Fifa scraps controversial investment plan

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1:15This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

1:21I'm Pete Ross and in the early hours of Saturday 1st August, these are our main stories. FIFA scraps its controversial plan to sell stakes in its competitions to private investors after global outrage. And the head of a tech company hacked by a rogue AI agent calls for greater accountability.

1:42Also in this podcast, a discovery in the Amazon rainforest sheds new light on ancient indigenous civilisations. and... We found one case where a capuchin monkey adopted a little marmoset monkey. Or there was a case of a macaque monkey who made friends with a chicken. The unlikely friendships forged in the animal world.

2:09It's nearly two weeks since the men's World Cup final, but it seems football's world governing body FIFA has never left the news. In a dramatic development, FIFA's president Gianni Infantino says he's scrapping controversial plans to sell off stakes in the World Cup and other competitions to private investors. Following widespread opposition from both within FIFA and from regional confederations, Mr Infantino said the proposal had created division within the sport. James Franey is a journalist with the New York Post newspaper. He's been speaking to Helena Humphrey. This was a question of politics really killing this deal.

2:48The numbers simply didn't add up. When you had UEFA come out against the privatisation plan just yesterday, you had the spectacle where many big stars like Jude Bellingham, Kylian Mbappe wouldn't have been present at the next World Cup in 2030, which is being hosted, may I say, by Spain and Portugal, as well as Morocco. So it just wasn't workable. As soon as UEFA came out with that statement, this plan was already on the rocks, And we got the confirmation earlier this afternoon that investors had pulled out, leaving Infantino with really nowhere to go. James, tell us more about that. What did your sources tell you about how this collapsed, essentially?

3:32Indeed. So we spoke to many people across European soccer federations, Wall Street investors. This was really, as I've just said in my previous answer, a question of optics. no one would dispute that the game of football is all about making money we know that from the premier league we know that from the uefa champions league but the way that fifa went about it is what basically killed this deal dead on arrival the clubs the federations the fans it was just the global outcry against infantino's plan with may i say his own number two saying he wasn't even aware of it. It just left him really with no choice just to fold as he did in the statement that he released.

4:15I think the question now is what this means for Infantino's leadership of FIFA. Can he go on or will there be some kind of leadership challenge at the next presidential election? And what is the sense that you've been getting on that front as you've been speaking to different people about, you know, the level of confidence or discontent with his leadership in light of this? As you've seen from the statements that have come out from federations, this is almost universal. As I said in my first answer, you know, when UEFA came out with that statement that they weren't going to be present in the next 2030 World Cup, it was really already game over, I would say.

4:56You also had CONCACAF follow up with that saying, you know, even the US National Federation saying that this really wasn't what they were going to support. I don't know, frankly, based on my reporting, who could challenge Infantino at this point. But it's fair to say that his leadership is in crisis tonight. It's probably the darkest period in FIFA's 122-year history, given what's been going on. We'll have to see how this pans out, Helena. New York Post journalist James Franey. Now, for the latest on the growing clamour for stricter regulations on AI development, following further revelations that AI bots have acted autonomously.

5:33The boss of one of the companies recently hacked by an out-of-control bot says companies must be accountable for cyber attacks carried out by its creations. Hugging Face was breached two weeks ago by a rogue OpenAI bot that broke out of a test environment. His remarks come after Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude, also admitted that its bot had attacked three companies in similar circumstances in recent months. These recent developments have led to much soul-searching within the AI industry and calls from those high up within it, such as OpenAI boss Sam Altman, for tighter control. Callie Hayes is a BBC reporter based in San Francisco.

6:13I asked her whether there is now acceptance that new legislation may be needed. There is real concern. I think a huge part of it is the idea of future legal liability, of which there currently seems to be very little. But I do want to note that Sam Altman, as well as other tech luminaries and leaders of major AI companies, have long said, we welcome regulation, we would really like it, etc., etc. They very rarely put forth anything specific, and American lawmakers in particular almost never pick it up. It sounds nice that they would want regulation, but it just seems to never become a reality.

6:51And just remind us exactly of the details of this specific case. First of all, it was reported that it was only Hugging Face that was breached, but that's no longer the case, right? There's now several companies that had the same thing happen to them. Yeah, there are a couple of others. They tend to be, Hugging Face I think has gotten the most attention because it's the most notable. It's just a huge and very popular repository for information, especially in the tech industry. But a couple of other smaller companies, yes, had basically similar actions, which is a single or a mix of AI chatbots that OpenAI created were told to go and do something with very broad parameters.

7:32They were just basically given a task to complete, and they went about completing that in any way possible. They weren't given good parameters for what not to do. So they went ahead and broke down through like these technological walls in order to accomplish exactly what they were told to accomplish. So in a way, it's sort of like a compliment to OpenAI's prowess that its AI agents were able to do this. But then, of course, the real world implications are kind of quite scary. And essentially, no, because the genie's out the bottle, someone can repeat this, that would have nefarious motivations, if you like.

