--:-- Valerie Sanderson: This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Go on, get a little out there into the big heart of Nevada, where you can go off-road and off the map on two lakes or on horseback. Dip into hot springs and dive into deserts. Climb a mountain or make your best effort. See thousands of stars in some of the darkest skies. Stake out haunted hotels. Can you make it to sunrise? There's always something new to see because we've got plenty of space to just be. Plan your trip at TravelNevada.com.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson, and in the early hours of Friday the 5th of September, these are our main stories.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Tributes are being paid to the Italian designer and giant of the fashion industry, Giorgio Armani, who's died at the age of 91.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The Israeli military says it now holds 40% of Gaza City as it presses ahead with plans to fully capture the city.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: After talks hosted by France, President Macron says that 26 countries have signed up to contribute to Ukraine's security after any ceasefire with Russia.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Also in this podcast, the more I picked up, the more I saw that this was a good thing to do, partly for the water and certainly for me. How for one group of elderly women, happiness is diving into a murky lake looking for trash.
--:-- Sara Mineta: A symbol of the best of Italy, he was able to bring luster to Italian fashion and inspire the entire world. That's how the Italian Prime Minister paid tribute to Giorgio Armani, who's died at the age of 91.
--:-- Sara Mineta: Giorgio Armani was supremely successful in founding an empire which eventually included clothing, sport, music and luxury hotels.
--:-- Sara Mineta: Armani's my best friend. No, he's my best friend. On a stage between actors Sophia Loren and Steve Martin, Giorgio Armani smiles somewhat shyly and pretends to walk away.
--:-- Sara Mineta: The Italian designer was a favourite of Hollywood stars who wore him on screen and on the red carpet.
--:-- Sara Mineta: Mr Armani designed it and it's really tight and it's really beautiful. I'm not, you know, a real show-offy kind of guy, but I do want people to pay attention to him. And I think spiritually he makes things that allow me to feel that kind of thing.
--:-- Sara Mineta: Style is not about being noticed, it's about being remembered. Mr Armani used to say.
--:-- Sara Mineta: And the elegant simplicity of his creations truly was what made him stand out and successfully weathered the passing trends of fashion for more than half a century.
--:-- Sara Mineta: But in an interview for a BBC documentary, Giorgio Armani talked about himself with humility. I don't present myself as some sort of great personality. I work from morning till night, just like the people around me.
--:-- Sara Mineta: Born in a small town in northern Italy just before the Second World War, he grew up in poverty.
--:-- Sara Mineta: As a young man, he first tried to become a doctor. Then he went into the army.
--:-- Sara Mineta: His first brush with fashion was a job as a window dresser in a department store in Milan.
--:-- Sara Mineta: From there, he moved to fashion brand Cerruti and only launched his own company in 1974 after selling his car to pay for his first collection.
--:-- Sara Mineta: One show after the other, he began building a name for himself revolutionising fashion by tearing the jacket apart and getting rid of his stiff padding.
--:-- Sara Mineta: I realised that a certain kind of woman was looking for a self-dressing that was more men-like They liked deconstructed jackets plain, soft and flowing something they could move in freely, like a second skin
--:-- Sara Mineta: But cinema was really what gave him international recognition. The iconic scene in the movie American Gigolo where Richard Gere tears into his closet and lines up on the bed for Armani outfits was the beginning of a long collaboration between Hollywood and the Italian designer who never made a secret of his love for the big screen.
--:-- Sara Mineta: Cinema was my great passion. If, when I was young, I could have afforded it, I might have preferred being a film director rather than a designer.
--:-- Sara Mineta: By the end of his life, his brand, one of the few still fully independent. And although now there will be questions over his company's future, Giorgio Armani's legacy is already pretty much set in stone.
--:-- Sara Mineta: For many people, having something Armani is an aspiration. For a young man or woman, owning an Armani suit is a sign of success.
