scientists say they have made a significant breakthrough in nuclear fusion, significant breakthrough in nuclearfusion, bringing the possibility of an almost unlimited source of carbon free power a step closer. experiments at a uk laboratory produced 59 megajoules of heat during a five second burst of fusion more than doubling the previous record. protests are now spreading across india and beyond, against a ban on the muslim headscarf in some colleges in one southern state. hundreds of demonstrators came out onto the streets of kolkata and chan i. and canadian police have threatened to arrest a lorry drivers and protesters who shot down central ottawa for two weeks protesting about covid rules. they have wanted blocking streets and the federal capital may amount to a criminal offence.

now on bbc news, rules requiring people in england with covid to self isolate could be lifted within weeks. borisjohnson is hoping to remove the remaining domestic restrictions a month earlier than planned, due to what he called encouraging trends in the data. he is our health editor hugh pym. it's another big step in the journey from life in the pandemic to something like normality — the final restrictions lifted in england, including the ending of the legal requirement to isolate after a positive test, perhaps as soon as february the 21st. reporter: are you going off to save your leadership, - prime minister? the prime minister headed to the commons to make the announcement, with an eye perhaps to cheering up his backbench mps, pulling forward to the ending of restrictions which had been planned for march. provided the current encouraging trends in the data continue, it is my expectation we will be able to end the last domestic restrictions — including the legal requirement

to self—isolate if you test positive — a full month early. later, labour gave their reaction. the fact we had no notice this was coming, no sense it was coming, suggests some throwaway remarks at the start of prime minister's questions were more about digging the prime minister out of a political hole than dealing with the serious challenge facing the country. in manchester, where daily case rates have been coming down, people we spoke to seemed positive about the ending of covid restrictions. if you're going to get it, you're going to get it, it's that simple. everybody is at a stage where we know the risk and we have to get on with the rest of our lives. i love that we have - lots of our freedom back and i want to enjoy it, but i think it's still- important to be cautious. the office for national statistics survey suggests that 3.3 million people in the uk had the virus last week, up a bit on the previous week. case rates varied around the uk, wales was the only nation to see a decrease.

but hospital admissions have been falling, with the omicron variant proving less severe than first anticipated, and the continued take—up of boosterjabs. i don't think this is a scientific decision, though. i think it's clear the rates are still very, very high, particularly in some sectors of the community, particularly children and people who look after children, parents and teachers. another scientist said the decision was, on balance, reasonable, though he had concerns about the vulnerable, like rachel, who's not happy about the news, and says she's much more likely to stay indoors. she had a kidney transplant and her immune system is compromised. she's worried about picking up the virus from her family. i know they will carry on to protect themselves and they'll do tests if they can get them, but you don't know who they're mixing with and stood next to in supermarkets. the paranoia i had is starting to come again, because who can i trust?

while england heads towards life without restrictions, scotland, wales and northern ireland are moving at different speeds. they'll publish their own plans in due course on life with covid. hugh pym, bbc news. there is more on that on our website. i will be back at the top of the hour with more of the day's news, but now it is time for click. this week, we're on the hunt for the parrot pirates. you've missed a bit! how to spot when buildings go wrong. and the musicians taking on the streaming scrooge. here we go again! this week, lara is doing something unusual. she has left the city to join

someone special on a walk. she is in the new forest national park with wildlife tv legend chris packham. what a beautiful scene. tell me about this area. well, we're in the new forest national park here, which is famous for various habitats, its valley moors, its sandy lowland heath, but also, its ancient woodland, and there are a number of veteran trees here, a significant number, so we're talking about trees that are five, six, 6.5, maybe even 700 years old and because there's been woodland here for that amount of time, it means that it supports a lot of other life — there's a great richness of biodiversity. the bird fauna here is really important too — we've got a number of national rarities. you can hear the birds — this is not a sound i'm used to, living in the city! no, what have we got? hold on... we've got a bit of robin going.

