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In 2012, a new charity bursts onto the scene. It's called Believe in Magic and it grants wishes to seriously ill children. It has the support of the biggest boy band in the world, One Direction. It's run by an inspirational 16 year old girl called Megan Barry, who herself is battling a brain tumour. They've been in and out of hospital and seen so many other very poor children. But when questions arise about her story, they reveal she could be facing another very different danger. What is this girl going through? It wasn't supposed to end like this. Listen to Believe in Magic with me, Jamie Bartlett.
The Global Jigsaw is the new podcast from BBC Monitoring. The BBC team tracking and analysing media in 100 languages. We're lifting the language barrier, showing you the world through the eyes of its media, where conflicting narratives are competing to influence your views. Search for the Global Jigsaw, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
"The Global Jigsaw"是英国广播公司(BBC)监测和分析100种语言媒体的团队新推出的播客节目。我们打破语言障碍,通过媒体的视角向你展示世界,让你了解各种相互竞争的叙述,这些叙述会影响你的观点。在任何你能取得BBC播客的平台上搜索 "The Global Jigsaw"。
Hello, welcome to NewsHour. It's live from the BBC World Service Studios in London, I'm Tim Frakes. Later in the programme we'll hear from the man who's helping to lead the efforts to broker a peace deal, not just a ceasefire, between the warring generals in Sudan. South Sudan might seem like an unlikely peace broker, given its recent history of bloody past struggles. So what can it hope to achieve? I'll be asking the country's foreign minister in just over 30 minutes.
We're going to begin though with the extraordinary news that broke shortly before we came on air. It's come out of Moscow where officials say that there has been an attempt to assassinate President Putin. The finger is being pointed at Ukraine and two alleged drone attacks, overnight on the Kremlin, the seat of power in the capital, a little while ago.
I got the latest from the BBC's Russia editor Steve Rosenberg, who's in Moscow. Well, I should stress, Tim, that all we have to go on right now is a statement that was issued a short while ago by the Kremlin press service and a couple of videos which have appeared online. According to the Kremlin statement, there was an attempted Ukrainian drone attack on the residents of the President in the Kremlin overnight. The statement from the Kremlin says that there were two drones, but that the Russian military and Russian special services used radar systems to put the drones out of action. And so there were no victims, no damage according as a result of the drones crashing.
On a couple of the videos which have appeared, you can see some kind of explosion. Now the statement ends by saying that the Kremlin views these actions as a planned terrorist attack and an assassination attempt on the life of President Putin and that Russia reserves the right to respond whenever and wherever it considers necessary.
Now I have to say this is all very surprising for a number of reasons. I mean, the Kremlin is heavily guarded. Nothing like this has happened before, not that I can remember. And also surprising because earlier today when President Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, gave his daily conference call, held his daily conference call with journalists, he made no mention of this. It was only after the conference call that they put out this statement. So it is rather strange and it comes just a few days before the big military parade, the victory day parade on Red Square to mark the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany.
Right. And I want to ask you a bit more about victory parade. I know that they said that they're not going to cancel the one in Moscow. But have they given any details as to where these alleged drones came from? Are they saying that they were sort of piloted all the way over from the border or are they saying that they were sort of launched by Ajahn provocateur in Moscow? I mean, have they given any details on the attack?
No. No more details. They're just talking about unmanned aerial vehicles, in other words, drones. So where they came from, who launched them? We simply don't know. From what I hear, Ukraine has denied any link to this alleged attack. But we have very few details at the moment to go.
Okay. And just in terms of those victory day parades, Moscow is going ahead. But have there been any effects of these Ukrainian drone attacks that have occurred over the border allegedly? Have they had any impact on victory day parades elsewhere in the country?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, over the last few weeks, I suppose, a number of Russian regions, particularly those bordering Ukraine, but not only have decided not to hold their annual victory day parades, citing security concerns. Now, the Kremlin has been saying all along that the biggest parade of all, the Moscow one across Red Square, will go on as planned. And they've repeated that today after the announcement about. this alleged attack. But there are still a few days to go before that. And certainly, this adds to that the sense of nervousness here at the moment. Steve Rosenberg, our Russia editor, speaking to me from Moscow and a little bit later in the program, will have one of our experts from BBC monitoring to give us their insight into what we can glean from these videos that have been appearing on social media.
