--:-- Nick Miles: This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
--:-- Nick Miles: I'm Nick Miles and at 13 Hours GMT on Tuesday the 15th of July, these are our main stories.
--:-- Nick Miles: After Donald Trump gives Russia 50 days to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine or face stiff tariffs, he speaks to our chief North America correspondent about President Putin.
--:-- Nick Miles: I'm disappointed in him, but I'm not done with him, but I'm disappointed in him.
--:-- Nick Miles: Do you trust him?
--:-- Nick Miles: I trust almost nobody, to be honest with you.
--:-- Nick Miles: I'm disappointed that this hasn't been done.
--:-- Nick Miles: We get reaction from Moscow.
--:-- Nick Miles: The Syrian government announces a ceasefire with Druze leaders after deadly clashes with Bedouin tribes.
--:-- Nick Miles: And also in this podcast, we hear from some of the thousands of people abused in Myanmar's scam centres.
--:-- Nick Miles: And if you are a moth, this is what a tomato sounds like.
--:-- Nick Miles: We find out why it matters.
--:-- Nick Miles: We start this edition with an exclusive glimpse into the mind and policies of the US President Donald Trump.
--:-- Nick Miles: Late on Monday, our chief Washington correspondent Gary O'Donoghue received a phone call from the White House saying the president was ready at short notice for a phone interview.
--:-- Nick Miles: It came at the end of a hugely significant day for American foreign policy.
--:-- Nick Miles: Just hours earlier, President Trump had announced a deal to send more US weapons to Ukraine and given a warning to Vladimir Putin that unless a ceasefire in Ukraine was agreed within 50 days, then Washington would impose sanctions on Russia and nations that trade with it.
--:-- Nick Miles: So in the light of those developments, Gary O'Donoghue spoke to the president about his attitude to Vladimir Putin and Russia, amongst other subjects.
--:-- Nick Miles: But first, he started on the subject of an assassination attempt on Mr Trump whilst he was on the election campaign trail almost exactly a year ago.
--:-- Nick Miles: I'm here with the president.
--:-- Nick Miles: Here you go.
--:-- Nick Miles: Mr. President.
--:-- Nick Miles: Hi, Gary.
--:-- Nick Miles: How are you?
--:-- Nick Miles: I'm very well, sir.
--:-- Nick Miles: Thank you very much for sparing some time.
--:-- Nick Miles: You covered us very fairly.
--:-- Nick Miles: Appreciate it.
--:-- Nick Miles: Well, I wanted to ask you briefly about that to start with.
--:-- Nick Miles: I know it's not a topic you like talking about very much, but I wanted to ask you the moment you realised what had happened and then the moment you realised you survived, what was your immediate thought, sir?
--:-- Nick Miles: Well, it happened very quickly and I'm not sure I had any conscious thought other than to say that I had to let the people know because I knew they must have thought that it was a disaster.
--:-- Nick Miles: And I could tell by that it was like dead silence and everything.
--:-- Nick Miles: We had 55,000 people and it was dead silence.
--:-- Nick Miles: And so, you know, I assumed that they expected the worst.
--:-- Nick Miles: And so I had to let them know I was okay, which is what I did.
--:-- Nick Miles: That's why I tried to get up as quick as possible.
--:-- Nick Miles: They had a stretcher ready to go.
--:-- Nick Miles: I said, no, thank you.
--:-- Nick Miles: I actually had a big argument with them.
--:-- Nick Miles: They wanted me on a stretcher, and I said, nope, I'm not doing that.
--:-- Nick Miles: Did it change you, what happened?
--:-- Nick Miles: Well, I like to think about it as little as possible, to be honest.
--:-- Nick Miles: I don't like to think about it would change me, you know, because it could have changed a lot of people.
--:-- Nick Miles: And I just don't.
--:-- Nick Miles: Do you understand what I'm saying?
--:-- Nick Miles: I don't want to think about it.
--:-- Nick Miles: It's like the power of positive thinking or the power of positive non-thinking.
--:-- Nick Miles: But so I don't I don't like dwelling on it because if I did, it would be, you know, might be life changing.
--:-- Nick Miles: I don't want it to be that.
--:-- Nick Miles: It was a crazy moment.
--:-- Nick Miles: You know, I went on to win the presidency.
--:-- Nick Miles: I don't know if that had anything to do with it, to be honest, but I went on to win the presidency.
--:-- Nick Miles: We're having a great presidency.
--:-- Nick Miles: One thing I was keen to ask you is, these world leaders, they do treat you differently to the way they treated you first time around.
