Trump election: What previous also-rans did after losing the race

Summary: So you lost the US presidential election, perhaps against expectations. Then what? Hillary Clinton said she would like to curl up with a book but would fight on. What have previous also-rans done after losing the biggest race in their lives?

Mitt Romney The first Mormon to receive the Republican Party's nomination in 2012, the businessman and politician was defeated by Barack Obama in 2012. He initially kept a low profile and went back into the business world he had come from, joining the board of Marriott International as a director. However, he returned to the political scene as a Republican campaigner and fundraiser and considered, then rejected, standing in the 2016 presidential election. John Kerry After narrowly losing the 2004 election to Republican incumbent George W Bush, he remained a senator. He was eventually made secretary of state in 2013, replacing Mrs Clinton. Al Gore After serving as vice-president under President Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, he lost to George W Bush after a cliff-hanger election in 2000, involving a recount in Florida which was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. The decision led to George W Bush winning the election in Florida by 537 votes, and nationwide by just one Electoral College vote. Mr Gore turned to environmental issues, founding the The Alliance for Climate Protection, which encourages civic action against climate change. His documentary An Inconvenient Truth was a critical and box-office success. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental work (with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 2007. Gore appeals to UK over climate change Bob Dole As the oldest first-time presidential candidate, he lost the 1996 election against the incumbent, Mr Clinton. He worked part-time for a law firm in Washington DC, then engaged in a career of writing and television appearances. He has been a commercial spokesman for products like Viagra, Visa, Dunkin' Donuts and Pepsi-Cola. He made regular appearances on Larry King Live, The Daily Show, and 60 Minutes. He has written several books, including one on jokes told by US presidents. Henry Clay (1777-1852) Not one to give up easily, he turned into a career presidential candidate losing elections three times. He also sought and failed to get his party's nomination twice. Away from his burning but never fulfilled desire to hold the country's highest office, he fared well in politics, serving three consecutive terms as speaker of the House, and as secretary of state. Aaron Burr (1756-1836) One of the more colourful presidential candidates the US has had, he lost the 1800 election to Thomas Jefferson. However, at that time the person with the second most votes was elected vice-president, a post he held for the next four years. He went on to kill another political opponent, Alexander Hamilton, in a duel; was tried for treason for plotting to create a new republic; fled to Europe; and returned to New York to practise law.

तो आप अमेरिकी राष्ट्रपति चुनाव हार गए, शायद उम्मीदों के खिलाफ। फिर क्या? हिलेरी क्लिंटन ने कहा कि वह एक किताब के साथ आगे बढ़ना चाहेंगी लेकिन लड़ेंगी। अपने जीवन की सबसे बड़ी दौड़ हारने के बाद पहले भी-रान्स ने क्या किया है?


Marlon Small named as Chapeltown stab death victim

Summary: A man who died after he was found badly injured on the pavement of a Leeds street has been named by police.

CCTV operators in the city saw the man lying on the pavement in Merrion Street in the early hours of Saturday. Police and paramedics were called to the scene where they found Marlon Small, 31, of Chapeltown. Officers want to speak to any witnesses. West Yorkshire Police said a post-mortem examination showed Mr Small had died of a single stab wound.

लीड्स स्ट्रीट के फुटपाथ पर बुरी तरह से घायल पाए जाने के बाद मरने वाले एक व्यक्ति का नाम पुलिस ने लिया है।


Sonic, Street Fighter and the 'golden age' of gaming magazines

Summary: Retro gaming is enjoying a surge in popularity with Nintendo, Sega and Sony all releasing mini versions of classic 1990s machines. The decade also spawned a boom for console magazines desperate to win the publishing war for pocket-money pounds.

By Simon ArmstrongBBC News Sonic, Street Fighter II and Super Mario World. Between them, they would define a generation of gaming. As standard-bearers for Sega and Nintendo's competing machines, the titles provided thrilling leaps into colourful new worlds and cemented home gaming as a multimillion-pound industry. With the Mega Drive and Super Nintendo becoming must-haves for children up and down the land, it is an era still fondly recalled by many. Indeed, Sega will be the latest firm to cash in on nostalgia for the period with the imminent release of the Mega Drive Mini following compact versions of Nintendo's NES and SNES, and Sony's PlayStation. Vying for players' attention first time around would be a proliferation of equally enchanting magazines - all keen to satisfy the voracious appetite for news and reviews and, crucially, secure a lucrative foothold in the quickly expanding market. For the small teams of journalists working late into the night to meet punishing publishing deadlines, it would be a "golden age" as wondrous as a high-speed spin though Sonic's Green Hill Zone or dodging dinosaurs in Mario's Donut Plains. "We absolutely loved video games," recalls Julian "Jaz" Rignall, editor of Mean Machines - an irreverent magazine from London-based Emap that stole a march on the opposition and quickly became a big seller. "The technology was facilitating new and exciting games, and every month we seemed to have something incredible turn up. I remember when the Super Nintendo was delivered for the first time, taking it out of the box and playing Super Mario World. The whole office would stop, we'd go into the games room and crowd round the screen. There was a high level of excitement and that came across in the magazine." Beginning life as a section within Computer & Video Games (CVG) in 1987, it had focused on emerging platforms such as the PC Engine, Game Boy and Atari Lynx. The first magazine under the Mean Machines banner would hit the shelves dated October 1990 and coincide with the UK release of the Mega Drive - two years after its Japanese debut. "The office was a mess," laughs Rignall. "There were games and bits of hardware and old computers everywhere. We would occasionally have tidy-ups, although for the most part it was an absolute dump. "But, you know, it was the perfect environment for us and that allowed us to produce a really great magazine." With an initial print run in the region of 30,000 copies, monthly sales would soon go on to top 150,000. So what made Mean Machines such a huge success? Humour and personality were undoubtedly key ingredients. While striking features acclaimed the merits of Street Fighter II, readers were mercilessly mocked by Rignall's "Mean Yob" letters page persona and Insult Corner saw near-the-knuckle put-downs hurled around with glee. "It was very much part of the remit not to talk down to the readers," he says. "We really wanted to be inclusive. It had a very juvenile and anarchic humour - double entendres, being rude but not quite being rude. We wouldn't swear, but we would allude to swearing. The personalities of the staff really came through, and the tone and style was very different to most other magazines out there. "Most important of all, we were very, very enthusiastic about video games." As the likes of Streets of Rage, Super Mario Kart and Star Fox drove sales of Sega and Nintendo's machines in a battle that came to be dubbed "the console war", advances in desktop publishing meant magazines could be put together more quickly and cheaply than ever before. You may also be interested in: Circulation revenues were boosted by booming advertising profits as games companies, big-name retailers and small independent shops snapped up space. It was low risk, high reward for Emap and rivals such as Bath-based Future. GamesMaster, Mega, Total! and Edge would all be launched between 1991 and 1993, while Rignall's title would split to become Mean Machines Sega and Nintendo Magazine System to capitalise on winning the official Nintendo console publication licence. Easily the most eye-catching, though, would be Future's Super Play. Its intricate Japanese-style art and focus on anime (the term for Japanese animation) immediately set it apart when its debut issue launched with a cover date of November 1992. Columns explored the idiosyncrasies of Far East cartoons and comics, while dazzling images adorned each cover courtesy of illustrator Wil Overton. "The technology was just good enough where a small team of four or five people could make quite a nice magazine and there was an audience of many, many tens of thousands that would lap it up," says its first editor, Matt Bielby. "There were all these competing games platforms and any market where there's competition tends to be quite vibrant because people choose one side or the other. "It's like Blur v Oasis, or whatever it might be. If there's a little fight going on - even if it's not serious - it makes things more exciting." Having also been offered the editor's chair at Sega-focused Mega, he chose Super Play as a means of indulging his "obsession" with Japan. "The whole look and feel was massively important. I went to Japan at one point and picked up lots of magazines, and we went to places like the Japan Centre in London and would buy imported magazines on any subject - cars, fashion, anything. Because the team were big fans of the subject matter, elements of our lives blended into each other. "We didn't have a life outside of Super Play very much, but that was fine. We quite liked it like that. Two of them married each other so that kind of worked." By late 1993, it would be selling 50,000 copies a month. But how conscious were the writers of the influence they wielded? "You were very aware these games were not cheap," Bielby admits. "Often it would be 50 quid or something of that order, which was a hell of a lot when you consider how much a pint of milk or beer was back then. If anyone bought a game they were investing quite a lot of money into it and they deserved something that would last them and they'd really enjoy. "In retrospect, it was clearly a very special period of time where you had lots of very young, inexperienced people let loose with magazines that got big audiences. We were in a little golden age through the 90s." As the Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation usurped their predecessors, another wave of titles inevitably hit the shelves. Steve Jarratt, launch editor of Future's Edge, Total! and Official UK PlayStation Magazine, describes it as a "licence to print money" for the publishing companies. "We felt invincible. I rode the glory days. We'd make about £1 profit on a £2.99 magazine, printing 13 times a year. The PlayStation magazine's sales peaked at about 350,000 and that's at five or six pounds for each copy with a demo disc on the cover. It was generating a huge amount of wealth. Future made an enormous amount of money." Change would come though. In a painful irony mirroring the finite lifespan of the machines they covered, games magazines would be rendered outdated by technology's relentless march. As the new millennium rolled around, it was "game over" for print. Free to read and unconstrained by monthly deadlines, websites allowed the instant publication of information while games could be viewed more easily than via the VHS cassettes magazines had offered as promotional gifts. Circulations plummeted. "On a bad month [in the 1990s] we might lose 20,000 sales. Now most people would think 20,000 sales [in total] would be brilliant," Jarratt says. "We knew the internet was coming, but didn't appreciate the full impact. I don't think anyone did. "At first it was slow to load and visuals were clunky so it didn't feel like much of a threat. Then came a dawning all the stuff we were doing could appear online and over time we started to see people covering video games." No longer as profitable, publishers closed title after title. While a small number remain today, circulation figures are dwarfed by those that went before. "Instead of investing in the product, at Future it always felt like lots of cost-cutting to keep the [profit] margins up," says Jarratt, who left the company in 2011 and now works on a freelance basis contributing to the likes of Bitmap Books' series on retro gaming. "You end up under so much pressure. No matter what you do sales go down, revenue falls off. You put your fingers in the holes in the boat to keep the water out. The internet is a double-edged sword. It's amazing for communication, but at the same time it's absolutely slaughtered certain markets. The High Street is dying, newspapers and magazines are struggling." So has anything been lost with the disappearance of the printed page or are gamers simply better off? "There was something about the physicality of magazines," says Rignall, who has worked in the games industry in the United States since 1994. "But ultimately things have evolved. "These days you can read about whatever you want and you're not limited by having to wait for a magazine to turn up. I think it's cool." Photography by Caroline Briggs

