US cuts health aid to Zimbabwe

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. Coming to you live from London, I'm Rajini Vaidyanathan. Coming up later in the programme, we'll hear from a journalist in the Cuban capital Havana for the latest on the shooting incidents off the Cuban coast, which has left four people dead. And we'll also bring you a special report on drugs gangs in Mexico. But first, for a US administration which likes to do deals, the failure of this one has far-reaching consequences. The American embassy in Zimbabwe says it's ending some $367 million of health funding to the country, which is used to support the treatment of HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and maternal and child health. It leaves 1.2 million men, women and children who currently rely on American funds for their HIV treatment now in limbo. Well, the US blames Zimbabwe for the breakdown in the agreement, saying that it's already signed health funding deals with 16 African nations. But Zimbabwe said it had no choice but to back out. In short, it felt that it was an unequal deal. Well, I've been speaking to the BBC's Shingai Nioka, Ian Harare, who explained first the government's position. Well, Zimbabwe is of the belief that this deal, which essentially was a memorandum of understanding discussions with the US about the US providing Zimbabwe with over 360 million US dollar in assistance in the health sector. And so these talks were ongoing. And then Zimbabwe essentially is saying that the U.S.'s demands are an unequal exchange, that they're lopsided, that Zimbabwe is being asked to share sensitive data in terms of its biological resources, biological samples related to disease control over an extended period of time without any real guarantee that Zimbabwe would benefit from any kind of research in terms of vaccines and treatments. Yeah, I mean, I think the government in Zimbabwe described the arrangement as asymmetrical. Yes, it did. And the concern that they expressed was that the samples would be used in the US for research and have potentially commercial value for the US. But then there's no guarantee that if in future there is some kind of an epidemic that Zimbabwe or any African country would be able to have access to the results of that research in terms of medication, in terms of vaccines. All that said, though, there are serious concerns now that this funding could leave millions of people without treatment, including HIV treatment for 1.2 million people. And that is the concern. And it's quite interesting that even as there's been a lot of social media chatter today, there's been a lot of support for the Zimbabwe government position. But what we've also seen is concerns expressed by doctors who are working in the field around the area of HIV prevention and treatment. And Zimbabwe has made significant progress over the last 20 or so years, largely due to the assistance that it's received from the US. They are effectively supplying medication to about 1.2 million people. They've spent about $2 billion in the health sector over the last 20 years. And the criticism that the US ambassador gave as a response to Zimbabwe deciding to terminate the talks is that they also wanted the Zimbabwean government to step up in terms of funding its own health programs. And so that's the concern that doctors now have is will Zimbabwe be able to do that, be able to fill that gap with the $360 million that the US government is now saying that essentially they're winding down these programs. That's the BBC's Shingai Nioka in Harare. So what does this mean for the Zimbabwean healthcare system and of course the people who rely on it? Well Rashida Farand is a professor at the London School of Tropical Hygiene. She's lived in Zimbabwe for the last 20 years and her research focuses on HIV in children and young adults. So how concerned is she about this shortfall now in funding for Zimbabwean health programmes? I think any health professional working in Zimbabwe will be very concerned right now. On a background of an overwhelmed health system, the sort of current news really puts programmes at substantial risk. And this includes HIV programmes, but also other programmes like maternal and child health, TB, malaria, and other diseases like that that are of substantial public health importance in the country. You spoke of an overwhelmed healthcare system. I wonder if you could paint a picture of just how overwhelmed things are. Well, there's been chronic underinvestment in the system for some time now. There's user fees for health facilities. Patients often have to buy many of the commodities that they have to access in hospitals and in clinics. There is a shortage of basic things like painkillers and essential drugs like antibiotics. Some clinics don't have running water. So there is a considerable worry that this will add an additional burden to the health system. And where does this leave the estimated 1.2 million people in Zimbabwe who have HIV? It's a rocket science to see that this will create a lot of uncertainty and anxiety for people who work within HIV programmes and for patients who are accessing care. And it puts the country in a really untenable situation, really, to be sort of, in