Rescue efforts after Tibet floods reach ‘critical phase'

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Support comes from wise, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global. Your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose wise. You can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rate that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get wise. Visit wise.com. Tease and seize apply. Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service, we explore a scandal which has left one country scarred. Columbia is still reeling from an atrocity which saw the army murder over 7,000 innocent civilians passing them off as rebels. This story takes us from the perpetrators to those who uncovered the scandal. What we want is justice and justice. The price of peace. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hi, I'm Anka Desai and at 14 hours GMT on Friday the 28th of August, these are our main stories. The Chinese President Xi Jinping has chaired an emergency meeting to coordinate rescue efforts following the deadly floods in Nepal and Tibet. Norway Morns as King Harold V dies at the age of 89. And we analyse the situation in the mid-least six months since the start of the conflict between Iran and the United States. Also in this podcast a new study reveals that our brains apply a special tag to events as they happen to help us prioritise our memories. Every day our centre is sort of bombarded by so much information that our brain needs away to figure out what is actually important that we're seeing and we're hearing that needs to be committed into a long-term memory. We are both male British voices for sure. However, I am not David Attenborough for anyone out there who might be confused. More than 80 actors are calling on the British government to give every person a legal right to own their voice because of famous voices cloned by AI. We start with the devastating landslides and floods in Nepal and Tibet. Two days after the initial disaster we've been hearing about a lake which was threatening to burst its banks risking further devastation. Well, according to officials on the ground that has now happened. But while Napali officials say water levels are rising as a result, the fear deluge has not as yet occurred. Nearly 500 people are now known to have died in the disaster. Hundreds are still missing and relief agencies are struggling to help survivors. Dr Nithi Shrestha is an anesthetist who has travelled to the district hospital in Rasua to treat the injured. Many people have lost their loved ones. People they were trying to rescue but had to leave behind. People have ran away from their home just to save themselves. Without even their phone with no slippers most of them are like covered in mud because it was like a mudflide. People have told me that they had to leave their relatives behind because they couldn't carry them or maybe if they couldn't walk like elderly people. Well relief operations on the Tibetan side had been suspended over the threat of renewed flooding but have now resumed. I china correspondent Stephen McDonnell told me more. Yeah on the Tibetan side of the border the situation has stabilized somewhat. The rescue and recovery effort has started again and that's because fears of this second round of flash flooding have subsided somewhat. People are not so concerned and I tell you why. It's because there was this artificial lake if I could describe it as that created when mud and debris, rocks etc. poured into a mountain valley and this then filled up with water create a huge volume of water creating what they call a barrier lake and the concern was that this would burst leading to another huge gushing amount of water pouring down that valley. But government officials are saying that the water level has subsided quite a bit in that lake and because they've dropped they've decided to resume the very difficult effort to try to find people who might still be alive trapped underneath. I don't know the remains of buildings or something like that after that huge wall of water and mud came crashing down a couple of days ago. Stephen Chinese president has made an offer of help to Nepal. Is there much cross-border cooperation on this one? Yeah he said that Chinese teams can be available. I mean a lot of other countries have also offered to help Nepal but at the moment the Nepalese government seems to be saying they don't need any help in terms of the immediate rescue. They've got their own military doing this. What the government in Nepal has said is they mightn't it help with is the recovery later on. So some sort of financial support to assist those areas that have been devastated by this terrible incident and maybe China will be there to help with that but China does have a lot of resources especially when you compare the country to Nepal however at the moment at least we haven't seen any Chinese teams operating on the other side of the border. And Stephen what do we make of the coverage of this story so far based on what the Chinese state media are saying and then what a lot of people in China are seeing on social media? Well certain things have happened here for example the really shocking footage of the original just gargantuan amount of water pouring down, smashing settlements, engulfing multi-story buildings and people trying to outrun this hasn't been shown on television here only stills. Now in one way people might say that that's the government censoring this type of stuff but there is an extent to which it could be quite disturbing for people who live in Tibet. I mean imagine you've got friends and relatives you're essentially watching them die and so you can also understand why they might have been a decision not to run that footage. It is highly controlled there though it's the most controlled part of China I think it'd be fair to say that foreign reporters we can't go into the Tibetan autonomous region ever without permission from the government and so that's why we're covering it from here so it is also very hard to verify what's really going on. I heard more about the situation in Nepal from Sanjayadakal of the BBC's Nepali service who's in