--:-- Nick Miles: Well, I think they think it's maybe not all luck.
--:-- Nick Miles: You know, it's like when you do it twice, it's a big difference.
--:-- Nick Miles: I also think that you know over the years they've gotten to know me this is not an easy crowd to break into you understand these are smart people heading up very very successful generally countries you know they're all Germany and France Spain and you know big countries and you know I've gotten to know them over a pretty years and I think they've come to respect my respect me and my decision making.
--:-- Nick Miles: How do you feel, though, when they're kind of obviously, sometimes they're very obvious in their flattery, sometimes over-obvious in their flattery?
--:-- Nick Miles: Yeah, well, I think they're just trying to be nice.
--:-- Nick Miles: You've said you were four times close to a deal with Putin.
--:-- Nick Miles: Yeah, I thought I had a deal four times.
--:-- Nick Miles: Are you done with him?
--:-- Nick Miles: I mean, I know that sounds a simplistic thing.
--:-- Nick Miles: No, I'm not done, but I'm disappointed in him.
--:-- Nick Miles: But I'm not done with him, but I'm disappointed in him.
--:-- Nick Miles: We had a deal done four times and then you go home and you see he just attacked a nursing home or something in Kiev.
--:-- Nick Miles: I said, what the hell was that all about?
--:-- Nick Miles: Do you trust him?
--:-- Nick Miles: I trust almost nobody, to be honest with you.
--:-- Nick Miles: So how do you deal with someone you can't trust?
--:-- Nick Miles: Well, it's not a question of that.
--:-- Nick Miles: It's like I'm disappointed that this hasn't been done.
--:-- Nick Miles: The deal we made last week is amazing.
--:-- Nick Miles: The, you know, the 5%.
--:-- Nick Miles: Nobody heard that was possible.
--:-- Nick Miles: And it amounts to over a trillion dollars a year.
--:-- Nick Miles: On that deal, you once said that NATO was obsolete.
--:-- Nick Miles: I think NATO is now becoming the opposite of that.
--:-- Nick Miles: I do think it was passed.
--:-- Nick Miles: And it was very unfair because the United States paid for almost 100% of it.
--:-- Nick Miles: But now they're paying their own bills.
--:-- Nick Miles: And I think that's much better.
--:-- Nick Miles: And what about the collective defence thing?
--:-- Nick Miles: Do you believe in that still?
--:-- Nick Miles: I do, yeah.
--:-- Nick Miles: I think collective defence is fine.
--:-- Nick Miles: Can I ask you about Britain?
--:-- Nick Miles: Because you're having the state visit in September.
--:-- Nick Miles: I know you're looking forward to that.
--:-- Nick Miles: I do, I do.
--:-- Nick Miles: I look forward to it.
--:-- Nick Miles: And in terms of Britain's sort of role in the world, it sits between the US and Europe.
--:-- Nick Miles: Sometimes it tries to act that mediation role.
--:-- Nick Miles: Do you think it achieves that?
--:-- Nick Miles: Do you think there is this special relationship that British politicians often claim there is with American military?
--:-- Nick Miles: I think, you know, one of the problems with NATO is, I said, you know, we have to fight for them, but will they actually fight for us if we had a war
--:-- Nick Miles: And I not sure I can say it but I will say this I believe that the uk would fight with us there something about it it just been so many years and i really think the relationship is just a really great one i think that they would be with us i'm not sure that a lot of the other countries would be which is unfair because we pay far more than anybody else there's a special relationship we have well look that's why i've made a deal with them and i haven't made it I mean, I've made some other deals, but for the most part, in terms of your competitors and in terms of the European Union, I haven't made a deal.
--:-- Nick Miles: But no, the UK is very special.
--:-- Nick Miles: And it's been there for a long time.
--:-- Nick Miles: Yeah, they have been a really true ally.
--:-- Nick Miles: So may I ask you, what would be, looking back, what would be the key for your legacy for you?
--:-- Nick Miles: What do you think would define your legacy?
--:-- Nick Miles: Saving America.
--:-- Nick Miles: I think America is now a great country, and it was a dead country one year ago.
--:-- Nick Miles: And that's been told to me by many leaders of the countries, you know?
--:-- Nick Miles: Thank you very much for your time, Mr President.
--:-- Nick Miles: Thank you, Gary.
--:-- Nick Miles: It's a great honour.
--:-- Nick Miles: Let's pick up on some of the Russia-related themes of Gary's interview now.
