How could El Niño affect us?

25:27If you've followed the band, there's always been little hints. A lot of guys in my line of business, they develop drug addictions, and I got a country addiction. The album was inspired by Brandon's return to his hometown in Utah and the memories of his childhood that that prompted. At first I was a little bit like an adolescent, I think. But now it's just, we're really fortunate that we were able to raise the kids in Utah and, you know, I would take them to the park where my dad taught me to ride a bike.

26:07The seasons did have a big impact on me, and it's actually crept its way into quite a bit of the songwriting.

26:19The album's also full of personal reflections. In one song, Brandon imagines meeting Elvis Presley and asking him, is the fame and the fortune really worth it? That's maybe the most weirdly poignant moment on the record. When he laughs when I ask him if it was all worth it. Because that's just something that I'm letting you in on maybe more about myself, you know, than on any other song I think that I've ever written. Is it all worth it? I don't know. You know, my dad didn't have anything like that. But I think, is he less happy than me? Or more? He may be more happy than I am. And he made$25 ,000 a year, you know, and barely got by.

26:56But he's 82 and he paints and goes to garage sales and he's like pumped for that. He's pumped for it. Yeah, I don't know if it's worth it. I don't know anymore.

27:09That fame can all be traced back to this song.

27:16Mr. Brightside, written in 2001, propelled the killers to the top of the bill at festivals like Reading, Leeds and Glastonbury. It's now the longest running entry ever in the UK singles chart, with 519 weeks in the top 100. Do you still get a thrill when the audience sings every word back to you? There's an enthusiasm, obviously, and you know that some of these people might be their first time hearing it. And so that just doesn't get old.

27:56And there we are, Brandon Flowers of The Killers, speaking there to Mark Savage.

28:10The family of Pakistan's jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan say they remain concerned about his health, despite him being declared medically fit after a short hospital visit. The background to this is that the Supreme Court in Pakistan said Imran Khan should get a check-up at a specific hospital, but he was then taken to a different one. The army says he's been checked and is receiving appropriate treatment. Supporters of Imran Khan are not convinced. Zulfi Bukhari is an advisor to Imran Khan based in London. What can he tell us about Imran Khan's medical condition? Previously, he had lost vision in one eye, close to about 85%, we believe.

28:50that that's bettered a little bit, but not entirely. But at the same time, he's never had blood pressure issues or anything of the sort, but he keeps getting regular high blood pressure, anxiety, palpitations. And in the medical report, it says it's due to constant isolation. And he's in complete solitary. And that's causing serious issues to his health as well. He's had no contact with the outside world, totally against Mandela rules. and it's a total violation of all prisoners rules of all human rights. So, I mean, the army says or the authorities say that he does get some access from family that one of his sisters, I think, was in the hospital to observe.

29:34She's a doctor to observe this medical checkup. So they're saying there is some contact. No, that's completely out of context and wrong. The contact with her sister was only last night. And, you know, just for the listeners, that's after 10 months. So the court had ordered, the highest court of the land, Supreme Court, had ordered for him to go to a particular hospital. And they ordered a particular panel of doctors, which included his own doctor from his cancer hospital, Dr. Faeser Sultan. They went to the prison to collect him and go with the convoy. Dr. Sultan's convoy was taken to the hospital what the court had ordered.

30:12and Imran Khan's convoy deviated and went to a government hospital where his sister was with him only. And, you know, she's not a practicing doctor or anything of the sort, but his own doctor was sent to another hospital. And within hours, they just did a couple of little checks and sent him back to prison. So they abided by nothing, nothing whatsoever for what the Supreme Court had ordered. Is the PTI, Imran Khan's party, going to ask the Supreme Court to insist that its order is complied with? Yes, tomorrow we're filing for contempt on many grounds, including the ones that they've taken him completely to the wrong hospital.

30:48The court order actually says that if you have to keep him there until the 16th of September, until his next hearing, do so. They only kept him barely there for a few hours without the complete medical board that the court had ordered, right? Without the checkups that the court had ordered. And they just did a makeshift sham and then they moved it back. It was just a complete mockery what happened last night. Do you think the reason for the switch in hospitals is that the army feared that supporters of Imran Khan would gather at the hospital he was meant to go to and start protesting? No, that's total rubbish.

31:21There was no protesters outside. We have given strict orders for no protests. We respect the hospitals. There is nothing of the sort whatsoever. So because everyone had respected what the court had said and everyone was applying, was abiding by it to letter in spirit. Do you think the reality of the political situation in Pakistan now is that however popular Imran Khan may be, and many say he's very popular still, that he has no future because the army are determined to keep him behind bars? The army can't play God, first of all. And second of all, the army has taken out lots of political leaders and they've come back.