a blue tit. yeah, there's blue tits and great tits calling. i mean, it's a lovely, sunny, pre—spring day. they're loving the sunshine and they're pumping out some song. but, unfortunately, not all birds are left alone in their natural habitats and wildlife trafficking, mainly perpetrated online, is having a major impact on the world's biodiversity crisis. carl miller has been looking at the problem. we've had catastrophic declines of whole suites of bird communities. with our large tracts of forest, they're silent — they're silent forests, because the birds have been trapped out of these environments. so trapped out, in fact, that 40% of all bird populations in the world are now in decline. to find out a bit more, i came to london zoo, where some of these species have found a home.

we have our blue—crowned laughing thrushes, you know, which are a species from china. there's less than 250 of those birds left in the wild and we actually have more in captivity. the species is more threatened than the giant panda because of the trapping for the pet trade. the illegal pet trade is a major factor in declining bird numbers. what may come as a surprise to many is that most endangered of all groups of birds are parrots. what would be less surprising, though, is that the pet trade is a majorfactor in their decline. einstein could sure fit the bill because she loves to dance. can you get down? laughter. let's get down for everybody. come on now. she's gonna make me do it, too. imitates dance music. this is an african grey parrot, famous for its intelligence and the most popular one to be kept as pets. even though many are bought in legitimate ways, their popularity fuels

the illegal trade, too. these birds have been almost wiped out in some of their native countries so, five years ago, they were given the highest category of international protection. it means all international trade of any wild african grey became illegal and there were serious restrictions on any transaction involving captive—bred birds as well. in short, it became illegal to capture and sell african greys. so, we went undercover to investigate how online trafficking still carries on under the radar, particularly on social media. we followed one of these ads which took us to bangladesh — one of the major hubs in southeast asia for the trafficking of african greys. we set up a meeting with faiz ahmed, a trader whose social media led us to investigate possible illegal activity alongside his legitimate business. we operated under the pretext of wanting to start a breeding farm.

the conversation started over legal captive—bred parrots but faiz was also prepared to sell us wild african greys. he was confident that he would be able to get around customs import restrictions, and also advised it would be a lucrative business. recently, a global initiative was set up to understand the scale of the problem and a new system was designed to give conservationists a data—driven view of possible illegal trades online.

no—one is able to give us an authoritative answer to how much of this is online and everywhere that it is occurring — it is too dynamic, the online space is too fragmented. the system's mission is to identify online trading hot spots in the hope of disrupting a business that's worth £15 billion a year. although many online sites have worked to remove illicit content, the system has found around 10,000 classified ads all over the world for the sale of potentially endangered species and their parts. we showed our film to rowan martin of the world parrot trust, whose expertise in parrots and trafficking is helping the project's researchers. so, rowan, that was obviously undercover filming that colleagues of ours did in bangladesh. what do you think of all that? a lot of those would be endangered species but it might not necessarily be illegal trade. the conversation switches from this sort of legal side of things to more grey areas, where he is offering up or explaining how he can import

large wholesale quantities of wild—caught african grey parrots into bangladesh. and that would be illegal under international law? yeah, that would be illegal under international law. back in bangladesh, faiz was getting cold feet. he told us the authorities were getting stricter, so the birds could still be imported but he could not take responsibility for them at airport customs. when later called up by the film's producer in the uk, faiz at first denied offering to trade african greys, and then claimed he did not know that their import was now illegal. our reporter contracted other sellers based in africa and asia and secured promises of shipments via transit countries.

