Trump criticises Putin as his UK state visit ends

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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Valerie Sanderson, and at 17 hours GMT on Thursday the 18th of September these are our main stories.

President Trump says again that he's disappointed in Vladimir Putin as he completes his state visit to the UK.

Ukraine says it's attacked two refineries in Russia bringing operations at one of them to a complete halt.

Hundreds of thousands of people are on strike in France in protest at the government's austerity plans.

And a lager a day, the alcohol intake enjoyed by wild chimpanzees and why it matters to humans.

This sort of supports the drunken monkey hypothesis, which basically says that human attraction to alcohol today originated from this evolutionary exposure to ethanol.

It has been a whirlwind two days in the UK for President Trump on an unprecedented second state visit.

Wednesday saw a day of pageantry when he was welcomed by King Charles at Windsor Castle for a glittering event with guests who all sat down to the best food and wine the UK can offer.

Today, Mr.

Trump's destination was Chequers, the official country residence of the British Prime Minister, for talks.

It has been a flawlessly choreographed and tightly controlled trip, with the greatest moment of possible danger left to the end, the news conference when both leaders would be questioned by journalists from the UK and the US.

In his opening remarks, the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, said the country's special relationship had been renewed for a new era.

The United Kingdom and the United States stand together today

as first partners on defence,

first partners in trade with the groundbreaking deal we struck in May, and now with the new agreement that we've just signed this afternoon, we're confirming our status.

as the first partners in science and technology, ready to define this century together, just as we did the last.

President Trump was asked whether peace talks on Ukraine have come to the end of the road and if President Putin has let him down.

He has let me down.

I mean, he's killing many people and he's losing more people than he's, you know, than he's killing.

I mean, frankly, the Russian soldiers are being killed at a higher rate than the Ukrainian soldiers.

But

yeah, he said, let me down.

I don't like to see it's death.

You know, it it doesn't affect the United States.

We have other than unless you end up in a world war over this thing, you could.

This was a thing that would have never happened had I been president.

If I were president, it would have never happened.

And it didn't happen for four years.

People, most people agree.

It didn't happen, nor was it close to happening.

And I spoke to President Putin about Ukraine.

It was the apple of his eye.

I've said that many times.

It was.

But he would have never done what he did, except that he didn't respect the leadership of the United States.

As the news conference ended, we got the initial thoughts of our North America correspondent, Gary O'Donoghue, and our UK chief political correspondent, Henry Zeffman.

So, how did Henry think the Prime Minister's office in number 10 Downing Street would feel about how it went?

I think they'll be delighted with that in number 10.

President Trump disagreed with Kirstana, sure, on quite a few important things on Gaza, on illegal immigration and how to handle it, on energy policy.

But those are all things that we knew at the start of this trip that they disagreed on and President Trump disagreed in the most agreeable way possible.

The tone of the whole thing was essentially agree to disagree.

And then there were the unexploded ordinances.

There was nothing really other than something quite perfunctory on Jeffrey Epstein and Lord Mandelson.

In fact, Donald Trump claimed not to know who Lord Mandelson was and nothing at all on Nigel Farage.

So I think chalk this one up as a big success for Sir Kir Sadama and Ten Down the Street.

Yeah, I mean I'm not going to step onto Henry's territory, but if I was Downing Street I'd be cracking open the champagne right now because you couldn't have hoped for that to go any better.

Donald Trump was in one of those kind of reflective,

I don't want to say low energy, but sort of not quite in one of those sort of full-on moods that he can be.

It's obviously been a long visit, you know,

and that has taken its toll to some degree.

And as Henry was saying,

there were opportunities for fireworks there.

He was, People laid some bait in terms of freedom of speech a couple of times.

That wasn't taken in terms of attacking the UK.

When it came to recognition of Israel, all he said was

we disagree.

It's one of the few things we disagree on'.

And then he stopped and he said nothing more.

So you look at things like that and you look at some of the other issues around particularly around Gaza and

Putin.

I I think that that will be an absolute win for the President as well because

the pomp of his visit has not been overshadowed by any kind of fireworks at the press conference.

And if you're in Downing Street, as Henry has been pointing out, you will breathe an enormous sigh of relief at that moment in this visit, that moment in the visit where you didn't really have control over what would happen.