32:00Primary example being the illegitimate government at the moment. Nawaz Sharif was in exile for many years and now his brother is a prime minister and his daughter is a chief minister. So it's not about what they want. The fact is also in this entire period when the army has taken out leaders, they've never been as popular as Imran Khan. At the end of the day, the army is not operating as an institution at the moment. It's being run by one man, and that's the field marshal. And, you know, the one man doesn't live forever. The one man doesn't, army chief doesn't remain forever. You see dictatorships come into martial laws and dictatorships come into Pakistan's history.

32:37They last about anywhere seven to ten years. And then after that, it's a very horrible end. And then what happens is the next chief doesn't come in. The next army chief that comes in doesn't carry the other one's baggage and brings the army back into the barracks and starts going back to democracy. So this is a cycle we've seen many, many times. The only difference is that no one has ever been as popular as Imran Khan. One last thought. I mean, I guess it could be argued that Imran Khan, when he was in power, didn't really respect the human rights of his opponents, and it's now happening to him?

33:05I mean, again, this is just, if someone can even show him, draw me a comparison between what has happened at that time and what has happened now. Imran Khan heard of journalists being picked up by the ISI. He immediately ordered for them to be released. There was a complete freedom of press in Pakistan. We were criticised every day while we were in power. I was a sitting minister. I was, whenever something didn't feel right, they were criticised at night and day. No one has been in isolation for 10 months like this or in jail for three years in it. You know, families picked up, kids abducted. If someone could even show me the comparison, I would love to see it.

33:40And that was Zulfi Bukhari. He's based in London and an advisor to Imran Khan.

33:49As you may have heard, a consortium of states in the United States is suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, over the damage it's allegedly doing, particularly when it comes to children's mental health. It is seen as a case that is unprecedented in its scale and its scope to possibly remake social media. But these concerns are far from new. Just under five years ago, a former product manager for Facebook leaked thousands of pages of internal company documents which detailed the company's conduct. And that manager, Francis Hogan, told the US Senate back in 2021 that, I believe Facebook's products harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy and much more.

34:36Her defiance has now been turned into a Hollywood movie, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, and due to be released in October. While Tim Franks has been speaking to Frances Hogan, five years on from her decision to leak those documents, what does she think has changed? When I came forward as a whistleblower, I brought forward just a sliver of documents compared to what we know today. So I brought forward about 20 ,000 pages of documents, and as a result of finally getting the legal right to subpoena these companies about what happened to kids, we now know millions of pages of documents about how the companies described the problem internally, what they did to try to solve it, and the decisions they made to not act.

35:19So you're saying the volume of what we know has changed, but essentially the issue at the core of this, which is the balance between safety and profit, one which obviously Meta themselves say they're very aware of and they strive to keep in check. But you're saying it's just the volume of what we know has changed. I wish I could say I came forward as a whistleblower and the world changed on a dime. But the reality is, as recently as this summer, the New York Times was doing reporting on how when you actually go audit the safety features that Meta claims it has for kids, the majority of them aren't active.

36:00They no longer trigger. They don't behave the way the company says they do. We live in a world where social media right now holds all the cards. This court case is one of the first things we, the public, have to actually demand accountability. I mean, you'll be aware of Meta's pushback to this, which is essentially that these claims that there are these safety features, but they just don't amount to a hill of beans, that they are unsubstantiated. I mean, these were questions that Mark Zuckerberg posed back in 2021 when you leaked your thousands of pages of documents. He said, you know, if we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space, even ones larger than us?

36:48When we look at where the revenues flow around the internet for social media. For every advertising dollar that you give to a social media company or to the industry that is social media, overwhelmingly, the majority of that money goes to Meta. We should expect them to spend the most on safety because they take the lion's share of the revenue from the industry. They net billions and billions and billions of dollars of profits every year. But if you're going to come out there and say, hey, we have all these safety features, it should be possible for an independent researcher to go and do the behaviors that you claim you're preventing and see that those behaviors are stopped.

37:24And what we saw even as recently as this summer is extensive reporting from places like the New York Times where they went and tried to do that. They tried to trigger the eating disorder or the self-harm features on Instagram and found that they were not behaving the way the company had described. This court case and the ones that have come before, so this is like the New Mexico jury verdict that came out earlier this year or the one in California, have shown that Facebook knew how to do very basic things that seem obvious. You know, like, should you send a young child a notification after midnight on a school night?