Kathmandu. Most of the areas dry in very remote part and in a high mountain area so access is very difficult and we have seen videos of security personnel, rescuing people from totally muddy places and it looks like a very complicated operation. Access by road is very limited. The largest stretch of highways have been washed away by the flood and therefore the most of the job has to be done either through aerial route and access to the people in the most difficult region is very difficult. In terms of the risk of further flooding are there any warnings which are coming out about this? There were lots of warnings from the Chinese side also and today this afternoon Nepal is a disaster response authority also issued an alert asking people to remain on a high alert because the water level was slightly rising in the river area where the flood had occurred but then there were also then reports that the bridge that occurred today has stopped the search kind of reports came from China side inside and so for the time being rescue and our assaults and rescue is ongoing but there's a big worry that there could be another flooding the bridge of that lake so there's that big worry. The government's response has this been adequate what the measures in place where which could have maybe alleviate what had happened earlier? Our search and rescue operation is very difficult and complicated process it is of course it is not adequate because people are still waiting to hear about their loved ones many are missing over 900 people are missing so you know it's inadequate but the terrain and the area is also quite difficult. Sanjay Dhaka in Kathmandu King Hoekhan the eighth has ascended to the throne in Norway after the death of his father Harold the fifth Harold died early on Friday morning at the age of 89 large crowds gathered to watch the new monarch's arrival at the Royal Palace in Oslo where he's been meeting government ministers. We really love our king and I thought he was really a king of the people so I think it's really important that people come here to show how grateful we are for his his heart was really a good hearted man. King Hoekhan has been such a good king and I think most Norwegians really feel that they know him very well he's been very active as a king he's been participating in so many different situations for so many years and it was a great guy. The king's final months though were overshadowed by turmoil in the Royal family. His daughter-in-law Crown Princess Metamarrit underwent a long transplant. Her son Marius Borghoibee was for four years after being convicted of two rapes. Metamarrot also apologized for her past friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. A Global Affairs reporter Mimi Swaby told me more about his life and reign. King Harold V took throne in 1991 and oversaw so many changes worldwide, let alone in his country Norway. But he was seen, despite having no political power or form of political power, is very much a symbol and a status of comfort and stability for many Norwegians. He would often go to disasters, address victims of attacks, and really was seen as a king of the people. And that is something I've heard from Warners across yesterday when people started preparing for this event going to the palace and also laying down flowers, lighting candles, holding vigil for him, until this morning again when we heard the news from the rule court confirming that King Harold had passed away peacefully. They said at Oslo University Hospital after suffering with a blood infection which was being treated for there. But he was very much seen as a modest king. He was a unifying symbol, unifying figure. And that is something that many people have been saying that they will remember him as his grandfather figure for the country and was hugely loved despite all these scandals that the wider royal family have been played with in recent years. Maybe we do know what happens next. So when the success will be sworn in for example. King Hawking is now the new king. It is automatic when the previous monarch passes away, the next in line, his son automatically assumes that title. So he is now officially the new king. He hasn't been sworn in yet. He will take an oath later time. But at the moment we're seeing mourners pay their respects. There are extraordinary counsel of state happening right now. That is basically a meeting of a full cabinet meeting of Norway's parliament with the new monarch. They're signing the condolences. We can then expect an in person kind of appearance in the palace square by ministers as well as the new king and then a sequence of eulogies then going on to officially being sworn in. And this is a sequence of events at timetable which is full of tradition and ceremony. But it is important to say it is also in keeping with the nation's more low-key royal family than their approach to kind of raining over Norway. This will be nothing to rival the pageantry and the ceremony that we saw in the likes of the British succession as well as other monarchies. So it will be a humble affair. These are words I've been using all morning humble modest low-key than that is something that we can expect to see in these sequence of events today. Norway is in a morning period. We don't know how long that period will be but it would be until the funeral that date is yet to be announced. And the flag is flying at half mast over the palace in Oslo. But there is a sequence of events which has already started and will last for the coming hours but also days before that funeral is held. Mimi Swaby. Now do you remember that car license plate you saw the other day? The one with the combination of letters and numbers that made you think. No? Well there's a reason you don't. New research has found that your brain applies a kind of tag to your daily experiences and then overnight uses those tags to work out whether or not to remember those moments or to let them slip away. The study was led by Dan Dennis from York University's Department of Psychology here in the UK. He spoke to Johnny Diamond. Every day our centre is sort of bombarded by so much incoming information that really our brain needs a way to