And the Prime Minister, he kind of bossed the whole 45 minutes, didn't he?

He bossed it.

Yeah, he did.

He felt completely in control, Gary, of the way in which the press conference was unfolding, of who was asking things at different times.

And that, I think, was the risk for Downing Street was that he ceded that control, deliberately or otherwise, to President Trump and then lost control.

But I mean, you're absolutely right.

President Trump did not take opportunities which, in other circumstances, or perhaps with other fellow world leaders who he likes less, he might have taken.

I think actually at one point President Trump even said, I don't want to be controversial.

I mean, you know, I think that wouldn't have been in the wildest spin doctor's dreams in 10 Downing Street as something that President Trump would both say and then act on.

And I thought it was interesting.

I mean, Donald Trump repeated the idea that he won the 2020 election again, which we know he didn't.

Now, you know, he repeated that.

No one picked up on that.

And that could have been something, a very tricky question for Kier Starmer if someone had said, do you agree?

He just said he won the 2020.

Do you agree with that?

But no one really picked up.

on that.

And I thought the interesting thing that the Prime Minister does is he, when he's asked a difficult question about the areas of disagreement, he actually focuses in on the nugget of what they do agree within that disagreement.

So, asked about Palestine, he goes straight in on Hamas being a terrorist organisation.

They don't want to be part of a two-state solution, they should have no part in the future.

So, he gets right in there with the bit, the bit, the tiny bit, where there's common ground.

Well, and I think it helps us understand how deftly he is clearly handling President Trump behind closed doors as well.

It's clearly not an accident that Sir Keir Starmer has managed to find a way to, dare we even say, make President Trump a bit boring.

And, you know, that has happened behind closed doors.

They've established this warm rapport.

And I think actually probably what we got a bit of in public view was the way in which Sir Keir Starmer manages to smooth over those points of difference and maintain the rapport.

Our UK chief political correspondent, Henry Zeffman, and our North America correspondent, Gary O'Donoghue.

A day of action is underway in France.

Where hundreds of thousands of people are expected to join strikes and demonstrations against the government's plans to cut public spending.

Some schools are closed, many pharmacies are shut, and there's expected to be severe disruption on the Paris metro network.

The effect of strikes and demonstrations is being felt across the country, with cities including Marseille and Lyon also affected.

Our correspondent, Hugh Schofield, spoke to us from the Place de la Bastille in Paris.

This is very much a traditional public sector union-organised demonstration, you know, a real kind of display of muscle by the unions and

the battalions in the big public sector.

So I can see red balloons, orange balloons from the various different unions and it's very hard so far to gauge how big it is but already the unions of course are claiming it's been a big success.

There's I don't know 250 different demonstrations and cortege around the country.

Yes as you said this is happening everywhere isn't it not just Paris.

Totally and I mean that but that's classic for a day like today.

It's you know it's a big day of protest organized by the unions and with the backing of the left-wing parties.

They want it to be a real kind of arm twister on President Macron and his new Prime Minister, Le Cornu, to influence them as they go through the motions now of forming a government and trying to draw up a new budget.

So

even though the odd thing about all this, of course, is that it was called when there was another Prime Minister, François Beirou, in order to counter his plans, dramatic plans in their view to counter the growing debt.

He's gone.

Beirut's gone, but they've maintained this display of force in order to maintain the pressure on his successor, who's Sebastian LeCornu, and of course through him on President Macron.

So are these protests primarily about cuts to public spending or are people angry about other things too, for example, low wages?

Look, it's a left-wing demonstration.

It's a political show of force by

the people who support the left, particularly the unions and the parties and so on.

And what they want to do is exert pressure.

They want to exert pressure on the government to tailor a budget which is more to their way of thinking.

That means with fewer cuts, with fewer of the threats that they see in the budget to the welfare state as it's been handed down over generations.

So what they're protesting about is the general sense of threat to the world they know.

The counter-argument from the government and certainly from the outgoing Prime Minister, Rosabeiru, is you can't go on like this.

We can't go on like this.

There is a massive levelette which is going to hit us in the face soon.

And if we don't get our act together, life is going to get very, very tough indeed.

And all talk of any kind of welfare state is going to go out the window.

