India launches 'monster' rocket

 

India's space agency has successfully launched its heaviest rocket.
The 640-tonne rocket blasted off from a launching site off the Bay of Bengal in Sriharikota.
As one website put it, "it's been a big day for India". The rocket will reduce the Indian Space Research Organisation's (Isro) reliance on European vehicles to launch heavy satellites.
The coverage of the launch has been euphoric, and often colourful, with websites comparing the rocket to the weight of 200 elephants, or five jumbo jets.

'200 elephants'


Such comparisons highlight the importance of the launch for the country, which is aggressively competing to get a bigger share of the global commercial satellite launch market.
India has so far relied on other countries to send heavy satellites into space, which is expensive and a drain on Isro's budget.
The GSLV Mark III can carry put a payload weighing more than three tonnes into the high altitude orbit occupied by the spacecraft that relay TV, telephone calls and broadband connections.
But it's far from being the world's heaviest rocket because Nasa's Saturn V, which was used between 1967 and 1973, still holds the record at 2,676 tonnes when fully fuelled for lift-off - or about 400 fully grown elephants.


The NDTV website says the rocket is as heavy as five Jumbo jets. And the weight matters because communication satellites are quite heavy.
Experts say the rocket gives India more flexibility in launching different kinds of satellites.
"We were able to send [satellites weighing] up to two tonnes previously. This is a double quantum jump for India," Ajay Lele from the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses told the AFP news agency.


Isro hopes hopes that the rocket, called the "monster" by one newspaper, will be able to carry an astronaut to space by 2024.
India wants to become the fourth country after the US, China and Russia to send a person into space.
Experts say the successful launch will give impetus to India's indigenous space programme.
launch follows Isro's other recent achievements, including a mission to Mars, and the launch of more than 100 satellites in a single mission earlier in the year.

Taller than Statue of Liberty

In the spirit of finding fun facts, the BBC also did some research on the height of the rocket and found that it's taller than the Statue of Liberty.
The rocket is 43m (141ft) tall, while the statue stands at 33.83m, minus the pedestal foundation.

Cartoons by the BBC's Kirtish Bhat

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The countries that cane their convicts

wo men are due to be caned in public after they were caught in bed together in Aceh, Indonesia.

The men will each receive 85 lashes in public, as punishment under the strict Islamic laws used in Aceh.
It is the only Indonesian province where Sharia is in force. According to human rights campaign group Amnesty International, 108 people were punished for various offences in 2015.
Their offences ranged from gambling to alcohol, adultery and public displays of intimacy outside of marriage.
Pictures of these public punishments - designed to humiliate as much as to injure - show people being led onto a raised platform, and made to kneel or stand as a hooded man beats them with a long, thin cane while a large crowd watches.
Caning is considered so barbaric that Amnesty says it could be considered akin to torture.
But flogging as a punishment for transgressions in countries where Islamic laws are followed is relatively common.
In Sudan, women can be flogged for dressing "indecently". In Saudi Arabia, a woman driving a car can be enough to warrant the sentence. In Iran, attending a party with both men and women can end with being whipped.


One woman flogged for doing just that described on the Iranian Facebook page My Stealthy Freedoms how she was led into a room in shackles and beaten by a woman.
"With the impact of the first lash, I jumped out of my [seat] uncontrollably," the woman wrote. "I was so shocked that even my tears would not drop. I wanted to scream, but I could not even control my voice."
But probably the most famous case in recent years is that of Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for "insulting Islam" online.
So far, authorities have only carried out the first 50 lashes. The public outcry appears to have had some success in halting the sentence, but it still hangs over him.
In the Maldives, where Sharia law is mixed with English common law, flogging is also legal punishment, most commonly used on those convicted of having extramarital sex. The majority of cases are women.
Caning is also used as a punishment in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, a legacy of British colonial rule in the 19th Century.
Unlike the public floggings in Aceh, however, these punishments take place behind closed doors, with the accused tied to specially constructed frames and carried out with a doctor in attendance.