It was two years ago, May 2021, that a passenger flight from Greece to Lithuania was suddenly diverted to Belarus. On board was a Belarusian dissident journalist called Roman Protaceovitch. He was arrested, as soon as the plane landed in Minsk Airport. Today, Protaceovitch was found guilty of organizing mass riots, leading an extremist group, and conspiracy to seize power. And he's been sentenced to eight years in jail. Framack Vietroka is an advisor to the Belarusian opposition leaders, Fiatlana Chikanovskaia. A guilty verdict can't have been a huge surprise to them. So what does he make of today's news?
I think this is the sentence, not just to Roman Protaceovitch, but to all Belarusian journalists, to Belarusian journalism, overall, on the press, freedom day, three reporters, three journalists were sentenced by the regime. So this is the message of Lukashenko to the entire world that he doesn't care about media, he doesn't care about international rules, norms, laws, that he will be punished in all the dissent he has in Belarus. Personally, I fell sorry for a man because he got into this turmoil by accident. He didn't want to be on trial today. He didn't want to be in prison today. He's taken hostage by the regime. He was hoping that he will be able to avoid the imprisonment. He collaborated with the regime with KGB. He provided them with all the information, but you see, he didn't help him to avoid imprisonment.
It had come out before that as a result of Roman Protaceovitch's treatment in detention and this information that appeared to be extracted from him that hundreds of opposition activists were arrested, can you just give me a little bit more detail about what you understand happened and his connection to all that? I was seen in Roman Protaceovitch every single day. We worked together on organizing the protests in Belarus and he was basically involved in all stages of democratic movement and revolution of 2020. When he was kidnapped from this Ryanair flight, he was bringing all the documents, papers, names of the people who were helping Belarus democratic movement. When KGB started to interrogate him, we don't know what they were doing with him, probably tortured. He shared basically all the information and because of him, hundreds of people landed in jail, hundreds of people were sentenced to 515, some people to 20 years of prison. So the consequences of this arrest, of this drama with Roman Protaceovitch are much bigger than anyone could expect. You know him. How do you think he's likely to be holding up? I mean, it's a heavy sentence that he is now facing and he's had already two years in detention. How do you think he is likely to be fairing?
Today I show him on a video after the sentence was announced and I think he was surprised. He was shocked. He was hoping till the very last moment that he will get this sentence conditionally or he will be pardoned or whatever. Because he understand that Lukashenko's prison is the worst place in Europe right now. Many people who are in jails right now are being tortured, beaten, humiliated even after being released. For many, many years they're not able to rehabilitate fully. This was not a trial. This was the circus. This was the show. Belarus just turned back into the Stalin era terror machine. Do people have access to, I mean I've realized it won't be ready access, but can they access anything approaching free information inside Belarus? Many media were closed. Many media were announced extremists. So even being subscribed to YouTube channel or TikTok account of independent media can land you in jail for five or seven years. They do what they can in such horrible circumstances.
Frank, via Chalka on the imprisonment day of the Belarusian blogger Roman Protacea Vyacheslav you may recall the mysterious news last September explosions damaging the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, the pipelines which carry gas from Russia into Germany. I say mysterious because all sorts of theories have been posited in the months since about who might have been responsible and why. The latest one to come around comes from a consortium of Nordic broadcasters. who carried out a joint investigation. They have found out that Russian Navy ships were present in the area shortly before the blasts. One of the moody is Berlin correspondent for the Times.
What does he make of the latest theory? For a number of weeks now really since the middle of March, there has been growing evidence of Russian Navy vessels having visited the area where the bombs went off in the days beforehand. And what this latest part of the investigation does is really kind of builds up the picture in particular with evidence of some previous Russian naval maneuvers in that area in June last year.
Clearly there have been a number of theories as to who's been behind the pipeline blast. Where does this fit into that? For logically speaking, there have been three theories that have attracted a degree of attention. The first one was from the veteran American investigative reporter Simor Hirsch who argued based originally on a single unidentified source that it had been carried out by the CIA with a lot of help from the Norwegian Navy. A lot of the details in that story have fallen apart on closer inspection.
So I don't have very much time for it. The second one is that it was commissioned by a very powerful Ukrainian businessman and former politician and that he got a small crew to hire a yacht in northern Germany, set it out to the attack site and then two divers dropped. The equivalent of half a ton of TNT on the pipelines and then blew it up that way. Again, there are a lot of questions about whether it would really have been possible to carry out an operation like that with such a small vessel and so few people. And so where we're at now is this kind of drip, drip, drip of evidence that it may very well have been the Russian Navy itself that certainly had as many as half a dozen vessels in that area five or six days before the bombs went off and we now know that it had sent vessels to the same area a few weeks before that as well.
