Xi calls for China and US to cooperate despite differences

17:36Michael Baumgartner:This is perhaps what is going on right now with the deployment of military forces and police forces and the presence of the president himself. and for now it seems that they are gaining the control of the situation of the current crisis. We are waiting to see what will come in the upcoming days because that is the main key to see how the government is dealing with this huge violence problem in the context of Santa Marta specifically.

18:06Xi Jinping:And of course this is quite a test isn't it for the president because he's only been in power for what not very long at all?

18:14Michael Baumgartner:Yes, it's a test, another test. We have unfortunately faced a lot of very critical issues, not only related to violence, but this is a very critical test because it will define the security strategy that he has imposed since he came to power. It will define if it's enough for a president to be tough because the president has built a very confrontational security message. And Santa Marta is almost a perfect test for that approach. An armed organization has challenged the state in a major Colombian city, a major tourist city. And the government has responded with military force and a very strong rhetoric.

18:51Michael Baumgartner:The real measure, I would say, of that success is not how many troops are deployed or how tough the president sounds, but what will come after the immediate crisis.

18:59Xi Jinping:Has anything happened like this before in this area? And what can you tell us about this specific gang, it seems, that did this earlier this week?

19:08Michael Baumgartner:Well, this gang is also called the Pachenka or the Autodefensas of the Sierra Nevada. And they have had a huge presence, a long presence in the territory, focused a lot on gaining control over the criminal economies and over extortion and intimidation and other types of these criminal activities. So this is not new. This situation is not new. Perhaps it's the first time that this group does what it started doing in the last couple of days, but as a retaliation. But this is not necessarily a new thing in the region. And one thing that maybe we'll like to highlight is that, nevertheless, this tries to put on the table that this group, the Pachenka or the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada, are trying to show their strength, or at least to show a strength that they might have, as a retaliation for the government's pressure over them.

20:02Xi Jinping:That's Dr. Andres Macias there, a conflict and security expert in Bogota.

20:14Michael Baumgartner:Hi, it's me, your gutters. I want to start by saying I'm fine. Everything is totally fine. There's just, there's a lot of debris up here and I've been managing it mostly on my own for about eight months now. And I just thought maybe you could find someone on Angie to clean me up. You don't have to make it a whole thing. It doesn't need to be a whole thing. I just, I could really use your help. Your gutters have waited long enough. Find a pro at Angie.com.

21:04Michael Baumgartner:to in-depth analysis and features. Visit bbc.com forward slash subscribe to find out more.

21:16Xi Jinping:Welcome back to NewsHour. Local Kenyans who've spent decades living and working alongside elephants in the Mount Elgon region of the country have helped researchers understand how the elephants use dozens of different medicinal plants to treat themselves. The elephants even appear to give medicinal plants to their babies. The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports. Dr Ella D. Freeman is one of the authors. She spoke to New South's James Menendez.

21:44Michael Baumgartner:When we sat down with all of these incredible local experts who have spent the majority of their lives living amongst and working with these local elephant populations, we got all of these incredible first-hand observations and descriptions and stories of elephants seeking out medicinal plants that are also used and important in local medicinal human knowledge systems. And one example that I can give, for example, is a group of elephant that was appearing unwell to the observer. They weren't really moving as much as they typically do, not walking very much. And they sought out the bark of a tree, and they used their tusks to kind of tear some bark away and eat it.

22:24Michael Baumgartner:And what's so cool is that this tree is a really, really important medicine for the community. And here we have a case of sick elephants seeking it out. So we have 35 different incredible cases like this, and it just expands greatly what we knew about African elephant self-medication behaviours. The last time we spoke, Aladie, we were talking about chimps self-medicating. But I mean, how unusual is this behaviour in the animal world? That's what's so cool about this topic. We used to think it was rare. We used to think that it was just chimps and just great apes that were doing this. And the more we learn, the more we realise how widespread it is across the animal kingdom.

23:00Michael Baumgartner:We have cases now of insects, of bears, of civets, of geese. So what we're finding is that actually this is a really common behaviour and why wouldn't it be? Animals are able to seek out food, they're able to seek out shelter, in some cases they're able to seek out tools, why wouldn't they be able to seek out the medicines that help them flourish in their ecosystems? Common behaviour, but obviously this needs to be observed and I suppose the fact that you can talk to local people who've been living alongside these elephants for a long time gives you kind of a wealth of knowledge, right? Right.