--:-- Nick Miles: Our Russia editor Steve Rosenberg told me how Moscow has been reacting to the news from Washington.
--:-- Nick Miles: President Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has held his daily conference call for journalists and commented briefly on Donald Trump's announcement yesterday about arms to Kiev and possible additional sanctions against Russia.
--:-- Nick Miles: Clearly, he didn't want to say very much.
--:-- Nick Miles: He said this, that Donald Trump's announcement was a very serious one.
--:-- Nick Miles: Part of it was directly addressed to President Putin.
--:-- Nick Miles: Of course, Mr. Peskov said, we need time to analyse what has been said by Washington.
--:-- Nick Miles: If and when President Putin considers it necessary, he will for sure comment on this.
--:-- Nick Miles: Let's wait for Putin's decision to comment himself.
--:-- Nick Miles: So very little there.
--:-- Nick Miles: Now, I followed that up with a question to him about Gary's interview.
--:-- Nick Miles: And I said, you know, Mr. Peskov, in the interview with the BBC, Donald Trump said he was disappointed with President Putin, but wasn't done with him.
--:-- Nick Miles: Would you like to comment on that?
--:-- Nick Miles: He didn't.
--:-- Nick Miles: He said, please refer to the last thing I said.
--:-- Nick Miles: I'm not saying anymore.
--:-- Nick Miles: This is all I'm going to say on the subject.
--:-- Nick Miles: So clearly, the Kremlin is, I think, a little bit rattled by what Donald Trump announced yesterday.
--:-- Nick Miles: And I think it's likely that at some point we'll hear from President Putin about what he thinks about it.
--:-- Nick Miles: And Steve, I'm seeing on the wires that Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, given an interview to the TASS News Agency, saying that Russia rejects ultimatums.
--:-- Nick Miles: And yet Russia will be concerned, won't it, about the possibility of secondary sanctions being put on its training partners.
--:-- Nick Miles: That could potentially have an impact?
--:-- Nick Miles: Potentially, yes.
--:-- Nick Miles: But keep in mind, those secondary sanctions come with a caveat.
--:-- Nick Miles: They won't be introduced for 50 days.
--:-- Nick Miles: Now, 50 days is a long time.
--:-- Nick Miles: A lot can happen.
--:-- Nick Miles: A lot can change in 50 days.
--:-- Nick Miles: We've had previous deadlines set by Donald Trump, two weeks, for example.
--:-- Nick Miles: This is 50 days.
--:-- Nick Miles: So that gives plenty of time for Moscow and Washington, if they want to, to sit down and talk about things.
--:-- Nick Miles: It gives Russia time to come up with counter proposals to Washington.
--:-- Nick Miles: And it also gives time for Russia to continue doing what it's doing right now on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.
--:-- Nick Miles: You know, from Mr Dupakov's statements, it's clear Russia will push on with this so-called special military operation.
--:-- Nick Miles: Steve Rosenberg in Moscow.
--:-- Nick Miles: Syria's defence minister has announced a ceasefire in the predominantly Druze city of Sueda after deadly clashes with Bedouin tribes killed about 100 people.
--:-- Nick Miles: He said the move follows agreements with what he called the city's notables and dignitaries.
--:-- Nick Miles: Earlier, Syrian security forces had entered the city to restore calm.
--:-- Nick Miles: Hugo Pacheco reports.
--:-- Nick Miles: This is the first time that Syrian government forces have been deployed to Sueda since Islamist-led rebels ousted the Assad regime and seized power in December.
--:-- Nick Miles: The violence of the last few days has underscored the challenges the new administration led by President Ahmed al-Sharaf faces in asserting control over a country that remains deeply fractured.
--:-- Nick Miles: Minority groups are suspicious of the new leaders, and the province of Sueda has remained largely under the control of Jews-armed groups that have resisted calls to join government forces.
--:-- Nick Miles: Meanwhile, Syrian state media reported fresh Israeli airstrikes on the city of Sueda.
--:-- Nick Miles: Hugo Bacheca.
--:-- Nick Miles: Now, if you're ever feeling stressed out and want to let out a sigh or scream, you are not alone.
--:-- Nick Miles: It turns out that plants do something similar.
--:-- Nick Miles: A group of scientists recently learned that some plants make sounds when under stress.
--:-- Nick Miles: And now they've shown the first interaction between these crying out plants and animals.
--:-- Nick Miles: The team found that female moths avoided laying their eggs on nearby plants if they made sounds indicating poor health.
--:-- Nick Miles: Here's our science correspondent, Palab Ghosh.
