King Charles welcomes Trump at Windsor Castle

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

I'm Celia Hatton, and at 17 hours GMT on Wednesday, the 17th of September, these are our main stories.

The U.S.

President gets royal treatment at Windsor Castle as he meets with King Charles and members of his family at the start of his state visit to the UK.

Israeli forces say they've struck more than 150 targets in Gaza City since Tuesday's ground incursion began.

Thousands of Palestinians are struggling to escape the assault.

Also in this podcast, the wife of the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny says new forensic evidence has emerged that proves he had been poisoned.

He died in prison last year.

And Ben and Jerry's ice cream might need to shorten its name after Jerry resigns, accusing parent company Unilever of trying to silence the brand's activism.

Today in the UK,

a military band played the American national anthem after President Trump's arrival at Windsor Castle.

The U.S.

President is on his second state visit to Britain.

His host, King Charles, accompanied him in an elaborate golden carriage through the grounds of the castle.

They went on to inspect a guard of honor and watch a large military parade.

As we record this podcast, Mr.

Trump is shortly due to watch a fly pass by the Red Arrows, the Royal Air Force aerobatics team, and later, he'll be attending a state banquet with 160 guests.

Britain has never hosted any other U.S.

president for two state visits.

Our UK political correspondent, Rob Watson, is at Windsor Castle, and he told us it was meant to be a grand affair.

It certainly was a stunning spectacle and very much carefully planned to be exactly that.

You described some of it.

There were 1,300 troops all in full ceremonial outfits.

So if you imagine all the brass gleaming, the bearskin hats.

You had 120 horses all dressed in their finery.

And of course, the carriage is polished to within an inch of their life.

And this is entirely what it was designed to be.

I mean, the British government, the royal family know that this is what Donald Trump likes.

And this was an absolute sort of full-fat, reddest of red carpets that you could possibly imagine for the president.

I mean, Mr.

Trump has been full of praise for King Charles, but privately, the two men don't necessarily agree on everything.

What do we think they're going to be talking about?

I mean, it's an extraordinary thought, isn't it?

I mean, if you think about King Charles, he is renowned for being very concerned about the environment.

He's very much concerned about a whole host of what you might call liberal issues.

You couldn't imagine someone like President Trump having a more different sort of worldview.

What will they talk about?

I mean, the short answer is we don't know, but we know that President Trump has described King Charles as a friend.

And they do seem to have a good chemistry.

And I think it's worth bearing in mind that King Charles has had many, many years of diplomacy right Celia he knows how to to conduct himself and they'll have all sorts of things that they'll want to talk about no doubt memories of his mother the queen who who President Trump was very fond of and of course away from all the pageantry though we have to remember that this is a visit between the US and the UK what are the two sides hoping this visit will achieve

Well, I mean briefly on the US side, I think it is.

It is the pomp and pageantry.

I mean that's why Donald Trump has come far more than the sort of political business deal-making side, which leads us to the Brits.

And I think they want four things very briefly.

I mean one is to, you know, some distraction from all of Prime Minister Stamer's recent troubles.

A second, to get President Trump in a good mood, right?

This is a sort of sweetener.

I mean, the third is to talk up these deals between UK and US tech companies, particularly with regard to AI.

And then I think the fourth thing is to try and send a message to the world from the Brits, which is that, look, you may not get horse-drawn carriages and, you know, and a guard of honor, but this is a country that you could do business with.

You know, come and have a look.

Rob Watson.

And today, the British government has announced that U.S.

tech firms are to invest more than $40 billion in the UK.

Much of that money will be spent on new data centers, and one of those companies, Microsoft, will also be involved in the development of a powerful supercomputer.

Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, is here alongside President Trump.

He believes that AI investment in the UK could boost economic growth here by 10%.

Our technology editor, Zoe Kleinman, asked Mr.

Nadella, what's in it for Microsoft?

We've been in the UK since 1982.

It's 40 plus years.

And we've consistently, over all these decades, invested in the UK to bring the best technology so that we can then have customers across the United Kingdom.

