British MP's warned of 'relentless' China spying campaign

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Speaker 5 This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

Speaker 5 I'm Janet Jalil, and at 16 Hours GMT on Tuesday, the 18th of November, these are our main stories.

Speaker 5 Britain's security service warns politicians that Chinese spies are carrying out a relentless campaign to influence and interfere with their work.

Speaker 5 As anger grows in the Philippines about alleged corruption that led to inadequate flood defenses, prosecutors file charges.

Speaker 5 A human rights group accuses the French oil giant Total of complicity in war crimes in Mozambique.

Speaker 8 Also in this podcast, we've seen vaccinators get onto camels to reach girls that are part of remote herding communities.

Speaker 8 We've seen vaccinators get into boats to reach people that live on the banks of rivers and don't have roads to reach their villages.

Speaker 5 The pursuit to prevent cervical cancer and save hundreds of thousands of lives. And should there be a spisometer, an index grading food's hotness?

Speaker 5 The so-called golden era of thriving relations between Britain and China following the handover of Hong Kong is now a fading memory. Relations have deteriorated sharply in recent years.

Speaker 5 Last month, a case against two British men accused of spying for China collapsed suddenly, sparking recriminations.

Speaker 5 There are also security concerns about plans for a new Chinese mega-embassy in London near its financial centre.

Speaker 5 Now, the Domestic Intelligence Service has warned members of the British Parliament to be aware of possible Chinese espionage. The UK Security Minister Dan Jarvis addressed MPs.

Speaker 10 This activity involves a covert and calculated attempt by a foreign power to interfere with our sovereign affairs in favour of its own interests. And this government will not tolerate it.

Speaker 5 As we record this podcast, there's been no comment from the Chinese authorities. A UK political correspondent, Rob Watson, told me more about this latest alert.

Speaker 11 It went from the UK's domestic intelligence service, that is MI5, in a form of a letter to MPs and members of the House of Lords, the unelected chamber, essentially warning them and the officials and those around who work for them that China is essentially trying to interfere in Britain's democratic institutions as sort of broad and, if you like, as grave as that.

Speaker 11 And when the minister who you just heard from there was outlining it to Parliament, he said it wasn't just about the UK's politicians that others needed to be careful.

Speaker 11 And he mentioned people who worked in think tanks, economists, government officials, you know, a broad range of people who might be useful to Chinese state intelligence.

Speaker 5 And it's not the first time there's been such a warning. Relations have become pretty poor between China and Britain.

Speaker 11 Yes, I mean, this feels more like a continuation rather than a sort of seminal moment in Chinese-UK relations because the minister himself mentioned that it

Speaker 11 went back to 2021 where there were first concerns about Chinese state officials trying to interfere, trying to butter up to influence parliamentarians or those close to parliament.

Speaker 11 So I guess one wants to see this as an ongoing threat, but I mean obviously immensely serious.

Speaker 11 There has been a statement in Parliament and while this may not be some new action, it's not suggesting that somehow China is doing something new.

Speaker 11 I think the Minister used the phrase it confirmed a pattern of behaviour, but nonetheless, one that the UK government is trying to say it is taking seriously.

Speaker 5 And China is very important to Britain, clearly because it is the world's second biggest economy. And China has issued menacing words, if you like, about this row over the planned embassy in London.

Speaker 5 So a very difficult decision there for the UK government.

Speaker 11 It is a very difficult balance. It's not just the UK government that has faced this.

Speaker 11 I mean all over the world countries face that in their dealings with China, certainly those in the sort of Western democratic world.

Speaker 11 And it was interesting towards the end of his statement he talked about this difficulty of of you have to both engage China.

Speaker 11 He said that was very, very important to engage with them, but also to challenge them on issues like this.

Speaker 5 Rob Watson. Prosecutors in the Philippines have charged several people in connection with an ongoing corruption scandal, which resulted in inadequate or non-existent flood defences.

Speaker 5 In a country which has recently experienced deadly storms, the allegations have sparked huge protests, as our global affairs reporter, Paul Moss, explains.