figure out what is actually important that we're seeing and we're hearing that needs to be committed into a long-term memory. And we think that these tags that sit alongside these memory traces of what's essentially guided the brain into making that decision. It's important to understand that our memories are not just a static snapshot of exactly how we experience it. They get transformed and they evolve over time. So when we first experience something the brain will tag it, give it a level of priority and that priority might be based on things like the emotion that's being felt or the personal relevance that you feel towards that particular experience. And then to ensure that it remains a stable memory into the long term it then needs to be reprocessed again during sleep where that memory trace gets replayed in the brain multiple times and that's the process by which the new experience that we formed during the day enters our long-term memory so that we can recall it in the future. Different people remember different things don't they? I mean this is a very personal and individual moment. It's not something that you're saying applies in a uniform way. You're just explaining how these things are remembered. Is that right? Yeah exactly. There are some things that are probably going to be well remembered by almost anyone and they tend to be emotionally charged, often quite negative events, tend to have almost universal saliency. But there are lots of other things like you said that are going to vary person to person and that's what this tagging is doing. It's deciding or indicating relevancy and it might be drawing on our own past experiences and our own previous memories in deciding in the moment what is relevant to you as an individual. And how important is the nature of the sleep that you get to the filing process if I can call it that? The sleep itself is very very important. We think that the filing process as you said or the replaying of the new experience tends to happen when we're in a stage of sleep called slow wave sleep and that's the deeper stage of sleep that we get when we're most detached from the world. Anything that can disrupt that deep sleep might interfere with these ongoing memory processing which is going to be in the end detrimental to its memory. How does it mesh with the idea that you can improve your memory that you can train yourself to remember more and different things? Yeah I think that's a really interesting question and something we want to explore a bit more in the future is how different kinds of learning strategies influence this process of selectivity in what we end up remembering in the long term. One thing for example is if you're trying to remember a new association like maybe an association between a new name and a face. If you can form a visualization in your mind that links those two things together very strongly that's going to improve your ability to recall that person's name when you see them. In the future and interestingly the brain mechanisms that are involved in that binding process, that linking of different things together appears to be the same kinds of brain mechanisms that are involved in the tagging that we're seeing in our research. Psychology professor Dan Dennis next have you heard of voice cloning? This is where artificial intelligence creates a digital replica of a person's voice based on an audio sample of them speaking. So David Attenborough said he was profoundly disturbed when he discovered two years ago that he was being widely mimicked online using AI technology. One of the websites that had been creating copycat clips of the British naturalist responded to the controversy by posting this audio. Let's set the record straight. Unless Mr Attenborough has been moonlighting for us in secret and under an assumed name with work authorization in the United States, he is not on our payroll. I am not David Attenborough. It sounds a lot like him but just to be clear, that's an unauthorized AI version of David Attenborough and not the real thing. Now, a group of more than 80 actors, including Kuboneville, are calling on the government to give every person in the UK a legal right to own their voice. They're concerned performers like voice over artists could lose their livelihoods to digital knockoffs. They also point to the growing number of scams involving voice cloning. Peter Corfield is founder of the Save Our Voices Now campaign. When I started digging deeper into the clauses of these online companies, it seemed that we don't have any rights when it comes to our voice ownership. So from an artist's point of view, that wasn't quite scary because it's sort of like, well, we're putting our voice out there all the time, whether it's on social media or whether it's audition tapes and it's just like, actually, what happens for that data and what happens to your voice after you've sent it off into the ether? At this point in time, we don't really have any rights or laws to protect our voice. You think that you would own your voice because you were born with it, but actually there is no law that really protects us from anyone with the right kind of AI software from copying your voice in three seconds and then using it as their own, which is quite terrifying. The actor, Peter Corfield, who's part of a new campaign calling for a crackdown on AI voice cloning still to come in this podcast. Samsung's eight generations into this product already, they've obviously gone through a lot of growing pains. It does look like Apple's coming in later. We find out why Apple are about to enter the foldable phone market. This is Support comes from wise. The smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global. Don't be fooled. Choose wise. You can send, spend, and receive money in over 40 currencies. Be smart. Get wise. Visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. feeling from an atrocity which saw the army murder over 7,000 innocent civilians, passing them off as rebels. This story takes us from the perpetrators to those who uncovered the scandal, while we want istiastist and dros. The price of peace. Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of your Dead To Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian and we have a lovely funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Goulton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrot. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to your Dead To Me wherever you get your podcast. Thank you. Bye! Liza's Ordinary is bringing you a special series of extraordinary love stories. Roshan Sethi was an uptight Canadian doctor who couldn't come out to his Indian family. Karinsani was an actor from India who felt he had to keep his sexuality a secret to make it in Hollywood. But they met, fell in love, and things began to change. They decided to make a romantic comedy based on their relationship. Livesless ordinary love stories from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. The Global News Podcast Today marks exactly six months since the start of the conflict between Iran and the United States. Professor Paul Morkraft has spent decades analyzing and reporting from the world's war zones. Joe Mitchell asked him if we could still be sitting here in three months time in the same situation as now. You know, it's very easy to be depressing about this war, especially as some argue we're in the foothills of the Third World War. I don't think so. We've had six months since the war on Iran started and last week the 60 days of the ceasefire ran out. So the first phase is over the heavy, kinetic fighting Israel and the American Iran. Now Washington says we're in the big economic war. That's the second phase. I think there could be a third phase. It depends what happens to the American elections, to the Israeli elections and so on. But I think there's likely to be a managed kind of an awful war until next year and there's going to be bad news for the world economies. Yes. And you mentioned the economic phase, this talk of economic day day was being talked about. And as we began the week, we were expecting those sanctions. We got them by the middle of the week, but not all the major international players in particular China going along with the United States on that one. And it's worth their reminder, the global economy oil production massively affected by Iran's closure control over the state of Hormuz. Well, of course, and it could get worse. If it moves into a third phase, then the hoodies under Iran's orders will start blocking the Red Sea, having a go at the Suez Canal and the Egyptian ports. There's lots of things the Iranians could do. They've done extremely well in this war. They've showed great resilience, great spirit, and they're much harder than people expected. But neither side, neither the Americans or the Iranians, Israelis may be different, want a major war because the economic effects. Unlike the First World War or the Second World War or NATO versus the Warsaw Pact, there are cross-cutting allegiances. China's economy is very important to America. Also the Russians and the Israelis still are quite close in some respects. So this isn't a complete NATO war. It's not going to turn into the Third World War, but nobody wants the state of Hormuz to remain closed, except perhaps the Iranians in this sense. They have won this war. They're much stronger than before the war started six months ago. So the Americans got to do an awful lot of things. They've got to persuade the Iranians to do a deal, a proper deal. They've got to open the state of Hormuz without charging money. And there's lots of things that the Iranians want, whether the Americans can give it. And on top of that, the Iranians government is much more hard-line than it was. Especially, it was a theoretical government, but now the military or the Revolutionary Guard Corps has basically running the show as well as the economy. There's many hard-liners within the Guard Corps who do not want to do any deal. So there are splits within the Iranian government, whether they're a third phase or further bombing will make them change their mind. I don't know. But I think the Chinese are getting involved. And also the Russians, perhaps because Trump likes to talk, feel he can talk to President Putin. I think there's not going to be an absolute community war. Besides, there are lots of problems with the American military, whether it's passionate missiles or whether it's endurance on the carriers and so on. I think despite all problems, Trump and elements, some compromising elements of the Guard Corps will do a deal, I hope. Analyst Paul Moorcraft, violence by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank is set to reach record levels this year, as human rights groups warn that they are increasingly spreading into new areas of the territory. Attacks on Palestinians have risen under Israel's current government, alongside a rapid increase in Israeli settlements. And Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson has been looking at reports of settler violence across the West Bank in the course of one week. A teenager shot dead, beating, arson attacks, a donkey tortured. You might have seen the worst attacks by Jewish settlers here in the occupied West Bank, but behind those lies a much wider campaign of violence against Palestinians. We've counted more than 60 incidents here, just in the past week, including daily incursions and intimidations that never make the news, some of which aren't even reported by the victims at all. On Saturday, amputee Syed Alamour was beaten by a settler with an iron bar as he stooped to pick up one of his crutches. A shocking video recording the assault clearly shows his attacker who's now under arrest. Syed, who lost his leg last year after being shot near his house by a settler security guard, says settlers are constantly harassing the family. They want me to leave this place. It's not only me who is targeted, it's everyone. If I leave, they'll go after my neighbor down the road, then the next one, then the one after that, until they remove everyone from these areas and replace them with Zionists. On Friday, a large group of Jewish settlers, some of them armed, walked through the Palestinian village of Syed near Hebron. Past the house of 17-year-old Kareem Shalaldi. His father, Sanad, told us Kareem