--:-- Alexander Fury: Fashion journalist Alexander Fury interviewed Giorgio Armani for an interview published last week. He tore up the rulebook and he literally tore up tailoring. He deconstructed men's tailoring and basically every suit that we have in the world today is a reaction to an Armani suit.
--:-- Alexander Fury: But he did also change women's wear. I think a kind of apt summary is to say that he softened men's wear and he hardened women's wear.
--:-- Alexander Fury: He opened a VIP dressing salon in 1988, which was incredibly early for anyone to be kind of interacting with dressing celebrities on the red carpet.
--:-- Alexander Fury: And he also worked on over 200 films with different directors. As Martin Scorsese even directed a documentary about Armani in the early 1990s, there was very much a response, a kind of creative exchange between him and those celebrities and a mutual admiration.
--:-- Alexander Fury: At one point, Armani was the biggest fashion company in Italy. It kind of outstripped all of its competitors. I would say that was probably in its heydays of the 1980s and early 1990s.
--:-- Alexander Fury: But obviously, it's still a sizable business. And it was entirely independent, which was something that for him was incredibly important.
--:-- Alexander Fury: There's a huge Armani flagship in the middle of Milan, which incidentally is in a building from the 1930s, but one that's built in the shape of an A, which is very kind of in keeping with everything Armani.
--:-- Alexander Fury: You know, and in that building, you can buy Armani clothes, but you can buy Armani chocolates. You can buy Armani floral arrangements. You can stay in an Armani hotel. You can live in Armani residences. It really was, I think, beyond 360 in terms of his kind of creative control over all of these different spheres.
--:-- Alexander Fury: He once told me that the designer he most admired was Gabrielle Chanel. And I think, interestingly, you can talk about a Chanel style, you can talk about an Armani style, and everyone knows what you mean when you mention those names.
--:-- Alexander Fury: Those names resonate with everyone. They have a universality, and that's kind of part of the legacy that he's left behind.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The Israeli military says it now holds 40% of Gaza City, the largest city in the Palestinian territory.
--:-- Effie Defran: Today we hold 40% of the territory of Gaza City. The operation will continue to expand and intensify in the coming days. Hamas will meet the IDF forces in Gaza City in full force.
--:-- Mimi Swaby: Israel has increased its bombardments of Gaza City despite mounting international pressure to stop its campaign.
--:-- Mimi Swaby: The Hamas-controlled health ministry says Israeli fire across the enclave killed at least 53 people on Thursday, most of them in Gaza City.
--:-- Mimi Swaby: One strike reportedly hit a tent sheltering a displaced family, killing five people, including three children.
--:-- Mimi Swaby: Footage showed a pair of blood-stained pink slippers among the debris.
--:-- Mimi Swaby: One resident told the BBC that despite receiving multiple evacuation orders, they can't leave, as moving is too dangerous and there is nowhere safe to go.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The French president Emmanuel Macron says 26 Western allies have formally committed to deploying troops to Ukraine.
--:-- Emmanuel Macron: We have 26 countries You have 20 or so countries ready to put troops on the ground in Ukraine to have support in the air to have support in Ukrainian seas and that will boost the implementation of the support and the reassurance for the Ukrainian people.
--:-- James Waterhouse: I was hoping for some kind of concrete outcome because it is these security guarantees being discussed which are central to any kind of lasting ceasefire or peace deal for Ukraine.
--:-- James Waterhouse: What does Europe want? It wants a ceasefire before anything else, including Ukraine.
--:-- James Waterhouse: The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, called for it once more, but Donald Trump, after arguably being lobbied by Moscow, has said, I'll bypass a ceasefire, let's go straight to a peace deal.
--:-- James Waterhouse: I think that's reflective of the difficulties in slowing Russia's war machine.
--:-- James Waterhouse: So what have we learned today? Well, 26 out of 30 or so countries have said, we will put troops on the ground or some kind of military contribution.