a way, held hostage through this health colonialism, if you will, by being asked to exchange their health data and access to minerals at the expense of losing health funding. So overall, it's a really difficult situation. And I think, you know, at this point, I would imagine that patients and healthcare providers are really worrying about the continuity of the programs and about how patients will access care, but also indeed how this will impact on prevention of HIV. For example, how it will impact on mother to child transmission of HIV, how it will impact on commodities and programs that are working to prevent spread of sexual transmission of HIV. So I think it's a really worrying time for the country. You used the phrase health colonialism. Do you think this is also a moment for Zimbabwe to relook how these kinds of programmes are funded and whether the country can be more independent when it comes to finding funding sources? Absolutely. Absolutely. I've said this for a long time that I think that whilst there is a responsibility for countries in the global north to provide support and development, This can't come at a cost and exploitation that has hitherto been in place in many settings. So it is time for countries like Zimbabwe to look to how they can reconfigure their health systems and reconfigure their funding structures to be able to support their health programmes, including HIV programmes. HIV is not going to go away for a long time. And do you think there are other countries that Zimbabwe should be looking to then if the US isn't a country to work with anymore on this? I do think that it is time and overdue that other partnerships be explored and to realise that there is a world order and health can't be funded by holding a gun to a country's head. There has been long a history of exploitation in the medical field with respect to kind of data and with respect to kind of resources that are garnered from the global south. And this is one example. So I do think that there is a need to look elsewhere. Rashida Farhan there, a professor at the London School of Tropical Hygiene, speaking to me a short while ago. Now let's get the latest on the fallout from the Epstein files and two big US names who appeared in those documents, which were released by America's Department of Justice earlier this year, have publicly distanced themselves from their associations with the late convicted sex offender. First off, Bill Gates, who says he's taking responsibility for his actions over his ties to Epstein. He made those comments to a meeting of employees of the Gates Foundation. And the former US Treasury Secretary and one-time Harvard President Larry Summers says he's retiring from his roles at the university after its review into Summers' ties with Jeffrey Epstein. Well, Hannah Humphrey is our correspondent in Washington. I started by asking her why Mr. Summers was resigning now. So as you were mentioning, Larry Summers, probably best known as having served as the US Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton. But at one point, the president of Harvard, most recently holding those academic and faculty posts. And we had a statement from Harvard with regards to why he's resigning. So they said that his exit was, quote, in connection to their ongoing review by the University of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. We've also had a statement from Larry Summers himself. He told the BBC that that decision to resign had been a difficult one. He's actually been on leave since November, people might remember. So he'd been taking that leave while the university was investigating any Epstein links, which he's previously expressed regret over. Because what we saw in the Epstein files is that they indicated that Larry Summers had corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, until the day before his arrest in 2019. And we have to state that there are millions of files that were released. Being named in the files is not an indication of wrongdoing, but what we had seen was Epstein and Summers discussing, Summers asking for advice about a romantic advice with someone who he described as an economics mentor. Now of course Helena no survivor has accused Mr Summers of misconduct and on the same day as we just said Bill Gates has apologised to his staff over his connections with Epstein so what did he have to say? That's right so we had a spokesperson for the Gates Foundation saying that it was a scheduled town hall that Bill Gates had with employees which he does twice a year and so Bill Gates was answering questions from the staff on a range of issues and that touched on the release of the Epstein files. And they said that Bill spoke candidly, addressing several questions and took responsibility for his actions. Of course, the question is, what are those actions? Well, the Wall Street Journal reported that Bill Gates apologised to staff saying that he had had two affairs with Russian women, which Jeffrey Epstein later found out about. And he said that in relation to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, quote, I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit And Helena Mr Gates said he didn do anything illicit as you say there he was very