Registered another wreck or toll of 3309 fatalities on friday my camera has more from washington d. C. The promise now that the perth doses will be in place by monday and initial surge of 2900000 doses will go out over the next few days and then 21 days later another 2900000 for the 2nd follow up injection the 2 injection procedure of course. They can fill with where the site had been established this is something thats been drawn up over a period of months. Place in love like jerry hall searching for missing students after gunmen stormed a secondary school a large Group Partner of attack is on motorbikes arrive late on friday at the boarding school in the state of kid seen a. Machine a child as a child regardless of his parent children were kidnapped and we didnt sleep throughout the night since 10 pm and were just hearing gunshots some of my relatives children were also taken i have been at the school since dawn when im sincerely speaking we here in Katsina State are in a terrifying condition we dont see the value of the government in fact i have a younger brother and a child taken along by the kidnappers i am from down jack Katsina State and i have been in this school since dawn and yet there is no update. Venezuelans home on the broader voted in a nonbinding home localise by Opposition Leader aung wind it asked people whether they wanted to end president Nicolas Maduro israel and hold new elections results are expected in the coming hours and you can follow their stories on our website to touch their top comes updated through the day they talk of we have more news ahead next hits the listening post you stay with us. But he talks. Ok to see which city. Im going to say constructive talks taking place between the 4 nations and they want to reach a final agreement hello im richard gives birth in europe the listening post where we dont cover the news we cover the way the news is covered here or the media stories were looking at this week theres news of a possible reconciliation in the arabian gulf the end of the blockade of qatar the french president still is president c. C. Of egypt with the legion of honor but make sure there are no french journalists there to cover it science reporters have proven their value in covering the pandemic theyve also taken some heat and finally what are the chances that the planet earth will be accepted for membership in a ga lactic federation is there enough food to go around it looks like some people are starving based on our track record not great. Its been 3 and a half years now since 4 arab governments led by saudi arabia cut off relations with qatar and imposed a blockade on the country now there are headlines suggesting that a rapprochement is that hacked when this rift opened up back in 2017 critics which included the United Arab Emirates bahrain and egypt all demanding that this network aljazeera be shut down while accusing qatar of backing political movements the trade in terror in the years since the information sphere has proven to be a crucial battleground from the competing Television Channels owned and influenced by the governments involved to the armies of trolls and influencers on twitter and facebook to the millions of dollars spent on lobbyists trying to get washington onside now with riyadh showing signs of making peace with doha there are some careful message manage. Underway and everyone covering the story after read between the lines our starting point this week the arab airwaves. For almost 4 years now a Saudi Led Coalition of arab countries has tried to isolate qatar politically and economically blocking trade with qatar forcing it to import food from iran and turkey turning the airspace over their countries into no fly zones for qatari passenger planes and turning their air witness into delivery platforms for anti qatar rhetoric and. How. Many are. Going to. Be is just one example the channel is saudi control based in dubai abu dhabi the capital of the United Arab Emirates has a majority stake in sky news arabia the channel is a central protagonist in what has turned into an antique atar media coalition. And the. Machine. After more than 3 years of that kind of talk there is change on the air certainly in saudi controlled media although you still have to read between the sound its. Not harming the shed it cannot happen at home im not going to have that had gotten the tone also appears more conciliatory on aljazeera is the arabic language news channel which like this channel is funded by the government of qatar. B. How did the who know how its been a little bit of the additional a will jimeno in love. A couple of months are we are more however the a the other way how did the one who is a very very serious situation very serious crisis multiple levels. And also. Well be so different look. Anywhere you go she only knows that the gold entries are actually divided and that they dont all have one policy out that while closer in the white knight it looks equally. Teach equally its definitely no information war all countries in 2017 where ready for such war they have the experience on how to control the social media sphere of the media sphere to use their trolls to use their armies so these governments they were all ready for the fight. Saudi arabia and qatar have not been on the same political page for decades. Independent brand of Foreign Policy took form in the early ninetys. And its launch of aljazeera arabic in 1996 changed the relationship qatar had with its neighbors in the gulf aljazeera journalists offered the kind of reporting critical of authority that the saudis and other arab governments did not tolerate on their own state funded they still do in 2017 when muhammad bin salma m. B. s was made Saudi Crown Prince the gloves came off the blockade was in place. As the saudis bahrain and each issued a