this is bbc news. i'm ben boulos and these are the headlines: iranian state media says british—iranian dual national alireza akbari has been executed on charges of spying for the uk, which he had denied. britain's prime minister calls it a "callous and cowardly act". the prime minister, rishi sunak, has confirmed the uk will provide challenger 2 tanks to ukraine during a call with president volodymyr zelensky. climate activist greta thunberg joins protesters in the german village of lutzerath as police try to clear the area to make way for coal mining. it's the fourth day of officers trying to forcibly remove demonstrators.

they say they don't plan to leave. takeaways, restaurants and cafes in england will have to stop using plastic cutlery, plates and bowls from october as part of a new government plan to tackle plastic pollution. you're watching bbc news. now its time for click. let's get 2023 started in style. welcome to las vegas,

where there's lights, sounds and a whole lotta shakin�* going on. uh, not sure this is what they meant, though. did that make you feel better? trust me, it made me feel everything. yes, every january, the tech world heads to the massive consumer electronics show, spread throughout the las vegas convention center and surrounding hotels. it's great to be here, back in our studio, overlooking part of the show. yeah, only part, though, because this place is big. how big? very big. to give you an idea of how huge, i'll tell you what, should we give them a whistle stop tour? i'll go that way, you go that way, i'll meet you halfway around. deal. all of the halls have pretty spectacular stands in, and you even get a bit of a theme in each one. this is the north hall and i'm getting health care vibes from this place. here at the venetian expo is my favourite bit, eureka park, where some start—ups get small

stands to set out their big ideas. the west hall is shiny and new, and this is where all the car stuff is. and now we're in the central hall to try out some haptic gloves that mean, when you touch things in virtual reality, you can feel them. here, shake my hands. hello? that's so weird! laughs. you're tickling me! iam! have a little tickle. do you fancy a jenga battle? sure, why not? all right. you could feel the blocks as you pick them up! that is really incredible. you could drop them on your hand and feel. 0h. as i grip this book over here, i can actually feel resistance. so as i try and squeeze it, i'm being stopped, which really gives me the impression that there is a solid thing between my hands. it's the air pressure that's used in there, at 135 sensing points, so you can feel every little bit of movement.

oh, my fingers are double jointed! we've forgotten to do thejenga. this is much more fun, actually. we have. let's move this out of the way and play the game. yeah, 0k. i've got to fix this. you're not doing it right. here we go. oh, oh, 0k. that's actually a bit tricky. i tell you what. .. i don't have as much control as i should. i tell you what i do when i lose, is that. oh, no. i'm going to prod you for that! laughs. so the use cases for this are suggested to be, first of all, training, so you can train people to use equipment and they get an idea of how it feels. also design. you could design a new car, for example, and run yourfingers over the body before it actually exists. big leap forward for haptics, would you say? yeah, i would. big difference from anything i've used in the past. it really is good to see ces getting back up towards its pre—pandemic size. the question, of course, is whether these big expos have permanently changed as a result of covid.

and the person who is responsible for bringing the beast that is ces to heel is gary shapiro. thanks for having us back, gary. thank you for that unique introduction, and thank you for coming. laughs. it was our pleasure. obviously, ces 2021, it didn't happen in the reels. 2022 was a lot smaller. this feels kind of like it's getting back to normal now. is that how you see it? after three years of the pandemic, this feels phenomenal, and the excitement, the crowds. what are the big trends this year? every company here is talking about efficiency, sustainability and leaving a better world for our kids and grandkids through technology. we are in a cost—of—living crisis, an energy crisis, and a climate crisis. do any more expensive, power—hungry, carbon—emitting devices? well, when you frame the question that way, i don't know what the answer is, but i'll tell you what we do need, is we need solutions to fundamental human problems in health care,

energy efficiency and things like that, and that the product introductions we're all the time. the other good news is, you talk of more expensive products. i'm happy to say consumer technologies in this industry is the only industry that i'm aware of that's actually fighting inflation. smartphones are cheaper, desktops are cheaper, laptops are cheaper. and why is that? the chips are getting better, they're using less energy, they're getting more compact. there are two countries that have the world's attention for the wrong reasons at the moment. you've got china with a covid explosion, and russia with its invasion of ukraine. are there many chinese or russian companies here? i spent a lot of time this morning at the ukrainian pavilion talking to ukrainians there, and very proud we are supporting them, and there is not one russian company exhibiting. is that a decision you took? it's a decision we've made as an organisation that we're not allowing russian exhibitors. in terms of the chinese which you raised, we have one third of the number of chinese we had in 2020.

