The News Quiz: Ep 4. A Lib Dem Conference and a Seagull Summit

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Speaker 1 There now follows a public health announcement on behalf of the Farage Institute of British Bird Life Safety.

Speaker 1 Are you a swan?

Speaker 1 Are you feeling strange tooth-like sensations somewhere on your body? And are you concerned about rapid weight loss? Then you might be being eaten by a foreigner.

Speaker 1 Don't worry, it's perfectly normal. It happens all the time.
It's just part and parcel of being a British swan these days.

Speaker 1 The best thing to do is relax, try not to worry about it, and remember that you're just a porn in a political game as you listen to this week's News Quiz.

Speaker 1 Hello, welcome to the news quiz. I am actually hang on, I've got to tap in with my new prototype digital ID to make sure I'm who I think I am.

Speaker 1 Sandy Toxfig.

Speaker 1 Haven't quite nailed the technology yet. Right, let's meet our teams.
Well, it's just been announced that it is International Bird Noises Awareness Decade.

Speaker 1 So our teams this week commemorate some of the most popular bird noises of all time and also pay tribute to who is running medical science in America and to political leadership rumblings here in the UK.

Speaker 1 We have Team Quacks against Team Coo.

Speaker 1 On Team Quacks, we have Simon Evans and Times columnist Cindy Yoo.

Speaker 1 And on Team Kuhn

Speaker 1 we have Tiff Stevenson and Neil Delamere.

Speaker 1 Well happy party conference season one and all and to mark this happiest time of the year we will start with a question about the inescapable swamp of resignation, resentment and sorry, politics.

Speaker 1 I read it wrong.

Speaker 1 This can go to Simon and Cindy. Rumours of political manoeuvrings are swirling around Westminster, as so often happens in the months between January and December inclusive.

Speaker 15 Whose ears in particular have been Burnham this week?

Speaker 16 It's the king in the north,

Speaker 16 Andy Burnham, who says that he doesn't want to run for the leadership but has given a massive interview to the new statesman in the week ahead of the Labour Conference.

Speaker 16 But he doesn't want to step on any toes, goff at it.

Speaker 15 Burnham's in an interesting situation, isn't he? I mean, he's got a recognisable face, and actually, it's got quite strong features as well, which I've always thought is useful in politics.

Speaker 15 You can tell what he's thinking, can't you? He has very expressive eyebrows.

Speaker 15 You rarely see eyebrows that expressive outside of a Pixar film about some brave woodland animals that are trying to fight off an evil property developer who wants to expand his golf course.

Speaker 15 But I think he is deluded as to where the pinnacle of politics is. I think mayor of Manchester is probably about as good as it gets in this country.
I mean, being mayor, it's a top job, isn't it?

Speaker 15 You get to swagger about that you're a big fish or duck or whatever it is in a small pond. You never have to buy yourself a drink.

Speaker 15 You'll get an extra, you know, little shake of scraps on your chips, won't you?

Speaker 15 It's a top life. You get to wear a bit of bling, you know, and now he wants to come down to Westminster and just be another cog in the great churning machine of disappointment and bile.

Speaker 1 I think he's error.

Speaker 15 That is a terrible calculated error.

Speaker 14 I think it's a disastrous idea to be a big fish or a duck in a small pond because apparently Eastern Europeans might eat you.

Speaker 17 They've got some neck.

Speaker 1 Burnham also gave an interview to The Telegraph, so he's playing

Speaker 1 all sides.

Speaker 14 He said, I'm being dragged into this. I am being dragged into this.
All I did was give two different interviews to two different publications. It's like a matador going.

Speaker 14 I was just walking by the bullfight. I was carrying a massive red tablecloth and I was covered in grass, and I was just dragged into this.

Speaker 14 Can you imagine how paranoid Kirst Armer is going to be now?

Speaker 14 He can't go to Liverpool because Burnham is from Liverpool. He can't go to Manchester because he's the mayor of Manchester.