candid to his staff i mean once again no one accused him of misconduct either either have they no indeed i mean both men are named in the files as you point out doesn't equate to wrongdoing but certainly the emails from those files indicate that larry summers was messaging with epstein seemingly asking for romantic advice. They dined together. Epstein often tried to connect Summers to prominent global figures. When it comes to Bill Gates, he had said that it was a huge mistake to spend time with Jeffrey Epstein. But the point he made in that town hall was that he said that he'd never spent time with the victims, the women around him as well. And he made an apology to people who'd been drawn into this because of what he called a mistake. That's the BBC's Helena Humphrey, reporting from Washington DC. And there's more on the fallout from the Epstein files, of course, on the BBC News website. You're listening to the BBC World Service and this is NewsHour. Coming up, the AI company taking a stand against the US Defence Department because of concerns over the use of its technology. Anthropic do not want this technology to be used autonomously, so without a human in the loop, in scenarios where there could be lethal force and also in scenarios where there could be mass surveillance of American citizens. Let's take a look at the latest headlines. And Cuba says its Coast Guards shot dead four people travelling in a US-registered speedboat in an exchange of fire off the Cuban coast. Washington says it'll ease restrictions on Venezuelan oil exports to Cuba's private sector as the US blockade leads to a worsening crisis on the Caribbean island. And two former Brazilian lawmakers have been sentenced to more than 76 years in jail, each for ordering the killing of a prominent Rio de Janeiro activist. This is Rajini Vaidyanathan with NewsHour Live from the BBC headquarters in London. Now, let me take you back almost exactly 45 years to February 1981 and the Congress building in the Spanish capital Madrid. Well, Spain at that time was just a young democracy and the military dictator Francisco Franco had died a few years before. so the country was now a parliamentary democracy, with King Juan Carlos as its constitutional figurehead. But elements loyal to Franco weren't happy with the way the transition to democracy was going. And so, in the early evening of the 23rd of February, this happened. Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Taggero, along with about 200 other officers in the Civil Guard, stormed into Congress during a vote to swear in a new Prime Minister. Well, it was an attempt to launch a military coup, which led to all those inside the chamber being held hostage for some 18 hours. But the attempt failed after a televised intervention by the king denouncing the plotters and calling for democratic government to continue. Many of the facts of this pivotal moment in Spanish history are known, but not all. And earlier in the day, the government released a bundle of classified documents relating to that failed coup. Well, Professor Mary Vincent's an expert on modern Spain at the University of Sheffield here in England. And she was telling my colleague James Menendez why the government decided to release all of these documents now. I think it's partly routine in any democracy documents are released after a certain period of time. And obviously, that period of time has now elapsed. I do think it's very interesting, though, that they're being made publicly available on a website. And I think that reflects the importance of the 81 coup in Spain's transition to democracy. What about in terms of what we know or don't know about what happened back then, 45 years ago? How much still isn't known about the coup and how it unfolded? I think mostly it's known about the coup, but it was an intensely dramatic moment. You have tanks on the streets of Valencia with an old Civil War general at the helm. You have Tejero going into the Parliament building and shooting into the ceiling and everybody diving for cover and holding the government hostage. The King goes on television and that's the Kennedy moment. It's the moment everybody remembers what they were doing, at what time he came on, what it meant for them, and calms nerves and the police are in control and the coup is disarticulated. And after that, the transition to democracy is seen as a success and the King is seen as pivotal in that success. But the King was Franco's appointed heir. He was a military man. This is a military coup. And ever since then, there's been a lot of speculation as to how much did the king know? What do you think about those suggestions that he knew that this was being plotted in advance? I have never heard or seen anything to suggest that he didn't play an entirely straight role during the coup. But I do understand the speculation and the fact that his subsequent fall from grace was so spectacular. He's such a hero, the king. Lots of people who are not at all monarchists are still very favourably disposed towards him. His later fall from grace and all the scandals, I think that evaporated, particularly the corruption scandals, the money. Could it have unfolded very differently? I mean, might the coup have succeeded