So there are two polar opposites here.

And it has to be said that the public feeling is much more with the protesters who are saying, no, don't touch our welfare state, than it is with those Cassandra-like figures like Bronzo Beru who are saying, hang on, we've got to do something or else none of this is going to survive.

Hughes cofield in Paris.

Ukraine's special operations forces say they've struck an important oil refinery in the city of Volgograd in western Russia.

They claim the attack has brought operations there to a complete halt.

The refinery is one of Russia's largest and helps supply the country's armed forces with fuel.

Dani Aberhard has more details.

Russia has not officially commented on the Ukrainian claims to have hit and stopped production at the Volgograd refinery.

The region's governor spoke only of Russian air defenses repelling a massive drone attack, adding that, as he put it, debris had fallen on private homes in the city.

The Russian authorities have, though, acknowledged there's been a drone attack and a fire at a separate petrochemical refinery in the Bashkortistan region to the north of Kazakhstan.

Video footage of the aftermath posted online that's been verified by the BBC shows large amounts of black smoke rising into the sky from a fierce blaze at the plant.

Danny Aberhard.

Could artificial intelligence replace journalists?

Around the world, some newsrooms are increasingly using it to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

But big questions remain over the ethics and quality of AI output.

Sam Gruitt has this report, which begins with an AI-led news channel.

Hello, and welcome to Channel 1, a new way of consuming, reporting, and thinking about the news powered by artificial intelligence.

For Channel 1, the future is very much here.

All presented by our team of AI-generated reporters.

The generative AI news service launched for a brief period last year advertised its news scripted, edited, and presented by artificial intelligence.

But would you or anyone you know actually watch a channel that lacks a real human being?

I put that to founder and CEO Adam Mossan.

We got, I think it was 8,000 emails in the week after that.

And that was from such a wide variety of folks, everything from people that were the creatives in the industry to the CEOs of I feel like most of the biggest media companies on the planet.

What about the potential for AI to completely replace journalists?

Listen, there's a lot of jobs that, you know, if you speak to folks in the industry that are being done that people don't really want to do, right?

They want to focus on higher value content.

If we could take that off their off their plates, our product essentially acts as an assistant to the creatives, right?

Next comes the launch of our daily news program in countries and languages across the globe.

So, with new possibilities for news output, how much of it are we seeing rolled out across newsrooms around the world?

Chris Stokel Walker is a journalist and author of How AI Ate the World.

We are seeing AI being used on the front lines of journalism at the point at which the audience consumes that bit of information.

But it's not all been smooth sailing between the media and AI.

The New York Times is suing Microsoft and chat GPT maker OpenAI over copyright infringement.

The newspaper claims the companies used its intellectual property to train large language models.

It also one of the challenges here is that, you know, the generative AI space has been a little bit of a wild west.

There is this real appetite for these AI models to be trained on data.

Without that source information, AI needs that base data.

OpenAI has denied these claims, and the case is ongoing.

And frankly, the outcome of it could really significantly affect the future of AI development.

So, I've been a journalist with the BBC for the best part of the last decade.

And what I'm about to do isn't part of my typical day.

It's not part of my usual workflow.

I'm going to use the most popular AI chatbot, that's ChatGPT, although others are, of course, available.

And I'm going to ask it to write me an introduction for my next guest.

He's called Dylan Jacks and he's group technology director at the Telegraph Media Group.

Our next guest is at the forefront of how one of Britain's biggest newsrooms is using technology to shape the way we consume journalism.

We really have been trying to position ourselves as an organisation that drills into the value of how AI can support, elevate, and accelerate journalism.

We've got a really interesting AI project around our Ukraine the latest podcasts.

From today, each episode of Ukraine the Latest will be translated into Ukrainian.

We want to ensure those most affected by the war can access our coverage.

That podcast has got really great global reach, but one of the things that we wanted to do is we wanted to make that available to non-English speakers, particularly in Ukraine and Russia.

And we used very advanced AI tooling to to recreate that podcast, cloning and using the voices of those presenters.

To be clear, this is AI helping to present our journalism, not produce it.

That report by Sam Gruitt.

Still to come, why becoming less inclusive means the fashion industry is going backwards.

I think we're potentially going back to sort of an industry that's just sort of one type is the norm.