Its use is relatively widespread: in Singapore 2,203 people were caned in 2012, including 1,070 foreigners, the US State Department said.
Since 2010, at least three Europeans have been sentenced to be caned for vandalism, including Swiss software consultant Oliver Fricker, who spray-painted graffiti on a train.
But the numbers pale in comparison to Malaysia.
In 2010, Amnesty International released a report saying some 10,000 prisoners and 6,000 refugees were being caned each year, punishment for more than 60 crimes - including drug-related and sexual offences, as well as migration violation

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What to expect at Bill Cosby sex assault trial

US comedian and actor Bill Cosby is to go on trial for sexual assault in Pennsylvania later in a case that is expected to last about two weeks.
Former University employee Andrea Constand alleges the 79-year-old drugged and molested her in 2004.
Mr Cosby says he is innocent and the encounter was consensual.
It is being seen as the biggest US celebrity trial since former American football player OJ Simpson's murder trial in 1995.
Several of Mr Cosby's co-stars from the 1984-1992 sitcom The Cosby Show are expected to attend the trial in Norristown outside Philadelphia, along with more than 100 journalists. Broadcasters and photographers are expected to camp outside.

What is he accused of?

Mr Cosby faces three counts of aggravated indecent assault. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 10 years and a fine of up to $25,000 (£19,500).
In 2004 Ms Constand was 31 when she visited Cosby's home seeking career advice after befriending him through Temple University in Philadelphia, where he served on the board of trustees.
She said Cosby gave her three blue pills which made her legs feel "like jelly" and that he then began to touch her inappropriately.
In 2006, the comedian settled with Ms Constand after providing an undisclosed cash sum to her.


At least 50 women have accused Mr Cosby of sexual assault, but he only faces charges in Ms Constand's case because of statutes of limitations.

What is the evidence against him?

Prosecutors are expected to use the testimony of Ms Constand as well as that of another woman, known as Kacey, who says she was assaulted by him in the 1990s.
They are also expected to refer to Mr Cosby's own admission in 2005 that he had used drugs as part of his efforts to have sex with women. 

The drugs, called Quaaludes, are a sedative that was widely used recreationally in the US in the 1970s.
However Judge Steven O'Neill has ruled that the court will not hear about the 2006 civil case. Neither will jurors hear from Mr Cosby's many other accusers.

What is Mr Cosby's defence?

Mr Cosby says his encounter with Ms Constand was consensual.
He also says he offered women drugs as a way to encourage them to relax rather than a way to render them helpless.


On the night of the alleged sex assault, Mr Cosby says he gave Ms Constand some Benadryl, an anti-allergy medication that can cause drowsiness, because she appeared stressed.
Mr Cosby's lawyers are expected to ask Ms Constand why she returned to Mr Cosby's house after she said he had made previous unwanted sexual advances on her.
They may also question why the case is being brought now, more than 10 years after a previous district attorney decided there was not enough evidence to go to trial.

Will he testify?

No - Mr Cosby has said he will not testify and last month told Sirius-XM radio that he feared prosecution lawyers could twist his words on the stand.
"When you have to deal with examination, cross-examination, et cetera, et cetera, more than two sides to every story - sometimes it's four or five," he said.
He has also speculated that some of the allegations against him could be motivated by racism.

Who is on the jury?

The jury is made up of seven men and five women. They include two black people and 10 white people, the New York Times reported.
The jurors are from the Pittsburgh area, 300 miles to the west of the court in Norristown, because Mr Cosby's defence team argued that jurors there could have been affected by pre-trial publicity.
The jurors will be kept away from media reports for the duration of the trial.

Why is Bill Cosby important?

Mr Cosby is best known for his role as the father in the television hit The Cosby Show, which was a huge hit in the US and around the globe.
At one point he was the highest-paid actor in the US.


He was born in Philadelphia and started his career as a stand-up comedian in 1962, debuting on NBC's The Tonight Show in 1963.
In 1965, he became the first black actor to star in a drama series in the US, in the espionage show I Spy. He earned three consecutive best actor Emmys for his role, at a time of high race tensions in the US.
In 2013 he did a national stand-up tour and received rave reviews. After that, several women began to come forward with allegations of sexual assault, some going back nearly 30 years.

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Drug shrinks ovarian tumours in early trial

