--:-- Celia Hatton: This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Israeli forces say they've struck more than 150 targets in Gaza City since Tuesday's ground incursion began. Thousands of Palestinians are struggling to escape the assault.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Also in this podcast, the wife of the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny says new forensic evidence has emerged that proves he'd been poisoned. He died in prison last year.
--:-- Celia Hatton: And Ben and Jerry's ice cream might need to shorten its name after Jerry resigns, accusing parent company Unilever of trying to silence the brand's activism.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Today in the UK... A military band played the American national anthem after President Trump's arrival at Windsor Castle.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The US president is on his second state visit to Britain. His host, King Charles, accompanied him in an elaborate golden carriage through the grounds of the castle.
--:-- Celia Hatton: They went on to inspect a guard of honour and watch a large military parade.
--:-- Celia Hatton: As we record this podcast, Mr. Trump is shortly due to watch a fly pass by the Red Arrows, the Royal Air Force aerobatics team.
--:-- Celia Hatton: And later, he'll be attending a state banquet with 160 guests.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Britain has never hosted any other US president for two state visits.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Our UK political correspondent Rob Watson is at Windsor Castle, and he told us it was meant to be a grand affair.
--:-- Rob Watson: It certainly was a stunning spectacle and very much carefully planned to be exactly that.
--:-- Rob Watson: You described some of it.
--:-- Celia Hatton: There were 1,300 troops all in full ceremonial outfits.
--:-- Rob Watson: So if you imagine all the brass gleaming, the bearskin hats, you had 120 horses all dressed in their finery.
--:-- Rob Watson: And of course, the carriage is polished to within an inch of their life.
--:-- Rob Watson: And this is entirely what it was designed to be.
--:-- Rob Watson: I mean, the British government, the royal family know that this is what Donald Trump likes.
--:-- Rob Watson: And this was an absolute sort of full fat reddest of red carpets that you could possibly imagine for the president.
--:-- Rob Watson: I mean, Mr. Trump has been full of praise for King Charles, but privately, the two men don't necessarily agree on everything.
--:-- Celia Hatton: What do we think they're going to be talking about?
--:-- Rob Watson: I mean, it's an extraordinary thought, isn't it?
--:-- Rob Watson: I mean, if you think about King Charles, he is renowned for being very concerned about the environment.
--:-- Rob Watson: He's very much concerned about a whole host of what you might call liberal issues.
--:-- Rob Watson: You couldn't imagine someone like President Trump having a more different sort of worldview.
--:-- Celia Hatton: What will they talk about?
--:-- Rob Watson: I mean, the short answer is we don't know, but we know that President Trump has described King Charles as a friend.
--:-- Rob Watson: And they do seem to have a good chemistry.
--:-- Rob Watson: And I think it's worth bearing in mind that King Charles has had many, many years of diplomacy, right?
--:-- Celia Hatton: He knows how to conduct himself.
--:-- Rob Watson: And they'll have all sorts of things that they'll want to talk about, no doubt, memories of his mother, the Queen, who President Trump was very fond of.
--:-- Rob Watson: And, of course, away from all the pageantry, though, we have to remember that this is a visit between the U.S. and the U.K.
--:-- Celia Hatton: What are the two sides hoping this visit will achieve?
--:-- Rob Watson: Well, I mean, briefly, on the U.S. side, I think it is. It is the pomp and pageantry.
--:-- Rob Watson: I mean, that's why Donald Trump has come far more than the sort of political business deal-making side, which leads us to the Brits.
--:-- Rob Watson: And I think they want four things very briefly.
--:-- Rob Watson: I mean, one is to, you know, some distraction from all of Prime Minister Starmer's recent troubles.
--:-- Rob Watson: Second, to get President Trump in a good mood, right?
--:-- Rob Watson: This is a sort of sweetener.
--:-- Rob Watson: I mean, the third is to talk up these deals between UK and US tech companies, particularly with regard to AI.
--:-- Rob Watson: And then I think the fourth thing is to try and send a message to the world from the Brits, which is that, look, you may not get horse-drawn carriages and, you know, a guard of honour, But this is a country that you could do business with.