37:57Should you send them notifications during the school day? Now, they ran basic experiments like this and found that kids slept better. They were less stressed when you don't do the obvious things that any adult would say. And yet they chose very explicitly not to launch these features because it reduced the amount of time that kids spent on these products, sometimes by very small amounts, like one or two percent. You said that this court case that we've got this week that's been leading our bulletins, it's hugely important. I wonder if you think that five years ago you were testifying before the British Parliament, you were testifying before the US Congress, that actually there was a failure there from politicians, from regulators.

38:45One of the things that happens in the United States sometimes is that because the way our system is set up, so our system is set up to be methodical, sometimes when we face really huge societal problems, And, you know, this court case, they think that the damages could be over a trillion dollars. Well, that could be scaremongering from them. I mean, that could be them saying this is existential for us. If you look at just New Mexico court verdict. So we had a case in New Mexico around child exploitation just a few months ago. The first round of penalties from that case came out at over$300 million.

39:19In just the last couple of weeks, there have been remediatory penalties that add to another over$500 million. When you think about this on the scale that New Mexico is, on one issue, less than 1 % of the population of the United States, close to a billion dollars in damages. We really could be facing over a trillion dollars of damages for this company. But the question is, how do you get to a point where you have a societal problem where the courts might decide this is a trillion dollars of damages and we still didn't see action? And I think part of that is Meta has spent more on lobbying than just about any other company in the United States.

39:54And when you spend a lot of money getting to explain to people how to solve a really complicated problem, you can buy inaction. I think that's definitely a thing that we've seen happen. Social media, it's a slightly gauzy term. It can be attractive as well as addictive. There are good parts to it. And that perhaps makes it more difficult to prosecute the case against a company such as Meta. I think part of the reason why we didn't see any action on a litigation perspective for so long is that for a long time, we did focus on this question of where does responsibility lie based on what was shown to users?

40:30And in the United States, there is a law called Section 230 under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that says if you have third party content, you can't be held responsible for it. You have immunity. But the difference in this case is they're taking a step back and saying, you know, we could have social media that we felt good about at any time. It's not social media as a whole that is universally bad. My hope is that it opens up an era where tech companies at least pause when they're making decisions like this. And that was Francis Hogan, whose whistleblowing has been turned into a movie that will be released this October.

41:10Carlos the Jackal, as he became known, was one of those people who managed to be seen as glamorous despite doing terrible things, in his case murdering a series of totally innocent people and some who he considered enemies. His violent career began when he volunteered to fight for the Palestinian cause and as the years passed he became more of a gun for hire. hired, that is, by governments who wanted opponents abroad killed. His violent career ended with his arrest in 1994, since which time he's been in a French prison. And that is where Joby Warwick met him for an interview which helped him form his book, The Jackal, The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the world's first super-terrorist.

41:54So, to start at the beginning, where did Carlos come from and what was his real name? He wasn't born Carlos. He wasn't a Palestinian, even though he claimed to kind of represent that cause for years. But his real name was Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez. He was a Venezuelan, son of a very devout Venezuelan Marxist, who hops around the world. He has a lot of money, as his family does. So he ends up in London during his formative years, later in Moscow, then in the Middle East. And eventually, he ends up getting a colorful nickname, and that's Carlos the Jackal. And I guess the biggest single attack that he mounted was at the OPEC meeting in Vienna.

42:32Remind us when that was, what happened? Yeah, I've written about terrorism for decades. And this is one of the most astonishing single acts of terrorism that I've ever come across, just in terms of its audacity. So to bring listeners back, this was 1975, late December. And in Vienna, Austria, you have an annual meeting of OPEC. is the international oil cartel. All the wealthy Arab and African oil producers come together and they fight over prices and things like that. So their meeting is going on in late December, and all of a sudden, who bursts through the door with his buddies and a bunch of machine guns, but Carlos the Jackal.

43:09And it proceeds to hijack the entire conference. And this thing was so unbelievable. And of course, very quickly, the TV cameras are there, so it starts to play out as a live drama. But the extraordinary ending, just to kind of skip ahead, is that Carlos pulls it off, and he manages to talk the Austrians into giving him a DC-9 airliner, a crew, a tank of fuel, and then he flies off to North Africa to try to barter his hostages for money. Well, exactly for money. I mean, you could argue that there were political aspects to that case, and clearly there were. But some of his murders were just totally random people.

43:43I mean, he was a murderer of innocent people. That's true, but there's one thing that comes across throughout his career and studying his behavior. He is sort of classic criminal narcissist who appears unable to empathize for other human beings. So he can walk into the home of a wealthy businessman, the president of Marks and Spencer, and burst into the man's bathroom, look at him eye to eye, and then pull the trigger and shot him in the face. Miraculously, the man survived, but it's the kind of thing that Carlos could easily do, and that's part of what made him popular with his bosses because he had sort of endless courage and ability to do daring things without feeling any risk or personal consequences.