list of 13 demands the guitar is happy to meet if relations grew to be normal. Has. Turned to turkey and iran for trade and has drawn closer to the Islamic Republic directing its planes through iranian airspace. The saudis with. The political transition now unfolding in washington and the management of m. P. s his reputation also appear to have factored into this current shift in riyadh. Mohammed and so my name was synonymous to so many negatives in the region he was there. When several saudi businessmen were locked in a hotel in riyadh his name is there in yemen we saw his name involved with jamal high shifty so he has so many negative things associated with his name so i think most of the people who followed his policies so that there was a time when it had this a man will start a new strategy and i think qatar is the easiest issue he can solve with the ending term of. A new administration that will likely be harsher on saudi arabia and unemployment. The Saudi Crown Prince is to find solutions to some of the Foreign Policy issues to make his m. H. R. An International Front so this will also help his ambitions to become the next king of saudi arabia. The list of the 13 demands the coalition made conditions to end the blockade started with qatar curbing its diplomatic ties with iran and bringing an end to military cooperation with both iran and turkey countries the saudis and emma rockys consider their advice and in addition the coalition demanded guitar sever all talks with what the quartet calls terrorist organizations including the Muslim Brotherhood ties qatar has denied also on the list was al jazeera and the requirement that guitar shut the network and its journalism down those who follow both politics know that. Was the main focus of all these countries they moved from targeting aljazeera directly into targeting washington d. C. Trying to convince congress to shut down and just get out to constrain their movement in washington and the us just survive and it will survive for a very simple reason there is no foreign official. Who respects freedom of speech will go to qatar doha and tell them please close and just to end this rift there are a lot on the saudi site and sky arabia on the u. A. E. Side and then there is a whole bunch of different. Smaller networks but the flagships are a lot of and sky arabia and neither has had the experience the quality the money the resources. Staffing that. On the other hand as i say its reputation. Of being above the fray has changed so now i think what a lot of people do is they watch and they watch some other be your only assume the truth is somewhere. Actually not predicting what will be the future threats to i just you know will be i think time is shown us that just you know is. Also i think kind of seen as a response to now. Just you dont was kind of. Policy on the other hand i think they were also trying to really also defend themselves i think that was directly under attack and you know it happened as you know it was an attack. On. The rift has also transformed the online space in the gulf just prior to the blockade network of twitter accounts was born in saudi arabia and the emirates are tweeting and retreating hash like qatar funds terror or we demand of the closing of the channel of papers there was evidence of some prokop term driven by bots too but not to the same extent its been 3 years plus of toxicity online between. Gulf arabs that will not be easy to just turn. On twitter also on other social Media Outlets which actually increase the and dug in isnt it to not only these governments but also between the peoples of the g. C. C. States which actually have common cultures among themselves and there was a cast which basically you know lies any sympathy towards. That people to stand against. Siri thing that i think was also very interesting and also very shocking was using tribalism as a tool to mobilize people against their government or against their leadership so i think the blockade has definitely changed the. Identity of cultural identity internationally and this is the thing that is difficult to repair now the door is for the people. To bring in science by the media. And media stream down there and then the other. May be go back to normal qatar has always wanted a situation without. The u. A. E. I think. For some i mean this is an. Unbridgeable divide nobody invaded and occupied something so this is a. Remember. Something but there is real bitterness and the bitterness is not going to go away that quickly. One of the countries in the attic a turk or tat thats been less visible in this potential of more has been egypt presidency seems been busy with a few other things including a state visit to france and actually rob youve been keeping an eye on that you know how did this visit turn into a media story one of the big reasons richard was when the french government attempted to hide one of the main events in this visit when president c. C. Was presented with frances highest award the legion of honor it was a gala event held at the palace capping a 3 day visit and there were no french media present which is absurd the palaces website had no mention of it and the french president s office that is microns office failed to provide any footage or images to french media french outlets only found out about this event after an investigation by a t. V. Show which was tipped off by coverage in egyptian media. Dont know if the. I mean certainly yes well i did return soon after iraq you know all told so this you could you know egyptian. People dont get to discern its not always or to me its what the continual process. Here so what are we to make of the secretive approach that the french government took but theres been a lot of pushback against president macron hosting let alone celebrating presidency of the past