then? I'm not sure the coup could have succeeded. And there is a fear during the transition, which is very much a movement of political elites. They control the movement toward democracy. They want to avoid a revolution, as has happened in Portugal, though I don't think the condition for a civil war in is. Spain has fought a civil war. There is a real desire to avoid that level of bloodshed. And all of those things are very possible on the night of the 23rd of February 1981. For a while, there was a reluctance, wasn't there, to talk about things. It was just about focusing on the present and the future. Do you think now that Spain is a more mature democracy, some of those questions can be tackled more easily? Yes, definitely. There's definitely been a re-evaluation of the transition, which was seen as this elite movement which was skilfully handled, in which the king played an absolutely crucial role. I think there is now much more scepticism about that, a feeling that there were questions that were not addressed. And to hold people account, I think there is a definite willingness. That was very difficult in the 1980s. That's Mary Vincent, an expert on modern Spain at the University of Sheffield in England. And since that interview with Mary was recorded, we've learned that Antonio Tegero, the leader of Spain's failed coup, has died. In case you didn't know, that's the distinctive sound of the emperor penguin, a remarkable species. because once the female has laid an egg, it's the daddy penguin who incubates it, balancing that egg for weeks on end on his feet to keep it warm during the harsh Antarctic winters. Well, while the cold has been challenging for the emperor penguin, warmer temperatures are now putting them at risk. Well, new research has found that ice that penguins rest on while they molt every year is melting faster with serious consequences. Dr Peter Fretwell's a senior scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, and he's worked on emperor penguins for 20 years. So I asked him just how serious this threat is. Well, it's very serious, unfortunately. The emperor penguin goes through a very strange molting process. It loses all its feathers at once, where the new feathers push out the old feathers. And it takes quite a lot of time, four to five weeks. And in that time, the feathers aren't waterproof, so the animal can't go into the water to feed. or to do anything else. And that means it loses up to half its body weight in those four to five weeks. It does it standing on the sea ice like it does everything else, breeds and forages around the sea ice. And it has to find very rare stable patches of sea ice because this is the Antarctic summer it does it. Now, the problem is that recently with the very low sea ice extents in Antarctica, we've been seeing that the sea ice under these emperor penguin malting groups has been breaking up well before the malt has finished and that could have fatal consequences for the adult emperor penguins. Yeah, I mean, you've described this in another interview as an oh my god moment. So, I mean, this is really serious, isn't it? If you're using that kind of terminology, what can be done? It is. This is something that we'd never really seen the malting groups before in satellite imagery. And so it was a bit of a surprise to actually be able to find them in the first place. We could only see them really because they concentrated together because the sea ice was so small. And then we went back in the archive and saw these events of the sea ice breaking up under them. It's due to climate change, really. You know, there's very little other things that affect tempera penguins. This is due to warming Southern Ocean and the fact that the sea ice is breaking up sooner because of those warmer temperatures. Climate change isn't something we can change or solve on a regional basis. We can't put the ice back. It's to do with the warming planet. So really, the only solution for this is for us to accelerate our movement towards renewable energies and stop pumping so much methane and CO2 into the atmosphere. So there's nothing else you can do on a localised scale then, or move penguins to safer places where the ice isn't melting? I guess that's not a solution. No, no, it's not really a solution, unfortunately. There's very few of those places around. And of course, there's only so much food that they can have. You can't move them all to the same place. So we just hope that there is still time to save the emperor penguin because we know that climate change is getting worse. This problem and other problems with breeding that they have is getting worse over time. So it's going to be a race against time, really, to see if we can save not just the emperor penguin, but many other species. That's Dr Peter Fretwell from the British Antarctic Survey and I'm looking at some wonderful pictures of the emperor penguin on the BBC News website. You can go to bbc.com forward slash news if you'd like to take a look too. You're listening to NewsHour. Thank you. and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Good humor, slow misdades, lovely unfulfilled characters and exactly the right dose of sarcasm. Bingo. BBCNL, the place for the best British misdades series. Just on your Netherlands TV. I'm Sam Peranti. And for the past seven years, I've been granted access to a team of US special agents. Their job? To track down those who create and trade in sickening images on the dark web. When I hug my kids, that's your fuel. That's your why. From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, the darkest web tells their story. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts This is not the future we were promised Like how about that for a tagline for the show From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to NewsHour. Most visitors to the UK who previously travelled visa-free will now need to apply for an ETA, an electronic travel authorisation. That's before they'll be allowed to enter the country. The government says this will improve the immigration system, but some travel groups say that it's an unnecessary burden on tourists. The current cost is £16, around US$21. Now this follows similar schemes already in place in America and Australia and the EU is also bringing in its own compulsory visa later this year. Rick Kelsey has more. I'm coming through airport passport security, a biometric scan and I'm through. From now on, people from outside the UK coming through these gates will need to have a UK ETA, an electronic travel authorisation. It costs £16, about US$20, and you'll need to apply three days before to guarantee you'll get it on time. We hear week on week about people who have been unable to board flights, have wasted huge amounts of money and they just haven't understood fully the paperwork that they need to cross the border. Claire Irwin is travel editor for the Sunday Times in the UK. If you are relying on your consumer rights to get you a refund for a flight you're not able to take because you haven't got the right paperwork, you're sadly mistaken. You are the only one who's going to miss out. It is complicated. The European Union's new entry and exit scheme will come in from October. There are thousands of messages on travel forums you can read about people missing flights because, frankly, they didn't know about these new visas. just like video producer Owen Efran from South Wales. When I checked into the flight in Toronto, they were like, you don't have an Aster. You need one to board the flight. So I had to apply for one whilst in the queue to check in. I was then like asked to sit on the side where I had to wait for the Aster to be approved. It took about two hours. Luckily, I was like three hours early for the flight. And then once it got approved, they let me through. And then I was rushed to security. They let me go through security with priority, but then I got through to immigration. And that was a huge queue. And there were other people in the queue about to miss their flight. Owen, unlike many others, just made it. There's also the problem of fraud and businesses making large profits off the new arrangements. Almost all the visas ask that people book directly from the government or official site of the country that you're visiting. But this has not stopped companies charging sometimes hundreds of dollars for doing it for them, even masking as official partners, which is what happened to Jasmine Gallant from New Brunswick in Canada. We had paid our flight. This link appeared and said all travellers to the UK need a travelling visa. So I applied for it. I ended up paying £100, which the first time I had applied cost me £20. Most of these new travel authorisations cost between $15 and $30 and they last for up to three years. But don't forget to do it before you head to the airport. That's the BBC's Rick Kelsey there. You're listening to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. I'm Rajini Vaidyanathan. Now in Mexico's Sinaloa, fear is everywhere and the fear is constant according to people living there. The state and city of Culiacan have erupted in bloody violence after one of the world's most powerful drug gangs, the Sinaloa cartel, descended into civil war after the removal there of one of its leaders. As many as half a dozen murders take place every single day. The cartels made billions trafficking the deadly drug fentanyl to the US, and America's warned the Mexican government that it will take direct military action if it doesn't stop the trade and the traffickers. Mexico says it has cut fentanyl production in half, but in Culiacan, the drugs keep flowing and the body count keeps rising. Our international correspondent Quentin Somerville recently returned from Sinaloa, A warning that his report features graphic descriptions of violence right from the start. We're just tearing through central Kuluakam with the paramedics. We're driving at speed and we're heading towards the scene of a shooting. We've just arrived at the scene. We're actually inside the cordon now. It's a garage. A relative has just arrived. One murder, six shots in all body. So Hector, as paramedics, there's nothing you can do. You mainly see bodies, the dead. Yeah, it's hard, hard job, hard job. There was in fact one person that was killed, the owner of the garage. He was found dead in his office. I can see a photograph of him now covered in a blanket, just his feet showing. and somewhat awfully typical for these