China warns of further floods near Nepal border

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1:14This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Will Chalk and in the early hours of Friday the 28th of August these are our main stories. There are growing fears a second flood could make things a lot worse as the search for survivors of the catastrophic floods in northern Nepal and Tibet continues. The Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Miladic, who oversaw the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War, has died, and a trial that's gripped the US. She was very anxious and sad. She was begging for help. This was a woman who acted intentionally to accomplish a very specific goal, to kill.

1:54The story of Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three children, but her defence say postpartum psychosis means it wasn't murder. Also in this podcast, Donald Trump renames Lake Ontario as the tariff war between the US and Canada notches up yet another gear. And... The telescope's designed to help us answer fundamental questions about the structure and the composition of the universe. NASA gears up for the launch of its flagship Space Observatory.

2:29As the water recedes in Nepal and Tibet, the scale of the damage and the enormity of the task ahead is being revealed. Wednesday's flash flood on the border saw huge levels of destruction, and there were growing fears that debris blocking a river could cause another disaster. In Nepal, almost 500 people have been confirmed dead. More than 1 ,400 are missing, many of them tourists. Nepalese soldiers have been sent to the region to search for survivors. Thousands of people are homeless. In Nuwakot, a hospital has been turned into a shelter.

3:04I don't know where to go. We had three houses, all of which were washed away by the floods. The land where we had planted rice is also gone. Everything in the house has been swept away. We still can't reach my eldest son. I don't care for wealth. I just want my son back. If any of you could rescue my son, please do it for me. We've been staying in shelters since the floods hit. We didn't have anywhere else to go. Some tarpaulins have been distributed, but we don't have a place to put one up. It doesn't make any sense because we need to search for someone else's land, even for temporary makeshift shelter.

3:44Our correspondent, Azadeh Mishiri, is in one of the worst hit areas. It's eerily quiet where I am in northern Nepal in Thishali. And yet past the barricades, past the police checkpoints, emergency workers are racing to save more lives. The prime minister has ordered that all of these efforts should continue. And in some cases, they have been successful. People's lives are being saved. And we have spoken to people, family members of those who are missing, who are holding on to hope. We started the journey back in Kathmandu, hours away from here. And we met one woman who was holding on to the memory of her lost phone conversation with her husband.

4:22It was a video call at about 8 a.m. on Wednesday. And he was driving tourists through this region when the flood happened. But she still hopes that she'll hear good news. And yet mixed with all that hope is the devastation that we've seen across northern Nepal. The pictures of what's happened are still very difficult to see. imagine being a family member and having to see that as well. I mean, this is a very painful time for them. And on top of that, there are warnings of more danger to come. There are warnings that some of the debris may have washed into the river systems and that there could be more flooding.

5:01Azadeh Mishiri there. Now, while journalists are free to report from Nepal, information from across the border in Tibet, which is controlled by China, has been limited and tightly restricted. Shortly before recording this podcast, I got an update on what's happening from our Beijing correspondent, Stephen McDonnell. Well, the latest we're hearing from officials is that more than a thousand people have been moved to safety in these flood hit areas, including over 500 tourists. The good news there seems to be that rescue teams are getting to these most remote parts of the Himalayas, which have been hit really badly by this devastating wall of mud and water which struck there with such ferocity.

5:45What they're worried about, though, is this artificial lake which is formed by the mud and water which came. The fear is that there's so much water in there, and then when it bursts, that could lead to another round of flooding. People here are very mindful of this because in recent months in China, Man-made dams have burst following heavy flooding because of the typhoons. And so people have seen the devastation when this happens. It could just be like all over again, this water racing down those valleys. And to make it worse, rain is expected in the coming days. Obviously, more rain means more water, means building up the level of that artificial lake and also hampering the rescue and recovery effort for those emergency teams.

6:35Now, we've heard reports of China almost attempting to downplay some of the images and very much control the narrative coming out. I mean, what are they trying to achieve by doing that? Well, what the Chinese government would say is we don't want to scare people. So those most shocking bits of footage, for example, of those multi-storey buildings being swallowed up in that wall of muddy water that hasn't been shown on television here. Just stills of it. Others would argue that people have a right to know. I mean, it's not that this footage isn't circulating now on social media, because it is. It's just that official outlets aren't showing that.

