US and Denmark reach deal over Greenland

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0:51Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. Coming to you live from London, I'm James Kamarasamy. And later on in the programme, South Africa's police minister on the official response to the rise in women being murdered around Johannesburg, plus the vanishing Y chromosome, a little-known sign of some types of cancers in men, and the newly unearthed recordings by the legendary Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, which shed new light on her life and career. We begin, though, with a deal reached on Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark described as the world's largest island, which has been at the centre of arguably the largest crisis that NATO has ever faced.

1:30And that's because even before he was re-elected, Donald Trump had been talking about the United States needing Greenland, part of a fellow NATO country for its security. And once he returned to the White House, President Trump turned up the volume even appearing to suggest he'd be prepared to annex the territory. This is what he told reporters in January. I will say this about Greenland. We need Greenland from a national security situation. It's so strategic. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.

2:09And Denmark is not going to be able to do it, I can tell you. That was shortly before Mr Trump attended the World Economic Forum in Davos. the run-up to that dominated by a fair amount of soul-searching about the future of the military alliance. And then when he was in Davos, he somewhat backed off, conceding that he wouldn't start a war over Greenland. Well, now, after months of negotiations, he, together with the Danes and the Greenlanders, have announced that the two sides have reached an agreement. So what's in it? Here's our North America correspondent, Anthony Zirka. We'll have to wait to see what are the details of this agreement, But the way Donald Trump describes it, it will give the United States permanent control over security and all other needs, all other needs being kind of the key part of that there, because the United States and Denmark are part of NATO.

2:58So the United States has always been involved in protecting the security of Greenland, including with a military base there. But one of the things that Trump has had his eye on with Greenland is the economic resources, the natural resources, the critical minerals that are present on the island and denying access to those to other non-NATO nations, places like China and Russia. And according to Donald Trump, this agreement will do that. It'll keep these other nations out. It'll give the United States much broader access to Greenland and the ability to even improve and expand its military presence there without having to go to the Danish government or the people of Greenland for explicit permission.

3:45So while it's not annexation, while there's not going to be an American flag planted in Greenland, it does give Trump some of the things he wants, even if it doesn't give him that big, clear item that he had desired so much. Anthony Zirka in Washington. Well, the prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland have both welcomed the agreement, which is expected to be signed at the UN General Assembly next week. Medda Fredriksson and Jens Frederick Nielsen said it strengthened their common security in the Arctic and North Atlantic, adding that it also recognised the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark and the right of the Greenlandic people to self-determination.

4:25Well, Tilly Martinisen is a Greenlander, former MP in Greenland's parliament, and joins me now on the line from Copenhagen. Welcome to NewsHour. What's your initial reaction to this? well I don't think that anyone in Greenland has forgot the prep for invasion that we had to do five days of gathering water and getting our elders and making sure that we had medicine and some heat sources that was independent of anything electrical so I think all Greenlanders are very skeptical also some of the things that you're citing Mr. Donald Trump has been lying all through this deal and all through the communications to the world about this and that and we have also not forgotten that both Ms.

5:07Trump and J.D. Vance has been going back and forth on deals and how respectless they have been to Greenland, as well as, I might say, someone like Volodymyr Zelensky of the Ukraine. So I think everyone is pretty skeptical until we see the parts of the deal that are. What we're going to keep an eye on is the trade part. Is there something where we have to exclusively trade minerals and stuff like that with the United States. We don't want to do that. Of course, the owning of lands, it has always been said they're not going to plant any flags, but are they actually able to that? And then lastly, the pollution that we might get from military activities.

5:48We do have pollution still left over from 1950s and Second World War from the United States. So yeah, I don't think that people are too happy. You're not cheering. You're not cheering. Your scepticism shines through. I mean, clearly, as you are suggesting, the devil will be in the details of this deal. But if it does smooth over things between the United States and Denmark and the people of Greenland, will that in itself be a good thing? Yes, it will, of course. But I mean, I don't think anyone has gone into this naive. And of course, we trust our prime minister, Jens-Fordrich Nielsen in Greenland.

6:28And we also trust the Danish prime minister. So as long as they're saying, look, this is a good deal. It sounds like we're cautiously optimistic, let me say it, but that we're hugely skeptical because it's who it is. And between now and the UN Assembly, there's a lot of days he can go back and forth on that. But what we're hoping for is that we'll gain some peace. And it's probably almost the same deal as we already had since 1951, where we have had disagreements between Greenland, Denmark and the United States. I wonder if we can go back to where you started this conversation, these days when you were preparing for a possible invasion by the United States.