--:-- Nick Miles: This is a sound Israeli researchers recorded in 2023 of a tomato plant gasping as a result of it being dehydrated.
--:-- Nick Miles: It's normally outside the range of human hearing, but the frequency has been adjusted to allow us to hear it.
--:-- Nick Miles: Their latest research shows that moths respond to the sound.
--:-- Nick Miles: The discovery opens up the possibility of an invisible ecosystem between plants and animals based on the secret sounds they make.
--:-- Nick Miles: Researchers will now investigate the sounds of different plants and whether other species make decisions based on them, such as whether to pollinate, hide inside or eat the plant.
--:-- Nick Miles: They'll also consider whether plants can pass information to each other through sound and crucially act in response, such as conserving their water in drought conditions.
--:-- Nick Miles: Another new area of investigation is where the plants and animals have co-evolved the ability to produce and listen to the sounds for their mutual benefit.
--:-- Nick Miles: Pallab Ghosh.
--:-- Nick Miles: Still to come.
--:-- Nick Miles: It took me sort of virtually the best part of a day to have sort of three to four hours of my body being scanned, but on a particular day there was a lot of attention, as you can probably appreciate.
--:-- Nick Miles: We meet the milestone man, number 100,000, of the world's biggest human imaging project.
--:-- Nick Miles: Hi, I'm Susan Glasser.
--:-- Nick Miles: I'm Jane Mayer.
--:-- Nick Miles: And I'm Evan Osmos.
--:-- Nick Miles: And we host the Washington Roundtable from the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast.
--:-- Nick Miles: For me, this is the water cooler.
--:-- Nick Miles: This is a wonderful chance to sit down with two of the smartest colleagues in the country and, you know, just kind of compare notes.
--:-- Nick Miles: No, that's so true.
--:-- Nick Miles: Because, first of all, we are actually friends.
--:-- Nick Miles: In real life, but I can't wait till Fridays to hear what you guys think.
--:-- Nick Miles: Everybody sees the headlines, but you guys fill in the gaps.
--:-- Nick Miles: I also think, though, occasionally we get somebody to come on, and I'm always smarter for it.
--:-- Nick Miles: If you get a great historian who can tell you about a presidential election 50, 60 years ago, often it can help you understand about what's happening today.
--:-- Nick Miles: So if you're looking for weekly insights into what's going on inside the Beltway, please join us every Friday on the Washington Roundtable, part of the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast.
--:-- Nick Miles: Aid workers have described it as one of the biggest human trafficking events in history.
--:-- Nick Miles: The thousands of migrants from around the world, often tricked by the promise of a normal-seeming job offer, only then to be forcibly held at scam centres on the border of Myanmar and Thailand.
--:-- Nick Miles: The BBC's Ed Butler has been to the region to speak to aid workers attempting to rescue them and hear accounts of those now set free.
--:-- Nick Miles: I see a WhatsApp status of my best friend's husband saying there's data entry jobs in Thailand.
--:-- Nick Miles: It was a good offer.
--:-- Nick Miles: So I never thought they were going to scam me and send me to Myanmar.
--:-- Nick Miles: Anika Boram from Sri Lanka is one of 8 or more trafficked migrants from around the world who recently were released from Myanmar scam centres
--:-- Nick Miles: After being tricked into accepting an apparently normal IT job she spent 18 months luring people into buying fake cryptocurrency schemes.
--:-- Nick Miles: Failure to scam them led to brutal punishment.
--:-- Nick Miles: We didn't have any option.
--:-- Nick Miles: If we didn't do, we are getting beat.
--:-- Nick Miles: We are getting electric shock.
--:-- Nick Miles: It was really traumatic.
--:-- Nick Miles: Still, sometimes I cannot sleep in the night.
--:-- Nick Miles: We were lucky to come back.
--:-- Nick Miles: Judah Tanner is an Australian aid worker and activist who's trying to get the migrant workers freed.
--:-- Nick Miles: You're looking at over 100,000 people brought into a single area at just a 70-kilometre stretch of land, almost untouchable.
--:-- Nick Miles: Because of sovereign laws, you can't go in and rescue these people.
--:-- Nick Miles: They've found this particular niche area within Myanmar that's controlled by military groups, and then you've got this illegitimate government that says that they have no jurisdiction in that region.
--:-- Nick Miles: And so you get this no-man's land that has built what we know today as one of the most successful criminal enterprises in the world.
--:-- Nick Miles: The forced scamming is built on a system of beatings and worse, according to some of those who've been inside.