I guess part of the problem in all this is that it's possible to construct reasons from various different sources why somebody might want to disrupt the flow of Russian gas into Germany. Right and one of the objections that critics of the Russia theory raised is why would Russia demolish the last piece of leverage and significant energy leverage that it had over Germany. And I think the kind of the lack of an obvious rationale has very much created the space for people to come up with all kinds of alternative explanations.
If it were Russia, if it could be pinned on Russia, you know what point does this become an act of war? I mean is I guess my question is do you think that there's a there's a certain amount of benefit for Western countries in not identifying a culprit? Well I think this is precisely why the three national investigations in Germany, Sweden and Denmark into the bombing have been so circumspect and so utterly watertight with what they reveal to the public because if they're going to accuse Russia of having been behind it they want to be absolutely sure of what they're doing and that they know what the consequences are. Oliver Moody from the Times newspaper.
And coming up on the programme as the diplomatic efforts to resolve Sudan's conflict continue. We hear how people in the capital are just trying to scrape by. You can't use the roads. There is serious exploitation currently going on. Like if I want to take my family anywhere like the city of ports of Dan for one person it might cost about a thousand dollars so my whole family of four is going to cost us four thousand dollars. More from that resident of Hartoom in just over 20 minutes.
Our headlines this year, Russia has accused Ukraine of trying to assassinate President Putin in a drone attack on the Kremlin key of his denied anything to do with the incident and we'll be having one of our in-house BBC experts to pour over the video footage of that with us in about 15 minutes. This is news air. It's live from the BBC in London with me Tim Franks.
In the Serbian capital Belgrade, eight children and a security guard have been killed in a shooting at a school. Further six pupils and a teacher have also been injured. Police have arrested a 14-year-old student from the Vladislav Rhybnikov school. Speaking through an interpreter, the Serbian Education Minister Branko Ruzic praised school staff who would try to protect children.
It is unthinkable how when you see the scenes at the scene of the place what the children have been through and the teachers who have tried to protect the children. The government has issued a decision to proclaim a three-day morning period on the entire territory of Serbia. Alexander Melodinovitch is with the BBC Serbian Service in Belgrade. What has he been hearing from the police and from the authorities?
The 14-year-old pupil obviously organized this morning events in great details. He organized a month ago a list of kids, his fellow pupils, he was he intended to shot. He had four rounds of ammunition, a Molotov cocktail that he never used, and a gun he obtained from his parents. He showed up at the end of first class this morning, first shot the guard at the entrance to the school and then started killing fellow students of his own class that had a history lesson with the history teacher he also severely injured. We also heard reports that the student was bullied in the past, though he didn't state that as his motivation. His motives are still to be explored and examined by the police.
Right and in terms of how quickly the police got there and the state of the people who've been wounded I mean has there been much on that? This was an unprecedented event and it's very hard to compare the reaction of the authorities to any other event because nothing of this skill ever happened not only in Serbia but also in the region. It took a while for some parents to find out the whereabouts of their kids. It took some time for them to find out if their kids are safe and sound. It took a while and those moments I would say were the longest in their lives.
They gathered in front of the school one of the most prestigious elementary schools in the Serbian capital awaiting for the information and it didn't last too long until we found out that two more kids are severely injured and are still being treated and built great hospitals. Just briefly Alexander I imagine there are still a fair number of guns around the place in the wake of the wars of the 90s but how restrictive are gun laws in Serbia?
The gun rules are quite restricted and it's very widely restricted the gun ownership. The father of the boy had all the licenses for the guns he possessed so it is not now an issue of illegal possession but it is an issue of gun culture that stayed very viable and vivid in the Balkans after the wars in the 90s. That was Alexander Melodinovich from the BBC Serbian service, speaking to me from Belgrade.
US health officials have declared that the country is facing an epidemic of loneliness which is as dangerous to health as smoking. The surgeon general Vivek Murphy has called social isolation to be treated as seriously as obesity or drug abuse. In a BBC interview he warned that getting on for half of all Americans experience loneliness and that increases their risk of premature mortality by almost a third. In addition to raising the risk of depression, anxiety and suicide, the increase in risk of physical illness like cardiovascular disease, dementia and stroke is profound.
