National / International News

Councils across Wales plan to cut jobs and services to make up a £145m funding shortfall after setting their budgets.

The health minister Edwin Poots has circulated a 30 page draft document to executive colleagues on long awaited abortion guidelines.

Ori Ingbar is about to show me something cool. He points his iPhone camera at a bottle of Pepsi Maxx. The phone sings, “Pi-pe-pe-pep Pepsi Maxx!” On camera, the Pepsi label turns into a pulsating beatbox.

“Now the whole idea is that you can actually use your own voice, your own tracks,” Ingbar explains. He makes noises with his mouth -- "Doom, cheesh! Doom, cheesh!" -- and the app records his voice and sets it to a beat. He can even scratch the bottle's label, like a turntable.

Ingbar’s company, Ogmento, developed this app for a Pepsi campaign in Israel. Advertisers like augmented reality because it makes us look at their product longer. But it can also be used to help professionals in all sorts of industries, from medicine to construction.

Imagine a building contractor pointing his iPad at a wall and instantly seeing electrical wires, pipes, and so on. “So when you’re looking for problems in a building or trying to fix something, you’d be able to see through the walls,” says Ingbar.

This is the kind of thing that excites developers at Augmented Reality New York. "ARNY" is the largest monthly meet-up of its kind in the U.S. Dima Kislovskiy is a long-time member who is developing a device for car windshields. A virtual green light appears to hover above the road, out in front of your car. When it turns left, you should too.

“You can therefore see where the road is going,” Kislovskiy explains, “past the next turn, past the next hill, beyond those next trees.

But the big event was a demonstration of a device called Meta, developed by Meron Gribetz. He asks volunteers to wear a pair of bulky black glasses. When they look through the glasses, a digital bubble appears on each fingertip. 

As Gribetz puts it, “The controllers for this device are the most natural controllers for manipulating your environment, your hands and fingers and arms."

Gribetz says that Meta will be able to project computer graphics on to the real world. That means you can type on a virtual keyboard, or swipe floating screens like in the movie "Minority Report."

He promises that Meta will someday look like a pair of Ray Bans... not a View Master from the ‘70s.  But he doubts that people will go the next step and wear augmented contact lenses.

“If you take the population in New York City, there’s a huge fraction of people who want to use computers but have never put that kind of invasive device in their eye,” he says.

Someday we may look back on that prediction -- through our virtual contact lenses -- and laugh.

A man is charged with manslaughter after the death of a police officer following a "scuffle" outside a Wolverhampton nightclub.

Preliminary tests find six new beef products that may contain horse DNA above 1%, the Food Standards Agency says.

More than 60 people suffered food poisoning at a Danish restaurant described as the world's best eatery, it has emerged.

We've invited Duncan to play a game called "Now, don't be fresh ... I just take dictation!" Three questions for the secretary of education about the education of secretaries.

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A council chief executive is suspended while an investigation takes place into the way he was awarded a controversial £25,400 pay rise.

German pensioners Uwe and Gunther Breuer are freed by Colombian ELN rebels who had held them hostage in north-eastern Colombia since November.

Two construction drills break through into a railway tunnel in east London on a busy First Capital Connect route.

The chairman of the Treasury Committee, Andrew Tyrie, writes to the Financial Services Authority about the Bank of Ireland's plan to raise mortgage tracker rates.

Beaches in Florida have been closed as a huge school of sharks swam close to the shore during their annual migration.

Ex-London Welsh team boss Mike Scott receives a life ban from rugby union for his role in the fielding of an ineligible player.

Sure, the economy added 236,000 jobs last month and unemployment dropped to 7.7 percent. But questions about low wages, consumer debt and government austerity cloud the sunny picture. We look at five points economists are debating.

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A 22-year-old man arrested on suspicion of fatally stabbing 16-year-old Christina Edkins in Birmingham is sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

The Housing Executive in Northern Ireland has revealed that almost a third of their tenants are currently in rent arrears.

While the laws in some states might allow school employees to bring guns into classrooms, South Dakota is believed to be the first state to enact such a specific measure. It gives districts the right to set up "school sentinel" programs that train personnel.

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10 cardinals who could be Pope by next week

Two people have died and two others have suffered serious injuries in a crash on the A90 Aberdeen to Dundee road.

Brennan was sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden using an original draft of the U.S. Constitution.

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