This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Understand the latest business trends. We're looking at how the war in the Middle East is affecting businesses and people around the world. And how they might affect the money in your pocket. Globally, the state of the world economy is in the hands of just a few people right now. Business daily from the BBC World Service explores the forces driving the global economy and their impact on us all. When oil flows and evenly the cost of that instability shows up on receipts around the world. Listen now, search for business daily, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Janet Joliel and at 15 hours GMT on Friday the 29th of May, these are our main stories. NATO and EU members condemn Russia after a drone hits an apartment building in Romania, injuring two people close to the border with Ukraine. Eight students are arrested in Kenya on suspicion of arson after a fire at a boarding school kills 16 girls. Anthropic overtakes open AI to become the world's most valuable AI firm, valued at nearly a trillion dollars. Also in this podcast? Everybody has to search for things that, you know, we might think of basic, but they're really important part of the lies, whether it's like how to boil an egg or how to tie a tie or even how to know if you're in love. We take a look back at two decades of Google searches. We begin the programme in Romania. Where a drone has crashed into an apartment block in a city that's close to the border with Ukraine, causing a fire and wounding two people, a mother and her child. It sparked a chorus of condemnation from NATO and EU leaders who have accused Russia of acting recklessly. These residents of the port city of Galatts said they feared this was not an accident, but a deliberate attack by Moscow. Well, I think it's another provocation by the Russians. I don't believe this was an accident that's happened too many times for the Russians to be doing this by accident. Either that or they're highly incompetent at waging war, but NATO needs to do something about this. I am thinking Russian peace is slowly reaching here in Romania. I'm Ukrainian and what happened here? In Ukraine, there are hundreds like these all night, kidney people, children, the elderly, one fell here, and the Russians and the Europeans must continue to draw attention to the Russians understand they can't do such a thing. And while Russian drones have fallen in Romania before, the Romanian president Nikosodan said this was the most serious incident to occur on Romanian territory since the start of Russia's war with Ukraine. As well as condemning Russia, there's been an outpouring of support for Romania from European leaders. The NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte says he's assured Romania that the alliance stands ready to defend every inch of its territory. Germany, France and Britain condemned the drone strike, and the US ambassador to NATO said Washington stood with Romania. As we record this podcast, Moscow has neither confirmed nor denied the drone was Russian. I got more from our world affairs correspondent Join Wood. The port of Galati is about 20 kilometers or so from the nearest Ukrainian port just a few miles over the border. Luckily it does seem that the damage to the building was severe, but people inside, not nearly as bad as it could have been. Two people injured, 70 people evacuated. The fear is of course if it had hit lower down the building it would have been much worse, but when you look at the pictures, you can see an impact point and fragmentation marks going away. It's right at the top of the building. And so the human cost hasn't been that serious. I think what's much more serious is the potential political and diplomatic fallout from this. And F-16 fighter jets were scrambled, but they couldn't shoot down the drone. It's not as straightforward as you might think taking down a drone like this because it's a densely populated area. We don't know the exact path, but the Romanian military have come out and basically said, flying as low as it was, there were legal considerations. There were lots of restrictions on what their planes or F-16s could do. Of course they can shoot drones out the sky, but you haven't got much time to react just a few minutes they had. And it seems basically they were also concerned that they might veer into Ukrainian airspace. NATO have always been for all the support they've offered Ukraine, very, very keen not to get involved in this war themselves. And they fear that, for example, if NATO jets started going into Ukrainian airspace, that would be seen as a provocation by Russia. Many people are voicing concern that this was not an accident, but Russia deliberately testing the response of a NATO country, Romania and its allies. And there are some in Romania that are calling for more air defenses to be given to it. Yeah, I mean we should start this by saying, obviously we don't know what the intention was. I mean we haven't heard anything from the Kremlin so far other than in the last few minutes we're told that Vladimir Putin is aware of the situation. But that's the fear, isn't it, that by going into NATO airspace, these little sort of testing jabs by Russia to see exactly what would happen. So the German military have said that they think within five years or so the Russians are going to be in a position and may well try and take an actual nibble of NATO territory. And the idea is that all of these little things, little provocations are about testing NATO defenses, testing NATO reactions and testing NATO resolve. Joe Inwood, we told you in an earlier podcast about a fire at a girl's boarding school in which 16 of the pupils died. Now police in Kenya have arrested eight of the students on suspicion of arson. There have been a string of fires in boarding schools in Kenya in recent years and questions are again being asked about why they continue to have such a poor safety record. Thomas McWana has been to the school in Gilgill, northwest of the capital Nairobi and gave me this update on the police investigation. The news