Houthis in Yemen target Saudi oil exports

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1:13I'm Alex Ritson and at 15 hours GMT on Thursday the 23rd of July, these are our main stories. Global oil prices spike after Houthi rebels in Yemen say they attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. now a new danger area, along with the Strait of Hormuz. India's Narendra Modi promises to punish corrupt officials involved in leaking exam papers, but it may not be enough to quell widespread angry protests against the government. Raids on independent bookstores in Hong Kong make I am a bookstore employee into a growing protest slogan. Also in this podcast... The goal has always been we need to match the defence.

1:59And so you need to have on the other side roughly the same amount of defence. We hear from the boss of the company that was on the receiving end of an unprecedented AI hack.

2:14We begin in the Middle East. As the US and Iran continue exchanging strikes, yet another front in this broad conflict has opened up in Yemen. On Monday, the Iran-backed Houthis announced what they're calling a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia and the Red Sea in retaliation for a Saudi blockade of their own ports in Yemen. Now, the Houthis say they've hit two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea. The Saudi news agency has so far confirmed that one tanker was hit and that there was a fire on board. Our international editor, Jeremy Bowen, told us about the significance of the Houthi blockade. The Houthis have their own disputes with the Saudis.

2:56And the way to think about them really is an ally of Iran rather than a proxy because they're very independent minded. But one thing that they have not been doing of late until now is blocking the very strategic Bab al-Mandab, which is the narrow strait at the bottom of the Red Sea. They did that during the Gaza war to quite some effect. Now, this is significant for the Saudis because the Saudis, because they can't get their oil out through Strait of Hormuz because Iran blocks it, have been pumping a lot of it in their east-west pipeline to a Red Sea port and exporting it that way. So for the Saudis, this is quite serious economic damage, potentially, if it goes on.

3:42And it's the case that the Saudis have a lot of military plans in place. and they certainly have been discussing the prospects of going back to war with the Houthis as a result of this. And of course, Donald Trump himself has said that the Americans could get involved. So this is another way in which the decision to go to war with Iran, taken by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu on the 28th of February, how that is spreading war across the region potentially. Jeremy Bowen. And since the Houthi strikes, oil and gas prices have shot up. Ben King is from our business unit. Well, the rise in price is undoubtedly significant.

4:23Just a few minutes ago, the Brent crude oil price benchmark went above$99 a barrel. That's the highest level we've seen since early June. Gas prices in Europe and Asia have also been rising steadily. The European gas prices at its highest since March. And so, understandably, that's a factor of great concern. And if you look, that's here in the UK, for instance, already feeding through to petrol prices. Petrol prices on the forecourts here in the UK have been rising too. So that is going to have an economic effect. And I think if it continues, central banks will have to look at how they adjust their interest rates to control any inflationary results of these higher prices.

5:06How important is this shipping lane, particularly given the near closure of the strata formu? Can tankers still get through? Yeah, it's a very significant lifeline. The Saudis have been able to export about 5 million barrels a day from the port of Yanbu. Obviously, the Asian markets are very important and the most direct route to Asia is to go south past the Yemen. If that's no longer possible, crude tankers can still get through the Suez Canal. and go around the long way around Africa. But the capacity of that will be limited. And that adds a month to the journey. So it won't completely block that route, but it will restrict it.

5:47That will have an effect on the global oil market. And that will result in higher prices. The Saudis furious then? I'm sure they must be. Yes. You know, so far, this has only been two ships that have been targeted, but I'm sure it will be a serious concern for them. And indeed, for anyone in Asia and in Europe looking to depend on that Saudi supply of crude. And presumably, whatever happens, even if both shipping lanes were to reopen tomorrow, in some ways the damage is now done. That's right. Even if peace were to break out tomorrow, still many of those oil fields which have had to cease production because there's nowhere to put the oil they produce would take a while to get back into action.

6:28The Qatari natural gas plants, which are absolutely crucial for world gas supplies, will take a long time to get back up running. Also, some of them appear to have been damaged in the earlier attacks. So it will certainly take a while for the world energy markets to return to normal, even if peace does break out. And frankly, there's no sign that that's going to happen anytime soon. Our business reporter Ben King. To the Indian capital now, where anti-government protests are continuing and growing.