Speaker 14 He can't go to Shakespeare because like a Labour Party internal battle is Shakespearean. And he'll be sitting there going, yeah, but who would take me on?

Speaker 14 And then three witches just go, Burnham would.

Speaker 14 Look, it's a very simple path to power, isn't it, for Andy Burnham?

Speaker 14 All he has to do is retire from the mayoralty, and then he has to find find somewhere that will have a by-election, somebody give up that seat.

Speaker 14 The executive council has to make sure that he actually stands for the by-election, and he has to win the by-election against a resurgent reform, and then he has to have 80 MPs from some of the most fractious political parties to exist in the history of time.

Speaker 14 And then, Bish Bash Bosch, you're the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Speaker 15 This is a man who was beaten for the leadership election the last time he tried by Jeremy Corbyn, of course, which you remember.

Speaker 15 He's been beaten twice against Ed Miliband.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 14 So that's four times less than Farage.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 17 It's something to lose against Ed. If you're talking about good faces in politics, I think Ed Biliband's got a look on his face constantly like he's just seen boobs for the first time.

Speaker 14 Not even in real life on a calculator.

Speaker 1 Burnham accused Kirsten of being divisive. That's quite a divisive accusation to make, isn't it?

Speaker 14 Well, yes and no.

Speaker 15 He's divided Corbyn and Sultana into a separate, you know, which have then managed to self-immolate almost immediately. Quite extraordinary.

Speaker 1 That was one of the quickest, even by the standards of left-wing politics. Yeah.

Speaker 15 They usually create a party before internal fueling images.

Speaker 1 Tiff and Neil, what did Andy Burnham say should be rolled back?

Speaker 17 Is it blazer sleeves?

Speaker 17 So we can all be cool like Miami Weiss.

Speaker 15 The war skin of austerity.

Speaker 17 Now we know what you call your penis, Simon.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 The foreskin of the penis. It gives, it takes away.

Speaker 14 This is going to be hard for everybody, but let's just get through it.

Speaker 14 We're just wondering who's going to explain foreskin to Andy.

Speaker 14 Camera and Shay.

Speaker 1 What did Burnham say should be rolled back?

Speaker 15 Would it be the 1980s? The 1980s.

Speaker 1 The 1980s.

Speaker 15 And now he wants to roll back the 1980s,

Speaker 15 by which he presumably means the Thatcherite revolution.

Speaker 15 Whether he means that he wants to then shunt the 70s onto the 90s and just one decade is missing, or whether we're going all the way back to James Callaghan, the winter discontent, or possibly the last time

Speaker 15 a pre-new Labour leader. It's hard to know exactly what he's thinking.
But I will say this.

Speaker 15 I am encouraged by a Labour leader with that level of nostalgic ambition, because that's normally very much a conservative trend.

Speaker 15 Oh, it hasn't been the same since they introduced trade unions or, you know, collective bargaining or the coronavirus. The French Revolution, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yes, Labour is stumbling into its party conference with the weary resignation of a fourth-term government bracing itself for the inevitable electoral shepherd's crook after just a year and a bit in power.

Speaker 1 Mayor of Manchester and former cabinet minister Andy Burnham strongly hinted and flatly denied that he might be amenable to the concept of challenging for the leadership of the Labour Party.

Speaker 1 It's less than a year and a half into Stalman's prime ministership. And unrest is growing in the Labour Party about the growing unrest in the Labour Party.

Speaker 1 Burnham, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, the former newspaper,

Speaker 1 accused Downing Street of spreading alienation and demoralisation, possibly another example of Stalma taking on Farage's clothes.

Speaker 1 Andy Burnham said that he had unspecifiedly been sounded out by some unspecified MPs for a possible leadership at an unspecifiable point in the future, which wasn't the most obvious way not to cause instant speculation about a definite leadership challenge.