gary, thanks for having us back. thanks for seeing us. thank you! thank you for that very authentic thank you. i appreciate that. one of the big themes in 2023, as it was in 2022, �*21, and �*20, is virtual reality. and there are a couple of big new headsets on the block this year, which zoe kleinman has been trying out. i am getting quite the workout here. oh, wow, 0k. oh, i've been hit by some sort of... putting on a headset to experience a virtual world isn't anything new in gaming. but for it to go really mainstream, companies which make them need to tempt a lot of people to buy one to use in their everyday lives. first up i tried the meta quest pro. it's been on the market for a couple of months and costs almost £1,500. meta won't tell us how many they've sold. what i want to do is to get these floating buildings, which for me are here and here. put them down. so if i use... all right, no.

now i've gotjust one selected. there we go, right. this is fiddly. what is your expectation in terms of how long it would take somebody to get together with this? am i doing terribly badly? no, it's a more complex app that we have. so no i am looking in at a kind of mirror, except what's looking back at me, unless my appearance has changed dramatically in the last few minutes, is a female face with green skin. and whatever i do with my face, she does. so ifigo... ..she is doing that. if i squeeze my eyes shut, she does that too. i can wink at her, i can blink at her, she's got a much better instagram pout than i do, that is for sure. laughs. welcome back! thank you very much. you're welcome. it's a little more... it's smaller, this room.

now is this the solution to being very bored on long carjourneys? let's find out. the taiwanese company htc is hoping to tempt people to buy a holoride pack for their cars. it costs around 900 euros. you need a bit of kit to stick to your windscreen, a yearly subscription, and a headset, of course. so i'm short—sighted. do i need to wear my glasses? no worries. so if you're short—sighted, you can dial in with the glasses for htc. i'll set it up for you, so no worries. but is it worth the money when you can currently only play ten games on it? basically, i am a flying robot in the sky. i can move around within this screen. and as the car moves, the robot moves. and when we stop at lights, the robot also stops, so it is perfectly in sync with the movement of the car. that wasn't very friendly. the whole environment around you is basically generated based on map data.

0h, is it? we know where the streets are and can put this in game. for example, you know there is a right—turn road, but the creator says, ok, let's take the road away and place asteroids left and right, and suddenly you move through an asteroid, evade, and you think, "how does the game know this?" this is how we leverage this. the newest headset, unveiled at the ces tech show in las vegas just last week, was the htc vive xr elite. and i was one of the first journalists to get my head in it. all right, let's have a go. what do i do? this headset is also pricey, coming in at almost £1,300. but it does fold up pretty small. my drawing is dreadful! laughs. i mean, ithink, you know, that someone like picasso would be quite proud of that masterpiece. i am very pleased with it. laughs. and there is lots of speculation that this might finally be the year

that apple launches some kind of mixed reality glasses, which could be a much—needed iphone moment for the whole thing. but as ever, these devices are currently all let down by battery life. and even the most expensive headsets need to be charged every two hours, or it's game over. with product launches aplenty, ces saw the big players hitting the headlines, as usual. lenovo teamed up with motorola to unveil its thinkphone, a smartphone that syncs with thinkpad laptops. lenovo says the two devices will have unparalleled functionality together. sony used its keynote speech to announce a playstation five controller for disabled gamers. sony says it's a highly customisable kit of different buttons, triggers and sticks that allow players to create a setup that suits their needs. we're really excited to see

