Search for survivors after Colombia earthquake

0:02Hello and welcome to NewsHour live from the BBC World Service in London. and I'm Rebecca Kesby. And we begin the programme today in Colombia, where the authorities have declared a state of emergency after yesterday's magnitude 7.4 earthquake. The quake hit in Choco province, but was felt right across the western area of the country. Entire buildings collapsed in some areas and the moment was captured by one survivor on their phone.

0:37Well, at least 224 people are known to have died. That's according to Colombian authorities. Rescue teams have been working through the night to try to find survivors and updated figures are expected. But the fear is that many more people may have been killed. The city of Cali is one of the worst affected areas. Isabel Tomeo, who's in her 20s, lives there. She told us of the terrifying movement the earthquake struck. Some people screaming because it felt really, really strong. And it was for a long time, it was very, very awful. And there were a lot of dust in the air. I started to walk around my neighborhood and there was a residential complex that's called Yolose and a lot of houses in there collapsed.

1:30And there were a lot of people outside, you know, crying. Some were trying to call their relatives. And there was a school that collapsed and it has a lot of children in there still. So it's a pretty, pretty difficult time for us. Well, the epicentre was near San Jose del Palma. About 50 kilometres away is a city called Pereira. And this video was recorded at the airport there.

2:06Well, we got in touch with the man who recorded it. You could hear him shouting there. Luckily, he is OK. But he sent us these voice notes, which we've translated. Hi, my name is Jose Gaiko. I was at the airport in Pereira when the earthquake hit. The only way I could describe this is like a horror movie, like my worst nightmare. I had to cross the city walking for two hours. I could see the destroyed buildings. There are more than 100 people dead, many injured. I haven't been able to sleep. Physically, I'm okay, but I feel bad mentally. When I shut my eyes, I feel like I'm reliving the moment.

2:54There were people running, screaming, bleeding, bloody clothes, people asking for help, asking for people to call their families, mothers crying for their children. It was the most terrifying moment of my life.

3:15new year. Jose Gugiego there, speaking to us from near the epicentre just a few hours ago. Well, Cali is about 200 kilometres from the epicentre. On Monday night, we got through to the mayor of the city, Alejandro Adair. We're still searching around the city. It's a very large city and it was a very strong quake, but the city held up quite well. That kind of makes it a little bit harder to find the victims and the collapsed buildings because it's kind of like finding needles in a haystack right now. Some of them are multi-storied, unfortunately, and these first 48 hours are key to getting people out, to getting people to safety.

3:56We're tending to this emergency primarily with our own firefighters and our own search and rescue teams, and we're waiting for more teams to arrive from other major cities in Colombia. Our teams are very well trained. We actually sent our search and rescue team, we just sent it to Venezuela. So they have very recent experience in these types of events. I remember when we sent our firefighters to Venezuela, I spoke about it with the fire chief and I said, this will be good training for our guys. I hope we don't have to use them. Look at this, you know, just a few weeks later, here we are. Alejandro Adair there, mayor of the city of Cali in Colombia.

4:36Well, we can speak live now to Jose Camilo Cordoba from the NGO Progresa Choco. He's speaking to us from there now. Jose, hi. Thank you so much for coming on to talk about this, well, tragedy. You're about four hours away from that epicentre by car, but I think you could feel it there, couldn't you? What was it like? Thank you for having me. I was at home. I had just come back upstairs. after walking my dog, when I started feeling the movement. At first, I was trying to understand what was happening, but at the second pass, the shaking became stronger and stronger. That was when I decided to go downstairs and get out onto the street.

5:25I lived right next to the fire station. And in a way, having the firefighters there helped calm us and some of the neighbors. But in the minutes, immediately after the earthquake, you could really feel the fear and desperation spreading across the city. People started ruining their homes. Parents were desperately trying to get to their children's schools and find out if they were safe. Quibdo is a city with a huge number of motorcycles and I live in a very central area. So suddenly there was an enormous amount of movement, motorcycles everywhere, people rushing from one place to another, trying to reach their families.

6:12What I remember most is how quickly everything changed. One moment I was simply coming home after walking my dog and minutes after, the entire city was outside, frightened, trying to understand what had just happened. Goodness me, it does sound absolutely terrifying. I mean, you're in the capital there, Qibdo, I think is how you say it. But the region more widely around you is very forested, isn't it? I mean, a lot of it's jungle. Is that going to be a challenge for rescue teams to reach people? Yes. Chocó is one of Colombia's most geographically isolated and socioeconomically vulnerable region.

