's — what do you that mean, airspace? airspace means that they would put it on top of an existing - building. because of covid, a lot| of the cities are looking at how are they going to get tourism back? | how are they going to get people back into their - countries and their cities? what is the draw going to be? we do think that the technology that we've got will be the future of statues, and there won't be just an image of one person. we think that images will change as society changes. and in fact, the image that paddy thinks will draw most

attention is the image of you. part of the visitor experience will involve getting your whole body scanned and then thrown up onto the statue for all to see. voice-over: the world's most awe-inspiring selfie! _ you can look up and you will become the giant. you are calling this the world's biggest selfie. it is the world's biggest selfie! there's nothing like it on the planet. you can't ignore it, can you? it's so big, it's going to be gigantic. poor, poorfoolish little people. - look what you've done. with goliath ambitions, the giant company hopes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and plans to roll out the first five by the end of this year. 0ne things for sure — the scope of that task will be enormous. when i first heard about this project, i thought it was nuts. but then i got here and i saw the scale model of the head and i started to understand

how it could work and the technology needed to bring this to life is proven — it'sjust coloured leds — so maybe the main question is whether people will want it. but we're living in the century of the selfie, so, i kinda have a feeling they will. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that huawei launched its self—developed operating system harmony0s in an attempt to challenge google's dominance in smartphone software. the eu and bill gates announced a push for $1 billion to accelerate clean tech. and big news — ebay updated its terms of service, meaning that sellers can no longer use paypal. also this week, a cyberattack hit the world's largest meat supplier. computer networks atjbs were hacked, temporarily shutting down some operations in australia, canada and the us.

the ransomware attack could lead to shortages of meat or raise prices for consumers. a drone has filmed itself crashing into the lava flow of a volcano. it happened in the south—west of iceland, where youtube and drone pilotjoey helms tried capturing the fagradalsfjall volcano, which has been erupting since march. and finally, a not—at—all creepy robot which copies you. scientists at columbia university in new york used deep learning to teach robot ava to mimic the expressions of people around it. ava can express six basic emotions — anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise. the aim of the technology is to build trust between humans and robotic co—workers and caregivers in real—world applications, such as hospitals, schools and homes. of course, these machines are not softening us up before they become our robotic overlords. the hay festival is

steeped in tradition — a place where people come to exchange their screens for a good old—fashioned book. but the pandemic has forced even the most conventional to adapt, and this appearance has gone beyond digital and has proved no gimmick. i am a transitioning cyborg. this is peter scott—morgan, and he has motor neurone disease, also known as als. but he's also a doctor of robotics and he calls himself the world's first human cyborg. peter was diagnosed with als in 2015 and that was when he decided to use technology to overcome the extreme difficultits that he knew that he would face. he said that he chose to thrive rather than die. there have been two sides to peter's transformation — the physical and the virtual. and in a minute, stephen fry

will talk to one side about the other. but first, nick kwek has been looking at how peter 2.0 has been realised. today, i'm in the scottish capital of edinburgh, a city with a rich history of storytelling, where novel ideas come to life and the art of discourse has been mastered. i'm here to meet the engineers putting personality into synthetic voice. voice is part of what we are, it's part of our souls, it's the way we communicate, it betrays where we're from, our emotions, our motives, everything. dr matthew aylett and his team have been banking peter's voice so that peter can continue to talk now it is gone. he had to have his vocal tract removed, so before that happened, we recorded him extensively and then we were able to recreate his voice in a speech synthesis system so he can now type in text and it will speak

exactly the way that he used to speak. text—to—speech technology has been around for a while. we all remember microsoft sam, right? sam speaks monotonously: h 3 voice sounded a tad monotonous. peter provided far more than the average voice sample recording amount — 15 hours' worth of material. in order to make a voice, you take that audio and you use a neural net system to learn how the sounds in the voice relate to the words that are being spoken. once you have that model built, you can put a new set of words in and it will produce a new output with that voice. to better convey sentiment for specific scenarios, peter captured himself speaking in four different styles. tone of voice is very important. tone of voice is very important! tone of voice is very important. he also tirelessly recorded 3,000 stock phrases, which he can quickly

drop into conversation. a little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but is not half as bad as a lot of ignorance! right, 0k. he doesn't want an automatic voice which talks for him, he wants an automatic voice which he can control. the whole idea of human—centred ai is to work as a partnership, and peter has got a great phrase — he sort of describes it as a "jazz combo". it's like the idea of two systems working together to produce something which is greater than the sum of their parts. and create, they have — they have taught peter 2.0 how to sing. # come with me... # and you'll be... # ..in a world of pure imagination! this is brilliant! # take a look... how did you manage that, then? well, again... are you willy wonka? no!