23:32Michael Baumgartner:And this is another great example of, you know, Western science catching up with traditional knowledge and local ecological knowledge that people who live in these environments have about the animals and the plants around them. And it's now just a matter of us scientists listening to these accounts and listening to these firsthand observations. And they provide us with this incredible jumping off point for future research and future studies. And just briefly, I mean, do you think this is common behavior amongst elephants across the continent? I really wouldn't be surprised. We know that elephants are incredibly intelligent animals.

24:09Michael Baumgartner:We know they live in tight-knit, complex social groups. And we also know that they pass down information about their environment from generation to generation. So we have these incredibly amazing and wonderful and endangered animals. And we know that they're relying on the plants around them in Kenya. why wouldn't they also be doing that in other parts of the region and the world?

24:29Xi Jinping:That's Dr Elodie Freeman there from Brown University in the US on the self-medicating elephants of Kenya.

24:46Xi Jinping:You're listening to NewsHour live from the BBC. I'm Rebecca Kesby. More details have been emerging on the extent of that cyber attack on the FBI earlier this week. In a statement on social media, FBI officials say they're actively and aggressively investigating the matter. It seems that hackers have stolen the personal information of every member of staff that works for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That's around 38 ,000 people. Phone numbers, home addresses, photo IDs, all in the hands of a cybercrime gang. And as you can imagine, many of those FBI employees will be involved in very sensitive criminal cases where personal security is a major concern.

25:30Xi Jinping:More on that in a moment. First, though, here's the technology journalist Chris Stokel-Walker. What do we know about the group thought to be behind this hack, Shiny Hunters?

25:41Michael Baumgartner:A decent amount, although not everything that we would perhaps like to know, Rebecca. So they're a loose international cybercrime group really specialising in data extortion, so taking information and then either extorting a ransom or extorting some sort of change from their victims. They've been active for nearly a decade now, since around about 2019 or so, and their modus operandi is effectively breaking into organisations, exfiltrating that data, then using the threat of publishing that or putting it up for sale to try and put victims under pressure.

26:13Xi Jinping:Yeah, now it doesn't seem as if they want cash for this particular hack. They want something else. Can you explain?

26:19Michael Baumgartner:They want effectively a retraction from the FBI. It is a really notable incident, this one. Alongside taking this data, managed to hack into the FBI website and put up a statement in place of what was originally on that website saying that they give the FBI a week or so to either correct or remove so-called false allegations that have been made earlier this year, which described shiny hunters as a cyber criminal group specialising in large-scale data breaches and extortion. They dispute that and obviously say they want that to be changed.

26:51Xi Jinping:You would have thought that the FBI in particular had particularly strong, you know, cyber security. How did they manage to do this?

27:00Michael Baumgartner:It's not entirely clear. The organization themselves, Shiny Hunters, they say that they had managed to exploit what's called a zero-day exploit, which means a previously unknown issue with a database that is used by the FBI to try and store this information. Although with these sorts of things and cyber criminals, you always have to be very wary of how they actually describe what they've done. They like to cover their tracks and perhaps mislead somewhat. So it may well have been the case that that has happened. But likewise, what they tend to do and what they have done in previous instances to use social engineering to mimic or replicate trusted processes and trusted individuals to convince people to hand over effectively the keys to the kingdom.

27:43Xi Jinping:We're going to hear from a former FBI agent in a moment. But briefly, what is the fear that they might do with this hacked information?

27:50Michael Baumgartner:Well, the 38 ,000 odd details that are available there have intensely personal information. Obviously, these agents operate often in the utmost secrecy. So the concern, I think, is that it gets shared widely, both within cybercriminal networks and also beyond.

28:04Xi Jinping:That's technology journalist Chris Stokel-Walker. Well, earlier I caught up with Rob D 'Amico. He's a former senior FBI agent. In fact, he was a supervisor at the FBI, serving from 1995 to 2021. So how serious is this breach and are FBI agents now at risk as a result?

28:25Michael Baumgartner:I think it is very bad. The information they got, it's through the portal where people apply to government jobs and specifically to the FBI. You have to list everywhere you live, every relative you have, all your foreign contacts. And supposedly that was in this hat.

28:42Xi Jinping:What can be done to try and mitigate the risk to agents?