--:-- Rob Watson: You know, come and have a look.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Rob Watson.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The British government has announced that US tech firms are to invest more than $40 billion in the UK.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Much of that money will be spent on new data centres.
--:-- Celia Hatton: And one of those companies, Microsoft, will also be involved in the development of a powerful supercomputer.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, is here alongside President Trump.
--:-- Celia Hatton: He believes that AI investment in the UK could boost economic growth here by 10%.
--:-- Zoe Kleinman: Our technology editor, Zoe Kleinman, asked Mr. Nadella, what's in it for Microsoft?
--:-- Satya Nadella: We've been in the UK since 1982.
--:-- Satya Nadella: It's 40 plus years.
--:-- Satya Nadella: And we've consistently over all these decades invested in the UK to bring the best technology so that we can then have customers across the United Kingdom.
--:-- Satya Nadella: So that's the goal for us is to be able to really, at the end of the day, make these long term capital investments because of the attractiveness of the market and the policy stability across governments in the UK.
--:-- Satya Nadella: And to me, that is what allows us to be able to sort of go year after year, decade after decade and bet on the customers of the United Kingdom using this technology to, quite frankly, create technology that then is used around the world.
--:-- Zoe Kleinman: The UK economy is pretty sluggish at the moment, I think it's fair to say.
--:-- Satya Nadella: When do you think AI is going to deliver this promised 10% growth boost that we're supposed to be getting?
--:-- Satya Nadella: Always, whenever anyone gets excited about AI, I want to see it ultimately in the economic growth and in the GDP growth.
--:-- Satya Nadella: So could we say in 10 years?
--:-- Satya Nadella: Well, I mean, you can never predict.
--:-- Satya Nadella: So the point is, since it all is compounding, right?
--:-- Satya Nadella: So the ability for AI perhaps to benefit from even the investments everyone made even on the cloud, it may happen faster.
--:-- Satya Nadella: So our hope is not 10 years, but maybe five years.
--:-- Satya Nadella: But it does take time.
--:-- Satya Nadella: I think there's no shortcutting the time for diffusion and also change.
--:-- Satya Nadella: Let's not ignore the fact that organizations also have to go through the hard process of how to change the processes that adjust to these new levels of productivity.
--:-- Zoe Kleinman: Is there a danger that the UK is giving up its digital sovereignty though by doing so many deals with US companies like Microsoft?
--:-- Satya Nadella: We are making this capital investment in the UK soil right
--:-- Satya Nadella: So these are AI factories cloud factories that are very much part of the infrastructure of the United Kingdom.
--:-- Satya Nadella: And so you have now trusted American technology that UK can use and companies across the UK can use to create more technology for the United Kingdom and for the United States and the world.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The widow of the Russian human rights campaigner Alexei Navalny has said on social media that new scientific evidence proves that her husband was poisoned.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Mr. Navalny died suddenly in February last year while serving a 19-year sentence in an Arctic penal colony.
--:-- Celia Hatton: But Yulia Navalny says the official Russian version that her husband died from natural causes was false.
--:-- Yulia Navalny: Alexei was my husband. He was my friend. He was a symbol of hope for our country.
--:-- Yulia Navalny: Putin killed that hope.
--:-- Yulia Navalny: We have the right to know how he did it.
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: I heard more from BBC Monitoring's Russia editor Vitaly Shevchenko.
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: Alexei Navalny's widow, Yulia, says that their team were able to obtain what they call biological samples from Alexei Navalny and send them to laboratories in two countries, which, she says, independently of each other, reached the conclusion that it was poisoned.
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: Now, Yulia Navalny does not name the substance that allegedly killed her husband, which laboratories or even which countries studied those samples.
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: In fact, she suggests that these laboratories are reluctant to make their findings public for what she calls political considerations.
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: But she says that Vladimir Putin killed my husband.
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: And she also accuses Russian secret services of developing banned chemical and biological weapons.
--:-- Celia Hatton: OK, so still some missing information, but any response from the Kremlin so far?
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: I mean, Yulia Navalny has always maintained that her husband was killed on President Putin's orders.