7:07I mean, it sounds like that has imprinted itself on the psyche. I mean, is that something that is still there then? It is. And it's the first thing out of every Greenlander's mouth I've seen on the early interviews that I've seen on TV, but also what I've heard on the radio and on social media as well. I mean, everyone is going in there. This sounds great and we're trusting our own, but do not trust the Trump administration. Just make sure that until he's out of office and his administration, that's why I was mentioning J.D. Vance, we're not trusting anything that they're saying because everyone remembers what it was like.

7:45it was unfathomable. And that's just one of my points that I want to say. We're all going, yeah, of course, and we're not going to have a war between NATO countries and there's not going to be like a wiping out and we don't have to mobilize the way that we maybe thought that we would. But look at the way he's been treating Canada. That's a pretty low bar, isn't it? Yeah, it really is. And yeah, we're not trusting it, but we're trusting our own. So let's see what the deal exactly in taste. The devil really is in the details. And Mr. Trump is a little bit of a devilish character, I have to say. Tilly Martinesson, former Greenland MP, speaking to us live from Copenhagen.

8:25Well, NATO, for its part, has welcomed the deal. A spokesperson for the alliance said it would help advance security, stability and cooperation in this vital region. Joining us now, listening to all of that, Peter Ricketts, Lord Ricketts, he's former UK permanent representative to NATO, who's also the UK government's first national security advisor. Welcome back to News Hour, Lord Ricketts. What are your thoughts on this deal, given that we don't know the details yet? We don't. It sounds to me like a classic piece of Trump handling in that it sounds like it's a face saver for Trump, which doesn't actually change things very much on the ground at all.

9:02I mean, as your previous speaker was saying, the US has had an agreement with the US since 1951 on Greenland, which was very permissive. It basically allowed the Americans to deploy any number of troops they wanted. They had 10 ,000 during the Cold War, an early warning radar system at Thule Air Base, which is increasingly important for safety of American airspace. And so they had all that anyway. And I suspect this deal, you know, adds one or two elements around the sides of that, some sort of ban on other countries exploiting the minerals in Greenland or having military deployments. By the way, I don't think the Danish government was ever about to agree with any of that.

9:44So I suspect the Danish government have added some elements which were no problem for them because this remains under Danish sovereignty. And Donald Trump takes a win, parades it on social media, and NATO hopes that this crisis is now behind it. But as you were hearing there, it's left people deeply shaken about the extent to which they can trust America as an ally if threats of annexation are thrown out in the way Trump did. We played a clip there from that moment, which seemed like a moment of real jeopardy for the alliance back in January. And I wonder to what extent the NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutter, who's really been seen as someone who has bent over backwards to keep Donald Trump on board with the alliance.

10:27To what extent do you think he was involved in striking this deal? I'm sure he was. And he was very instrumental around the time of that Davos summit. Yes, to have one ally, the most important ally in NATO, threatening to annex the territory of another NATO ally. I mean, Trump may have thought that was just a clever opening gambit in order to get something less. But NATO depends on trust. And that trust was badly shaken by Trump's antics there. And I suspect Mark Rutte has been a go-between between the administration and the Danish authorities who have in the end negotiated this. So I'm sure it's good for the alliance that that threat is removed.

11:08But as your previous speaker made clear, there's a lot of ground to be made up in Denmark to build trust in any agreement that is signed by the Trump administration. So I suspect that Mr. Rutte's work is going to be cut out for the future. The fact that the Danish prime minister feels able to say it's a good agreement suggests that she must be pretty confident she can get it through the Danish parliament, in which case let's hope that this is one strain in the NATO alliance that can be put behind us. And what do you make of the timing of this? Donald Trump, as we know, has been in some political difficulty.

11:41The war in Iran is unpopular at home. There are midterm elections coming up. Do you think the timing is significant? Yes, you're being very diplomatic to say he's some difficulty. I think he's in really very serious trouble. The midterm elections are coming up. Inflation is high. Gas prices in the US are high. All right, it's very unwelcome. He's got precious little to show either on Ukraine or Iran. I think he's pretty desperate for a win. I think the timing may be related also to the UN General Assembly next week. I can imagine there'll be a pretty high-profile signing ceremony where Donald Trump will claim credit for a great victory, which, you know, if you look closely at the detail, it won't be, but that helps him domestically.

12:22So, yeah, I'm sure that's all playing in the timing of this. Well, you've sort of touched on this already to a certain extent, but when the dust settles, then assuming this does get through, it sounds as though it probably will through Denmark, Um, what kind of impact will this have had in the longer term on the alliance? Well, it has had the effect of shaking confidence. And it's not been the only thing. There have been threats to withdraw large numbers of US forces from Europe. There's been Trump appearing to be much more understanding of Putin than any European NATO country. But I think that the center of gravity in American administration seems to be swinging away from trying to do a deal with Putin.

