following a rapid offensive by the taliban who've taken over nine provincial capitals. tens of thousands of civilians have fled their homes and hundreds have died in recent weeks. in greece, residents have fled 20 more villages as wildfires continue amid a heatwave across the mediterranean. dozens have died in algeria and italy may have registered europe's hottest ever temperature — 48.8 degrees celsius. a british man working at the uk's embassy in berlin has appeared in court accused of spying for russia. prosecutors say the man, who's been identified only as david s, passed on documents to russian intelligence in exchange for cash. it followed a joint investigation by german and british authorities.

four men have been convicted of the murder of a 24—year—old nhs worker david gomoh, in what prosecutors described as a "frenzied attack" . the court heard mr gomoh was randomly attacked by a gang as he walked to the shops in april last year. leboo diseko reports from the old bailey. a random murder of a young man with ambitions to make something of his life. police say nhs worker david gomoh was killed by four men connected with a gang from north newham simply because he lived in what they saw as enemy territory. 19—year—olds mohammad jalloh and david ture, 23—year—old vagnei colubali and a 17—year—old who can't be named for legal reasons were convicted after a six—week trial. david gomoh was a smart, hard—working and dedicated young man. he had graduated from university and worked at the nhs. david had no gang links and was loved by many. he was murdered at random during a frenzied attack during the first pandemic lockdown.

he was on the phone to his girlfriend when he was approached by his killers, who were unknown to him. the case has highlighted the tragedy that comes from postcode wars and gang rivalries. david was stabbed at least nine times, then managed to stagger to his home but later died in hospital. the court was shown cctv of the men attempting to attack another man less than an hour before. the defendants were convicted of conspiracy to cause gbh with intent for that offence. among the evidence that convicted the killers were drawings by ture of the attack found at his home. david's mum marian said her son's murder was the hardest thing she and her family have been through, something no parent should have to go through. but, she said, she was grateful to god that today they have seen justice. sentencing for david's murder will take place in september. lebo diseko, bbc news.

now on bbc news...click looks at how artificial intelligence could be used to help health services around the world. this week: a special programme. can artificial intelligence make healthcare better for all of us, and save the nhs? here in the uk, the national health service has been in crisis for many years, looking after an increasingly ageing population with complex needs. fighting for resources, it has been at breaking point. and then the pandemic hit. there will come a moment when no health service in the world could possibly cope. and indeed, many countries�*

health systems have struggled with the sheer number of covid patients. even those which didn't have people spilling out onto the streets had to put all other treatments on hold. the nhs is an old health system. in fact, it's several different systems that sometimes work together and sometimes don't. and now, it's trying to reinvent itself and embrace technology to beat the queues that covid—i9 has created. this is a story i started filming just before the first uk lockdown, when we weren't yet wise to masks or social distancing, but there was definitely a hint that something was coming. i wanted to find out how artificial intelligence could be used to help take up the strain that the nhs was already under. and, on what turned out to be my last day in london for many months, i found myself about to do something that i'd never done before.

i wasn't nervous until i asked my twitter followers what i can expect. "very loud noise — claustrophobia." now i'm nervous. i'm going to have an mri scan on my liver. and i have to lay absolutely still? yep, and there's breathing instructions. this magnetic resonance imaging scanner — mri scanner — is going to be able to see my soft tissue and my fluid in great detail. and it will produce images like this, which will be looked at by a radiologist to try and work out if they can see anything unusual. now, the thing produces really strong magnetic fields, which means nothing metal can come in — and that includes you. but this is no ordinary mri scan. instead of being read by a human, my mri is going to be read by an artificial intelligence. this is a computer that will look at the images and read them at least as well as a human radiologist would.

breathe out and hold your breath. now, this film is not about computers stealing jobs. this is a film about computers filling the gaps in an nhs that is short of money, short of nurses, and short of the highly skilled radiologists who can read and interpret images like these. but that's a really difficult job that takes years of training. i mean, how could you teach a computer to do that? well, here's a classroom full of medical students, and this is a computer. the way you teach each is very different. what you have in front of you here are ct scans of a human lung with cancerous tumours. so i'll be teaching you how to identify them and hopefully save lives. the human brain is brilliant

at learning things. it can understand spoken words. it can understand diagrams. just through the teacher's descriptions, these students can have a good guess at finding tumours in these images. they get some right, they get some wrong. but with repetition and practice, their brains make more and more connections — which strengthen with success until eventually we really understand the task in front of us, and we can do it well. but computers are dumb. they literally know nothing. they can't look at a diagram and imagine it in real life. they can't understand spoken words. normal teaching

methods won't work. so, instead of trying to describe to them what we want them to learn, we teach them using trial and error. millions of trials, in fact. the computer starts by circling completely random parts of the image. itjust guesses — it doesn't even know what it's getting at. all it knows is when its guess is right and when it's wrong. and mostly, because it's guessing, it's going to get it wrong. and the great thing about computers is they can do this over and over again, really fast, and they remember everything. and every time it does accidentally get it right, it makes a connection to its previous correct guesses. with every right answer, certain connections get stronger.