रेट्रो गेमिंग निन्टेंडो, सेगा और सोनी के साथ लोकप्रियता में वृद्धि का आनंद ले रहा है, जो सभी 1990 के दशक की क्लासिक मशीनों के छोटे संस्करण जारी कर रहे हैं। इस दशक ने पॉकेट-मनी पाउंड के लिए प्रकाशन युद्ध जीतने के लिए बेताब कंसोल पत्रिकाओं के लिए भी उछाल पैदा किया।


The men who smuggle the loot that funds IS

Summary: The trade in antiquities is one of Islamic State's main sources of funding, along with oil and kidnapping. For this reason the UN Security Council last week banned all trade in artefacts from Syria, accusing IS militants of looting cultural heritage to strengthen its ability "to organise and carry out terrorist attacks".

By Simon CoxBBC, Lebanon The BBC has been investigating the trade, and the routes from Syria through Turkey and Lebanon to Europe. The Smuggler It has taken many calls and a lot of coaxing to get a man we are calling "Mohammed" to meet us. He is originally from Damascus but now plies his trade in the Bekaa valley on the border between Syria and Lebanon. He's 21 but looks much younger in his T-shirt, skinny jeans and black suede shoes. As we sit in an apartment in central Beirut I have to lean forward to hear the softly spoken young man describe how he began smuggling looted antiquities from Syria. "There's three friends in Aleppo we deal with, these people move from Aleppo all the way to the border here and pay a taxi driver to sneak it in." He specialised in smaller items which would be easier to move on - but he says even that has become too risky. "We tried our best to get the items which had most value, earrings, rings, small statues, stone heads," he says. He made a good profit but bigger players with better connections "sold pieces worth $500,000, some for $1m", he says. When I ask who's making the money and controlling the trade in Syria his gentle voice takes on a flinty tone: "IS are the main people doing it. They are the ones in control of this business, they stole from the museums especially in Aleppo," he says. "I know for a fact these militants had connections overseas and they talked ahead of time and they shipped overseas using their connections abroad." Mohammed is still involved in cross-border trade, but no longer in antiquities. "Anyone caught with it gets severe punishment," he says. "They accuse you of being IS." The Go-between To sell looted antiquities you need a middle-man, like "Ahmed". Originally from eastern Syria, he is based in a town in southern Turkey - he doesn't want me to specify which one as he doesn't want the police to know. As a Turkish-speaker he is popular with Syrian smugglers, who ask if he can move goods on to local dealers. When I speak to him via Skype he shows me a blanket next to him filled with artefacts - statues of animals and human figures, glasses, vases and coins. They were dug up in the last few months. "They come from the east of Syria, from Raqqa, all the areas controlled by ISIS (Islamic State)," he says. Islamic State plays an active part in controlling the trade, he tells me. Anyone wanting to excavate has to get permission from IS inspectors, who monitor the finds and destroy any human figures, which are seen as idolatrous (those Ahmed is showing me have slipped through the net). IS takes 20% as tax. "They tax everything," he says. The main trade is in stoneworks, statues and gold, and it can be extremely lucrative. "I have seen one piece sold for $1.1m," he says. "It was a piece from the year 8500BC." He gently handles each artefact as he brings it closer to the webcam to give me a better view. He has had to pay a sizeable bond to the smugglers to get this material and he doesn't want to lose any of it. The final destination is Western Europe, he says. "Turkish merchants sell it to dealers in Europe. They call them, send pictures... people from Europe come to check the goods and take them away." Ahmed will have to return the looted artefacts to his Syrian contacts, as I am clearly not buying them, but he won't be returning to his homeland. "If I went back I'd be killed," he says. The Dealer It's an unremarkable tourist shop in the centre of Beirut. Inside the glass cases are ancient oil lamps, rings and glassware but the shop owner, a laconic man in his late 40s, has an unusual selling tactic - he says much of it is fake. However, he assures me he does have genuine pieces from the Hellenic and Byzantine periods, around 1,000 years old. I'm interested what other items he can get, mosaics for example? I had been advised by archaeologists that mosaics would almost certainly be looted - at the moment, that would mean most likely from Syria. He asks which kind I want. Faces, animals, geometric designs? "If you're serious we can have a serious negotiation... there is always a way," he promises. When I ask if it's legal he smiles as he tells me the only way to legally ship these items is with official documentation from a museum saying they have been cleared for export. If it was only a small mosaic I wanted, I could take the chance and try to smuggle it out myself but he warns it's a serious decision, as I could get caught. For a fee he can have them shipped to the UK but it will cost me many thousands of pounds. We shake hands as I leave and he gives me his business card. It has only taken 10 minutes to be offered illicit antiquities. Arthur Brand, an investigator who helps recover stolen antiquities isn't surprised, it chimes with his experience in Lebanon. "I've been there several times and at times and it really is amazing," he tells me from his base in Amsterdam. "The illicit trade is run as a professional business with offices and business cards and you can buy antiquities from Lebanon, but also from countries like Syria, Iraq." The link between smugglers and dealers is the dirty secret the art world doesn't want to admit to, he says. The Cop He could easily pass for the star of an Arabic cop show but Lt Col Nicholas Saad is a real policeman, head of Lebanon's bureau of international theft. In his office, filled with certificates from the FBI and Scotland Yard, he shows me photos of huge Roman busts seized in a recent raid in Lebanon. We go up to the roof of his police station, where out to the east, beyond the mountains, is the border with Syria. This is where refugees pour into the country and are exploited by the smuggling gangs. "The refugees come in big numbers and the gangs put things between the belongings of the refugees," he explains. Since the conflict in Syria he has noticed a significant increase in the smuggling of looted artefacts, "especially from the Islamic parts, Raqqa (the base) of the Islamic State", he adds. His team has seized hundreds of Syrian artefacts. "We have the archaeology expert that said they're very valuable from the Roman period, from the Greek period, years before Christ," he says. But there isn't a market for them in Lebanon. "Lebanon is a transit station, it's one of the the doors that goes to Europe. The real money is made in Europe." The Treasure Inside the Beirut National museum are treasures from the cradle of civilisation - Hellenic, Roman and Byzantine statues, busts and sarcophagi 3,000 years old. Hidden away from the public in a store room below the main galleries, seized looted antiquities wait to be returned to Syria. My guide is Dr Assaad Seif, an archaeologist and head of excavations at the directorate general of antiquities in Beirut. He rings a bell and a wrought iron door is unlocked. Inside are scores of items - pottery, stonework - but the most valuable items are sealed away in a warehouse. "We have huge funeral sculptures, representing men and women used to seal the tombs, from Palmyra," he says. Most of the seized items are from excavations rather than thefts from museums. The looters target warehouses at ancient sites like Palmyra, a Unesco world heritage site. "The warehouses at archaeological sites have objects they know are not listed or catalogued yet, and they think it could be easier to sell them," he says. "The Palmyra objects had value for people in Syria... it gives a kind of identity," he says. Although reluctant to put a price on any of the bigger items, after some coaxing he relents. "We have a dozen objects that would sell for $1m each on the open market." I understand why they keep them out of sight of curious foreign visitors. The Destination It has taken days to get through to Dr Maamoun Abdulkarim, the archaeologist in charge of Syria's dept of antiquities in Damascus. When I do reach him, he's angry. "The sites under the control of ISIS, in these areas we have a disaster, a lot of problems. IS attack all things just for the money," he says. "It is our memory, our identity, for the government, the opposition, for all Syria." It's impossible to stop the looting but he is adamant more could be done to crack down on the trade. "We are sure through all the sources a lot of objects go from Syria to Europe, in Switzerland, in Germany, in UK - and Gulf countries like Dubai and Qatar," he says. It was a common refrain. Everyone from the Lebanese police to Mohammed the smuggler and Ahmed the go-between said the main market was Europe. In the UK there have been no prosecutions or arrests for selling looted Syrian artefacts but Vernon Rapley, who ran the Metropolitan Police's art and antiquities squad for almost a decade, says too much shouldn't be read into this. "I'm quite confident that there have been seizures of material like this," he confidently states, as we stroll around his new workplace, the Victoria and Albert museum, where he is director of security. Rapley still liaises closely with his former police unit and he is certain that artefacts from Syria are being sold here. He wants the trade in these antiquities to become "socially repugnant and unacceptable" so that in the future, he says, "we don't have interior decorators looking for these things to decorate people's houses". You can hear Simon Cox's radio documentary on File on 4, on BBC Radio 4, at 2015 on Tuesday 17 February, or afterwards on the BBC iPlayer

तेल और अपहरण के साथ-साथ पुरावशेषों का व्यापार इस्लामिक स्टेट के वित्त पोषण के मुख्य स्रोतों में से एक है। इस कारण से संयुक्त राष्ट्र सुरक्षा परिषद ने पिछले सप्ताह सीरिया से कलाकृतियों के सभी व्यापार पर प्रतिबंध लगा दिया, जिसमें आईएस आतंकवादियों पर "आतंकवादी हमलों को आयोजित करने और अंजाम देने" की अपनी क्षमता को मजबूत करने के लिए सांस्कृतिक विरासत को लूटने का आरोप लगाया गया।


Hebrides rocket launch: The space milestone we almost missed

Summary: Scotland has scored another first in space.