couple of months france has been grappling with debates about freedom of speech and religion weve covered some of this on our show and mccrone has spoken about the fact that france up holds peoples right to not just speak but to offend hes also talked about french secularist principles saying that the country is in a battle against what he calls islamic extremism and that the religion isnt some sort of crisis so how would Marc Ross Square that against whats happening in egypt under c c well thats where the problems in marriage egyptians can be arrested and tortured simply for participating in protests they can be jailed for social media posts that supposedly offend peoples religious sentiments and if youre an activist origin list theres a target on your back and readers on Mahmoud Hussein has been in jail for 4 years in egypt but the government has yet to charge him with any crime so clearly the french government realized that lecturing people on secularism and free speech why putting an award on an authoritarian leader of a deeply conservative religious country is not a good look so they just pretend it didnt happen. Journalists around the world will remember 2020 as the year they took a crash course in reporting on medical sites they had no experience in covering a pandemic and weve documented some of the shortcomings in their reporting now were turning to journalists with some actual credentials in this field science and Health Report its been a year to the month since they 1st recognized the potential dangers of the outbreak in will hawk leaving the rest of us to play catch up historically underappreciated and usually underrepresented in newsrooms science and Health Reporters now find their expertise is in demand their rise to prominence has been accompanied by a new level of scrutiny in the kind of work that they do and the critics have come out of the woodwork listening post flow phillips now on science journalism the highs and lows in the age of covert 90. 4 20 pm december 31st 2019. Hopefully this is nothing out of the ordinary but at permit mail posting i bowed and explained the mon years in china is giving me hashtags sours flashbacks. Boston usa in the last few hours of 2019 helen browns well senior Infectious Disease reporter for stat nenes started tweeting about the reports coming out of that it was something i definitely thought we needed to be watching this was something that was setting our whole our bills. 12 31 am january 15th 2020 years where we are on the sars like virus found in china still many many questions. 2 weeks later in berlin. Fishnet a molecular by a medicine expert and correspondent for Science Magazine joined the discussion about the still undefined virus it was really becoming clear that the pandemic was just not going to be stopped it was clear to everyone what it was about. So how. Might you know january 29th. Governments find denialism when you give the wrong people bash you can get to. You not mine spawned. By the end of january health and science journalist video krishna was trying to get the word out in india despite facing significant political challenges because the entire polity was union was only. On the 9th no longer and you need to find me even if you gave. 3 science journalists from 3 Different Countries all sounding the alarm on the virus that would come to be known as coded 19 well before the rest of the world realised what was coming. Their readership and online followings have skyrocketed as theyve taught you terms like flattening the. Theyve schooled you on the importance of lockdowns a mass testing theyve documented the failings of governments to act when the data was there for all to see and they know how to deal with scientists in early february helen browns well challenge dr anthony found who many consider to be the voice of reason on the trumpet ministrations Coronavirus Task force present given everything thats going on the risk is really relatively low. For me when i look at this fire of. Pressure for all i care. But theres no. Its not going to stop. You seem pretty frustrated in that forum one was that. You know i had been hearing for several weeks stories in the u. S. And other countries outside of china saying that they thought that the. Outside of china was low and it me 0 sense to me because. My wrist was spreading really effectively from person to person in china so when dr french he said that he thought the risk was for the United States at that point at pushed back because it made no sense he did say you know could this become a pandemic absolutely but it felt like they didnt want to alarm people at that point wasnt can make them it was already you know spreading the United States just had been repeating. Your work has also proven to be prescient an article you wrote back in 2013 included a quote about a bat in china carrying a potential pandemic this was peter dash the researcher that i talked to the quote comes from him so i was just doing my job as a reporter reporting his views so you know if anything he predicted it again and again in the in the last 10 years or so when i was doing my reporting this sentence came up from scientists where they were telling me you know its not a question of if there will be a big pandemic the question is when scientists like peter are crucial for reporters like pushing it because like most areas of reporting science journalism starts with the sources and there are 2 sources that many science journalists have in common the 1st is called prometa its the place where both brands well and compassionate 1st heard about an outbreak in which. Its an online portal where Infectious Disease experts share and discuss information on Unusual Health of bents its not designed for journalists but has become invaluable for many Health Reporters who have the background to