the withdrawal of nato troops from afghanistan, calling the decision "unbelievably bad" before warning that in his opinion, civilians were being left to be "slaughtered" by the taliban. president biden insisted soldiers will be pulled out by september 11th. south africa is to increase to 25,000 the number of troops deployed in response to widespread violence sparked by the jailing of former presidentjacob zuma. the government has said the unrest had brought shame on the entire country. the pop singer britney spears has secured the right to choose her own lawyer, as she tries to end the conservatorship that controls her personal and business affairs. the approval comes three weeks after the singer made an emotional address in which she called the existing arrangement "abusive". now on bbc news,

click looks at the tech trying to recreate the hajj experience for those unable to attend due to the pandemic. this week — the hajj through digital art. 3d glasses and 3d houses. and how about a glass of wine made with al? hey, welcome to click! hope you've had a good week. lara, how are you doing? i'm good — just trying to plan for another summer of the unknown! yep! another one of those is on its way, isn't it? summer is gonna be different for everyone once again this year, and that includes the many muslims

who would normally be about to undertake hajj. hajj is the pilgrimage that's made by around 2.5 million muslims every year from all across the globe to mecca, saudi arabia, and this year, it's happening in july. it's one of the most important acts of faith that a muslim can undertake, and it's said to amaze those who do. but of course, in the last couple of years, the coronavirus has led the saudi authorities to severely limit the number of people who are allowed to visit. however, another way to experience hajj — retelling its story using the objects and works of art associated with this sacred journey — is about to become available to everyone. and 0mar mehtab has been taking a look. the first part of my learning journey was to visit the v&a museum in london. and just being here in one of the special exhibitions, as well as the islamic art

galleries, something started to stir inside of me — almost a connection to the ancient past. the pilgrimage is to mecca, the birthplace of islam. but many also visit medina, the second holiest city for muslims. now, i've not personally been on hajj — it's supposed to happen at least once in every muslim's lifetime, but only after you're settled and haven't got any debts or obligations. and that's not me at the moment, so i'm not gonna be there anytime soon. however, being here and seeing these artworks, especially from mecca medina, really makes me — makes me want to learn more about my religion and the culture that surrounds it. this is special. so the next leg in my journey to learn more has taken me to a large space in south london, where a dozen pieces of art relating to hajj

are being digitised. they are from the khalili collections, which includes what's considered to be the largest and most significant group of objects relating to the cultural history of hajj. and its founder is sir david khalili. i didn't start collecting islamic art because it was islamic, because it was the most diverse group of art i've ever seen. every piece had a message. but the story of hajj has never been told through the object that was produced culturally to honour the place. as you are not allowed to go to mecca medina, but through the experience of collecting objects for the last 50 years of my life, i feel like i'm there anyhow. i virtually feel the soul of the artists have produced these objects through their beliefs. now, an obvious way to share

art is through digitisation. but for it to really work and notjust be 2—dimensional, the art needs to live and breathe — every brushstroke of a painting or every thread of a textile. you really need to bring out what's not visible to the naked eye. take this silk, for example, that's used to cover shrines in the holy mosque in mecca, finely embroidered in both silver— and gold—covered wire. the amount of time, effort and intricacy that's gone into many of these works is a matter of spiritual importance. it's not just art for art's sake, but this is produced for a very particular, sacred, ritualistic and spiritual purpose. that's where the google art camera, which is capturing the minutiae of detail, comes in. 0ur camera is a custom—built camera, built to capture images of paintings and artworks

in super—high resolution. it generates what is called a gigapixel, which is an image of over! billion pixels. so how does it compare to other cameras? well, i've got my phone here, so let's take a picture of it with this. and as you can see here, it looks great. but as soon as you start zooming in, it gets quite pixelated and messy. and the same goes for my personal camera with a 50mm lens. again, no real detail of the gold we know is sitting underneath the silver. the camera is equipped with a laser and a sonar and using high—frequency sounds, pretty much like a bat, it's able to measure the distance between the camera and the artwork to make sure that the focus is right. and after about 45 minutes, every bit is digitised and a programme stitches it together to generate the full image. an image captured with our camera can unlock information

around that artwork, but also unlock the emotional stories around certain artworks and generate, in a way, kind of an augmented experience of the viewing of an artwork. and weeks later, i'm at the final part of my personaljourney — all the captures telling the story of hajj from the khalili collection are there on one platform, using sphere technology. so it puts everything into this big sphere here, creating a 3d—like environment, combining scale with detail. but it's also quite easy to just drag around and zoom into something that interests you. this shirt, actually, is something that we looked at in real — in real life. wow! a lot of this i didn't actually notice when i saw it up close. the fading and the writing and then the detail, the patterns. it's a — it's a privilege. so this was a painting that we saw, a more modern one.