It also may surprise people to learn that the increased risk of premature death that's associated with social connection is on par with the risk that we see from smoking daily and greater than the risk we see associated with obesity. So this is a profound public health challenge. Jeremy Nobel is a physician and public health specialist at Harvard Medical School. He's the founder of a non-profit initiative called Project Unlone. What does he make of this intervention from the surgeon general? Do we need such a thing as an antidote to loneliness?
One important thing is to begin to frame the conversation around loneliness so that we begin to understand the complexity of loneliness that it's both a personal issue but also a societal issue. Even the framing of it as something that needs an antidote puts it into a medical model that may not always be helpful. Loneliness, it turns out, is not a disease. It's a brain state. It's a way of making sense of the world. But I don't think we end loneliness or cure it.
What we do is begin to understand and navigate it and some of the principles laid out by Dr. Murthy, I think, are a major step forward in enabling that. Yeah, so it's about acknowledging it. How far do you think it's down to sort of just the fact of modern life?
In many ways, we're more interconnected than we've ever been before through our presence online, but that can lead to greater disconnection. Do you think that that is part of it that it's just become a steeper mountain to climb? You know, that is the paradox. We are more connected in some ways. Just consider this lovely conversation we're having right now from such a great distance. Modern life is not just one thing. It's a really complex, wonderful array of many things. And so better understanding the factors in our modern experience that we can adjust, redesign, navigate, be creative about, opens up some. enormous possibilities to be more connected.
I mean, you've obviously spent a lot of time investigating loneliness. Is it possible to sort of define what we mean by it and at what point it starts to become a damaging phenomenon? What are the sort of determining factors for how well people can deal with loneliness? It begins with understanding what loneliness is. So, for instance, being lonely is not the same thing as being alone. Being alone can be such a positive, rewarding, enriching experience. We have a high class word for it. We call it solitude. And yet, being alone in certain circumstances can lead to a very negative state of low self-esteem. The classic definition of loneliness has been the subjective feeling, the gap we have between the social connections we aspire to, what we desire, what we feel we need to have, and what we feel we do have. Just having social connections doesn't mean you will be less lonely.
Classic example, imagine it's the holiday season and you're thinking about, okay, am I lonely these holidays as many people are? There are two types of loneliness at least in the holidays. One is when you don't have a holiday party to go to, and you feel isolated, ignored. The other is when you do go to a party, but you say, who are all these people around me that I can't connect with? It's a very different kind of loneliness. And we have to understand how loneliness actually appears in our lives, or else it'll be very challenging to take the steps that are personal or a societal level to navigate it.
Tell me a little bit about the project that you have set up, project un-lonely. What are you trying to achieve there? So, project un-lonely is a non-profit initiative started by the foundation for art and healing with three goals. One is to increase awareness of loneliness and its toxicity. The second goal is to reduce the stigma that surrounds it. Many people don't want to mention their loneliness. It leads to an immediate feeling that they may not be worthy or they've done something wrong. But the third is to begin to investigate programs and experiences that can be available to everyone so they can have the experience of being better connected by tapping into the power of creative expression.
For the arts to have been such a sustaining force of almost any culture, must mean they're doing something important for our psyche, something important for us to survive. So we tap into that power of creative expression as a way to give people a sense of connection to themselves, to others and their community. It's minute terrific ride. And that was Jeremy Nobel, a physician and public health specialist at Harvard Medical School on the US Surgeon Generals, warnings about the dangers of loneliness.
This is Neusah, it's live from the BBC, much more to come in the next 30 minutes.
这是来自英国广播公司的新闻节目Neusah,接下来的30分钟还有更多的新闻等待报道。
Welcome back to Neusah. Finding the magic combination which fires a song at the pop music charts is something which the music industry is conjured with as long as there's been a hunger for hits. You might be able to reel off some of the ingredients, the sound, the lyrics, the band, the artist, the look. But how about the weather?
Manuel Anglada taught runs the music culture and cognition lab at Oxford University and is the lead author of a study and the effect that the weather and the seasons could have on musical taste. We analyzed all songs that dripped the UK weekly top chart in the last 70 years. And then what we do is that we look at whether some musical features might relate to some extent with changes in weather. And here we looked also at different kind of weather conditions like daily temperatures, hours of sun or rainfall, also recorded in the last 70 years. And then we just use some statistical methods to look in clever ways, this kind of associations. And we find that songs that are energetic, densable and evoked positive emotions such as joy and happiness were positively associated with warm and sunny weather and negatively associated with rainy and cold months.