So that's the goal for us is to be able to really, at the end of the day, make these long-term capital investments because of the attractiveness of the market and the policy stability across governments in the UK.

And to me, that is what allows us to be able to sort of go year after year, decade after decade, and bet on the customers of the United Kingdom using this technology to, quite frankly, create technology that then is used around the world.

The UK economy is pretty sluggish at the moment.

I think it's fair to say.

When do you think AI is going to deliver this promised 10% growth boost that we're supposed to be getting?

Always, whenever anyone gets excited about AI, I want to see it ultimately in the economic growth and in the GDP growth.

So could we say in 10 years?

Well, I mean, you can never predict.

So the point is, since it all is compounding, right?

So

the ability for AI perhaps to benefit from even the investments everyone made, even on the cloud, It may happen faster.

So our hope is not 10 years, but maybe five years, but it does take time.

I think there's no shortcutting the time for diffusion and also change.

Let's not ignore the fact that organizations also have to go through the hard process of how to change the processes that adjust to these new levels of productivity.

Is there a danger that the UK is giving up its digital sovereignty, though, by doing so many deals with US companies like Microsoft.

We are making this capital investment in the UK soil, right?

So these are AI factories, cloud factories that are very much part of the infrastructure of the United Kingdom.

And so you have now trusted American technology that the UK can use and companies across the UK can use to create more technology for the United Kingdom and for the United States and the world.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaking with our technology editor Zoe Kleinman.

The widow of the Russian human rights campaigner, Alexey Navalny, has said on social media that new scientific evidence proves that her husband was poisoned.

Mr.

Navalny died suddenly in February last year while serving a 19-year sentence in an Arctic penal colony.

But Yulia Navalnya says the official Russian version that her husband died from natural causes was false.

Alexey was my husband.

He was my friend.

He was a symbol of hope for our country.

Putin killed that hope.

We have the right to know how he did it.

I heard more from BBC Monitoring's Russia editor, Vitaly Shevchenko.

Alexei Novalny's widow, Yulia, says that their team were able to obtain what they call biological samples from Alexei Novalny and send them to laboratories in two countries, which she says, independently of each other, reached the conclusion that he was poisoned.

Now, Julia Navalny does not name the substance that allegedly killed her husband, which laboratories or even which countries studied those samples.

In fact, she suggests that these laboratories are reluctant to make their findings public for what she calls political considerations.

But she says that Vladimir Putin killed my husband.

And she also accuses Russian secret services of developing banned chemical and biological weapons.

Okay, so still some missing information.

But any response from the Kremlin so far?

I mean, Yulia Navalny has always maintained that her husband was killed on President Putin's orders.

What is the Kremlin saying?

Yes, she's always been saying that, and the Kremlin has always been reluctant to even

utter Alexey Novalny's name.

Vladimir Putin, famously or infamously, has used different other words to talk about the politician.

Earlier today, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, of course, he was asked at his daily news briefing about Yulian Novalina's accusations, and he said, Well, I'm not aware of anything.

I can't give you any comment.

But earlier, the Kremlin called these claims baseless and insulting.

But we have to remember, right now, Vladimir Putin is an exceptionally strong and unchallenged position.

And before he ended up in this position, so many of his opponents died, some of them because of poisoning.

BBC Monitoring's Russia editor, Vitaly Shemchenko.

We're going to talk about art now, and one of the 20th century's best-known modern artists, Pablo Picasso.

45 of his paintings and sculptures have gone on display at the Tate Modern in London as part of a new exhibition called Theatre Picasso, which encourages viewers to reinterpret Picasso's works through music, video, and stagecraft.

Shanley has been given a preview.

Hello, I'm Rosalie Dobel.

I'm a senior curator of international art here at Tate Modern.

This year marks the centenary of an incredible work in the Tate collection, Pablo Picasso's The Three Dancers from 1925, which really, when it entered the collection, was transformative.

It represents this incredible turning point in Picasso's own working career as a painter, moving from a period of neoclassicism into a much more expressive mode.

And we were really inspired by this work to think about Picasso's relevance now.

And so we turned to contemporary artists who sang, and Enrique Fuente Blanca, to look at this painting afresh and to regard Picasso anew and give us a contemporary interpretation, really, of this work.