--:-- James Waterhouse: But what's notable is who isn't? You know, Italy, Poland, yes, supporters of Ukraine, but seemingly unwilling to provide the troops after a ceasefire is signed or after the war is paused.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The operator of the funicular tram in Lisbon, which crashed on Wednesday evening, killing at least 16 people, has promised to reopen the service in future.
--:-- Jessica Parker: The ding of the bell from one of the funicular cars on Elvedor de Gloria on Wednesday evening, moments before the journey went terribly wrong.
--:-- Jessica Parker: This sound is from the lower car, not the upper one that careered out of control, derailed and crashed on a bend.
--:-- Jessica Parker: The footage was filmed by Rasha on holiday with her husband and son as the carriage set off.
--:-- Jessica Parker: So we were driving up and all of a sudden there was no brakes in our cable car. It was going down fast with acceleration, like there's no control.
--:-- Jessica Parker: And it hit then down. The hit was very hard and people were crashing each other.
--:-- Jessica Parker: We didn't know what's happening and everyone started to shout and scream.
--:-- Jessica Parker: It was very scary because it was within some seconds.
--:-- Jessica Parker: Elvador de Gloria is the best known of Lisbon's famous funicular railways.
--:-- Jessica Parker: Within minutes, it carries people between the Restoradores Central Square in downtown Lisbon to the buzzing streets above of Barro Alto.
--:-- Jessica Parker: The two cars, connected by a cable, run on a counterweight system.
--:-- Jessica Parker: As one car goes down, its weight lifts the other up.
--:-- Jessica Parker: But just after 6pm on Wednesday evening, horror struck.
--:-- Jessica Parker: Civil Protection Officer Antonio Rodriguez believes a big focus of the investigation will be the connecting cable.
--:-- Jessica Parker: There are indications that it may have ruptured at the moment of liftoff, when the strain and tension on the cable are greatest.
--:-- Jessica Parker: Experts are looking at the engineering mechanism to understand what failed.
--:-- Jessica Parker: Lisbon's public transport operator Caris told reporters they couldn't yet reveal what had caused the accident, but said they had increased maintenance spending in recent years.
--:-- Jessica Parker: Portugal's Prime Minister described the crash as one of the great human tragedies in the country's recent history.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Now, what's the key to happiness and a long, healthy life? Well, how about diving into a cold, muddy lake looking for trash?
--:-- Susan Bauer: I started around 2018 because I had tried so hard to get towns to act so that turtles wouldn't lose their habitat, stop dogs from running in and out of the ponds, stop people from making new beaches.
--:-- Susan Bauer: And I failed and failed and failed. And so the one thing I sort of could do without asking anybody's approval was to pick up garbage.
--:-- Susan Bauer: And the more I picked up, the more I saw that this was a good thing to do.
--:-- Susan Bauer: Is it hard work? Oh, yes. It's very hard work.
--:-- Susan Bauer: You can tell by the tryouts we have every year that you have to swim a half a mile in under 30 minutes and then be able to complete that mile.
--:-- Susan Bauer: So you have to be a tireless swimmer.
--:-- Susan Bauer: But then when you get going on the beer cans and the golf balls and you're diving eight to 10, sometimes 12 feet, time after time after time, and then you come up, you hand the can to the kayaker, often you'll give her three fingers, four fingers, meaning I've got four more down there.
--:-- Susan Bauer: Wait for me.
--:-- Susan Bauer: How many beer cans can you get in a single dive?
--:-- Susan Bauer: yeah, you get tired and we're in the water, really whatever the temperature from May through September for an hour to an hour and a half.
--:-- Susan Bauer: I mean, you talked about the trials, but you don't seem to have any trouble finding volunteers.
--:-- Susan Bauer: We have 30 people on our team right now. We have 45 volunteers.
--:-- Susan Bauer: I wish I could use every one of them.
