this is bbc news, the headlines. argentina have beaten australia 2—1 to progress to the quarter—finals of the world cup in qatar. the argentine captain lionel messi opened the scoring in what was his 1,000th professional match. in the next round, they'll face the netherlands, who beat the united states 3—1 earlier in the day. the level of the price cap on russian maritime oil exports will not stop the attacks on ukraine, according to president zelensky. he's called the $60 a barrel cap ”'weak" and says it will also not stop moscow's attempts to destabilise the countries imposing the limit. the father of a four—year—old girl who's critically ill in hospital with strep a has urged parents to be on the lookout for symptons of the infection and seek medical help immediately.

five children have died recently from the bacterium in england, and one in wales. now on bbc news, the media show. today, we are talking about what it is like to report on china, as protests sweep the country. and it's 25 years since the uk's rockstar games created grand theft auto. is it a prized cultural export or society's dark mirror? shouting. the sound of protests in guangzhou in south—east china, one of many that began over the weekend. they are on a scale that has not been seen for more than 30 years, as demonstrators rail

against their country's zero—covid policy. with me to discuss the challenges of reporting the protests and wider press freedom in china are howard zhang, editor of the bbc�*s china service, joseph menn, technology reporter at the washington post, and yuan yang, europe—china correspondent at the financial times. welcome to you all. i would like to start to talk about what has been happening to journalists during the anti—lockdown. this was the bbc�*s ed lawrence on sunday. are you 0k? barry, call the consulate now! he was beaten by police in shanghai and briefly arrested as he covered a protest there. yuan yang, you recently left china after six years in beijing for the ft, what is your reaction to the treatment ofjournalists during the protest? i think this is all too common and ed was not the only journalist arrested and detained, there are also reuters journalists and also many chinese domestic journalists and citizen journalists who were treated

very roughly and detained and sadly whose accounts we can't hear as clearly as ed's. this is a culmination of a number of years of repression ofjournalists that started to become more and more intense under president xi's authoritarian leadership in china. we have seen them being harassed and followed around when they have travelled outside the major cities, particularly in the region of xinjiang with they have a complete security lockdown on the uyghur muslim minority. so what we have seen in shanghai where police have been indiscriminately beating up people, including people who are filming the protests, such as the bbcjournalist ed lawrence, is sadly a reflection of how protestors and journalists are treated in china. howard zhang, you were in close contest with bbcjournalists and presumably other journalists there as well, would you agree that this is not unusual these days? absolutely, and i used to describe to people, just

imagine that you are seeing a dial with north korea at one end being zero tolerance on any reporting and the west with open media, you can do whatever you want, almost. china used to be, in the late '70s starting and to the '80s moving towards the middle, and giving slightly more leeway towards freedom of speech and freedom of thought and all of a sudden just this dialling back happens. and where president xi jinping from 2014—15 onwards starting to get closer to back to the north korea end. so that is happening. ed lawrence himself pointed out that a domestic chinese journalist would have faced much harsher treatment. howard, is there a difference between the treatment of national domestic journalists and ones from the bbc? absolutely.

a couple of factors. one, the chinese traditionally have this thing about face. so foreigners, international journalists, they tend to try to keep an air of legitimacy for themselves, so they tend not to come after them, they will first sort out the domestic journalists before they go after the international. but then at a certain point, when they think it's really, really serious, they will go after anybody. yuan. i think what you're really conscious of when you're a journalist in china, as i was for the last six years, is that as a foreign national with a british passport, if the worst gets the worst, you can probably leave at any point. you have the protection of your embassy and you have hopefully a government at home who will speak out for you and make representations to the chinese side if anything does happen to you. but if you're a chinese national, you have none of those protections. so the utmost importance for foreign journalists is to protect chinese sources who don't have the same ability to leave as as you do as a foreign journalist. and how does it mean that

journalists of asian descent are more likely to find it difficult to work in china? if you do not make them aware that your foreign passport holder... it's just difficult now because numbers tell if you look at all the international organisations calculated like numbers, there are two or three ethnic chinese but foreign passport holderjournalists injail in china at this moment. but in terms of domestic journalists, the number goes over 100, if not more than that. so that just quickly give you a glance of the situation. over 100 journalists jailed domestically and only one or two with foreign passport, but all asian looking. yuan. i mean, more broadly, what is it like being a journalist working in china? you were chair of the foreign correspondents club in china back in the day. yes, i was one of the boardroom members of the foreign correspondents club, which seeks to defend the press freedoms in the country, and and surveys journalists every year about their working conditions.