6:57to reach you know we only have two ways to access by land the region and actually to go to the municipality where the epicenter was you have to leave Choco enter another department and then go through the mountains to San Jose del Palmar where the epicenter was. So the situation for authorities, for rescue teams is very challenging. But however, I hope that the conditions because in Kibido, it's raining almost every day. But today and yesterday is very sunny. And I hope that helps rescue teams to enter the areas to help people. Right, yeah, because heavy rain could be a problem as well. I mean, I should say, Jose, many people will remember that Colombia's only just got a new government, hasn't it?

8:09I mean, this earthquake hit just about three days after the new president was sworn in. It would be a challenge for any government. But, I mean, are there worries about the fact that this government is so new? it's going to be a difficult moment for them to come to power. It's very difficult. However, the president himself came yesterday to Kibdó. He attended a meeting with the governor, with the mayor, with the local authorities. And he just put all of the government capacities to help Chocó, to rebuild Chocó. And we hope that he keeps his words. And now he attends, you know, because the urgent needs are, for example, urgent priority is saving lives and supporting the healthcare system.

9:10So hospital needs medical supplies, medicines, seat your kids, personal protective equipment, blood supplies. Yeah, Jose, we'll let you go for now, but good luck and thank you so much for speaking to us. And thank goodness you're OK at least. But I understand how distressing it must be. Good to speak to you. Thank you so much. Let's cross over now because we can speak to somebody who will be involved in the rescue efforts, as we've heard there. I mean, we've heard the Red Cross have deployed teams to Colombia, other agencies, Save the Children, World Central Kitchen also involved. And Tatiana Flores is with World Central Kitchen.

9:52She's in the capital, Bogota, about to get on a flight, I believe, to Cali. Tatiana, what can you tell us in terms of what aid you're able to take there to the affected areas? Hi, good morning from Bogota. Yes, I'm at the airport already checked in and ready to fly to Cali in a few minutes. So World Central Kitchen, we try to be very, very quickly in the field and be able to support the people affected by giving them food. So yesterday, Alejandro, one of my colleagues that lives in Manizales, one of the most affected cities, he started distributing sandwiches while he is trying to find out what the need is and how we can help.

10:39So today, sorry to interrupt, but I mean, we just heard from the mayor of Cali earlier talking about how Colombia sent teams to Venezuela just over the border when they had that dreadful double earthquake just a few weeks ago. Are resources stretched as a result of that disaster? Well, for us, fortunately, we are ready because of that and because this is not our first time in Colombia either. We've been in the February flooding in Córdoba department. We have help in the migration crisis in Colombia as well, in Cúcuta, actually the frontier point with Venezuela. And so we are very comfortable working in Colombia and between Venezuela.

11:32We have our team in Venezuela, which has delivered already more than 1.5 million meals to the people affected. And yeah, we're already here. Okay, that's good. So yeah, I don't think that will be an issue. That's good to hear. But the challenging circumstances are going to be multiple, aren't they? We're just hearing there about the jungle areas, the remote areas difficult to access, challenging weather conditions, potentially with torrential rain. There's also militants in very many areas of Colombia, including in the Western area. How will you negotiate that? Correct. Well, that's why we are basing our hub in Cali, which is the largest city.

12:14Their party is not affected, so we're flying there. The whole team, part of the team already flew there because they're mobilising via cars. to Pereira, another city affected, Armenia, Manizales. So we're mobilizing from Cali and that will be our hub. And yeah, we hope to lie with whoever we can to be able to move freely and to help. Well, good luck. Good luck with it, Tatiana. Really good to speak to you before you get on that flight to Cali. That's Tatiana Flores there live from Bogota. She's with World Central Kitchen. Coming up later, how an AI assistant tasked with simply booking a gym class hacked into the system and then took somebody else's slot.

13:05So we can give instructions to AI. And sometimes the words we use to describe AI anthropomorphise them and make us feel like they are our assistant. But actually they're a piece of code that tries to maximise the question that we're asking it. More on that to come. other headlines, a Syrian court has found the exiled president, Bashar al-Assad, guilty of war crimes and sentenced him to death. And at least 169 people are now known to have died in a major earthquake in Colombia, where rescue operations are still going on. And there's more details on that on the BBC website as well, updating that from our sources in the field.

13:55This is Rebecca Kesby with NewsHour live from the BBC. Now, did President Trump get smuggled out of Air Force One in a catering truck to board a separate military plane on his way back from the NATO summit in Turkey last month? That's the claim from US media outlets, first reported by the Washington Post. Footage from July 8th show the President boarding the plane as usual, A catering truck can then be seen the other side of the plane, then moving away. The White House has not confirmed there was a switch, but officials have told the BBC's US partner CBS News that US security had detected a credible Iranian threat to fire a missile at the plane.