laughs it's about communication, not just about the words you say. they've taken things even further by combining his synthetic voice with a virtual avatar, which is a work in progress. it's pretty amazing what technology can do these days. so, where does the ai start, and peter stop? there is a sort of path of least resistance, obviously. if the ai says stuff in a certain way, it's easy to say, well, let'sjust do that then, but then how do you get the balance right? the real key is for the al to be personalised to peter, rather thanjust being a default system. you are watching click at hay festival. that was nick, so what can peter 2.0 do? that's what stephen fry asked at this year's hay festival, and this was the answer. speaks french translation: and if one day i start sounding like a classicl american newscaster it is because i can,

and it seemed like an interesting idea to try. and it is still the real me. ok, here are some highlights from peter's session at the festival. stephen, it is absolutely wonderful to be talking with you. thanks so much for inviting me. it is going to be fun. i think it is, it's going to be fun and fascinating. - first things first, _ you have described yourself as a transitioning cyborg. how do you define a cyborg? cyborg is a fancy word for part human, part machine. in my case, what has never been done before is that the most important machine parts of me will be ai, not mechanics, and that all potentially gets a bit weird. not least because i am planning to use more and more ai, to look at everything from speaking to controlling

things to moving about. i think that it is fair to say. that we could describe your journey to becoming the world's ifirst ever cyborg, real cyborg, i outside science fiction, - begins with, how can i put it, a wonky foot. so, my very first symptom was as you so accurately categorised, a wonky foot, but it then took a year to get a diagnosis. there is no test for mnd. if you are going to have a terminal disease, mnd is the one to go for~ _ there is no nausea, no pain, and usually, your brain stays as sharp as ever, and the terminal bit turns out to be negotiable.

with that said, it has been dubbed the world's cruellest disease which inevitably sucks the joy out of life, but i found that the key to imagine total paralysis is to imagine that you're in a luxury spa hotel, and they insist that you put your feet up and don't move a muscle. it's brilliant. at one point you write . about the fork in the road which we try to get at howl humanity, notjust for you, but the word human i involves alongside ai, and for you as a living. embodiment of ai, this is something you feel passionately about. l way back in the early '80s, i was preparing my dissertation for what turned out to be the first robotics phd in the uk. based on this and against the advice of both my professor and my publisher, i ended my first robotics textbook with these words: "if the path of enhanced human is followed, then it will be possible for mankind and robots to remain on the same

evolutionary branch rather than humanity watch the robots split away. in this way, mankind will one day be able to replace its all too vulnerable bodies with more permanent mechanisms and use the supercomputers as intelligence amplifiers. " that was 1984. ever since, i've advocated for making ai our partner rather than rival. can you make any predictionsl as to how our daily lives might actually play out, - how they might look? especially for those with disabilities... or at extreme old age. we are at the early dawn of escaping the fear of becoming powerless and feeling trapped in an inadequate body. some people are pessimistic about al and humanity, but i have to say, from my perspective, from everything i know, i feel incredibly excited about our future. i understand that you have a world—first that you have chosen to reveal here and now,

to me, and to our audience. . hello, i am peter 2.0. welcome to the future. now, if there is one thing i know about lj rich it's that she loves her thrills. here she is on a vr roller—coaster from a few years ago so when we found out that legoland had a new flying theatre ride, well, there was one person we could send to find out how it works. like many of us, i often dreamt of flying as a child. i think that's why i love thrill rides and theme parks. secure the harness, forget your daily worries and simply escape into the sky for a few

beautiful minutes. this is the newly opened flight of the sky lion at legoland, the uk's first flying theatre ride and i'm lucky enough to be in before it opens to the public. it's like vr without the headset! the only person on one of seven gondolas spread across three floors. the ultimate in social distancing. it is a wonderful, complex mix of creativity and technology. behind the scenes, the maintenance team kindly put the ride into manual. when the ride starts, the gondola rotates towards and into a concave, 20—metre high screen. here's a close—up of the motorised mechanics in action, which is surprisingly quiet. there are three for each axis, allowing for a 30—degree swing