of the eight arrests was met with a lot of anger understandably from here mostly because the parents that are present here, some of those parents are parents of kids who died in the fire and others of children who are held because of suspicion of arson. This is not an isolated case. We can school children, mostly high school students use us on re-s a form of expressing protest and it's happened in the past and in the very rare occasions that it happens at a massive scale like this one. It does result in the loss of life within the school itself in the domicry that caught fire. It is said by the Ministry of Education that the preliminary investigations have revealed that the students that were in the domicry are first of all overcrowded many of them way more than they should have been inside the around 135 bunk beds. And on top of that the only had one exit in the case of an emergency which goes against the safety requirements of these high schools. And Thomas it's been taking some time to identify the dead have all the parents now found out which of their daughters died in this fire. Most of the parents by this time have found out the depressing thing about being at the scene of this of this fire since yesterday is that you hear occasional whales from parents because maybe they've been met with the information that their children are amongst those who died in the 16 and some of them are found out that some of their children are dead. And you found out that some of their children have been arrested in connection to this fire and you then in this place where police are trying to contain parents who are protesting because they believe their children have been held within the school on this suspicion of Asun and they haven't been given access to their children for the past over 24 hours. And in two cases this morning of parents who say they haven't had about their children being inside the school under the custody of the police or whether they've died some of them are just left without knowing what's happening and communication is part of the problem but the moment police officers are trying to reunite and try and figure out which child is who's and why they can't be found. So as you outline some of the reasons why these fires keep happening but surely there must be growing anger that the authorities aren't doing more to address this recurring problem. Absolutely, absolutely and most of the anger is actually towards the Ministry of Education because in 2024 after another similar incident actually that cost the lives of 21 boys at a primary school far from here. The Ministry went on a countrywide inspection of all boarding schools, both primary and secondary boarding schools and boarding schools are majority of the schools here in Kenya and they established that around 348 had not achieved the safety standards required to run and they say that they shut it down but this school had a boarding section that led to all these deaths and it's just come from the Ministry of Education as well that the boarding section had not reached those safety requirements so the question is where did the Ministry let it run. Thomas McWarner speaking to me from outside the school in Gilgill in Kenya where a deadly fire killed 16 schoolgirls. We've heard a lot about chat GPT and its creator OpenAI but now I'm going to talk about it.
Another company has overtaken it to become the world's most valuable AI firm. Anthropic, which is behind the Claude Chatbot, announced that it had raised $65 billion in funding, which means the company is now valued at nearly a trillion dollars. More than double what it was worth just three months ago. I asked our business correspondent, Nick Marsh, why Anthropic had overtaken Open AI. It's fundamentally to do with the business model that it's decided to pursue. You're quite right. Most of us have heard of ChatGPT, a lot of us use it, Open AI is pretty famous, but that's because it's tailored for the everyday consumer. You use it in your everyday life, look up a cake recipe or ask it to plan your holiday. Anthropic Claude, the Chatbot, it can do all of that, but what it's done, it's focused a lot firstly on coding, and that's been incredibly valuable. And it's also focused on selling its system to, they call it enterprise in the industry, just business is basically commercial clients. You integrate Claude into your systems at work, into your computers, into everything you do, and you operate with Claude. And obviously, being a commercial client, you can charge an awful lot more. That's what's really in a very simplistic way, being behind this unbelievable rise in terms of Anthropic's value. And this valuation shows how enormous amounts of money are still flowing into the AI industry, despite widespread public distress and fears of what it means for our future. Yes, exactly. So there were two main concerns. The first is that there's going to be some kind of stop-market bubble. I mean, we're talking about trillions of dollars here. I think I was talking to one of your colleagues about SpaceX not long ago. That's going to list on the stop-market soon. That's expected to become a $1 trillion company. Same could well happen with Anthropic. By the way, Open AI isn't doing too badly either. It's been overtaken by Anthropic. That's a company that's going to list on the stop-market either this year or maybe beginning of next year. That's going to raise hundreds of millions. And all of these companies, they sort of work to lift each other up. So for example, Anthropic is going to pay billions to SpaceX to use its data centers. These data centers keep on getting built at an incredible rate because you need so much. They call it compute, basically, the physical hardware, the systems to be able to power it. There are no signs of this slowing down. We're going to get to a point where the vast majority of the stop-market's value is made up by AI companies. A lot of people say not a very healthy position to be in, but showing no signs of slowing down. The other concern, Jeanette, is to do with safety. Who's regulating it? Anthropic itself, it's