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: What is the Kremlin saying?
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: Yes, she's always been saying that, and the Kremlin has always been reluctant to even utter Alexei Navalny's name.
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: Vladimir Putin famously or infamously has used different other words to talk about the politician.
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: Earlier today, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, of course, he was asked at his daily news briefing about Yulia Navalna's accusations.
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: And he said, well, I'm not aware of anything.
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: I can't give you any comment.
--:-- Vitaly Shevchenko: But earlier, the Kremlin called these claims baseless and insulting.
--:-- Celia Hatton: We're going to talk about art now and one of the 20th century's best known modern artists, Pablo Picasso.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Forty-five of his paintings and sculptures have gone on display at the Tate Modern in London as part of a new exhibition called Theatre Picasso, which encourages viewers to reinterpret Picasso's works through music, video and stagecraft.
--:-- Rosalie Dobell: Hello, I'm Rosalie Dobell.
--:-- Rosalie Dobell: I'm a senior curator of international art here at Tate Modern.
--:-- Rosalie Dobell: This year marks the centenary of an incredible work in the Tate collection, Pablo Picasso's The Three Dancers from 1925, which really, when it entered the collection, was transformative.
--:-- Rosalie Dobell: It represents this incredible turning point in Picasso's own working career as a painter, moving from a period of neoclassicism into a much more expressive mode.
--:-- Rosalie Dobell: And we were really inspired by this work to think about Picasso's relevance now.
--:-- Rosalie Dobell: And so we turned to contemporary artists, Wu Sang and Enrique Fuente Blanca, to look at this painting afresh and to regard Picasso anew and give us a contemporary interpretation, really, of this work.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: He was a bit of a performer himself, wasn't he?
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: He was, absolutely.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: And we see the exhibition opens with an incredible clip of Picasso in a Man Ray film where we see...
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: He's wearing a mantella around his head.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: It is, and he is lighting a cigarette.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: His mannerisms really emulate those of Carmen's.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: I'm Enrique Fonte Blanca, I'm a writer and curator, and I staged this exhibition, Theatre Picasso, Tate Modern.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: We wanted to understand how he implemented a lot of tools that comes from the world of theatre and performance to his painting and to his world.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: So it's not an exhibition about the relation between theatre and Picasso, that is huge and is rich, but it's an exhibition about how he implemented all his tools to construct his own identity.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: Enrique, can you show us some of the examples in this exhibition that illustrate the point you're making about his ability to incorporate theatre into his art?
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: Can we go and take a look?
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: We have one in front of us.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: We have one of the Sweet Ball Arts sketching of Picasso where we can see a faun and we can see a really interesting painting about the scopic gaze, about the idea of the artist that is presented as the faun, as the mythological character that is looking to women, that is veiled.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: And if you look at it with attention, the figure of the women, it's almost disappearing to think that the object of the desire is not real, it's always in the unconscious, like something that is underlying or is something that needs to be unveiled.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: We are actually coming out on the stage where just behind the footlights looking out to the audience, there's even conveniently a bench there for audience to sit on, which gives us just a different perspective on this.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: And suddenly we've got there the three dancers.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: It is a mesmerising picture.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: It's also huge.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: We have three figures, but actually these figures are also in a kind of metamorphosal movements.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: We can do something actually that is kind of funny.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: Right now, for example, we are listening to the soundtrack, the jazz soundtrack from Auric from the film.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: It brings us a kind of lecture with the crowd.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: It could be like dancing, like some popular dances.
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: But when the music changes and we listen flamenco...
--:-- Enrique Fonte Blanca: Suddenly it could be more formal it could be more control exactly we can see like the main figure it acting like a kind of flamenco dancer
--:-- Celia Hatton: Rosalie, people might associate Picasso in particular with that period in the early 20th century when he was going through his blue period, quite austere paintings, paintings of beggars and sex workers and drunks, and wonder what happened in his life for him to lighten up like this and produce work as kind of spectacularly kind of passionate as the three dancers.
--:-- Rosalie Dobell: Picasso once said that painting is a sum of destructions and you can see this constant stylistic transformation.