even with this, zoom — zooming right in. just the finer details of the painting, the shadows and the hats. and it works quite similar to google earth in that way, in that you can zoom in and see incredible detail of a specific location — but, in this case, of art. some of these pieces are being shown for the first time. but even in a museum, you can only view it from a distance or when the artwork is inside glass boxes. see, barely anyone has the privilege to see these pieces in real life, let alone this up close. remember the silk cloth used in the holy mosque? here it is, with hints of gold underneath the silver, not really visible to the naked eye. it's — it's as if the tech is helping me to reach something beyond the art. i can see what sir david meant — that it's another side to it. going on hajj is one thing, but completing that spiritual, that cultural side of it, using this art that's

entrenched in the hajj�*s history, is... ..is something special. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week thatjeff bezos stepped down as amazon boss 27 years after founding the online tech giant. china's cyberspace administration ordered the removal of ride—hailing app didi from chinese app stores amidst accusations it's been illegally collecting personal data. and nintendo announced a new $350 nintendo switch games console, complete with a bigger 0led screen. it was also the week that the european space agency showed off an iim—long robotic arm. the era, or european robotic arm, will be the first arm able to walk in space, anchoring itself to fixed points and moving between them. the first pictures of the world's first 3d—printed

school in malawi were released. the walls can be erected injust 18 hours. unicef estimates a shortage of 36,000 classrooms across the country and the creators of the new printed schools hope they can help bridge this gap in ten years. and finally this week, a belgian artist is shaming smartphone—obsessed politicians with an ai tracking tool. the machine learning system analyses live—streamed debates of the flemish government. it then posts the guilty parties to twitter and instagram under the handle theflemishscrollers. the winner of the a! song contest has been revealed — a team from the bay area and california won with this entry, listen to your body choir. # let me ask you a question. # what is it like out there?

the song starts as a ballad before the beat drops. # go on. # listen to your body choir. i called john and max from the team to hear more about how they created their half ballad—half banger. i kind of did that on purpose because it was going to be a little bit of a popularity contest. you know, it was going to be voted on by an audience and ajury, and i knew it could not be music by robots for robots. i think that can really quickly devolve into just five minutes of straight screaming white noise, you know, in your ears. so at some point, it has to be palatable for humans. in our case, one of the things we did was we wanted to create a sort of palette of textures that wouldn't sound like anything we'd heard before. those made up of a lot of those puzzle pieces that i gave back to max and it was sort of this — this challenge of like, 0k. 0k, max, here's the craziest

samples that you've probably ever had to work with. but they all — they all are kind of cohesive because they come from this — this theme that we started with, so let's see what you can do with this. # i want to be on time. # up there in the clouds. when you think about al or computers making music, usually we think of like bleep blorp, you know, kind of quantised autotune. what i was surprised by was that the majority of the content we were creating with the ai, because it's emulating organic sounds and it does not necessarily know what a piano sounds like and like what certain — you know, it doesn't have the same history that we do in our heads, it ended up making sounds that were way more organic.

choosing a pair of glasses usually involves rows and rows of them in all shapes, sizes and colours. pick them up, try them on and either you like them or you don't. but the way we choose our glasses in future could be set to change. it's time for personalised 3d—printed frames. 0verproduction is fashion�*s biggest environmental problem and for eyewear, this means 20—30% stock risk. and 3d printing can solve this problem by shifting the focus from more inventory—focused production to a more on—demand—oriented production and along the way also solve

the problem of fitting — this is a major problem. here in front of me is a range of 3d—printed glasses. they come in a variety of colours, too. now, the idea is that you choose the style that you think will suit you best. no. and from there, a pair can be 3d—printed that should fit you perfectly. so using a tablet and three cameras, yourface is so scanned in store to create an avatar to try on the eyewear. the system's algorithm is measuring you up for glasses that should not only fit you perfectly in appearance, but also in doing theirjob well. this process should eventually be entirely possible on a mobile phone. typically, the measurements that we would take would be the pupil distance, the distance between the two pupils, the heights of the pupils, so where the pupils sit within the lens... ok, so i need to

label my right pupil. there we go. left pupil. right temple... the vertex distance, so the distance from the surface of the eye to the back of the lens. we'd also have look at the wrap of the frame as well, so we can see how much of a wrap the frame had. so your trip here may only need to be to get your eyes tested, unless you want to feel the product first, or long for an optician�*s opinion. i can choose the colour of the arms — let's go for silver, they look nice. now i can order them. and the future could also see more choice. 3d printing now is a technology where you can print in more than 15 materials. so in the future we will print goods, frames, in transparency material, in bio material, in metal material.