44:21Just tell us a bit about how he was protected by governments. I mean, that's one of the fascinating things about your book is he basically made loads of money and stayed safe for years because governments protected him. Yeah. And it's kind of an early example of state-sponsored terrorism because bad guys in the Middle East saw him as an asset because people were afraid of Carlos the Jackal. They could employ him to do things that they didn't want to get caught doing or didn't want to have the responsibility for doing, but they could send Carlos to do the job. And he lived in Eastern Europe for years, and he didn't tell them he was coming.

44:55He just showed up and started living large in a hotel in Budapest. And the East Europeans were fascinated by him at first and then decided, you know what? This is an asset for us. We can keep this guy here. We kind of sort of control him. But Carlos, as far as we're concerned, could do whatever he wants. He can go to Western Europe and blow things up, come back home, and we're okay with that. And so that's how he managed to survive for years. I was trying to think when reading it, what's the relevance of Carlos the Jekyll? In a way, it's that this is happening again. I mean, just this weekend, we had some guns discovered in Germany, in a forest which apparently were Russian-related.

45:27You know, governments are again doing this kind of thing. I absolutely believe that. So Carlos basically created the template for government-sponsored terrorism, as we knew it back then, but as is coming back now. In the 70s and 80s, it was Muammar Gaddafi hiring Carlos to bomb something or to assassinate someone. Now, we're seeing al-Qaeda on its back foot, to say the least. Instead, you've got this kind of recurrence of Carlos's, you know, mercenary terrorists who can be hired on the Internet, on some encrypted platform to commit a terrorist act. It's advantageous for some of these countries because they can do it and get away with it.

46:03They don't have their fingerprints directly on it. It's harder to hold them responsible. but it's a successful model. And unfortunately, we're seeing it come back again. I was with a group of journalists, and we were trying to get access to Carlos to ask him about some Pakistani related things and failed. And you succeeded. So how on earth did you do it? You know, I do think it was partly persistence. And because this being a book, I had a very long deadline. And I approached Carlos to his lawyer, and he was eager to talk. But the French authorities are understandably reluctant to give Carlos the microphone.

46:35He has a history of lying about his activities, glorifying what he did, and the French don't want to let him do that. So there were very strict conditions. I had a limited amount of time, no recording equipment. And also there was a prohibition against publishing like a Q &A interview. So I had, you know, about an hour and a half just to sit next to him, like literally knee to knee, and just ask him things, take notes. I could sort of quote him in a limited way, but mostly it was my ability to size up the man and see what he is like at 75 and how he reflected back on his career. And it was quite fascinating.

47:08And finally, what is he like? He is now as an old man, he's a bit slow. His mental faculties, to be frank, are beginning to decline. He repeats himself, loses the thread of conversation. Listeners may be curious to know if there's a woman in the room, and there was by chance during this interview, someone from the French prison ministry. He is an incorrigible womanizer, and he just could not stop breaking off the interview to talk to this woman instead. But the thing that comes across in terms of his criminal personality is a refusal to accept responsibility for anything he did, a refusal to apologize or express remorse for people who were killed, because he believes that no innocents died.

47:45He believes that he was on the side of anti-imperialism and was all for the good. He was never a mercenary. So you have to take everything he says with a big grain of salt. Did the meeting change your perception of him? In a way, it kind of brought him down to earth for me, because I'm old enough to remember those days in the 70s when he was, you know, running wild and creating a lot of carnage. And ever since then, I've had a fascination with him. I've wanted to know more about him. And so when I began digging deeply into this book, you have this mix of kind of, you know, revulsion because he's a horrible human being, but also just intense interest in how he did what he did, because he managed to get away for 20 years with his crimes.

48:22And then you meet him in person and, you know, he's a very ordinary guy in many respects. You know, he speaks a lot of languages. He's very smart, but he can't begin to take full responsibility for what he did. He truly got lucky in a time when security services were much more lax than they are now and our ability to surveil and track people across borders. Just they weren't up to Carlos's skills. And that's how he managed to get away with so many things. And that was author Joby Warwick on his encounter with Carlos the Jackal in that Parisian prison cell. And that brings us to an end of this edition of News Out.

48:56So thank you very much for listening. And from Owen Bennett-Jones here in London, goodbye.

49:11Has Prince Harry and Meghan's American dream failed? I'm Asma Khaled, and I host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. The Sussexes are intending to return to the UK, six years after moving to California and striking multi-million dollar brand partnerships. Just last year, Harry told the BBC he couldn't see a world in which his family would return. So what's changed? Find out on the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.