hello and welcome to the lebanese capital beirut. this is the famous corniche, still farfrom recovered from the devastating explosion of 2020 and its economy and morale is as badly damaged as its infrastructure. and now it is deeply nervous about the possibility that it might get sucked into yet another war with israel if the present fighting in gaza spreads. but what are the chances that it will? it is tense, it is very volatile and that is the concern, that this could become a new front in this conflict. one crisis tends to wipe out the memory of previous ones. the collapse of western support for afghanistan, for instance, and the victory of the taliban in 2021. a million plus afghans fled illegally to pakistan and the pakistani government is now threatening to throw them out. the government of pakistan has built the narrative that terrorism acts in pakistan, there is always an afghan link. and artificial intelligence, can a conference based at the first home of electronic computing find ways of bringing it under control? these tools can only be really powerful if the guard rails are off, but equally becoming more powerful makes them potentially more dangerous. there is a very real sense of anxiety in the air here. twice in recent history israel has invaded lebanon. last night it was plo held territory, today it is the israelis�* front line... ..in 1982, in order to chase out the palestine liberation 0rganisation headed by yasser arafat... and in 2006 to try to break the power of hezbollah, the dominant shi'ite militia which is strongly influenced and armed by iran. i reported on both conflicts here. in order to be able to push hezbollah further north... and there have been lesser confrontations with lebanon as in 2014. but in both of the big assaults, 1982 and 2006, israel did immense damage to lebanon and altogether thousands of civilians died. hence the very real anxiety here now. will hezbollah from its bases in southern lebanon decide to strike at israel while israel has got its hands full with the other iran—backed group hamas in gaza? and what is the situation at the moment? i talked to hugo bachega, the bbc�*s middle east correspondent who is based here in beirut. we have been to some villages near the border and thousands of residents have left because these attacks have intensified in the last few weeks. 0n the lebanese side you have hezbollah, which is this powerful group, heavily armed group, supported by iran, and you have the israeli army and the israelis have been saying that they are going to retaliate, they are going to respond to every single attack from the lebanese side. so these attacks have happened multiple times a day in different locations along the border so it is dangerous for those residents who live near the border. i think the un has said that around 30,000 residents have left. it is tense, it is very volatile, and that is the concern, that this could become a new front in this conflict. and what is your feeling as a correspondent here? that iran wants all this? is iran happy to let all the action be in gaza with hamas, the organisation it supports there? or does it want to stir things up here? it is interesting because iran is perhaps the glue between all these groups iran supports, the so—called axis of resistance. so you have hezbollah here in lebanon, which is perhaps the most important, the most powerful group in this alliance, but you also have groups in syria, which borders israel, groups in iraq, rebels in yemen. so it is a combination of many different players. we have seen that in the last few days there have been a number of attacks in syria and iraq specially targeting bases being used by american soldiers. the americans have expressed their concern that these attacks could continue, they have been warning iran against escalating the situation. i think when you look at the bigger picture, hezbollah here, is a very important player for iran in terms of acting as a deterrence if, let's say, the israelis were to attack iran's nuclear facilities. for many, many years the israelis have been saying that one of the main concerns is about iran's nuclear programme, but it is also something that concerns a number of western countries. and hezbollah here, a very powerful group with tens of thousands of fighters, really well experienced fighters who have been to syria, fought in syria, have an arsenal of tens of thousands of rockets, including missiles that can hit deep inside israeli territory is good for iran. famously the other day you did an interview with a hamas leader who walked out on you. tell me a little bit about what you think triggered him to walk out. what was the atmosphere? so i think i started the interview by asking him how he could justify the killing of hundreds of people who were at a music festival, who were in their homes, families, children, women. the vast majority of the people who were killed on the 7th of october were civilians. and i repeatedly asked him how he could justify it. he said it was a military operation that hamas leaders hadn't given any orders for civilians to be targeted. it is almost impossible to believe that that is the case, you know. you have hundreds