Speaker 9 Torrential rain pours down as Typhoon Kharmagi strikes the central Philippine island of Cebu. Whole families forced to climb onto their roofs to escape the resulting floodwater.

Speaker 9 More than 200 Filipinos died in this month's storms, but this is a country where bad weather has often proved devastating, so people might well have treated the latest catastrophe with resignation.

Speaker 9 However, it came amidst allegations that much flood defence work had not been carried out properly. Projects were left uncompleted or poorly completed.

Speaker 9 More than 200 flood projects were registered as finished, but in fact had never been built.

Speaker 9 A government minister then admitted that nearly three-quarters of the money allocated to flood defence work had gone missing.

Speaker 9 Now, people in the Philippines are accustomed to corruption, just as they are to natural disasters, but this scandal seems to have proved too much for public tolerance.

Speaker 9 Hundreds of thousands took to the streets, and it seems their protests have now had an effect.

Speaker 9 On Tuesday, a congressman was charged in connection with the alleged scams, along with several government staffers and figures from the construction industry.

Speaker 9 And the Philippines Ombudsman Office promised that more prosecutions would follow. Public funds were meant to protect communities, a spokesman said, not to enrich officials.

Speaker 5 Poor Moss.

Speaker 5 Now to a phenomenal achievement. Cervical cancer has the most devastating consequences for women in lower-income countries, which often lack the facilities to prevent or treat it.

Speaker 5 But the World Vaccine Alliance, Gavi, says it's prevented nearly 1.5 million deaths from cervical cancer with a three-year vaccination campaign in poorer regions.

Speaker 5 It says an estimated 86 million girls have been protected against cervical cancer. The head of Gavi's HPV program, Emily Kobayeshi, told the BBC about the challenges it had to overcome.

Speaker 8 We are celebrating today the number of girls that we've reached.

Speaker 8 And I think that every time a new country introduces the HPV vaccine, we have seen that misinformation starts circulating right off the bat. And I also think it's natural.

Speaker 8 Parents have questions about something that is new and that is affecting their child's health. So what we've seen is is that governments have mounted a really proactive response.

Speaker 8 First, understanding what questions people have, what their concerns are.

Speaker 8 Secondly, finding the trusted messengers who can reach those parents and answer their questions and address their concerns, and then equipping those messengers with the right information so that they can convey it.

Speaker 8 Sometimes it's online influencers, sometimes it's doctors who can be very compelling, and sometimes it's somebody like a religious leader or a volunteer in the community.

Speaker 8 And the fact is that once parents know that HPV vaccine is safe, it's been tested and used in many countries around the world, it's highly effective at preventing cancer, parents are ready to accept it.

Speaker 8 These campaigns are often delivered through a campaign approach that's led by the government.

Speaker 8 And in that approach, they're designing for each community in each part of the country how to reach the eligible girls who are generally aged 9 to 14.

Speaker 8 So in some remote areas, we've seen vaccinators get onto camels to reach girls that are part of remote herding communities.

Speaker 8 We've seen vaccinators get into boats to reach people that live on the banks of rivers and don't have roads to reach their villages.

Speaker 8 We've seen people go to schools that have thousands of children enrolled and vaccinate hundreds of girls in a day.

Speaker 8 So, using this wide array of strategies to reach girls where they are, that's how we're able to reach really high coverage.

Speaker 5 Emily Kobayashi, the head of Gavi's HPV programme.

Speaker 5 We hear a lot about the potentially scary consequences of artificial intelligence, but there are also lots of positives.

Speaker 5 One way the technology could help us is in speeding up research into ways of stopping antimicrobial resistance.

Speaker 5 This occurs when bacteria become resistant to the drugs used to treat them, such as antibiotics, and it's feared that this could lead to the deaths of millions of people in the coming decades.

Speaker 5 Professor Aradazi is from the Fleming Initiative, which is a global project based here in London. He told Nick Robinson more about the work they're doing.

Speaker 1 AI could be transformative, I mean, in many ways, a new drug discovery, screening millions of assets for their antimicrobial properties. AI recently, our work with DeepMind, looking at

Speaker 1 the transfer of resistant genes between bacterial phages. For example, a work which was done for 10 years by one of my colleagues was done in 48 hours in a lab.