By Ken MacdonaldBBC Scotland Science Correspondent A rocket from the Hebrides missile range in the Western Isles has become the first vehicle to be launched into space from UK soil. But the achievement almost went unnoticed. It happened in October during an international military exercise in the Atlantic. The aim of At Sea Demonstration 15 was to test the ability of warships to defend themselves against incoming missiles. One of the those incoming target missiles was an American Terrier-Orion two-stage rocket which was launched from the Hebrides missile range in the Western Isles. Playing the part of a ballistic missile, it soared high over the North Atlantic, so becoming the first space vehicle to lift-off from UK soil and leave the Earth's atmosphere. Until now every UK space shot has had to go abroad to be launched. It was an exercise which achieved several firsts in military technology. But this milestone passed almost unmarked. The point was to stop the missile coming down, not watch it go up. What's more the Terrier-Orion will never appear in a museum because it was blown to bits over the Atlantic by the US Navy's guided missile destroyer USS Ross. 'Family croft' For Dr Malcolm Macdonald, of Strathclyde University and director of the Scottish Centre of Excellence in Satellite Applications, the milestone has brought particular pleasure, not least that it was launched from the Hebrides Range. "Probably the least-heralded event of 2015 is that an object was sent into space from the UK," he says. "Also, that's where my family croft was, according to our family history. "It'd be great to see some real spacecraft going up into orbit from Scotland." That may happen next. The news emerged as six sites are vying to become the UK's first commercial spaceport, four of them in Scotland. A conference organised by the Royal Aeronautical Society is hearing from six sites hoping to be the chosen by the UK as a spaceport. They are the airports at Prestwick, Campbeltown and Stornoway, the former RAF base at Leuchars in Fife, Newquay airport in Cornwall and Llanbedr airport in the Snowdonia National Park. Here the emphasis will be on horizontal launches, such as those achieved by the Virgin Galactic project. There's more to that than space tourism. Virgin Galactic are preparing to test a launcher which could put small satellites into orbit from a Boeing 747. 'Plastic alien' And former Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn says the tourism spin-offs are not to be sniffed at. "People will come to see space launches," he says. "Would somebody go to Machrihanish to see a rocket launch? "Well, people go to Cape Canaveral to see rockets launched. "They even go to Roswell, New Mexico, to see a plastic alien because they're so interested in space." It is worth bearing in mind that Scotland is pretty good at this space business already. It's reckoned our space industry already supports five and a half thousand, mostly highly-skilled, jobs. In 2014, Ukube-1 became the first Scottish-built satellite to go into orbit. Does today's news mean the Hebrides Missile Range could host a space launch site? QinetiQ, who run it for the UK Ministry of Defence, say they have no plans to use it as a commercial spaceport. But they do stress they have the expertise to support a spaceport anywhere in the UK. And a feasibility study is under way for a commercial vertical launch facility near Tongue in Sutherland. Could Scotland boldly go? We already have.

स्कॉटलैंड ने अंतरिक्ष में एक और पहला गोल किया है।


Apple Watch: The net reacts to Apple's first wearable

Summary: It's not often that details of a major tech product can be kept under wraps until it appears on stage, but the Apple Watch managed to dodge the rumour sites and stay a secret right to the end.

It helped that Apple isn't ready to release the wearable until next year - missing the busy Christmas shopping season - though it may squeak in in time for the Chinese New Year in February. Tim Cook and Co managed to tantalise their audience with the promise of elegantly designed miniature apps - some, such as Maps and the exercise-focused Workout sounding genuinely useful, others, such as the ability to transmit your heartbeat to a loved one, perhaps less so. And while the Digital Crown control and pressure-sensitive screen hold the promise of a clever user interface tailored for the Watch's size, there was surprise from some that the fashion-conscious firm had opted for a rectangular watch face rather than a circular one, bearing in mind Motorola and LG have been praised for doing the opposite. But if one thing is clear from previous Apple launches - until you get time to play around with their products at length it's easy to miss many of their fine points and flaws. Of course, that didn't prevent a flood of instant feedback before U2 had a chance to round off the press conference. Below is a selection of what appeared online in the hours after the announcement. Vogue: From a fashion point of view, the external aesthetic seemed neutral: neither super-stylish nor repellent. I would imagine that geeks would love it more than aesthetes. Yet smartphones have already transformed the fashion world in a way we never imagined. Gizmodo: Maybe the cleverest part of the Apple Watch's design is how you control it. Instead of relying on multi-touch gestures designed for bigger screens, the Apple Watch leans on the use of the "digital crown," aka "the spinny knob" aka that thing you typically use to adjust the time... Think clickwheel 2.0. Wired: An intriguing feature is the Maps app, which in addition to offering directions also takes advantage of the haptic vibration system inside the device. In practice, this allows Apple's Maps app to not only plot a journey from your current location, but guide you using different types of vibrations on the wrist. The Verge: Apple left out some key details about the product, such as screen resolution, processing capabilities, and most importantly, expected battery life.... It also doesn't bode well that the display is not always on and only lights up when you move your wrist or interact with the watch Financial Times: What's the psychology behind showing your audience a rapid-fire demo of your most important new product for years, then blasting them senseless with a deafening rock band? Maybe it's to bludgeon us all into submission. Wall Street Journal: OK, someone tell me why I need to share my heart rate with another Apple Watch owner. Honest question. I guess if I am very close to my caregiver. Techcrunch: It seems spectacular, worlds better than other solutions. No doubt there are countless other consumer companies gearing up to announce their Android Wear devices. And now, instead of simply competing with the round-faced Moto 360, they have to announce their device in the face of the Apple Watch. Washington Post: Look, do we really need this? Besides, if you want to know what time it is, there's always your phone. Twitter: A lot of kitchen-sinking in the Apple watch. Much like the iPad launch. It's a piece of glass that could be anything, but what in particular? @BenedictEvans Apple to left-handed people wondering about the lack of left hand controls on the watch: "You're wearing it wrong." @rort [Apple later confirmed that the watch could be worn the other way round to suit left-handed users. However, this will mean that the Digital Crown will be located at the bottom of the device rather than at the top, as depicted in promotional images] Apple Watch design ... #uninspiring. Thick, square, still looks like a tech geek's toy. @jasonhiner I was just watching a video on the Apple Watch, and no exaggeration drooled on myself. I wish I was joking. I'm at work. @elizabiitchanna Apple Watch is the antithesis of what we've come to expect from Apple. Software looks absolutely amazing, hardware design is dated and ugly. @zacharye Complete standing ovation for the Apple Watch - looks utterly stunning. Am worse than drooling @stephenfry The Apple Watch allows us to share our heartbeats. Next year: colon x-rays. Stop over-sharing, America @bobcesca_go The differences between Google Glass and Apple Watch tell you a lot about the two companies... @nxthompson For Apple Watch as it was for the iPad and the iPhone before that: it is all about the apps! @caro_milanesi With Apple Watch, Apple Pay, is Apple changing it's naming convention from iEverything? @jaspmeshultz Facebook: I've a Breitling on my wrist. What will I do with Apple watch? Jochen Winkler No mention of waterproof... in the announcement or on the Apple pages. Very disappointing. Guess no swimming apps then? Stephen DeVito I would gladly pay $250 but $350 is ridiculous. Dave Hunter Wish it was coming out before Christmas! Debbie Argyle Treiber Did you make one for left-handers? Kimberly Huebner I think that the requirement for the Watch to require the iPhone should be re-thought on the next one. Cathy J Cross Reddit: The only appealing part of it in my opinion is the user interface. I can't believe I'm saying this, but a Motorola product looks infinitely more elegant and well designed than an Apple product. OsamaBeenModdin I really like it... but the more I think about it there is one critical piece that keeps nagging at me. When I think of an iPhone/iPad, I am purchasing it for a limited cycle (I don't expect to keep the device for more than three years). When I buy a watch, I'm wanting to buy something that will last 10+ years. lastmessiah No sleep tracking, since you're probably gonna have to charge the thing at night, removes 50% of what I want my wearable to do. arcalumis It looked thick in the pictures alone, but when they showed it on peoples' wrists it looked a lot better. I like it. gallionator I saw how the iPhone was revolutionary and how the iPad is one of the most amazing entertainment devices around, but I don't know what the watch is fulfilling. am0x The battery will be make-or-break on this one. abbotleather There's going to be an explosion of third-party bands and accessories, which may also serve to drive sales over the competition in the same way the accessories market for iPhone does. stultus_respectant Apple has previously waited for others to pioneer new tech before leapfrogging the competition as the graphic below illustrates: Xerox Alto Macintosh 128k Rio iPod IBM Simon iPhone Fujitsu Stylistic iPad Apple Watch Fossil Wrist PDA 1973 The Xerox Alto personal workstation The Alto was one of the first computers to use a mouse, and an early pioneer of the “desktop” concept. 1984 Macintosh 128K Apple’s first almost-affordable, mass-market computer was launched with a futuristic ad by Ridley Scott. 1998 Audible / MPMan / Rio The Rio had just 32MB of memory – enough to store roughly an hour of music. 2001 iPod Apple launched the original iPod with the slogan '1,000 songs in your pocket'. 1994 Weighing half a kilogram and featuring a rather crude touchscreen, the Simon was able to send and receive emails, as well as take notes. 2007 iPhone At the iPhone’s launch, Steve Jobs told the audience the device was 'five years ahead of any other mobile phone'. 2003 Fujitsu Stylistic Based upon what used to be known as the 'slate form factor', Fujitsu’s tablet PC could be operated with a pen or connected to a keyboard for use at a desk. 2010 iPad One million iPads were sold in 28 days after its launch in the US. 2003 Fossil Wrist PDA Developed in partnership with Microsoft and Palm, the Fossil could deliver traffic and weather reports, among other things. 2015 Apple Watch The Apple Watch comes in three ranges, each built out of different materials. All provide access to apps, notifications and activity-tracking data.

ऐसा अक्सर नहीं होता है कि एक प्रमुख तकनीकी उत्पाद के विवरण को तब तक गुप्त रखा जा सकता है जब तक कि यह मंच पर दिखाई नहीं देता है, लेकिन ऐप्पल वॉच अफवाह साइटों को चकमा देने और अंत तक एक गुप्त अधिकार रखने में कामयाब रही।


The silence over gay footballers

Summary: There are currently around 5,000 professional footballers in Britain, but none are openly gay. Amal Fashanu, niece of Justin Fashanu, asks why no gay player has followed in her uncle's boots in nearly 25 years.

My late uncle, Justin Fashanu remains the only professional footballer in Britain ever to come out publicly as gay. Justin broke into football as a teenage prodigy at Norwich. In 1980 he won the BBC's goal of the season award for an incredible strike against Liverpool. I still feel a surge of family pride every time I watch it. It's the casual celebration which always gets me. That was Justin. Effortlessly talented, effortlessly stylish, if a touch cocky. But what I learned about Justin is that, sadly, "that goal" marked the high point of his career. He was catapulted to fame, when Nottingham Forest paid a million pound-transfer fee to Norwich. But it was largely downhill from there. Forest's manager, the famous Brian Clough - or in my family the infamous - took a disliking to Justin. In his autobiography, Clough recounts the confrontation he had with Justin over rumours about frequenting gay clubs in Nottingham: "'Where do you go if you want a loaf of bread?' I asked him. 'A baker's, I suppose.' 'Where do you go if you want a leg of lamb?' 'A butcher's.' 'So why do you keep going to that bloody poofs' club?'" Those were the typical attitudes Justin faced in his profession, and very little had changed by the time he took the momentous decision to come out publicly a decade later in 1990. These prejudices he had to endure saddened, rather than shocked, me. But what I did find surprising was the slow pace of change within football since my uncle's courageous step into the limelight. I learned Justin was no angel, but he genuinely believed he was setting an example to other players facing discrimination. Sadly, it's an example no other gay player has felt able to follow in nearly 25 years. Why? Several reasons, I discovered. Matt Lucas, comedian, avid Arsenal supporter and one of Britain's best known gay football fans, shocked me with his description of the homophobia still prevalent on the terraces. But I learned it's not simply a case of the terraces frightening a gay player from coming forward. Max Clifford, the celebrity PR guru, pinpointed the role of agents and their perception that an openly gay player would be a weak commodity in the transfer market. "If by their star coming out, it's going to affect their earnings, then they won't want them to do it," says Clifford. Clifford also told me he had been approached by gay and bisexual Premiership players, terrified that their sexuality would come out and petrified that this would mean the end of their careers. Joey Barton, Queen's Park Rangers outspoken captain, feels close to the issue as his father's youngest brother initially hid his homosexuality. Barton highlighted "archaic figures" in management positions as an obstacle to gay players. Former basketball star turned psychologist, John Amaechi, who came out after retiring as a professional sportsman, went even further. "Football is clearly not that comfortable with women in board rooms. They're clearly not that comfortable with black people in management positions. And so, when it comes to gay people, that just blows their mind," said Amaechi. But there were some definite chinks of light. I encountered determined campaigners for change, like the Gay Football Supporters' Network, which has been trying to fight homophobia in the game for many years. Other organisations, like Kick It Out and Show Racism the Red Card and the Professional Footballers' Association, have also added homophobia to their anti-discrimination agenda in recent times. The Football Association, the game's main governing body and so often the target for criticism over its shortcomings and failings, are about to launch a four-year plan aimed at encouraging more gay players to participate at grassroots level. Barton was adamant that within the next 10 years there will be an openly gay footballer in the professional game. However, I was left with the overwhelming feeling that progress has moved at a snail's pace since Justin's era. As someone from a different generation, who works in fashion with gay colleagues on a regular basis, I found this particularly hard to comprehend. As well as being a great eye opener here, my research allowed me to close a very difficult chapter in my family life, which has always bothered me. By the time Justin came out publicly, his relationship with my dad, John Fashanu had broken down. My dad was upset that Justin had not at least consulted him before taking this step. When Justin later took his own life in 1998, following unfounded allegations of sexual assault in the US, it was shattering for my dad and family. I think as a 10-year-old my family, rightly, tried to protect me. But I was deeply upset by watching a documentary about Justin's life made shortly after he killed himself and discovering how my dad reacted in the media to Justin coming out. He said his brother would have to "suffer the consequences" and that he "wouldn't like to play or even get changed in the vicinity of him". I also heard for the first time the message that Justin left in which he said he felt abandoned and alone. Reliving that terrible time just made me wish I had been old enough back then to be there for Justin. I'm not saying I could have changed everything but I think he only needed that one family member or someone close to help. He shouldn't have ever felt alone and I think that's what most distressed me. I spoke to my dad about his reaction at the time and asked him whether he would now have changed any of his actions. "I'm not homophobic and I never had been, but at the time I was certainly cross with my brother," said my dad. "I sleep at night wondering all the time, could I have done more and I keep coming up with the answer, yes I could have done more. Does that console me? No. We've cried for nearly two decades for Justin, it's enough." I think I've come to realise myself that maybe Justin wasn't the perfect person that I had painted when I was 10 years old, and maybe he did do some things that upset our family. But having said that I still don't excuse my dad for disowning his brother publicly. My uncle's death and this family episode were tragic. But this should never disguise that Justin was proud to be who he was and proud to have been a pioneer.

वर्तमान में ब्रिटेन में लगभग 5,000 पेशेवर फुटबॉलर हैं, लेकिन कोई भी खुले तौर पर समलैंगिक नहीं है। जस्टिन फशानू की भतीजी अमल फशानू पूछती है कि लगभग 25 वर्षों में किसी भी समलैंगिक खिलाड़ी ने अपने चाचा के जूते क्यों नहीं पहने हैं।


HMP Lindholme death: Prisoner died from stab wound

Summary: A 22-year-old inmate found dead at HMP Lindholme near Doncaster at the weekend died from a stab wound, a post-mortem examination has revealed.

South Yorkshire Police said they were contacted by prison officials following the death on Saturday afternoon. Two prisoners, one aged 23 and another 26, who were arrested on suspicion of murder have been released on bail and returned to the prison service. Formal identification of the dead man has not yet taken place, said police. His family have been informed. HMP Lindholme is classified as a Category C and D prison with a capacity of more than 1,100. The former RAF base opened as a prison in 1985 and houses men over the age of 21, including inmates serving life and indeterminate sentences. An inspection in the summer was highly critical of the jail's wing for low-risk prisoners, which has since been closed.

सप्ताहांत में डॉनकास्टर के पास एच. एम. पी. लिंडहोल्म में मृत पाए गए एक 22 वर्षीय कैदी की चाकू के घाव से मौत हो गई, एक पोस्टमॉर्टम जांच से पता चला है।


How John Hersey's Hiroshima revealed the horror of the bomb

Summary: At the end of this month 70 years will have passed since the publication of a magazine story hailed as one of the greatest pieces of journalism ever written. Headlined simply Hiroshima, the 30,000-word article by John Hersey had a massive impact, revealing the full horror of nuclear weapons to the post-war generation, as Caroline Raphael describes.

I have an original copy of the 31 August 1946 edition of The New Yorker. It has the most innocuous of covers - a delightful playful carefree drawing of summer in a park. On the back cover, the managers of the New York Giants and the New York Yankees encourage you to "Always Buy Chesterfield" cigarettes. Past the Goings on About Town and movie listings, past the ritzy adverts for diamonds and fur and cars and cruises you find a simple statement from The Editors explaining that this edition will be devoted entirely to just one article "on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb". They are taking this step, they say, "in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use". Seventy years ago no-one talked about stories "going viral", but the publication of John Hersey's article Hiroshima in The New Yorker achieved just that. It was talked of, commented on, read and listened to by many millions all over the world as they began to understand what really happened not just to the city but to the people of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and in the following days. It was spring 1946 when John Hersey, decorated war correspondent and prize-winning novelist, was commissioned by The New Yorker to go to Hiroshima. He expected to write, as others had done, a piece about the state of the shattered city, the buildings, the rebuilding, nine months on. On the voyage out he fell ill and was given a copy of Thornton Wilders's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Inspired by Wilder's narrative of the five people who crossed the bridge as it collapsed he decided he would write about people not buildings. And it was that simple decision that marks Hiroshima out from other pieces of the time. Once in Hiroshima he found survivors of the bomb whose stories he would tell, starting from the minutes before the bomb was dropped. Many years later he told of the horror he felt, how he could only stay a few weeks. Hersey took these accounts back to New York. Had he filed from Japan the chances of them ever being published would have been remote - previous attempts to get graphic photographs or film or reports out of the country had been halted by the US Occupying Forces. The material had been censored or locked away - sometimes it simply disappeared. John Hersey - 1914-1993 Hersey's editors, Harold Ross and William Shawn, knew they had something quite extraordinary, unique, and the edition was prepared in utter secrecy. Never before had all the magazine's editorial space been given over to a single story and it has never happened since. Journalists who were expecting to have their stories in that week's edition wondered where their proofs had gone. Twelve hours before publication, copies were sent to all the major US newspapers - a smart move that resulted in editorials urging everyone to read the magazine. All 300,000 copies immediately sold out and the article was reprinted in many other papers and magazines the world over, except where newsprint was rationed. When Albert Einstein attempted to buy 1,000 copies of the magazine to send to fellow scientists he had to contend with facsimiles. The US Book of the Month Club gave a free special edition to all its subscribers because, in the words of its president, "We find it hard to conceive of anything being written that could be of more important at this moment to the human race." Within two weeks a second-hand copy of The New Yorker sold for 120 times its cover price. If Hiroshima demonstrates anything as a piece of journalism it is the enduring power of storytelling. John Hersey combined all his experience as a war correspondent with his skill as a novelist. It was a radical piece of journalism that gave a vital voice to those who only a year before had been mortal enemies. There in a cataclysmic landscape of living nightmares, of the half-dead, of burnt and seared bodies, of desperate attempts to care for the blasted survivors, of hot winds and a flattened city ravaged by fires we meet Miss Sasaki , the Rev Mr Tanimoto, Mrs Nakamura and her children, the Jesuit Father Kleinsorge and doctors Fujii and Sasaki. The six characters There had been demonisation long before Pearl Harbor. The Yellow Peril of the cartoon strips had sunk deep into the American psyche. In 1941 Time-Life ran an extraordinary article telling readers how they could tell Japanese from Chinese - "How to tell your friends from the Japs". The pilot of the Enola Gay is reported to have said he felt like sci-fi hero Buck Rogers the day he dropped the bomb. So only a year after the end of the war these six close-ups on five Japanese men and women and one Westerner, each of whom "saw more death than he ever thought he would see" were unexpected and shattering. Readers who sent letters to The New Yorker, almost all in admiration for the work, wrote of their shame and horror that ordinary people, just like them - secretaries and mothers, doctors and priests - had endured such terror. John Hersey was not the first to report from Hiroshima but the reports and newsreels had been a blizzard of numbers too big to fully comprehend. They had reported on the destruction of the city, the mushroom cloud, the shadows of the dead on the walls and streets but never got close to those who lived through those end-of-days time, as Hersey did. It was also becoming increasingly clear to some that this new weapon carried on killing long after the "noiseless flash" as bright as the sun, despite intense government and military attempts to cover it up or deny it. Hiroshima was the first publication to make the man on the San Francisco trolleybus and the woman on the Clapham omnibus confront the miseries of radiation sickness, to understand that you could survive the bomb and still die from its after effects. John Hersey in his calm unflinching prose reported what those who had survived had witnessed. As the nuclear arms race began, just three months after the testing of further atom bombs at Bikini Atoll, the true power of the new weapons began to be understood. Such were the reverberations of Hersey's article, and Albert Einstein's very public support for it, that Henry Stimson who had been US Secretary for War wrote a magazine article in reply, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb - a defiant justification for the use of the bomb, whatever the consequences. News of the extraordinary article had been reported in Britain, but it was too long to publish - John Hersey would not allow it to be edited and newsprint was still rationed. So the BBC followed American radio's lead and about six weeks later it was read out over four consecutive nights on the new Third Programme, despite some concern among senior managers about the emotional impact on listeners. The Radio Times commissioned Alistair Cooke to write a long background piece. Alluding to its publication in The New Yorker, renowned as the home of witty cartoons, he called it "the deadliest joke of our age". Find out more The listening figures were high and the BBC decided to rebroadcast the reading on the Light Programme all in one go, just a few weeks later, to make sure even more people heard it. That's the Light Programme whose remit was, according to the BBC Handbook for that year, "to entertain its listeners and to interest them in the world at large without failing to be entertaining". There was little to entertain in this two-hour programme. The Daily Express critic, Nicholas Hallam, called it the most terrifying broadcast he had ever heard. The BBC had also invited John Hersey to be interviewed and his cabled reply is in the BBC archives: "Hersey gratefullest invitation and BBC interest and coverage Hiroshima but has throughout maintained policy let story speak for itself without additional words from himself or anybody." Indeed, Hersey was only to give three or four interviews his entire life. Sadly not one of them was for the BBC. A 1948 recording of a reading of Hiroshima remains in the BBC archives. The effect of the crisp English voices telling this harrowing story is startling. The prose is revealed as rhythmic and often quietly poetic and ironic. One of the readers is the young actress Sheila Sim, newly married at the time to the actor Richard Attenborough. By November, Hiroshima was published in book form. It was translated quickly into many languages and a braille edition was released. However, in Japan, Gen Douglas MacArthur - the supreme commander of occupying forces, who effectively governed Japan until 1948 - had strictly prohibited dissemination of any reports on the consequences of the bombings. Copies of the book, and the relevant edition of The New Yorker, were banned until 1949, when Hiroshima was finally translated into Japanese by the Rev Mr Tanimoto, one of Hersey's six survivors. Hersey never forgot his survivors. In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the bomb, he went back to Japan and wrote The Aftermath, the story of what had happened to them in the intervening four decades. Two of them had since died, one of them certainly from radiation-related disease. More from the Magazine When time stood still - a Hiroshima survivor's story Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook

इस महीने के अंत में एक पत्रिका की कहानी के प्रकाशन को 70 साल बीत चुके होंगे, जिसे अब तक लिखी गई पत्रकारिता के सबसे महान टुकड़ों में से एक माना जाता है। जॉन हर्सी के 30,000 शब्दों के लेख हिरोशिमा का व्यापक प्रभाव पड़ा, जो युद्ध के बाद की पीढ़ी के लिए परमाणु हथियारों की पूरी भयावहता को प्रकट करता है, जैसा कि कैरोलिन राफेल ने वर्णन किया है।


Delays after lorry hits Cradley Heath level crossing barriers

Summary: A lorry hit level crossing barriers, causing delays on trains in the West Midlands.

Trains had to run at slower speeds after the lorry struck barriers in Cradley Heath at about 12:40 GMT on Monday, London Midland said. Delays between Smethwick Galton Bridge and Stourbridge Junction were reported. London Midland said rail services were back to normal by 16:35 GMT. A spokeswoman apologised for any disruption to passengers.

एक लॉरी लेवल क्रॉसिंग बैरियर से टकरा गई, जिससे वेस्ट मिडलैंड्स में ट्रेनों में देरी हुई।


Sniffing out cancer with electronic noses

Summary: We may soon be able to obtain easy and early diagnoses of diseases by smell. This week researchers found one odour-sniffing machine was as good as a mammogram at detecting breast cancer - and many other devices capable of spotting other diseases may be on the way.

By William KremerBBC World Service "I may sound crazy but I'm not," writes Joanie, on an online support forum for people affected by cancer. She relates how, while her husband suffered from prostate cancer, she could smell "an odour similar to decay". It went away with the cancer, but in 2012 she was alarmed to smell the putrid stench once again. Not long afterwards, Joanie herself was diagnosed with lung cancer. Although many cancer sufferers and their relatives do not notice a nasty smell, Joanie's experience is not unusual. "I've had numerous people writing to me about this," says George Preti from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "I've had lots of notes from nurses and researchers in the area, but they're mostly anecdotal reports." Throughout history, doctors have sniffed their patients' breath, urine, stool and other bodily fluids to help with diagnoses. A 2011 review article featured "smelling notes" of dozens of diseases. Yellow fever is said to smell like a butcher's shop, liver failure like raw fish, and typhoid like freshly baked brown bread. A recent experiment also provides some evidence that people give off a bad smell as they fall sick. A team led by Mats Olsson at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm dressed eight healthy volunteers in tight, cotton T-shirts and injected one half of the group with a placebo and the other half with a chemical that gave them a mild flu-like reaction. A month later, the participants came back and were injected with the other solution - the one they had not received the first time. All the T-shirts were then collected and patches from the underarm area were cut out and placed in squeeze bottles. These were used to supply puffs of air to a panel of smelling volunteers. "They rated the T-shirts with regards to intensity, unpleasantness and healthiness," says Olsson. "And for all these measures it turned out that the so-called sick group smelled more aversively." Although Olsson admits that the study - published in the journal Psychological Science - was very small, he believes ill people may emit a chemical "cue" to warn others of contagion, or possibly to signal they need help. Bad smells exist for a reason, agrees Val Curtis from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. "The disgust system in the brain has evolved to make us stay away from things that might make us sick. The most dangerous place on the planet is other people." For Mats Olsson, "the new thing and interesting thing" about his T-shirt study is that human beings seem capable of sniffing out disease early on - long before we start smelling like a butcher's shop or raw fish. For cancer, early detection is crucial, but the symptoms that prompt a visit to the doctor's surgery often don't emerge until the disease is advanced. George Preti gives the example of ovarian cancer, which has become the focus of his own work. "If you picture a peppercorn and an onion, the difference in size between those two is the difference between when it should be diagnosed and when it's traditionally diagnosed," he says. He hopes that ovarian cancer's smell could help doctors arrest the disease at the peppercorn stage. As part of everyday metabolism, our bodies produce chemicals which evaporate into the air. Cancerous cells, Preti says, have a different metabolism from normal cells, and therefore emit a different pattern of chemicals, a different odour. While it's too subtle for most human noses, dogs have been trained to identify multiple types of cancer, as well as diabetes. (Humans have around five million scent receptors, but dogs have up to 300 million.) Preti is working with the Penn Vet Working Dog Center, which is training four dogs to detect ovarian cancerous tissue. He says they can do this with greater than 90% accuracy. However, the idea is not that these dogs will get jobs in the oncology departments of hospitals. Instead, the Penn Vet dogs will help Preti identify the unique "odour signature" of ovarian cancer. "They're sort of a four-legged bio-assay," he says. Once the odour signature or profile of ovarian cancer is determined, it will be used by Preti's colleague Charlie Johnson to programme sensors in a device sometimes called an "electronic nose" or "e-nose". Johnson's prototype mimics the receptors in our nose with hundreds of carbon nanotubes, each with a strand of DNA attached. These strands are able to transpose the mix of chemicals in the air into an electronic signal. "You can have the power of a dog's nose on this small chip the size of your fingernail," Preti says. It's this device, rather than the dogs, that might end up on hospital wards. But dogs aren't the only animals that can smell cancer. So, apparently, can fruit flies. A recent paper in Nature showed that the scent of cancer samples prompted a particular pattern of activity on the flies' antennae. The paper's author, Martin Strauch at the University of Konstanz in Germany, is planning to identify which receptors on the antennae respond to the cancerous smells. Then he hopes to grow his own antennae in a petri dish, for use in an e-nose. "The biological sensors have been optimised by evolution - they are quite good," he says. Electronic noses of other kinds are already being put to work in a range of different fields, from checking for poison gas in war zones to ensuring the quality of beer. They are now on the verge of being set medical tasks, following tests on a device called BreathLink, which is designed to check for breast cancer. The device, developed by a company called Menssana, starts by building a profile of the ambient gas in a room. A patient in the room then breathes into a tube for two minutes. The composition of her breath is laid over the ambient room profile, and whatever's left over is compared to the known profile for breast cancer held in a database in the US. The results of the latest tests on BreathLink show it has similar diagnostic power to a mammogram, but women don't have to undress and are not exposed to X-rays. The results also come through within 10 minutes, instead of two weeks. Dr Roy Lalisang, who tested the machine at the University of Maastricht Medical Centre in Holland, says further tests are required, but it could be ready for service in the next couple of years. BreathLink could also, potentially, be used to test for tuberculosis. Another company, Owlstone, also hopes to bring a device to market in roughly the same time-frame, which would be used to screen patients for bowel cancer and other digestive diseases. Called Lonestar, this device would prevent some patients having to undergo an uncomfortable colonoscopy. As well as screening patients, medical sniffing devices can potentially be used to monitor the patients, as well as screening them. Krishna Persaud at the University of Manchester has been testing one that monitors victims of severe burns for signs of infection - if his e-nose sniffs an unwelcome odour, doctors can react immediately, instead of waiting three days for the sample to be analysed in a lab. A long-term goal for the sector is to get easy-to-use diagnostic tools into the home... and into our pockets. With the ever-growing sophistication of mobile phones - some of the latest models have temperature and humidity sensors - the idea of routinely breathing on to your phone to check for disease is not science fiction. The chip already exists, and getting it into a phone is straightforward engineering or electronics, says Billy Boyle of Owlstone, which was a recent runner-up in a competition sponsored by Nokia. For lots of patients these new tools cannot arrive in hospitals and doctors' surgeries too quickly. Roy Lalisang says that since the results of the BreathLink study were published last Wednesday his phone has not stopped ringing - most of the callers being women who are sick of getting prodded and pummelled in mammograms. "In my daily practice, I so frequently hear from women who have to undergo mammography," he says. "They say, 'Oh, when is the next one? In one year? Is it really necessary because it's so painful!' I always say: 'If men had to undergo this examination they would have found another test many years ago.' "Women will not undergo mammography if this is a comparable screening test." Mats Olsson spoke to Health Check on the BBC World Service. Listen to the programme on iPlayer or get the Health Check podcast. Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook

हम जल्द ही गंध से बीमारियों का आसान और जल्दी निदान प्राप्त करने में सक्षम हो सकते हैं। इस सप्ताह शोधकर्ताओं ने पाया कि एक गंध सूँघने वाली मशीन स्तन कैंसर का पता लगाने में मैमोग्राम जितनी अच्छी थी-और कई अन्य उपकरण जो अन्य बीमारियों का पता लगाने में सक्षम थे, रास्ते में हो सकते हैं।


What is defence alliance Nato?

Summary: Formed in 1949 to counter the threat of post-war communist expansion as the Soviet Union sought to extend its influence in Europe, Nato - the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - is the world's most powerful regional defence alliance.

It has traditionally stated its general aim as being to "safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation" of its members by promoting "stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area". Members agree that an armed attack against one shall be considered an attack against them all, and that they will come to the aid of one another. Originally consisting of 12 countries, the organisation expanded to include Greece and Turkey in 1952 and West Germany in 1955. However, then, as now, the alliance was militarily dominated by the United States. In 1955 the Soviet Union created a counter-alliance called the Warsaw Pact, which dissolved after the break-up of the USSR in 1991. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland became the first former Warsaw Pact countries to gain Nato membership in 1999. The next historic step came in 2004 when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, republics of the USSR until its collapse in 1991, along with Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania were welcomed as Nato members at a ceremony in Washington. Montenegro became the most recent addition to Nato in 2017. Why was Nato set up? Nato was set up in the post-World War II atmosphere of anxiety, largely to block Soviet expansion into Europe. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and subsequent demise of the Warsaw Pact, therefore, left Nato with no obvious purpose. Since then Nato has used its defensive role to justify a more proactive approach to "out of area" activities - arguing that instability in any part of Europe would constitute a threat to its members. Thus, at the end of 1995 it organised its first ever multinational Implementation Force (Ifor), under a United Nations mandate to implement the military aspects of the Bosnian peace agreement. In 1999 the alliance launched an 11-week campaign of air strikes against Yugoslavia to push Serb forces out of Kosovo. The strikes were the largest military operation ever undertaken by Nato, and the first time it had used force against a sovereign state without UN approval. The Nato peacekeeping force remains in Kosovo, although it has been scaled down from 16,000 to about 6,000 by 2012. In 2003 Nato took its operations outside Europe for the first time when it assumed strategic command of the UN-mandated peacekeeping force in and immediately around the Afghan capital, Kabul. What happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Nato embarked on a series of steps designed to build new relationships with former Warsaw Pact countries and particularly with Russia, which was profoundly suspicious of the alliance's plans to expand eastwards. In 1994 Nato offered former Warsaw Pact members limited associations in the form of the Partnership for Peace programme, allowing them to participate in information sharing, joint exercises and peacekeeping operations. But this simply appeared to confirm Russian fears that Nato posed a creeping threat to its security. The Nato-Russia Permanent Joint Council was established in May 1997 to give Russia a consultative role in discussion of matters of mutual interest. While Moscow was given a voice, it rarely felt that it was really listened to. Russia's fears intensified when in 1999 the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland became the first former Soviet bloc states to join Nato, bringing the alliance's borders 400 miles closer to the Russian frontier. Aftermath of 9/11 attacks The 11 September 2001 attacks on targets in the US were a pivotal moment for Nato. The US did not involve the alliance in the international military campaign that followed, even though Secretary-General George Robertson quickly invoked Article Five of the Nato constitution declaring an attack on one member to be an attack on all. Russia's supportive reaction following the attacks proved to be the catalyst for a thaw in relations with Moscow. The establishment of the Nato-Russia Council was agreed in May 2002. This body gives Russia an equal role with the Nato countries in decision-making on policy to counter terrorism and other security threats. However, the relationship with Russia continued to be difficult. Russia was unhappy that the Nato expansion of early 2004 brought the alliance to its borders. Relations took a marked turn for the worse after the brief Russo-Georgian war of August 2008, when Nato announced that cooperation would be suspended until Moscow pulled all its troops out of Georgia. Relations improved after Barack Obama assumed the US presidency in January 2009, and Nato announced in March 2009 that it would be resuming high-level contacts with Russia. However, relations took a turn for the worse in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine and was accused of supporting separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. The developments appeared to give Nato, which some described as a Cold War relic, new relevance. Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the Ukraine crisis "reminds us just how important Nato is. The idea of collective defence has become more important given how Russia is using force to change borders in Europe." What have been some of its biggest challenges? Disputes between Germany, France and the US over the 2003 invasion of Iraq caused one of the worst crises in Nato history. The alliance itself played no part in the invasion, although most member countries did. It later assisted in training Iraqi security forces. Nato has since shaped a new role for itself. It took command of the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan in 2003 as part of a growing awareness of the global terrorist threat, and set up a 9,000-strong rapid reaction force for swift deployment to trouble spots anywhere in the world. However, the reluctance of many Nato governments to supply reinforcements for the Afghan mission raised questions about the alliance's ability to sustain such large-scale operations. At a key summit held in Lisbon in November 2010 the alliance adopted a new "strategic concept" or mission statement that pledged it to cut costs while prioritising defence against new emerging threats, such as cyber-attacks. Nato allies also agreed to deploy a missile defence system to cover all of the territory of its European members, complementing US plans for a missile defence shield. And agreement was secured on moving towards Afghan control of internal security, which is due to begin in July 2011 and envisages full Afghan control by the end of 2014. The imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya in March 2011 posed a tricky problem for the alliance. Although countries such as Britain and the US were keen for Nato to play a major role in heading the operation, some Arab governments were initially uneasy at the prospect of Nato command. Following a period of disagreement and confusion, Nato agreed to take on the responsibility of enforcing the no-fly zone, which proved crucial in defeating pro-Gaddafi forces in October. US President Donald Trump has been critical of Nato since taking office. He has repeatedly complained that Europe's Nato members are not spending enough on the alliance. In October, he pulled forces out of northern Syria without consulting European Nato members. In November, just a month before the 70th anniversary of Nato, French President Emmanuel Macron described Nato as "brain dead". He warned European members that they could no longer rely on the US to defend the alliance.

1949 में युद्ध के बाद के साम्यवादी विस्तार के खतरे का मुकाबला करने के लिए गठित किया गया था क्योंकि सोवियत संघ ने यूरोप में अपना प्रभाव बढ़ाने की मांग की थी, नाटो-उत्तरी अटलांटिक संधि संगठन-दुनिया का सबसे शक्तिशाली क्षेत्रीय रक्षा गठबंधन है।


Woman dies as 'hazardous materials' probed in Stoke-on-Trent

Summary: The sudden death of a woman in Stoke-on-Trent may have involved hazardous materials, police say.

The body of the woman was found at an address in Eaton Street, Northwood, at 17:45 GMT on Friday. Staffordshire Police cordoned off the road while some residents in neighbouring properties were evacuated as "a precautionary measure". "The death is being treated as unexplained at this stage and a post-mortem will take place," police said. Five emergency workers were taken to hospital to be checked for possible effects after exposure to the "suspected materials". Follow BBC West Midlands on Facebook, on Twitter, and sign up for local news updates direct to your phone

पुलिस का कहना है कि स्टोक-ऑन-ट्रेंट में एक महिला की अचानक मौत में खतरनाक सामग्री शामिल हो सकती है।


Australia bushfires: Pollution concerns for tennis tournament

Summary: When tennis player Dalila Jakupovic was unable to complete her qualifying match for the Australian Open, which begins on Monday, she blamed the "unhealthy" air quality caused by fire smoke. Bushfires have been burning across Australia for weeks, causing air pollution which can be harmful to health.

Ms Jakupovic criticised the organisers for letting the match go ahead in those conditions, as she and several other tennis players experienced effects, including coughing and difficulty breathing, nausea and muscle cramps. How harmful is bushfire smoke? Breathing in smoke can cause irritation in the eyes, nose, throat and lungs. In more serious cases it can lead to hospital, especially for people with pre-existing respiratory conditions. As trees, leaves and other ground vegetation burn, they release small particles of solid carbon, water vapour and gases including carbon monoxide. Ultrafine particles of less than 2.5 micrometers - referred to as PM2.5 - pose the biggest risk to health because they can bury deep into the lungs and even enter the blood stream. This risks irritation, infection and an increased chance of heart attacks and lung disease. Professor Francesca Dominici, a statistician who works on public health, conducted a recent study into the effects of exposure to particulate matter. She found it was linked to hospital admissions for a wider range of conditions than previously thought. As well as the known effects on the lungs and heart, her team identified "new diseases including septicaemia which is a serious bloodstream infection... urinary tract infections and renal failure," she told ABC News. Bushfire pollution does not typically do as much lasting damage as traffic or industry pollution, according to Associate Prof Brian Oliver, an expert in respiratory disease from the University of Technology, Sydney, because conditions often lift with a change in weather. This means any breathing discomfort is mostly short-lived. But because many fires have been burning for weeks, and authorities warn that there is no immediate end in sight, experts say this should now be treated as medium-term exposure. Who is this affecting? Bushfires have been burning across the country, often sending smoke over populated areas. Residents of Sydney - Australia's largest city - have endured smoke for weeks. The city's air quality has exceeded "hazardous" levels on several occasions. That has led to a 10% rise in hospital admissions, say officials. Paramedics have treated hundreds of people for breathing problems. Adelaide - a city of 1.3 million - was also affected last month, with its residents told to stay indoors. Because PM2.5 particles found in bushfire smoke are so small - a ninth of the size of a grain of sand - they can travel huge distances on the wind, potentially affecting many more people. The smoke is expected to make "at least one full circuit around the globe," according to the US space agency Nasa. Most vulnerable are children, the elderly and smokers, while those with asthma, heart and lung problems can see exacerbated symptoms - such as chest tightness and difficulty breathing. And, as competitors in the Australia Open tennis tournament have experienced, athletes can be more susceptible to smoke damage because they are breathing in larger volumes of air as they exercise. The more intense the exercise, the more extra air will be taken in. Standard face masks are ineffective when it comes to blocking out fine particles, according to health authorities. They warned people to avoid exercising outdoors this week - a suggestion that many have ignored. How bad has Australia's air quality been? Australia's clear air standard is a PM2.5 level of eight micrograms per cubic metre. By comparison, smoking a single cigarette produces 20 micrograms per cubic metre. Recent readings in Sydney have been as high as 734 micrograms - the equivalent of about 37 cigarettes. What about 'thunderstorm asthma'? Smoke is an obvious health hazard that can travel vast distances from the fire front. But the weather stoking the flames has created other issues too, such as dust storms. In Victoria, officials issued an "extreme" warning in November for a phenomenon known as "thunderstorm asthma". This is where strong winds create more pollen in the air, which can lead to an outbreak of asthma attacks. In 2016, nine people died in Melbourne from just such an outbreak. Bushfires can actually create their own weather systems, which may exacerbate this effect, according to Rachel Badlan, a researcher at the University of New South Wales. If it covers a large enough area, the upward movement of hot air from a fire can interact with the atmosphere and form a pyrocumulonimbus - a cloud of smoke, ash and water vapour which comes alongside massive thunderstorms. Pollutants from these storms are flung into the stratosphere - more than 10km into the earth's atmosphere - according to Nasa. Reporting by the BBC's Frances Mao. Additional reporting by Rachel Schraer.

जब टेनिस खिलाड़ी डालिला जैकुपोविच सोमवार से शुरू होने वाले ऑस्ट्रेलियाई ओपन के लिए अपना क्वालीफाइंग मैच पूरा करने में असमर्थ थीं, तो उन्होंने आग के धुएं के कारण "अस्वस्थ" वायु गुणवत्ता को दोषी ठहराया। पूरे ऑस्ट्रेलिया में हफ्तों से झाड़ियों में लगी आग जल रही है, जिससे वायु प्रदूषण हो रहा है जो स्वास्थ्य के लिए हानिकारक हो सकता है।


Trustrees aim to raise new Aberdeen Art Gallery funds

Summary: A new board of trustees has been unveiled to raise the remainder of what is required to complete work on a major refurbishment of Aberdeen Art Gallery.

The gallery officially closed its doors earlier this year to allow work to start on the £30m project. A third of the money was granted by the Heritage Lottery Fund, with the city council also committing £10m. Aberdeen City Council said about £200,000 has been raised towards the final £10m needed. This has been through early fundraising and donations. A number of applications have also been made to trusts and foundations for funding. The redesign of the Schoolhill art gallery building was backed by 27 votes to 15 by Aberdeen City Council in 2013.

एबरडीन आर्ट गैलरी के एक बड़े नवीनीकरण पर काम पूरा करने के लिए आवश्यक शेष राशि जुटाने के लिए एक नए न्यासी मंडल का अनावरण किया गया है।


Cabinet row over how to tackle extremism

Summary: Two competing views of how to combat Islamic extremism. Two competing approaches over how to tackle allegations that extremists have taken over Muslim schools in Birmingham. An old-fashioned Whitehall turf war. Oh, and a bit of personal politics too.

Nick RobinsonPolitical editor That's what lies behind the row between the home secretary and the education secretary revealed by The Times this morning. I understand that Michael Gove and Theresa May clashed at a recent meeting of what's called the Extremism Task Force - a committee of cabinet ministers set up by David Cameron. They argued about how to define extremism. Mr Gove has long argued that Whitehall is too soft on extremism; that it only confronts people once they've turned to violence; that you should "drain the swamp" and not wait for "the crocodiles to reach the boat". At the meeting he argued for a broader definition. Mrs May, for a narrower one. She won. 'No smoking gun' They also argued about how to handle the Trojan Horse allegations. He argued for an aggressive approach. She for a softer one. Again, I'm told, she won. To her fury - according to a source familiar with the row but who is not in either department - Mr Gove then "went behind her back" to his friend the prime minister and re-opened the argument. In a week's time the Trojan Horse report will emerge. One well-placed source within Whitehall tells me "there is no smoking gun." In advance of its publication Mr Gove's allies briefed The Times of their frustration with the Home Office's softly-softly approach. The Home Office released a letter from Mrs May to Mr Gove pointing out the failings in his own department. An ally of Mrs May told me that she was angry with the way Mr Gove had handled this argument which should have stayed private and was "going in for the kill."

इस्लामी चरमपंथ का मुकाबला करने के लिए दो प्रतिस्पर्धी विचार। इन आरोपों से निपटने के लिए दो प्रतिस्पर्धी दृष्टिकोण कि चरमपंथियों ने बर्मिंघम में मुस्लिम स्कूलों पर कब्जा कर लिया है। एक पुराने जमाने का व्हाइटहॉल टर्फ युद्ध। ओह, और थोड़ी सी व्यक्तिगत राजनीति भी।


Coronavirus: 'I'm being bombarded by gambling ads'

Summary: For two addicts in recovery, the gambling industry's pledge this week to halt radio and TV advertising during the lockdown doesn't go far enough. It still leaves them exposed to online ads, they say, which could be enough to cause someone in their position to relapse.

By Nicola KellyBBC News Every time Kelly looks at her phone, she feels nauseous. Sometimes she calls her mum, incensed and seeking comfort. "I'm being bombarded," says Kelly. "These pink, fluffy ads are flashing up all day, every day. Maybe I notice them now because we're indoors more, but it feels like the gambling industry's really trying to coin in on the lockdown." Until earlier this week, she saw the ads on television and radio too. Now it seems to her that they are appearing in greater numbers online, overwhelming her as she scrolls through online shopping sites. At its worst, Kelly's gambling addiction cost her £500 a day. As she racked up debts of more than £70,000 playing bingo and other casino games, she kept her habit a secret: no-one would be any the wiser if she carried on smiling. But soon, the guilt and shame led to more sinister thoughts. "I would get in my car and think, 'I'll go out and I'll wrap myself around a tree. It's only me and the tree that will get hurt.' I was in a dark, gloomy place… There was no light at the end of the tunnel." Gambling charities are concerned that social isolation, boredom, personal conflict and financial insecurity during lockdown may drive more people to consider gambling, and prompt recovering addicts to relapse. One in fivewho've not gambled in past 4 wks, likely to in next 4 wks One in 10who've not gambled in past year, likely to in next 4 weeks Neil McArthur, chief executive of the Gambling Commission, the gambling regulator, told the House of Commons Public Accounts committee this week that about 15% of gamblers were now spending more time gambling, rising to 60% of the "most engaged" gamblers, who are at higher risk of addiction. "What we know from YouGov data is that firstly there is a sense of people who have not gambled for a while, thinking that they might. One in five gamblers who have not gambled in the last four weeks say they are likely to gamble in the next four weeks, and one in 10 who have not gambled at all in the last year say they are likely to turn to gambling in the next four weeks," he said. The number of people seeking help troubles two of the charities that provide support. GamCare, which operates the national gambling helpline, has told Moneybox on BBC Radio 4 that the number of contacts in the three weeks after the lockdown began, on 23 March, was 50% down on the three weeks preceding the lockdown. It is concerned that people slipping into a gambling habit feel unable to call the helpline in front of their family or housemates. But Gordon Moody Association, a charity that helps seriously addicted gamblers, has registered more calls to its helpline than ever before. "Usually we have around 50 interactions a day; we're now getting about 170 a day. And for our residential support programme, we've got a growing waiting list of more than 20 people, which we've never had before," says chief executive Matthew Hickey. The charity has also seen a spike in the number of women requesting support, who are primarily drawn to online games such as bingo. "At the moment, with the suspension of live sports events, we've seen a migration towards casino games, which are particularly popular among women," Hickey says. "They're very easy to access - but they're also highly addictive." Neil McArthur told the Public Accounts Committee that the lack of live sport meant that gambling companies were likely to lose between £1bn and £1.5bn this year, but that profit from online casino games and online slot machines would increase. For those with a potentially life-threatening gambling habit, the stakes are high. Recovering addict Tony, who served a three-year prison sentence after stealing from his employer to feed his habit, says that his tweets about gambling mean that he regularly receives targeted ads. Like Kelly, he feels that he is being baited by gambling companies with ads that nudge him to take a spin on the roulette wheel or have a go on the slots. He says he feels he must remain more vigilant now, under lockdown, than previously. Where to get help GamCare operates the National Gambling Helpline, providing information, advice and support for anyone affected by gambling problems - advisers are available 24 hours a day on Freephone 0808 8020 133 or via web chat Gordon Moody Association provides advice, education and therapeutic support to problem gamblers, as well as an intensive residential treatment programme - for more information visit the website or call 01384 241292 Further sources of support can be found on the BBC Action Line "In my eyes, I will always be an addict," he says. "I am seconds away from a bet and from destroying my life again, so I can never be complacent. "This period is a very testing time, so it would be very easy to fall back on what our brains tell us are feel-good factors. Without any limits set, you're prey for the industry." Before lockdown, Kelly and Tony would attend regular meetings with other recovering addicts in their areas to share experiences, and help each other to resist the temptation to relapse. They are now able to take part in similar sessions held online, but these - often attended by large numbers of people they have never met - are not as effective, they say. "Under lockdown, the mental health pressures may be acute, especially for those with pre-existing gambling issues," says Anna Hemmings, chief executive of GamCare. "People need to ensure they keep accessing their existing support networks or treatment services. We, and other charities, are boosting availability of online services to help people isolated in their homes." Gordon Moody Association says it is also continuing one-to-one phone mentorship but is unable to offer new places on its 14-week residential rehab programme until the lockdown ends - which is why the waiting list is growing. Support workers are also encouraging addicts to subscribe to services that block targeted advertising and urging problem gamblers to protect their financial assets. "Customers who are experiencing problems are encouraged to use self-exclusion schemes, such as GamStop," Matt Gaskell, Clinical Director of the NHS Northern Gambling Service, says. "There are also banks which offer a service to block gambling transactions and customers can use deposit limits online." In a letter to its investors last month, online casino company 888 said: "The board recognises that, with people spending more time at home and with potentially increased stress from economic uncertainty, 888's vigilance on safe gambling and preventing gambling-related harm is even more important than ever. "The group continues to offer its customers support and is proactively communicating with its customers to make them aware of safe gambling tools to limit and control their play." In his comments to the Public Accounts Committee, Gambling Commission chief executive Neil McArthur said his organisation had warned operators not to exploit the current situation - for example, by pushing casino products to customers who have so far only placed bets. He added that the evidence to hand did not show a significant increase in advertising. But for Kelly, fearful of a return to her darkest days, the industry is not doing enough to help problem gamblers. She would like them to provide clear signposting to advice lines, and would favour a ban on celebrities endorsing online games. "These adverts have been forced down people's throats for too long, without any signposting for where to get help," she says. "I don't want to go down that rabbit's hole again - but you cross that invisible line very quickly. "All you can do is be honest, speak out and ask for help. I know there's a life beyond gambling. There is something else." You may also be interested in: "Not in a million years, not in a million years did I think that gaming could lead to compulsive gambling." Steve is sitting on a bench in a churchyard. He's agreed to talk to me about his son's gambling addiction. He's nervous, he hasn't done an interview before and I can feel his anxiety. How my son went from gamer to compulsive gambler

ठीक होने वाले दो नशेड़ियों के लिए, इस सप्ताह जुआ उद्योग की लॉकडाउन के दौरान रेडियो और टीवी विज्ञापनों को रोकने की प्रतिज्ञा काफी दूर नहीं जाती है। वे कहते हैं कि यह अभी भी उन्हें ऑनलाइन विज्ञापनों के संपर्क में छोड़ देता है, जो उनकी स्थिति में किसी को फिर से प्रभावित करने के लिए पर्याप्त हो सकता है।


Cybercrime experts advise businesses at Glyndwr University

Summary: Police and experts in cybercrime are meeting in Wrexham to discuss ways to tackle the issue and keep people safe online.

Glyndwr University is hosting the first meeting of the North Wales Cyber Security Cluster with local businesses also attending. Prof Vic Grout said the aim is to meet monthly to share good practice. Security agency GCHQ said people and businesses could adopt basic cyber security principals to keep safe.

पुलिस और साइबर अपराध के विशेषज्ञ इस मुद्दे से निपटने और लोगों को ऑनलाइन सुरक्षित रखने के तरीकों पर चर्चा करने के लिए रेक्सम में बैठक कर रहे हैं।


Can White Space fill in the broadband gaps?

Summary: He's a quiet, even shy, farmer working hard tending his beef cattle herd on the Isle of Bute and mending outbuildings battered in the January storms. He admits he knows little or nothing about the internet, but Robert McAlister is part of an experiment which could help the UK achieve the government's slightly unlikely goal of leading Europe in broadband provision.

Rory Cellan-JonesTechnology correspondent@BBCRoryCJon Twitter Because Bute is the site of a pilot of a technology called White Space, which seems as though it might be ideally suited to filling in some of the gaps in our broadband coverage. BT, which is running the trial, is certainly hoping that it will be part of the answer to reaching the 10% of the population which won't be served by the market, or by the various government schemes to bring fast fibre to remote areas. White Space is part of the dividend from the digital switchover, spare spectrum no longer needed for television broadcasts. It is in the UHF band, familiar to anyone who tuned an old television years ago, and the amount of "space" varies around the UK. Fortunately, there is more of it in the areas where broadband coverage is already patchy and households are unlikely to see a fibre connection arriving anytime soon. Places like the Isle of Bute and other more remote spots in the Highlands and Islands. The pilot programme on Bute involves a transmitter at a tiny exchange near the community of Kilchattan Bay, from which a broadband signal is transmitted to 10 homes participating in the trial. It sounds like wi-fi but the signal is actually just an extension of the fixed line network, with homes needing their own aerials to pick it up. The McAlister family farm is one place testing out White Space. It's too far from the exchange for the copper network to deliver broadband, and the satellite broadband link the family used to depend on proved both expensive and unreliable. So how is the new broadband link? "You'll have to ask my wife and kids about that," Robert McAlister told me when I asked what benefit the family were getting from the trial. But, as we looked at some of his prize bulls which can fetch a good price at auction, he explained that he had found one profitable use for the web. His daughter had shown him how he could monitor cattle auctions on the mainland via their websites, and watch live to see where the best prices could be found. Chris Gibbs of BT's Openreach division, which hopes eventually to offer White Space as a wholesale broadband product, explained that it was a technology which would augment, rather than replace the standard copper network: "Although it has the same characteristics as copper - the further you go the worse the signal gets - it goes a bit further, and that's the advantage." And, like a television signal, it can go direct to homes, whereas a copper or fibre cable has to wind its way along country lanes. On a glorious March day - apparently it never rains on Bute - we toured the island to test the speeds delivered over the trial network. On a viewing platform overlooking a bay where seals could be seen playing in the shallows, we tested it out with a Skype video call. After a few hitches, it seemed to work pretty well, with sound and video coming across then network. The speeds on offer, however, are far from spectacular. BT says it can deliver around 10Mbps or more, but at the moment it's giving users download speeds of between 4 and 8Mbps. My own tests showed the network delivering only around 3Mbps - but then the upload speeds were about the same, making video conferencing eminently feasible. During the trial, the available capacity is being tweaked between upload and download to see what works best for consumers. Compared with what they had before, the White Space broadband certainly seems an improvement to the trialists. At the Kingarth Hotel, a fine pub at Kilchattan Bay, they explained that their old broadband connection made it virtually impossible to order new stocks of beer online, with "timed out" messages a constant irritation. Now they have much speedier access to the brewery website. BT says this trial, and another taking place in Cambridge, are yielding promising results, but it warns that it is early days and it still isn't clear whether the technology will prove commercially viable. And White Space will have competition in the drive to bring faster broadband to Britain's notspots. As I caught the ferry back from Bute to the mainland I took a call from a company eager to tell me about a rival technology. A firm called Tooway Direct, which provides satellite broadband connectivity, promised that it could offer customers in Bute and elsewhere across the Highlands and Islands, a fast and affordable broadband connection. I pointed out that the farmer I had visited in Bute had found his satellite link neither fast nor cheap. Tooway Direct's managing director Andrew Walwyn admitted that the technology was still suffering from an image problem, but insisted that the launch last year of a new satellite dedicated to broadband provision had transformed the situation. For many communities, he told me, the chances of getting a fast broadband connection in the next five years from BT were remote, but satellite promised "really fast broadband now with a comparatively small investments." So, White Space could be one answer to patching the gaps in broadband coverage, satellite or 3G and 4G mobile networks could be another. The good news is that places that seemed doomed to the broadband slow lane are now in the sights of companies promising to make life online better.

वह एक शांत, यहां तक कि शर्मीला, किसान है जो ब्यूट द्वीप पर अपने गोमांस के मवेशियों के झुंड की देखभाल करने और जनवरी के तूफानों में क्षतिग्रस्त बाहरी इमारतों को ठीक करने के लिए कड़ी मेहनत कर रहा है। वह स्वीकार करता है कि वह इंटरनेट के बारे में बहुत कम या कुछ भी नहीं जानता है, लेकिन रॉबर्ट मैकएलिस्टर एक ऐसे प्रयोग का हिस्सा है जो यूके को ब्रॉडबैंड प्रावधान में यूरोप का नेतृत्व करने के सरकार के थोड़े अप्रत्याशित लक्ष्य को प्राप्त करने में मदद कर सकता है।