and hundreds of civilians being killed, especially when you see the footage. the fighters broadcast some of the attacks live on social media. he even refused to acknowledge the fact that civilians had been killed. and then when i said, "well, look, if civilians were not targeted, you are now holding 200 people hostage in gaza, many of them civilians, why don't you just release those people then if you are not interested in attacking civilians or targeting civilians?" and again i asked him how all of this would advance the palestinian cause. again when yourfighters are storming a music festival, neighbourhoods, killing civilians, and he decided that it was... he pulled the mic off... ..and decided to walk away. lebanon is a country with an ethnic, religious and cultural complexity which makes it wonderful in so many ways, but which guarantees its political weakness. no—one has carried out a census here since 1932 because knowing exactly how many christian, sunni and shia muslims and druze there are would be dangerous politically. lebanon is so liable to civil war and so lacking instability lebanon is so liable to civil war and so lacking in instability and it is horribly vulnerable to its neighbours. jim muirfirst came here as a correspondent in the 1970s and he has been a stalwart of the bbc�*s reporting in lebanon for nearly 50 years. well, there is no doubt it is quite existential where we have got to now and in a way it is kind of like the crowning moment of all these decades of turmoil that have led up to it. lebanon basically has never really been a proper functioning state. it is a patchwork of sectors welded together. people are concerned about their front doorstep but beyond that, you know, they don't really care, they don't have a feeling of belonging to a country, but more to a family, a sect, a clan, and so on. and that has basically really come to a head now. i mean, that feeling of fragmentation and the weakness of the state is what allowed the original war to start in1975, 1976. all the big powers have been involved here. i think the russians are probably the only ones who haven't actually had forces here, but the americans, the british, iran, the arabs, they have all been here, israel, you know. that is when i first met you, in fact in 1982 in the israeli invasion. there is a big lesson to be learned there because israel invited there is a big lesson to be learned there because israel invaded to basically finish off the plo, it wanted to decapitate the palestinians by getting rid of the plo. they succeeded through extreme military pressure on beirut but in a sense it was a new lease of political life for the plo. the plo was not destroyed. yasser arafat ended up going back to gaza and back to the west bank. this is the lesson that could be valid today for gaza because if hamas is similarly squeezed out of gaza or was destroyed, like they tried to do in 1982, there are a lot of voices being raised saying that can't be the solution to the palestinian issue. we have to look at a two—state solution. the americans are talking about a two—state solution now even as the bombs are dropping. what do you think about lebanon in all of this? how likely is it that it will spill over northwards as well as into gaza? i don't think anyone in lebanon wants that to happen, but that doesn't mean to say it is not going to happen. everybody knows hezbollah and israel knows hezbollah is much stronger than hamas. everybody knows it is the strongest force in the land bar none, including the lebanese army. i don't think hezbollah itself wants a war, but again it is so pinned into a corner by its own rhetoric that if there is a massive attack on gaza, if hamas is really on the wall and more and more thousands of palestinians are being killed, it may feel that it has to do more than it is doing at the moment with the attendant risk of a major flareup. how bad are living conditions here now? at the moment there are two classes of people here. there are people who have access to dollars and there are people who don't. many lebanese, including friends of mine, are still being paid in lebanese pounds or they are getting their pensions in lebanese pounds which have become worth roughly 2%, 3% of what they used to be against the dollar. a lot of people are on the skids, but you don't notice it. you can go and step away from here and you will see restaurants and clubs and bars that are crammed every night with people who have got access to dollars. but that is maybe 5% of the population maximum. at least 80% to 85% are under the breadline and the un is ringing the alarm bells about that because it is a large percentage. plus, of course, you have got 1.5 million, maybe 2 million syrian refugees here and the lebanese are starting to turn on them because they think they are living the life of riley on handouts from the un in dollars. well, that's not really the case, the are getting very miserable little handouts. is it too kind of grossly optimistic to wonder whether perhaps this time in israel israeli opinion will decide that trying to stop a two—state solution isn't working? the americans and others are all saying two—state solution, two—state