7:05Victory to Mother India. The police will not silence us. Just one of the defiant chants coming from the protesters. Many of them are students demanding action over the leak of exam papers, which meant tests had to be resat. They now want a total overhaul of the education and employment sectors. Earlier this week, police used batons to try to break up the marches. But thousands of people have been out on the streets again on Thursday. We have come here for education reform, to protest, protest peacefully, and we will stay here until the education minister resigns. It's becoming common to see placards calling for the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to resign too.

7:47It appears to be one of the biggest challenges to his power since he took office 12 years ago. He now says fast-track courts will be set up to deliver, as he puts it, swift and stringent punishment to those responsible for the exam leaks. and he's once again said he's ready to talk to the leaders of the protest. So will those words be enough to calm the mood? Our correspondent in Delhi, Arunade Mukherjee, went to the protests on Thursday. We're now seeing these comments coming out of the Prime Minister, which certainly gives you a sense that there is a worry there. And he's essentially again trying to talk to the students, saying that nothing is more important than the welfare and the future of our youth.

8:26He's talked about directing concerned authorities to take necessary steps. But when we spoke to the protesters that, look, this is what the prime minister is saying, what do you have to say? They said, these are just words. They don't mean anything. Until we see the resignation of India's federal education minister, Mr. Dharmendra Pradhan, we're not budging. So they're very clear that this kind of lip service that they feel the politicians are paying is not enough. It's time for action. And this is something that they need to do to hold the government accountable. Yes, because this started with protests over the leak of the medical entrance exam papers.

9:03But it feels as though this has become much, much bigger and the issues now are much, much wider. That's right. I mean, that still remains at the core of their protest. That is what they're talking about. But essentially, the larger demand is for reforms in India's education system and employment system. They're saying we need to root out corruption. We need to fix broken systems to ensure that students get a fair chance who are coming out into the job market, into the education market. They need to ensure that the systems are fixed, where these students, after their grade 12, they are preparing for these very competitive exams, and then if a paper gets leaked, an entire year of preparation goes in waste.

9:38Briefly, how perilous a moment is this for Mr Modi? Look, this is a prime minister who's really been a strong political leader, given the kind of mass support he's built, and that is indicative of the number of elections he's continued to win. But this kind of public dissent that we're seeing on the streets of Delhi, you've got to look at the optics here. This is the capital city of India. You're close to the parliament. You're close to all the ministers, residences, their offices, where you have these mass sort of movements of people and youth. That really is the first time we're seeing this level of dissent against this government.

10:13And this definitely could have a political fallout, which the BJP would be a bit concerned with because we're talking about the youth. So they would be very cautious going forward, which is also why you're seeing these attempts at kind of reaching out to the students through posts on social media. And it remains to be seen what else the government tries to do at the moment. Arunade Mukherjee in Delhi. In a previous edition of the Global News podcast, we covered a story about the tech company OpenAI, which revealed that its advanced artificial intelligence systems had gone rogue and hacked another AI company to steal information it needed to pass an eternal evaluation.

10:53The AI agents targeted one of the world's largest hubs for sharing AI models known as Hugging Face. My colleague Rob Young spoke to Thomas Wolfe, the co-founder of Hugging Face. What did he make of this cyber attack? When it took place roughly 10 days ago, started on the weekend before, past weekend, we were still able to rather quickly identify and stop the progression of the attacker. At that time, we had no idea if it was a human hacker, we had no idea if it was an AI and what the attacker was looking for, basically. And so now you know that it was an AI autonomous attack, an AI system that had decided to attack yours.

11:33What do you make of that? Are you impressed? Are you wowed by the sophistication of it or are you unnerved by it? You have to know we're really very visible in the AI world, right? And so we are really a regular source for human hackers to attack. And this, for the first time, was a very different type of traces. We had like very short time, 17 ,000 events coming for Vius IP and focusing on one of the things that I would say human attackers don't really tackle so much, which is the data set and the place where we store private evals, right? So I think the first thing for us is it helped us understand what happened when OpenAI reached out and said, hey, this was actually our model.