and with every wrong answer, others get weaker. through this barrage of guesses a network grows, similar to the human brain, which starts to distinguish between right and wrong. a digital thought process that we call a neural network. until eventually, after a multitude of attempts, it has very few failures and a lot of success. ok, let's try some more difficult scans now. so if we just take your gown off... and this is the technique that could soon help to relieve the pressure on the uk's breast screening service. almost 1000 women die

from breast cancer in the uk every month. the aim is to catch the disease early when it's most treatable. but that means that more than 2 million women have their breasts scanned for potential cancer every year. my entire role is clinical diagnostics within breast. you know, it takes up a great deal of my life, it is really important, and we are kind of fighting a big fight. bernadette works at the lincolnshire breast screening service, and she is part of a shrinking workforce. for years, the nhs has been unable to train or even recruit enough radiologists, and many services now face chronic staff shortages. this is further complicated by the fact that each mammogram needs to be read independently by at least two specialist clinicians. so we have two people reading a mammogram, because it is actually a really difficult process, 0k?

what we're looking for is tiny, tiny cancers. maybe two millimetres, maybe a little tiny smudge within a breast. and we are human, and some of us miss them. so that second read is that second opportunity to pick up that tiny little smudge that may, you know, change a woman's life. so the nottingham university hospital has been trialling a new tool that may help. this is mia, an ai trained to spot breast cancer. the aim of this project is for this system to be the second reader, potentially speeding up the whole process. so mia has had a look at this mammogram as well, can we have a look at what mia thinks? so in this particular case, mia has actually marked the area that i would also be concerned about. and it makes a callback decision itself and as you can

see there mia says callback, malignancy, because it's suspicious. its makers, kheiron medical, have been developing mia for over three years. here in nottingham, jonathan and his team have been testing mia on the hospital's historical data sets. these are women who have been to this clinic in the past and were diagnosed by a human. the aim is to see if mia would have made the same decisions. so this time, mia hasn't actually placed any mark on the image here, and its opinion is no recall is required. actually this lady did come back for some extra tests and this well—defined mass, she had an ultrasound when she came back and this was a cyst, a perfectly harmless cyst. so i suppose the recall would be a false positive, this lady didn't actually need to come back. a false positive is when the reader thinks that there is cancer, but on further investigation it turns out that they were wrong. and over at the cambridge breast unit, professor fiona gilbert has been conducting

research to try and reduce those false positives. something that not only puts a lot of strain on the system, but also a lot of strain on the patients. it obviously causes quite a lot of distress to the woman being called back, and the majority of them turn out to be normal. it is a lot of work for us to be assessing all of these women for a relatively small number of cancers. and when a programme screens over 2 million people every year, these little percentages do matter. every year around 70,000 women are given a false positive result, and some never attend a screening again. fiona and her team have been testing an ai built by google health to see how the software compares to human radiologists. so in the retrospective study that was done, the algorithm performed better than some of the individual radiologists, and worse

than other radiologists. so when they took the average performance of all the radiologists, the algorithm would have called back fewer people. but this research project is still in its early stages, and is set to move to the next phase of development this year. in the meantime, back in nottingham, mia has finished its initial trials and will now be tested in 15 more nhs sites against ongoing cases, to make sure that it works. artificial intelligence is the next amazing transformation, so that is what excites me. and it excites me that i don't know the full potential. we know that the cancers we are missing tend to be smaller, they tend to be more aggressive, and those are the ones that we want to find. but as the pandemic hit, all of this had to stop. and as breast clinics emptied out, elsewhere the nhs