13:07And we've had the FBI unsealing indictments on five Russian intelligence officers for plotting assassinations in the US and around the world. and this I think marks a toughening of US approach to Russia. That plus a settlement of the Danish difference I think is good news for NATO and so in the long term I'm not sure it will affect things very much as long as the Americans now stick to the deal they've done with the Danes and we have no more nonsense about annexation or military occupation. Lord Ricketts, former UK Permanent Representative to NATO, former UK Government National Security Advisor, thanks very much.

13:44You're listening to NewsHour. And coming up later on in the programme, a new book about the legendary Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, which features rare archive recordings, including the most personal interview she ever gave. I reproduced myself. I made a beautiful child, a girl. But at the time I was penniless. There was no way that I could take it. I was not the right person to raise this child. We'll be speaking to the author of that book later on in the programme. Our main headlines is how the leaders of Denmark and Greenland have welcomed a deal agreed with the United States that Donald Trump says will give his country permanent control over security and other needs in Greenland.

14:30And the EU has spoken out against a decision by the Trump administration not to give Palestinian officials visas to attend the UN General Assembly in New York.

14:48You're listening to the BBC World Service. This is NewsHour, coming to you live from London with James Kamarasamy. A study by the University of Arizona has found evidence of a loss of the Y chromosome in the tissue cells of men adjacent to cancer tumours. Although scientists have long known about the so-called loss of Y phenomenon in white blood cells, it's not previously been identified as a possible early signpost of cancer. Mark Jobling is an emeritus professor of genetics at Leicester University in England. He began by explaining what Y chromosomes are. The Y chromosome is sex determining.

15:25So what that means is when an embryo is developing, if it has a Y chromosome, then it will become a male. And if it doesn't, then it will become a female. So normal females have two X chromosomes, as well as the set of other chromosomes they get from both parents, while males have an X and a Y chromosome. So its primary role is to determine maleness. And what we're talking about here is the loss of Y chromosomes. How do cells lose Y chromosomes? Well, when cells divide, they have to carry out a kind of complex dance of the chromosomes to make sure that the two daughter cells inherit the right numbers of chromosomes.

16:09And sometimes that goes wrong. and it goes increasingly wrong as we age. So as we get older, we see a phenomenon that's called genome instability developing and that's where errors of various kinds in the genome, including this mitotic segregation, as we call it, increase. And the Y chromosome is actually the smallest chromosome we have and that may make it more vulnerable to this kind of problem. And we've known about what's called the loss of Y, L-O-Y, for decades, but now research is drawing a link between that and cancers. That's right. So I think in 1963 was the first observation of this, but it's become, with new technologies, it's become easier to measure this and observe it.

16:58And there've been some big studies done of tumours in men and also in normal men to see what the loss of the Y chromosome looks like. So in the general population, about 40 % of men over 70 show this phenomenon. It's not all the cells in the body that lose the Y chromosome. It's a proportion, and that proportion will vary. That loss is associated with a wide range of cancers, not just male-specific cancers, but these are cancers that affect both men and women. But if we look in men with these cancers, we see increasing incidence of them correlated with the loss of the Y chromosome in those men.

17:38Does this knowledge in any way help prevent cancers? Well, it seems that men who have loss of Y chromosome, their tumours may be differently sensitive to certain chemotherapeutic drugs and to radiotherapy. So it could be in the future that if a man has loss of Y chromosome, then he may be treated slightly differently. It's rather early days in that though. Right, so not preventative but it could help with treatment. Exactly, prognostic and it's what cancer biologists call a biomarker. So it's something useful you can measure that might tell you how you should treat that particular patient. But could it be identified early and patients with those biomarkers followed more closely for potential signs of cancer?

18:29Well, I think as with any screening protocol, you need to justify it in terms of the cost of testing. And I think the argument wouldn't be strong to pre-test men for loss of Y, although that may change in the future as knowledge improves. And is it linked to other risks beyond cancers? Yes. So loss of Y chromosome is associated with increased all-cause mortality, so that's general death. It's also linked to increased risk of Alzheimer disease. Men live five years on average less than women do, so this could be the contributing factor to that. Professor Mark Jobling there. Now, although we're used to listening to music digitally, there's still a lot of love for old school records.