and 23 degrees pitch, and degrees of yaw, or left to right. and, during the ride, fragrant mist is sprayed from onboard canisters so that we can smell sea air baby lava dragon burps. it is clear how much the video, lighting and music add to the atmosphere. the sight, the sound, smell, the movement, to be as overwhelming as it is, and to know how the technology works, but even knowing how it works, it works on my body, physically, in a way that is quite astounding. inside the control room, the ride operator monitors the gondola's precise movements, and theo is one of those responsible for working out how exactly how it is moving and when. 0n the computer, first, we would understand where those peaks are and where those drops are, and we would programme that in, and we would essentially go for a ride, and we would film that ride and also speak

whilst we were riding it, and we had a big digital meter on the ride, so that we could say, at two minutes ten, we need to bring this movement back, or we need to exaggerate that big drop, at three minutes ten, we are going to bring that forward. the video creators also need to have intimate knowledge of how the ride moves. one of the first things that we actually start i with is the ride envelope, what are - the degrees of motion? three degrees forward and back, pitch and roll, stuff _ like that, so all of those - mechanical engineering things that are built into the way - that we work with our camera. even though the ride envelope may be x, you can trick- the brain into y, because even though the seat only moves i a little bit down, if we thenl continue the camera further down, then slow down the way that the seat moves down - and speed up the camera, - you have the sense that you're going much faster than you may actually be, or you may be - going at a steeper rate - of descent than you actually are, so it is understanding - the mechanical engineering side of it and then kind of howl

we actually trick the brain. outside, the sculptures hold 1.76 million lego bricks, they're hybrid lego animals which move when you access them through the app, and augmented reality contactless safari, and post—covid, the park's director is optimistic that most of us will eventually return. the last year has been challenging with the pandemic. we've had measures in place such a social distancing, so we have had to reduce the number of people coming actually into the park in the first place. we do collaborate with competitors on something like this. it is very important that we as an industry can get guests through the door again for the longer term recovery. there'sjust time for one more ride.

that was lj rich having the time of her life. we have enjoyed being back in hay and hopefully next year we will be back for the full shebang, don't forget, you can get us on facebook, instagram and twitter, @bbcclick. thanks for watching, and we'll see you soon. hello. two main points to take from our forecast for the next five days. number one, there is very little rain on the way for the uk as a whole, and number two — temperatures will be sitting above average for the majority of us in the days ahead. the reason for this weather, this ridge of high pressure which extends up

from the azores. we will see various weather fronts trying to push their way in to the north—west. there'll be some rain for the northern isles on thursday. more cloud around in general and some patchy, light rain possible around western coasts and hills, often quite mucky and murky here with mist and fog as well. best of the sunshine on thursday will be for central and eastern england. quite windy to the north. that could break the cloud up quite nicely across eastern scotland, seeing temperatures up to 23 around the moray firth. further south, 211—25 across central and eastern england. 0vernight thursday into friday, we do start to see a weather front having a bit more success working its way south across the uk, but not bearing anything significant in the way of rain. it basicallyjust introduces some slightly lower humidity here, so slightly less muggy across the northern half of the uk first thing on friday. to the south, still a warm and humid start, and a cold weather front works its way south through the day, but you can barely make it out. it's essentially a few showers

drifting their way south across england and wales. the odd one may be sharper, but certainly, the majority of places will stay dry. ahead of the front, still looking at temperatures in the mid—20s, a little down on thursday thanks to more cloud. to the north, it will feel fresher, but temperatures still into the high teens, even the low 20s. and then, through the weekend, the high pressure plumbs us into a more southerly airstream once again. it keeps things fine and it also bumps those temperatures back up after that brief dip behind the cold front on friday. there's what's left of the cold front heading off into the continent. here is saturday. aside from a bit of cloud across western scotland and perhaps northern ireland, wall—to—wall sunshine and temperatures above average across the uk. for sunday, just the chance of a little more in the way of rain getting pushed in on the front to western scotland. elsewhere, though, again, a lot of dry weather. sunday, if anything, the warmest of the two days. eastern scotland up to 2a, perhaps close to 30 in the south—east.

a warm welcome to viewers in the uk and around the world. this is bbc news with mark lobel. our top stories: president biden arrives in the uk for the g7 summit — it's his first foreign tour since taking office injanuary. the united states is back and democracies of the world are standing together to tackle the toughest challenges. the eu says its patience is "wearing very thin" with the uk, in talks aimed at avoiding a trade war over border checks with northern ireland. sky—gazers delight — amateur astronomers across the northern hemisphere await a partial eclipse of the sun. those in the arctic will have the best view. and, curfew stops play — the quarter— finals of the french tennis 0pen

are disrupted by coronavirus restrictions, as 5,000 fans