watered down. It's own safety regulations recently. Big dispute with the Pentagon, you know, in its use of weapons. So there's a big concern there as well, but the money keeps flowing. Nick Marsh. For the first time here in the UK, an intensive care ward has opened on the roof of a hospital. It allows some patients who are too ill to leave their beds to breathe fresh air and enjoy nature, while still being hooked up to their life support systems. Their progress will be monitored to see if spending time outdoors helps them to recover more quickly. Our health reporter, Jim Reed, has been to King's College Hospital in London to see how it all works. I can't remember the last time I experienced being outside. For Holly, this is week nine in intensive care. She's been in this room in South London, getting treatment for a damaged heart valve. It's so hard. It's lovely because you have lovely nurses, lovely doctors, but the actual mental and physical size is just horrific. And especially at a young age of 29, you don't know what's coming next. It's horrible. Today though, Holly will be the first patient ever to be led out of her room, to a brand new space on the roof of this giant hospital. When you're up here on the fifth floor with these amazing views out over the London skyline, it might feel and look like a nice roof garden, but actually this in front of me is a full critical care ward with a space for six different beds. These cabinets here are all hooked up to life support. So the sickest patients cannot be monitored. They can be given oxygen, all from the top of this roof. The same sort of level of treatment that you'd expect to find downstairs in the main critical care unit. Wow, very carefully a whole team of menics smooth Holly out of the lift and into the sun for the first time in months. Oh it's lovely. Don't a bit of shade. Oh it's time-law-the-thing. Holly's doctors now plan to study the impacts of this garden and its effects on heart rates and pain levels. Just the contact with sun, wind, rain pulls them back into their own reality. Dr Philip Hopkins is a consultant in intensive care medicine. It's going to be absolutely critical to the NHS going forwards because a lot of what we do is about rehabilitation, saving people's lives, but making sure that when they leave intensive care, they leave in a way that A, they're not going to come back and be that they are returning to their normal lives in the best possible shape. The garden with all its lifts and equipment has cost £2 million, pay for almost entirely by charity fundraising. It's full of herbs and other plants that patients can smell and touch from their beds. Rosemary's, lavender's, jasmine, honey suckles. Several price, a three-time medalist at the Chelsea flower show, is one of the designers behind the project. It's the antipysis of a hospital ward. You want to be able to smell the damp soil of the rain, the scent of flowers to step out into a garden and just having that sense of being connected and it's a different timescale. Patients like Holly have a long recovery ahead. The hope is that a scheme like this could speed that process up and ultimately take some of the pressure off intensive care. When you're at the stockings I do today, there's no motivations to really try and get that to normal life. Does it feel a bit more normal up here? Oh it does, it feels lovely. I don't want to leave. Hospital patient Holly ending that report by Jim Reed. Still to come in this podcast? What could be better? Lying around, being fed glorious food, being in the company for the greatest artist in the world and having all the sun's supplements to read. We talked to the woman who posed nude for one of Lucian Freud's most famous paintings ahead of its sale. Globally, the fate of the world economy is in the hands of just a few people right now. When oil flows unevenly the cost of that instability shows up on receipts around the world. Listen now, search for business daily wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast. As conflict, displacement and widespread mistrust complicate efforts to fight the latest deadly Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the head of the WHO has now arrived in the country to show his commitment to containing the disease. On his arrival in the capital Kinshasa, Tedros Adhanom Ghebiusus have this message of reassurance for the Congolese people. "To come here is to really show to the community that they're not alone, pushing orders from my comfortable office in Geneva is easy. But if I'm asking my colleagues to work with the community and I'm asking communities to protect themselves to do this on that, so I came here to show that the community they're not alone." This comes as a plan by the Trump administration to set up a Ebola quarantine centre in Kenya for American nationals has been temporarily blocked by the Kenyan High Court while it hears a case brought by a civil society group. I also corresponded in Kenya, Barbara Pletasha, how much of a difference the WHO Chiefs visit to Congo would make to efforts to fight the disease. "He's very much highlighting the moral support of the head of the WHO coming to the Democratic Republic of Congo and he's going to be visiting not only Kinshasa but heading to the main epicenter of the outbreak. So that's one thing he's really been stressing but on a practical level he will be looking at coordinating and reinforcing the response efforts because it is complicated. It's a remote area with a lot of difficulties, security, infrastructure and otherwise. And there are a lot of elements involved. The national government is leading the response, but there are a lot of international partners as well. And then you know they're going to have to have a system, a coordinated system because there's no vaccine. So they have to go back to like surveillance, testing, contact tracing, isolation, care for patients and then trying to prevent further infection and that requires a whole coordinated system and he's going to be looking at how to reinforce that." But he has a lot of obstacles to become the sort of despair.
