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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You're listening to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. This edition is published in the early hours of Wednesday, the 15th of April. Sudan marks a grim milestone, three years of civil war.
Chapter 2: What triggered the civil war in Sudan and what is its current impact?
We hear from a journalist who was trapped in a brutal siege there. President Trump suggests talks with Iran could resume in the next few days. And Ukraine says it's recaptured territory from Russia using just robots. Also in the podcast, the tech bosses using AI to create digital twins. The bot passed with flying colours.
Chapter 3: How has the humanitarian crisis in Sudan escalated?
Employees could not distinguish between the human CEO and the bot CEO correctly.
And... Talking to people we don't know that well puts us in a good mood. It exposes us to new information. It's a source of novelty and learning and new perspectives. And it's a chance to put something good into the world.
How small talk can have big benefits. It's three years since a power struggle between two armed factions in Sudan erupted into full-blown civil war. The fighting between the regular army and the paramilitary rapid support forces has led to a de facto partition of the country and triggered the world's largest humanitarian crisis.
The fall of the city of Al-Fasha in the western region of Darfur last October was one of the most brutal episodes of the conflict. Journalist Mohammed Suleiman was there, facing a communications blackout that cut off his connections to the outside world. He's now made it to safety and shared his story, as Barbara Platt-Usher reports.
This sound is so familiar and so crucial to how we live our lives. But when Mohamed Suleiman entered the telecoms office in Port Sudan in January, he hadn't heard a phone ring for a very long time. He'd been isolated by conflict and unable to convey fully the horrors he was witnessing. I was flustered because people were talking on their phones inside the office.
Throughout the past three years, my phone has mostly been silent. After I inserted the SIM card, my tears flowed. When his phone sprang to life, it was pinging with three years of messages. News of colleagues who died.
Friends asking whether Mohamed was alive.
A few days ago, a friend called me saying he thought I had died. Some people had told him that I was in Port Sudan. So he called me, but he didn't believe it until I called him back by video. Then he broke down in tears. Mohamed had been trapped in the western city of Al-Fasher, an epicenter of the war. From the beginning, communications were very unstable because of the fighting.
But that became a full blackout when the paramilitary rapid support forces laid siege to the city. In some ways, the silence was almost as deadly as the violence. He felt suffocated as he watched people, including children, die of hunger, thirst and disease. He was unable to call and warn others when he saw drones coming.
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Chapter 4: What experiences did journalist Mohammed Suleiman share about living through the conflict?
And there has been a meeting in the U.S. which could at least go some way perhaps towards resolving that.
Yeah, there was a historic meeting in the U.S. State Department in Washington between the ambassadors from Israel and Lebanon. Now, that's the first time those countries have met face to face in decades. They don't share diplomatic relations between them. They never normally talk to each other. So this was an important event in itself.
After a couple of hours, both sides came out saying that it had been a productive meeting. The Israeli ambassador said that both nations had agreed that Lebanon wants to free itself from the influence of Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants who operate inside the country. The Lebanese ambassador said that they had agreed to talk again. So all of that is positive.
They did not, though, manage to agree a ceasefire. They did not come to any kind of agreement about Israel halting its attacks on Lebanon. And in fact, those... attacks continued throughout the day.
So without some kind of agreement on stopping those strikes, it's difficult to see how those countries are going to get much further on or how that could have a material impact on the discussions between America and Iran.
Sarah Smith at the White House in Washington. Well, as well as the military conflict, the US and Iran have also been fighting a propaganda war, much of it on social media. The Iranians have gone viral with short videos mocking the US and Israeli war effort using AI-generated Lego characters, like this one featuring the AI-generated rap song Loser.
Hey, hey, hey, loser, come closer, I'm the exposer. The video shows a Lego version of President Trump injured in hospital. At one point, he's depicted as a circus clown jumping through a fiery hoop, held by what looks like a Lego version of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The videos come from an Iranian digital company called Explosive Media.
They spoke to a BBC podcast, Top Comment, and acknowledged that they have worked with the Iranian government. Explosive Media's YouTube channel has since been taken down. To find out more, Evan Davis spoke to Darren Linville, author of a study into Iran's tactics.
The Iranians have been putting out a great deal of propaganda around the ongoing war. They have really done a great job of tapping into the language of the internet. A lot of their content is tongue-in-cheek, it's irreverent, What is powerful about the propaganda that the Iranians have been putting out is that it spreads organically.
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