Speaker 1 As the old saying goes, if a priest comes around to your house wearing speed-os, there's a fair chance he'll ask to have a go in in jacuzzi after finishing the exorcism.

Speaker 1 Moving on to the conference we had last week, fill in the missing superheroes in the film plot announced last week. In an elemental battle with the forces of darkness, people turn to their last hope.

Speaker 1 Fill in the honk.

Speaker 14 Do you know what that honk is the last sound that a swan hears?

Speaker 1 Every swan hears.

Speaker 1 Who is the last hope against the forces of darkness?

Speaker 16 It's Ed Davy on a jet ski.

Speaker 1 Correct, basically, yes.

Speaker 14 So he came into the conference playing drums, and you suddenly realise that you view things through the prism of your nationality.

Speaker 14 Because you just saw a man walking along playing the drums, didn't you? Because you're English.

Speaker 14 Whereas I saw a man playing the drums at the head of a marching band surrounded by people with orange signs.

Speaker 14 And I thought, it's not even the season, man.

Speaker 14 And he made this rousing speech then, didn't he?

Speaker 14 Where he mentioned Nigel Farage 31 times in 49 minutes because the Lib Dems think that reformer is going to be their main opposition at the next election.

Speaker 14 Just purely for entertainment purposes, I want to see reform go up against the Lib Dems.

Speaker 14 Just Ed Divy up on a paddleboard again and Nigel Farage not letting it land because it's essentially a small boat.

Speaker 14 He always has a good point though, doesn't he, Nigel? But it's never Guinness because Guinness is from a foreign country and you have to let it settle.

Speaker 17 At the risk of being earnest, it would be great if the Lib Dems shared more of what they want to do and how they're going to achieve that rather than telling us who they don't want to be like.

Speaker 17 It doesn't feel like the greatest platform to stand on because it just sort of feels desperate now.

Speaker 17 Like Labour are twisting in the wind like an inflatable tube man at a last-stop repo sale, literally falling for everything and unable to stand for nothing.

Speaker 17 So you kind of feel like, as a left-wing person, you're like, what hope do we have if it's it's not the Lib Dem? So you just kind of want to hear them say what they're actually going to do.

Speaker 16 The problem for them is that they are targeting quite contradictory groups.

Speaker 16 They want to have the wet Tories who are now turned off by the Tory lean to the right, but they also want to attract people who are more left than Labour. But you really can't do both.

Speaker 16 So at this conference, they were talking about patriotism. I think you talked about cricket pavilions and village greens.

Speaker 16 So they're clearly targeting the Tories this year, but who knows what they're going to do in the future?

Speaker 15 District nurses cycling to mass across the cricket green, around the ancient elms, stout calves like a hock ham from Waitrose.

Speaker 15 He's got to have some powerful, evocative images.

Speaker 14 Have you just described a mixture between OnlyFans and Call the Midwife?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've never seen a more shameless bid to be poet laureate.

Speaker 1 In terms of the

Speaker 1 Liberal Democrats targeting the Conservatives, Daisy Cooper, the deputy leader, said the Liberal Democrats, who won 72 seats at last year's election, are aiming next time to win more seats than the Conservatives for the first time since 1910.

Speaker 1 So, on current polling trajectories, let me do the maths, they need approximately rounding down. They need to lose no more than 71 of those seats.

Speaker 1 Liber Dem leader Ed Davies said that his reform UK counterpart, Nigel Farage, wants to turn what into what?

Speaker 17 Flags into legal spouses.

Speaker 15 Do you want to turn Tommy Robinson into the moderate option?

Speaker 15 They want to turn Britain into the 51st state, is his,

Speaker 15 yeah, yeah, which is absolutely wishful thinking. We're not even in the next 10, I don't think.
Canada is 51. Puerto Rico, Mexico, you know, Britain, Greenland, absolutely.

Speaker 1 I think. But yeah, like

Speaker 15 a little mini-meter Trump's America is essentially his fear, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Is that a fair statement, do you think? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Frack on.