--:-- Nick Miles: One informant who asked to remain anonymous showed me this collection of very brutal torture videos.
--:-- Nick Miles: His words are spoken by my translator.
--:-- Nick Miles: They torture as much as they can, but not to die.
--:-- Nick Miles: If a victim dies, it's more cost.
--:-- Nick Miles: Have you seen people being killed?
--:-- Nick Miles: Yes, he has seen a Chinese man die.
--:-- Nick Miles: And this is run by Chinese gangsters?
--:-- Nick Miles: Yes, they dare to do everything, kill the people, rape the girls.
--:-- Nick Miles: If someone touched to their profit or business, they will kill everyone.
--:-- Nick Miles: This is one of those who informants say is profiting from the trade.
--:-- Nick Miles: His name's So Shui Wah, and he's the deputy leader of a Karen rebel group called the DKBA, which has been specifically implicated, alongside the Chinese criminal groups that run the scam centres.
--:-- Nick Miles: Eyewitnesses identified the general visiting compounds where his own soldiers are running security and allegedly carrying out killings.
--:-- Nick Miles: Claims that he brushed aside when I put them to him.
--:-- Nick Miles: Why do all you journalists ask me about these scam centres?
--:-- Nick Miles: Why do they ask all these questions?
--:-- Nick Miles: So he's never had control of any of the migrants, he's saying?
--:-- Nick Miles: I don't commit any crimes.
--:-- Nick Miles: That's why journalists can come and talk to me, because I have nothing to hide.
--:-- Nick Miles: Please now, stop the recording.
--:-- Nick Miles: That report was by Ed Butler.
--:-- Nick Miles: The medical charity Doctors Without Borders says it has found evidence that Ethiopia's federal forces executed three of its staff during the war in the northern region of Tigray.
--:-- Nick Miles: A report issued following the charity's own review of the incident suggests that the three were killed intentionally and at point-blank range while facing their attackers.
--:-- Nick Miles: The BBC has contacted the government of Ethiopia for a response to the allegations.
--:-- Nick Miles: Speaking to our senior Africa correspondent Anne Soy, MSF Spain's Director General Raquel Ayora demanded accountability.
--:-- Nick Miles: Our colleagues were killed intentionally.
--:-- Nick Miles: They were clearly identified as humanitarian workers.
--:-- Nick Miles: They were clearly identified as MSF workers in a medical mission.
--:-- Nick Miles: They were killed facing their attackers.
--:-- Nick Miles: And other investigations have as well established that there was a convoy of ENDF in the road, very close to the place our colleagues were found after the killings.
--:-- Nick Miles: Why have you decided to publish the review now?
--:-- Nick Miles: We have been trying for four years to persuade the Ethiopian authorities by engaging with them instantly, for them to provide an explanation and a clarification of what happened to our colleagues.
--:-- Nick Miles: So far we haven't achieved any concrete results.
--:-- Nick Miles: So we think it's for us the moment to really make it public and to try to persuade them by all means.
--:-- Nick Miles: We know that it's a very difficult task.
--:-- Nick Miles: What do you hope would be the outcome, the desirable outcome for MSN?
--:-- Nick Miles: What we need is an explanation, a clarification of the circumstances as close as possible to the truth.
--:-- Nick Miles: Four years have passed.
--:-- Nick Miles: What we have seen as well is a deterioration, a trend of disregard and targeting of humanitarian workers everywhere across the world.
--:-- Nick Miles: We have seen the numbers in Gaza, we have seen the numbers in South Sudan and many other places.
--:-- Nick Miles: And what we see now is a trend of impunity, pure impunity that cannot continue.
--:-- Nick Miles: So we hope that by making this report public, we will force some actors to really take a stance with regards to this problem of impunity.
--:-- Nick Miles: Raquel Ayora from MSF.
--:-- Nick Miles: China has been bearing the brunt of the most stringent of Donald Trump's tariffs regime.
--:-- Nick Miles: But now there's a sign that relations could be easing over some key US exports there.
--:-- Nick Miles: The US tech giant and the world's most valuable company, NVIDIA, has been told it can sell advanced artificial intelligence chips there again.
--:-- Nick Miles: Washington restricted sales under President Biden and stopped them completely earlier this year under Donald Trump.
--:-- Nick Miles: The concern from Washington had been that it didn't want China using the tech for military purposes.
--:-- Nick Miles: So given that, I put it to our business reporter, Katie Silver, that this U-turn was a bit of a surprise.
--:-- Nick Miles: Chips have actually formed something of a bargaining chip in the relationship and in the negotiations between Beijing and Washington.