solution. that doesn't mean it is going to happen, that doesn't mean it is even feasible. but it depends what happens in israeli public opinion. if israeli public opinion decides that that is the only best option, it could happen, although we have got settlements being built by the dozen all over the west bank. there are something like 600,000 settlers now in the west bank, massive, you know. very hard to dismantle but you could do a careful swapping of land, for example. at the moment it is a little bit fanciful i think to think that there could be a new liberal, left—wing thing that would say, "ah, yes, we must talk to the palestinians." and, unfortunately, ithink what hamas did on the 7th of october on the civilian side, massacring civilians, has made that even more difficult for israeli public opinion. some of president biden�*s closest advisers have admitted privately that the american withdrawal from afghanistan two years ago was a colossal error ofjudgement. it made america and its allies look weak and it handed the country back to the taliban. but for millions of afghans it was a personal catastrophe. refugees flooded into the neighbouring countries, the majority to pakistan, some legally, but most illegally. the estimate is that 1.7 million afghans are illegal immigrants there and with pakistan hitting difficult times the government has announced it is throwing them out at very short notice, the 1st of november. but how realistic is this? and what are the reasons for it? asif farooqi, editor of bbc urdu spoke to me from london. the government claims that last month's bombing which resulted in the killing of more than 50 people, that was linked with afghans living in pakistan and in afghanistan. that is something which has triggered this latest campaign by the government. it has been going on for months and years, that the government of pakistan has built the narrative that terrorism acts in pakistan, there is always an afghan link. similarly they also say that afghans are involved in the smuggling of notjust goods, but of dollars lately. so pakistan had a very serious foreign exchange crisis a couple of months ago and when it was investigated, the state bank for example and investigative agencies, said afghan nationals are smuggling dollars from islamabad to kabul. but it does seem like a kind of pretty panicky response. the government is trying and the law enforcement agencies are trying to give this message to its public, that they are doing whatever they can to bring things back to, you know, to where they were a few years ago. and this seems like one of those initiatives that the government has taken on, very active involvement by the military. but is it enforceable, asif? do you think... i mean, that is an awful lot of people to throw out, isn't it? this is not the first time this campaign is going on. probably first time it was like 911, �*95. a similar sort of a campaign was hashed by the government. it didn't work at that time. then it was in 2006, around that time, similar campaign led by general pervez musharraf. it didn't work at that time. the thing is, there are more than 3.1 million afghans in pakistan and the government claims almost half of them are staying back illegally and they want to push them back into afghanistan. that does not sound practical at all. the sort of cliche view everywhere you go in afghanistan is that the taliban were the creation of pakistan and theyjust do what pakistan wants. that clearly isn't true, but what is the relationship now between the two of them? when there was a government in kabul, which pakistan thought was hostile towards pakistan. the karzai government and then the ghani government. in pakistan it was common knowledge of the government that they were closer to india than pakistan. they were hoping that it would change. it did change after the taliban took over kabul. but things have not gone as pakistani military establishment, for example, had imagined it to be. for example, they wanted the taliban government to be more lenient on certain issues, where they could help them gain international recognition, for example. human rights, women's rights, that did not work. and the other thing, the afghan taliban could not deliver on their promise of kind of taming the pakistani taliban. the pakistani taliban continued with their attacks against pakistanis military establishments and in some cases, public, throughout last year. of course, it's a really bad time for both pakistan and afghanistan, isn't it, in terms of the earthquakes and the economic situation in both countries. i mean, this is really quite a worrying time, isn't it? the economy in pakistan is going through probably the worst time in their history. because the inflation has never been that high ever in pakistan. the joblessness is on the peak, similarly in afghanistan we know the situation is really bad. but both the neighbours have not been able to help each other. bletchley park is a rather ugly late 19th century country house outside london, where the impossibly difficult german enigma code was broken during the second world war. the codebreakers, people like alan turing, were able to do so because they