the impacts of the controller on helping to make access to gaming available to many more people. wikipedia's operator has denied claims that the saudi government infiltrated its team in the middle east. two international human rights groups have said that saudi officials altered or deleted content. the wikimedia foundation said no evidence of saudi infiltration was found. top youtuber logan paul has apologised to fans who lost money after investing in his cryptocurrency game, cryptozoo. he'd encouraged people to buy crypto collectables for what he called a really fun game that makes you money. but more than a year after its launch, no game has materialised. i have come out here to test an automatic car inspection app called raven. it uses alto assess damage insider or outside a vehicle so if you're

returning a rental car, buying a car or have an insurance claim, it can do some of the work for you. let me show you how it works. you start your scan like this and then where there is any damage, there is some here on the door, you zoom in and it should identify what the damage is. dent on left front door, yep, it's got it. you can either approve it, edit it or delete it. if i keep moving around, i'll take a closer look at the tyres. you need to make sure that you have the whole car in shot. it also takes some photos so when you've finished, it'll send you some snapshots, known as the beauty shots, as well as a full report of any damage that's been found. and as i come around to this side, it tells me thejob is done, simple. in amongst all of the screens, and the cars and the other weird stuff here at ces, there are plenty of home appliances too. some of them can roam around

by themselves these days, but have you wondered how they find their way about? well, many of the modern ones you something called simultaneous location and mapping. for short, slam. modern, domestic and industrial robots are notjust bump and go, you know? the need to build a map of where they live to make sure each spring cleaning isn't a brand—new voyage of rediscovery that means they might forget the occasional nook and cranny. one common way to scan your surroundings is lidar, which uses a spinning laser to determine the distance to everything around you. but lidar has its shortcomings. the problem with lidar is if you want high performance, they're extremely expensive, can be thousands of dollars. so that's not going to cut it for commercial products at all in the consumer space. but then the low cost ones, which you see on many of the consumer products out there, just are very unreliable. the degrade over time and they also capture a tiny amount of spatial information compared to the amount

of information you capture with a camera. we're able to access that spatial information, but using very low cost processes and silicon. this vacuum robot is running new software developed by slamcore, which builds up a map using vision instead of lidar. this allows the software to more intelligently work out notjust how far it is from stuff, but what that stuff is and whether it's likely to stay there. when it knows where it is, it needs to know what are the obstacles in its way, where is it free space, is it going to crash if it tries to go through a certain space? the next level of spatial intelligence is knowing how the world around you is shaped just from a geometry point of view so knowing what's occupied space and what's not. once the software's labelled everything, it can do different things with the information. for example, if it's committing the layout of your flat to memory, it might want to remove objects it

knows aren't permanent, like books, other stuff that's strewn around, or even people that it's encountered on its travels...like me. don't worry about the look of this particular vacuum bot. at the moment, it's wearing a low cost stereo camera and inertial sensor on its head but the plan is for these to be integrated into vacuum cleaners, drones, and other autonomous devices in the future. the point here is that a few low cost peripherals are all devices like this would need to collect enough data to feed 0wen�*s software, which is the real breakthrough here. a really small, tight, neural network lightweight enough to be stored in the device that can label everything and work out how to respond to different types of objects. one of the big benefits of a robot or a machine knowing the objects it's encountering is it may choose to modify its behaviour depending on the type of object that is. so, for example, a drone may see a person and want to keep a really wide berth because there could be

a safety risk there. but if it's going to get through a door or somewhere a bit more narrower where there's only inanimate objects around, then it can have a much smaller safety margin to be able to make it through. plenty of ways, then, for a new way of navigating the world to help you to clean up. lara: honestly, this is the first time i've ever seen him do the chores. now, at ces, healthcare often takes centrestage. but the covid pandemic is really proven the importance of innovation in the area. three years ago, mrna vaccines had never been used or generally even heard of, but pfizer and moderna's groundbreaking and effective formulations played a major part in ourjourney back to normality. unlike conventional vaccines that contain a spiked protein, messenger rna instructs yourselves to create their own. a novel idea for dealing