12:14But the second thing is I expect this to become just more frequent in the future, right? This is going to be one of the most common type of cyber attack we'll see. On the positive side, what we saw is the defense that we use, which is based on open source model. You just have to be able to use them fast to deploy them, because when an attacker starts to be inside your infrastructure, it's a matter of reacting. But just to be clear what you're saying there, you are saying that as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, and it appears to be getting more sophisticated almost by the week, these kind of attacks where companies' data is infiltrated, stolen, is just going to become more commonplace.

12:55And so is it the case then that no data is actually safe if it is held on a computer? To be honest, cybersecurity is just a regular development, right? We've increasingly had more and more complex tools that enable hackers to attack more and more complex systems. And the goal has always been we need to match the defense. And so you need to have on the other side roughly the same amount of defense. The main problem right now is some of these models are closed source, so you need to apply for access. And so you don't really have time when you're under attack to go and basically apply for a vetoed access.

13:34So for us, we were fortunate that we know and we use regularly open source models that you can freely download. So we had a lot of defense. That's something that more and more companies will need to have as part of their regular cybersecurity toolbox. And what is your experience of how well defended many companies, many public institutions actually are from this new breed of cyber attack? Yeah, I think it's also a wake-up call, right? Thomas Wolfe speaking to Rob Young. In Hong Kong, independent publishing has come under attack after raids and arrests at two bookstores last week. But there's been a response in the form of a slogan.

14:14I am a bookstore employee which is being shared by booksellers, politicians and activists. The raids are part of the continuing campaign to crush free speech and dissent in Hong Kong. Our correspondent Stephen McDonnell is in Beijing. You can't protest in Hong Kong really. To give you an example, even if you were busking and you sang a song that the government didn't like, well you could find yourself thrown in prison. And the latest hotspot has been bookshops because they were holding out against the broad crackdowns going on by just selling certain books. And now five people have been arrested in two different bookshops over the last week.

14:56Just the third time in recent months that bookshops have been raided. And it's these little independent bookshops. shops. So bookshop chains are more easy to be contained, if you like, because they're putting their book orders through the censors in Hong Kong and making sure they're not putting books up on the shelves that the government doesn't like. And there are a number of people, presumably quite brave people, who are now walking around the city wearing t-shirts saying an innocuous slogan, I am a bookstore employee. Yeah, well, what happened is that there's a photo of one of the staff of one of these bookshops being taken out of the bookshop, hands behind her back, but looking quite defiant and wearing a black t-shirt with the writing, I'm a bookshop employee.

15:45I mean, in Mandarin, it would be, and it has become a bit of a meme online, especially in Taiwan, which is now the remaining place in the Chinese-speaking world, which has these freedoms. And people in Taiwan on social media have been spreading this sort of slogan around. And actually, another spinoff of this has been the sales of a particular book. These independent bookshops that have been raided are said to have been guilty of selling so-called seditious books. Police in Hong Kong haven't said which books, but there's been widespread speculation that one particular book entitled Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China.

16:33Now, this is a book by Emily Fong. As a result of the news that it's that book that's gotten these bookshops into trouble, in Taiwan, sales of this book have gone through the roof, and the publishers had to publish 10 ,000 extra copies this week. And how do people feel in Hong Kong, more widely in China, about the restrictions that they live under? Well, you know, the thing is that in mainland China, people have been used to this for some time. But in Hong Kong, it's a huge change. Before 2019, there were protests all the time there. I went there. We'd regularly cover the candlelight vigil. I went to the last one, the final candlelight vigil, marking the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

17:18Now, the idea that you could have a candlelight vigil in that city now, marking Tiananmen Square, is just unthinkable. So the city has completely changed. Stephen MacDonald. Still to come in this podcast. Scientists are telling me that is where the mechanism camels have breaks down. That makes them very weak. So heat waves are cleaning so many camels now. How extreme temperatures are making it too hot even for camels in parts of Africa.