developed an early form of computer. and when today's british government wanted to show that britain could be a world leader in creating and controlling artificial intelligence, it called an international conference at bletchley to agree ways of dealing with the problem is that al poses. what are its chances of success? ——with the problems that al poses. what are its chances of success? from my hotel balcony here in beirut, i took to the bbc�*s technology editor zoe kleinman in london. the uk doesn't have the tech giants that the us has. and it doesn't have the infrastructure that's needed. ai needs huge networks of computers and massive data centres and we just don't have anything like that infrastructure in place here. but what we do have is the expertise and the knowledge to try to be involved in a more kind of regulatory or safety level. i think what we are trying to be or trying to become is the referee in the world of ai. the government does say that actually just getting all of these people in a room to have these conversations, it's describing it as a world first. and do you know what? it may well be. a lot of the us tech firms are all talking to each other anyway, but en masse with world leaders as well, that's not happening quite as often, i wouldn't have thought. when you read the newspaper accounts of what it's going on, you get the feeling they are slipping into that sense that china is somehow the enemy. but is it the enemy here? this is a powerful technology that doesn't really respect geopolitical boundaries or frontiers. it is a tech that's going to be used all over the world. as a major player in this field, we know the big companies in china are massively focused on this. we know that china has already come up with its own ai rules, it's doing its own thing and it would be irresponsible not to try and involve them in the conversation. the question is, whether they want to talk to us? i don't know why everything always seems to be about size, ——i don't know why everything always seems to be about sides, but is it governments versus big tech then? big tech is saying it wants to be regulated, it is saying to governments, "please regulate us, we want rules, "we want to work with you." now, there is a history to this and that history is social media. you may remember in the early days of social media, those companies fought against regulation. but we know that that didn't work out very well, we know there have been so many stories that have come out about, you know, failures of us tech companies to regulate their social media and the dramatic impact that has had on society. and everybody is very cautious about repeating that. and so you have got these companies appealing to governments for regulation. in a way, absolving themselves for a bit of responsibility, aren't they, because they are sort of saying "you tell us "what those rules are and we will play by them, fine." and in another way lobbying, as you can imagine, extremely hard to make sure, to try to make sure that those rules fit their own agendas. what rules? what type of rules? where would they operate? how would they operate? we have got these very, very powerful tools that are being trained often to do a particular thing, but the fear is that they could also be trained to be misused. for example, you have an ai tool which is trained to look for new combinations of drugs, to come up with new medication. it has already happened — an ai tool came up with a new antibiotic that tackled a superbug in a hospital that we have never been able to treat before. is it possible that that same tool in the wrong hands could come up with a new lethal poison that we have never seen before, and we wouldn't know how to treat it if it was used in some way on the population? the answer is guardrails have to be in place, but there is a dilemma here because these tools can only be really powerful if the guardrails are off, but equally becoming more powerful makes them potentially more dangerous. there are people who say, "do you know what, there are really more immediate "and close to home risks before we get there." and that is the disruption that al is already bringing to jobs. we are already seeing ai tools doing jobs that had been done by humans. and in the short term, what are those humans going to do with theirjobs are being done by ai? it's happening already. and when you talk about the regulators we talk about human beings? or is it human beings using al to control ai? i think that is a really difficult question. if you have got a situation where ai is regulating itself, then arguably we have fallen into one of these dystopian scenarios, because one of the biggest threats that people are worried about is this idea of ai controlling itself, and humans being left out of the loop, and ai tools starting to act in their own interests rather than in the interest of humans. this kind of comes back to what i was saying. in order to be powerful and at their most helpful to have got to be able to operate as freely as possible, but that does also make them potentially a much more dangerous proposition. zoe kleinman, bbc technology editor. some of the most painful memories of