but for every one of these traders who we have highlighted, there are countless others using tricks online to avoid detection. they use clever things like sharing memories of something that maybe happened back when it was legal, but that might then stimulate a discussion amongst traders about whether or not something was still available. so they might not have been directly advertising, butjust indicating that these things are available. or, more specifically, school people within these groups about how to talk about the trade without it being flagged. this is all made worse by the way in which social media allows pockets of communities to form, who actively evade any enforcement efforts that do exist. they are using, sort of, new private channels which might only be viewable to friends and only available for a short period. these platforms aren'tjust, sort of, passively hosting a problem, they're actually

acting to amplify that problem. that's where the system is aiming to outwit illegal sellers by figuring out the tactics being used in specific markets. on these indonesian posts, for example, it's cracked a code of letters and numbers used by sellers to represent the asking price for each bird. and, in other cases, it's found a slang familiar to enthusiasts which may be used in possible sales, such asjitot for a bird which is fully tamed and raw for those that are wild and in plentiful numbers. we showed some of the posts selling endangered birds to the platforms hosting them, pointing out that in many cases, their existence was breaking their own site guidelines and policies. of those that responded, meta, the umbrella company of facebook and instagram, said... people are not going to huge lengths to hide behind tor browsers and on the dark web, because they don't need to.

and i have seen it for myself with these birds that often get mutilated. they are crammed in these really crowded boxes, dying of dehydration. it is a slow, painful, miserable death for a lot of these birds. lara: back in the new forest, i asked chris about the wider impact of the illegal wildlife trade. we are in the middle of a climate and biodiversity crisis which is really, really seriously impacting on our lives — even if we haven't felt here in uk yet — so stamping out illegal wildlife crime is absolutely critical. the principal culprits here for me are not those poachers — sometimes people living in poverty that cannot do anything but capture birds in the forest to feed their family — and tackling that part of the crime will be extraordinarily difficult. the easier part would be dealing with those platforms. they have the technological capacity to stop this, i believe, overnight, if there was a will. what do you feel that

conservationists could do to help with this cause? frankly, i cannot write code. i don't understand algorithms. i understand birds and birdsong. but in order to protect those birds and that birdsong, i need young, smart people with their fingers on the buttons of that technological capability to act in our interest. i mean, frankly, if i had my finger in the conservation purse at the moment, i would spend a lot more money on buying more nature reserves, so on and so forth. i'd spend certainly a significant sum on tackling these tech—led issues because we are underestimating how much damage they are doing and we've got to change that. hello, it's time for your 90—second tech news round—up. it was the week india announced its intention to launch a digital rupee this year. china is already publicly trialling its digital yuan. facebook�*s crypto project diem, once called libra, has officially been laid to rest. and sony announced it will buy video game developer bungie, famous for series like halo and destiny, in a deal worth $3.6 billion.

spotify will add content advisory warnings to podcasts containing discussions about covid—i9. it's in response to concerns over spreading misinformation. veteran artists neil young and joni mitchell wanted their music removed as the platform also hosts the controversial joe rogan podcast. the aviation fan who built a bot tweeting elon musk�*s flight plans has rewritten it to support other rich people's personal planes. flight plans that aren't sensitive are pubicly available, but elon dmed jack sweeney to offer him $5,000 to stop, citing security concerns. the 19—year—old said he was holding out for $50,000, but would also delete the @elonjet account in exchange for a tesla internship. right, time for the "and finally," and most of you probably know by now that those grey, yellow and green squares showing up in our socialfeeds is in fact the daily

web—based game wordle. well, this week, the new york times bought it for an undisclosed sum in the low seven figures and has said the game would initially remain free. so go on then — what's your starter word? feels nice at the moment. you know, i've had worse things on my head over the years. i am here at digital construction week in london's excel centre, which features some of the industry's newest tech. it's the world's most accurate augmented reality device. we are able to position it into position. david is one of the founders of the company behind these augmented reality headsets specially created for the construction industry. if you think back to your school days, you might remember these. these are 2d elevations of a complicated bit of 3d engineering, and the idea is that the construction workers look at these

plans and then build it in the real world. but apparently they don't always get things right, and myjob is to go onto the site and see whether they stuck to the plans or not. i would like to ask you, what do you see? do you see any deviations between the design, which is the hologram, and what's there in reality? maybe if you have a walk around and see if you can spot the difference. and i have to say, it becomes immediately and shockingly obvious that some of the pipework here doesn't match the augmented reality version. some of the pipes are a few centimetres out. they're what's called out of tolerance. even worse, some valves are pointing in the wrong direction, and some aren't even there. and what you're able to see is the model and what actually happened in reality.