Speaker 14 I'm just relieved I was able to get here from Dublin and I wasn't stopped at all the Sharia law checkpoints.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 we did we because we are recording this at the uh the BBC Radio Theatre in London and we did have to ask Sadiq Khan for special dispensation for you to be allowed.

Speaker 1 Let's uh move on, Neil and Tiffany can have this question. What is a Boris wave?

Speaker 17 Oh, is it Nigella Lawson trying to pronounce microwave?

Speaker 16 Boris Wave.

Speaker 15 Is it what Boris does towards a small child that may or may not be one of his, but he doesn't want to be legally binding?

Speaker 16 Boris Wave is the wave of migrants who've come since Boris Johnson said he would control migration. Yes,

Speaker 14 it's the wave of people who've come, isn't it? Yes.

Speaker 1 As described by Nigel Farage and Reform UK, 3.8 million people, they say, have entered the UK after Brexit due to the looser rules brought in under Johnson's prime ministers.

Speaker 1 And reformers placed to end indefinite leave to remain. Now, do you all know what that is? Indefinite.

Speaker 1 So it might sound like the fence-sitting third option that should have been on the Brexit referendum post.

Speaker 1 It's been fairly roundly criticised for basically changing the rules that people came here under and the assumptions that they how does that sit with sort of British values of fair play that Farage likes to sort of be the exemplar of changing the rules after people have come here

Speaker 15 thinking that they'll they'll have an indefinite leave to remain yeah i think that's fine under the current uh british rules of fair play which have been established for about three and a half weeks

Speaker 16 there was a news story about an um asylum seeker who i thought really imbibed these british values he was meant to be sentenced for assaulting another asylum seeker then he misses court hearing he misses sentencing because he was eating fish and chips so 15 minutes later his lawyers were panicked looking for him found him outside having some fish and chips on the bench so now his court hearing has been delayed at the end of October.

Speaker 16 I think that's I think we should let him stay.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean uh critics say that Farage's proposal threatens the status rights and prospects of hundreds of thousands of legally resident migrants, people who've been living here under the assumption that they had secured a legitimate permanent right to live in Britain.

Speaker 1 And the counter-argument is yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 see how those two sides can be reconciled. Of course net migration went up significantly after Brexit.

Speaker 1 So even if Brexit has pleased neither those who voted for it, because it's not banned out the way they thought it would, nor those who voted against it, because it has banned out the way it thought it would,

Speaker 1 I think we can all agree: boom times for British irony fans.

Speaker 1 And also, immigrants will have to, under reforms proposal, demonstrate good character, quotes, ruling out people who commit financial misconduct, tax evasion, and other criminal convictions.

Speaker 1 Because we have that amply covered.

Speaker 1 Well, I have one final politics-related question. According to Boris Johnson, what links Noah, the celebrity Middle East-based ark magnate,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 young people in the UK today?

Speaker 15 Well, a very long line of patronage, I suppose.

Speaker 15 And they're all wet.

Speaker 1 Yes, wet. Yeah.

Speaker 16 But Noah famously wasn't wet, right? He was pretty dry on his ark.

Speaker 1 Yes, yeah.

Speaker 15 So you're going to have to go away and rewrite that, Andy.

Speaker 1 You're the wettest generation since the flood. He said, do you know why he said why he claimed?

Speaker 14 they don't drink and they don't have sex and they don't drive as much as previous generations.

Speaker 14 But uh writing about young people not being the same as to our generation is the most tedious subject in the history of newspapers.

Speaker 14 Everybody is oh the Edwardian said this, the Georgian said this, the Victorian said this. I bet you can find the Romans going after young people today they wouldn't even suckle a she-wolf

Speaker 14 I bet if you go back there's hieroglyphics on an Egyptian tombstone that just says, big dog's head, big dog's head, eye, young people, iPhone.