men that, as paramedics, there's no help that they can provide, really, because they're dealing with execution-style killings and murders and it's only dead bodies, time after time. It's just before 8 in the morning here in central Coulier Can, just outside one of the main shopping malls, and another body on the pavement. This one is very grisly. It's a man who's been tortured. There's a message taped to his body. It seems to have photographs and some writing. But clearly a message has been sent. It gives you an idea of the extent, the brutality, the viciousness of the infighting within the Sinaloa cartel at the moment. Meeting with the cartels is difficult at the best of times but now even more so because they're right in the crosshairs of the United States and President Trump. He's labelled them terrorist groups. He says their product, fentanyl and other drugs, are a weapon of mass destruction and he's promised that as well as bombing the cartels at sea, he's going to tackle them on land. So they're feeling under threat like never before. I'm about to go and meet with a group I'm going to have to leave my phone behind These men are vicious criminals fighting for an illegal drugs business worth billions They've gone to war after the son of one of their leaders betrayed another This power struggle is a fight to the death and they show little remorse They insisted we disguise their voices The civil war in the cartel has created a bloodbath in Culiacan. Women are being killed. Kids are being killed. Do you feel guilty about that? Yes. A lot of times innocent people die. Children die. There is a lot of death of innocent people. A lot of people will keep dying because the cartel is still fighting and it's going to keep getting worse. This war will continue. Nothing will come down until there is only one faction left. A small protest taking place outside the main cathedral on this beautiful sunny day in Kulia Khan. Lots of relatives of the victims of the cartel violence are here. They're wearing white. Some are carrying pictures of their loved ones. They're all sexes, ages. gives you a sense of how all-encompassing the violence is here. The chant here is, they took them away alive, we want them back alive. It's seven hours since the peace march and the sun is setting here in Kuleyakan and they almost made it through the day without a killing but just in front of me is a young man who's just been gunned down. He's 16 years old, he was on his bike He's wearing blue jeans and he's got a light blue T-shirt on. He's still tangled up in his bike. He's lying dead there on the pavement. The family are here. They're on the other side of the police state, but I can hear the screams and wails from here. It seems that the kid was shot 10 or 12 times. The cartel is strong in this neighbourhood and uses young men as spotters. its spies are ever-present and no one was willing to answer our questions. You can follow me. In a cartel-owned basement, we meet a fentanyl smuggler. He has six kilos of the powder in tightly pressed bundles, each worth at least $20,000. What we have here is fentanyl. This product is ready to be sent to the United States and pressed into pills. The drug that he's holding and the battle to control it has cost the lives of tens of thousands here and in the United States. He doesn't take any responsibility. There is no shame for what he does. Even though President Donald Trump refers to us as terrorists, I would just remind him that as long as there are consumers, we're going to keep doing this. But that doesn't necessarily make us terrorists. No one forced them to start using this stuff. Even though the government has intensified their search, when it comes to production, we've never stopped. Sometimes we do scale back because the government gets too close, so we lay low for a few days. But once that problem passes, we either continue or move to other areas. I'm with a group of women, Madras and Lucha, mothers fighting back. they're here, we're about half an hour outside of Koliakhan in the grounds of a half-built church they're looking for lost sons, lost brothers who are victims of cartel violence now the women are heading into some rough ground and fields beyond they have shovels, they have pickaxes, they have machetes The woman leading the search here today is Rinalda Guirido. Her son disappeared back in 2019 and she won't stop searching for him. I wake up every day and I ask God, tell me why I'm here. And what gives me strength is realising that no one else is going to look for them. I realise it because no one is moving to search for the disappeared in Sinaloa. And a mother will always look for her child. No matter if it's to the ends of the earth, she will look. He responded to two people injured. They were asking for help at the incident. Paramedics Julio and Hector have been called to another cartel shooting, but this one is different. We've been following these paramedics for a week. We've been to multiple call-outs with them. This is the first time they've arrived at a scene and the person has still been alive. Decapitating the Sinaloa cartel leadership may yet destroy it but for now there is only violence The BBC Quentin Somerville reporting from Culiacan in Mexico Now it