my entire career have sprung from events here in beirut. in 1982 i was briefly captured and tortured here by palestinian extremists and subjected to a mock execution. i saw young boys lined up outside the emergency ward of a big hospital ready to pull a larger, piece of shrapnel from the bodies of patients being carried into the operating theatre. i counted the piles of corpses of palestinians murdered by christian phalangists in what became a well known massacre. i saw the terrible after—effects of cluster bombs and phosphate bombs, and in every case the great mass of victims were civilians. today in the kibbutzes of southern israel and the densely packed streets of gaza city, it is not men in uniform who are the main casualties, it's ordinary people and their children. that's the fear that haunts everyone here in beirut. that's what they are watching on television from israel and gaza, afraid that it might be repeated here in lebanon and not for the first time. well, that is it from this edition of unspun world in beirut. from me and from everyone who has worked on the programme, goodbye, until we meet again. hello. after what has been a very wet week for many, and a very stormy week for some, things do look a little calmer for the weekend. no, it isn't going to be completely dry or completely settled. there'll still be some rain at times, rather windy in the south, but not as windy as it has been. and amidst all of that, some sunshine. 0n the earlier satellite picture, you can see this stripe of cloud pushing in from the southwest, bringing outbreaks of rain in association with this area of low pressure. the centre of the low tracking eastwards, the strongest winds on the southern flank, which means the very windiest weather will be across parts of france, spain and portugal. for us, yes, it will be blustery in the south, but nothing particularly stormy. this band of rain pushing northwards during saturday morning, becoming slow moving in north wales, the north midlands, parts of northern england. to the south of that, sunny spells and heavy thundery showers with some rather blustery winds, particularly around southern coasts. but the far north of england, and certainly northern ireland and scotland, will see lighter winds. spells of sunshine once any early fog has cleared. just the odd shower temperatures of 9—13 degrees. during saturday night, we'll still have this band of cloud and showery rain across central parts of the uk. could see some really heavy showers actually developing across the southeast corner. remember, any rain that we do see could bring the risk of further flooding. if you're off to fireworks events on saturday night, there will be some showers around, perhaps by sunday night, bonfire night itself, there will be fewer showers. they won't be gone completely, but there won't be as many because this area of low pressure during sunday will be pulling away eastwards. we will start sunday morning, though, with some pretty strong winds. in fact, we could see the winds touching gale force across the channel islands for a time. further north for winds that bit lighter. and through sunday, once we've cleared this early cloud and rain away from eastern england, actually, there should be a decent amount of sunshine around. however, further showers will race in from the west. some of these could be on the heavy side. temperatures around 9—13 degrees at best. now, into the start of the new week, we will briefly see this ridge of high pressure toppling through. so things will turn a little drier. but then midweek we will bring this frontal system in from the west. outbreaks of rain with that, and behind it where things could just turn a little bit chillier by the end of the week. so not as stormy or as turbulent as it has been, but still unsettled. good morning. welcome to breakfast with naga munchetty and charlie stayt. 0ur headlines today: an israeli attack on an ambulance in gaza is condemned by the un and world health organisation. israel says it was being used by hamas fighters. more british nationals who were trapped in gaza have managed to leave. a uk—based doctor is the first to be reunited with his family at heathrow. the comedian and actor russell brand is being sued in new york for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman on a film set in 2010. more troubles for ten hag at manchester united — he blasts the birthday party, that marcus rashford had after the manchester derby defeat as unaccetable, with the team heading for fulham this lunchtime. good morning. the weather remains re good morning. the weather remains pretty unsettled _ good morning. the weather remains pretty unsettled with _ good morning. the weather remains pretty unsettled with rain, _ good morning. the weather remains pretty unsettled with rain, blustery i pretty unsettled with rain, blustery showers _ pretty unsettled with rain, blustery showers as well. the full forecast throughout the programme. it's saturday the 11th of november. our main story: the un secretary general and the world health organisation have condemned an israeli attack on an ambulance in gaza. the palestinian red crescent society says 15 people were killed