was about to be overrun. the coronavirus pushed intensive care units beyond their limit. but even before the pandemic, these wards had been running at very near capacity. and it is here that one of the biggest killers in the uk, and indeed the world, lurks. it is called sepsis. so sepsis is when there is a severe infection, and when the body's response to that severe infection leads to organ failure. it can set in without warning, and can affect anyone. this is a lady in her early 50s, she is in day four on the unit, she was very unwell initially. people are admitted to icus for many reasons, but sepsis tends to strike when patients are at their weakest. we literally collect every heartbeat and every breath. when you first start in intensive care, when i started,

it was difficult to see what was important because there was much data. but remember, computers love data, and love spotting patterns in it. they don't get tired, and they never stop. so the doctors and computer scientists teamed up to create something called ai clinician, an algorithm that can detect and even predict early signs of sepsis, and then advise how to stop it. what we have used is a large database with 20,000 patients, and then we tested it in another 80,000 patients. that's more than any doctor could see in their lifetime. the trials were proving successful, but neither the ai nor the humans were ready for a new type of sepsis, one brought on by covid—i9. there are a few differences.

one is the intense inflammation they had in the lung made their oxygen levels really low, and so they needed high amounts of oxygen. if they didn't tire of their breathing so quickly as many patients with other pneumonia often struggle with their breathing. we also saw things like a lot of blood clots, which we occasionally see in other sepsis, but were far more frequent in this disease. nearly all the patients coming through to icu now had this new sepsis, and for the ai, this was an illness it had never seen before, nor had any data on. and remember, just because a computer has learned to be good at one task, doesn't mean it can do a different one. the ai clinician was back to square one. but the humans weren't. their idea was to gather data from icus across the uk to create a database of treatments that worked, so the doctors in the thick of it could learn from each

other at speed and save their patients. we build for the first time a picture of how disease was treated in real—time on the databases across the country. and you see all the diversity of all the different approaches people are trying, what was working and what was not working. now this data will be used to retrain ai clinician and one day it may help to treat sepsis that's caused by covid. so it's about 18 months since we started making this programme and in that time, we've all started to use technology in new ways and some of that has included gp consultations over video call, for example. so i think it probably means that many of us will be happy to accept medical help from machines and computers in the future. but for those computers to be good at theirjobs, they are going to need

a lot of data. a lot of our personal medical data. many services like instagram, google and facebook don't charge us any money. instead they get to use our personal data to try and work out how better to target us with ads. for many of us, that seems like a fair exchange. they make our lives easier and they connect us to the world. but now, those same companies which have been collecting and profiting from our personal data are moving into healthcare. amazon, microsoft and google are all trying to grab a seat at the table and dine on our medical data. and the nhs has something unique to offer. a whole nation's information from birth to death. that's something that might

make one feel uncomfortable. i don't think many health professionals sit down with their patients and say do you want your data to be sold to google or deep—mined? i don't think those kind of conversations are being had. we're notjust talking about the big household tech names either. plenty of other companies that you never have heard of also want access too. the issue of sale of data to technology companies is an interesting and controversial issue. there are some people who believe it's an asset to the nhs and we should sell it, there are other people who believe that in some way or another that's a wrong thing to do from a moral point of view. but if we get it right — and it is a big if — the benefits could be huge. a unified joined—up store of medical data could really speed up research and lead to new treatments. and ai would be used to look for the patterns hidden within. and that's something that could soon be helping those who are suffering from long

covid. thanks to artificial intelligence, we were able to link patient records with imaging and produce an analysis of 41,000 patients, imaging and clinical associations in about two months. adriana roca is part of a team that has been looking into why long covid only affects some people. what we found was quite important and shocking because it was actually not obesity, perse, but fatty liver disease linked to obesity that was increasing the risk actually up to five times of being severe with covid—i9. ajay agade is one of almost a million people suffering from long covid in the uk. he's a0 and a doctor, and he moved to the uk from india to complete his specialist training.

so in the last week of march, i was on the weekend duties and i was not feeling well. i went back home immediately. i self—isolated and then i was tested positive. i wasn't thinking that this virus will affect me because i was a fit adult and i thought it would be just ok, like any other flu virus is for me. there was a moment when i thought i willjust die, and i had a three—year—old, and i would not be able to see her ever in my life. i never knew that this virus will leave me or others with so many problems and disabilities, even after one year. so, to understand his illness more, ajay signed up to a study aiming to help long covid patients — a trial that's using the very same ai that lured me into that big magnetic tube earlier. this ai had originally taught itself how to spot certain liver characteristics.