28:47Michael Baumgartner:This happened before through the government office called OPM, Office of Personnel and Management, which is like the government's HR department. Back in 2013 and 14, the Chinese actually got into their system and got all the same type of information on over 20 million people.

29:07Xi Jinping:That was a state hack. Yes.

29:09Michael Baumgartner:So what they were looking for was on the espionage side. They wanted to identify FBI and CIA people that were operational, either over in China. And the CIA actually recalled some of their officers out of Beijing after that. They wanted to identify what agents were working counterintelligence here in the States. I got three notifications during that time that all my information was released to the Chinese. I didn't care. I wasn't working counterintelligence for Chinese targets. So I didn't really care that the Chinese had all this information on me. Could this be more dangerous then? It could be because state on state, a nation state, there's some rules in there, so to speak, about violence to one another's agents and such.

29:53Michael Baumgartner:But in this case, shiny hunters could release this on the dark web and you could have very dangerous cartels that don't play by the rules getting agents information. So if you had an agent that was working, say, on an MS-13 case, they buy the information off the dark web and then they find out this agent, his name, they find it. They found his spouse, his family members and an address that has to be listed in some of these documents. Now you have a criminal enterprise that doesn't play by the same nation state rules. it now could potentially put the agents, their spouses and their families in harm's way because you have a criminal group have that information.

30:33Xi Jinping:And that is very possible, isn't it? Because the sorts of cases that FBI agents are working on can be very sensitive indeed. Organized crime, all sorts of people that might want this information.

30:46Michael Baumgartner:Absolutely. I did undercover against the mafia back in the late 90s. But it's kind of funny because the mafia even has some rules when it comes to FBI agents. I was not worried if the mafia guys found out as an FBI undercover agent. They would probably just back off. They don't want to do things violent to an FBI agent because it would bring down too much heat on them. They want to still be able to operate what they're doing. But there's now criminal groups out there like MS-13, some of these other violent groups, ISIS that are willing to do violent acts against a government agent. So it is kind of different when you're looking at the different groups that may have access to this information, especially your family.

31:23Michael Baumgartner:I never worried about me. I walk around with my own personal defense stuff, but I would absolutely worry about if it got out to a group that I was working that was violent and my kids and where they live and schools and stuff gets out there, I'd be very much concerned with that information being released to the wrong people. What I'm hearing is that they have access to the millions of records of people that applied to the Bureau and got accepted from so many years back. Well, why was that information still connected to a server that had a public-facing website? If I applied to the Bureau 10 years ago and got hired, why didn't they take all my information that went through that website, take it off that server, put it in the cold storage where it's encrypted, where someone who hacks that vulnerable public-facing website doesn't have access to it.

32:12Xi Jinping:Rob D 'Amico there, former supervisor at the FBI, and he mentioned MS-13, which of course is a transnational gang, which was designated as a terrorist organization by the United States last year. Next, as promised, fascinating new information about bats, which not only help us understand them better, but may help us learn how bats can ultimately help us. It's the biggest This study of its kind involving more than 130 researchers from all over the world published in the journal Nature. And one of its key findings is that bats originated in Europe. For more details, I've been speaking to Liliana Davalos, co-author of the study and professor of evolutionary biology at Stony Brook University in New York.

32:56Xi Jinping:And she told me what they were actually looking for in this massive study.

33:00Michael Baumgartner:We were interested in finding out how the living families of bats are related to one another. but also to their extinct relatives, to fossils that we've had for a long time, because we thought that this would be the key to understanding when and where and how bats have evolved over time.

33:17Xi Jinping:One of the things you found out was that bats actually originated in Europe. How did you work that out?

33:24Michael Baumgartner:Yes, it's a fascinating story because bats had been thought to evolve in several other continents except in Europe. But by including these fossils that have been known, especially from Germany, the Messelpit, has a series of exquisitely preserved bat fossils that preserve the anatomy really well and are very complete. And those have been known for a while. But exactly how they were related to the living bats and to other fossil bats, for example, from North America or from Africa, that wasn't precisely known. So we used a series of very advanced methods together with the genome, but also looking into the morphology of this diversity of living and of the extinct bats.