understand the significance of whats on that the 2nd source. These journalists have in common is what they call preprint. Theyre kind of a testing ground for academics a place where they share their Research Online before it gets Peer Reviewed and published in normal times a lot of scientists hold that Research Back play it safe until theyre sure of that work because at 19 has changed things scientists are flooding the servers with information they hope will help curb the virus maybe even cure it and some of that material is making it into the headlines when that happens and potentially invaluable but often unverified information reaches the public because it can easily end up being misconstrued by both the press and politicians and other such opposing a britta later say the word can which you can do either through the skin or. In some other way. And i think you said youre going to test those Interest Rates one of the things that i found tragic about. This tend to make in the coverage of the pandemic help politicize the whole thing has become which side of the divide people on which. This is a misunderstanding of whats going on in certain parts of the country anyhow lightly i know its not be nontraditional lenity and it has been asking our. Population lie are you. Not or youll go or a great medicine to lose your unity up with me. On common. Ground there. God. Got a plan. In the country on this one and they wonder lupul or do you believe in line with the politics so that it doesnt look back on it the story goes on lines need not go into handles and politicians you know would you employ those and questioning identity and dismissing the story without actually lending law whats wrong factually thats been. One of the reasons the politics tends to trump the science is because thats the way the politicians want to perspective the official say make available it that we think its scientific experts are usually count numbered by political. Reflected also in the press corps covering a shortage of reporters trying to have science of the story im not sure that sanctions need to take the lead but i certainly think they should be you know at the table and i think that is something that also bothers me when i see the press conferences there are a lot of important questions that science journalists you know to ask that political journalists dont know to ask do you have true or people in georgia who are soon going to have a choice about where saddam now from on our getting that tattoo Retail Businesses need a bit of time to shop did a bit of time to prepare to wipe out all the opening of german. Provision title which one to the soprano can. Put it to. The president ial order. In by on of the reason it just seems like this press conference would really profit if there were also science journalists there the only body that einstein i know by we dont act instantly. Im not a scientist well im not free to expense and we have indeed immediately think with joe at this point does not have a single scientists us and does not have a single science journalist in the audience speaking of the other cats and you look at so dont know what theyre talking about and the politicians journalists dont will. On the asking the wrong question. Another way to put it rather than dispatching medical specialists to diagnose the biggest story of our time to surgically dissect political narratives it 19 most news organizations are sending in the equivalent of Family Doctor the general practitioners in journalism thats hardly the best use of available resources when the story youre covering is a pandemic. And finally as this problematic year draws to a close with its biggest news story still swirling around us the pandemic racial and social unrest Climate Change how to make you wish you could just leave it all behind maybe jump on one of you on mosques rocketships find another planet to live on except one of those rocket ships just crashed and burned this past week somewhere in texas 2020 wins again very thomas a u. S. Based comedian is thinking along similar lines in this viral video he imagines what it would be like if the planet earth was to apply for membership in a star trek like the lactic federation sort of like a European Union except for outer space and he concludes that earthlings would be long shots unless we clean up our act well see you next time here at the listening. How fast are you are teleporter. Know teleports. Flying cars. A high speed train that goes around the planet no you dont have that either ok what about does everyone have health care is there enough food to go around it looks like some people are starving you do have enough food then why isnt it logistics you want me to write. Logistics ok starving because of logistics i mean things could be worse right imagine if you were still fighting over resources. Oh you do you have big wars when you have a pandemic right now you have a pandemic oh no its jason bring the threat bring the sanity thank you. You need to use the bathroom we havent done that in centuries we dont do that here well you still have prisons jason they still have prisons ok well i think that should be enough youve given us a lot to think about well see soon by jason burn their application its. The whole planet. Is there a school realistically how can you do it institutionalize corruption and this country we listen if this breaks up until conflict between pakistan and india this has implications for the rest of the world we meet with global news makers and talk about the stories that matter just 0. Distribution has begun right now boxes are being packed and loaded with vaccine with emphasis on Quality Control the United States prepares to begin a mass coronavirus Vaccination Program with supplies expected to start reaching states from monday. And i met clark this is out