a battle which pits the might of the US Department of Defence against the growing power of artificial intelligence, and it's unclear who exactly will win. In one corner, we have the tech firm Anthropic, which describes itself as a high-trust and low-ego AI safety and research company. And in the other, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who wants to use Anthropic's technology across US military operations. But the boss of Anthropic, Dario Amadei, is said to be concerned that the government could use its model, known as CLAUDE, to make military targeting decisions without human intervention, as well as for other uses. The Pentagon says the current dispute's unrelated to that and says it's given Anthropic until Friday to comply or it'll remove them from its supply chains. While Christina Criddle is a technology correspondent with the Financial Times in San Francisco, she's been breaking down what this all means. So the Department of Defence has been contracting with AI companies to basically use their technology in both classified and unclassified scenarios. and the classified scenarios are the parts of the tension here. So Dario Amadei, who's the chief executive of Anthropic, he's been meeting with the defense secretary to try and negotiate the terms of use for its AI technology. Its model is called CLAWD. So what scenarios that can be used in? And that seems to be a sticking point here where Anthropic do not want this technology to be used autonomously. So without a human in the loop, in scenarios where there could be lethal force and also in scenarios where there could be mass surveillance of American citizens. Tell us more about Clawed and what it's been used for. Clawed is an AI chatbot very similar to ChatGPT from OpenAI or Gemini from Google. And the way that most consumers use it is just typing in questions and getting an answer back from this AI chatbot. But it can do things like write code, it can analyse a lot of data. And so this is where it could really come in handy for the government as well. Now there were reports that Claude was actually used when it came to seizing Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela and I was curious to know how exactly an AI chatbot could be involved in something like that. Yes there's been reporting that it was used in this instance but it's not clear in what way. Anthropic has been trying to find out specifically how it was used as well but there are little details out there about what was technically going on and how Claude helped with this operation. And why does the Department of Defence want to use this technology so badly? I think the US government is concerned that adversaries like China are already using AI very effectively. There are lots of other AI companies who are also awarded contracts with the Department of Defence. They're also talking through having their technology used in this way. OpenAI, Google and Elon Musk's ex-AI. But I think because Anthropik has been used. It's the first to kind of take this stand. And there have been concerns about the safety of Anthropik's AI technology, even though the company very proudly says on its website, safety is its biggest concern, because one of its safety researchers quit recently, didn't he? Anthropik was founded with a specific focus on safety. It was former OpenAI employees who wanted to build a company that really prioritised safety. And a lot of Anthropics' work and its research is focused around that and centred around that. And they have ethicists, they have researchers, all trying to work out how to make these systems safe. Is the company concerned, for example, if it doesn't comply, if it gets taken off the Department of Defence's list? There is this option for the Department of Defence to use a DPA to basically take the technology and use it anyway. But Anthropic could then take legal action against the Department of Defence. That's Christina Criddle, a technology reporter with the Financial Times. This is Rajini Vaidyanarvan with NewsHour coming to you live from the BBC's headquarters in London. In the past few hours, there have been reports of a shooting incident off the Cuban coast. Cuba says its coast guards shot dead four people travelling in a US-registered speedboat in an exchange of fire. Well, Cristiana Mesquita is the news director of the Associated Press's Caribbean Bureau. She was on the line from the Cuban capital, Havana. Not an awful lot. You know, it took place in Cayo Falcones, which is a small fisherman village in the north of the country. So, so far we have what we have been informed by the Minister of Information that four people were killed and that a Cuban officer of the Coast Guard was also wounded. Um, we haven't been able to find out their names, uh, or even their nationalities. We know the boat was registered in Florida, but the registration number that they gave us has not allowed us to verify the ownership of the boat. Having said that, this is not unusual. We have seen this in the past. Speedboats that come to the coast, either to collect people, to take them back to Florida, or even in smuggling activities. And we have had absolutely no confirmation from either the State Department or the Pentagon of any other activity