with viruses for something that has been researched for a while for treating cancer. and a few weeks ago, in a collaboration with merck, moderna announced positive results of a phase ii trial from its personalised mrna cancer vaccine. i've been talking to the ceo of moderna, stephane bancel, and asked him what he thinks the cancer treatment of the future will be. i think as we move away from chemotherapy and into immunotherapy and personalised treatment, i think we will start to see less side effects of what we saw with chemo, which was very drastic, chemo was going with a a big hammer on everything and very hard to cancer patients. what we know today which we didn't know 20 years from now is that cancer is always a disease of our dna, always. it's a mutation in our dna versus a healthy dna that you have, so what we do then is we make a product for one human being,

so we build a robot to make product for one human being at a time. it takes us around 60 days, having been by the time we launch, it will be around 30 days, from the biopsy to you getting in your arm, like a covid vaccine, getting in yourarm, the medicine that is madejust for you, for your cancer, designed based on the sequence of your cancer. so then is it one vaccine, a series of vaccines? how will the process work? it's a good question. today, what we try in the clinic where we showed a 44% reduction in recurrence or death, compared to the best drugs available in the uk or us, with all technology. it is nine injections, intramuscular, so just in your arm, put a band—aid and then you are done. but what we've shown is that we think three orfour might be enough. so we still are going to do a phase iii study with nine, to make sure we keep that good data, but then we do a lot of studies to see can we shrink it, to possibly go to only three or four.

precision medicine is obviously the dream, but whenever i've looked at it before in other stories, it always feels like we're at the very beginning of collecting the kind of data that can make a huge difference in the future, but right now it's quite challenging to make a difference with it, isn't it? yes, but i think that...i�*m very excited about this. we know this study is real, why it was powered, 150 people, and the statistical value, the p value of a study is very, very small, so any creation of shared data, we are all super excited because this is real. and what other cancers are you hoping to be able to treat? i think, you know, the lung is the obvious next big one. kidney, breast cancer. i think colon is a good one to try as well. we're going be very aggressive and modernise, very well—funded, $18 billion of cash, so we're not going to be shy to use that capital, to try a lot of things at the same time. people are dying. i don't want to try one thing after the other, i try all at the same time. thank you very much, really, really interesting. another big thing this year has been tech to help disable people.

paul carter has toured the show floor with one woman who is created away to help people with low vision see the world differently. this is rebecca. she's visually impaired and navigating herfirst ces. she's the creator of an app to help other low vision people navigate the world better. i have a rare disease called albinism, which basically means that my body doesn't create enough pigment or melanin, which is why my hair, skin and eyes are the colour that they are. in addition to that, it affects the development and the maintenance of proper vision. as a result of that, i have really an uncorrectable impairment where no amount of glasses or lasik or really any current treatments can aid the problems that i have. and what i found growing up and as a student is that there

really was no assistive technology that was appropriate for someone like me who had a vision impairment that couldn't be corrected. but i'm not blind. i'm still actually even able to have a driver �*s licence. but i still, despite that, have trouble sometimes during normal everyday tasks, like reading the posters here at ces. the app makes it easier for people with low vision to see things around them. it uses customisable smartphone camera filters that users can change to suit their own unique visual impairment. because i have an impairment, it's really easy to fall into the trap of saying, well, i know what's best for these people. i know what they need or what they want. 0ur rebokeh app spent about a year in beta with about 100 beta users, where our sole goal was to solicit feedback from people with vision impairment, optometrists, ophthalmologists. and over the course of that year we added or adjusted more than ten different features.

how might be useful for looking at something like this? yeah, so i can totally show you. so this is actually really hard for me to differentiate, especially because there's so much going on right here. there's just a lot of images. so what we can do is actually point it up and with one finger — it's meant to be one—handed — so with just one finger i can kind of zoom up and in. so let's pick one to look at, maybe this picture of a computer and whatnot. what we can do is we can actually add some contrast... oh, wow. ..to make things a little bit brighter. the light�*s a little bit lighter. we can also add actually colour filters. so this particular screen has a lot of green on it. so there's a whole lot that we can kind of do to... see, now, everything's kind of green. but to kind of make certain colours or certain features pop out a little bit, you know, now i'm kind of understanding what this company does, whereas before it wasjust a whole lot of chaotic kind of images. in a way, it's quite a simple process, but i can imagine it's quite liberating just being able

