Transcripts For BBCNEWS Newsday 20240703

Hello, and welcome to the programme. We begin in the United States where a key witness at the Hush Money Trial of donald trump has told the court in new york how he suppressed negative stories about the former president to help him win the 2016 election. The court heard today how the then candidate picked up the phone and called this man, david pecker, former publisher of a tabloid, the national enquier, to discuss whether to pay off a Playboy Model who was shopping around a story of having a year long affair with trump. Before the trial resumed, though, thejudge held a fiery hearing to determine if mr trump violated a gag order, which bans the former president from verbally attacking the jury and witnesses. This was Donald Trumps response. Well, i think the gag order is totally unconstitutional. Cant even allow articles to be put in. For example, these were articles over the last day and a half. Theyre very good articles. They tell you the case the sham, it shouldnt even have been tried or submitted. And, i dont even know if we are allowed to put them in. We have a gag order, which to me is totally unconstitutional. Im not allowed to talk but people are allowed to talk about me. And theyre keeping me in a courtroom thats freezing by the way. In a courtroom all day long, sitting up as as straight as i can all day long. Because, you know what . Its a very unfair situation. Earlier, i spoke to our correspondent gary odonoghue, who has been following todays proceedings from new york. I starting by asking him about mr pecker� s testimony. This is part of the prosecutions basic case here, that this money that was paid to stormy daniels, the pawn to stormy daniels, the porn star, was paid to her for reasons of keeping the story Quiet Because of the election. Now, thats why they say the payments were dressed up as something else, because they would they could look like Illegal Campaign contributions. Now, what theyre trying to do is to establish the background here and say that david pecker, the publisher, the then publisher of the national enquirer, was involved really in a sort of plan with donald trump and his lawyer, notjust to stop those negative stories about donald trump, but to promote positive stories before the election and indeed to promote smears about some of his opponents, hillary clinton, the republican opponents like ted cruz. So, what theyre trying to say is that this was part of a pattern that led to the situation with stormy daniels, which, of course, is the subject of this particular case. I also want to ask you about the gag order, which mr trump was just responding there. He was scolded somewhat by the judge for his social media posts, and thejudge generally seemed rather frustrated. What was your take on that . Well, the prosecution have said that donald trump has effectively broken this gag order, which means he shouldnt be talking about witnesses. He shouldnt even be talking aboutjurors, families ofjurors or families of court members. And the prosecution say, look, hes broken this gag order about ten times, according to them. And really, new york law says that he should be fined 1,000 each time he breaks that. Now, thejudge has heard those representations. Hes waiting to make a decision. He listened to Donald Trumps lawyers, and and when he listened to them this morning, he was heard to say that they were losing credibility with the court. So, it wouldnt be surprising, i dont think, to see which way his decision goes. But well have to wait to see what that is in the coming days. Just hours after rishi runak� s flagship rwanda bill was passed in the uk parliament, five people including a child have died while trying to cross the sea from Northern France to britain. You can see the Chaotic Scenes On A Beach Near Calaisjust before daybreak on tuesday. The incident happened as migrants tried to launch a boat and cross the channel to england. Andrew harding has this report. Theres a real battle going on on the beach here. Must be more than 100 migrants trying to get to the water. Theyre letting off firecrackers to try and keep the police away from them, but the police are moving in. Theyre trying to stop them from getting to the water. Lets go ahead and see what we can see. You can see the smugglers here. Some of them have sticks. Theyre trying to protect the migrants as they head towards the sea. In the us, police say 133 people have been summoned to appear in court after being arrested during pro palestinian demonstrations at New York University. The latest arrests follow a wave of protests in the past week at some of the most prestigious universities in the country. Students on both sides say there has been a rise in both anti semitic and islamophobic incidents since the israel gaza war began. Heres our north america editor, sarah smith. People chant. Police clashed with students outside New York University last night with over 100 arrested when they wouldnt leave. People scream. Creating another flashpoint in the spreading pro palestinian campus protests. Please leave the plaza now. Free palestine free, free, free palestine today, nyu students took up their placards again, eager to show their defiance. The police raided and caved in on the protesters in an extremely aggressive manner. They pulled one of our Student Organisers to the ground by her hair. They maced and Pepper Sprayed protesters. Somejewish students have complained that the protests are intimidating, and say theyve faced harassment and Anti Semitism on campus. Im