Speaker 13 So that is the key, is it? It's speed.

Speaker 1 It's speed and specificity and sensitivity of what you're actually doing.

Speaker 1 The experiment itself.

Speaker 13 So that, as it were, is the work in the lab or on the computer, but this has got three dimensions to it. You want the public's engagement and involvement too.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 I'm a scientist. I wake up in the morning.

Speaker 9 That's what wakes me up in the morning.

Speaker 1 But besides the science, we have to engage the public in this debate. This is a demand-led problem.
We've all done it.

Speaker 1 Feeling slightly under the weather, you go to your general practitioner and you get a prescription prescription of antibiotics. That has to stop.
That is the main driver for resistance.

Speaker 1 Bacteria are very smart, very smart bugs. The more threat you give them with antibiotics, the more they're able to develop genes that will resist that antibiotic.

Speaker 1 That is why we're running out of antibiotics.

Speaker 13 So you need better science, you need the public to stop demanding antibiotics. What do you need to say in the policy frame?

Speaker 1 We have to. On the policy side, the regulatory framework, the prescribing.
For example, 60% of antibiotics prescribed are without a diagnostic test.

Speaker 1 Now, tell me, is there any disease I could treat you without knowing what I'm treating? And 60% of these,

Speaker 1 majority of these are viral illnesses, not bacterial illnesses. So you're actually driving changes in the microbiome, the gut bacteria, which are very important to your well-being.

Speaker 1 And you're developing resistance.

Speaker 13 And to be clear, that is personal. It's not that you're causing a problem for society.

Speaker 3 You are causing a problem for your own health.

Speaker 13 Absolutely. If you just think, oh, as a precaution, why don't I just take a course of

Speaker 1 and the global side as well is the misuse of antibiotics in animal health. 80% of cattle in the US are fed on antibiotics.

Speaker 1 So we need to do something in animal health as well because resistant bugs transfer to humans.

Speaker 5 Professor Ara Dasi.

Speaker 5 Still to come in the Global News podcast.

Speaker 14 The term actually goes back to the 1960s.

Speaker 14 And originally it wouldn't have been these digital relationships, but it would have been the types of relationships you would have had with the Beatles or the royal family or any kind of one-sided famous person.

Speaker 5 Parasocial is named as Cambridge Dictionary's word of the year.

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Speaker 5 A human rights group has accused the French oil giant Total of complicity in war crimes at one of its gas sites in Mozambique.

Speaker 5 A European NGO filed a legal complaint with France's anti-terrorism prosecutor seeking to tie the company to alleged torture and abuse carried out by Mozambican soldiers who were deployed to protect the gas project in the aftermath of a deadly Islamist attack.

Speaker 5 Total has denied any wrongdoing. Our Paris correspondent, Andrew Harding, is following this case.

Speaker 17 So this dates back to 2021 and northern Mozambique and Ericul Cabo Delgado. Two huge things are going on simultaneously.
One is a massive gas investment project, onshore and offshore.

Speaker 17 It's the biggest private investment project in Africa to date.

Speaker 17 Separately to that, but obviously linked, there is a terrible Islamist insurgency that is causing absolute chaos across the region, lots of beheadings.

Speaker 17 And in early 2021, the Islamists attack a nearby town close to the gas field shore and they kill perhaps 1,500 people.

Speaker 17 Soon after that, the troops, the Mozambican military, who are guarding Total and other companies' holdings on shore, who are basically protecting the government's investment and this international consortium's investment, they take about 200 civilian men, they put them in containers, and it's alleged they kill most of them.

Speaker 17 So it's a massacre that's been well documented.

Speaker 5 And this case that's being brought by this human rights group, why now?

Speaker 17 Well, they claim that they have evidence that Total knew about what was going on, should have known more about what was going on, and should never have got involved in basically cutting a deal with Mozambique, a corrupt government with an army that was notorious, the claimants claim, for human rights abuses, and therefore they should never have relied on Mozambique to guard this huge investment in what was a very unstable part of the world.