He was a bit of a performer himself, wasn't he?

He was, absolutely.

And we see the exhibition opens with an incredible clip of Picasso in a Man Ray film where we...

it now actually he's wearing a mantello around his ears

and he is lighting a cigarette much his mannerisms really emulate those of Carmen

von der Blanca I'm writer and curator and I stage this exhibition Theater Picasso at Tate Modern we wanted to understand how he implemented a lot of tools that came from the world of theatre and performance to his painting and to his world.

So it's not an exhibition about the relation between theatre and Picasso, that is huge and is rich, but it's an exhibition about how he implemented all his tools to construct his own identity.

Enrique, can you show us some of the examples in this exhibition that illustrate the point you're making about his ability to incorporate theatre into his art?

Can we go and take a look?

We have one in front of us, we have one of the Sweet Bollards sketching of Picasso, when we can see a fountain and we can see a really interesting painting about the scopic case, about the idea of like the artist that is presented as the fountain, as the mythological character that is looking to a woman that is veiled.

And if you look at it with attention, the figure of the women, it's almost disappearing.

To think that the object of the desire is not real, it's always in the unconscious, like something that is underlying or is something that needs to be unveiled.

We are actually coming out on the stage where just behind the footlights, looking out to the audience, there's even conveniently a bench there for the audience to sit on, which gives us just a different perspective on this.

And suddenly, we've got there, the three dancers.

It is a mesmerizing picture.

It's also huge.

We have three figures, but actually, these figures are also in a kind of metamorphosical movements.

We can do something actually that is kind of funny.

Right now, for example, we are listening to the soundtrack, the jazz soundtrack from Aurik from the film.

It brings us a kind of lecture with the crowded.

It could be like dancing like some popular dances, but when the music changes and we listen flamenco,

something could be more formal, it could be more controlled.

Exactly, we can see like the main figure, it's acting like a kind of flamenco dancer.

Rosalie, people might associate Picasso, in particular, with that period in the early 20th century when he was going through his blue period, quite austere paintings, paintings of beggars and sex workers and drunks, and wonder what happened in his life for him to lighten up like this and produce a work as kind of spectacularly kind of passionate as the three dancers.

Picasso once said that painting is a sum of destructions, and you can see this constant stylistic transformation.

Picasso really thought about performance and thought about how he could control his own output and how really he was engaged in the act of self-mythologizing.

And that is what is examined here in Theatre Picasso.

Theater Picasso runs until April next year.

Coming up, using AI to help identify wild giraffes by their distinctive markings.

It only takes literally seconds to do what used to take weeks and weeks to do.

We create a history of how often we've seen these giraffes so we can get some really important information about their lives.

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In a push to root out Hamas operatives there, Israel has intensified its bombing.

Hospitals are reporting more deaths in the Strip.

Israel's attempts to take control of Gaza City and the effects on civilians there has led to widespread international condemnation of Israel's latest actions.

At a meeting in Brussels, Kaya Kalas, vice president of the European Commission, proposed downgrading trade ties with Israel and sanctioning two far-right Israeli ministers.

The aim is not to punish Israel.

The aim is to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

All member states agree that the situation in Gaza is untenable.

The war needs to end.

The suffering must stop and all hostages must be released.

We must use all the tools we have towards this outcome.

We must also not lose sight of the dangerous developments in the West Bank that reduce the viability of a two-state solution.

Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinian residents are rushing to try to escape the assault on Gaza City.

For the latest on the attacks, I spoke to our Middle East correspondent, Yola Nell, who's in Jerusalem.

According to the Israeli military, there's been more than one hundred fifty locations targeted in Gaza City in just the past day since it announced that it was beginning its new ground assault.

That we've been hearing from people in the city has been terrifying.

They say that they can hear the loud sounds of explosions, also of houses being demolished on the outskirts of the city where their Israeli ground forces are operating.

They've not yet entered into the heart of the city.

They say this is the Hamas nerve center.

That's expected in the next few weeks, according to reports in the Israeli media.