i found another one. the hoofer doofer was supposed to come up here, and they put it this way. now it becomes really obvious how those 2d drawings can be more confusing than seeing it in real life. that's right, but throughout my career i became obsessed with why we're still using 2d drawings, and ifelt it was the 2d drawing process itself that was introducing these errors, because it is limiting. we went out and we did a study of exactly how much of works are built out of tolerance, and we found that up to 80% of construction works is built out of tolerance. so built slightly in the wrong place. i wish it was slightly. som bot by five to ten millimetres, but by 200 to 400 millimetres, which is substantial. apart from mistakes and misinterpretations, there are many decent reasons why building work may have to deviate from the plans, depending on the realities of the environment. but the important thing is for a construction manager to be able to walk the site and spot those deviations and decide whether they or the plans need fixing. hang on, we've got another pipe problem. look.

right, there's another pipe that's supposed to be going that way, and they made it go that way. there is a pipe that's supposed to be going there, and it's not. it's not here at all. exactly. well, they forgot to put in a pipe. or there was a change made on site where they decided to go outside. once this is handed off to the next trade or the next set of work starts, because that has a knock—on impact on the rest of the building process. and that wouldn't be spotted until when? until it's too late, if i'm being serious about it. unlike other augmented reality headsets, the xyz system uses these lasers to sweep across the site and precisely locate all of the helmets. this then taps into the site co—ordinate system to put the ar building exactly where it should be in your vision.

so would you sign off this piece of works? no, they forgot to put this on. this is just shoddy. this is shoddy. building buildings is a large, complicated, messy business, and it's been a surprise to find out that things don't always go to plan, literally. but maybe with a system like this, we'll see fewer missing hoofer doofers in the future. hoofer doofer? technical term — move on. 0k. now, the modern music business is defined by technology, from the way that our favourite songs are created right through to how we listen to them. but one key part of the industry, namely how people actually get paid, is still playing catch—up, as paul carter has been finding out. what is the music industry? famous stars, hit songs, streaming services, record labels. or — money. people making it, people

wanting it, orfighting over who has the rights to it. but often behind all the hit songs which you know and love are often a team of people you don't — musicians, producers and audio engineers all helping to make a track. for doing this, they earn royalties, money paid each time a track gets played on a streaming service, on the radio or on tv. in 2021 the uk music rights society, ppl, which collects this money, paid out £229 million of royalties to artists. but in the same year, the us music rights group mlc put aside a whopping $424 million of so—called black box money. the actual name for the black

box money is unidentified money, so money coming in, but there's no way of finding out where the money should go. so while the big artists may make millions of dollars off a track, some musicians, producers or composers who helped bring it to life in the studio miss out because they can't be identified or the paper trail has got confused. it's so easy for all that information to go out the window, and you're like, what was that person's surname? and i've had personal experience of writing a whole song with someone and then at the end of the day realising i only knew their pseudonym or their artist name, not their real name. and the moneyjust sits there, waiting for someone to claim it. but one company may have come up with the answer, and of course, it's tech. session is a tool that

helps creators to capture all the important data around who did what, where and when when you create music — all the data that is needed later to be able to pay the creators if there is money coming in for this song, and also to credit the creators when the song is out on a streaming services. it's a very different approach to how it currently works. normally, it would be a bunch of publishers or managers or agents after the fact, scrabbling about trying to work out who was in the room what day, what was the song title, who actually wrote that song, and it's an absolute nightmare. you can imagine how inefficient it is to try and find that information out afterwards. it's almost impossible. but with session, when a musician arrives at a studio to make a recording, they scan a qr code to sign in. each musician has a unique identifying number, and this is automatically assigned to the tracks they work on.