So some of the best examples they found in our data, this patheto by Luis Fonsi, I'm sure everyone knows. So this song, Dranked the Top Charge in the UK in May 2017. And a second favorite is I want to dance with somebody by Winnie Houston, which stopped the charge in the UK in June 1987.
在我们的数据中,他们发现了一些最好的例子,其中之一是Luis Fonsi的 “Despacito”,我相信每个人都知道。这首歌曲在2017年5月在英国成为最受欢迎的歌曲。第二个受欢迎的歌曲是惠妮·休斯顿的 “I Want to Dance with Somebody”,它在1987年6月在英国成为最受欢迎的歌曲。
Does it work the other way round so that you know miserable music works? better when it's of wet Wednesday in February? We thought that would be the case. So what we did here is that we analyzed all of these big data sets. This is more than 20,000 unique songs and we use machine learning to extract features from it. So we can classify this music in different categories, one category is positive and energetic music, but another category is sad music.
And we thought this second category would be related, as you said, with bad weather conditions, but we actually find no relationship with this kind of music when it comes to weather variations. And this is potentially interesting because it might indicate that sad music may be more influenced by individual personal stories, like whether you broke up with your partner, for example, whereas positive mood states might be more affected with this kind of collective behavior, like whether saddening is like a sunny day and everyone probably is a bit happier. Music is such a mystery, isn't it? How it works, how it appeals to us, I guess that's all part of your research. That's, I guess, why I study music in the first place, like music is highly subjective and culturally dependent, it's so difficult to study and this challenge is what it makes it so interesting.
Indeed it does. That was Manuel Anglada taught at Fox University's Music Culture and Cognition Lab. This is news our life from the BBC with me Tim Franks.
Back to our top story now, the Russian claims that there's been an attempt on President Putin's life and that it's come from Ukraine using drones to attack the Kremlin. There are several videos circulating on social media showing that the moment of the alleged attack, Olga Robinson is with BBC monitoring, there are team in-house who track and translate and analyze global media and they've been trying to verify the authenticity of these images.
Olga, what have you been able to learn from looking at them? So hello Tim, in one video we see an object fly late at night over the buildings in the Kremlin complex and then explode over the dome of the San ad palace. That's literally one of the iconic buildings at the heart of Moscow and then other videos circulating online also show the aftermath of the incident or a fire on the same dome and then a plume of smoke following the explosion of this flying object.
But what remains still unclear is from the footage that we've seen because it was shot from quite a far what exactly was flying over the buildings in the inside the Kremlin complex. However, one drone expert we spoke to suggested that just the way the object is moving in the video is consistent with how a drone would move. However, that in itself is not a definitive answer and ideally you'd need a debris to see it to say for sure but there's just no footage of that.
Yeah, one of the videos that I saw intriguingly appeared to show a couple of people on the roof of that senate palace building you were talking about. Yes, it's quite fascinating actually because at first we didn't even notice the ourselves the the two people in the staircase of the dome because it was shot like I said quite from from afar but if you zoom in you can see that just as the object is flying towards the dome of the senate palace you can see two people walking up the stairs of the dome but remains unclear though what exactly they were doing and who they are. Yeah, indeed.
Well, it all does seem to be a bit of a mystery at the moment. I was seeing that in the US State Department Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State has said that as far as they're concerned they can't validate reports on that drone strike. We simply don't know he said.
Now to that question which has dominated our last few weeks, who will decide Sudan's future? Will it be the generals and their factions who since the middle of last month cause such destruction and unleashed such chaos inside the country or can at least in the immediate future the outside world in the form of the highest level diplomats and politicians persuade the leader of the Sudanese military and the leader of the paramilitary rapid support forces to agree to a ceasefire this time for seven days starting tomorrow, Thursday and also some sort of meaningful peace talks.
The ceasefire as much as anything is to allow desperately needed relief supplies to be distributed and it's for that reason that the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has arrived in Kenya to try and coordinate that effort. The Sudanese are facing a humanitarian catastrophe. Hospitals destroyed humanitarian warehouses, units, millions facing through insecurity and the Equipreza Trillium Routus strength rails for the parties to de-escovet tensions return to the negotiating table and agree on a lasting ceasefire.
So I hope fair that meaningful talks between the two rival generals Abdel Fattar Al-Buhan and Mahamad Haundan Dagelow and Mehdi might now take place. Pressure for negotiation is coming. from a regional group of countries called Iigad and helping to lead that effort is Africa's newest country South Sudan.