At the moment, the focus of the Israeli military is still very much trying to get people living in Gaza, and there's still several hundred thousand of them, to leave and to head to the south, what they're calling a humanitarian zone.

Although humanitarian agencies tell us that it's really not a safe place, a place where people will not be able to easily find shelter.

We're still seeing these scenes in footage of people fleeing on the coastal road, but the Israeli military has also now opened up another another route temporarily through the centre of the strip it says that that will be operating for the next two days and really still very desperate scenes it's extremely difficult for people to find transportation one person told us it can be as much as a thousand dollars you're quoted if you want to take a ride in one of these lorries heading towards the south we've seen that many people have been just walking on foot carrying their children pushing carts with their belongings in It's still in the middle of the day, intensely hot.

On foot, this journey to the south of the Gaza Strip from Gaza City can take easily nine hours.

Yolande, the EU sanctions that we mentioned, they're just a proposal so far.

They need to be approved by member countries.

Any reaction to that idea in Israel, and could it make a difference?

Well, I mean, at the moment, it doesn't look like this measure has sufficient support among the EU's member countries to pass.

So we're not getting a comment on that proposal at the moment that I've seen anyway.

In general, though, you know, we had the Prime Minister saying a couple of days ago that Israel would have to become more self-reliant as a result of the economic sanctions that it's been facing.

He then faced a lot of really quite intense criticism over that.

And he put it down to a misunderstanding at a news conference late yesterday.

And, you know, the Tel Aviv stock market had taken a tumble with that.

High-tech leaders have come out criticising him.

He's now sort of you know going back on that somewhat.

He also used this news conference to stress that there's still strong support from the US and that he has been invited back to the White House for his fourth meeting since Donald Trump's inauguration.

That will be at the end of September and will be you know his fourth meeting at the White House since President Trump was inaugurated.

That will come after his UN General Assembly address.

But of course the UN General Assembly is expected to be a tough time for Israel, with many world leaders condemning actions in Gaza and some countries saying that they will now be recognizing a Palestinian state.

Yolan Nell in Jerusalem.

Now, when it comes to Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza, the founders of the famous ice cream brand, Ben and Jerry's, have not shied away from expressing their anger over what's happening there.

You might associate Ben and Jerry's more with its creative flavors, everything from Cherry Garcia to caramel sutra.

But for Jerry Greenfield and Ben Cohen, the two friends who started the company almost 50 years ago, their ability to speak out on big issues is also a major part of the brand.

That's come under pressure, though, after the brand was acquired in 2000 by the corporate giant Unilever.

It's now part of the Magnum Group of ice creams.

Things have come to a head, and now Jerry from the company is stepping down.

Our Our business correspondent, Katie Silver, told me more.

According to a post by his co-founder, Ben Cohen, on social media, he said that it's about trying to stop attempts at being silenced.

He said that he was heartbroken to do this, that the company has been silenced and sidelined, to quote him, for fear of upsetting those in power.

And of course, this goes back quite a long time.

They have butt heads with their parent company, Unilever, that acquired the brand back in 2000.

They've been butting heads since about 2021 when Ben and Jerry's decided that it was no longer going to sell its ice cream in the Israel-occupied West Bank.

Now, more recently, there's been a lot of conflict, particularly, for example, Ben and Jerry's calling the conflict in Gaza a genocide.

That's created conflict with the parent company.

They were also allegedly told by Unilever to stop criticising President Trump.

And they've also been very outspoken on issues like LGBTQ plus as well as climate change.

And much of this, when it comes to the parent company, is that they would prefer Ben and Jerry's to be a little bit more quiet on the matter.

That's interesting that they wanted Ben and Jerry's to be quiet because Ben and Jerry's was never your average ice cream brand, was it?

It's always been quite loud, quite colourful.

Can you remind us about that?

It's a very colourful brand indeed.

So it was founded in the late 70s by two childhood friends, that's Jerry Greenfield and Ben Cohen.

They started it with just one small little ice cream store in the US state of Vermont in Burlington.

Since then, grown it to be this behemoth where it's sold across the world in supermarkets as well as having their own outlets.