so we are at the beginning of this industrial revolution. the aim here is what is being called mass customisation — where by making lots of personalised products, the cost can be kept down. and although these glasses do start at £160, which is similar to many others on the shelves, that rises with some of the options. but beyond all of this, and the sustainability element, for this to really work, the finished product needs to prove to be the perfect fit. 0k, well your glasses have arrived now, do you want to pop them on for us? they are super light and really comfortable, but the thing that i noticed more than anything was in the shop when i was trying them on, everything looked a bit wonky. i always have this with sunglasses, where one eyebrow shows and the other doesn't, so clearly i have a wonky face. and these glasses seem to fix the issue. the glasses are maybe as wonky as my face...

i never thought of you as having a wonky face before but i will have to take a closer look in future. i tell you what, do you fancy something else that is so printed? it is slightly bigger than a pair of glasses though. what is it? it's a house. in california, you will be unsurprised to hear, 3d printed houses are a thing — kind of. these are houses that are partly constructed using 3d printing techniques, and here is james clayton to tell us more. california, like many places around the world, has a housing problem. too few homes has led to sky—high prices, and that has also helped contribute to the state's homelessness problem. step in 3d printing. you can make pretty much anything with a 3d printer these days, from guns to iphone cases — so 3d printing houses help solve california's housing crisis? well, one company here in oakland thinks that it can,

and it has already started to 3d print components of houses. yeah, so i think 3d printing has a huge opportunity to help solve the housing crisis. obviously i am a little bit biased. mighty buildings has won a contract to build what they say is the world's first community of zero carbon 3d houses in rancho mirage, in southern california. we are going to be deploying a combination of three—bedroom two—bath single family homes. these houses are not small, so how can they build such big structures out of plastic? what we have done is we've leveraged a proprietary 3d printing technology we have created with the material called lightstone, which is a thermostatic composite, so it's kind of a synthetic stone, that cures using light, so that means that it cures almost instantly, which allows it to support its own weight, meaning we can do curves, unsupported spans and all sorts of things you can't really do with concrete or other materials. the plan isn't to build an entire house, it is to build different panels and then on—site try and fix them

together like lego. the question i had, though, is aren't mighty buildings just building prefab houses under a different name? we are totally prefab, we make no bones about it and we are proud to be prefab.

but the cool thing is we are able to help prefab lead into its promise in a way it never has, because one of the issues with prefab to date is it usually involves taking additional construction and putting it under a roof, which gives you some gains but not all that they are capable of. but also usually means

needing a lot of space, which means you are usually going to be far away from the housing demand. our vision is to deploy these mighty factories around the country and the world in areas where we have demands and we have partners, and minimise those logistics. mighty buildings have mighty ambitions, but before you start thinking this could solve the housing crisis in the near future, think again. firstly mighty buildings currently sells a hybrid 3d house, but that is pushing it a bit. when it comes to 3d printing there is a lot of hype, but in this unit, the only thing that is so printed is this section here. everything else here is built through traditional housing techniques. the houses that it plans to build in rancho mirage will use 3d printing for the building's walls, but the development is only 15 houses. the houses themselves are being sold for more than $500,000, so you will need a fair bit of cash to buy one, and they don't actually have

permission to build yet. mighty buildings certainly has potential, and many in the building industry will be looking on with interest. but is this the answer to today's housing problems? well, no, not yet. that was james. now as we said, summer season is upon us and many of us will be getting itchy feet, and wishing we could go on holiday abroad. but alas, here we are. so we're bringing you a story from far away — really far away. when nick kwek was in south australia, naturally he wanted to test some of the produce — of course he did. over half of all the wine grown in australia is grown here, in south australia. the industry is worth $35 billion to the country every year. and where there is wine, i must surely follow. so i have strapped on someone else�*s wellies and set forth in the name ofjournalism. changing climate conditions and water shortages means that

growers here are turning to tech to help out the humble grape. we were in very dry parts of australia and irrigated viticulture needs very fine tuned management to successfully grow high quality commercial quantities of grapes. researchers here at the university of adelaide are developing a smart system so vintners can keep better tabs on their produce. ok, so that's where the leak is. they are deploying various sensors that can be monitored remotely. so what we have here is a flow sensor, connected to a radio unit that transmits the data in real—time. this one is the soil moisture probe, basically mount this thing right underneath the soil. we actually have the equivalent of a stethoscope hearing the water in the plant going up and being taken up by the plant. and they are using thermal imaging cameras