and what we've seen in those surveys year on year is that over the last three years, the pattern that's emerged is of the covid restrictions being used as an additional layer of control for journalists. so about half of the journalists surveyed last year were told to leave an area because for their own inverted commas, safety or for public safety reasons, when in fact there was no covid reason for them to leave or be quarantined. so the tracking apparatus that the government has created, like the health kit that shows up on your on your mobile phone, that shows up as a traffic light system, green or red or orange, according to whether you've been to a high risk area or not, those kinds of tracking systems can also be used to track journalists and to restrict journalist access. 0k. so they're using covid as an excuse. what other methods does the state use to restrict press freedoms? well, either open or covert, you know, surveillance and also on your mobile phone. that is a really good point, because now people used to tout the, you know, how advanced the chinese mobile phone systems are, how you don't even need cash any more. you can go anywhere, do anything with your mobile phone.

the trouble is, you've handed over every bit of control over any individual's life now to the state, because china does not have a internet or per se, it's a giant intranet. so the state controls all data down to where you've been an hour ago. where did you have your snack? where did you buy anything? so with that level of control, you know, it'sjust a matter of time before anybody can't really move without any authorisation. it's becoming like that. and of course, we do know that the chinese state goes to great lengths to suppress information getting to its citizens. and the protesters have been holding up blank sheets of paper symbolising censorship. joseph menn, technology reporter at the washington post, i'd like to bring you in here. twitter is blocked in china, but you had a story as the protest took place that the site was being flooded by spam accounts, effectively a ruse to hide what was really going on. that's right. people get to twitter through various ways. virtual private

networks is one. there are others. and twitter. and twitter is is not is not censored directly in china because the company doesn't have much of any presence there. so if you can get to it, you can find out what's going on, or normally you can. but in this case, over the weekend, if you were searching for news from a city where there are protests erupting and so you just typed in shanghai or beijing or whatever into the twitter search bar, you would get this flood of ads for escorts and other unmentionable things. and it would be very frustrating, you wouldn't be able to find the news. and unfortunately, this came at a really pivotal time for twitter and they were just unprepared for it. so why was that happening? just explain a bit more what was happening. so you were getting on twitter, you're looking for a site, you're looking for information about a protest, and instead you're finding about information about a sex worker, who's putting that up, what was going on? so the attribution isn't precise in this case.

it is a technique that has been used by government operators before in a couple of instances several years ago. i mean, the most common thing is if you're looking for information about xinjiang, you'll get like happy tourists or people who appear to be happy tourists, domestic tourists, saying how lovely it is or, and those are basically run by government. and of course, that's where xinjiang, just to remind our listeners, is where, you know, we know bbc has reported about camps full of uyghur muslims, where oppression is going on. right. and they've also used the sort of adult content technique against individuals in the past. so mentions of a specific person or a tweeting at a person with all this garbage, so that if you hear about somebody, a protester or somebody said something critical and you're looking them up, you just see garbage. and twitter�*s dealt with that in the past. but it was a different twitter two months ago. just to remind your listeners, elon musk bought the thing

a month ago now almost exactly. and the staff has gone from 7,500 down to ballpark, 2,000 people. and unfortunately, within that are a lot of the experts on foreign influence operations, propaganda, spam and other techniques. so they were just... and a lot of their language specialists, so they were just ill—equipped to deal with it. i suppose the reason why all this matters, though, when it comes to china is that, you know, in the past, information found on social media has been really crucial, really key to other civil uprisings. yes. and i think that fact is not lost on the chinese leadership. and president xi himself talked about the dangers of the jasmine revolutions and uprisings that were fueled in part by people's access to easy information. and i think that's why the government has invested so much in creating this great firewall of censorship within china. however, it does take human decision making

to to to make it work. and in the first few days of the protests, certainly over the weekend, there was a lot that was getting past the censors because people were in this cat and mouse game. people were trying to invent new ways of being sarcastic or newjokes that were kind of not immediately, obviously, about the protests, for example. i saw it. yeah, that one saying things because saying saying repeating phrases like i saw it, you know, or even the phrase yes, yes, yes, over and over again, because of course, saying no would be seen as a negative criticism. so of course, you can just say yes repeatedly. and of course, this becomes very tongue in cheek. and i think it does take a lot of human judgment to decide what crosses the line in a protest and also how much of a pressure valve you need to give people to just let off some steam. so they can vent a bit. exactly. and we were talking about twitter, but presumably just tell us a little bit more about the other sites that are used in china, probably more more widely and how they're being blocked. well, then, so within china, the domestic platforms are, the most common one is wechat, which is kind of ubiquitous.