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21:01Mauritania say the boat left the Gambia and drifted for several days before their coast guard was able to reach it and rescue 36 people. The United Nations says the route to Spain's Canary Islands is one of the world's deadliest. Rob Young spoke to Ali Nuerhead, the head of the field office for the UN's refugee agency in Mauritania. As you reported, more than 140 refugees and migrants are reported dead or missing last week. and actually they were all on one boat with the size of a school bus. It's a bit larger than that, but almost sized like a school bus. They left the Gambia, hoping to reach Spain, but had drifted in the Atlantic for nearly 25 days and only 36 people have survived.

21:48The latest information that we have last night, as my team and I were following the situation, we received reports from local fishers that additional bodies were still being covered at sea. Unfortunately, this is a painful reminder that even with all the efforts of coastal authorities, humanitarian partners to save lives, the Atlantic routes remains one of the deadliest crossing in the world. That's quite unfortunate. And so is your assumption then that when the boat set off, it just didn't have enough fuel to make that journey to the Canary Islands? Well, this is definitely the main reasons based on the accounts or testimonies of the survivors.

22:28But actually, there is as well another reason behind that as well is the lack of food. This is as well another reason. So that's why people, based on what they told us, they started drinking water from the sea. So this is unfortunately just aggravated the whole situation. And among the survivors, there were children, there were women. I still remember, actually, that's quite striking to see two children trembling, being helped out of the boat. they were the only ones left of the families. Everyone they had set out with was gone. And what do you know of the 140 who are missing, feared, dead? Unfortunately, we have very limited information about them, but we do know they are from multiple, from various nationalities, mainly Senegalese, Gambian, Malians.

23:19The reason, yeah, unfortunately, we don't have a lot of information about that. but the latest one that the bodies are still being recovered until now, even after one week of the incident. Ali Nuihead from the UN's Refugee Agency. To Southeast Europe, where Albanian police have used tear gas and water cannon against protesters outside parliament. It's the latest confrontation over a tourism project linked to President Trump's family. Scientists and activists say the project to build luxury hotels has already caused irreparable damage to a once pristine coast. The protests have now been going on for more than 50 days.

23:59The protesters are calling for the Prime Minister, Eddie Rama, to resign. Emilio Cricchio has this report from Tirano.

24:14This has been the sound in the streets of Tirana every evening for the past two months. Protesters gather outside the offices of the embattled Prime Minister, Eddie Rama, and then march throughout the various neighbourhoods in the city. No more dictatorship, they shout. This is the final battle, Rama to prison.

24:40What originally sparked over-environmental concerns around a proposed luxury resort project, backed by Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has evolved into a wider movement against corruption, democratic backsliding, and calling for the resignation of the Prime Minister and his government. I'm here, I'm protesting against the government, our land has been sold, our hospitals, we have no medicine, our government's corrupt, Albania has been suffering so many years. We're here for the people, for the country. We need a new government. We need to bring this government down. Arlind Kori is the head of one of the parliamentary opposition parties backing the protests.

25:19One of the main and most important slogans of this protest has been Albania is not for sale. And it's also a message to the international community, the US but also in the European Union, which means that, of course, Albania is eager to become part of the European Union and Albania needs its international partners, but we also need respect. We need to be treated as equals and we need that our, for example, EU accession process be delivered on basis of merit and on basis of real democratising reforms and not only as a geopolitical gift to our corrupt politicians. Prime Minister Edi Rama is so far refusing to resign and says the protests are a sign of a healthy democracy.

26:06Gressa Hassa, a researcher at the Faculty of Law and Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, explains, however, that this is the most pressure he has been under throughout his 13 years of rule. What we're seeing since two months now is an accumulated anger of 35 years. Albania emerged from one of the harshest communist dictatorships in the Eastern Bloc and what replaced that dictatorship during these 35 years has been just different forms of semi-autocracies and people have had enough of that. Though it is yet to be seen whether these protests can actually bring about governmental change, they are certainly the centre of political attention in the country now and there is a sense that the coming weeks and months will be consequential for the country's future.