--:-- Rosalie Dobell: Picasso really thought about performance and thought about how he could control his own output and how really he was engaged in the act of self-mythologising and that is what is examined here in Theatre Picasso.
--:-- Celia Hatton: safe. Theatre Picasso runs until April next year.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Coming up, using AI to help identify wild giraffes by their distinctive markings.
--:-- Celia Hatton: It only takes literally seconds to do what used to take weeks and weeks to do.
--:-- Celia Hatton: We create a history of how often we've seen these giraffes and we can get some really important information about their lives.
--:-- 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.
--:-- Celia Hatton: To the Middle East now, and one day after Israeli forces launched a ground offensive into Gaza City in a push to root out Hamas operatives there, Israel has intensified its bombing.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Hospitals are reporting more deaths in the Strip.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Israel's attempts to take control of Gaza City and the effects on civilians there has led to widespread international condemnation of Israel's latest actions.
--:-- Celia Hatton: At a meeting in Brussels, Kaya Callas, vice president of the European Commission, proposed downgrading trade ties with Israel and sanctioning two far-right Israeli ministers.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The aim is not to punish Israel.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The aim is to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
--:-- Celia Hatton: All member states agree that the situation in Gaza is untenable.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The war needs to end.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The suffering must stop and all hostages must be released.
--:-- Celia Hatton: We must use all the tools we have towards this outcome.
--:-- Celia Hatton: We must also not lose sight of the dangerous developments in the West Bank that reduce the viability of a two-state solution.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinian residents are rushing to try to escape the assault on Gaza's city.
--:-- Celia Hatton: For the latest on the attacks, I spoke to our Middle East correspondent Yolan Nell, who's in Jerusalem.
--:-- Yolan Nell: According to the Israeli military, there's been more than 150 locations targeted in Gaza City in just the past day, since it announced that it was beginning its new ground assault.
--:-- Yolan Nell: That we've been hearing from people in the city has been terrifying.
--:-- Yolan Nell: They say that they can hear the loud sounds of explosions, also of houses being demolished on the outskirts of the city where there are Israeli ground forces operating.
--:-- Yolan Nell: They've not yet entered into the heart of the city.
--:-- Yolan Nell: They say this is the Hamas nerve center.
--:-- Yolan Nell: That's expected in the next few weeks, according to reports in the Israeli media.
--:-- Yolan Nell: At the moment, the focus of the Israeli military is still very much trying to get people living in Gaza, and there's still several hundred thousand of them to leave and to head to the south, what they're calling a humanitarian zone, although humanitarian agencies tell us that it's really not a safe place, a place where people will not be able to easily find shelter.
--:-- Yolan Nell: We're still seeing these scenes in footage of people fleeing on the coastal road,
--:-- Yolan Nell: But the Israeli military has also now opened up another route temporarily through the centre of the strip.
--:-- Yolan Nell: It says that that will be operating for the next two days.
--:-- Yolan Nell: And really still very desperate scenes.
--:-- Yolan Nell: It's extremely difficult for people to find transportation.
--:-- Yolan Nell: One person told us it can be as much as $1,000, you're quoted, if you want to take a ride in one of these lorries heading towards the south.
--:-- Yolan Nell: We've seen that many people have been just walking on foot, carrying their children, pushing carts with their belongings in.
--:-- Yolan Nell: It's still in the middle of the day, intensely hot on foot.
--:-- Yolan Nell: This journey to the south of the Gaza Strip from Gaza City can take easily nine hours.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Yolande, the EU sanctions that we mentioned, they're just a proposal so far.
--:-- Celia Hatton: They need to be approved by member countries.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Any reaction to that idea in Israel?
--:-- Yolan Nell: Well, I mean, at the moment, it doesn't look like this measure has sufficient support among the EU's member countries to pass.
--:-- Yolan Nell: So we're not getting a comment on that proposal at the moment that I've seen anyway.
--:-- Yolan Nell: In general, though, you know, we had the prime minister saying a couple of days ago that Israel would have to become more self-reliant as a result of the economic sanctions that it's been facing.
--:-- Yolan Nell: He then faced a lot of really quite intense criticism over that.