everyone is on it. it's like facebook and whatsapp, everything rolled into one big platform. and of course, there's douyin, which is the domestic equivalent of tiktok, the short video platform. and it's notable that, for example, in the case of ed lawrence's arrest, not only was he filming on his camera, but there would have been hundreds of people on their cameras filming in that very that very tight area and lots and lots of footage of him getting tackled and kicked to the ground. and so those kinds of clips really go viral very quickly. it takes a human sensor, even human sensors augmented by ai algorithms, time to figure out what they need to trace and then to clean it up afterwards. now that cleaning up is what we're seeing. i think over the last few days there's been a lot less protest—related material, but there is a lot of kind of what i would call kind of gray space material, which is complaint people complaining about the lockdowns and the impacts of lockdowns on their livelihoods, not directly calling for an end to the policy or calling even for the leadership to step down. but clearly there are some very sharp criticism that is being allowed to be aired right now. and howard from the bbc

chinese service, yuan was just talking about ed lawrence. i mean, he actually put up on twitter footage of people being forced or asked to remove whatever they had shot on their phones of the protest in the streets. exactly. and is that a common occurrence? and we have been hearing from various sources and our interviewees, of course, anonymously now, people, homes being searched and people being contacted and being chased by police. so some type of it seems some type of crackdown is going on at this moment. and yes, including right in the streets, police officer will walk over to you, give me your phone and i will check what type of video or image you have, without any court orders. so this is the type of thing that, you know, people here may not be able to even imagine. absolutely. and yuan yang from the ft, you know, ijust wondered, when it comes to the likes of twitter or telegram, those sorts of sites, who is managing to get access to them?

i mean, joseph menn was talking about vpns or how many people in china are managing to get access to these sites that are blocked? well, sadly, that's not a number that we can we can give, because for many people who use vpns, they're trying to do it outside of scrutiny. but certainly lots of academics need to have access to vpns because they need it to be able to read literature published outside of china. lots of students and universities and there are lots of student protests in over 70 campuses. i wondered if it was a generational thing, you know, who's consuming what media, i guess, in china? are, you know, older people more likely to get their information from tv or...? i think broadly so. i mean, for example, if you take my my grandparents who are in the eighties, they still religiously watch the the evening tv state media broadcast broadcast as they have done since then since the middle lines but for the younger generation, it's really all about doing the short video platforms

like tiktok, wechat and online news and i think quite a broad cross—section of chinese people have been watching the world cup, the football fans across the country seeing videos of unmasked, unmasked people celebrating in the stands at the world cup. and so those kinds of images of how the rest of the world is slowly returning to normal after a pretty disastrous pandemic in the rest of the world, but now normalising, i think, have quite a big impact on people in china thinking why can't we normalise as well? and joseph menn, just bringing you back in from the washington post, to what extent do you think silicon valley actually cares about all this? what's the reaction of twitter been, for example, to the site being a host for loads of spams? well, twitter, the people left at twitter realised what was happening after some researchers... ..and then, frankly, i called them about it and then they did a betterjob of getting it down. so by the end of sunday, if you page down, the top would be a mix of porn and protest about 50—50,

according to one government official i spoke to, a contractor, but if you page down a bit, it wasjust it was just all adult content. how willing have the uk, of the us tech companies being to help chinese protesters bypass the censors? it is a very sticky situation. it's extremely sensitive. apple has is coming under increasing pressure for the concessions it's made to the government there. china's enormous market, and of course elon musk's biggest, biggest market outside of the us and rival to the us is china for tesla, which is the major source of his wealth. so he cares a lot about what china thinks. whether he cares about the protesters is another question, but he's certainly gutted the staff that would deal with that. it's a very sensitive topic in silicon valley. of course. and before we end, i wonder how i just wanted to talk about how the ability of journalists to operate in china has changed over the years. yuan yang from the ft, our state controls tighter over press freedoms than they were, for example, when the tiananmen protests took place in 1989? i think there's been,

we've seen a generational shift of growing repression after tiananmen that then kind of cooled down with china's entry into the world trading system, with the beijing olympics in 08, when the government started to liberalize a lot of constraints around journalists. and i think in the last ten years, particularly in the five and six years since i've been in china, we've seen the tide go in the opposite direction of more and more tightening. and when i started reporting in china in 2016, it was still fairly easy to make sources and speak to new people. i think nowadays the so—called red lines of political sensitivities are ever, ever broader areas. so previously we knew that it was difficult to speak to people about things like that, like the one party system, questions of taiwan's independence and so on. nowadays, even speaking to european business people in china working for multinationals about their policy in terms of in high tech areas is extremely politically sensitive. so i think that now there is no clear boundary between what is and what isn't 0k.