--:-- Susan Bauer: Every one of them wants to join, wants to be part of this adventure because there aren't that many adventures, and especially for women over 65.
--:-- Susan Bauer: Is that the bottom age limit then? 65 to 85, I'm the 85.
--:-- Susan Bauer: Is there something more to picking up the litter that improves your well-being, do you think?
--:-- Susan Bauer: We are an environmental service. We get the spent fireworks with leaking perchlorates out of the water. We get car batteries. We get bad things out of the water.
--:-- Susan Bauer: But we're also an inspiration for women over 65. We're active, we're strong.
--:-- Susan Bauer: As a retired psychologist, I think the most active of the active ingredients is the fact that we're in the flow, in the zone.
--:-- Susan Bauer: And by that, I mean that we present ourselves with a job that is so challenging, so difficult, slightly dangerous, very definitely slightly dangerous.
--:-- Susan Bauer: We never know what we're going to pick up or what we're going to find.
--:-- Susan Bauer: We lose track of ourselves and we are totally unselfconscious.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: still to come as new research suggests watching too much TikTok on the toilet is bad for the bowels this doctor is understanding they as addictive as a one bandit in a casino so we sort of fighting that So I don feel sort of too blameful of all of us as humans
--:-- Cindy Crawford: Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford and I'm the founder of Meaningful Beauty.
--:-- Cindy Crawford: Well, I don't know about you, but like I never liked being told, oh wow, you look so good for your age.
--:-- Cindy Crawford: Like why even bother saying that? Why don't you just say you look great at any age, every age?
--:-- Cindy Crawford: That's what Meaningful Beauty is all about. We create products that make you feel confident in your skin at the age you are now.
--:-- Cindy Crawford: Meaningful Beauty. Beautiful skin at every age. Learn more at MeaningfulBeauty.com.
--:-- Dr. Whitney Brown: According to a nationwide survey conducted by GeneSight, nearly 9 in 10 Americans who've been diagnosed with depression or anxiety believe that mental health medications are somewhat or very effective.
--:-- Dr. Whitney Brown: However, despite that belief, more than half of those individuals say they have avoided taking medication due to concerns about potential side effects.
--:-- Dr. Whitney Brown: That's why I often recommend genetic testing to our patients as part of their treatment journey.
--:-- Dr. Whitney Brown: As part of my treatment plan, I offer the GeneSightTest, which analyzes how a patient's genes may influence how they metabolize or respond to certain mental health medications.
--:-- Dr. Whitney Brown: It gives me insights and takes out some of the guesswork that can be associated with prescribing them.
--:-- Dr. Whitney Brown: If you or someone you love is facing challenges with depression or anxiety, Talk to your doctor about how genetic testing may help.
--:-- Dr. Whitney Brown: To learn more, visit genesight.com.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: That's genesight.com.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: This message comes from Greenlight.
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--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Join millions of parents and kids building healthy financial habits together on Greenlight.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Get started risk-free at greenlight.com.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: After a week of turmoil at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, the man who sparked it all, America's controversial health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been defending himself in a bruising Senate hearing.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: The nephew of JFK insisted to Republicans and Democrats that he'd been right to shake up the department and fire its recently appointed director, Susan Menares.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: When my uncle was president, we spent zero on chronic disease. Today, we spent $1.3 trillion.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: We are the sickest country in the world. That's why we have to fire people at the CDC.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: They did not do their job. This was their job to keep us healthy. And I need to fire some of those people to make sure this doesn't happen again.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: And in a fiery exchange with the Colorado Democrat, Michael Bennett, Mr. Kennedy denied he was taking away parental choice with possible changes to vaccine policy for diseases, including measles, mumps and polio.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: I'm asking the questions for Mr. Kennedy on behalf of parents and schools and teachers all over the United States of America who deserve so much better than your leadership.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: That's what this conversation is about, Mr. Chairman.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: Senator, they deserve the truth and that's what we're going to give them for the first time in the history of that agency.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: Our North America correspondent, I followed the hearing and she told us it was a very tough encounter for Senator Kennedy.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: One Democratic senator described him as a charlatan.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: I think it was always going to be very bruising.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: I remember his confirmation hearing back in February.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: RFK insisted he was an anti-vaccine. Democrats did not believe him.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: There were some Republicans that were sceptical.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: And then since becoming America's top health official, he's taken all these drastic steps.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: you mentioned there firing the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: It was someone he actually appointed and he's also terminated research on some life-saving vaccines.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: But as we heard there, he hugely defended himself.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: And this hearing, it's worth mentioning, you know, it's not like he will lose his job or anything, but it was an opportunity for lawmakers to really sort of hold his feet to the fire and question him on what he's been doing the last few months.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: So he won't lose his job. Will this hearing change anything? I mean, might he change course?
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: It'll be difficult to see how that could happen.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: So it's worth mentioning that there are plenty of people who believe in the methods of RFK, so the Make America Healthy Again movement.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: It is pretty vocal.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: There are many Republicans that agree with him on being sceptical about vaccines.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: You're already seeing the impact of some of his changes.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: We're seeing in Florida, where they've moved to end constitutionally upheld vaccine requirements.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: But I think if you look at the polls, the Make America Healthy Again movement is pretty fringe.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: There are plenty of polls won out today by our CBS partner station that say Americans tend to believe that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s policies are making vaccines less available rather than more available, and they want them to be more available.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: But at the same time, the large majority of Americans feel that government policy ought to make vaccines more available if people want them.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: And that is, I think, RFK's position generally.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: But in terms of whether or not he will be fired, Donald Trump massively supports him.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: How worried is the medical establishment about him and about his current policy?
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: I think they are really worried, especially if you look at the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: They've broken with the CDC advice. They released vaccine recommendations last month.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: And that is a break from the federal guidance that they're usually shaped by when it comes to health.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: And basically, they have said that they do recommend vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women, and they do not agree with the CDC's advice.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: And just to mention, the AAP is a professional organisation.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: It has more than 65,000 board-certified paediatricians.
--:-- Nomia Iqbal: And so you do have groups like that really concerned about what's happening.
--:-- David Kessler: Perhaps not surprisingly, it's more tempting, more rewarding for the brain to eat tasty combinations of sugar, fat and salt than to devour broccoli.
--:-- David Kessler: Now, the America doctor, who led the White House's scientific COVID-19 response team, has written a book about food.
--:-- David Kessler: He himself has used weight loss drugs like a Zempik and Monjaro, but he thinks they're not a complete solution to what he calls an abundance of addictive food.
--:-- David Kessler: I've gained and lost my body weight repeatedly over my lifetime.
--:-- David Kessler: I have suits in every size. Every time I lost it, I thought I was done and it would come back.
--:-- David Kessler: And this brings us then to the food that we're eating.
--:-- David Kessler: You think we are literally addicted to certain kinds of foods and they're not foods that are giving us much nutrition.
--:-- David Kessler: They're foods that are giving us basically a lot of dopamine hits.
--:-- David Kessler: Addiction is not about the weak or the downtrodden.
--:-- David Kessler: The human brain evolved to deal with scarcity, not abundance.
--:-- David Kessler: For much of human history, there was no guarantee as to when our next meal would arrive.
--:-- David Kessler: So our biological systems are designed to seek out the sweetest, most energy-dense foods.
--:-- David Kessler: We're wired to focus on the most salient stimuli in our environment.
--:-- David Kessler: And that, for many people, it's that energy-dense food.
--:-- David Kessler: And only when you go without, try to stop doing it, do you see that craving, that relapse.
--:-- David Kessler: If you just keep on eating, you're not going to notice those addictive circuits, those reward circuits.
--:-- David Kessler: Those ultra formulated foods, they have been engineered to manipulate the brain's reward systems.
