Portugal president vetoes gender law
The law would have allowed those from the age of 16 to change their legal gender without a medical test.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "It was a nightmare, it wasn’t safe enough to drive"
BMW is extending a UK recall of its cars after the BBC's Watchdog found that vehicles could cut out completely while they are being driven.
It is recalling 312,000 vehicles: the BMW 1 Series, the 3 Series, the Z4 and its X1 petrol and diesel models made between March 2007 and August 2011.
BMW initially recalled 36,410 petrol cars last year over safety issues.
It said it now recognised there may have been similar problems in cars not covered by the first recall.
The German carmaker initially recalled cars in the UK after Narayan Gurung, who was travelling with his wife on Christmas Day in 2016, died when their Ford Fiesta crashed into a tree to avoid a broken-down BMW in Guildford, Surrey.
BMW advert 'promoted dangerous driving'
The BMW had suffered an electrical fault, causing its brake lights to fail and resulting in the vehicle stalling on a dark A-road.
An investigation by Watchdog has found that the fault could affect a wider number of cars.
Image copyright Gurung family Image caption Narayan Gurung was killed on Christmas Day in 2016 when his car swerved to avoid a stalled BMW
One BMW owner, Mwape Kambafwile, told the BBC how his BMW 3 Series car had cut out completely while he was driving in December 2016.
"I just thought to myself if I was driving on the motorway with my family in the car, that could have been very dangerous," he said.
'Furious'
Mr Kambafwile said he took his car to BMW who called the next day to say that they had found the fault, which looked like "the cable had burnt out and no current was passing through the fuse box".
BMW allowed Mr Kambafwile to take the car home without any warning not to use it, he said.
He refused to drive the car and was furious to later discover that petrol versions of the same vehicle had been recalled for the same fault.
It recently emerged that BMW had failed to tell the UK's Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency about the electrical fault in some of its cars that led to the death of Mr Gurung.
Image copyright Getty Images
BMW said it had worked with the DVSA and rejected suggestions it had ignored instructions or provided incorrect information.
An inquest revealed that the carmaker had received complaints of an electrical issue that caused a total power failure as early as 2011.
BMW recalled 500,000 cars in the US in 2013, as well as in Australia, Canada and South Africa.
Commenting on Watchdog's investigation, BMW said: "We now recognise that there may have been some cases of similar power supply issues in vehicles not covered by the original recall.
"In order to reassure customers with concerns about the safety of their vehicles, we are voluntarily extending the recall.
"We are therefore announcing today that we will take the proactive step of expanding the existing UK recall to cover all vehicles potentially affected by the power supply issue."
BMW said that it will open a customers' complaints line and will contact affected owners directly.
Watch Watchdog at 8pm tonight on BBC One
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
A campaign calling for the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to step down has flooded social media.
The campaign comes after Mr Erdogan, who has ruled Turkey for 15 years, said in a speech to Parliament on Tuesday that "if one day our nation says 'enough', then we will step aside".
Seizing up on this statement, many Turks have taken to the hashtag #TAMAM, which translates as 'enough', to say they have indeed had enough.
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The hashtag has been used almost two million times since Tuesday evening, with many social media users strongly criticising the president and the ruling AK Party.
As the trend gathered momentum, pro-government accounts mobilised to launch a counter hashtag, #DEVAM - which translates as "carry on".
The showdown between the rival campaigns has been called "one of the largest political hashtag wars in internet history" by Professor Akin Unver, who is a Fellow of Cyber Research Program at the Centre for Economic and Foreign Policy Research.
One Instagram user depicted the battle between #TAMAM and #DEVAM as a fight between superheroes.
Mr Erdogan's comments come amid heightened political tensions after the president called a snap election to be held on 24 June.
Muharrem Ince, who is the presidential candidate of the opposition Republican Peoples' Party used the phrase to suggest "time's up" for Mr Erdogan.
Syrian cartoonist Iad Wawil used the hashtag to share an illustration suggesting Mr Erdogan may be haunted by his "TAMAM" comments.
Image copyright @iadtawil
Many thousands simply tweeted #TAMAM, while others got creative with the ways they shared the anti-Erdogan slogan.
Some spelt it out with green peppers and some used their limbs to form the word.
Despite the rapid growth of the hashtag and the fiercely critical nature of many posts, Mr Erdogan remains popular in Turkey having brought sustained economic growth to the country.
The rival hashtag #DEVAM was launched later on Tuesday by pro-government users and has been used over 300,000 times.
Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu used the hashtag to claim the government "will carry on with our blessed cause for a more prosperous and powerful Turkey,"
Some Erdogan supporters used variations of #DEVAM to ask those critical of the president what they have had enough of.