As I say, it was then acquired by Unilever in 2000.

But when that acquisition occurred, they had in their clause that they were allowed to continue their social activism.

Now they say that they have been silenced.

And we saw, for example, earlier this year, the company's chief executive, David Stever, him, according to Ben and Jerry's, being removed by its parent company, Unilever, again for the social activism element.

And what is the company saying in response today to this announcement from Jerry?

Magnum, which is the ice cream spin-off within Unilever,

a spokesperson has released a statement saying that they're grateful to Jerry for his role in co-founding the company, but they said that they disagree with his perspective and have sought to engage both co-founders in a conversation.

We haven't heard from the wider parent company, Unilever, yet, but of course, Ben and Jerry's has been trying to broker away through this disagreement.

Last week we saw Unilever, according to Ben and Jerry's, reject the proposal to sell the brand to investors.

Now they say that they were going to be able to sell it for the fair market value of between one and a half to two and a half billion dollars.

Clearly that hasn't worked and that's why we find ourselves in this position now today, Celia.

Katie Silver.

And for our last story, we're going to venture out into the wild.

You might already know that the markings on a giraffe are as unique as human human fingerprints, something conservationists have used to track the animals in the bush.

Now, that task has been simplified by using artificial intelligence.

Scientists in Tanzania say that technology is offering new clues about how these animals live and survive.

Dr.

Monica Bond is a scientist with the NGO Wild Nature Institute and a research associate at the University of Zurich, which uses the AI tool.

Dr.

Bond is in Tanzania, and she spoke with the BBC's pre-arry.

Those spot patterns don't change from the time that the giraffe is born till the time it dies.

So we know who all of our animals are, we know where they move around, we know their survival rates, reproduction, etc.

And from this, we can then determine where in the landscape giraffes are doing well and where they're not.

So we can target conservation actions to the places where they're needed most and we can help recover the populations that are declining.

We go out on our giraffe surveys and take more than a thousand photographs on each survey.

We do this six to nine times per year, and we've been here doing this for 15 years.

So now it only takes literally seconds to do what used to take weeks and weeks to do, which is match these patterns.

So then we create a history of how often we've seen these giraffes and we can get some really important information about their lives.

So essentially then the AI, what kind of things is it revealed that you might not have been able to as easily before?

My job is to go out and collect the photographs and then I ask questions about giraffe lives and giraffe survival and the step in between taking all those photographs and then answering those questions is the onerous part of the processing of the data and that's where the AI tool comes in.

So we still do the looking at the results, interpreting the results, determining the conservation actions, but the AI tool helps us to get from data collection in the field to being able to answer those questions about where giraffes are doing well, where they're not, and why.

What has it told told you?

In some parts of the ecosystem, the giraffes are declining.

And why might that be?

It's because adults, for example, are not surviving well.

It's natural for a lot of the calves to experience mortality from natural predators, but once a giraffe is an adult, so five or six years old, they have very, very high survival because they're relatively invulnerable to natural predation.

But what we see is that people tend to be a problem for the adult giraffes.

You have illegal poaching.

There's also a lot of paving over of habitat, making them farms and human settlements.

So, we've actually pinpointed that the problem is lower adult survival and we've determined where that is occurring.

So, then we can target things like anti-poaching patrols and that kind of thing into areas where we've discovered through fast processing of our data where the problems are occurring.

What are the wide benefits to the rest of the environment if giraffes can be better protected?

They're really big animals and they have a very large range, but maybe about 150 or more square kilometers.

So when you're protecting the habitat for an animal that ranges that widely, it's protecting the habitat for so many other species that occur within there.

So giraffes can be, not only are they sort of iconic flagship species for conservation because they're so loved around the world, but they're also helping to protect all those smaller species that share the savanna with them.

Lots of enthusiasm from giraffe researcher Dr.

Monica Bond in Tanzania.

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

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

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

You can also find us on X at BBC World Service.

Use the hashtag Global Newspod.

This edition was mixed by Ricardo McCarthy, and the producer was Vanessa Heaney.

The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Celia Hatton.

Until next time, goodbye.

Stop settling for weak sound.

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