--:-- Yolan Nell: He put it down to a misunderstanding at a news conference late yesterday.
--:-- Yolan Nell: And, you know, the Tel Aviv stock market had taken a tumble with that.
--:-- Yolan Nell: High tech leaders have come out criticising him.
--:-- Yolan Nell: He's now sort of, you know, going back on that somewhat.
--:-- Yolan Nell: He also used this news conference to stress that there's still strong support from the US and that he has been invited back to the White House for his fourth meeting since Donald Trump's inauguration.
--:-- Yolan Nell: That will be at the end of September and will be his fourth meeting at the White House since President Trump was inaugurated.
--:-- Yolan Nell: That will come after his UN General Assembly address.
--:-- Yolan Nell: But of course, the UN General Assembly is expected to be a tough time for Israel with many world leaders condemning actions in Gaza and some countries saying that they will now be recognising a Palestinian state.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Now, when it comes to Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza, the founders of the famous ice cream brand Ben & Jerry's have not shied away from expressing their anger over what's happening there.
--:-- Celia Hatton: You might associate Ben & Jerry's more with its creative flavors, everything from Cherry Garcia to Caramel Sutra.
--:-- Celia Hatton: But for Jerry Greenfield and Ben Cohen, the two friends who started the company almost 50 years ago, their ability to speak out on big issues is also a major part of the brand.
--:-- Celia Hatton: That's come under pressure, though, after the brand was acquired in 2000 by the corporate giant Unilever.
--:-- Celia Hatton: It's now part of the Magnum group of ice creams.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Things have come to a head, and now Jerry from the company is stepping down.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Our business correspondent Katie Silver told me more.
--:-- Katie Silver: According to a post by his co Ben Cohen on social media he said that it about trying to stop attempts at being silenced
--:-- Katie Silver: He said that he was heartbroken to do this but that the company has been silenced and sidelined, to quote him, for fear of upsetting those in power.
--:-- Katie Silver: And of course, this goes back quite a long time.
--:-- Katie Silver: They have butt heads with their parent company, Unilever, that acquired the brand back in 2000.
--:-- Katie Silver: They've been butting heads since about 2021, when Ben and Jerry's decided that it was no longer going to sell its ice cream in the Israel-occupied West Bank.
--:-- Katie Silver: Now, more recently, there's been a lot of conflict, particularly, for example, Ben and Jerry's calling the conflict in Gaza a genocide.
--:-- Katie Silver: That's created conflict with the parent company.
--:-- Katie Silver: They were also allegedly told by Unilever to stop criticising President Trump.
--:-- Katie Silver: And they've also been very outspoken on issues like LGBTQ+, as well as climate change.
--:-- Katie Silver: And much of this when it comes to the parent companies, they would prefer Ben & Jerry's to be a little bit more quiet on the matter.
--:-- Katie Silver: That's interesting that they wanted Ben & Jerry's to be quiet because Ben & Jerry's was never your average ice cream brand, was it?
--:-- Katie Silver: It's always been quite loud, quite colourful.
--:-- Katie Silver: Can you remind us about that?
--:-- Katie Silver: It's a very colourful brand indeed.
--:-- Katie Silver: So it was founded in the late 70s by two childhood friends.
--:-- Katie Silver: That's Jerry Greenfield and Ben Cohen.
--:-- Katie Silver: They started with just one small little ice cream stall in the US state of Vermont in Burlington.
--:-- Katie Silver: Since then, grown it to be this behemoth where it sold across the world in supermarkets as well as having their own outlets.
--:-- Katie Silver: As I say, it was then acquired by Unilever in 2000.
--:-- Katie Silver: But when that acquisition occurred, they had in their clause that they were allowed to continue their social activism.
--:-- Katie Silver: Now they say that they have been silenced.
--:-- Katie Silver: And we saw, for example, earlier this year, the company's chief executive, David Stever, him, according to Ben and Jerry's, being removed by its parent company, Unilever, again for the social activism element.
--:-- Katie Silver: And what is the company saying in response today to this announcement from Jerry?