Speaker 17 So they are linking them in complicity to those human rights abuses, what they call war crimes, and they have filed a complaint here in France with anti-terrorist prosecutors.

Speaker 5 And how has Total responded to these very serious allegations?

Speaker 17 Well, so far today, they haven't replied to us. We've been trying to reach out to them.

Speaker 17 But in the past, to these same allegations, they have explicitly and repeatedly denied any responsibility or knowledge about what was going on at the time.

Speaker 17 And they say they can't be held responsible for what the Mozambican security forces were doing at a time when they had already basically closed down operations because of the attack on the nearby town of Parma that I mentioned.

Speaker 5 Our Paris correspondent, Andrew Harding. Cryptocurrencies have recently soared in value, especially after being heavily promoted by President Trump.

Speaker 5 But as fears grow of a tech bubble, traders have been getting nervous, and more than $1 trillion has been wiped from the cryptocurrency market in the past six weeks.

Speaker 5 The world's largest digital currency, Bitcoin, is now around the $90,000 mark, down from its record high of $126,000 in early October.

Speaker 5 Our North America business correspondent Michelle Fleury looks at the reasons behind the Bitcoin slide.

Speaker 18 Talk about a crypto crush. Almost exactly one year.

Speaker 18 After rising above $90,000 for the first time in its history, Bitcoin has crashed back to earth, wiping out its gains for this year and entering bear market territory.

Speaker 18 Only a month ago, the price of the oldest cryptocurrency hit an all-time high above 125,000. This was, after all, meant to be crypto's year.

Speaker 18 It had support from Wall Street to the White House, not to mention institutional cash. Remember big money helped the price of the oldest cryptocurrency hit that record high.
So what's changed?

Speaker 18 Well, there are concerns over the Fed's next move. Lower interest rates had helped boost the price of cryptocurrencies, but traders are no longer sure that the Fed will cut interest rates in December.

Speaker 18 And that makes investing in traditional markets, well, a little more exciting and less risky.

Speaker 18 Investors also appear to have lost faith in Donald Trump's attempts to position the United States as the crypto capital of the world.

Speaker 18 Plus those professional investors, well, they've grown more cautious with cash flowing out of ETFs tied to Bitcoin and other currencies in recent weeks.

Speaker 18 And with this digital asset market faltering, so is the wealth that President Donald Trump and his family has won from cryptocurrencies.

Speaker 18 A reminder that even high-profile crypto investors aren't immune to a market meltdown.

Speaker 4 Michel Fleury.

Speaker 5 An hour's drive northwest of Madrid, a huge cross rises on the horizon. It belongs to a monument once known as the Valley of the Fallen, built by Spain's dictator, General Francisco Franco.

Speaker 5 After his death in 1975, Franco was buried there, and it became a shrine for the far right. But in 2019, his remains were exhumed and transported to a family crypt.

Speaker 5 Now, as Linda Presley reports, the government is planning a museum to explain the controversial site to visitors.

Speaker 4 The Valley of Cuegamoros has always been contentious in Spain.

Speaker 4 Built by Francisco Franco, partly with the forced labour of political prisoners, for many it represents his nationalist victory in the civil war.

Speaker 4 And its underground crypts contain the human remains of some 33,000 people killed in that war.

Speaker 4 Although those are from both sides of the conflict, most Republican families weren't told the remains of their loved ones were being transported there.

Speaker 4 But others have a a different connection to the valley. When I visited with a BBC's producer in Spain, Esperanza Escribano, we met a couple, Adrian and Juana.

Speaker 4 She's Romanian, but grew up in Spain and remembers her first visit here.

Speaker 19 Quierona Maravilla. I thought it was a marvelous place, very beautiful.
So the first time I came here, I told him, and I always tell this story, if one day we get married, it has to be here.

Speaker 4 Adrian's family have a strong connection to the valley. It wasn't only forced labor that built the monument.
Adrian's grandfather arrived in the 1950s.

Speaker 19 One day he found out that they were looking for people to work in this place and he decided to come because the salary was the highest in Spain.

Speaker 4 Once the monument was completed, Adrian's grandfather settled here and would go on to run the funicular that used to take visitors up to the base of the cross.