You know, being European is the norm.

norm.

Being super thin is the norm.

We hear from the former editor-in-chief of British Vogue.

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Australia has faced global criticism for its continued reliance on fossil fuels.

It's one of the world's biggest polluters relative to the size of its population.

Now, the country has announced a plan to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 62% over the next decade.

That's compared to 2005 levels.

But critics argue the planned cuts don't go far enough.

The Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made the announcement at a news conference flanked by ministers.

This is a responsible target backed by the science, backed by a practical plan to get there and built on proven technology.

It's the right target to protect our environment, to protect and advance our economy and jobs and to ensure that we act in our national interest and in the interest of this and future generations.

Tom Woodruff is a senior international fellow at Australia's Smart Energy Council, which is a forum for promoting and working in renewable energy.

So what does he make of the announcement?

It's a step in the right direction and it certainly shows that Australia is continuing on its journey of transitioning from being a fossil fuel reliant economy to hopefully an economy that is driven by both clean energy and green industrial exports.

There's no beating around the bush that the target falls short of what a lot of us hoped for, particularly with respect to what would have been Australia's fair share with respect to the international effort in terms of what the science demands.

But this is still a really significant step.

It means that Australia, by the time we get to 2035, will need to be powered, for example, by 93% renewable energy across its national electricity grid.

And getting to that point is obviously no small thing.

It's not a leap, this.

It's a step, you described it as.

Can it be reached?

It absolutely can.

Australia, in fact, should be able to not just meet this target and meet the upper end of its target, which is a 70% reduction in emissions by 2035, but it should be able to beat it.

Governments are obviously cautious.

They're setting policies and goals based on the information and tools that they have at their disposal right now.

But we know from this journey of the clean energy transformation around the world that this is an exponential curve.

And certainly we believe, renewable energy doing the heavy lifting of this transition, that actually Australia should be able to get a reduction in the mid-70s at the very least by the time we get to 2035.

And how far would this go towards meeting the longer-term ambition for Australia to get to net zero by 2050?

Would this get Australia that much closer?

It certainly puts Australia on the right track and gives us a credible pathway to getting to net zero by 2050, as you say.

The really big thing that it requires and it is incumbent on us to do, though, in the next decade, if we are to get to net zero, is we need to take our transformation as being one around largely renewable energy domestically and our domestic sources of electricity.

And actually, we need to be looking at the hard to abate sectors of our economy and also pivoting our economy to one that is driven by green industrial exports.

Whilst our fossil fuel exports are not accounted for within our national target, because those emissions, if you will, are exported into other jurisdictions.

Our ability to replace those sources of trade revenue on our balance sheet require us to be producing the green industrial commodities of tomorrow.

Things like green ammonia, potentially green hydrogen, certainly green iron and green steel, where there's a huge potential in Australia.

And this target continues to allow us to go on that journey.

Tom Woodruff.

We heard earlier about the protests happening across France.

And as well as his political battles, President Macron is also fighting a defamation case against the right-wing U.S.

influencer Candice Owens after she promoted videos online claiming that his wife, Brigitte Macron, was born a man.

A lawyer acting for the Macrons has said the couple are planning to present photographic and scientific evidence to a court in the US.

He was speaking to the BBC's Fame Under Fire podcast, presented by Anushka Matanda Doherty.

Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron are suing the American right-wing influencer Candice Owens after she made repeated claims that France's first lady was born male.

Miss Owens has stated she would stake her entire professional reputation on the allegation.

The Macrons began their legal action in July, saying she'd been spreading outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions.

Their lawyer, Tom Clare, wouldn't at this stage reveal the exact nature of the expert scientific testimony the couple were willing to give, but he said they were prepared to demonstrate fully, both generically and specifically, that the allegations were false.

Obviously, it's incredibly intrusive for

this family to have to go into open court and present this evidence, but that should just demonstrate how serious they are about it, how confident they are in their ability to prove it as false in a public forum, and how they want to put this falsehood to rest once and for all.

Candace Owen's legal team have filed a motion to dismiss the case.

In July, she called the lawsuit goofy.

Anushka Mutanda Doherty.

The fashion industry is notoriously ageist.