placement called by conflict and also the widespread mistrust. Yes, and we've seen that before in Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is the 17th, by the way. So that means that there has been some, not much experience of this before. The community, it's, as I said, it's in a remote area. It's an area that has been afflicted by conflict from armed groups for decades, basically an area of state neglect. So there's a certain amount of suspicion of outside forces coming in and people are saying they attitude is somewhat like you come here when there's a Ebola, but otherwise you don't give us anything. That's on the one hand. On the other hand, there's misinformation and suspicion about whether this disease really is as bad as that people say it is or whether it's actually happening to that degree. And they want access to the patients. They don't want to go and be quarantined somewhere. They don't want to let other people bury their dead. So there has to be a lot of community engagement and all health officials have acknowledged this, not only the WHO director and there is going to be, that is going to be part of the response. And it's especially important because of the fact that there is no treatment or vaccines and so they will need the cooperation of the community. Barbara Pletasha. Every day, millions of us use the internet to find answers to questions from the practical to the deeply personal. Worldwide, the weather forecast remains the most popular search. Another frequently asked questions include what is my IP address, which dinosaur had 500 teeth and even where am I? Simon Rodgers is Google's lead data editor and he's been looking at two decades of anonymous searches for his new book. So what does the data tell us about our search habits over time? Yes, definitely evolved over time. And sometimes it's obvious things like slang or language because there's always new things to learn, isn't there? Like a new emoji that we've never heard of before, that sort of thing. But also what you've got is a lot of trends that have just increased over time. So for instance, we search for how to help more than at any time in search history now. And we've also seen like changes in society. So people are more likely to search now for take care of parents than they are to search for take care of kids. AI is obviously really changing the way that we ask for stuff. Three is now three times as long as they used to be because they're much more conversational. We're almost having a conversation with search now. So we'll ask really complicated questions. I mean, if you're one of those people who feel like everybody else has got everything sorted out and you're the only person in the world that doesn't know something, I can tell you you're not. Everybody has to search for things that we might think are basic, but they're really important part of our lives, whether it's like how to boil an egg or how to tie a tie or even how to know if you're in love, all of those things are the kinds of things that we search for every day. There are some things that search globally that are very searched in similar ways. Like you might be surprised to know that like the top place searching for Liverpool Football Club isn't Liverpool. It's some Cassandrati, which is in Uganda, the top food that searched in Paris, the capital of the culinary excellence in the world is pizza. But there are some things that are similar like everybody around the world searches for how to learn to play the piano in December, just for Christmas, you know. But then there are some things which are different in different places. So we look like kids' classes after school in the US parents search for like etiquette classes for kids in Australia, it's coding classes in Canada, it's boxing classes and the UK's parkour classes. Simon Rogers and Justin Keshe were wondering which dinosaur did have 500 teeth. We googled it for you and the answer is a Nigosaurus. Now a sound that many of us don't like to hear. Mosquitoes. A new research suggests that deep-based repellents to protect ourselves might not always work. That's because the mosquitoes may learn that where there is deep there is food, i.e. us. Henry Ranson is professor of entomology, that's the study of insects at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. What does she make of the discovery? It is a very interesting study and a clever study. But I think the first thing I would say is don't be too alarmed, deeter store a very effective, repellent the most effective repellent we have. But what the scientists doing a study were able to show is that you can effectively train a mosquito to associate deep to this very effective repellent with a blood meal. And so where is the mosquito normally if it could smell the deeter would avoid the skin because it's so keen to get the blood meal by training the mosquito to associate the smell of deep with a blood meal. You can then make the deeter not effective. You sort of people will be bitten. But this was an laboratory experiment over a short period. What we don't know is if this was done over about an hour. And if you were to go the next day or even a few hours later, would that learning behavior still be retained? They might forget. They might forget exactly. Yes. And of course, under wild, you know, natural situations are a huge range of different stimuli. There are a number of different repellents. There's also access to other sources of blood or even parts of your own skin. We all know that we're not that great at putting on repellent and there's usually a patch of skin we miss that doesn't have the repellent. So the mosquitoes will be honed in to finding that blood