8:11And do you think that means that there is the chance that regulation might be coming sooner rather than later? I would love to say yes. It's kind of, you know, sooner in a realistic context is probably three to five years from now. So it seems like the AI tools that are scary now in three years or five years would be just that much more powerful. So I'm not quite sure how quickly regulation would come. But at the very least, I think at least in the United States, these voluntary schemes for testing that these companies are supposed to be doing with the United States government should be enforced.

8:52They should be happening. And I think that's like an easy first step for the government to not even really impose regulation, but just have some kind of knowledge about what is coming down the pike. But I mean, if like you take social media regulation as an example for, you know, a major tech company that is responsible for various things and people seem to understand that it's not so good. It's taken about 15 years for, you know, any kind of meaningful regulation to even be in a position to be approved, much less actually be made into law. Kelly Hayes in Silicon Valley. The World Meteorological Organization has warned the El Nino weather pattern is expected to intensify over the next three months, contributing to continued heat waves, drought and violent storms.

9:39The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said the effects of El Nino, combined with human-driven global warming, are causing apocalyptic conditions. Mark Poynting is our climate reporter. El Nino, just to remind people, that's a natural weather pattern that we see in the Pacific Ocean. It happens when the waters in the eastern tropical Pacific get unusually warm, and we see it every two to seven years. And what the World Meteorological Organization has said is, as you say, that a strong El Nino is developing. It's expected to strengthen over the coming months, potentially peaking towards the end of the year.

10:17And that's going to bring much warmer temperatures for many parts of the world and also disrupt rainfall patterns. So some really important regions such as northern South America or Australia and Southeast Asia, these are regions that often we see during El Nino have a greater risk of droughts and wildfires. Now, I think it's fair to say there are limits to how much some of these countries can get prepared. The Secretary General pointed to poorer countries often bearing the brunt of climate change, even though they've done little to cause it in the first place. But already we've seen some of the impacts that we typically see from an El Nino.

10:58So, for example, below average rainfall in the Indian monsoon. And what the UN hopes is that countries in parts of South America, Southeast Asia, where we're anticipating impacts over the coming months, that they'll take much greater steps to prepare. So things like preparing for wildfires, making sure that people are on hand to respond. Mark Pointing. While some humans struggle to get along, a new study has shown surprising friendships being formed between different species. The team at the University of Oxford found some pretty remarkable examples of animals that might normally be tempted to shun or even eat each other, choosing to be friends.

11:38The study was led by Dr Cyril Grunter. He spoke to Ben Wright. I think it all started when I was visiting a zoo in China. It was about 20 years ago and I was watching the gibbons.

11:53and I noticed that there was one gibbon who was carefully holding a little mouse in her hand and she was caressing the mouse. Then later on when I was doing field work in China for my PhD I was studying a group of monkeys in the forest and then I saw little monkeys jumping on the backs of domestic pigs.

12:17And then I started to realize that this behavior is actually more common than I thought. So we tried to get more information about this. And to our big surprise, we found more than 430 cases of primates interacting in a friendly way with other species. And there were even a few cases where primates would adopt a member of a different species. Well, take me through some of the most surprising encounters that you came across. In the Americas, we found one case where a capuchin monkey adopted a little marmoset monkey.

12:56These are different species. They belong to different groups of primates. And normally they would not interact socially with each other. Or there was a case of a macaque monkey who made friends with a chicken.

13:14Presumably that's because the macaque monkey was lonely and he was looking for a social partner. That's probably one of the reasons why this behaviour is quite common in captive situations or in a zoo environment when individuals don't have a play partner, for example. And what does that tell us about the emotional life of the animals and the species you've been looking at? In most cases, you know, these interactions are probably driven by curiosity. But sometimes I think there seems to be genuine care for the other species. There were a few cases where the two different species started interacting with each other and then the primate would become a little bit rough in the way it was handling the member of the other species.

13:55And in some cases that even resulted in death. The bigger picture of all of this is that we are trying to understand the line where non-humans and humans overlap or where they differ. And I think it just adds another example to the pool of examples we already have about how similar non-human primates are to humans in lots of different realms. Dr. Cyril Grutter.

14:23Still to come in this podcast. The rule was, of course, introduced to put more women into chat, so our argument is why are you now using that same rule to exclude women from the team and make us bring a male player on? Why does an all-female chess team have to recruit a man?

14:44Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Join host Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioural 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 make the choices we do and how to make better ones to help avoid costly mistakes. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen.

15:17Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parris.

15:51So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.

16:25in North Africa. The political and diplomatic fallout is rippling through Europe. Madrid says the vast majority of those who made it to Ceuta have now returned to Morocco. At least 57 people were killed. It's still not clear what led to these events, with some people questioning where all the Moroccan border guards were when so many migrants were crossing. I asked our former Morocco correspondent, Richard Hamilton, for his assessment. I spoke to a Moroccan friend who's a journalist in Casablanca and he was convinced that it was spontaneous and he said this all happened because about a month ago the Spanish Supreme Court ruled that if migrants who were trying to get into Theuta and Melilla by sea, if they were intercepted, they can't be taken back to Africa without a fair trial.