Now, one of its most influential figures, the former British Vogue editor Edward Ennenfel, is tackling this taboo by featuring an actress in her 50s on the first cover of his new magazine, 72.

She might be Julia Roberts, a Hollywood A-listor and famous beauty, but she's 57 years old and at an age where women are overlooked, as he explained to the BBC's Amo Rajah.

When I talk about inclusivity, people always automatically go to race.

They think it's always about colour.

But My work at British Vogue, my work has always been about women who I call ageless.

And it was very important to me that the first cover

was a woman of a certain age.

It's the age where women are seen as invisible when they hit their 50s or 60s.

And I felt like

talking of inclusivity, that is

the kind of woman I wanted to target for the first issue, sort of the invisible woman.

And Julia does represent, yes, all that, the fame, the biggest movie star in the world.

But at the same time, she's also

a woman of a great age, a beautiful age.

And I thought, let's start with her.

You're no longer the editor of British Vogue.

I just want to ask you about your departure from there.

Were you sort of surprised at the fact that it ended?

And are you glad that it ended?

Because here we are now, you're launching something new.

I decided to end it.

I sort of changed that industry where diversity was concerned.

Six years in, looking at every magazine, September covers, you had women of color.

Everywhere I looked, I felt my work was done but also we're in an industry in flux at the moment because I think we're potentially going back to sort of an industry that's just sort of one type is the norm you know being European is the norm being super thin is the norm it's a bigger picture designers are leaving houses you know new designers have been brought in then they're taken out but the exciting thing about now is it's like it's almost like anything goes right now this is the perfect time to be able to shape an industry and i've always sort of kind of been around in those moments somehow.

So I'm so excited to be coming back to this industry right now because I know there's a lot of work to be done.

Edward Edinfall.

Humans have drunk alcohol for thousands of years.

It's not clear how we got a taste for it, but we know wild chimpanzees also consume alcohol by eating a lot of fermented fruit.

New research has found they consume the alcoholic equivalent of a standard-sized bottle of lager every single day.

Alexei Marrow from the University of California, Berkeley, took part in the study.

We went out and collected fruits from underneath foraging chimpanzees and on the ground where they were foraging in some cases in Thai.

And we assayed the ethanol concentrations within the fruits and found about very low concentrations of 0.3 to 0.4 percent on average.

But since chimpanzees consume such a large amount of food per day, upwards of 10 percent of their body mass it really does add up and as they say, over the course of a day, they consume about 14 grams of pure ethanol.

Is it your sense then that they are deliberately going out to, well, not get drunk, that would be to put a too human a spin on it, but to look for that alcohol?

Yeah, so we tend to think of alcohol in terms of drinks.

It's really less comparable to a drink of highly concentrated liquid alcohol that you drink quickly, and more like eating highly fermented food during the course of a day.

Because even if you had a drink drink or two, if you spread it out over breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you know, you're hardly likely to feel anything.

You mentioned getting it from under the feet of these chimpanzees.

Was it quite an undertaking, quite a difficult thing to do?

Well, these chimpanzees have been habituated for decades now, and they've been studied for a long time.

So it's actually really fascinating.

It's like getting a window into an ancient society or something.

Each of the chimps are recognizable by their face.

They all have a name and a backstory.

And the more time you spend out there, the more you recognize that.

And it's really fascinating.

Yeah.

And does it suggest then, add more evidence the case that humans might have got our taste for alcohol, the taste that some humans have for alcohol, from our primate ancestors?

That's exactly right.

Since we suspect that chimpanzees today live a similar lifestyle to what our remote ancestors did millions of years ago when we were fruit eaters.

So if there's fruit, if there's alcohol fermenting in the fruits now, then there likely was back then as well.

And this sort of supports the drunken monkey hypothesis, which my PhD advisor, Robert Dudley, started,

which basically says that human attraction to alcohol today originated from this evolutionary exposure to ethanol through our fruits that we were eating.

And through particularly the smell of ethanol may be a signal of sugar calories and helped us to find the fruit crops in the forest.

So it's cheers for the chimps.

That was Alexi Marrow speaking there to James Coppnell.

And that's it from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later.

If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

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Use the hashtag Global Newspod.

This edition was mixed by Darcy O'Brie.

The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Valerie Sanderson.

Until next time, bye-bye.