scared to wear a jewish star here. Ive gotten very nasty anti semitic comments at me and ijust dont understand how this is accepted. Many of the protesters are Wearing Masks as they say theyve been bullied online when theyve been recognised. We are facing very good, very well organised zionist agitators, right, Who Weaponise their claim ofjewishness in order to shut down what is legitimate protest. Accusations of intolerance from both sides are a common feature of these demonstrations. It looks like this may now be growing into a nationwide movement, because every time one of these protests has been broken up, it has simply inspired more demonstrations on more campuses right across america. Protests have spread to campuses right across the us, from the east to west coasts, including yale university, where almost 50 students were arrested last night, and california state university, humboldt, where students barricaded themselves inside a building. People scream and shout. Where the university summoned the police, a highly controversial move on any campus, where students demand their right to protest. It was at new Yorks Columbia University that the first arrests were made last week. Many classes there have now been taken online. Universities across the country are braced for protest to disrupt Graduation Ceremonies this summer. Sarah smith, bbc news, new york. Lets take a look at some other stories in the headlines. Israels military has rejected accusations that its forces buried the bodies of palestinians in mass graves at a medical complex in gaza, describing the palestinian allegation as baseless and unfounded. The uns Human Rights Chief says he is horrified by the reports and calls for an independent investigation into the deaths. The Us Justice Department will pay nearly 140 million to survivors of the former National Gymnastics team doctor larry nassar. In a 2022 lawsuit, some of nassar� s victims alleged that the fbi mishandled credible complaints and didnt take them seriously. Nassar is currently serving up to 175 years in prison for sexual assault. Four aboriginal spears taken by a british explorer more than 250 years ago will return home to australia. Cambridge university is the latest institution to hand back pillaged artefacts at a ceremony with direct descendants of the gwee agal people who crafted the spears. Around the world and across the uk. This is bbc news. Prime minister rishi sunak has announced a new package of military aid for ukraine worth £500 million including 400 vehicles and long range missiles. He was speaking during a visit to poland where he held talks with natos Secretary General. Mr sunak also said uk Military Spending would rise to 2. 5 of National Income by 2030 thats compared to under 2. 1 last year. Labour has already pledged 2. 5 but only when � Economic Conditions allow�. Our political editor, chris mason, reports. Apologies for that, we have some technical issues but let me bring you a story. A man in iraq has started the first legal action of its kind against the uk oil giant bp, over the death of his son. This is alijulood who died at the age of 21. His father, hussein julood, alleges that gas burning at an oilfield run by bp in southern iraq caused his sons leukaemia. Gas burning, known as flaring, is one of the ways the Industry Deals with gas released during oil extraction. Esme stallard has the story. Ali julood was a happy child who loved playing football with his friends. At 15, he was diagnosed with leukaemia, and last year, after six years of treatment for cancer, he died. In 2022, he documented his life for the bbc, living close to polluting gas flares, where gas is burned off during oil production. His family have been left devastated by alis passing. Now his father has started legal action against bp seeking compensation for his sons medical treatment. Translation it has been a year since ali died. May his soul rest in peace. It was very sad year for the family. For me, his mother, for his brothers, too. Ali was an unforgettable person. He was my backbone. I depended on him in my work, my life, and in everything in the house. All the days we live are sad. This claim will be the first time that an individual has taken legal Action Againstan oil giant for gas flaring. Gas flaring happens all over the world at oilfields, its a by product of oil production, but its happening at very significant levels here both in absolute terms and in relative terms to other oil fields around the world. So were effectively saying that his leukaemia was caused by this excessive gas flaring, which was occurring within five kilometres of his home. Bp says its not the operator of the Rumaila Field and doesnt have any ownership or rights to the oil produced. But bps own report shows that it was the biggest stakeholder in the operator. In a statement, they said. We continue to actively support of the lead contractor, Basra Energy Company limited, in its work to help the operator of the field, the Rumaila Operating organisation, to reduce its flaring and emissions. We understand the concerns. Alis family will now wait to hear if bp will accept liability or refute the claim. But for all those living in rumaila, they hope for the day when the flaring ends. Esme stallard, bbc news. Around the world and across the uk. This is bbc news. Earlier we were trying to bring you a report about the Prime Ministerfor the uk you a report about the Prime Minister for the uk announcing a new package of military aid for the agreement worth £500 million. Here is chris mason. Europes front line Ukrainian Tanks heading into battle. A war in our back yard showing no sign of end. In neighbouring poland today, at a military base outside warsaw, the Prime Minister, his polish opposite number and the Secretary General of the nato defence alliance. And, from rishi sunak, this promise on Defence Spending. Today im announcing the biggest strengthening of our National Defence for a generation. We will increase Defence Spending to a new baseline of 2. 