--:-- Nick Miles: We have just last week, for instance, seen three companies that make the vast majority of the software that goes into making chip designs being allowed to export again to China.
--:-- Nick Miles: It does seem that on one side, you've got China saying, give us lower tariffs, we'll give you rare earth, but we also want your chips as well.
--:-- Nick Miles: So it does seem to be forming something of a part of that.
--:-- Nick Miles: And they do seem to have figuring the conversations that we've had and seen in Geneva and London.
--:-- Nick Miles: Washington's concern was always that the chips could be used for military use.
--:-- Nick Miles: There is a caveat to these sales that they're not going to be the top end.
--:-- Nick Miles: That's right.
--:-- Nick Miles: So the H20 chip was brought about for the Chinese market.
--:-- Nick Miles: It's a slightly downgraded version on the H100 chip that NVIDIA has that's available to the rest of the world.
--:-- Nick Miles: It was made for the Chinese market, slightly slower, slightly less bandwidth.
--:-- Nick Miles: It was able to be sold there until April.
--:-- Nick Miles: That was when the requirements were made more stringent.
--:-- Nick Miles: According to NVIDIA and what they filed with stock regulators, it was basically because US officials were worried that China would use these chips to build a supercomputer.
--:-- Nick Miles: So that's what the fear had been.
--:-- Nick Miles: And for NVIDIA, which was losing tens of billions of dollars over this, This is extremely good news, isn't it?
--:-- Nick Miles: It is great news for them.
--:-- Nick Miles: And it certainly forms a part of a multi-stop charm offensive that we've seen from the chief executive, Jensen Wang.
--:-- Nick Miles: So according to a statement, they said that they had visited both Beijing and President Trump in Washington.
--:-- Nick Miles: And as part of that, they had to agree to a number of concessions and to really appease President Trump on what his big concerns are.
--:-- Nick Miles: So basically saying that it's going to create jobs, that it's going to strengthen the AI infrastructure, that it's going to onshore manufacturing, which, of course, is very important for President Trump, and that ultimately all of this will lead the US to being the global AI hub, the place for AI in the future.
--:-- Nick Miles: Katie Silver.
--:-- Nick Miles: Now, voice recognition software has transformed the way we get help from companies and banks.
--:-- Nick Miles: No need for people on the other end of a phone.
--:-- Nick Miles: A virtual assistant will help you out, right?
--:-- Nick Miles: Well, sadly, not in all cases.
--:-- Nick Miles: Voice recognition only goes so far as people with regional or non-standard accents know all too well.
--:-- Nick Miles: One company in the UK, though, now thinks it's cracked the problem, as Will Chalk explains.
--:-- Nick Miles: Even within the UK this is a problem many people from outside the South have Amy is from Yorkshire in northern England I constantly have robots that can understand me They all sound southern
--:-- Nick Miles: And this is what happened when a BBC radio presenter in the English city of Derby tried to speak to her own local council's AI helper.
--:-- Nick Miles: Who do we report potholes to?
--:-- Nick Miles: Because we've got a big one outside here.
--:-- Nick Miles: Your message was blocked by our content filter.
--:-- Nick Miles: This may be due to language that appears inappropriate or sometimes genuine questions get flagged by mistake.
--:-- Nick Miles: Thank you so much and have a great day.
--:-- Nick Miles: Please wait while I process your request.
--:-- Nick Miles: It's actually quite easy to see where this problem's come from though because AI needs to be trained on data and if that data mainly comes from North American or Southern English speaking sources, AI voices will naturally sound similar and it's not just an English problem.
--:-- Nick Miles: We especially work you know with like lots of customers, many of them are based in Europe or in Asia or even like in other parts of the world.
--:-- Nick Miles: And these people tend to have accents that, you know, they're rightfully proud of.
--:-- Nick Miles: Youssef Alami Majati is from London-based AI company Synthesia, who've spent a year training in AI on different accents.
--:-- Nick Miles: He uses the example of French accents, which, when reproduced by AI, tend to sound French-Canadian.
--:-- Nick Miles: And this is just because like, you know, The companies building these models tend to be North American companies and they tend to have data sets that are biased towards the demographics that they're in.
--:-- Nick Miles: Synthesia's product is being released in the next few weeks and it says it's better at solving the accent problem than some of its US or Chinese rivals.
--:-- Nick Miles: But is it?
--:-- Nick Miles: The BBC's technology editor Zoe Kleinman has been trying it out on Northern Irish accents.