A new targeted treatment for ovarian cancer has shown "very promising" results in women in the advanced stages of the disease.
It shrank tumours in about half of women who took part in a small trial.
Researchers had only been testing the drug to see if it was safe for humans to take, but found it had an almost instant clinical effect.
It is hoped the drug could help women who have stopped responding to all other currently available treatments.
So far, it has only been tested in 15 women, and the researchers say it may not be safe to take for more than a few months.
However, ovarian cancer is a difficult disease to treat, and the prognosis in the advanced stages is very poor.
Marianne Heath, 68, one of the patients who received the drug, said: "I had no other treatment choices, so I felt this was my only option.
"I just want to keep going so I can keep the tumours at a level where I can enjoy my life. It isn't a cure, but it is life extension for me."
Marianne had treatment over six months, and the drug shrak all three tumours in her body, taking away much of the pain she was experiencing.
One tumour - in her back - has started growing again since she stopped the treatment in January, and she is undergoing radiotherapy for that, but the others are stable.
The researchers, from the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in London, wanted to establish whether the drug, known in the study as ONX-0801, was safe, so they tested it on a small number of patients.
But they found it significantly shrank tumours in seven of the 15 patients who took the drug - all seven carrying a particular molecule that the drug was specifically designed to target.
ONX-0801 is the first in a new class of drugs which work by mimicking the ability of folic acid selectively to latch on to cancer cells, while leaving healthy tissue alone, thus reducing the side-effects often seen with traditional chemotherapy, such as infections, diarrhoea, nerve damage and hair loss.
Once locked on to a cancer cell, the drug disrupts its chemistry by blocking the action of a key molecule, causing widespread DNA damage and cell death.
The researchers, who hope to carry out bigger clinical trials as soon as possible, have also developed a test that can detect which women are most likely to benefit from the treatment.
Study leader Dr Udai Banerji said: "The results we have seen in this trial are very promising. It is rare to see such clear evidence of reproducible responses in these early stages of drug development.
"The beauty of this particular drug is that it is targeted to the cancer cell. This means there are fewer side-effects, making it a kinder treatment for ovarian cancer patients.
"It's early days of course, but I'm keen to see this treatment assessed in later-stage clinical trials as soon as possible."
Dr Catherine Pickworth, from Cancer Research UK, said: "It's encouraging to see this new drug is showing promise as a potential new treatment for ovarian cancer.
"The next steps will be for researchers to test the drug in larger clinical trials to confirm it works and is safe, and to work out which women with ovarian cancer this drug could help."
Prof Michel Coleman, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, urged caution.
He said: "Shrinkage of tumours is important, but as the authors point out, that is not the same as producing the hoped-for extension of survival for women with ovarian cancer.
"The excitement of the investigators is completely understandable, but one should be cautious about interpreting this result as a breakthrough for ovarian cancer patients until data on longer-term outcomes are available."

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VR pioneer founds border security start-up

 

Virtual reality pioneer Palmer Luckey has founded a start-up concentrating on technology to police borders and large events, reports the New York Times.
He has told senior Trump administration staff about the company's technology.
Until March Mr Luckey worked at Facebook, which paid $2bn (£1.55bn) for Oculus, the VR firm he founded.
He told the New York Times there was a need for a "new kind" of defence company using "superior technology" to protect troops and citizens.
The paper quoted insiders who said it planned to use sensors similar to those found on autonomous vehicles to monitor activity around fences and walls.
Smart software would be able to tell the difference between things that can be ignored, such as birds and other animals, and those, like drones, that demand attention.
Details about the new firm, including its name, are scant.
Former staff from Oculus who have also left the company are believed to have been recruited for the new start-up.
Tech news site The Verge speculated that the firm could either be linked to Mr Luckey's support for Texas senator Ted Cruz, who has regularly called for improvements to border controls, or could be a smart business move.
In April, Mr Luckey hosted a fundraising event for Mr Cruz to help the politician's efforts to be re-elected in 2018.
Mr Luckey is also known to have funded a pro-Trump online advocacy group and gave cash to help pay for President Trump's inauguration ceremony. 

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London attack: Tech firms fight back in extremism row

Technology companies have defended their handling of extremist content following the London terror attack.
Prime Minister Theresa May called for areas of the internet to be closed because tech giants had provided a "safe space" for terrorist ideology.
But Google said it had already spent hundreds of millions of pounds on tackling the problem.
Facebook and Twitter said they were working hard to rid their networks of terrorist activity and support.
Google, which owns Youtube, along with Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, and Twitter were among the tech companies already facing pressure to tackle extremist content.
That pressure intensified following Saturday night's attack, which killed seven people and injured 48. The so-called Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Speaking outside Downing Street on Sunday, Mrs May said: "We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed.
"Yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies... provide."
Culture Secretary Karen Bradley said tech companies needed to tackle extremist content, in a similar way to how they had removed indecent images of children.
"We know it can be done and we know the internet companies want to do it," she told the BBC on Monday.

