National / International News

Northern Ireland's first and deputy first ministers travel to Brazil for a five-day visit to the country.

Oscar-nominated actor Stanley Tucci has admitted he hates working on CGI and 3D films, despite starring in new 3D movie Jack The Giant Slayer.

Universities that fail to respond to the rise of online universities will be swept away by global competition, a report warns.

As former Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary Chris Huhne and his ex-wife Vicky Pryce prepare to be sentenced at Southwark Crown Court, Sunday Times journalist Isabel Oakeshott tells the BBC's Sunday Politics programme her side of the story.

China's government has announced plans to remove power from the agency that oversees the country's one-child policy. Observers say this could spell the beginning of the end for the rule.

Follow more of our coverage on China's one-child policy:

2010: Marketplace's One Child policy series

Looking at the future of the one-child policy

 

For the past 34 years, China has limited urban couples to one child in an effort to curb massive population growth. Though the family planning policy has always been controversial, nowadays many urban couples are content with one child due to mounting economic pressures such as inflation.

To hear more about why China's government is rethinking its one-child rule, click on the audio player above.

Residents and visitors to a Kent village are racking up extra charges when their mobile phones connect to French networks.

Wizard of Oz prequel Oz the Great and Powerful did not need Dorothy and Toto to conjure up magic numbers at the US and Canadian box office this weekend.

Over 100 people, mostly women have signed an open letter in protest at the proposed abortion amendment which would make it illegal to perform an abortion outside the NHS.

The trial of the dead Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is delayed, amid criticism from the United States and European Parliament.

Security and software updates on personal computers are beyond irritating -- just ask NASA. Last month, it lost direct contact with the space station for three hours because of a software update.

"FYI,” one of the astronauts eventually told ground control, “the station's still flying straight."

Well, Earthlings, prepare to reboot. Tomorrow is "Patch Tuesday:" Microsoft's release of software fixes to correct bugs. And expect more of these fixes as hackers become increasingly aggressive, says Chester Wisniewski with network-security company Sophos.

"We see 20,000 new malicious web URLs every day on the Internet. This is a very wide-scale problem," he says, and not just for PCs. "We’ve seen well over a million [Macs] compromised in the last 12 months. So that could be the beginnings of, unfortunately, the Mac catching up with the PC."

But why do the updates have to be so irritating, with pop-up windows and computer restarts?

Wolfgang Kandek, chief technical officer at computer-security firm Qualys, says there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

"The older the software is and the less time a vendor has invested into this mechanism, the more cumbersome it is. Newer softwares do this in a better way," he says. Kandek says more software will update without users even knowing it.

Yet it’s also worth remembering that the only thing more annoying than a security update is getting hacked.

For those who rely on technology to speak, there are a limited number of voices. "Perfect Paul" sounds robotic, and "Heather" can seem too old for some. Now, a researcher is using sound samples from people who have never been able to speak to create new, personalized voices for them.

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The Leap Motion Controller senses and tracks hand motions to allow users to browse the Web, play games and open documents. It represents another step in a goal of computer scientists: to make interactions with machines feel natural and easy, and to take away the barriers between humans and computers.

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A man is killed in an early morning road accident in Portaferry in County Down.

Kenichi Togawa was working at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Japan the day the earthquake and tsunami struck. His family is still living in temporary housing. For many people, the stress and isolation brought on by the disaster could pose more persistent hazards than the radiation.

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Former cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, who went to prison himself, describes the process of being imprisoned and the issues Vicky Pryce and Chris Huhne will have to face.

Women who took aspirin at least a couple of times a week for five years or more cut their risk of melanoma by 30 percent. The new study adds to the mounting pile of research suggesting that cheap, common aspirin lowers the risk of many cancers, including colon, breast, esophagus, stomach, prostate, bladder and ovarian cancer.

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The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses satellite radio waves to map restaurants on our smartphones, guide cars and monitor aircraft. For those who want to stop others from tracking their movement, GPS signals can be jammed -- albeit illegally. And now, GPS signals can also be "spoofed."

"A GPS spoofer, instead of just trying to jam the signal, tries to mimic [it]," says Todd Humphreys, a professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas, who spoke during a recent session at South by Southwest. "And if you can do this precisely enough, you can fool a receiver into tracking your [spoofed] signals instead of the authentic ones."

Humphreys and some of his students set out to test the possibility. They got an $80,000 pilotless aircraft -- a drone -- and flew it over an otherwise empty football stadium. 

"The drone was commanded to hover in place, holding its position," says 23-year-old graduate student Daniel Shepard, who ran the experiment. The team then told the drone's GPS receiver that it wasn't hovering -- it was rising. "In response it plummeted towards the ground in rather dramatic fashion."

The demonstration got the attention of Congress and Homeland Security which unlocked some funding to try to protect the GPS system from spoofing.

To hear more about the possibility of GPS spoofing, click on the audio player above.

Benefit claimants need help to be given online access or risk losing out financially, a Welsh minister warns.

Andy Murray avoids a third successive loss in Indian Wells by coming back from a set down to beat Russia's Evgeny Donskoy.

This final note today, which, as you'll see, has a distinct 'keeping the workers happy' theme to it.

Next time you're feeling sleepy on the job -- not unusual around this time of year with the whole daylight savings time thing -- go ahead and consider a nap. USA Today points out a 20-minute nap can give a big boost to productivity. And that some companies are in fact setting up rooms just so you can grab a quick snooze.

And about what I said Friday -- no, I'm not leaving. Are you kidding?

Did get the big boss to agree to Beer Cart Friday, though.

@kairyssdal OK. I hear you! You pick the Friday, and I will get the beer for the whole Marketplace crew. #CultureBeforeProfits

— Jon McTaggart (@JonMcTaggart) March 9, 2013