in that area. But Christine, the timing of this is interesting, isn't it? Of course, because it comes at a time where there are heightened tensions between America and Cuba. Absolutely. I mean, you know, very heightened tensions. As you all know, Cuba is under energy blockade from the United States that is causing all kinds of problems here. Long lines for gasoline while it lasts, constant power outages. We expect that there might be some food shortages soon. But we also have another element, which is the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, currently in the Caribbean. He's in 10 hits together with the leaders of the CARICOM, the Caribbean trade bloc. And we know that Cuba is a divisive subject among the Caribbean leaders. And I'm sure this is going to be a high priority talk, you know, talking point for the Secretary of State. That's Christiana Mesquita, the news director of the Associated Press's Caribbean Bureau. Well, in the past few minutes, James Uthmeyer, the Attorney General of the US state of Florida, has said this on the social media platform X in response. He says he's directed the Office of Statewide Prosecution to work with federal, state and law enforcement partners to begin an investigation. He says the Cuban government cannot be trusted and we will do everything in our power to hold these communists accountable. There's more on the BBC website as well. As we reported earlier in the programme, America is withdrawing from its health programmes in Zimbabwe, a move which could impact more than a million people with HIV. But as aid is cut to programmes, there's also hope. A breakthrough for long-term survivors of HIV could revolutionise their treatment. A new daily oral tablet would combine two current HIV treatment medications and reduce the number of pills that some patients take. Well, Professor Chloe Orkin is the lead author of that study, and I asked her why the current medical regime is so complicated for some patients. So for most people living with HIV, it's very simple. They take a single tablet every day or two monthly injectables. But there's a group of people who have not been able to benefit from medical advances. these medical advances allowing them to take a single pill a day. And these are typically people who were diagnosed very early on in the HIV epidemic when we were learning how to treat HIV and we gave inadequate pills and that led to the development of resistance to different types of HIV drugs. So the result of this is that these individuals, unlike everybody else, have to take lots of pills and in many cases twice a day still for their HIV. So effectively time has stood still for these individuals and they haven't been able to benefit as everybody else has from newer medications. So this breakthrough would really benefit older sufferers of HIV? This would benefit people who are on complex regimens and most of those people are people diagnosed early in the epidemic, but also some people who were born with HIV have been living with HIV for a long time and have resistance. So they also can't take the newer medications. So this is a very new combination with a new class of drug, which is giving them the opportunity to take a single tablet. And one of the big concerns about them being on these complex regimens is that they have drug interactions with other commonly prescribed medications. And therefore, these people are at high risk of coming to harm from drug interactions. So you're saying in these particular patients, they're already taking a number of tablets. And that is why it's better to reduce the number that they would have to take for HIV. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because most people with HIV now are taking a single pill a day, except for this group of people. And, you know, in this study, the largest number of pills taken by a single person in the study was 11. and many people were taking twice daily pills. That's a lot, isn't it? Yeah, it's a lot. And just remind us what HIV is and what it can do to someone's body if it's not treated, if people don't take these tablets. So HIV without treatment is a universally fatal condition and it really affects the immune system and people's ability to fight infections and to fight cancers. And prior to HIV treatment, it was invariably fatal and people would die of awful infections and conditions. And what exactly do these pills do then to the body? So what the pills do is they control the HIV virus to an undetectable level. So they control it so that it's not replicating in the body. And it's there at very low levels. It's not a cure, but it's very well controlled. And we call it undetectable. And when the virus is undetectable, it allows the immune system to recover. but it also means that people who are undetectable cannot pass the virus on to other people through sexual contact or in any other way. So getting people undetectable is vital for an individual's health but also for population health. That's Professor Chloe Orkin there ending this edition of NewsHour. I'm Rajini Vaidyanathan from myself and the team. Thanks to all of you for listening. Transcription by CastingWords porn industry be stopped. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.