to monitor their irrigation. just with a normal camera you wouldn't be able to see that leak, but with this thermal imaging it now shows it very clearly. and also how severe it is. all the gathered data is fed into the custom—built, exceedingly smart vitiviser platform. you can call it a super ai brain, which can process to understand and can assess the situation to see whether it is all doing well or something we need to manipulate or change or to intervene. and also can predict what the yield is going to be. it can draw in information on how much water is being used at the moment within the vineyard. is there a leak in that vineyard, has a drone been deployed to find exactly where that leak is, and has it been stopped? we also have information on when the vines will mature, and therefore the farmer can go and order or perhaps the dashboard can help pre—order the machinery required to come at a time for the harvest. it will work out the growing

rate for grapes at the time and factor in labour and water costs too. and of course, they are developing an artificial intelligent rover which will autonomously patrol the rows, understand the current conditions of the vines and raise the alarm. it sent a text message to the growers saying you may want to reduce your water irrigation, save your water bill, maybe give you better quality and reduce the chance for disease. because if overgrown canopy has lost ventilation, it is bad for you. also through the cameras we can accurately predict the pruning rate, how much you want to prune back the vine, which is a crucial step for the growers. the project is backed by riverland wine and the government. we see technology playing a critical role in helping to forecast issues, if you see a frost coming or understand when a dry spell is going to settle in, and make sure

you have got your irrigation decisions as well set up as possible. the team says their work will ultimately lead to a better beverage, but the proof will be in the...bottle? cheers, nick, ithink i will treat myself to a glass of red after that. i think i willjust stick to the fruit juice unless they can create wine that doesn't give you a hangover, now that i would be interested in. because it is not about you, is it, it is the wine's fault. anotherfilm for another time i think. that is it from us. as ever you can keep up with the team on social media, find us on youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter at @bbcclick. thanks for watching and we will see you soon. bye— bye.

hello, there. sunshine did wonders for the temperatures on wednesday. aboyne in aberdeenshire one of the places that got above 25 degrees with scenes like this. parts of southern england saw similar temperatures, as well. and over the next few days, with more sunshine on the way, those temperatures could have a little further to climb — maybe up into the high 20s in parts of the south over the weekend. but it's not all about sunshine. this is the earlier satellite picture from wednesday. you can see this cloud that spilt in across scotland and northern ireland — that working down into england and wales, as well. so a lot of places having a fair amount of cloud through thursday, maybe even giving the odd light shower in eastern england. but that cloud will tend to break. we will see spells of sunshine. i think the best of those across parts of northern england, northern ireland and a good part of scotland. and in the sunniest places, temperatures will get up to 25, maybe 26 degrees. but some eastern parts of england will be affected

by a keen breeze, and that will feed more cloud in across east anglia and the southeast once again as we head through thursday night into friday. at the same time, cloud will topple in from the northwest, but in between a slice of clear sky and a mild start to friday morning. now, through friday, this area of high pressure continues to establish itself. that means mainly settled conditions, but we do have a frontal system close to the north of scotland, so the closer you are to that frontal system the more cloud you are likely to see. northern and western scotland, parts of northern ireland, too, quite breezy, quite cloudy maybe with the odd spot of drizzle. cloud first thing towards the southeast, that will tend to clear. for most places friday will bring plentiful sunshine and temperatures well up into the middle 20s celsius. and then we get on into saturday. again, more cloud up towards the northwest of scotland. some light and patchy rain is possible in the northwest highlands, but further south it is largely fine with plenty of sunshine and temperatures likely to peak at 27 degrees. but those temperatures could climb even further by sunday.

this area of high pressure is still with us into the second half of the weekend. this frontal system still with us in the north, as well, and that may reinvigorate a little through the day. so we could see some slightly more widespread and heavier rain into the far northwest of scotland later. but elsewhere, some good spells of sunshine, and in the south we are looking at highs of 29 degrees. that's all from me for now.

this is bbc news. i'm ben boulos. our top stories: unbelievably bad — former president george w bush delivers his verdict on the us pullout from afghanistan. unbelievable pullout from afghanistan. how that society changed, unbelievable how that society changed, from the brutality of the taliban, and now all of a

sudden, you know, sadly, i'm afraid afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable horror. burned—out buildings and looting mark the sixth day of chaos in south africa. more than 70 are dead, and the crisis is growing. britney spears wins the right to choose her own lawyer as she tries to end the 13—year—long arrangement that controls her personal and business affairs. and jadon sancho speaks out — the england footballer says hate will never win after receiving online racist