National / International News

The cost of corruption has risen sharply in Afghanistan over the last few years but fewer people are paying bribes, a UN report says.

Nick Robinson on Michael Gove's decision to rethink exam plans

London Mayor Boris Johnson has demanded that Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg gets his Cabinet colleagues out of their "posh limos" and onto public transport.

Colombia's Farc rebels propose land use reform, including the legalisation of some coca, poppy and marijuana crops, during peace talks with the government.

Aftershocks continue to rock the Solomon Islands, a day a tsunami left at least nine people dead and swept dozens of houses away.

A year-long inquiry finds widespread use of banned drugs in Australian sport, with links to organised crime and possible match-fixing.

The world's first "smartphone satellite", assembled by British engineers, is sent to India for its launch into space at the end of the month.

The lead lawyer for the public inquiry into neglect at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust says there is no room for complacency in the health service in Wales.

One in five music fans now buys all their music as downloads, according to new figures from the recording industry.

MPs criticise the Department of Health for allowing a new hospital in Peterborough while a private firm was being hired to run Hinchingbrooke Hospital 24 miles away.

A friend of a woman who died after being left at home without medication, food, or water for nine days has said somebody must be held to account.

Hong Kong, Finland and South Korea share education secrets

According to a survey carried out for BBC Breakfast, more than half of office workers regularly work through their lunch hour.

There are signs that Sony's recovery plan may be starting to pay dividends as the struggling electronics group cuts its quarterly losses.

A Welsh production company is hoping to make its mark in the world of Scandinavian crime drama with a detective series set in stark surroundings.

This week, we're asking folks in the tech world about a great shift, from an Internet of webpages toward an Internet of interconnected objects: the Internet of Things.

A D.C. area company called SmartThings sells kits that let you rig all sorts of stuff around the house up to smartphones and tablet computers -- sump pumps, jewelry drawers, you name it. SmartThing's CEO Alex Hawkinson says the inspiration came from a rustic mountain cabin, a deep freeze, and burst pipes.

"Everything thawed out and started rotting and we didn't discover it until quite a time later, and it drove us crazy that we didn't know that that had happened. So we started the company on the basis of, you know, how do we take the available bandwidth that's in the air -- your iPhone's connected, your Kindle's connected -- and make it possible for simple sensors to connect up so you could see an event like that from anywhere," says Hawkinson.

Hawkinson says the hook-up allows you to make everyday, "dumb" objects suddenly intelligent. And what happens when more and more objects get connected? Imagine a sprinkler that doesn't go off when it rains, a water pump that monitors its own leaks, a car that "talks" to the road.

"We think this is the third epoch of the web, we call it the 'physical graph'," says Hawkinson. "It crosses all the parts of our life. The implications range from security, to efficiency -- we think 30+ percent of the energy use in the world is wasted based on lack of intelligence."

To hear about other ways the Internet of connected things could change your everyday life, click on the audio player above.

A social worker says he reported concerns Cyril Smith was abusing boys in Rochdale four years before a police investigation was held.

iPad home videos -- what's worth recording, where, and how? Janell Burley Hofmann, a Cape Cod mother-of-five with strong opinions about how to behave with technology, says it's all about the small moments:

"I'm in my daughter's first grade classroom and they are doing a presentation on holidays around the world, and the teacher has pre-recorded them on video. A dad takes out his iPad and starts video-ing the video of his son. This memory that he's capturing here is of his child on a screen. So, I'm really thinking, what are we trying to capture here? I look back at my kid's videos when they were babies -- it's not those formal things that I like to look at, it's those one or two minutes of life, of them wrestling on the couch cushions or playing out in the yard with the dog. Those are the things that I think really capture life. I really feel like that's what we're missing," says Burley Hoffman.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in a comment below.

iPad home videos -- what's worth recording, where, and how? Janell Burley Hofmann, a Cape Cod mother-of-five with strong opinions about how to behave with technology, says it's all about the small moments:

"I'm in my daughter's first grade classroom and they are doing a presentation on holidays around the world, and the teacher has pre-recorded them on video. A dad takes out his iPad and starts video-ing the video of his son. This memory that he's capturing here is of his child on a screen. So, I'm really thinking, what are we trying to capture here? I look back at my kid's videos when they were babies -- it's not those formal things that I like to look at, it's those one or two minutes of life, of them wrestling on the couch cushions or playing out in the yard with the dog. Those are the things that I think really capture life. I really feel like that's what we're missing," says Burley Hoffman.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in a comment below.

Federal regulators may want Wi-Fi Internet connections to get more widespread and powerful, but the government is not giving the service away for free. A Washington Post article has sparked debate this week over what exactly the government is trying to do.

It's true the Federal Communications Commission wants some sections of the radio frequency spectrum to be left up for grabs -- free for companies to provide service, but not necessarily free to consumers. Wireless Internet was first developed on open spectrum just like this.

"We're making a mass migration as a country away from using spectrum for broadcast TV to using it for wireless data because we're all using smartphones," says Susan Crawford, a Roosevelt Institute fellow and author of Captive Audience, a book about telecom policy. "The FCC is going to carry out for spectrum and there will be spaces left between the TV stations that get left behind and some data uses for those frequencies. Those spaces are called "white spaces" and they can be used opportunistically for Wi-Fi, and that's what the FCC is hoping for."

A company called FreedomPop already offers free wireless connections through cell phone and some Wi-Fi technology. Free, that is, until you use more than half a gigabyte of data a month.