No place on our platform'

Google said it had invested heavily to fight abuse on its platforms and was already working on an "international forum to accelerate and strengthen our existing work in this area".
The firm added that it shared "the government's commitment to ensuring terrorists do not have a voice online".
Facebook said: "Using a combination of technology and human review, we work aggressively to remove terrorist content from our platform as soon as we become aware of it - and if we become aware of an emergency involving imminent harm to someone's safety, we notify law enforcement."
Meanwhile, Twitter said "terrorist content has no place on" its platform.
Home Secretary Amber Rudd said on Sunday that tech firms needed to take down extremist content and limit the amount of end-to-end encryption that terrorists can use.
End-to-end encryption renders messages unreadable if they are intercepted, for example by criminals or law enforcement.

Analysis - Dave Lee, BBC North America technology reporter

Silicon Valley is both on the offensive and defensive.
Defensive in that they are protecting their reputations as companies that put in a lot of work to stamp out extremist content online, but offensive in making it clear they do not feel "kneejerk" regulation is the way to solve the issue.
The tech industry is mostly in agreement on this. They believe that end-to-end encryption, while perhaps frustrating to police, is a technology that means everyone's communications are far more secure.
The logic put forward by experts is that if there's a way to break into a terrorist's smartphone without his permission - then there's a way to break into your smartphone too.
On Monday, Apple will be holding its annual developers' conference in San Jose. I'm not expecting chief executive Tim Cook to talk about the issue - he won't want to willingly draw his company into the debate - but you can fully expect Apple to put its weight behind any movement that seeks to increase security.
And the company will speak out, as it often has, against any attempts from authorities to compel tech firms to give them a so-called "back door" into their systems.

'Intellectually lazy'

The Open Rights Group, which campaigns for privacy and free speech online, warned that politicians risked pushing terrorists' "vile networks" into the "darker corners of the web" by more regulation.
The way that supporters of jihadist groups use social media has changed "despite what the prime minister says", according to Dr Shiraz Maher of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King's College London.
They have "moved to more clandestine methods", with encrypted messaging app Telegram the primary platform, Dr Maher told the BBC.
Professor Peter Neumann, another director at the ICSR, wrote on Twitter: "Blaming social media platforms is politically convenient but intellectually lazy."

'Tool for extremists'

However, Dr Julia Rushchenko, a London-based research fellow at the Henry Jackson Centre for Radicalisation and Terrorism, told the BBC that more could be done by tech giants to root out such content.
She felt that the companies erred on the side of privacy, not security. "We all know that social media companies have been a very helpful tool for hate preachers and for extremists," Dr Rushchenko said.
Investors suggested that tech firms would be more willing to take further action against extremist content if shareholders and advertisers pressured them to do so.
Jessica Ground, a UK fund manager at Schroders, told the BBC: "It's going to be an interesting debate how you put the pressure points. It could be the money rather than the governments."
Simon Howard, chief executive of UKSIF - the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association, said: "We'll need all the technology companies to do a bit more and we'll have to decide what the UK legal framework in which they do that is." 

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London attack: Spanish 'skateboard hero' Echeverría missing

A Madrid man is missing in London after he used his skateboard against one of the jihadists, who was stabbing a woman, Spanish media report.
Ignacio Echeverría, 39, saw the attack unfolding at London Bridge on Saturday night, and rushed to help the woman.
Friends with him at the time told his family what had happened.
Reports say Mr Echeverría is not listed among the dead. His sister has gone to London hospitals, but there is no news of him being among the injured.
In a message on Facebook his father Joaquín Echeverría urged members of the public to help find his son, posting details of Ignacio.
At least one other Spaniard is in a London hospital, lightly injured after the terror attack at London Bridge.
Reports say Ignacio Echeverría came upon the scene at London Bridge while cycling back from a park with two friends, with whom he had been skateboarding.
In a Facebook post, his father said "They saw him lying on the floor on the sidewalk after defending someone with his skateboard".
Apparently Ignacio did not have ID on him at the time. The Spanish embassy and HSBC Bank, his employer in London, are helping to search for him.
 

On Saturday night three men rammed their van into pedestrians on London Bridge, then went on a stabbing rampage at nearby bars and restaurants, before police shot them dead.
They killed seven and wounded dozens more, of whom 21 are now critically ill in hospital.
The attack has been claimed by so-called Islamic State. At least one of the killers had shouted "this is for Allah!" during the attack, witnesses said.

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    Apple to scan iPhones for child sex abuse images

      Apple has announced details of a system to find child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on customers' devices. Before an image is stored on...