It's perhaps unlikely player in potential peace talks given the protracted and bloody power struggles which have marked its 12 years since independence. I've been speaking to South Sudan's acting Foreign Minister Deng Dao Deng and we'll get on to that point in a moment.
First what are the signs that Buhan and Mehdi will agree to a ceasefire and talks? We have been clearly pushing for the ceasefire, cessation of hostilities, for the purposes of humanitarian access but most importantly for evocation of foreigners and other national that are leaving the areas of war to other safe areas.
Can I ask you about the prospect not just of getting a ceasefire between the two generals but also of encouraging them to actually start peace talks. Do you think to put it candidly? It's about trying to buy the two men off at this juncture. What is crucial at this point?
It's actually as the president I've talked to was to appeal to them at personal level that the Sudanist nation is bigger than them and that the future of their country rests in their shoulder. His excellency president Selva Tog, he knows the pride of the Sudanist army. Of course you have the Sudanist army, they want not to be defeated but again the paramilitary, they have been also operating with the Sudanist army, they don't want to be defeated.
So these two concepts and beyond that is what he's actually the president I've said it is important for two of you to look at the future of the Sudan, look at the future of those who are suffering now and look at the future of those generations that will come. From 1956 Sudan have not experienced such kind of conflict.
It has been just a coups that happened in 1969 and 1971 and 1989 but they were quite limited but this time around his excellency the president have appeal to them that please stop your forces not to attack the rest and let us go for talk so that we can resolve issues that cause these particular tensions between them.
But can I turn that on its head for a minister in the sense that you know the history of Sudan that you have described since the 1950s is not one where civilian power has flourished and what you have got here is two men who together launched a coup two years ago to stop the move towards a hand over to a civilian administration and frankly they've got little incentive it seems now to make peace between themselves in order then that they can give up power once again and hand over to the people who should be in charge civilians elected by the people of Sudan.
Well time will time our view is that you're on poor hunt a responsibility as a leader of the Sudan in fact he himself is the share of the head of states of you got currently so yes a responsibility also he may have a responsibility before that they help us in some Sudan to achieve our own peace they were co-grantists and they have come to do for several time of course the issue of civilian government is very crucial but at this particular time the two generals and the stakeholders in the Sudan to come together for them to be able to address the current situation in Sudan.
May I ask why you think the warring generals in Sudan should listen to what President Salvat Kier has got to say on this given that south Sudan unfortunately has seen so much conflict itself and peace deals have come and gone I mean why should the generals in Sudan listen to encouragement from south Sudan?
First we share history we have also a lot of things in commonality and President Salvat was in the Sudanist army before and the first vice president of Republic of Sudan and president of South Sudan yet a lot of contact with the Sudanese army of the SES also he met he at the time when he came into this position he has been a very close contact with President Salvat Kier at it the most important thing is that our experience should not be reflected in Sudan but they should benefit from what they have seen in southern Sudan there are always challenges in between implementation of agreement but we are moving forward in spite of all those difficulties the issue of the Minister of Defense is being discussed and I want to thank Vice-Based President Dr. Rieck and President Salvat they have been discussing this matter and they have agreed to resolve it amicably and we hope that he met he and Yoral Borhan will be able to reflect back on the time the number of jen that they have come to jubo to advise President Salvat and to advise first vice president Dr. Rieck Bashar so that they can implement the agreement.
Thank you Dan Danks south Sudan's from Minister from those grand diplomatic ambitions to the daily scrabble to get by at least for those tens of millions of Sudanese living. with this conflict Tariq Babakir is one of those he lives in Khartoum and Lizawala go he told me what he'd been up to today.
I've been securing some food supplies to the family which was a bit hectic but then I managed to find a store for some reason was shot for a while and he decided to open today so he had enough supplies so I was quite lucky to get like bottled water and some pastas rice stuff like that oil cooking oil. Okay but I mean just getting food and drinking water presumably is something that you can't take for granted these days.
It's not even safe because the current location is not in my residence it's our family business but our house in a place called Khartoum 2 quite an upscale place next to the international airport in the first week or two of fighting has seen like mom apartments and all sort of ammo and shells that have never heard before yeah so we had to move over here it's a bit safer but on the other hand you can't use the roads there is serious exploitation currently going on like if I want to take my family anywhere like the city of ports with Dan for one person it might cost about a thousand dollars so my whole family of four is gonna cost us four thousand dollars we have the money but I'm just saying the current atmosphere is just very sort of unstable.