7:13We also have the organisation department. This is the branch of the Communist Party, which appoints all people to all senior jobs in this country, saying that inside Tibet, officials who flee their post or who don't control instability, what have you, this is going to affect your career, warning people to take it all very seriously. And also saying, on the other hand, those who step up and do the right thing, if they're not members of the Communist Party, we can fast track that. So So word has gotten out by those organs to try to mobilise as many people as they can because they are worried about instability alongside this terrible disaster.

7:56Stephen McDonnell there. Moving on to our next story. He was known as the Butcher of Bosnia, oversaw a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing as Yugoslavia splintered in the 90s and spent his final years in prison for war crimes. Yet, among some Serbians, Ratko Mladic remains a respected wartime figure. His death at the age of 84 has, for many, meant looking back on one of the darkest chapters in modern European history. Mladic oversaw the siege of Sarajevo, in which thousands of civilians were killed. This is audio of him ordering the bombardment of Muslim areas of the city during the war. General Mladic here, shall the presidency and the parliament Shoot at slow intervals till I order you to stop.

8:45Understood.

8:49Tell it Muslim neighbourhoods. Not many Serbs live there. Yes. Show them till they are on the edge of madness. Malaric also led attempts to force Croat and Muslim civilians from large swathes of Bosnia in the campaign, which became known as ethnic cleansing. In 1995, his forces massacred more than 8 ,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica. This woman lost her relatives. It's really difficult to describe how I feel. We watched as men and boys had their throats cut all around us. Women were raped here. Over two nights, people committed suicide watching what was happening. They took my husband to that building over there.

9:32My son wanted to escape, but he never appeared again. For many years, Malavich evaded justice, assisted by nationalist Serbs who saw him as a war hero. But he was eventually captured and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017 for his many crimes. Hasan Hasanovic is a survivor of the genocide and now works at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre. I was 19 when I was forced to flee Srebrenica and I lost my twin brother, my father and many family members. So when I heard that Ratko Almendic has died, I think about the lives he and his forces destroyed. What matters to me is that he died having been convicted of genocide and other crimes.

10:16And his death cannot erase that historical and judicial truth. Let's get the perspective of the BBC's Alan Little. He reported extensively from Bosnia in the 90s and co-authored a book, The Death of Yugoslavia, which is still regarded as the definitive account of the war. He spoke to James Menendez about Ratko Mladic's crimes. He was made the commander of the Bosnian Serb army right at the start of the war by President Milosevic of Serbia. And it was his men, men acting under his command, who conducted the campaign that came to be known as ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is not a phrase coined by the Western media.

10:53It was what the Serbs themselves, the term the Serbs themselves used to describe what they were doing. They would go from town to town, village to village, municipality to municipality in a very organized way, round up all the non-Serb men, put the women and children on buses and ship them off to refugee camps and hold the men in concentration camps. The men were then divided into categories. Those regarded as dangerous would be killed right from the beginning of the war and the rest would be held and later used in prisoner exchanges. They were held in conditions of starvation, in sanitary conditions.

11:26Many of them died there. And it was all about establishing an ethnically pure Serbian territory in the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. These were among the worst war crimes committed in Europe since the Nazis. And Srebrenica, which came in 1995, three years after the start of the war in Bosnia, was different only in scale from what had been happening across the Serb-held territories from the very beginning. There were mini Srebrenica's, if you like, right from the start all the way through 1992, 3, 4 and 5. Alan, you met him, didn't you? I think in 1992. I did meet him by pure chance. I was in the Serbian army barracks at Lukovic on the southern edge of Sarajevo at the bright start of the siege of Sarajevo.

12:11And he stopped me and said, yes, and I looked incredulous. He said, yes, yes, it's me, it's Mladiv. and he shook my hand and pulled me right into him and wouldn't let go of my hand. It was really quite eerie and he'd just been down to the city centre front line at a bridge across the river called the Brotherhood and Unity Bridge and you could tell that he was very pumped up by having been so close to the military action and he talked about how his ambition was that there should be no guns anywhere in the world except the little toy guns used by little boys. I found it very, very disturbing and alarming because he was clearly very, very excited by the violence.