19:14But there is also an older school because before sound was stored in the grooves and lumps of vinyl, it was captured on a different analogue medium, and that's wax. And this week at London's Royal Academy of Music, a group of guitarists created that old form, or recreated that old form of recording live on stage with a stylus etching the sound vibrations onto rotating wax cylinders. The audience listened to the original music and then to a playback of the wax recording. And I got to hear both versions at a rehearsal for the concert with the musicians and the musicologist who organised the event.

19:52Today we are here because we are doing something very exciting and very unusual, I think.

20:03My name is Inja Stanovic. I'm a senior lecturer at the University of Sarri. We are exploring early sound recordings and guitar playing. Specifically wax cylinder recordings. When did you first become aware of them? Why are you interested in them? Well, it was a long time ago now, but I'm a pianist and a musicologist, and during my PhD I heard these wonderful things, and I was very shocked because they preserve playing styles which are not in use anymore. And how did these people do it? You know, in one take, there is no magic button for volume, so there is no volume control on phonographs, and so what you record, that's what you get.

20:57How do the sound waves react, if you like, with the wax? I still, OK, I deal with these recordings for over a decade and I still think it's magic. You wind the phonograph up and I have a little piece here which has a stylus made of sapphire. and it cuts. While it's cutting, I will have to blow on the cylinder to make the wax shavings go away. While it's recording. Yes, while it's recording. So my job is very simple in a way. I need to be very close to it and make sure that the wax residues don't block the stylus. And so we will record in one go and then we will set it up for reproducing because I will need to change the recorder to a producer and then I will use a different horn, which is a reproducing horn.

21:57And a different stylus as well? Yes. So one stylus cuts, the other one reads the groove. But it's as easy as that, that I just change one little piece of phonograph.

22:15Hi, I'm Marco Aramelli. I will play two songs, a medley, of Levinu Albano de Concesao, that is a blind guitarist from Brazil that actually record with the same system. For a guitarist, what does it mean to then record on a wax cylinder like this? You have to make your sound brighter. You have to play some notes louder. And also, we have only two minutes, so you have some time to speed up, some time to work with time, because you have a limit. For a listener then, what do they get from listening to a wax cylinder recording that they don't get from other recordings? A window to the past, a freedom which is forgotten, this type of freedom of improvisation, the freedom towards mistakes.

23:04You know, mistakes. I do know I present live programs. So I know. And it's so good to have a disc where there is a mistake. It's a normal thing. And believe me, it doesn't spoil the musical magic of what is registered.

23:25Not so much waxing lyrical as waxing musical. the Inja Stanovich and the guitarists who were recording their music onto wax cylinders. You're listening to the BBC World Service and this is NewsHour, coming to you live from London with James Kamarasamy.

23:48Welcome back to NewsHour. Now, scarcely a day seems to go by without a warning about artificial intelligence going rogue. On Friday, Google said that its AI system Gemini had escaped its testing environment and had hacked into three companies. And although they have provoked quite a bit of scepticism, the most apocalyptic predictions warn of a greater than 10 % chance that the technology could wipe out the entire human race in the next 10 years. These types of warnings are coming from a section of the AI community that's often called AI doomers. So what might their doomsday scenarios actually look like?

24:23Here's a BBC cyber correspondent, Joe Tidy. The warnings have ramped up, but how could a super intelligent AI that wanted to control our world actually kill us all? One thing that recent AI outbreaks has shown us is that AIs are now very good at hacking. The kind of dizzying rate of progress means that things that were previously in the realms of science fiction are now becoming reality. Jacob Coxon is a former researcher at OpenAI and Anthropic. he quit the companies, saying that safety wasn't being taken seriously enough. To give a concrete example, AIs can hack. They could hack into the sort of critical infrastructure that the world runs on.

25:02The scary scenario here is that a rogue AI might infiltrate the computer networks of internet providers, energy grids, or even nuclear power stations. The AIs could shut it all down, so there's no electricity for humans, no heating or cooling, no internet connectivity. Another scenario was explored in an influential research paper called AI 2027. Thomas Larson was one of the co-authors. What we sort of said happened in that scenario was in 2027, so next year, AI is recursively self-improve and that snowballs to an AI that has access to a large number of robots, which are doing most of the physical tasks throughout the economy.

25:43In the US, as well as other governments worldwide are like constantly asking this AI for advice. However, unfortunately, it's also not friendly and is out for its own ends. And then eventually what happens is it releases a bioweapon, killing most humans, and it continues to run the robot economy itself. And so that resulted in human extinction. In another scenario, the end of humanity is a mistake. The so-called paperclip maximiser hypothesis was imagined more than 20 years ago by philosopher Nick Bostrom. So in this thought experiment, it's a hypothetical AI that cares about making as many paperclips as possible.