Yeah I'm sure may I ask why you haven't taken the decision to try to leave? My father who had a stroke he's a semi-paralleled and then I have my mom and sister they go like if my dad is not coming when I'm coming so and then I feel like you know a country every now is it is like serious security sort of unrest I would say that's been exploited by mobs they're like 500 or thousand of them they go storm a market and rob it or they storm a house and rob it as they can kill someone you know what I mean so I felt like my semi-paralleled dad and my mom's sister would be quite vulnerable for anything like that so I'd rather sort of protect them or I wonder how how aware you are tarryk of the efforts that are going on outside Sudan to try and bring the two warring factions together to agree a ceasefire and to agree to peace talks and and if you are aware of them what what what you make of these efforts I've heard that there is like most of the efforts apparently for a ceasefire for for evacuations etc but I think these efforts won't work out because the two parties are quite hard headed you know what I mean on the other hand the army they feel like they have to like relinquish the powers of the hematee of the other side and other side of the hand has his alliance the tribal alliance which from Sudan goes through Chad and Niger and all those Arabian tribal his that supports him apparently and he has even support from Wagner group apparently in Russian they all like fuel the conflict so I think the ceasefire won't work because there is like international players a medal in the peace process or a medal in even the ceasefire well all of which I mean it sounds plausible but it also means that it doesn't sound as if you feel that there's much of a future for you and your family in Sudan you know it's quite a sad saying you know.
I have a manufacturing plant my dad has a manufacturing plant I don't know we have probably 99 percent of our assets over here well over two million city I don't know probably four million dollars I don't know and they all probably worth nothing right now and that's like the worst nightmare ever you know what I mean because that's that's how it is really. Tarek Baugh here on the really disastrous reality of trying to get by in Sudan at the moment this is news app live from the BBC this is news app it's live from the BBC I'm Tim Franks.
I mentioned earlier in the program that the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was in Kenya trying to organize humanitarian relief in Sudan. On route, he had stopped in Doha in Qatar to try and staunch the damage in a rather longer running catastrophe: the situation in Afghanistan. Boys from several countries were brought together to try to agree on a unified approach for dealing with the Taliban authorities. You may recall how they recently banned women from working for NGOs, despite a spiraling humanitarian crisis in the country.
Two-thirds of people don't know where their next meal will come from. An unestimated 167 children under the age of five die every day because of preventable diseases. That's according to UNICEF. Public health infrastructure that was weak before the Taliban took over and foreign funding was frozen is now virtually broken. The little that is being supported by aid agencies could also be under threat because of those Taliban policies.
In the western province of Gore, the BBC's Yogi Telemaya, together with her BBC colleagues Sanjay Ganguly and Imogen Anderson, has this disturbing report on what that would mean for Afghanistan's children. "I'm in the main hospital in the province of Gore in the west of Afghanistan. I'm in the pediatric ward. To the left and right are rooms that are full of patients. They're all looking overcrowded to me. I've just stepped into one now. There are about 10 beds or so here, and on each one, there is more than one child. Some of them have three children on them. Doctors have told us that most of these children are suffering from pneumonia.
In the past one and a half years, we've been to at least a dozen hospitals and clinics across this country. The situation everywhere has been grim, but I can tell you I've not seen this level of overcrowding before. One-year-old Sir Jard's breathing is rapidly worsening, but there's no oxygen mask for his small face. All around the room, which is the hospital's intensive care unit for children, mothers are holding oxygen pipes near the noses of their babies, trying to fill in for a lack of trained staff and medical equipment.
We've just stepped out of one of the rooms that's full of little children. We've gone and earlier, and the doctor had pointed out one baby in the corner who was suffering from pneumonia, severe acute management, and hepatitis. And as we were looking at the child, the baby didn't appear to be breathing. The doctor called in nurses. They came in with oxygen masks, and at this moment, they are trying to revive the baby. The baby's name is Thia Bulla. He's three months old. A nurse uses an oxygen pump to try to get him to breathe. They've heard a faint heartbeat through the stethoscope. A doctor uses his thumbs to perform compressions on Thia Bulla's tiny chest.