Speaker 4 Juana wasn't put off by the stories of human remains in the crypt that Adrian told her.

Speaker 19 Yes, he told me the history of the place, but that's the past.

Speaker 4 In 2022, Juana got her wish and married Adrian in the Basilica of the Valley of Gualgamuros.

Speaker 4 Given the strong feelings this place generates across the political spectrum in Spain, I wonder if there were any guests who refused to come to Juana and Adrián's wedding.

Speaker 19 No, my friends, and not too many of them are into politics, and they all understood that they were not coming to something political, they were coming to my wedding and they wanted to be with me.

Speaker 4 So they want to build some kind of museum or some kind of structure here to tell the story of the valley? What do you think about those plans?

Speaker 19 If the plans of the government are going to improve this place, then I would agree.

Speaker 19 But if they're going to build a museum that explains what happened correctly, and if for once we're going to get rid of all the political meanings of this place, I would agree with it.

Speaker 4 Adrian wants to see some economic development in the area. Perhaps that will come with the government's plan to build a new museum.

Speaker 5 That report by Linda Presley. Now, here's a headline to stop you in your tracks.
Sorting out a spice scale could unite humanity. It's in the Times of London newspaper.

Speaker 5 It's a top-up topper column by Satnan Sangira, in which he acknowledges that the world may have bigger problems to deal with, but that we are, as he puts it, in desperate need of a standardised international system of measurement for spiciness to make the lottery of ordering food described as hot or spicy, well, a bit less of a lottery, to avoid either bland disappointment or excruciating pain, which poses a problem on live radio.

Speaker 5 This was my colleague Sean Lei, being given an introduction to some spice by Jen Ferguson, a purveyor of hot sauces in London.

Speaker 5 This is the last one. This is a completely called the last dab, and this is a lot of

Speaker 5 sauce you're putting on that crisp there, Sean.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 1 In the last half minute or so, I'm going to just try this.

Speaker 5 So it's called The Last Dab, and it may be the last thing we ever hear from Sean.

Speaker 1 You You said there's a kind of thousand, and that's two million on this scale.

Speaker 5 There's two million plus.

Speaker 3 Oh, I think this is.

Speaker 1 I may still be tasting this at breakfast tomorrow.

Speaker 3 Ouch.

Speaker 5 Well, Gurdi Ployle is an award-winning food writer and the author of the book Flavour Heroes.

Speaker 20 The first thing that we need to sort of decipher, though, is the difference between spiciness and heat.

Speaker 20 And if you think about it, you know, a Christmas cake is full of spice and a cardamom bun is full of spice. It's just that the spice is cardamom.

Speaker 20 What we're talking about here really is chilly heat and actually interestingly we already have that spectrum which is the scoville factor which is what we were talking about in that crip in that clip just now and I really felt I felt that heat in my tongue as you played it.

Speaker 20 I think for me that one of the things about it though is that having a universal scale and I'm not sure it's quite the right thing because what it would do is sort of conflate every cuisine of the world into one.

Speaker 20 And there's just so much nuance that I don't think we can never necessarily get into a universal scale.

Speaker 6 Yeah. I mean, I hear what you're saying, but at the same time, I've had those conversations in restaurants and CAFs where the waiter may say, are you all right with it being spicy?

Speaker 6 And to which the answer is, well, yes. But, and then you sort of don't quite know whether the roof of your mouth is going to be taken off or whether it's just going to be some gentle background heat.

Speaker 6 And I understand it also reflects on the customer, but

Speaker 6 we are sort of flying a bit blind, aren't we?

Speaker 20 I think we are, but I think what this does is it sort of opens up the idea of have food being much more of a dialogue.

Speaker 20 And I think one of the things that this sort of encourages consumers to do, really, is to kind of understand more about the ingredients.

Speaker 20 And if you speak to the waiters, they will always want to have a conversation about the actual ingredients and the levels of heat.

Speaker 20 So if you think about chilies, you know, a sort of Mexican ancho chili is just really earthy and almost more like paprika, whereas a sort of Thai bird's eye chili is something that's completely different and has really, really intense sort of triggering heat in a way.