Speaker 16 In this piece, he said that young people aren't having sex, and he writes, is it because they're worried about the emotional entanglements that come from having sex?

Speaker 16 I mean, he clearly doesn't know what that's.

Speaker 17 No, just the Boris Wave and album.

Speaker 1 I mean, given that he's a man hid in a fridge to avoid a journalist, accusing other people of being wet seems a bit of a stress, doesn't it, Simon? Simon?

Speaker 15 There is a long-term decline in testosterone in young men, which will demonstrate itself, the symptoms of which will, you know, easily be categorised for an elderly Tory as being wet.

Speaker 15 And that is a fact. Every generation, it's in decline.
Not uniformly across the West. And in Edinburgh, they are extraordinarily swift to correct me on that front.
They have no problem at all.

Speaker 15 Which is probably true because there are two major feedback loops which will bring up your testosterone levels. And those are fighting or standing your ground when threatened and having an erection.

Speaker 15 And if you've ever been to Edinburgh with somebody like my accident, at least you're never further from a fight than you want to be if you need a little boost.

Speaker 15 And the last half dozen spontaneous erections I've had have been going over cobbles in a bus.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 15 they have actually got the infrastructure necessary.

Speaker 15 But a left-leaning council has recently installed a tram network in Edinburgh now, which gives a much smoother ride and I'm afraid to say is probably feminizing their men.

Speaker 17 I feel like all of this should be on a podcast with you smoking cigars one in each hand.

Speaker 1 Well at the end of that round I think it's fair to say no one's in the lead. It's two points all.

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Speaker 1 Let's move on to some global news. Complete the following famous pop lyric in the style of a current American president.
Don't blame it on the sunshine. Don't blame it on the moonlight.

Speaker 1 Don't blame it on the good times. Blame it on the

Speaker 1 paracetamol. Correct.
yes.

Speaker 15 Yes, uh, Trump has uh he announced bizarrely during Charlie Kirk's memorial service that he had exciting news coming up about autism. So everyone was braced for anti-vaccine news.

Speaker 15 And no, it turns out it's uh high street painkillers during pregnancy.

Speaker 1 Correct.

Speaker 14 He's basically said there's a link between pregnant women taking Tylenol and autism. Listen, people like me who haven't gone through pregnancy in labour have lots of questions about it.

Speaker 14 What's it like to bring life into the world? Why aren't contractions called push notifications?

Speaker 14 I've got loads of questions, but whether somebody who's pregnant should take paracetamol is not one of them. My mother, I know for a fact, took loads of paracetamol when she was pregnant.

Speaker 14 She needed something to cope with the hangovers. So.

Speaker 17 We said there's been studies, and he said that some people, you know, don't use it and there's no autism. And then he looked at RFK Jr.
and then he sort of went, who? And he went, the Amish.

Speaker 17 And he went, so the Amish have no autism. And then RFK juniors are lower rates, just slightly lower rates.
You know what the Amish also don't have? Guns.

Speaker 17 In America, you can't have a drink until you're 21, but you can buy a long rifle when you're 18 so you can shoot your sorrows before you ever have a chance to drown them.

Speaker 14 I think if I had a gun, I'd be able to get a drink.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Tyler Knoll is the brand name for what we know as paracetamol, which explains why traditional jokes are much harder in America, why there are no painkillers in the jungle, because the Tyler Knoll.

Speaker 1 Doesn't work, does it?

Speaker 17 So they're calling it drug misuse. I don't like it when it says in films there's going to be drug misuse.
I want the drugs to be used properly.

Speaker 1 In other Trump news, he spoke at the United Nations this week. According to Trump in his UN speech, who is going where?

Speaker 16 Is it Jimmy Kimmel to Guantanamo B?

Speaker 1 Very much the subtext, I think, rather.

Speaker 14 Is it Cliff Richard on a summer holiday?

Speaker 16 Is it Melania to Slovenia?