my view on the problem is that you must go to the source. if we feed the music industry with a lot of different platforms and databases with the wrong information, it will still be wrong, so capturing the data here with session solves so many problems downstream. in some ways, it's a simple idea. butjoining the dots between the many parts of the music industry attracted the legendary bjorn ulvaeus of abba to invest in the project, as he believes it could become a lot more important. i think that there's no reason why not every song that is injected into the digital system shouldn't have the relevant codes and the identifiers. when that happens then everyone will get paid — as simple as that. and i realised i understand the plight of the songwriters today, with 50,000 songs coming into spotify every day, and i just want to help.

so while this app may not be the answer to increasing the levels musicians get paid, or even changing how much of a track they are worth, what it might do is make sure that money which could support artists doesn't go missing. and for some musicians, keeping the money flowing may be one way to keep the music alive. paul carter there, talking to the legendary bjorn ulvaeus about... # money, money, money, must be funny in a rich man's world... and that's all we've got time for this week. as ever, you can find us on social media, youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter @bbcclick. # ..in a rich man's world. # bye— bye.

hello. a colder day for all of us on thursday, but across the northern half of the country, quite a wild day to come — all due to this amazing swirl of cloud we saw to the south of iceland on wednesday. it's an area of low pressure which, as we start thursday morning, will have moved in across the western half of scotland in particular. to the south, we still have a weather front set to clear that will be sweeping away the last dregs of the milder air. to the north of it, a chilly start, a risk of ice in places, a few wintry showers — but as i said, a particularly wild start to the day in parts of scotland 60—70 mph gusts across the western isles and those northwestern coasts, big seas, as well, and blizzards on the mountains. we'll see wintry showers across northern england, northern ireland, and parts of wales, but sunshine in between those

and a blustery wind. strongest of the winds in scotland transfer eastwards through the day. winds always lighter further south and, once you've got rid of the morning cloud and patchy rain, it should be a bright and sunny day. the winds, though, will be a key feature — strongest through the afternoon in eastern scotland with gales. and it's here and across northeast england where it will feel substantially colder than the thermometers would suggest, made to feel well below freezing as we go through the afternoon. so a cold end to the day, rain, sleet, snow showers and strong winds clipping eastern parts of england for a time during thursday night, then skies clear, winds fall light. coldest night of the week, coldest commute of the week as we go into friday morning — temperatures could be as low as —10 through some scottish glens, a widespread frost and some ice to watch out for. but a lovely, crisp day to come for many on friday — a few wintry showers in the west, building amounts of cloud, as well, but most staying dry with sunny spells, the best of which in the east.

temperatures actually a degree so lower than normal for the time of year. but after a cold start to friday night, if you go into the weekend, it'll turn milder — and with it, some wet and windy weather. on saturday, especially in the west, outbreaks of rain coming and going all day long, more persistent through the afternoon in parts of northern and western england and wales. some parts of north east scotland may get away largely dry, staying largely dry to east anglia and the southeast, but even here we will see rain and strong winds sweep through as we go through into saturday night. and then for sunday, we just have to watch the potential development of this area of low pressure. a bit of uncertainty attached, keep watching the forecast, but it could bring some more persistent rain later in the day and strong winds around the english channel. further north, though, something a bit brighter sunshine and showers, but feeling a little bit chillier. that's how it's looking, see you soon.

this is bbc news. our top stories: scientists in britain make a major new advance in the quest to generate energy from nuclearfusion. what we have managed to demonstrate is that we can create a mini—sun, the right kind of mini—sun, hold it there and get really good performance levels. protests spread across india and beyond against a ban on the muslim headscarf in some colleges in one southern state. virus and the vote: has global democracy become an unwitting victim of covid—i9? a new report suggests it might. canadian police threaten to arrest lorry drivers who've shut down central ottawa as anger at mandatory vaccines spreads.