was killed while filming the settlers. The second bullet struck my son. I ran to him before he fell and held him in my arms. I would rather die myself a thousand times than see it happen to my child. Israel's army said it had received reports of Palestinians throwing stones. Jewish settlements here illegal under international law are expanding and settler attacks are rising as well. The Israeli human rights organization Yeshtim says more than 90 percent of police investigations into settler violence end without indictment. There is a problem of violence in the West Bank. Doran Spielman, a spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister's office, spoke to the BBC late last month. There are Jews who are a very small number of Jews. They are human beings. They have names that are just called settlers who have, in fact, been prosecuted by the police bike. The vast, the largest estimate would be maybe 300 or 400 youth that are involved in this out of a population of 750,000. This week, Zvi Sukot, a settler lawmaker in Israel's governing coalition, filmed himself destroying a village memorial in the West Bank because he said it honored terrorists. It triggered a rebuke from Israel's foreign minister and from the office of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Jewish settlers were also filmed torturing a donkey, tying it to their vehicle and dragging it along until it was dead, a sadistic act of aggression that shocked his rallies more than its shocked Palestinians. Lucy Williamson reporting from the West Bank. U.S. media is reporting that the Trump administration is in talks with Venezuela's interim government about Washington taking an ownership stake in its huge all resources. We heard more from our business reporter, Ejoma Endocque. Based on these reports, the U.S. is in talks with Venezuela about taking quite a significantly large stake in its oil fields. According to these reports, the details are still being ined out, the discussions are said to involve more than a dozen productive oil fields which have about 90 billion barrels of proven reserves. And if you bear in mind that Venezuela has 300 billion barrels of proven reserves, that's nearly a third of that. Now, some of these oil fields that are being discussed, they used to be controlled by former Venezuelan insiders, people with close ties to the Venezuelan government, including some who've now been indicted, and we know that some of them were also controlled by China. And from what we understand at this stage, in return for a US ownership stake, private companies, including American firms, would take over the development of these oil fields and return more oil revenue to Venezuela. There are some small oil traders who are very excited about this deal, but generally, if you look at some of the oil majors who have traditionally operated in Venezuela, they're quite nervous about investing huge sums of money into the country, especially during a time of political turmoil, because they invested money before and not got their returns back. When the Maduro regime was in operation, a lot of them went able to take full advantage of what they'd put into those reserves. Ijoma Indoka reporting. Apple is planning to shake up the tech industry again, as it prepares to enter the foldable smartphone market, with its first foldable iPhone expected to be unveiled next month. Huawei and Samsung currently dominate the market, accounting for 36% and 34% of global foldable shipments respectively last year. Apple's entry could significantly reshape the market. The launch will also mark the first major product unveiling under new CEO, John Ternis. Why has Apple waited so long to enter the foldable market? Brian Mah is a technology industry analyst with IDC. It's not entirely out of character for Apple to sit it out for a while, let the technology mature a bit before they get into it. On paper, Samsung's eight generations into this product already, they've obviously gone through a lot of growing pains, learning how to get the hinge to work, the waterproofing the work, all that kind of stuff. However, I think they wanted to make sure the experience was going to be good for a consumer, the opening and closing, whether there's much of a crease in the fold area, whether the hinge works out well. One of the challenges is that in order to get it so thin, they had to step back on a few things that they normally put into iPhones like Face ID, like a zoom lens. So the rumors are at least that Apple had to give up on some of those in order to make this work. So this first generation of product may be a bit of a compromise for folks, but eventually the hope is that as Apple comes out with future generations of the product, let's hope they do build in that zoom lens and that sort of thing. And so eventually we may get there. Think of this in the spirit of what Apple did with Apple Watch Ultra, really going beyond even just the high end Apple Watch present the ultra, even what they did with the iPhones going to Pro Max. So this is going to be a very premium product. We think this is going to be well over $2,000. So clearly that's not quite a mainstream product yet. It will be the early adopters, but it is something where you anecdotally hear people who let's say they see someone carrying a Samsung Galaxy Fold and they're like, when is Apple going to have one of those, you know? So I think there's folks that are looking at it and that assuming that Apple really delivers on a decent experience, this is something that is going to be in good demand. But again, that price point means that it will prohibit that from becoming a mainstream thing for at least a time being. Tech industry analyst Brian Mar and that's all for us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at [email protected]. You can also now watch our episodes in full. Just search for the global news podcast on YouTube. This edition was mixed by Tom Bartlett and the producer was Nikki Verico. The editor is Karen Martin and I'm Uncle Decide. Until next time, goodbye. [Music] Support comes from wise. Your life is global. Don't be fooled. Choose wise. Be smart. Get wise. Visit wise.com. T's and C's apply.