17:15And he thought that this had encouraged or incentivised migrants to try and get into Theuta. But I'm not convinced by that, because if you look at the footage, there's a sort of renter mob look about the people. It's a bit like, say, if you have a political rally in parts of Africa and thousands of people are bussed in to support that candidate. It's just something not very authentic about it. For a start, they don't look like sub-Saharan Africans. They look like Moroccans. Moroccans, and they left very quickly without much protest, saying, oh, we don't like it in Ceuta after all, which is a bit bizarre if you've gone to all that trouble, scale these big fences, swim for four hours around the coast.

17:57If you go into all that trouble and then you go back now voluntarily, it just seems a bit odd. That's not the normal thing that a migrant would do. They'd normally like set foot in Ceuta and then claim asylum in Europe. So I suspect that there's something going on and the Moroccan authorities, they may not have orchestrated it, but they've allowed it to happen to prove some sort of political point. And what could that be? Why would Moroccan authorities want to encourage this? What point could they be trying to make, do you think? So five years ago, there was a similar crisis. It wasn't on this same scale, but it was between 8 ,000 and 10 ,000 people got into Theuta.

18:36And at the time, Madrid had offered medical treatment to the leader of the Polisario, which is the independence movement for Western Sahara, which used to belong to Spain. And Morocco was very, very unhappy about that. And in order to make a diplomatic point, they sort of allowed all these migrants to come in. So I think something similar is happening. But because they haven't stated what it is, it's quite difficult to ascribe a motive. This whole event leaves Spain in a pretty tricky position, not just pressure from within Europe because it's not policed its borders correctly. But also it needs the support of Morocco.

19:13It's going to need some assistance from Morocco for these people to go back, right? Yeah, and they've had a very close relationship and they've managed to collaborate pretty well. And Madrid supports Rabat's plans for Western Sahara, which is basically to keep it as part of Morocco but give it some limited autonomy. So Spain has collaborated. They've collaborated on immigration. They're both going to be hosting, co-hosting the World Cup in 2030, along with Portugal. Spain and Morocco have a long history together. They get on pretty well. But Morocco tends to use immigration, tends to weaponise it in order to get something in return.

19:52But we're not quite clear what that is. Richard Hamilton. Archaeologists have discovered carved designs hidden in the dense Amazon rainforest, suggesting it was once home to a sprawling ancient civilisation before European conquest devastated indigenous societies. Our reporter, Anna Aslam, has been looking at the research. The team flew over the forest canopy near the borders of Bolivia, Brazil and Peru with laser scanning technology, and they found nearly 400 geometric shapes carved into the ground with ditches, mounds and connecting roads. Most of the geoglyphs span seven acres, and some are more than 2 ,500 years old.

20:30Their purpose remains a mystery. The lead researcher believes they could have been used for occasions like political ceremonies, music festivals and sports competitions. The team calculated that to create and maintain these earthworks, up to 3 million people could have lived in the 3 % of the Amazon they examined. This suggests the ancient Akiri civilization was larger than previously thought. The scale is surprising given the community developed far from major rivers, which historically supported large settlements. And it's estimated that these indigenous people lived in the Amazon more than a millennium before the Spanish and Portuguese arrived.

21:06Now, while the rainforest has long been thought of as pristine wilderness, there is mounting evidence that the Amazon was densely populated by indigenous societies that were largely lost after colonization due to diseases, forced assimilation and exploitation. Ana Aslam. Attendees at a global AIDS conference in Brazil this week were confused when US officials presented a map of Africa with countries in the wrong place. The US State Department has now owned up to the error and said it takes full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation caused. Shama Khalil reports from Washington.

21:43According to the State Department map, Nigeria, where the US currently has several hundred troops deployed, appeared to be landlocked in the Sahara Desert. Mozambique, which is in southeast Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Ivory Coast in the west was placed on the other side of the continent. The map also included the completely unrecognizable shapes of six misidentified countries. The State Department described it as an unfortunate error caused when a team member had hurriedly altered the slides. But the Democratic Senator Jean Shaheen said the incident was an embarrassment, adding, this is what happens when the State Department fires career experts and tries to have AI conduct diplomacy.

22:22Despite the controversy, the State Department said discussions of the conference had been substantive and constructive and reaffirmed its commitment in combating HIV-AIDS in Africa and elsewhere. Shama Khalil. Earlier this week, Washington announced that it was banning foreign-made humanoid robot imports to the US over what the Trump administration described as unacceptable risks to America's national security. The news might come as a blow to China, as it's a leading manufacturer in the field. China is also a world beater in warehouse robotics. Its leading company is called Geek Plus. One of its main products is a squat floor robot that glides beneath storage racks, lifts them up and carries them across warehouses to waiting workers.

23:07Our correspondent, Surinjana Tawari, travelled to eastern China to see them in action. This is the headquarters of Geek Plus in the eastern Chinese city of Hafei. The company has become the world's largest supplier of autonomous mobile warehouse robots, with customers including Decathlon, Tesco and Walmart. The robots don't follow rails or conveyor belts. Instead, they navigate using cameras, sensors and QR codes stuck to the warehouse floor. Yan Yu Liu is head of communications for Geek Plus. At the early stage, the challenge is to have the customers to recognize and believe those kind of robot technologies can real create values.