14:38Now, other people on board the flight, including journalists and some White House staff, were not informed of the threat, it seems. Let's get into the detail with the BBC's White House reporter, Bert DeBusman, in Washington. Bert, first of all, I mean, tell us about what we know of this decoy manoeuvre and what the sources are. Well, the stories from The Washington Post and The New York Times are all based on anonymous sources and documents that they've seen. What we know and what they've reported so far is that as President Trump was boarding this aircraft on July 8th, that he was immediately taken off and that the aircraft with the reporters and many of his staff flew to the UK on the way back to the United States from Turkey without anyone on board knowing that the president wasn't there.

15:26That's in and of itself extremely unusual for the White House press pool and for many staff to not know where the president is at any given time. Now, what we don't know is the exact nature of this threat from Iran and just how seriously it was taken. But as someone who does the White House press pool quite often, I would say it's very, very, very unusual because the White House press pool has gone with previous presidents and with President Trump to active war zones. And there was not these sorts of steps taken, even though there was very intense security. There had been questions swirling about this trip for quite some time because he chose not to fly on the new Qatari gifted Air Force One back from from Turkey.

16:12They had switched to an older model, 747 at the time. He said it was kind of for for old time's sake, but it was already an unusual flight. The reporters on board were ordered to put their window shades down, for example. But when asked about it, President Trump was very dismissive at the time of any sort of security threat. And he kind of made clear that while he believes Iran has targeted him, that he wasn't worried at the time. So the whole story is extremely, extremely unusual. It is very unusual. And as you say, the new Air Force One was a gift from Qatar. There's been questions about the security of that plane and whether it's been pushed into service too fast.

16:53Apparently, some of the defensive facilities may not have been completed. That was reported in the US media recently. But in terms of who was left on the plane, including journalists, I mean, are there any questions as to whether if there was a credible threat to the plane, there's an ethical question as to whether those people should also have been taken off the flight? I think that's going to be one of the main questions being asked in the coming days is whether the White House and the Secret Service had a legal obligation to tell the staff and the reporters on the flight. Because as the story stands, essentially what's being reported is that those still on board the Air Force One aircraft were being used as decoys.

17:35And in a domestic setting, for example, if the FBI were to, let's say, intercept a phone call saying that there's a credible threat to a certain venue or a certain person, they have a legal obligation to tell those who might be put at risk, even if it means jeopardizing an ongoing investigation or a criminal case. So I think the question now becomes whether the U.S. intelligence community had a similar legal obligation to those on board the flight if they really did believe that there was an active and ongoing Iranian threat against that aircraft. And very briefly, Bernd, it's very unusual to say that the president is in one place when in fact they know he's in somewhere else.

18:15When it's happened before, the comment has been at an undisclosed location, I think. It has. And as you mentioned, it's extremely rare. The one time that comes up in my mind is on September 11th, 2001, when then President George W. Bush was moved to an undisclosed location with a very, very slimmed down press pool in tow. Even in previous instance, for example, when President Biden secretly visited Ukraine, there were reporters there present who knew it was. But he that information was kept secret from the greater public until he arrived. But the reporters there actually knew. Good to hear from you.

18:52Thank you so much. That's Bernd de Boosman there for the BBC in Washington, DC.

18:59Now about 8 million voters have registered ahead of Zambia's presidential and parliamentary elections later this week. Following a painful debt restructuring process and a series of promised economic reforms, many Zambians are still asking whether the benefits of reaching ordinary households, rising living costs and energy crisis and unemployment with limited job creation remain major concerns on the campaign trail, but the government is pointing to its progress in stabilising the economy. So will voters be persuaded? The BBC's Dhinga Daba Jona Buayoyo reports. Calm and stable. Zambia's capital, Osaka, is certainly not a quiet city.

19:43On August 13, Zambians vote to renew the parliament and their president. The incumbent leader, Hagainde Hijilema, is bidding for a second term. But in recent weeks, a new challenger has gained momentum in the polls.

20:01Brian Munduile, a former minister and ally of the previous president, the late Edgar Lungu, has gained popularity. Many thought this upcoming vote would give Hijilema a fairly easy win. In the last elections five years ago, he received a solid mandate and recently one of his main challenges, former President Lungu, died. But many things have changed in Zambia over the past five years. The rising cost of living and an energy crisis which only recently started to improve are top issues among voters. The government boasts among its biggest achievements, the introduction of free primary and secondary education, the hiring of thousands of new teachers and health workers, and the successful restructuring of the country's high debt.