12:47And he struck me even then as dangerously fanatical. Justice did catch up with him in the end, but he evaded justice for many, many years. How? Well, because he was protected by not only Serbian public opinion, but by powerful people in Serbia. Even today, all these years on, and despite his conviction, if his body is returned home to the Bosnian Serb territory, he will be given a hero's funeral. Yeah, he evaded detection. He lived in hiding. He lived in secret. Public opinion in Serbia and in Serbian parts of Bosnia still regard him as a Serbian national hero. Alan Little there. Now, we've had a lot of warnings about the dangers of AI, but an open letter signed by more than 100 tech companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, perhaps stands out from the rest.

13:36It's a warning that a wave of AI-enabled cyber attacks are coming and that organisations and governments have only a short time to defend themselves. It follows a spate of cyber attacks from AI models, in some cases where they've gone rogue. In recent interviews, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said even though AI will help fight diseases and improve education, addressing these risks should be the world's top priority. If we manage the transition well, the good will vastly outweigh the bad. But I worry that we aren't preparing. There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era. Our technology editor Zoe Kleinman has this assessment.

14:14Last month, we had what was described as the world's first ever AI-enabled cyber attack. OpenAI was testing some of its AI products, and it now says it found out that they were secretly communicating with each other, working together. They set up a hidden message board, and the result of it was they hacked another company. And we've got other threats as well. We've got cyber tools that have been developed to find weaknesses in security systems that have hidden away. There's one called Mythos that was made by a company called Anthropic. And it says it found a weakness in one platform that had been hidden for 27 years.

14:49And this is how hackers get into systems and cause havoc, as we see. Plus, you've got AI tools just generating masses of spam emails trying to trick people into opening up their bank accounts. So with all of this going on, the letter that's been signed by these 100 companies is calling on the world to make sure it's ready and says the window to be prepared enough is closing. Now, you've got to bear in mind that some of the companies that have signed this letter are the same companies who own this technology. It's in their interest, isn't it, to tell us how powerful their own products are. But we do also know there's similar products being developed in China and that they are already freely available.

15:28So what the letter is saying is everyone needs to work together to AI-proof their defences. And it also says vital services like hospitals and water companies need to watch their backs. But what it doesn't say is how everyone is supposed to find the money to pay for this all. Zoe Kleinman there. NASA's preparing to launch its next flagship space observatory. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to take off over the weekend on a SpaceX rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Scientists are going to use the telescope to investigate some of the universe's biggest mysteries, including planets beyond our solar system, dark energy and dark matter.

16:06James Cocknell spoke to Morgan van Arsdel, the project's operations manager. We're aiming to launch on Sunday, and the telescope's designed to help us answer fundamental questions about the structure and the composition of the universe. We'll be studying things like dark energy, dark matter and exoplanets with the two science instruments on board. And the science instruments together are capable of producing over a terabyte of data every day. So we really can't wait to get on orbit and see all the amazing things we discover once we get out there. Gosh, yeah, quite a thing. Talk us through what exactly we know about dark energy and dark matter.

16:44What are they exactly? Why do they matter to us? So for dark energy, we know that the universe is expanding, which doesn't really make any sense. You would think that it would be either just expanding at the same rate or even starting to contract. But instead, it's expanding faster and faster. And so we know there must be some force that is repelling things. And we call that forced dark energy, which we really don't understand yet. And that's one of the things we're trying to learn more about with the Roman Space Telescope. Dark matter, on the other hand, we know that only about 5 % of the matter that we understand in the universe is visible.

17:21So the galaxies, the chair at your house, all fall in that 5 % of visible matter. But based on how gravity works throughout the universe, we know there must be something else. And we call that something else dark matter. So we're hoping to understand a lot more about what those things are that are really forming how the universe is structured. And as far as exoplanets are, that's just the fancy word we use for planets that are orbiting suns and stars outside of our solar system. And this has to be done from outer space a long way from our planet simply to get nearer, to get a better angle at all these things?

17:57Why can't it be done from down on Earth? So it's not really to get closer, but what we want to do is get above the atmosphere. As light comes in from all over the universe to Earth, it bounces around once it hits the atmosphere. So being above the atmosphere where we can get that vacuum of space, the light is a lot crisper and clearer coming through. and in the case of the Roman Space Telescope we're going to be at a point that we call the Lagrange point about four times further away than the moon is and that gets us far enough away that we don't need to worry about interference from the earth or just gives us a better view because we don't have things in the way.

18:33It all sounds incredibly straightforward but presumably anything in space is anything but straightforward. This might perhaps even be a slightly nerve-wracking time as you prepare for launch? Extremely nerve-wracking. I think we're all really excited. But within the last few days, you can tell that the whole team has sort of started vibrating at a new energy, that there's a lot of excitement, but a lot of stress and anxiousness to actually get on orbit and see everything start working. So we've done as many tests as we possibly can. We feel really confident in all of the work we've done to get here.

19:05But anytime you're doing something new in space, there's always a chance for some type of catastrophe to happen. Morgan Van Arstel there speaking to James Coppnall. Still to come in this podcast. It has been the great creative joy of my life to work on these books and I already know what will happen in book four and five. I have written part of the ending. Catherine Rundle, author of The Impossible Creatures, children's fantasy books, speaks to the BBC.

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20:39in one place. Visit schwab.com to learn more.

21:09racist discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye. Ever wonder why we make the choices we do and how to make smarter ones? Introducing Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Join Wharton professor Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book, How to Change, as she shares true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes, and everyday people about why we do the things we do and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes.

21:57Each episode covers the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like the power of self-control, shaping your mindset for success, navigating new beginnings, and why starting over can feel so hard. Listen to choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen.

22:23This is the Global News Podcast. The escalating tariffs and rhetoric between the United States and Canada since trade talks collapsed last week have been something to behold. Then, on Thursday, perhaps the most unorthodox trade war development yet from Donald Trump in the Oval Office. We're going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario, effective immediately to Lake America. That's going to take place right now as I sign the order. Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, Canadian officials aren't on board. We'll always call it Lake Ontario. I have to laugh when he comes up with these ideas. is it's always going to be Lake Ontario here in Canada.

23:05And that's up to the president if he wants to name it Lake America, Lake Trump, whatever he wants to do. Our Washington correspondent, Daniel Bush, told me how we got here. This has been an escalating feud between the US and Canada, one of its two biggest trading partners. President Trump and the Prime Minister of Canada, Carney, have now had sort of a feud of words. President Trump imposing tariffs on 20, up to 50 percent on$20 billion worth of goods from Canada. Carney then immediately said that he would retaliate and in fact now has said that Canada will begin imposing tariffs on a wide range of American goods.

23:44This infuriated the administration. Canada, along with China, is the only country really that has imposed retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. during President Trump's trade war in his second term. That led to today, where in the Oval Office, the president signed an executive order, which he says will rename Lake Ontario Lake America. Of course, it's important to note that this will be renamed for the purposes of the American government on maps and so forth. But other countries, private companies, private map makers are not required to use that name. And it's reminiscent, of course, of President Trump's move to do the same thing with the Gulf of Mexico over a trade dispute there last year where he renamed it the Gulf of America to try and pressure another ally to come to terms with him on trade issues.

24:30OK, I think some people listening will roll their eyes and go changing a name of a lake. What on earth? Give us the serious political argument for why this is a good idea. What is actually at play here is a much broader trade deal between the United States, Canada and Mexico, the old NAFTA trade deal that was renegotiated under Trump's first term. And all three countries tried to reach a deal to extend it for 15 years, were unable to do so in July. So now the USMCA, that trade deal between the United States, Canada and Mexico, is sort of in a perpetual annual renewal period where each year the countries have to come together and re-decide how they want to trade with each other.

25:14And this is really at its heart an effort by the administration to put more and more pressure on Canada to try and secure better trade deals. And you mentioned the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America. This has already been tried. Did that work? In a short answer, no. Mexico is a different economy with a different set of goals than Canada. Mexico, in fact, has taken a somewhat more conciliatory tack with the United States. The president, Scheinbaum, of Mexico has tried not to pick public fights with Trump in the hopes of securing a better trade deal. But for the U.S.'s perspective, symbolically renaming the Gulf of Mexico did not actually result in a better trade agreement.