Germans vote in state elections

25:07Another voter, an older man, told me he'd also heard the explosions. He said he wanted peace, but by peace he meant Ukraine's defeat. and certainly I think President Putin is using this parliamentary election that finishes today and will use the results of it to try to show that Russians are united behind his policies, behind the so-called special military operations to sort of give him a renewed mandate if you like to continue with the war. I saw that the mayor of Moscow had also said that the attacks were an attempt to disrupt those parliamentary elections but I mean it's not going to make any difference really to the outcome.

25:52No no one is holding their breath here about the results you know keep in mind that the whole political system in Russia is very tightly controlled by the Kremlin that has been the case for many years now and so the party of power here united Russia the party that is backed by President Putin, is expected to be the largest party in the new parliament, as it is now. And if you look back at previous parliaments, previous doomers, you see that the other parties that get into the parliament tend to back the Kremlin too, back the Kremlin's key initiatives, and as far as the last parliament's concerned, back the war in Ukraine.

26:34And just very briefly, I mean, how does the sort of choreography of the results, how will that be playing out?

26:43well the authorities will you know once the polls have closed and the count has begun uh results will start coming in from across the country but as i say no surprises are expected yeah steve thank you very much indeed that was the bbc's russia editor joining us live there from moscow you're listening to news app

27:18This is the BBC World Service in London. You're listening to NewsHour and I'm James Menendez. Let's head to Scotland now. I'm growing concerned there about the influx of powerful and very dangerous new synthetic drugs. Scotland has the highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe and those involved in trying to bring that number down and to combat addiction say the new substances are making that even harder to do. The new annual figures are due out on Wednesday and they're expected to show the number of fatal overdoses going up. Let's speak to Niamh Nick-Dade, who's a forensic scientist at the University of Dundee and joins us on the line.

27:53Niamh, very good to have you with us. What sort of substances are we talking about? Thank you for having me on. We're talking about a new type of synthetic opioids. opioids. That's an opioid drug that is man-made essentially, which are known or called nitazines. And we've seen over the last couple of years the prevalence of these compounds in the drug supply, I suppose you would call it, within Scotland on the increase. And why are they so dangerous? They're so dangerous because they're very potent. They're somewhere in the region of about 500 times stronger than heroin and as a consequence when they're included in other types of street drugs like benzodiazepines or indeed heroin itself only a very small amount can lead to a fatality.

28:45And so they are mixed in with other drugs and then users don't know what they're taking. That's exactly the issue James and the challenge here that we have is being able to educate the drug using population across Scotland to say that actually what you think you're taking might include things that you're not aware of and that have a much greater risk to life. And are these substances, are they being made in Scotland or are they being imported, you know? There is some evidence now to suggest that nitizens may be being produced in Scotland themselves. Certainly in the past, they have been imported in as part of the heroin samples or whatever they might be coming into the country.

29:30And you're going to be testing some of what is around. Just explain how that will help. Absolutely. As part of Scottish government's, the previous government's national mission, they provided funding in order to try to address the drug death issue in Scotland because of its severity. And part of that work has been the establishment of four point of care testing sites. So those are establishments out in the community in the four cities in Scotland, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee, where people who take substances can have those substances presumptively tested. And by that I mean it gives some indication of what compounds might be present.

30:15The samples that are tested in the point of care facilities will then be sent to my laboratory at the University of Dundee for confirmatory chemical analysis. So we will be doing what we call a back of house confirmatory analysis of what is contained within these pills, potions, powders. And the purpose of that is to try to give as close to real time information across the country as to what sorts of drugs are circulating and whether or not these drugs contain compounds like nitazine or indeed others. And does it work? Do people, do users come forward and say, look, I'm about to take this, can you just make sure it's not going to kill me?

30:55Well, we're hoping it will work. It's not yet established. We're doing all of the work in the background to get this drug testing sort of network established this year. And so there's a lot of work, as you can imagine, that goes in behind the scenes to ensuring that everything is ready to go. But we're certainly getting there now at some pace. And in terms of stopping the synthetic substances getting into the drug supply chain, I mean, is that, from your point of view, is that that's a role for law enforcement, is it? It is, absolutely. And I think that one of the things that we have to our benefit in Scotland is that we're a relatively small country.