to instantly be able to point your phone at something and see something differently. absolutely. for a lot of people, it's the difference between being able to read a menu at, you know, starbucks or mcdonald's when it's up in the back and needing to ask somebody else for help. and, you know, if you're by yourself, sometimes that's totally an independence issue. the app is currently available for iphone and ipad, but rebecca also has plans to make rebokeh a community for visually impaired people. there's about 25 million people in the united states alone with some type of moderate, uncorrectable vision impairment. and we're super excited to be able to also showcase and bring awareness to that population, to give those people a space to come and gather and say, we have our own very unique set of life experiences and needs and challenges and wants, and to give them an opportunity to come together with people more similar to them to talk about those things is really what we ultimately

want rebokeh to grow into. that was paul. see, ces is full of big, shiny, colourful tech companies but it's also full of brilliant human stories like that one as well. and that's all we've got time for from vegas, or shall we do some more next week? yeah, why don't we? why not? more from here next week. thanks for watching, see you then. bye— bye. hello. compared to the grey conditions most woke up to this morning, a bit more sunshine around almost uk—wide. but we'll still feel the effects of last night's rain, and flood warnings continue to go up

in some areas. the bbc weather website has all the latest details. and if you're on the move, bbc sounds to find your bbc local radio station, they'll keep you up to daate. they'll keep you up to date. it's this area of low pressure responsible. the main rain—bearing weather front moving eastwards, but we still have a hang—back of rain through 0rkney this afternoon and showers, and some longer spells of rain and hill snow pushing in to western scotland and northern ireland. in east anglia and south—east of the channel islands, it may take until maybe late afternoon to see any glimpses of sunshine. staying a bit wetter here for longer. but for all, temperatures actually dropping relative to this morning. around 5—11 c through the afternoon. the strong winds in the south will start to ease a little bit, but they will pick up across some parts of northern ireland and south—west scotland, and we could see gusts of a0 to 50 mph here, if not a bit more, to end the day and to go into the night. and it's here where as winds start to go more northerly, it will bring rain into more sleet and snow territory across parts of northern scotland. and this band of rain — across northern ireland, into northern england and, eventually, north wales — will have some sleet and snow

in the hills as well. north of it, the risk of frost and certainly some ice. all of us, a colder night than last night. so, as we go into sunday, a change is afoot. colder weather for all. the real coldest air — the darker blue colours here — waiting in the wings to push their way southwards through sunday night and into monday. it's to the north of this zone of cloud and outbreaks of rain, and also, hill, sleet and snow which arrive through parts of wales, the midlands and east anglia through the day. south of it, sunshine, a few showers, more of a westerly wind to the north of it. a northerly wind making it feel increasingly chilly. lots of sunshine around, but frequent snow showers in the north of scotland and a sub—zero wind chill to go with it. as you go, then, into sunday night, a bank of rain — as it pushes through the english channel — could turn to sleet and snow in the south—east. but northern england, northern ireland most likely to see a covering of snow as we start monday morning. but across the board, very cold start to monday morning. maybe as low as —8 through parts of scotland. and that risk of frost and ice, which will be with us for a time next week, with that colder air in place. and there will be a chance

of snow in places. frost and ice the most widespread risk. temperatures, you can see, in the capital cities staying in the mid, if not lower, single figures. rising, with some rain returning later in the week.

this is bbc news — welcome if you're watching here in the uk or around the globe. our top stories... iran has executed british—iranian dual national alireza akbari on charges of spying for the uk — which he had denied. britain's prime minister calls it a �*callous and cowardly act�* and prime minister rishi sunak has confirmed the uk will provide challenger two tanks to ukraine during a call with president volodymyr zelensky. it comes as russian forces launched a series of missile attacks across the country including the capital, kyiv. climate activist greta thunberg joins protesters in the german village of lutzerath as police try to clear the area to make

way for coal mining. come here, protect life, and fight for survival.