--:-- Nick Miles: I'm going to play you an AI clip and a real clip, see if you can spot the difference.
--:-- Nick Miles: Here's the first one.
--:-- Nick Miles: Most visitors know Box Day as a potato pancake, but in some counties like Leitrim and Fermanagh, it's served as dumplings.
--:-- Nick Miles: Sounds yummy, right?
--:-- Nick Miles: And here's the second.
--:-- Nick Miles: Dulse is a salty seaweed snack that may look unassuming, but we love it in Northern Ireland.
--:-- Nick Miles: The clip that was artificially intelligence generated, the AI clip was the first one.
--:-- Nick Miles: But of course, with all of this comes risk, because the harder they are to spot, the more opportunities AI voice tools offer for scammers and peddlers of misinformation.
--:-- Nick Miles: Will Chalk reporting.
--:-- Nick Miles: Scientists say they can study our bodies as we age in greater detail than ever before, thanks to more than a billion scans of volunteers here in the UK.
--:-- Nick Miles: The world's biggest human imaging project says it has now hit its target of scanning the brains, hearts and other organs of 100,000 people.
--:-- Nick Miles: The 100,000th volunteer to be scanned was Steve.
--:-- Nick Miles: He told the BBC about it.
--:-- Nick Miles: It basically involves me giving up my time for research.
--:-- Nick Miles: and it took me sort of virtually the best part of a day to have sort of three to four hours of my body being scanned.
--:-- Nick Miles: Because of the day I had and the attention I had by certain members of the media, it was a stop-start process.
--:-- Nick Miles: But it was an amazing experience having a full-body scan, a brain scan and ultrasound, to say the least.
--:-- Nick Miles: And you do it why, Steve?
--:-- Nick Miles: Giving back.
--:-- Nick Miles: I've got grandchildren, it's for the future generations and research is something we all must appreciate because doctors need to make decisions.
--:-- Nick Miles: Professor Rory Collins is the principal investigator and chief executive at UK Biobank.
--:-- Nick Miles: He told us more about how they carried out these studies.
--:-- Nick Miles: It involves magnetic resonance imaging, MRI.
--:-- Nick Miles: People may be familiar with that of the brain, of the heart, of the body.
--:-- Nick Miles: Low-power X-ray of the bones, the joint body, and also looking at the arteries themselves with carotid ultrasound.
--:-- Nick Miles: And critically, you want to learn how to prevent illness.
--:-- Nick Miles: We've just time to go through two, I think, dementia and obesity.
--:-- Nick Miles: What are you learning about that?
--:-- Nick Miles: Well, what the brain imaging data allows you to do is pick up very small changes in the brain and you can look at risk factors for developing dementia.
--:-- Nick Miles: You can look to see how they're associated with those very small changes in the brain and get much more sensitive information about the determinants of dementia and therefore identify ways to treat and prevent it.
--:-- Nick Miles: With respect to obesity, we know that body mass index, which is that measure of your kind of body weight and your height, is a very strong predictor of many diseases, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer.
--:-- Nick Miles: What we found from the body imaging data is that you can actually see very different distribution of fat, differences in muscle among people with the same body mass index.
--:-- Nick Miles: And those differences are likely to be very relevant to whether or not you are likely to get disease and therefore provide detailed and specific targets for treatments that will prevent the disease.
--:-- Nick Miles: Rory Collins speaking to the BBC's Nick Robinson.
--:-- Nick Miles: To end this edition, let's return to that late night telephone interview our chief Washington correspondent Gary O'Donoghue had with President Donald Trump.
--:-- Nick Miles: Now, often when a world leader does an interview with a news organisation, it'll be prearranged for several weeks.
--:-- Nick Miles: So how did this last-minute interview come about?
--:-- Nick Miles: Gary has been speaking to my colleague Amal Rajan, but first let's hear what Gary had to say to Rob Young, who asked him, did he just bring you up?
--:-- Nick Miles: Yeah, I mean, I've been for some weeks working some contacts and some channels that I have, particularly because I wanted to speak to him around the anniversary of the attempted assassination because I was there when that happened.
--:-- Nick Miles: Last July.
--:-- Nick Miles: And to be honest with you, I was asleep last night and the phone woke me up and one of his senior aides said, Hi, Gary, the president's on the line for you now.
--:-- Nick Miles: So that was that.
--:-- Nick Miles: So you quickly had to do this interview in your pyjamas.
--:-- Nick Miles: More or less, yeah.