5 of gdp by 2030. That starts today. Is it time to be candid now with people that the costs of supporting ukraine are going to run into the billions and billions for years and years to come . Could this last another decade . Well, chris, as i touched on, unfortunately, were living in a more dangerous time than at any point since the end of the cold war. If we dont deter russia in ukraine, all were going to do is embolden putin to go even further, and indeed embolden other adversaries around the world. Theres no way we can run away from that cost. We have to pay. Not least because we need to understand that the most expensive alternative is to allow putin to win in ukraine. Labour says it would raise Defence Spending to 2. 5 of National Income as soon as resources allow not as concrete a commitment. I fully support what the Prime Minister has announced in relation to further funding for ukraine. Its vitally important that we continue to support ukraine against russian aggression. Labour added the army had shriveled under the conservatives, but defence posture is changing direction in front of our eyes. What we are seeing in numbers, promises and backdrops is the politics of defence stepping up, an argument just beginning between the conservatives, labour and others over who can be trusted to protect us and how much its going to cost. From a polish afternoon to the dusk of departure. After the cold war, there was a Peace Dividend Defence Spending shriveled. But in this dangerous world, it is climbing again. In the last hour or so, the Prime Minister has arrived chris mason, bbc news, in warsaw. It is the most distant man made object in the universe this nasas voyager one probe, which is currently more than 15 billion miles from earth. The spaceship, which left the solar system in 2012, can still send data Back To Earth. The problem is for months nasa says what it has been sending was gibberish. Now though its making some sense again as our science correspondent Victoria Gill explains. We have ignition and we have liftoff. A spacecraft bound for a journey no one imagined. When voyager1 launched in 1977, its mission was to explore our solar system. It captured details of saturns rings and discovered that jupiter has a thin ring of its own. Then itjust kept going. In 2012, it became the first Human Made Object to leave our solar system and enter interstellar space. But last year, after nearly 50 years exploring, something finally went wrong. The Data Voyager1 was sending Back To Earth stopped making sense. Nasa engineers worked out that one chip on its decades old onboard computer had stopped working. To fix it, they transmitted an Essential Piece of code that was on that broken chip back to the craft. This very remote reboot worked, and the spacecraft has now sent data reporting its health and status Back To Earth for the first time in five months. This image taken by voyager1 in 1990 is said by some to be the most important photograph ever taken of our planet. Earth from 3. 7 billion miles away. Were a tiny little speck amongst the stars. That is our island home. Dont screw it up. What does it mean to see it back online . Were dealing with a spacecraft with very, very old technology. A lot of this technology is 605. Im sitting here at my my age thinking, good god, this thing is still going and its brilliant. Voyager1 is now the most distant Human Made Object from earth. Its traveling at around 38,000 miles per hour, and its more than 15 billion miles from our planet. That means it takes a radio signal from Mission Control 22 and a half hours to reach the craft. By next year, though, its ability to generate enough power to operate its instruments is set to come to an end, leaving it to wander through the milky way and beyond, perhaps for eternity. Hello from the children of planet earth. On board is a golden record with sounds and images of life on earth. Until its cut off forever, scientists will keep communicating with this icon of space exploration. Seeking only peace and friendship. Victoria gill, bbc news. Generative ai models like chatgpt have been Getting Better at a breakneck pace, but ai still struggles with some simple tasks that a two year old would have no issues with. A team of scientists is trying to solve that problem by putting headcams on their own Young Children to better train artificial intelligence. Earlier, i spoke to brendan lake, Associate Professor of psychology and data science at New York University. I asked him what he hoped to learn from this. Mainly, i wanted to see what it would be like to learn language, to learn about the world, through my daughters eyes. There is currently a tremendous data gap between the experience the ai system has to learn about the world and experience a young child gets. Talk about Language Acquisition for a moment. In order to reach the amount of Language Input an ai system has in order to learn to speak, a young child would have to listen to their parents speak for about 100,000 years, so that would be far more experience than any person can get in their lifetime. So we wanted to