Speaker 20 And I think for me, it's much more about people having that curiosity to sort of question, what are the chilies that are going into this? What are the spices?

Speaker 6 Yeah, so knowing also about the cuisines and understanding that if it's got Scotch bonnet in, if it's from West Africa or the Caribbean, that it's going to,

Speaker 6 it's likely to have much more punch than if it's, I mean, dare I say it, you're an expert on Punjabi food.

Speaker 6 And I mean, lots of other food, but that's that one thinks of that as being a slightly gentler heat.

Speaker 20 It is a slightly gentler heat, but you know what? I never shy away from taking people on that hot adventure, should they want it.

Speaker 20 So for me, and I think it's always that thing I'm often asked, you know,

Speaker 20 what my solution is, and I think, you know, have that extra hot chili sauce for people that really want it.

Speaker 5 Good advice. That was GoDeep loyal there.
Now, do you ever feel like you know a celebrity you follow online, even though you've never met them in real life?

Speaker 5 Could you see yourself as their friend or think that you'd get on really well together if you were ever to meet? Well, if so, you're not alone. It's called a parasocial relationship.

Speaker 5 And now, one of the UK's major dictionaries has named it as their word of the year for 2025. Cambridge Dictionary's Daniel Hutchinson told us how they go about choosing that word.

Speaker 21 We're looking at trends sort of throughout the year. So we analyse a lot of data.
Our lexicographers who work on the dictionary also have an extensive reading programme.

Speaker 21 But we're also looking for a crucial factor, which is staying power.

Speaker 21 So obviously, words come and go, trends come and go, but we're looking for something that has really made an impact in the sort of cultural zeitgeist, if you like.

Speaker 21 Essentially, what parasocial means is it describes a one-sided connection that people have with a famous person.

Speaker 21 So a good example would be someone like Taylor Swift, or possibly these days, even an AI chatbot. So it's someone they're unlikely to ever meet, but we kind of think of as our friends.

Speaker 21 And this is all made possible by current digital technology.

Speaker 5 Well, Dr. Veronica Lamarche, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Essex, has researched the phenomenon and its history.

Speaker 14 Parasocial relationships are something that researchers have been aware of for decades. The term actually goes back to the 1960s.

Speaker 14 And originally, it wouldn't have been these digital relationships, but it would have been the types of relationships you would have had with the Beatles or the royal family or any kind of one-sided, famous person.

Speaker 14 It could also be with fictional characters. So it's not something that has to do with that unrequited love or obsession.

Speaker 14 It's a natural psychological connection we form with these other people in the world around us that we admire and feel connected to.

Speaker 14 The interesting thing in our own research is that people actually feel that these influencers, these famous people, are capable of fulfilling our emotional needs to a certain extent.

Speaker 14 And if you think about it, if you're lonely in the middle of the night, you want some comfort, you want some connection, you can turn on these influencers and they can make you feel validated, seen, understood, a bit less lonely.

Speaker 14 So there's certainly a healthy component to it.

Speaker 14 In our own research, we found that 75% of people actually form some form of parasocial relationship, either with an online social influencer or with a movie character or celebrity.

Speaker 14 But there can be, just like any type of relationship, unhealthy components to it.

Speaker 14 And I think sometimes this breakdown of boundaries, because we forget that these are real people when we're talking about influencers and celebrities, and we're used to them being on demand for us, we sometimes expect things from them at all times.

Speaker 5 Dr. Veronica LaMarche.

Speaker 5 And that's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you you want to comment on this podcast, you can send us an email.

Speaker 5 The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. This edition was mixed by Kai Perry.
The producers were Stephanie Zacherson and Alice Adley. The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Jeannette Jalil.

Speaker 5 Until next time, goodbye.

Speaker 16 This is the story of the one. As head of maintenance at a concert hall, he knows the show must always go on.

Speaker 16 That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working, the HVAC is humming, and his facility shines.

Speaker 16 With Granger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces, plus 24-7 customer support, his venue never misses a beat. Call quickgranger.com or just stop by.

Speaker 16 Granger for the ones who get it done.