Speaker 14 God, she rocketed it up that escalator though, didn't she? As soon as that escalator broke, she was like, I see freedom and was gone.

Speaker 14 She was gone.

Speaker 1 Remember me, Mr.

Speaker 15 I assume it's something like Europe has gone to hell.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so European countries are going to hell.

Speaker 14 Yeah. Well, first of all, so he'd go at immigration and he had to go at green energy.
It's a hell of a time to be a South African that makes electric cars, isn't it?

Speaker 14 He's obsessed with wind turbines, Donald Trump. So he had to go with them again.

Speaker 1 They're killing the swans.

Speaker 14 He's always gone on, they're killing all the birds.

Speaker 14 Even though there's a study that says of a three-blade wind turbine, if you paint one of the blades black, it reduces the fatalities of birds by 70%.

Speaker 14 It is quite difficult to paint one of the blades black. You have to be very quick,

Speaker 14 He keeps going on about this stuff, and he said Europe was going to ruin. What was it? Because of the double-tailed monster of immigration and green energy.

Speaker 14 Even though, sorry, point of order, but all the best monsters are not double-tailed. All the best monsters have multiple heads.
Cerberus, Hydra. Monsters don't have two tails.

Speaker 14 He's thinking of swallows.

Speaker 14 A swallow never brought down an administration.

Speaker 1 He claimed to have put a stop to what in his speech?

Speaker 15 Specifically, seven wars. Yes.
Although he didn't name them all.

Speaker 15 So we're not sure whether these are like the seven signs of aging, you know, that are just vaguely myths, or whether like one of them might be the war on drugs or the, you know, the Pepsi-Cola wars.

Speaker 15 But there are a number that were specifically mentioned.

Speaker 15 One of them, I think, between Armenia and Cambodia, which if it was to kick off, would have been terrifying because the number of people who would have been caught in the crossfire.

Speaker 14 Yeah, Serbia, Kosovo was one, he said, even though there's tension there, but there's no war there. Ethiopia and Egypt, which didn't actually break out into fighting.

Speaker 14 The Jets and the Sharks, I think he did the Jets and the Sharks as well.

Speaker 14 A lot of people would say they danced that out, but

Speaker 14 he said he solved that one.

Speaker 14 The one he didn't solve is the Ukrainian war, the Ukrainian-Russian war, which he said, in fairness to him, he said that he would solve within one day when he was inaugurated.

Speaker 14 But he didn't specify the day, and he meant Venus Day. A day on Venus is 243 days.
So he, that was just last Saturday, so let's give him a break.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Yes, the 10-year perma wind that is Donald Trump's political career continued with a virtuoso display of live performative nonsensicalism at the UN General Assembly.

Speaker 1 The delusion addict and professional resentment monger witted on for almost an hour, well over his allotted 15-minute slot, cramming in his trademark cocktail of not entirely 101% verifiable claims, gratuitous jibes, and the free-form ramblings of a man with no internal or external editor.

Speaker 1 He claimed to have put an end to seven wars, not entirely clear which ones he meant to get his totaliser up to seven.

Speaker 1 Vietnam, possibly, his heroic refusal to enlist, made the peace movement great again at the time.

Speaker 1 Steve Waugh, the apprentice that made Donald Trump into the figure he is today, the American TV show, began on the 8th of January 2004.

Speaker 1 Steve Waugh last played for Australia's cricket team on the 6th of January 2004. Join the dots, people.

Speaker 1 Evelyn Waugh, not written a sausage since 1966.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 1 Franco-New Zealiak War, he started, that never really got off the ground, it was just an argument in a bar about whether Camembert is better than rugby.

Speaker 1 And the Fool War, the battle that raged in and around the tabloids and Ladsmags over whether or not it is acceptable to make lascivious comments to complete strangers.

Speaker 1 Well, the scores are now five points all, which means we're into a tiebreaker. And our question for our tiebreaker: who has been struggling to deal with gull power this week?