31:36And all of the agencies are working together, whether it's law enforcement, third sector, public health and indeed us from the academic side. So we all are working together in an attempt to understand the types of substances that are in use across our communities so that we can put in place both harm reduction information rapidly out into the drug-using community, but also that we can understand what sorts of compounds are coming into the country, which is really critical for law enforcement. Thank you very much indeed. That was Niamh Nick-Dade, forensic scientist at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

32:22Ukraine's language and culture have been brought into much sharper focus since Russia's full-scale invasion of 2022. And among those at the forefront of Ukrainian literature is Archer Drom. He joined the army at the start of the war at the age of 22 and fought until he was injured two years later. During lulls in the fighting, he composed a book of poetry, We Were Here, which was published to great acclaim. His first book of prose, Hemingway Knows Nothing, became an instant bestseller in Ukraine. Well, the book's now been published in English, and Artur told my colleague Julian Warwicker why he'd chosen that title, Hemingway Knows Nothing.

32:58Because he lived in different times, and his surname in the title is like an image of our greatest literature, anti-war literature of 20th century. And what I'm trying to say is that we cannot talk about modern Russian-Ukrainian war through their wars, through their points of view. We cannot use, for example, their narratives because it's totally different times, totally different nature of war. We should invite our own language to talk about it. And it doesn't mean that there is some problem with Hemingway or someone else. No, it's a problem with us if we will read about their words and try by these words explain what is going on in Ukraine right now.

33:50It is unrelatable in many ways and also it can be even harmful. People who are listening to this will perhaps assume that the book is therefore quite bleep. But I was also struck by the fact that throughout the book, there is a theme of love emerging. In fact, I think there was a quote from you in an interview, the most basic dimension of the human experience of war is love. What are you getting at? When we are thinking about war, we are trying to talk about some geopolitical things, to talk about territories, to talk about cities, presidents, about very high geopolitical terms. But it is actually not what this war is about.

34:37It's about one family, one mother who let her son every day to school and she doesn't know if he will come back from that school or Russian rocket will have it as its target. It is about a vegetable seller from Kherson who we saw one month ago on a video clip where a Russian FPV drone found him and was trying to kill him while he was selling vegetables in Kherson. It's like what we call existential war. It's a question of to live or to die. It's not about territories. It's not about Putin's regime or something. It's about Ukrainians not to exist. And this is a crucial thing. So when I was writing my book, I was trying to talk about these things, very personal side of the war.

35:34Talk to me about prose and poetry, because we're talking about a book of prose, yet you've written poetry about the war as well. What determines when something requires a poetic approach and when something is more akin to prose? Poetry is the most relatable kind of literature for soldiers because it doesn't need very specific conditions to write it. It's like quick emotional reaction on something. You can write it even just in your head without anything. And prose already needs different conditions. In general, I wrote this book after I was wounded, when I was in my rehabilitation period in Lviv.

36:17So I have this opportunity to think more, to put in one text many different sides of what I want to tell about. Like it's different, different conditions. That was Artur Dron talking there to my colleague Julian Warwicker. Now the British pop star Ed Sheeran's apologised to fans for making mistakes in his handling of a row over free speech during his world tour. He was speaking at his first show since one of his support acts, the American rapper Macklemore, was dropped from the tour over pro-Palestinian comments. Sheeran, who's produced some of the world's most streamed songs, insists it wasn't his decision to drop Macklemore and has tried to avoid being drawn into the fraught debate over the Middle East.

37:00But he was left with little choice after the withdrawal of his other support acts and they threatened the whole tour. And so alone on stage at Philadelphia's Lincoln Financial Field Stadium on Saturday night, he had this to say. What happened in Israel and at the No Music Festival on October 7th was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain. what is happening in gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate my heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilians lives of children's lives and the systemic injustice we're seeing unfold in the west bank cannot be overlooked well bridget goes was there and joins me now from south jersey bridget thanks very much for being with us how did the crowd react to that how did you react um i i was just trying to listen and like record because i wanted to get a good video the crowd was mixed reactions it's philadelphia and philly is going to make itself known there was people laughing there was people booing at certain points i think somebody shouted just get on with it some people didn't want to hear the speech some people were cheering at certain points it was very mixed reactions.

38:15I mean, listening back to it now and or watching your videos, what do you think? I mean, it sounds pretty scripted, doesn't it? Of course, it's scripted. I wouldn't have expected anything else. I think people are upset that he read from a teleprompter, but I don't see a big deal. I think that it's okay with him preparing a statement and not wanting to stumble over his words and make sure that he does say the right thing and doesn't flub up. Yeah. I think your boyfriend brought the tickets to the concert I mean was were you were always going to go or had you thought about perhaps not going oh I completely thought about not going my boyfriend told me I don't care about the money we bought them so long ago if you don't want to go we don't have to go we'll go we'll go out to dinner or something so I wasn't going to go but then I was like well who is going to go and who's going to go and actually talk about what's going on wow they're at the concert because if I was anywhere else in the world I'd be dying to know what was going on inside um and and how did it play out after that I mean then did it just become a the usual sort of Ed Sheeran music concert yeah it became a there was more energy though like I've been to a lot of concerts I've been to Harry Styles at his last show Madison Square Garden it felt like that energy like there was it was very very high energy and like people were hanging on to every word he said he even made a comment about how the noise level was so up and down because every time he talked, it got so quiet because people wanted to hear what he was going to speak about.

39:43And just in a sentence or two, I mean, do you think this is going to go away for him now or not? No, not at all. This will never go away for the rest of his life. He's going to have to deal with this, unfortunately for him. Bridget, thank you very much indeed for joining us. That was Bridget Goese, who was at that Ed Sheeran concert in Philadelphia, now back in South Jersey. You're listening to News Out from the BBC.

40:16This is James Menendez with News Hour live from the BBC in London. With all the talk recently about AI's possible threat to humanity, it's easy to forget the other profound questions the technology poses for our future, and in particular its impact on jobs and education. What's the point of training to do a job that may not exist in 10 years? What's the point of learning if a machine can tell us what the answer is? Well, even computer scientists aren't immune with AI models now writing their own code. Well, if you're a parent, it's especially worrying. How do we equip the next generation with the skills to navigate the new AI era?

40:51It's a question the economist and AI ethicist, Professor Daniel Suskin, has been grappling with in his new book. It's called What Should My Children Do? When Daniel came into the NewsHour studio earlier, I began by asking him what he worried about when it came to his own children's future. There's sort of two sets of worries. I mean, one is that this is just the water in which the next generation are going to swim. Their lives are going to be saturated by technologies that are far more capable than those that exist today. And bluntly, we're letting down the next generation if we don't prepare them for that world.

41:26But there's also another, and this runs through the book, there's also another view, which is it just seems so unimaginative not to. And what I'm trying to do in the book is show how we might use these technologies to help the next generation understand ideas, solve problems, even make discoveries that might not have been possible in the past. And I think there is a sense of hope and excitement and optimism as well about these technologies too that I think is important not to lose. And throughout, you emphasize the need still for children to learn the basics. Absolutely right. And yeah, it's really one of the starting points of the book, which is we've got to get back to basics, literacy, numeracy, critical thinking.

42:13Those basic skills are going to be incredibly important, incredibly important for two reasons. One, because any advanced skills that do turn out to matter are going to rely on those basics. You know, they're basics, not only in the sense that they're the simplest, but they're also the fundamentals, the building blocks for everything else. But there's also, I think, something important as well, which is that these technologies are not perfect and they're not going to be perfect for some time. They exhibit biases, they make mistakes, they hallucinate. And actually to tell the difference between when they are behaving wonderfully and when they're behaving awfully is not trivial.

42:46And we need to keep those basics, in particular our critical faculty sharp, to always be sort of testing and interrogating and pushing back on them. So the sort of analog skills and the digital skills can exist side by side. I mean, you talk about a nice example about when calculators came along. Just tell us a bit more about that, because in a way, that was a sort of that provoked a similar scare, didn't it? Exactly right. I think one of the most important tensions that we face is, well, look, Daniel, you say we ought to be spending a third of our time teaching young people to use these technologies, but doesn't using these technologies undermine those basics?

43:20You know, why bother learning to do long division if, you know, one of these systems can do a hard calculation for you? Why take the time to learn the discipline of sitting with a difficult text if you can ask one of these systems a question and it will give you an answer in a matter of seconds? And what I find really assuring is that we've actually been here before, exactly as you say, late 1970s, early 1980s, the electronic calculator arrives. what at that time was an extraordinarily powerful technology. And people worried in exactly the same way, oh my gosh, what's going to happen to arithmetic?

43:58And what happened, which was really interesting in the UK, was that the British government asked this relatively obscure academic, a man called Wilfred Halliday Cockroft, who was a professor at the University of Hull, to do a report into the state of mathematics education in the UK and wrote this vast report. There's this amazing chapter in it where he thinks about the response to the electronic calculator. And part of it's just really realistic. He says, look, we've just got to assume that by the end of the decade, everyone is going to have access to one of these calculators, which for us today just seems completely obvious.

44:33But, you know, back then that was a sort of that was realism. But there was also this really radical idea he had, which was he said, we need to take maths education and divide it cleanly in two. and we need to spend part of our time teaching people to use this calculator to do stuff that would have been unimaginable before but we also need to protect some of their time doing calculations without this machine to hand and crucially he said we've got to test both and you know anyone really who's been through maths education over the last few decades would have studied for a calculator paper and a non-calculator paper and i think we've got to do something similar with ai now.

45:11And in a similar bent, another sort of more optimistic example you give is that computers can play better chess than anybody else in the world now. And yet people are still playing chess. And in fact, it's growing in popularity. That's right. So there's this amazing moment in 1997, when Garry Kasparov famously loses to Deep Blue. And he has this sort of existential panic where he thinks, oh my gosh, what does this mean for the future of chess? What does this mean for the future of this game I love so much? Is anyone going to play it if these machines are so much better and as you say fast forward to today and chess is more popular than ever more people are playing online more people are signing up for clubs and it turns out that what we value in the game of chess is not simply the moves on the board but the very fact that it is a human being making those moves and i think you know that there is there's a useful insight for thinking about many areas of our working lives where it's not simply what human beings achieve in their jobs that we value, but the very fact that it's a human being doing the job that we value.

46:14And you can see, you know, in certain healthcare settings, however good a system might get at muttering the right words into someone's ear at the end of their life, it might matter to us that it's always a flesh and blood hand sitting there holding us. I think the challenge, though, is not to overestimate the value that people attach to process. Like, you know, talking to a group of accountants, one of them stood up and said, look, Daniel, you don't understand. The reason my clients come to me is for the personal touch. And I said, well, that isn't why they come to you. They come because they want their taxes done efficiently and effectively.

46:43Exactly. And if they can find another way to do it that doesn't use you, then they're probably going to go with that. So it's not always the case that that holds, but I think in many cases it does. So to sort of bring it around to the debate that has just, you know, really gathered ahead of steam this week. I mean, does that mean you don't believe that AI and if it reaches this level of artificial general intelligence, if that happens, that it poses some sort of existential threat to humanity. Will we naturally resist that, do you think? I think it would be surprising if this technology, the most consequential, most important technology we've ever built, didn't have two faces, didn't have an extraordinary promise and also a price.

47:23I mean, it's been true of all the most important technologies of the last hundred years. Nuclear is the great example. Nuclear weapons on the one hand, terrible. nuclear power on the other, extraordinary, the promise of resolving the environmental challenges. And so what we have always had to do with our technologies is constrain those risks, manage them, regulate them while trying to take advantage of the benefits. And that was the economist and AI ethicist Professor Daniel Suskin talking to me about his new book, What Should My Children Do? about how they should navigate the AI future. And that is it for this edition of news hour from me and the rest of the team thanks so much for being with us until the next time bye-bye

48:18can politicians improve our economic fortunes dave ramsey says no i'm tristan redmond from The Global Story, and I've been speaking to the massively popular U.S. money guru who says if there's a financial crisis, it's on us. When you borrow on credit cards and take out a$1 ,200 car payment on a freaking Range Rover, you've destroyed your life, not the president. For the full interview, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you listen.