20:52Here is President Heijilema. We inherited a broken down country. We were in debt, distressed, deforted on our obligations to pay our debts. The economy was declining, so we've restructured the debt. A clear saving of$1.9 billion per year. Not the money we're putting in the economy. Yet, some Zambians say they are yet to reap the benefits of these measures. I sell street food as my work, but now money has become so hard to come by. It's really difficult to get some money. We are trying to stay strong to survive, but things have become really hard for us. It's not that the money that we are getting paid, it's enough.

21:38We can sustain our lives.

21:45Meanwhile, the opposition are campaigning hard. In a country with more than 80 % of people under the age of 30, Mr Monduile says his party is targeting the youth. We are moving the women and the youths from the margins to the center of policy and economic transformation. We believe the youths have solutions to most of their challenges. So we are positioning ourselves, I'm positioning myself as president, as big brother to the youths. But some older voters, like this woman from Lusaka, distrust Munduile's party because it has links to old political parties who in the past faced corruption accusations.

22:27I wouldn't love to see them come back in the first place because we gave them a chance to rule the country and we saw what they did. This election will test whether the changes over the past five years have been enough for Zambians or if they like to see a different direction. That's Dinhing Daba, Jonah Boyoya there reporting from Zambia.

22:56Welcome back to NewsHour. Now, are you outsourcing your to-do list to an AI assistant? And could there be ethical complications in doing so? Yes, is the answer, according to one tech executive in Australia. Andrew Bird asked his AI assistant to book him a gym class. A simple task, you might think, but the class was full, so the AI assistant hacked the gym system to throw other people off the class to make room for him. when Andrew found out he was horrified and told the AI to reverse the hack, which it said it couldn't do with the added note, sorry about that. Well, a gym class isn't that important, but could the same thing happen to a plane, a place on a flight, a university place, or to a hospital waiting list?

23:39I've been speaking to Professor Sana Karaghani. She's a chief strategy officer at Era 4, a company focusing on AI infrastructure, and I asked her first why this AI went rogue. Technologies like AI or these large language models that are being now used, they try and maximise, they try and make you happy, essentially. They try and create a positive result for what you're asking them to do. So in this case, the task was to get a space in the gym and the AI went and maximised that and made it happen. So a human assistant might, you know, back off at a certain point or think, oh dear, well, you know, that's not fair and make an ethical judgment, which an AI can't do.

24:21So we can give instructions to AI. And sometimes the words we use to describe AI anthropomorphize them and make us feel like they are our assistant. But actually, they're a piece of code that tries to maximize the question that we're asking it. And it also throws up other questions, doesn't it? Like, whose fault is it? Absolutely. Regulation continues to be hugely difficult. Cyber attacks, for example, have no regional boundaries, but laws do. We also have, for example, the same AI technologies that are helping attackers discover weaknesses faster are also the ones that are helping defenders validate exposure sooner and reduce risk before it spreads.

25:02But frankly, just because these things are difficult doesn't mean that we should sit on the sidelines and do nothing. There's another part around this, which is called verification and assurance. So making sure that the technology that we're using is verified to do what it says on the tin and then assuring that it actually does do that. We need to be making sure that at every level our cybersecurity is up to speed. And, you know, we've been doing this at our biggest institutions, banks and hospitals, but we need to be doing this at every level. Libraries, community centers, gyms. That's expensive, though, isn't it?

25:34I mean, in the case of libraries or even hospitals, many just won't have the money for that. That's true. But it's one of the things we need to do in this day and age, because these tools are now democratising the access to knowledge and the access to be able to complete tasks that previously would have needed, you know, a lot more capability by individuals. So we need to be able to bring the other side of this up as well, which means actually using these same tools to help take cybersecurity much more seriously. That's AI expert Sana Karaghani, their chief strategy officer at the Era 4 company focusing on AI infrastructure and for the purposes of today, rogue AI assistance.

26:25You're listening to NewsHour live from the BBC. I'm Rebecca Kesby. Next to the occupied West Bank, where a Palestinian family say their home near the village of Qusra, south of Nablus, has been surrounded by Israeli settlers. The family has told us that the settlers have blocked the exit, trapping the family of four inside the home since Sunday. Yusuf Hassan is the homeowner. He and his wife have two little daughters, aged just two and four, and he says the settlers have also cut his electricity. Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under both international and Israeli law, but the family says that when the Israeli Defence Force's soldiers arrived at the scene on Sunday, instead of arresting or dispersing the settlers, they prayed with them.

27:16Yusuf Hassan was able to send us a voice note with more detail. We've translated it and voiced it over.