--:-- Nick Miles: Certainly grabbing a little recorder to record the phone call and gather my thoughts through somewhat bleary eyes.
--:-- Nick Miles: If I may say, Gary, some of our listeners may not know that you're blind.
--:-- Nick Miles: What practical challenge did that present you, given, as you say, you got this call from the president's team relatively out of the blue?
--:-- Nick Miles: Actually, I mean, the detail is kind of tedious in some ways, but when I sort of woke up and I think I accidentally hung up the call to start with, which is not good, is it, when you hang up on the president?
--:-- Nick Miles: Yeah, too busy.
--:-- Nick Miles: Sorry about that.
--:-- Nick Miles: Anyway, they rang back and I ran into my living room and I sat down and I pressed go on a little recorder of mine and I prayed that I had press go and we got the interview.
--:-- Nick Miles: There are some areas I think we could have covered, maybe should have covered, but you do what you can in the time and then they sort of pull it at the end.
--:-- Nick Miles: Although, to be fair, he was still talking as they took the phone off.
--:-- Nick Miles: Gary O'Donoghue, our Chief Washington Correspondent.
--:-- Nick Miles: And that is all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later.
--:-- Nick Miles: If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered, in it, you can send us an email.
--:-- Nick Miles: The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.
--:-- Nick Miles: You can also find us on X at BBC World Service.
--:-- Nick Miles: Use the hashtag Global News Pod.
--:-- Nick Miles: This edition was mixed by Holly Smith and produced by Tracy Gordon and Alfie Habersham.
--:-- Nick Miles: The editor is Karen Martin.
--:-- Nick Miles: I'm Nick Mars and until next time, goodbye.
--:-- Nick Miles: Hi, I'm Susan Glasser.
--:-- Nick Miles: I'm Jane Mayer.
--:-- Nick Miles: And I'm Evan Osmos.
--:-- Nick Miles: And we host the Washington Roundtable from the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast.
--:-- Nick Miles: For me, this is the water cooler.
--:-- Nick Miles: This is a wonderful chance to sit down with two of the smartest colleagues in the country and, you know, just kind of compare notes.
--:-- Nick Miles: No, that's so true.
--:-- Nick Miles: Because, first of all, we are actually friends.
--:-- Nick Miles: In real life, but I can't wait till Fridays to hear what you guys think.
--:-- Nick Miles: Everybody sees the headlines, but you guys fill in the gaps.
--:-- Nick Miles: I also think, though, occasionally we get somebody to come on, and I'm always smarter for it.
--:-- Nick Miles: If you get a great historian who can tell you about a presidential election 50, 60 years ago, often it can help you understand about what's happening today.
--:-- Nick Miles: So if you're looking for weekly insights into what's going on inside the Beltway, please join us every Friday on the Washington Roundtable, part of the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast.
--:-- Nick Miles: Aid workers have described it as one of the biggest human trafficking events in history.
--:-- Nick Miles: The thousands of migrants from around the world, often tricked by the promise of a normal-seeming job offer, only then to be forcibly held at scam centres on the border of Myanmar and Thailand.
--:-- Nick Miles: The BBC's Ed Butler has been to the region to speak to aid workers attempting to rescue them and hear accounts of those now set free.
--:-- Nick Miles: I see a WhatsApp status of my best friend's husband saying there's data entry jobs in Thailand.
--:-- Nick Miles: It was a good offer.
--:-- Nick Miles: So I never thought they were going to scam me and send me to Myanmar.
--:-- Nick Miles: Anika Boram from Sri Lanka is one of 8 or more trafficked migrants from around the world who recently were released from Myanmar scam centres
--:-- Nick Miles: After being tricked into accepting an apparently normal IT job she spent 18 months luring people into buying fake cryptocurrency schemes.
--:-- Nick Miles: Failure to scam them led to brutal punishment.
--:-- Nick Miles: We didn't have any option.
--:-- Nick Miles: If we didn't do, we are getting beat.
--:-- Nick Miles: We are getting electric shock.
--:-- Nick Miles: It was really traumatic.
--:-- Nick Miles: Still, sometimes I cannot sleep in the night.
--:-- Nick Miles: We were lucky to come back.
--:-- Nick Miles: Judah Tanner is an Australian aid worker and activist who's trying to get the migrant workers freed.
--:-- Nick Miles: You're looking at over 100,000 people brought into a single area at just a 70-kilometre stretch of land, almost untouchable.
--:-- Nick Miles: Because of sovereign laws, you can't go in and rescue these people.
--:-- Nick Miles: They've found this particular niche area