Speaker 14 Scotland, yes.

Speaker 1 Isn't it?

Speaker 16 They're calling it the seagull summit.

Speaker 14 Isn't there some conference about seagulls and having to try and come up with measures against seagulls? Yes. Seagulls get a bad rap when you think about it, right?

Speaker 14 Because basically, if you go for a lovely seaside meal in Britain or Ireland, all you do is get annoyed by seagulls versus mosquitoes in different countries.

Speaker 14 When you think about what mosquitoes and insects can give to us, like sleeping sickness, the Tetsi fly, they can give us Westnow fever, dengue fever, malaria, versus stealing your chips.

Speaker 1 Like that's all.

Speaker 14 All seagulls do is steal your chips and then make you chase after it to get them back. They are the forefront of our fight against childhood obesity, when you think about it.

Speaker 14 Aren't they? Because they never steal healthy food. You never see somebody go, look, that seagull's taking my quinoa.
You've never heard of that.

Speaker 14 I know it is a stereotype, but they're absolutely getting big.

Speaker 14 I went to the beach, a place called Dolly Mont Strand in Dublin about four or five weeks ago, lovely summer's day, and there was a kid getting an ice cream from a van.

Speaker 14 And I turned around, and the seagull had flown off with the van.

Speaker 1 Yes, the seagull summit has been convened in the northern Scottish city of Inverness in an attempt to clamp down on seagull mayhem.

Speaker 1 The birds of no fixed abode, aged generally between naught and 20, have been raiding bins, befouling sports facilities with their seagull posterial depositions, taunting locals over their inability to fly and stealing snacks.

Speaker 1 The Highland Council have attempted to do the Scottish thing and send the birds homeward, to think again, through the use of lasers and spikes, and have even tried to create bird-on-bird violence using a falcon, but there now seems no hope beyond sitting back and waiting for Russian drones to invade Scottish airspace and drive the gulls away.

Speaker 1 No gulls were available for comment.

Speaker 1 Since you both answered that last one at the same time, we'll have to have another tiebreaker. We're going to try and make a medical breakthrough using American techniques.

Speaker 1 I'm going to give a piece of paper to each of our panelists. Here we go.

Speaker 1 So, one of the team, so we'll go with Cindy and Neil, have to write down a medical condition, and Tiff and Simon have to write down the first thing that comes into their head.

Speaker 1 Okay. Are we done? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now pick a number between one and two inclusive, Simon.

Speaker 1 Two.

Speaker 1 Okay, you've got a cure rather than a cause. So did you write the first thing that came into your head? I did, yeah.
Which is what?

Speaker 15 Dungarees.

Speaker 1 Cure.

Speaker 1 Chronic lying.

Speaker 1 We're making progress.

Speaker 1 Let's see if Tiff and Neil can beat that. Tiff?

Speaker 17 Swans.

Speaker 14 Leprosy.

Speaker 1 We have a winner. A genuine medical breakthrough.
Swans

Speaker 1 cure leprosy.

Speaker 1 Congratulations to Tiff and Neil for that breakthrough, winning them this week's Newsquiz. Hard luck to Simon and Cindy.
Well, that's it from the Newsquiz.

Speaker 1 Do tune into Radio 4 for the next episode of The Life Scientific, in which Jim Al-Khalili interviews Donald Trump about his life in and love of science.

Speaker 1 That will be on Tuesday morning between 9am and two seconds past nine.

Speaker 1 Until next week, goodbye.

Speaker 1 Taking part in the NewsQuiz were Simon Evans, Cindy Yu, Tiff Stevenson and Neil Delamere.

Speaker 1 In the chair was me, me, Andy Zaltzmann, and additional material was written by Peter Talouch, Jade Gebby, Miranda Holmes and Ruth Husco.

Speaker 1 The producer was Rajiv Courier, and it was the BBC Studios production for Radio 4.

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