"Enough of what? Of the fight against terror? Of a completely independent Turkey that stands tall against the world? Of the homeland? Of the state? Enough of what? We will continue to the end" one user wrote.
Other users linked the anti-Erdogan #TAMAM campaign to the 2013 anti-government Gezi Park protests.
Taylan Kulaçoğlu posted that the authorities were "mad about this TAMAM issue... because it reminds them of the opposition that organised on Twitter prior to Gezi".
Skip Twitter post by @TaylanKulacogIu Bu T A M A M mevzusuna AKP'lierin çıldırmasının tek sebebi sadece seçimler değil, Gezi öncesi Twitterda örgütlenen muhallefeti anımsattığı için bu denli yükleniyorlar, korkuları biraz da bundan..
Neyse, Günaydın T A M A M ! pic.twitter.com/wv6A6D5ARN — Taylan Kulaçoğlu (@TaylanKulacogIu) May 9, 2018 Report
While #TAMAM has been widely used to criticise the government, censorship by the Turkish authorities is prevalent and well documented.
Twitter's Transparency report 2017 revealed that Turkey was at the top of the list of countries that had asked the social media platform to remove content.
Reflecting on this governmental control, prominent lawyer Kerem Altiparmak suggested that if a million people are using the term TAMAM on social media, the number of people who wish to express the notion, but don't, must be much higher.
Skip Twitter post by @KeremALTIPARMAK İşe başvururken, terfi alırken, ihaleye girerken, nefes alırken bile sosyal medya hesaplarına bakılıyor. Bu korku iklimine rağmen milyonlarca T A M A M yazılıyorsa gerçek T A M A M ların on milyonlarla ifade edilmesi gerekiyor. — Kerem ALTIPARMAK (@KeremALTIPARMAK) May 9, 2018 Report
Turkish authorities have previously restricted access to social media sites including Twitter and Facebook, and blocked all access to Wikipedia in 2017.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, referenced the hashtag while calling on Mr Erdogan to "unblock Wikipedia and to listen to the people".
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Google's chief executive reinforced the firm's push into AI
The demo was impressive, I’ll give them that. A machine - Google’s voice assistant - booked an appointment at a hair salon. And then a table at a restaurant.
Not online, or through some automated system. But by talking to a human. Over the phone. Blimey.
Google Duplex, unveiled at the firm’s annual developers’ conference, has incredible potential - albeit one that’s laced with a hint of terror over AI’s continued march into our lives.
Duplex is a system that can take a user's data - like wanting a hair cut on a specific day at 12pm - and relay it using an automated voice to a human being, reacting to questions and the irregularities of a typical person’s speech.
The voice is designed to sound completely natural, complete with the ums and uh huhs found in everyday life. The recipient of the call, ideally, is none the wiser.
You should take a minute to listen to the examples on Google’s blog post about the idea, published on Tuesday.
'Experimenting'
Now. Let’s start with the obvious question. Does it work? We don’t know.
Frustratingly, Google was unable to show us this technology in action. We have no idea if the calls shared today were the successful calls out of many, many attempts - nor do we know if the recipient was prepped beforehand. We don’t know how easy the system is to fool, or just confuse enough to render it useless. Anyone who uses Google’s Assistant today knows how often it stumbles over a lot of basic requests.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Watch: Google's new voice assistant in action
So, while others in attendance have referred to today’s demo as “stunning”, I’ll retreat to something more sensible: it’s promising.
As is increasingly the case, the key hurdle here may not be one of technological limitations, but societal.
Start here: will the recipient know they are talking to a machine? Do they deserve to be told? Will Google monitor each call and learn from its contents? If so, how would the recipient consent to that - as the law, in many places, demands - ?
"It’s important to us that users and businesses have a good experience with this service, and transparency is a key part of that,” Google said in its blog.
"We want to be clear about the intent of the call so businesses understand the context. We’ll be experimenting with the right approach over the coming months.”
Deceptive
So far that approach, according to the recordings, isn’t to tell the recipient they are talking to a bot - indeed, the “mhmm” noises from the AI are arguably pretty deceptive.
Assuming that gets figured out, think of it from the other side. As a human being in a service job, how would you feel about customers who couldn’t be bothered to call you themselves?
Like a shop worker might recognise an irritating customer’s voice, staff will surely start to notice the telltale signs of an AI speaking to them. I’m not sure I’d give it the time of day.
Then again - if it brings in a lot of business, workers might be told to just get over it.
Or maybe, the salon could get an AI assistant of its own. And then it's AI talking to AI. Booking appointments. Planning. Plotting. Waiting.