34:04Michael Baumgartner:And we found, using these methods, we find that the oldest branch of bats is this E.O. Chiroptura, E.O. for dawn. And so this dawn of bats is a branch that is the oldest group of bats to have evolved. And it includes these specimens from Germany and Vialesia, which is this bat from France. And that just pulls the entire phylogeny or the origin of bats into Europe in ways that were not suspected before. So when I say Europe is not Europe as we know it today, it really is very close to North America. And obviously, Europe's always close to Africa, but it changes our thinking about where the evolution of this early diversity took place.

34:45Michael Baumgartner:It pulls it away from other proposed origins like Asia or Africa or North America into Europe. And from there, forming an axis between Europe and Africa from where all the diversity of bats that we have today and several that went extinct came from.

35:02Xi Jinping:I mean, they really are fascinating creatures, aren't they? And what I've learned today is that there are around one and a half thousand different species of bats. and they represent about 20 % of all mammals on Earth. Tell us about the different sorts of species and the varieties.

35:21Michael Baumgartner:This is the diversity of bats. This is what drives us to become passionate and come together across 64 countries and do this work. And it's because we're heading into Halloween and we've got this diversity like the common vampire bat, right? And it's one of three species of bats that feeds exclusively on blood and we don't have vertebrates that become so specialised. except for the vampire bat. We've got vesper bats that you have in Europe and we have in North America, and they've conquered the entire world. At dusk, we can see them coming out. And these are bats that are relatively common, but they're a wonder of evolution because they can be some species, they can weigh 10 grams, but then they've been found to live up to 40 years old.

36:01Michael Baumgartner:At the same time, bats span the range. So some flying foxes may reach a wingspan of about three feet, but the bumblebee bat, it only weighs about two grams. And finally, I want to bring to your attention one bat that people may not have heard of, that's called the hammerhead bat, because the males make this booming sound trying to say, I'm here, I'm here, I'm the best.

36:22Xi Jinping:Well, I'm glad you brought up Halloween, Liliana, because bats do get a bit of a bad reputation sometimes, don't they, including for spreading disease in humans. And they do carry some diseases that can kill us that they're immune to. But the science of that is potentially very useful for us, isn't it?

36:40Michael Baumgartner:Absolutely. And last year, we also had another paper in Nature that was looking precisely into that. How do bats manage? This is an opportunity for us to learn about the interaction between bats and viruses. So we have only begun now to learn how to deal with inflammation at a cellular level. And we're learning some of it from bats.

36:59Xi Jinping:And just roughly, what's the current percentage of bat species that are endangered at the moment?

37:05Michael Baumgartner:The last assessment that was done in 2019 found that 18 % of the bat species that have been assessed are threatened with extinction. But there are lots and lots of other species of bats that we know very little about. We have this giant chasm with 80 % of bat species, eight zero, that are not well known, not understood how their population is doing, or they are threatened with extinction.

37:28Xi Jinping:That's Professor Liliana Davalos there with the latest on that huge study that's been done. It's published in Nature, but researchers all over the world putting in their findings into it there. This is Rebecca Kesby with NewsHour live from the BBC. Now the United States has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to the G20 meeting that will be held in Miami in December. The Kremlin said it would consider the invitation. It's not yet known how other countries will react. President Putin has an international arrest warrant out on him for war crimes. The US is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court so won't be obliged to arrest him if he does make an appearance.

38:14Xi Jinping:The news comes as Russia again has been hammering Kiev with drone attacks. The BBC's Paul Adams reports from Kyiv.

38:24Michael Baumgartner:So after last night's ballistic missile strikes, the clean-up in Kyiv is well underway. Here by the side of a busy road on a rainy morning, there's a crew digging a great big hole in the ground because a water pipe has been burst and they're anxious to repair it because people in the local area are without water for the time being. There's a stump of a lamppost here which has been peppered with shrapnel and the trees around here have all been burned. Some of them have been chopped down already and taken away and that seems to have really angered the lady who was here a moment ago. Clearly everyone here is on edge after what happened last night.

39:09Michael Baumgartner:And just nearby is one of Kiev's maternity hospitals and it's a place that's quite important to a lady we just met called Christina. Tell me what happened here last night. It seems that the part of the missile landed here, but it felt like the whole missile landed here. Were you here when it happened?

39:29Xi Jinping:I lead to apartment blocks from here.

39:31Michael Baumgartner:But you could still feel it? Yes, I could see the light and I also heard I jumped out of my bed. I was frightened.

39:41Xi Jinping:My sister gave birth here last year in June, and she's due again next year in January. We are very worried if everything will be OK.