--:-- Katie Silver: Magnum, which is the ice cream spinoff within Unilever, a spokesperson has released a statement saying that they're grateful to Jerry for his role in co-founding the company.
--:-- Katie Silver: but they said that they disagree with his perspective and have sought to engage both co-founders in a conversation.
--:-- Katie Silver: We haven't heard from the wider parent company Unilever yet but of course Ben & Jerry's has been trying to broker a way through this disagreement.
--:-- Katie Silver: Last week we saw Unilever according to Ben & Jerry's reject the proposal to sell the brand to investors.
--:-- Katie Silver: Now they say that they were going to be able to sell it for the fair market value of between one and a half to $2.5 billion.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Clearly that hasn't worked and that's why we find ourselves in this position now today, Celia.
--:-- Priya Rai: You might already know that the markings on a giraffe are as unique as human fingerprints, something conservationists have used to track the animals in the bush.
--:-- Priya Rai: Now that task has been simplified by using artificial intelligence.
--:-- Priya Rai: Scientists in Tanzania say the technology is offering new clues about how these animals live and survive.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: Those spot patterns don't change from the time that the giraffe is born until the time it dies.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: So we know who all of our animals are.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: We know where they move around.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: We know their survival rates, reproduction, et cetera.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: And from this, we can then determine where in the landscape giraffes are doing well and where they're not.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: So we can target conservation actions to the places where they're needed most, and we can help recover the populations that are declining.
--:-- Priya Rai: We go out on our giraffe surveys and take more than a thousand photographs on each survey.
--:-- Priya Rai: We do this six to nine times per year, and we've been here doing this for 15 years.
--:-- Priya Rai: So now it only takes literally seconds to do what used to take weeks and weeks to do, which is match these patterns.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: So then we create a history of how often we've seen these giraffes so we can get some really important information about their lives.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: So essentially then the AI, what kind of things has it revealed that you might not have been able to as easily before?
--:-- Priya Rai: My job is to go out and collect the photographs.
--:-- Priya Rai: And then I ask questions about giraffe lives and giraffe survival.
--:-- Priya Rai: And the step in between taking all those photographs and then answering those questions is the onerous part of the processing of the data.
--:-- Priya Rai: And that's where the AI tool comes in.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: So we still do the looking at the results, interpreting the results, determining the conservation actions.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: But the AI tool helps us to get from data collection of the field to being able to answer those questions about where giraffes are doing well, where they're not, and why.
--:-- Priya Rai: What has it told you?
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: In some parts of the ecosystem, the giraffes are declining.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: And why might that be?
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: It's because adults, for example, are not surviving well.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: It's natural for a lot of the calves to experience mortality from natural predators.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: But once a giraffe is an adult, so five or six years old, they have very, very high survival because they're relatively invulnerable to natural predation.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: But what we see is that people tend to be a problem for the adult giraffes.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: You have illegal poaching.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: There's also a lot of paving over of habitat, making them farms and human settlements.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: So we've actually pinpointed that the problem is lower adult survival and we've determined where that is occurring.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: So then we can target things like anti-poaching patrols and that kind of thing into areas where we've discovered through fast processing of our data where the problems are occurring.
--:-- Priya Rai: What are the wider benefits to the rest of the environment if giraffes can be better protected?
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: They're really big animals and they have a very large range, but maybe about 150 or more square kilometers.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: So when you're protecting the habitat for an animal that ranges that widely, it's protecting the habitat for so many other species that occur within there.
--:-- Dr. Monica Bond: So giraffes can be not only are they sort of iconic flagship species for conservation because they're so loved around the world, but they're also helping to protect all those smaller species that share the savanna with them.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Lots of enthusiasm from giraffe researcher Dr. Monica Bond in Tanzania.
--:-- Celia Hatton: And that's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later.
--:-- Celia Hatton: If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.
--:-- Celia Hatton: You can also find us on X at BBC World Service.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Use the hashtag Global News Pod.
--:-- Celia Hatton: This edition was mixed by Ricardo McCarthy, and the producer was Vanessa Heaney.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The editor is Karen Martin.
--:-- Celia Hatton: I'm Celia Hatton.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Until next time, goodbye.
--:-- 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.