--:-- David Kessler: I mean, these foods have become the new cigarette and they have resulted in a health catastrophe.
--:-- David Kessler: One interesting thing is there are countries that have not gone as far down the road you're describing as the United States or the United Kingdom.
--:-- David Kessler: I'm thinking, say, of France, where they sit and they eat a lot.
--:-- David Kessler: You know, they have a three course meal at school for lunch.
--:-- David Kessler: They love cheese but they nothing like as obese as the Americans
--:-- David Kessler: And it just what is going on there
--:-- David Kessler: If you look France and Italy there much less ultra processed foods
--:-- David Kessler: I mean also, I think that if you look in some of the Asian countries, and certainly the ultra formulated foods, you just don't see these unnatural combinations of fat and sugar, fat and salt.
--:-- David Kessler: I have to say, it rings so true to me.
--:-- David Kessler: I find when I go to the US, now I'm not eating at home, if I go to the US. I'm always eating in hotels or restaurants.
--:-- David Kessler: I feel I never go anywhere without such big portions and I'm never anywhere where I'm so hungry.
--:-- David Kessler: I'm always hungry in the US.
--:-- David Kessler: It's as though the food is designed to make you.
--:-- David Kessler: The next time you see yourself like that, ask yourself what just triggered that?
--:-- David Kessler: It's what's called cue-induced wanting.
--:-- David Kessler: Now a cue can be the time a day.
--:-- David Kessler: It could be you just passed that bakery.
--:-- David Kessler: It could be a memory of a food you ate even decades ago.
--:-- David Kessler: Now, all of a sudden, something triggers that thought.
--:-- David Kessler: If you eat the food, that thought goes away.
--:-- David Kessler: But if you try to resist, maybe I shouldn't have that.
--:-- David Kessler: Maybe it won't be good for me.
--:-- David Kessler: But then what happens when you have that craving?
--:-- David Kessler: And then what do you see with weight?
--:-- David Kessler: You lose it, but you gain it back.
--:-- David Kessler: You have that relapse.
--:-- David Kessler: So you have this cues, induced wanting.
--:-- David Kessler: you have this craving, you have this relapse.
--:-- David Kessler: Those are the essential elements of an addiction.
--:-- Pamza Felani: In the blistering sun in Rustenburg, the heart of South Africa's platinum region, we arrive on a 21-hectare farm and find a small team hard at work, tending to rows and rows of vegetables.
--:-- Pamza Felani: That's Kilebukhile, Lebu Musime. She's a 45-year-old mother turned produce farmer.
--:-- Pamza Felani: Interchanging between two local languages, Setswana and Isitosa, she gives instructions to each of her workers on what needs to be done.
--:-- Pamza Felani: It's a small glimpse of language diversity at play, how many people, not just in South Africa, but across Africa, often weave between indigenous languages to communicate.
--:-- Pamza Felani: Africa is home to a third of the world's languages.
--:-- Pamza Felani: Despite this, in AI development, those languages are missing.
--:-- Pamza Felani: Critics say the issue is a lack of investment and readily available data.
--:-- Pamza Felani: Many of the well-known AI systems are trained on English, Chinese or European data sets, what researchers call high-resource languages.
--:-- Pamza Felani: But for millions of people across Africa who only speak indigenous languages, this means being left behind.
--:-- Pamza Felani: Yet local experts say the opportunity for AI to help solve everyday challenges in Africa is immense, if designed with local languages in mind.
--:-- Pamza Felani: Our farmer Lebu agrees.
--:-- Pamza Felani: She uses a homegrown app, AI Pharma, for help when problems arise on her farm and can act quickly, saving time and money.
--:-- Pamza Felani: Prompting it in her home language, Satswana, the app understands and responds with suggestions.
--:-- Pamza Felani: You can see my cabbages, they're like opening, so I can go into AI and ask if my cabbages are opening what that is.