The sudden silence that has emulated in the room is broken by the sound of his mother Nigar crying, as she realizes her son is fading. His grandfather Ghosaddin looks stricken. It took them eight hours on rumbled roads to carry Thia Bulla here. A family that can barely afford to eat scraped together money to make the journey. After half an hour of trying, the family stoned Thia Bulla has died. Nurse Edimasalthani had tried to save Thia Bulla with whatever little they have in the hospital but was defeated by a lack of resources. "I'm also a mother, and when I saw the baby die, I felt like I've lost my child. When I saw his mother sobbing, it broke my heart. It hurt my conscience. We don't have equipment and trained staff. There is nothing we can do but watch babies dying."
Barely a few moments pass before we find another child in severe distress in the room next door. Do we roll Gulbatham is struggling to breathe despite the oxygen mask strapped to her face. She has a hard defect diagnosed six months ago at this hospital, but it's not equipped to treat her. So, the family took her to Kabul. Her grandmother Afwagul told us, "We borrowed money to take her there, but we couldn't afford surgery in Kabul, so we had to bring her back. Please help us cure them."
What Gulbatham has is not uncommon or hard to treat. It could have been fixed with a routine operation. She'd just begun to speak, forming her first words calling out to her family. Her father Navruz strokes her forehead, wanting to soothe his child forced to helplessly watch as she suffers. "If I had an income, she would have never suffered. Right now, I don't even have the money to buy a cup of tea. This hospital doesn't have any equipment to cure. You can barely find oxygen."
I asked doctor Ahmad Samadhi, who was in the room about oxygen, "How much oxygen does the patient require right now, the hard defect?" "Two liters of oxygen per minute," he replied. "And if we run out of oxygen, she will die."
When we came back later, we were told that's exactly what happened. Gulbatham died because oxygen ran out. Within hours, two children died, another crushing blow for doctor Samadhi, who runs the pediatric ward. "I feel exhaustion and agony. Every day, we lose one or two beloved children of court." we're almost accustomed to it now we need equipment ventilators and monitors we need oxygen and medicines for 20 years the world spent billions of dollars on Afghanistan's public health care what we've seen raises questions about how that money was spent in gore it hasn't taken long for the hospital to crumble after a regime change the salaries of doctors and nurses at this hospital the cost of medicines and food are currently being funded by humanitarian agencies even with the support it is clear that that is solely insufficient on the ground and the idea that that funding could be at risk now because aid agencies are warning that donors might cut the money that they're giving to them because of the Taliban's policies if that cut in funding happens in places like this it would be catastrophic and there was a Yigita Lamaya reporting from Afghanistan western Afghanistan she's South Asia correspondent she's one of our fantastic network of correspondence around the world you also heard from one of our team in Belgrade and our Russia editor Steve Rosenberg in Moscow we are very grateful to the work that all of them do that's it from the sedition of Nizhah from Me Tim Franks and the rest of the team here in London thanks you company news hour has been a download from the BBC to discover more and our terms of use visit bbc.com slash podcast the documentary brings together the best of factual storytelling from across the BBC world service this is a historic opportunity for peace to end violence for good in northern Ireland exploring the world around us and bringing the globe to your ears the invasion meant that the lives of millions of Iraqis changed forever there are still some memories that I can't talk about search for the documentary wherever you get your bbc podcasts
In 2012 a new charity bursts onto the scene it's called believe in magic and it grants wishes to seriously ill children it's run by an inspirational 16 year old girl called Megan Barry just wanted to look at the magical the experience is back it has the support of the biggest boy band in the world one direction believe in magic quickly becomes a household name in the child cancer community putting on parties sending thoughtful gifts even organizing trips to Disney every single child there felt like they were so important and they they weren't poorly they weren't in a hospital it was out of this world Megan is adored by all those she helps she had more sympathy and love for people than I never met anybody before because she herself is extremely unwell with a life threatening brain tumor her handbag was so heavy none of us could ever carry it and it was full of medicine when something doesn't add up about Megan's story a small group of parents start to question whether Meg is really ill I'd call it a witch hunt kind of thing asking questions like which hospital you in they know that they're not being honest about her illnesses we collectively said we won't let it drop we'll find out this time but is Megan actually facing a very different danger it's awful it's really not nice listening to that what is this girl going through I'm Jamie Bartlett a journalist and author and together with the producer Ruth we've spent the last year trying to get to the bottom of what really happened to Megan Barry and her charity believe in magic I cannot let I hear me understand why you've done what you've done to us it takes us on a journey far stranger I just saw him say these were my thoughts it was it that's not a car it's not a car is it and far darker than we ever expected I know what the truth is I've read the records and they just come in and lie to me it wasn't supposed to end like this listen to believe in magic