learn why children need so much less and, in a way, we wanted to run this ideal test. Train an ai system not just on massive amounts of data from the web, butjust on the experience, a subset of the experience that a single child would get. Some people would be uncomfortable with this type of experience. Firstly, was your wife on board with it . How did you suggest it . Yes. It is a rather personal data set in a lot of ways, but first of all its not the most interesting Video Recordings that you can imagine. Parents can usually bore their friends and relatives with photos of their babies, so i dont think there will be lots of people who want to watch all of the hours collected so far, but on the other hand, it could be this remarkable opportunity. Hopefully, my daughter would appreciate it years from now when we could look back and see some of these key experiences in herfirst years of life, or even search back based on what we might be talking to her about. All this, it could be possible we have modules that learn about the world through the experience she is getting. A Computer Vision Model Trained from the childs Point Of View is more effective than one train from the parents perspective, why do you think that is . There has been some very nice studies that looked at that. Children playing with toys in the lab, and theres a camera, a head mounted Camera On Theirforehead and on their parents forehead. Children, that work isnt for my lab in particular, but children tend to play with objects in more varied ways. They test lots of different orientations of the objects, they touch them in different ways, they put them in their mouths, and this process provides really interesting Training Data that that might help support some of these amazing Learning Abilities they come to have in the first years of life. Prince louis, the youngest child of the prince and princess of wales, is six years old now. To celebrate the occasion, a new photograph of the Beaming Louis has been released by kensington palace. It was taken by his mother, whos known to be a keen photographer. William and catherine have thanked well wishers for the Birthday Messages theyve received for louis. And finally, to an uncanny imitation of, lets see if you can guess. A seagull. This impeccable impression has won nine year old cooper from Chesterfield European seagull screeching championship. He has scored 92 points out of a possible 100, which meant he won the juvenile category and also had the highest points score in the competition. He says seagulls are a really nice animals despite losing his Tuna Sandwich to one. Thats all for now stay with bbc news. Hello there. Its not a particularly inspiring weather story at the moment, is it . But we still got that West East Divide across the country. On tuesday, we had the highest temperatures across south wales with 16 degrees, and there was some glorious sunshine at times with a little bit of shelter from the breeze. But out the east, it was disappointingly cool. A brisk northerly wind, temperatures struggled only around seven degrees across the East Yorkshire coast. Were going to keep quite a lot of cloud as well over the next few hours that will prevent temperatures from falling too far. Lowest temperatures to start the day on wednesday morning will be in the far north and west of scotland. We could have some thicker cloud and a little bit of drizzle first thing wednesday morning, easing away from south wales and south west england. But again, west will be best in terms of sunshine. A brisk northerly wind feeding in cloud from time to time, few scattered showers, and keeping those temperatures pegged back to single figures. So a top temperature of nine degrees along east coast, further west well see 12 or 13 degrees. Now, clear skies will continue through wednesday evening and overnight, and thats going to allow those temperatures to fall away to low single figures. So thursday morning, perhaps a chilly start quite widely across the country. And temperatures low enough in rural areas further north and west for a touch of frost, so gardeners and growers take note. But into thursday, this little Weather Front here could introduce a slight change. It will certainly bring more in the way of cloud as we go through the latter stages of the morning into the afternoon, and maybe some dribs and drabs of Showery Rain Pushing its way steadily south. So therell be more Cloud A Little Bit further west, and the temperatures really disappointing for the end of april, 9 13 degrees once again. Moving out of thursday into friday, sees low pressure starting to push in from the south. That will introduce some wetter weather across central and southern england, but potentially a little less cold. So as we close out the month of april, perhaps temperatures in the south back to where they should be for the time of year. But dont expect anything dry, settled and sunny. Its going to stay pretty unsettled. But we could see temperatures back up into the mid teens for some. Teslas profits tumble after the ev giant introduces deep cost cutting measures as it faces stiff competition. A bill to ban tiktok in the us is making its way through congress. We take a look at the battle it could face in the courts. Hello and welcome to Asia Business report. Im mariko oi. Lets start with tesla, because the electric car maker has posted a sharp fall in its profits and revenue for the first three months of the year. Profits are down 55 , and revenue is also lower by 9 . Its been tough several months for elon musk� s firm,