as well as spotting unusual masses, it had also learned to assess the overall health of the liver. and here's what made of mine. here we've picked up a small area which isjust a cyst, a simple fluid—filled sac. and the ai has picked that up as something unusual, something of interest? yes, but there's no concerning features to it and we wouldn't survey it. and otherwise it's a reassuring scan, with no increased evidence of inflammation or scarring, iron or increased risk of fat. but here's the thing. it turns out that because this ai can assess the overall health of the liver, it can do the same for other organs too. and so we expanded first to organs like the kidneys the pancreas, the spleen and the heart, originally with the aim of looking at type 2 diabetes, but it turned out that a lot of those organs were being affected by covid as well. if it was a radiographer manually analysing data from, say, six different organs, that could be up to about

24 man—hours of work. this allows us to basically automate some of the most labour—intensive parts of the process. we are trying to identify. which kind of fat is the one that puts you at risk. it's not obesity, as we've thought up until now. - what makes you at higher risk is the visceral fat, _ the fat in the organs. whereas we have found. also people with low bmi with high fat in the liver. ajay is part of the clinical trial which may show that young, fit people with a normal bmi can also get long covid if they have fat in their organs. and not everyone is aware about exactly what long covid is. i think eventually when the acute things wean off, i think more and more people will come out with long covid. there are many trials

in the country trying to understand long covid, and artificial intelligence has become a big tool in the race to find a treatment. but for many, help can't come quick enough. technologies that bring about big change also bring new problems. there is no point in denying that. but right now, ai is changing the world and opening up possibilities for huge medical breakthroughs. i mean, it helped us to develop highly effective vaccines in record time. so i know the pandemic is far from over, but i still feel kind of lucky that it happened now rather than even just a decade ago. and maybe it will mean the nhs is a bit more ready for the next one.

hello. we provisionally saw a new temperature record in europe on wednesday — 48.8 celsius recorded in sicily. the exceptional heat shown by the red colours here in this chart transfer a bit westwards across the med into the weekend, with record—breaking heat for spain and portugal. cast your eyes further north, though, across the uk, the blues appearing back on the charts. temperatures dropping below normal once again — so a cooler end to the week across the uk, and it will be blustery at times, mainly because of this area of low pressure — out to the west at the moment, but it will track across the north. through the night and into the morning, though, this weather front will bring some cloud and patchy rain into southern areas, keeping temperatures up in the mid—teens for some. but a much fresher start across many parts in the uk, but a sunny start for the vast majority. and for many, we'll see some good, sunny spells throughout the day, but cloud amounts will increase at times in the south, spreading into wales, the midlands,

and through the day, northern ireland, western scotland seeing batches of showers pushing in, some of those becoming heavy and thundery. only the odd one reaching eastern scotland and northern parts of england, as well as the isle of man. temperatures here in the teens into maybe the low mid—20s again across the south and east. but it will be a windy end to the day across parts of scotland, northern ireland, winds close to gale force across these coastal districts. further heavy, thundery showers rattling in notjust through the evening, but overnight, as well. head further south, most places will be dry, some clear skies around, and a slightly fresher night across some southern areas compared to what we'll have to start thursday morning. so, into friday we go, temperatures widely still in double figures, so not desperately cold. but it's another story of sunshine and blustery showers across scotland and northern ireland. a bit windierfor england and wales on friday, too, and we will still see the chance of some lingering cloud, especially towards southern counties of england, bringing the odd spot of light rain. but temperatures dropping relative to what we've seen on thursday — even in the south, low 20s, but still pleasant enough where you've got the sunshine out.

then, as we go into the weekend, our area of low pressure pushes eastwards, allowing the cold air in, and just a chance we could see some other weather systems working their way in from the west, bringing outbreaks of rain at times. this is how we see saturday at the moment — just be aware, though, it is liable to change, maybe a brighter day for scotland and northern ireland, less breezy but rather cool with sunny spells. but a bit more cloud across england and wales, and it's the north and west where we could see some rain at times brightening up again towards the south and the east. bye for now.

this is bbc news. i'm lewis vaughan jones. our top stories. afghanistan in crisis — us officials say the taliban could be in the capital, kabul within weeks, as thousands flee the advancing militants. 0ur reporter interviews some of the militants as the bbc�*s granted rare access to newly taken taliban territory. we came through here a little earlier this year. back then, it was still under government control. now, it's one of around 200 district centres taken by the taliban. greece's wildfires force the evacuation of 20 more villages — we speak to british firefighters helping battle the blazes. and we catch up with the teens bringing skateboarding to the olympics and the streets of japan. even our reporter goes for a spin!