39:51Michael Baumgartner:Do you think that the situation in Kiev is getting worse at the moment? Yeah, it's getting worse. Also, like last winter, we didn't have heating, we didn't have electricity.

40:02Xi Jinping:I lived in Bologna. It was minus, temperature minus in my apartment. So yeah, it's getting worse.

40:09Michael Baumgartner:We've heard that some people are thinking about leaving the city for the winter. Is that something you're thinking of? We were thinking of moving to the Capacian mountains, but I'm also scared to go there because here at least you have where to hide, and there are just mountains. After attacks like this, there are often brief power cuts. There are apparently problems with the internet today in some parts of the city. but so far we have not had the kind of widespread power cuts that we've seen in previous winters. As the temperatures drop and winter arrives, those widespread power cuts are an absolute inevitability.

40:50Michael Baumgartner:The people of this city are acutely conscious of that but many of them who have been through this before are determined to stick it out. This winter will be hard for us. every winter is hard for us because no electricity, so cold, so many ballistics, it's hard. It seems as though maybe this winter will be more difficult because you have the ballistic missiles and the new drones.

41:25Xi Jinping:I think it will be the same, plus minus the same as before this winter.

41:33Michael Baumgartner:So you're going to stay here in Kiev?

41:34Xi Jinping:Yes, stay in Kiev. Stay in Kiev. 100 % stay in Kiev. 1 million % stay in Kiev. The BBC's Paul Adams reporting. Finally, as we were hearing earlier in the programme, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping is on an official visit to Washington, his first for about a decade. But Mr Xi's first ever visit was back in 1985 as part of a regional agricultural delegation from China. In fact, it was his first trip outside China at all. He was about 30 at the time and stayed with the Dvorak family in Iowa. I've been speaking to Paula Dvorak, who was 14 at the time, and she's been telling me about it.

42:13Michael Baumgartner:I guess my mom thought, well, my brothers are at college, so we have room and why not? So she invited both Xi and the interpreter to stay at our house. and Xi stayed in the room next to mine and I believe the interpreter stayed downstairs in my brother Mark's room. My brother was a fairly talented artist and also a Star Trek fan so he had drawn this picture of Spock in his room. I have pretty good memories of that location.

42:53Xi Jinping:And what were your impressions of Mr. Xi back then?

42:56Michael Baumgartner:I was a teenager and I was obviously trained to be polite and nice to guests. The conversation began, I guess, through via the interpreter about movies, The Godfather. I can't remember 100 percent, but I believe that that was the one that stood out to him. But, you know, I remember kind of they were sitting at our breakfast table in our in our tiny little kitchen. And, you know, Xi was pretty quiet, not that he was unfriendly, but he was quiet. And the interpreter did most of the talking and the interpreter had such a big smile. And I just remembered that very, very vividly when I met him again in China in 2012.

43:41Xi Jinping:So I don't know whether it was the Star Trek themed bedroom, but your house did leave an impression on Mr. Xi because he invited you to China. to meet with him there. And you kind of became a little bit of a celebrity, didn't you, when you went to China? That's what I was told, yes.

44:01Michael Baumgartner:Because after the banquet happened, I was wearing a very brightly coloured flowered dress. Such bright colours made me stand out. And being younger than the rest of the delegation and blonde hair, I think, made me stand out. My brother, after he moved to China in 2013, said that that was still very much the opinion that I had become a little celebrity.

44:27Xi Jinping:Oh, interesting. So this trip was in 2012 and your brother then went to live in China in 2013. Yes. Is he still there?

44:36Michael Baumgartner:Yes, he is still there. Yep, he is. And he has had a formal dinner with Xi and his home is in Beijing.

44:46Xi Jinping:And do you think that is because of this sort of connection that happened when your mom decided to volunteer to host back in 1985?

44:55Michael Baumgartner:Oh, 100 percent. I mean, the fact that our family was connected to him opened up a lot of doors for business when he was there and he was able to continue to establish those connections. so his reasoning for going out there and taking his business out there definitely had to do with the relationship to Xi Jinping.

45:20Xi Jinping:Paula Dvorak there, reminiscing on the time President Xi came to stay and the enduring family links ever since. That's it for this edition of NewsHour from me and the whole team here in London, wherever you are in the world. Thanks very much for joining us.

46:10Michael Baumgartner:The Haunted Library with new episodes twice a week. Find The Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts.