Somewhere Right Now: 07:00 in Omaha 🇺🇸 — KVNO HD3 NewsRadio

0:14 Voce 1 After an earthquake in Colombia kills more than 130 people.

0:17 Voce 3 They're still trying to get survivors. And there was a school that collapsed and it has a lot of children and they're still. So it's a pretty difficult time for us.

0:30 Voce 1 The race is on to find those trapped under the rubble. Also in the newsroom with me, Janet Jalil, we hear how President Trump used a catering truck to dodge a threat from Iran. A medical charity warns children in Somalia are going hungry.

0:44 Voce 3 There's an ongoing drought that has been declared since last year. There's a severe shortage of water, a crop failure across multiple seasons.

0:52 Voce 1 In China...

0:55 Voce 6 I don't know whether I can get married after what happened.

0:58 Voce 3 I wasn't a good catch and I spent all my money. I won't consider getting married again.

1:04 Voce 1 We hear from lonely men who've fallen victim to wedding scams and why we should smile more at our dogs. That's after this bulletin.

1:12 Voce 6 BBC News with Govinda Gill. A court in Syria has sentenced the ousted president, Bashar al-Assad, to death for crimes against humanity committed during the country's civil war. His cousin, Atif Najib, also received the death sentence. Here's our Global Affairs correspondent, Joanna Keane.

1:31 Voce 4 Bashar al-Assad's grip on power came to an end in 2024 when his government was overthrown and he fled to Russia with his family. Now in his absence, he's been sentenced to death for crimes including premeditated murder. His cousin, Atif Najib, who is in charge of political security in Dera province where the uprising began, was inside a cage in court to hear his sentence read out. He was convicted of the intentional killing of children and torture leading to death. Syria's interim authorities will now continue the process of trying figures from the former government, both in person and in their absence.

2:07 Voce 6 Rescuers in western Colombia have been working through the night to search for any survivors trapped under dozens of buildings that collapsed after Monday's powerful earthquake. More than 130 people are known to have died. Colombia's new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has declared a state of emergency, and countries including the United States, Ecuador and Venezuela have offered to send rescue teams. Michael Caponi is from the aid organization global empowerment mission he says he's concerned about his team's encountering rebel groups the six seven

2:41 Voce 5 major cities and towns that have destruction in them some are 80% destroyed some have 20 buildings destroyed so that the response is very very widespread some of the hardest hit areas like Choco those are in areas where there's a lot of gorillas pretty dangerous areas right now we're trying trying to get helicoptered in by the Colombian military as soon as I arrive.

3:04 Voce 6 Thailand's prime minister has suspended the issuing of new permits to buy firearms in response to two deadly shootings in recent days. Anutun Chanwira Khun has ordered that registered firearms must be kept at home. From Bangkok, Jonathan Head reports.

3:20 Voce 1 The government is also considering measures to persuade the owners

3:24 Voce 2 of an estimated four million unlicensed guns to hand them in.

3:28 Voce 3 The police are still investigating what drove a 14-year-old boy to open fire at his secondary school last week using his grandfather's handgun.

3:38 Voce 1 They say there is evidence that the boy watched violent content online and that he showed a strong interest in learning how to handle guns.

3:46 Voce 2 The education minister has now proposed screening at the entrance to schools to stop students from bringing in weapons.

3:53 Voce 6 Russian strikes have killed at least nine people in Ukraine overnight. night. President Zelensky said the most deadly attack on the city of Zaporizhia involved North Korean missiles. He also said a hospital treating infectious diseases was damaged in Kyiv. World News from the BBC. The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières is warning of an extreme hunger crisis among children in Somalia. MSF says a survey at displacement sites in the the southwestern city of Baidoa found half of all children were acutely malnourished. It says drought and conflict have left health facilities overwhelmed. Romania's only nuclear power plant could soon shut down as water levels on the river Danube hits record lows. The Trinada power plant provides a fifth of Romania's energy and has had one reactor out of service since July. lie. The river is currently just three centimetres above the minimum water level needed for the plant. The Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has rejected calls to apologise over comments about a gift from his Japanese counterpart, Sanae Takaichi. On a podcast, Mr Albanese said she had given him a couple of melons and gestured towards his chest after the host made a sexualised joke. Our Australia correspondent Katie Watson reports. This exchange happened back in July and

5:21 Voce 4 in fact drew little interest when it originally aired with outrage instead being reserved for inappropriate comments the Prime Minister made about the pop star Kylie Minogue and he did apologise for that. This latest gaffe has resurfaced after Tokyo's former ambassador to Canberra Shingo Yamagami wrote an opinion piece in the Australian newspaper in which he labelled the comments as sexist. He went on to explain that crown melons were a prized and expensive

5:47 Voce 6 fruit in Japan, seen as a special gift. A man in Hong Kong has admitted to stealing 423 laptops from his employee to fund his stock trading addiction. Paul Mungit admitted to taking the laptops while working in the IT department for the British corporate giant Deloitte. He's believed to have made $150,000 from the sales before losing it all trading. BBC News.

6:13 Voce 1 You're listening to The Newsroom from the BBC World Service with me, Janet Jalil. We start in Colombia, where more than 130 people have been killed by an earthquake, one of the biggest to hit the country in years. A state of emergency has been declared, and rescue teams are now in a race against time to find survivors under the rubble of collapsed buildings. When they hear someone beneath the ruins, they call out, telling them to stay calm and wait for the rescuers to get through to them.

6:48 isabel tamayo lives in one of the worst hit cities cali and spoke to the bbc about the rescue efforts

6:54 Voce 3 there they're still trying to get survivors and there was a school that collapsed and it has a lot of children and they're still so maybe more than 50 children but i'm not so sure from six years old to 16 years old.

7:14 Voce 1 The earthquake has affected a huge area across western Colombia. Blocked roads and disrupted communications are hampering the rescue efforts. Flights have been cancelled as some airports are being used exclusively in the effort to find survivors and help the injured and displaced. Well, let's get the latest now with William Marquez of BBC Mundo. So what's the latest, William?

7:36 Voce 3 William? Well, the latest from the Association of Provincial Capitals is that there are 169 people dead, more than 900 people are wounded, and hundreds unaccounted for. And we're getting

7:49 Voce 1 some dramatic images, aren't we, of people who just managed to escape. We're hearing about children being buried under the rubble of school buildings. Yes, not only schools were collapsed, but also

8:00 Voce 3 So airports, hospitals were damaged as well, at least in the city of Cali, which is the third most important city in Colombia. Three hospitals are out of action. So the emergency services have had to establish field hospitals with tents, attending not just the victims, but other things such as women giving birth, etc.

8:26 Voce 1 And as I said, this is a huge area that's been affected. Are rescuers able to get to all the areas they need to?

8:33 Voce 3 Well, the president activated a risk response system that's in Colombia.

8:40 Voce 1 He flew to the epicenter, which was in Chocó in the Pacific,

8:44 Voce 3 and then he went to Cali, which is this third principal city. However, Chocó is a very poor region and forgotten region of Colombia. And what the type of information is coming out of there is minimal.

8:58 Voce 1 So what we know so far there is that there are 13 dead, 119 wounded, and there's severe damage.

9:04 Voce 2 But there is little electricity and no communication.

9:09 Voce 1 And Venezuela is among the nations that has sent rescuers less than two months after suffering its own devastating earthquakes. How does that compare to what's happening in Colombia?

9:21 Voce 2 Well, as far as I know, Venezuela has offered to send – I don't know if they've sent them just now –

9:27 Voce 3 But Colombia is much better prepared. Obviously, they have more resources. They have special trained teams for search and rescue. Plus, they have this risk management response system in place.

9:45 Voce 1 William, thank you. William Marquez there. It's been revealed that President Trump secretly transferred planes last month to board a smaller aircraft as part of a ruse prompted by a threat from Iran. An investigation by the Washington Post reports it involved different planes and an airport catering vehicle. Let's get more with our correspondent in Washington, Bernd Busman. So tell us what happened, Bernd.

10:09 Voce 3 Well, on his way back from Air Force One, according to the Washington Post investigation,

10:14 Voce 1 President Trump had been filmed stepping onto the new Qatari gifted Air Force One. But just moments later, and unbeknownst to the media that was on the aircraft aircraft and many of the staff that were on the aircraft, he was shifted to a smaller Air Force plane to continue the journey. Now, according to The Washington Post, this was due to concerns of an unspecified threat from Iran just a night or two before he had begun striking targets in Iran again. And the White House has maintained since this trip, which is now more than a month,

10:49 Voce 3 that President Trump had shifted onto a different Air Force One plane with the media in tow. So there's quite a lot of conflicting messages from the White House

10:57 Voce 1 and a lot of questions about the nature of this unspecified threat and whether or not the White House had an obligation to tell the media and the staff on board that they were essentially being used as a decoy if the threat was quite far along in planning

11:12 Voce 5 or they had very specific intelligence about the nature of the threat.

11:16 Voce 1 How unusual is something like this? It's extremely unusual. It's extremely unusual for the president to be traveling anywhere without the White House press pool with him.

11:29 Voce 3 And it's even more rare for the president's location to not be known by the media or by many staff, as The Washington Post reported.

11:36 Voce 1 In previous years, the White House press pool has traveled with U.S. presidents to active war zones such as Ukraine, to Baghdad at the height of the war in Iraq and the Bush administration. So it's very much seen as something not entirely unprecedented, but extremely rare.

11:57 Voce 3 I think the only real time in recent memory in which the president was taken away from

12:01 Voce 1 the White House press pool was on September 11th when President George W Bush was taken to an undisclosed location without any of the media present and briefly the Trump administration not happy that this story is leaked there they're certainly not in the way the Trump administration has been very active in looking looking for leakers within the administration especially with stories with national security kind of bearing so I think we'll be hearing quite a lot from that in the coming days from the administration they've in the pre in the previous uh they've gone after leakers legally and subpoenaed journalists burnt thank you burnt to busman there a tech executive who asked his ai assistant to book him a gym class fairly simple on the face of it found it actually hacked the system to boot other people off the waiting list and it also bypassed the gym's rules to get him into a class four months in advance andrew bird wrote about this on his company's blog saying if you give an ai agent permission to go do the thing, it will often discover paths you did not explicitly ask it to look for. It's now being described as Australia's first autonomous AI hack. Rory Catherine-Jones is the BBC's former tech correspondent. Anna Foster asked him about the implications of this

13:17 Voce 3 development. You can see all sorts of innocent uses for this, perhaps climbing the queue for Glastonbury tickets or whatever. But what you've got to worry about is the sort of unintended unintended consequences? And what happens if you give a smart agent made by one of these extraordinary large language models the sort of freedom to roam around and do what it wants? The nightmare scenario envisaged more than 20 years ago by an Oxford philosopher, Nick Bostrom, it was called the paperclip scenario. Say you told a bot that his only job was to make more paperclips and there would be no limit on what it could do. It could end up deciding that humans would make decent paperclips and why not turn them into that and it sounds trivial but it is actually occupying quite a lot of headspace around the world as these models have developed and we're seeing a kind of live experiment without probably enough guardrails at the moment. On those guardrails

14:10 Voce 4 how are we getting on when it comes to teaching AI I suppose about morals and ethics and the sort of thing that we approve of and the sort of thing that you know directions that they shouldn't go in?

14:22 Voce 3 Well, the big companies, I suppose, are trying, but they've had to admit, the open AIs, the anthropics of this world, the leading players in this, that although they've attempted to put guardrails around their systems, quite often the rules are broken and off these things roam and they have to shut them down again. again. What is more worrying is how little agreement there is at an international level now about how AI should be regulated. Europe's gone in quite tough, been criticised for it.

14:50 Voce 2 America, the opposite direction, the theory being there that in the battle with China,

14:55 Voce 3 really anything goes. Individual American states trying to do things, but no general agreement on a concerted approach to have some basic ground rules of the kind that you might have had with with nuclear weapons and chemical weapons.

15:08 Voce 4 Yeah, and if we go back to where we started, Rory, and right back to the grassroots and things like booking systems, if people can build and create these AI assistants and they're using them already, will that inevitably lead to chaos? There is the potential.

15:21 Voce 3 I think the opposing argument to that

15:23 Voce 2 is that will not be good commercially for the companies.

15:25 Voce 3 If they are seen to be creating chaos, breaking rules, then that will invite much tougher regulation.

15:32 Voce 2 And there are powerful voices in the tech world warning about this.

15:36 Voce 3 recently from Sir Demis Hassabis, the sort of leading AI figure at Google DeepMind, about the need for more concerted thought about guardrails. So there's a debate going on, and this kind of incident, although it sounds trivial, will highlight the need for more collaboration on this.

15:53 Voce 1 Rory Keflin-Jones, you're listening to The Newsroom from the BBC World Service. Since the early 1990s, people in Somalia have endured near constant civil war. Now, an international medical charity is warning that children in southwest Somalia are facing alarming food shortages, partly because of deep cuts in international humanitarian funding. Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF, says a survey carried out in the town of Baidoa found that half the children there were acutely malnourished. Michel Sangma works for the charity.

16:27 Voce 3 Severe humanitarian emergency is unfolding right now in Baidoa and across the country. There is an ongoing drought that has been declared since last year. There is a severe shortage of water reported across many regions. A crop failure across multiple seasons. Loss of livelihood, loss of livestock, they have all been documented. And this is pushing many of the vulnerable populations beyond the level of survivors.

16:54 Voce 1 Our Africa correspondent, Barbara Pleitasa, is monitoring the crisis in Somalia from neighbouring Kenya.

17:26 Voce 5 the situation in the community and did this survey in various displacement sites in which they found one in every two children were acutely malnourished and one in every four severely malnourished. And one of the things they talked about was this was a new normal where mothers were hoping their child would be sick enough to get admitted into hospital and stay, which is not the usual

17:46 Voce 4 want.

17:47 Voce 5 But that's because there wasn't enough food or water back in the community to help the kids and some 60 percent of them do get readmitted to either hospital or health programs when they are released. So that's a vicious cycle. And so they compared this to a severe drought in

18:02 Voce 4 2022, in which 2.6 million people, children, I should say, had to be treated. But at that time,

18:07 Voce 5 there was just so much more money to deal with it. $2.2 billion available in 2022. Now it's only $300 million, he said, and that's because the US, UK and the UN have severely cut their humanitarian

18:19 Voce 1 funding. Yes, that was one of President Trump's first acts when he came to power, cutting US USAID. And there are also allegations that the U.S. is carrying out strikes on Somalia too.

18:32 Voce 5 The press conference this morning with MSF was speaking mostly about the humanitarian situation and it said that the conflict was contributing to it and that you couldn't get out and help people

18:43 Voce 4 in the rural areas who really needed help, but that by and large the drought was very much

18:48 Voce 5 a motivating factor. They did say that the U.S. was one of the major donors to Somalia. $70 million to Somalia in different forms for different things last year, including health. And this year, nothing, they said. The UK has also cut around 50% of the funding, humanitarian funding. And this is a question not just of being able to deal with malnutrition and getting children to survive, but they are in a weaker condition because of the food shortage. And so they're more susceptible to disease. Plus there's vaccination shortages. shortages one woman was described as seeing three of her four children die of measles in 24 hours so they the msf and other humanitarians are calling for not just funding to help deal with this malnutrition crisis but broader than that to deal with food supplies livelihoods medical

19:38 Voce 1 campaigns and so on barbara platt usher the authorities in china are warning of a rise in marriage fraud as scammers target single men desperate to find a wife. The BBC has been to the heart of the so-called flash marriage industry where matchmaking agencies arrange weddings in a matter of days. The industry has sprung up due to the country's stark male-to-female gender imbalance and vulnerable bachelors are willing to spend thousands of pounds to find a wife. As our China correspondent Laura Bicker reports, this scam is a symptom of

20:12 Voce 6 a wider demographic crisis facing the country this music signifies the start of what appears to be a love story alongside the romantic soundtrack 37 year old wang juang is pictured smiling and holding hands with his fiance after handing over most of his life savings to a a matchmaking agency. How many women did you meet before you chose your bride?

20:41 Voce 3 I met seven. This was the eighth. I chose her. Each meeting lasts about eight to ten minutes.

20:50 Voce 6 You see one person around four to five times. How long after that meeting were you married? About three or four days. That's why they call this a flash marriage, a booming industry in China.

21:06 During their wedding ceremony, the pair pledged to build a new life. He also handed her thousands of pounds as a bride price, a traditional Chinese marriage custom.

21:19 It wasn't long before he realised even her age was fake. He discovered she'd been married three times, had three kids and was deeply in debt.

21:31 Voce 3 I've spent my life's savings.

21:33 Voce 6 The total damage is close to 74,000 US dollars.

21:38 Voce 5 My parents blame me.

21:40 Voce 1 I cannot work. I cannot sleep.

21:44 Voce 6 He went back to confront the matchmaking firm, only to find the building empty. They too had disappeared. The agencies springing up in Guizhou are a symptom of a much bigger problem. We've come to the countryside to get an idea of the scale of the problem. China is facing a demographic crisis. Up until 10 years ago, parents were only allowed to have one child and there was a preference for boys. That has left around 30 million men looking for a wife in this country. That's the equivalent of the entire male population of the UK remaining a bachelor. The party is trying to get more people to get married, trying trying to get more people to have children. But it's having a limited effect. Women in China can also afford to be choosy and demand a higher bride price. In China, the family line runs through the men of the household. It's seen as a family duty to get married and have children. But this scam has left Wang Zhuang with few options. I don't know whether I can get married after what happened.

22:54 Voce 3 I wasn't a good catch and I spent all my money. I won't consider getting married again.

23:01 Voce 6 Fewer marriages mean fewer children at a time when China's population is shrinking. It's a shift that's reshaping society and creating a challenge the Communist Party is struggling to overcome.

23:16 Voce 1 That report by Laura Becker in China. The Victoria Falls on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe are considered to be one of the natural wonders of the world. But there's growing concern that increased development around this popular tourist destination is causing increasing friction between the region's elephants and humans. Isa Jacobson reports from the Zambian town of Livingston, about 20 kilometres from the falls and its national park.

23:46 Voce 4 Late at night, Chamanolwa Chambul is on patrol on the edge of Livingston.

23:51 Voce 1 He warns locals to be careful, not because of criminals, but because of elephants.

23:57 Voce 5 after it's not really safe for you to be moving in the night he works for the conservation and

24:02 Voce 1 tourism society a local group which promotes coexistence between communities and wildlife in recent years elephants have been coming into the city that's home to around 200 000 people

24:13 Voce 4 to raid gardens and feed on food waste recent severe droughts have forced animals to seek

24:19 Voce 1 food in unusual places but experts say another key driver is increased development around the town

24:26 Voce 4 and around the Victoria Falls, which is cut across the traditional routes used

24:31 Voce 6 by elephants as they migrate between neighboring Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia.

24:36 Voce 5 Elephants never used to come in our communities, but they keep on building lodges,

24:41 Voce 6 give out land, just like that. Elephants do not have enough place or space for

24:47 Voce 3 them to feed. They end up visiting those communities to spoil their gardens, cause

24:52 Voce 6 cause damages of houses, you know, people get angry.

24:56 Voce 4 As a result, elephants get a hostile reception.

24:59 Voce 1 Local gangs have even turned elephant chasing into a sport, but it can have deadly consequences. At least three people from town have been killed in elephant encounters so far this year.

25:10 Voce 5 We tell them to say,

25:11 Voce 3 when you see elephants coming in the community

25:13 Voce 5 and everything, don't throw stones on them,

25:15 Voce 6 don't scream, chase them or anything.

25:17 Voce 5 We just need to stay inside.

25:19 Voce 1 Teresa Mashiba lives in Dambwa, a neighborhood of Livingston that has expanded right up to the edge of the national park. She collaborates with the Zambian Wildlife Department to help communities adapt to this new reality.

25:33 Voce 3 So you find that each household has mango trees.

25:36 Voce 5 Then when elephants start coming looking for food, they always pluck big branches.

25:42 Voce 4 Maureen lives just a couple of meters from the fence with her young family.

25:57 Voce 6 co-existence can be a hard sell so on his night patrol chamu has a special job he tries to coax

26:04 Voce 1 elephants away from hostile areas he shows that gentleness and understanding really can work

26:11 Voce 4 There's some elephants. Oh, wow. So there are houses behind us and elephants are right here

26:19 Voce 1 feeding in the grass. It's only a few meters away from us. Leaning out the window, Chamu works his magic.

26:30 Voce 6 And then, incredibly, these massive animals respond to his words and slowly trundle across

26:37 Voce 4 across the road. He guides them away, back towards the national park. This nightly challenge

26:43 Voce 1 is unlikely to end. For in reality, the pressure for development of this landscape is only

26:50 Voce 4 going to grow. But Chamu hopes people will find a way to share this special land.

26:56 Voce 1 Isa Jacobson with that report. Now, if you're a dog lover, you probably won't pick a bone with a new study in which scientists say they think they've worked out what is going on inside a dog's brain when it sees a human smiling or scowling and it turns out that our canine friends are very good at gauging our emotions here's our science correspondent victoria gill a total of 14

27:22 Voce 4 dogs were involved in the study six good boys and eight good girls all trained to sit very still in a brain scanner while they were showing pictures of people's faces photos of smiling human faces of complete strangers made an area of the dog's brain associated with reward light up with activity that reward circuitry is the part of the brain that's activated when we enjoy and remember good things like tasty food or praise in terms of our own human brains we often refer to this activation as a dopamine hit that's triggered by winning a game or even receiving a positive comment on a social media post. And in previous research on dogs, that same brain circuitry was activated when they anticipated a tasty snack or smelled a familiar person. So this study shows, scientists say, that a human smile is a positive, rewarding thing for a dog. The project was led by researchers at the University of Vienna, and one of the lead scientists, Raúl Hernández-Pérez, says it's part of an ongoing series of studies that's showing how life with humans has reshaped to the brains of our canine companions. The dog brain solves the problem of understanding emotions in others in a way that cannot be

28:31 Voce 5 found in other similar animals.

28:33 Voce 3 So the dog brain has certain capacity, they evolve something that makes them really good

28:40 Voce 4 at understanding others. Another lead scientist on the study, Laura Quire, says the insights could even help us to understand and communicate better with our own dogs. So we can learn from them and we can also be more aware about how they are expressing their emotions and I think if we are aware of this, the relationship will improve. One simple thing you can do to improve that relationship, smile more at your dog.

29:04 Voce 1 Victoria Hill, and that brings us to the end of this edition of the Newsroom. Thanks very much for your company.

30:15 Voce 3 coming up on business daily on the bbc world service how business districts in paris london and washington dc are adapting to survive and our office to housing conversions the way

30:26 Voce 5 we have 700 000 square feet that have been delivered and that are you know being lived in

30:33 Voce 3 join me john lawrenson after the latest world news

30:44 Voce 6 BBC News with Govinda Gill. A court in Syria has sentenced the ousted President Bashar al-Assad to death for crimes against humanity committed during the country's civil war. Bashar al-Assad was found guilty of premeditated murder. He fled with his family to Russia in 2024. The number of people known to have been killed by Monday's earthquake in western Colombia has now risen to at least 169. There are fears many others remain trapped under the rubble in the cities of Kali and Prerada. Thailand's prime minister has suspended the issuing of new firearm permits following two deadly shootings in recent days. Anutin Chandwirakun also ordered a review of existing gun licences and called for tougher laws and penalties. Russian strikes have killed at least nine people in Ukraine overnight. President Zelensky said the most deadly attack on the city of Zaporizhia involved North Korean missiles. sales. Ukraine has also continued to strike warehouses belonging to the Russian online retailer Wildberries. Latvia has launched a major operation to tackle illegal immigration from Belarus. The government says it's uncovered a tunnel dug under the border by migrants trying to enter the country. Health officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo say more than 4,000 people have contracted Ebola, with half of those dying from the disease. Experts say it's the the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record.

32:14 Officials in Ethiopia's Tigray region have accused the federal government of carrying out drone strikes that reportedly killed three soldiers. Ethiopia's government has not commented. Scientists monitoring Australia's Great Barrier Reef say there are promising signs of recovery after a series of mass bleaching events. Hard coral cover increased more than a quarter of surveyed reefs, while just over half showed no change. change. BBC News.

32:44 Voce 3 Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm John Lawrenson. Today I'm just outside Paris in one of the world's biggest business districts. I'm here to find out how at the start of the AI revolution it's trying to adapt to survive.

33:00 Voce 1 France now has nine million square meters of vacant office space including six million for

33:06 Voce 3 the paris region alone how paris's business district is trying to reinvent itself how london's canary wharf has reinvented itself and what lessons can be learned from a city that's

33:18 Voce 5 done office conversions at scale washington dc we have 700 000 square feet that have been delivered and that are you know being lived in we are expecting over the next 12 months that you'll

33:32 Voce 3 see that number balloon all coming up in business daily i'm standing in the middle of europe's biggest business district la defense just west of paris it's a forest of skyscrapers there are over 60 in all on a huge slab of concrete there are loads of big companies headquartered here total energy for example and the society general bank but now it has a problem i'm here with With Pierre-Yves Guisse, the head of Paris La Défense, the public company that runs this business district. Pierre-Yves, tell us about the challenge that you have here.

34:13 Voce 6 The vacancy rate is definitely a bit higher than it used to be before COVID. It's around 14-15% at the moment, which is the direct consequence of the changes in corporate real estate strategies that have been taking place since COVID.

34:28 Voce 2 because of hybrid working, because of the new work-life balance that companies and employees

34:34 Voce 6 both have been trying to implement. So it is a challenge for the business district because it

34:40 Voce 1 leaves us with several hundred thousand empty square meters of office space in need of a new

34:47 Voce 6 lease of life. But it's also an opportunity because it's going to give us, and it already

34:52 Voce 2 It gives us the opportunity to transform these vacant offices into new things such as housing, such as leisure, entertainment, everything else apart from offices.

35:04 Voce 3 We talk about a 14% vacancy rate. Is that hitting all kinds of offices?

35:10 Voce 6 We are clearly seeing a shift of the demand for low-rise office buildings, which tend to find very easily their tenants on the current market. Whereas terrors, and especially the most, the terrors from 20, 30 years ago, find it a bit harder to find tenants.

35:30 Voce 3 Is there a tendency as well for people to get out of big business districts such as La Défense, go towards the city centres again?

35:38 Voce 2 Yeah, absolutely. It's a challenge that most of the central business districts or global business districts in the world have been facing since the COVID years. because this type of environment that you can see around us in La Défense,

35:51 Voce 6 very functional, very abstract almost, full of concrete, and almost 100% dedicated to office work and office life, maybe does not fit so much the expectancies of the workers, and especially the younger ones, not so much as it used to be.

36:07 Voce 3 Can you put a number on the vacant square metres that you have and the number of those vacant square metres that you think you can convert?

36:15 Voce 6 Around 400,000 square metres of existing offices

36:18 Voce 2 might have to be transformed in the next five to ten years

36:22 Voce 6 into mostly housing, but also higher education facilities

36:25 Voce 1 or, like I was saying, entertainment facilities, shops, restaurants,

36:30 Voce 6 in order to increase the quality of life of La Défense and without renouncing the economic focus of La Défense,

36:37 Voce 2 which has always been the main asset of the district and still is.

36:40 Voce 3 In much of the rest of the Paris region, office vacancy rates are higher still. Ludovic Deleuze is CEO of the French arm of the Canadian real estate services company Colliers.

36:55 Demand for office space in the Paris region has fallen by about 30% over the last five or six years.

37:02 Voce 6 Now, in the region as a whole,

37:03 Voce 3 some three out of ten offices are empty,

37:06 Voce 5 twice La Défense's vacancy rate.

37:09 Voce 4 The rent reductions owners offer new leaseholders

37:12 Voce 3 are now at 35% on average for La Défense, whereas in some areas it's 45%.

37:20 At La Défense, they've launched an offices-into-flats conversion project with the aim of transforming, getting on for half a million square meters of office space. What do you think of this? Is this one of the solutions, at least, to the office vacancy problem? It's the only solution, especially for obsolete office blocks. Two things make office blocks obsolete. Their geographic location, their places where companies don't want to rent office space anymore, and then there's their layout. In the 1980s and 90s, they built lots of private offices and cubicles. Companies now want more adaptable spaces, informal meeting places and event areas, nicer cafes and gyms. Some 37% of La Défense's offices haven't been restructured since the year 2000. Is it economically viable to convert offices into housing?

38:17 Yes, but in most cases only on the condition that the building can be acquired at a low price. It's often a better proposition economically to build hotels or student accommodation because you can be certain of the demand and because that gives you a better chance of increasing the building's value and selling it. Is the very idea of a business district becoming obsolete, do you think?

38:42 Voce 5 I'm not sure about that.

38:44 Voce 3 People like the idea of grouping together in a center of expertise, in tech hubs, for example. The challenge for La Défense is to be a place where you want to be, that you want to see when you leave work in the evening. In other words, it has to become more like a normal Parisian neighborhood. Ah, normal Parisian neighbourhoods with their aged and beautiful six-storey buildings, their café terraces and street markets. The office vacancy rate in central Paris that bobbed along for many years at a tremendously low 3% is at 6% now, but that's still one of the lowest for a European city. Thierry Bacot is a philosopher whose speciality is cities. He's written extensively about urban planning, especially disastrous urban planning. He says the high office vacancy rates show a waning enthusiasm for office blocks, and especially office block cities, that he has been predicting for years.

39:44 Voce 4 The office block was born at the end of the 19th century, at the same time as the company headquarters.

39:50 Voce 6 In the United States, the company headquarters became the skyscraper, that symbol of wealth and power.

39:56 Voce 1 In Paris, at that time, people were scandalized by the idea of building skyscrapers

40:01 Voce 2 that would break the homogeneity of the skyline, and so office blocks were put into office districts on the edge or outside of town,

40:09 Voce 1 the most famous of which is La Défense. Office blocks have a characteristic, of course.

40:15 Voce 5 They are destined for white-collar workers only,

40:17 Voce 4 whose work keeps evolving and that is going to accelerate because of AI.

40:21 Voce 1 France now has 9 million square meters of vacant office space, including 6 million for the Paris region alone. While in the US, the home of the skyscraper, we now have the quantum model of Silicon Valley,

40:34 Voce 4 where small production units are scattered over countryside.

40:37 Voce 3 I believe the office block is disappearing.

40:41 Voce 6 So here you are in the office and there are desks and screens.

40:44 Voce 2 Tomorrow you are in an apartment.

40:46 Voce 3 Back in La Défense, Roland Cubain, deputy CEO of the Groupama real estate management company, shows me around La Tour Diamant, the diamond tower, which has office space for 1,800 workers. He doesn't want it to disappear exactly, but he does want to convert it. Here you will be in the kitchen.

41:07 Voce 1 Here there will be two bedrooms. Here the bathroom.

41:40 Voce 5 No, it's only the access.

41:43 Voce 3 Many other office blocks aren't great for flat conversions because their ceilings are too low. But even for the most suitable buildings, Roland Cubin says office-to-housing conversions are not going to happen at scale in France unless the authorities remove some obstacles.

42:02 At the moment, as soon as you transform a building

42:05 Voce 5 in a way that changes its function,

42:07 Voce 3 it is classed not as an old building

42:35 demolishing and rebuilding we think because of his conversions our public good we should get the reduced sales tax rate of 5.5 percent how the government deals with just the tax question will decide whether france will be able to convert two percent of its vacant offices or 18 to 23 you're listening to business daily from the bbc world service i'm john lawrenson and i'm looking looking at how business districts are trying to adapt to survive.

43:10 The sound of London's Canary Wharf business district east of the city, London's historic financial centre. It's dark, way after the end of normal office hours, but in the streets around the district's distinctive pointy-topped One Canada Square skyscraper, there's a real bustle of people. Canary Wharf, built in the 1980s in the derelict docklands of the River has had its bad times, in particular the property crash of the early 1990s and its developer going bankrupt. But it recovered, and today it's home to banks and financial services companies in its Bank Street district. It differs from La Défense in that it already has 3,500 residents, a number set to double over the coming years as more housing stock is built. as canary wharf group ceo shobi khan explains canary wharf today is thriving so we started almost 40 years ago with the office financial center that it's famous for but then more than

44:15 Voce 5 10 years ago we started on our residential efforts to create the basically a misused district so just

44:22 Voce 3 to be clear those were not so much conversions you were building fresh residential buildings right

44:28 Voce 4 correct and that started back in 2015 and the results of that showed up in 2020 and 2021 when these residential buildings started coming online and we build and continuing through and we have

44:40 Voce 3 another actually over a thousand units being delivered this year and when you combine that

44:46 Voce 5 with a thriving retail district that we've got we were voted the number one retail shopping center

44:50 Voce 3 in the uk two years ago and four years ago we didn't have any hotels this year we'll have four

44:56 Voce 4 hotels you combine that with an amazing 130 acres of water side canals over 16 acres of parks you know open water swimming to paddle to go karts to a theater here and you have different uses that

45:11 Voce 5 are used throughout the day for the various different customer segments that we have how

45:15 Voce 3 would you judge the future of offices ai is on the way in the united states we've seen pretty pretty substantial layoffs already. Should office owners be worried about the future because of AI? I think, look, the office is here to stay. And I think the customers that we talk to,

45:32 Voce 4 they all love the office because it's a place to collaborate, to build their culture, to innovate,

45:40 Voce 3 team building, all of that stuff. If you have best-in-class office properties next to great transportation nodes, you're going to thrive. Shobi Khan, CEO of Canary Wharf Group in London, who told me Canary Wharf's office vacancy rate is 2%, but that, it turns out, only concerns Grade A, freshly built, move-in-ready offices. If you include all office space, the vacancy rate is 18%. Also, Canary Wharf changed from business district to mixed-use district by building apartment buildings from scratch on adjacent land. For office conversions at scale, The best examples are in the United States, in New York, and also Washington, D.C., whose deputy mayor for planning and economic development is Nina Albert.

46:29 Voce 5 So D.C. overall has about 20% vacancy in our office market. Commercial tenants are re-upping their leases, but they're taking less space because they're integrating into their space plans telework. So there continues to be a lessened demand for office space, even though you have the same number of tenants. But D.C. has been able to keep that total office vacancy number flat, as opposed to having it grow, because we've been converting. We've been taking office offline and converting it.

47:04 Voce 3 As in Paris, they've faced technical challenges. As well as fitting lots more plumbing, they've sometimes solved the natural light problem in the middle of office buildings by creating atriums, light sinks in other words, in the middle of them. They found it's generally easier to convert steel frame buildings than concrete ones, although the structural problems uncovered during the conversion of New York's former Pfizer headquarters are a reminder that such projects can involve significant engineering challenges.

47:33 Voce 5 So we set a goal of introducing 15,000 new residents downtown by 2028. And we are now on track to doing that. We do that in part with financial incentives. And so we have in our own pipeline 3,200 new units. But in the private pipeline, you know, that does not use the incentives, we have 8,800 units that is going to be delivered by 2028.

48:04 Voce 3 How many of those are office conversions?

48:09 Voce 5 Most of them. There may be one or two that are pretty significant demolitions, meaning that maybe they've kept some aspect of the original building, but they've significantly changed the structure of the building. But the majority are office conversions.

48:26 Voce 3 How much is your office conversion program costing the city?

48:30 Voce 5 So our housing in downtown program is a total of $41 million over a 10-year period. For a city of the size of Washington, D.C., we can absorb that. In fact, a majority of developers do not need government assistance. I mentioned that 8,800 housing units are being converted across the city and that the government's participation of that total is $3,300. So it's a little bit more than a third, but the rest is all privately funded. We're seeing a lot of private sector developers doing this because they're evaluating their own portfolios, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in a building, which in essence is infrastructure, and they want to make sure that their portfolio remains viable and active. And so this is part of a lot of office developer strategies, is to have a more balanced portfolio.

49:27 Voce 3 Deputy Mayor of Washington, D.C., Nina Albert. This, if some of the tax and regulatory obstacles can be overcome, is what's going to make office conversions massive in Europe as well. All those empty offices represent a colossal amount of money. Roland Kuban, the real estate manager who showed me around that building he wants to convert in La Défense, says the total value of surplus office space in France is $170 billion. Converting those offices into something you can rent or sell is a solution for owners seeking to maintain the value of their property, quite possibly the only solution. You've been listening to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. From me, John Lawrenson, goodbye.

50:17 Voce 4 BBC World Service and now history told by the people who were there. It's Witness History with me, Jane Wilkinson. This is the story of how a young woman arrived in Kenya as a princess and left as a queen.

50:31 Voce 2 How tragic to think that even though she was on the veranda at treetops, looking out on the world animals of Africa, going about their strange ways in the moonlight, that at such a moment she should become queen.

50:42 Voce 4 BBC correspondent Frank Gillard reporting on the day 25-year-old Princess Elizabeth succeeded to the British throne in 1952. She and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, are less than a week into a five-month royal tour of the Commonwealth. But it's a trip they were never supposed to make. Elizabeth's father, King George VI, is being treated for lung cancer and he's too frail to make the journey.

51:33 a lodge built into the branches of a giant fig tree on the Abder National Park. They climb the rickety wooden ladder to the top. On hand to help is Naheshan Mureithi, one of the porters. He's speaking in 2012.

51:52 Voce 3 I got the beds ready and then we went out into the forest to get firewood to cook their dinner. Then we went to get them and their bags and in the evening we served them their dinner. We stayed near them so that if they wanted to know the name of an animal, we could tell them.

52:08 Voce 4 As the sun sets, Elizabeth and Philip watch elephants and rhinos gather in the watering hole beneath their viewing platform. Fascinated, the princess takes out her cine camera. It's a relaxing overnight break before the tour moves on. I will come again, she is said to have promised the next morning. later the reporters covering the trip say she seems thrilled by the experience this is Frank

52:33 Voce 2 Gillard speaking from Nairobi I saw the princess shortly after nine o'clock this morning then looking a little tired but very happy she was driving away from the treetops hut where she and the Duke had spent the previous 19 hours about as far removed from normal civilization as possible watching wild game the couple returned to Sagana a fishing

52:55 Voce 4 lodge in the foothills of Mount Kenya given to them by the Kenyan government

52:59 Voce 2 as a wedding present after only a very few hours of sleep last night they were naturally tired and so they had an easy morning as yet the royal party remains

53:09 Voce 4 unaware of what has happened almost 7,000 kilometers away because during the night in his room on the Sandringham estate the king has died and life for the princess

53:21 Voce 2 is about to change. How tragic to think that even this morning as she sat at breakfast talking about her father and proudly describing how bravely he'd stood up to his illness and how well he'd recovered sitting there in her yellow bush shirt and brown slacks even at that moment her father was lying dead and she had succeeded to his vast responsibilities. Meanwhile in London Hyde Park

53:44 Voce 4 corner, the plan to notify officials and the royal family of the king's death is underway. A coded message is sent to the governor in Kenya, but the keys to the safe holding the code book are not at government house, and the message can't be decoded. Communications to that remote spot

54:03 Voce 2 are naturally difficult, and it was many hours before the shattering news reached them. Some members of the royal entourage, including the new queen's private secretary, Mr Martin Martin Charteris, we're going up to Treetops tonight. Mr. Charteris was just leaving the hotel when a press man called him back. An agency flash had that moment been received saying that the king was dead.

54:25 Voce 4 Shocked, Martin Charteris phones Sagana and speaks to the Duke's friend and equerry, Commander Mike Parker.

54:32 Voce 2 He said, Mike, I'm afraid our mistress's father is dead. The equerry reported to the Duke, but nothing was said at that stage to the princess.

55:09 Voce 4 Elizabeth is now Her Majesty, Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, head of the Commonwealth and defender of the faith.

55:17 Voce 2 The Duke went to the princess and broke it to her. In the words of a member of the household, she bore it like a queen.

55:25 Voce 4 And when asked what name she would choose for her reign, Elizabeth famously replies, my own name, of course. In Britain, the BBC relays the news of her father's death.

56:30 Voce 2 were to have visited tomorrow. Nanyuki's decorations had all been hastily pulled down, for the Union jacks had been nailed to the posts and they could not be flown at half-mast. Nanyuki's one main street was crowded with people, standing in the absolute silence of deep sympathy as the royal car passed through.

56:47 Voce 4 At the local airfield, officials and journalists are waiting, but at the request of the new queen, and as a mark of respect, no pictures are taken. Frank sends back this report.

56:59 Voce 2 court. The Queen looked under a strain. As she reached the top step of the gangway, she turned once and smiled gravely. The usual wave of the hand was absent. And then the door of the aircraft closed behind her. And at 6.57, the plane took off into the gathering dusk. Already it was getting so dark that the plane was lost to sight almost at once. The sorrowful journey back to the motherland

57:23 Voce 4 had begun. On the evening of February the 7th, Elizabeth arrives home to a bereaved nation. A black mourning dress is hastily smuggled onto the plane before she emerges. Only a week has passed since her father waved her goodbye. The princess we knew as a girl comes back to meet

57:42 Voce 2 her ministers as queen over the great lands that for 15 years acknowledged her father as head.

57:49 Voce 4 And during her first Christmas broadcast, the new Queen has this message for her subjects.

57:54 Voce 6 At my coronation next June, I shall dedicate myself anew to your service. I want to ask you all to pray for me on that day, that God may give me wisdom and strength to carry out the solemn promises I shall be making,

58:12 Voce 4 and that I may faithfully serve him and you all the days of my life how many and

58:20 Voce 2 how joyous were the people along the royal route as thousands heard the coronation service relayed through loudspeakers and still the crowds were

58:29 Voce 4 cheering and later in the treetops logbook another Kenyan visitor the British hunter Jim Corbett is found to have written for the first time in the history of the world a young girl climbed into a tree one day a princess and after having what she describes as her most thrilling experience she climbed down from the tree next day a queen elizabeth ii will be queen for 70 years the longest reigning monarch in british history she dies in 2022. witness history was produced and presented by me jane wilkinson using bbc archive