--:-- Pamza Felani: I think for somebody in the rural areas like me who is not exposed to technology or anything, you can ask in a simple language.
--:-- Pamza Felani: So what did you just ask the app now?
--:-- Pamza Felani: I just asked it for the knowledge.
--:-- Pamza Felani: But such language-savvy tools are extremely rare, and AI needs massive data to work well.
--:-- Pamza Felani: A new project called Africa Next Voices may help with this.
--:-- Pamza Felani: Its researchers have created the largest known data set of African languages.
--:-- Pamza Felani: Across South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria, they asked everyday people to talk about everyday things, from farming, schooling to healthcare, in 18 different local languages.
--:-- Pamza Felani: Language is not just the words.
--:-- Pamza Felani: That's South African Professor Bukosi Marivate, a computer scientist and African languages enthusiast.
--:-- Pamza Felani: He's one of the leads on the African Next Voice project, which took two years to complete.
--:-- Pamza Felani: If I was to go to Nigeria, to Kenya, there are shared histories, things like colonialism, empire, that have impacted in the way that we think about languages and the way that they develop.
--:-- Pamza Felani: You need some basis to start off with, and that's what we hope the African Next Voices is, and then people will build on top of that and add their own innovations.
--:-- Will Chalk: If you picture all the ways mobile phones have changed lives, you may not think bowels are anywhere near the top of the list.
--:-- Will Chalk: But doctors are warning that mobiles are having a bigger impact on our insides than we might think.
--:-- Will Chalk: In a first for my once relatively glamorous journalistic career, I've had to come to the toilet to record this piece because it's all about how we pass our time when we're sitting on the loo.
--:-- Will Chalk: And one habit in particular. Nell's got a remembrance.
--:-- Will Chalk: That's your £36 model. Hello, excuse me.
--:-- Will Chalk: Namely, scrolling through apps like TikTok on our phones.
--:-- Will Chalk: Scientists at the beth israel deaconess medical center in boston in the u.s analyzed the toilet habits and bowel health of 125 volunteers they found toilet scrollers were 46 percent more likely to have hemorrhoids than people who left their phones outside
--:-- Will Chalk: why well put simply it's because they're incentivized to sit there longer
--:-- Will Chalk: they found 37 percent of phone users spent more than five minutes on the loo compared to seven percent of those without one
--:-- Will Chalk: the longer you're on the toilet the more pressure it puts on your anal tissues
--:-- Will Chalk: chris challenge is a colorectal surgeon in sheffield in england part of that is just the design of the toilet that while you're sitting there for a long period there's nothing actually supporting your pelvic floor so all of the the weight and the gravity of while you're emptying is passing straight out through you hence increasing the risk of piles developing
--:-- Will Chalk: now I'm not actually old enough to remember this but I am reliably told that before phones people would often take a book or even a newspaper with them to the toilet
--:-- Will Chalk: so what's changed
--:-- Will Chalk: ellie cannon is a doctor in london the phones are designed to be addictive so they are designed to do this sort of scroll refresh thing and you always get something new you know so you have another quick look you know so they're sort of they're as addictive as a one-armed bandit in a casino
--:-- Will Chalk: so we're sort of fighting that
--:-- Will Chalk: so I don't feel sort of too blameful of all of us as humans
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: And that's it from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, send us an email.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: You can also find us on X at BBC World Service.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Use the hashtag Global News Pod.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: This edition was mixed by Chris Cousares.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The producers were Alison Davis and Rebecca Wood.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The editor is Karen Martin.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: I'm Valerie Sanderson.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Until next time, bye-bye.
--:-- Asma Khalid: America is changing. And so is the world.
--:-- Asma Khalid: But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval.
--:-- Asma Khalid: It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
--:-- Asma Khalid: I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C.
--:-- Asma Khalid: I'm Tristan Redman in London.
--:-- Asma Khalid: And this is The Global Story.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Thank you.