meal. And so while I think this is a really interesting study, it tells us a lot about how that mosquitoes can learn and they can change their behavior. I don't think we should be too worried about whether or not Deeter is going to remain protective when we put it on to protect ourselves from the mosquito bites. Have we seen other ways in which mosquitoes have changed their behavior according to the environment? Yes, absolutely. I mean, they're very adaptive species. And particularly the mosquitoes that transmit human diseases because they live in such close association with us and they learn to adapt. So as we urbanize or we change our housing, they can adapt. And perhaps one of the best examples is for malaria control across Africa. The most effective preventative measure is to sleep under an insecticide treated net. But we're seeing that the mosquitoes are evolving or changing their behavior so that some of them now feed early in the evening or very early in the morning after people have got outside of their net. So they are changing, they are evolving, we need to stay ahead of the game with them. But the rise now of mosquito-borne infections across the globe, including in Europe, it's really important that people don't lose confidence in the efficacy of Deeter's and Effective Repelant. Professor Hilary Ranson speaking to Johnny Diamond. How does it feel to be the subject of a painting that's worth tens of millions of dollars? Most of us will never know, but Sue Tilly does. She was the nude model for a series of Lucian Freud paintings, The Last and Most Ambitious of Which, Sleeping by the Lion carpet, is coming up for auction in the next few weeks. Sue Tilly was paid a daily fee for the portrait of her seemingly asleep in an armchair, but she's never received any money from the sale of the paintings she modeled for. Professor Astor, if she ever thinks about how much a picture of herself is now worth. I've worked it out, I think I must be worth about a hundred million, what with all the four paintings and all the actions. How can that be possible? Well, I've never got any money myself. Well, I mean that's an excellent point and somebody should be taking that into account. What was it like, Sue? Because you have to sit for these things for quite a long time, don't you? I know it was a while ago, but it's a long process. Yeah, it was fine. As I've said often, what could be better, lying around, being fed glorious food, being in the company of one of the greatest artists in the world and having all the sunsies, supplements to read? It sounds perfect to me. What was he like? What was he like to work with? I know there were bits and pieces of the conversation that you probably can't say on the radio. Well, he was hilarious because I've been interested in people and their behaviour and he was very hard to pin down. He just did what he wanted and everything he did he thought was right. Even though he used to tell me stories of something he'd done like I'd go, "Oh, marvellous, I just can't eat it. What?" Yeah, really simple thing, not all thought. Well, it's a lot of chitchat to have to make, isn't it, I suppose. Or were the times when you just, as you say, you just sat quietly and thought, "Yeah, I think your own thoughts?" Yeah, sometimes I'd go and I'd be really desperate for sleep and he'd be dead chatey. And then, other times, I'd be quite chatey and he'd be quite dyes. Well, all of these memories that you've got is what I did hear from a talk about what he was doing about the painting or about his great vision for it. Not really, no. But people like to sort of read stories into the paintings and everything. But really, they're all a test of himself and what he could paint and how he could paint better because he realised he was getting older. So he just wanted to keep trying new and new things. Do you have attempted to go, "Oh, what about that bit there?" I didn't, but Lee Barry, who worked there as well, sometimes in the breaks he used to go up and add a bit of paint to the paintings of himself. Sometimes he used to say, "Can you make my hair look a bit nice, I thank you?" But he wouldn't. Do you ever go to these auctions and sort of drift through and see if people recognise, I mean, that would be quite a moment, wouldn't it? No, I've done parts, I've gone to auctions, but you know, that painting was recently in the National Portrait Gallery and I went there, because I don't really look like it anymore, I've got grey hair and everything. So people generally don't recognise me. I love the way that, you know, for you, it's all very, you know, it's just a part of your life that you, you know, people like me have asked you questions like, "There's so many times before." And yet you're very, very patiently still talking about it and still go back to those memories. I thought, if someone gave me a pound for every time I was asked how I'd met Lucy and [BLANK_AUDIO]
to be quite rich woman. You'd have all those multi-millions be yourself, wouldn't you? I would, yeah. Sue Tilly, who met Lucian Throyd through their mutual artist friend, Li Barry, and who once joked that she thought she was chosen as a model because Lucian Throyd got a lot of flesh for his money. And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at
[email protected]. This edition of the Global News Podcast was mixed by Nathan Chamberlain, the producer as Ed Horton, the editor is Karen Martin. I'm Janet Gillil, until next time, goodbye. Globally, theta the world economy is in the hands of just a few people right now. When oil flows unevenly, the cost of that instability shows up on receipts around the world. [Music]
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