and joseph menn from the washington post, i mean, have you noticed any change since you've been monitoring social media? are the chinese censors winning? so on social media, i mean, there is an enormous range of tools that are used. so there is word blocking. there's obviously the great firewall, but there's a lot of pressure on the companies themselves to police their networks. and then there's what's called the 50 cent army, where government employees essentially or contractors, you know, fill up comments with, you know, comment sections with ha happy stuff. ppy, but the creativity of the protesters and dissidents and critics is remarkable. so they use puns, as we heard earlier, they use illusions. earlier, they use allusions. and it's very hard to keep up. so i think it's really kind of a numbers game. and if enough people are trying to get out the word about something, i think they can. and howard, i mean, you were talking earlier about how china is going more

towards north korea when it comes to press freedom. so just what is it like, as a journalist in china, the people that you speak to for the bbc�*s china service, you know, can you just turn up at, i don't know, the scene of a crime or a court case or whatever it might be and start reporting? if you don't mind being arrested eventually, like, yes, but in reality it's becoming next to impossible. and the only way is through almost clandestine private contacts and maybe meeting up in, you know, places and trying to protect the identity of your interviewees. and rather thanjust openly doing interviews. and that's the case, whether you're a domestic or an international domestic? if you'rejust doing pro—government reporting, of course you have all the green light to do anything. do you see things getting better any time soon for china? for reporting, it's unlikely because if anybody cared to read the 20th party congress report, you can see national

security is mentioned, i think, no less than 50 times and the economy is no longer the priority. if you really read the report, it's not not important, but it's not the priority any more. it's the survival of the party and security of the nation for them. that more the priority now. thank you all so much. 25 years ago this week, one of the most profitable media franchises in history launched. now a new podcast tells its story. three words. - grand theft auto. it involves stealing cars... innovative... ..joyriding. .. ...provocative. .. ..and being chased by police cars. ..fun. or as millions of us know it, gta. - that's the rapper bugsy malone, co—host of bugsy malone�*s grandest game on bbc sounds, his grandest game being, of course, grand theft auto. chris warburton is the podcast�*s other host and he is here.

hello, chris. hello, katy. so, grand theft auto, i called it one of the most profitable media franchises in history. it's made about $9 billion since being released in november 1997. give us the basic premise of the game for people who all these years on may still not in all these 25 years have played it. how would you sum it up? how would i sum it up? it's freedom at the heart of this game. the many people that you've spoken to during the making of the podcast, that is the word that keeps coming up time and time again. freedom to go where you like in this huge open world. if you want to cruise down a beautiful coastal road, you can do that. if you want to carry out a hit on a rival crime gang, you can do that, if you just want to drive around one of these cities based on either new york or miami or wherever it might be, you can do that, but it's completing missions and being a criminal in the process. and as i said, it's been hugely successful, but it's also been hugely controversial in all these 25 years

since the first installment. it's been both of those things. a key thing about our podcast is that this is so much more than the story of a game, really. this is a tale of modern culture. you touched on it in your introduction. when you listen, you hear that gta is violent. it's funny, it's dark, it's full of satire, and it really revolutionized the medium. you know, for the first time in gaming, you were rewarded for being bad. for the first time it was. yeah, what does that tell us about our society? what we want to do is the usp of a game that makes you be bad. well, maybe so. but you know, the people who began to make this game realised that that is what the gamers wanted. initially, you could be the police officer, but it only took them a matter of months to realise it was a lot more fun to be the criminal, ultimately. but i mean, it punched out to me and i have to say i found this pretty shocking. and obviously lots of other people did, too. but i remember i can't remember which one it was. was it grand theft auto 2 when one of the things

you could do was pay a sex worker for sex and then kill her afterwards and get some money back? i mean, that is deeply shocking. yes, there are deeply shocking elements to the game. i think the actual bit that you're referring to might have been gta 3 when you really had the full kind of 3d immersive experience that this game brings. and there are many things, you know, you could kill police officers, as you say, you could kill sex workers. there are drugs, guns, stealing cars. there was already a lot of moral panic in the states around video games, partly after the first mass shootings in schools in america. columbine, for example, and people were blaming video games for that. politicians got involved, parent groups, all the rest of it, glamorising violence. and there is an argument on that side. well, it's makers, rockstar games were clear then and they are clear now. you know, this is an adult game and it is rated as such if movies they say the ones that the game was often emulating, films like goodfellas, scarface the ones that they really loved,

18 films in this country. they would argue if they could depict those kind of scenes with an 18 rating, then why couldn't a video game? and they would say, we only make the game, we don't sell it. it's down to the retailers to sell it appropriately and also to parents to stop it getting into younger hands. and the back story is really interesting to the podcast, sorry to the people behind the game. you know, your podcast tells the history of it and its origins, which is this unlikely collaboration between an ex—public schoolboy from london and a group of computer programmers from dundee. this is it. and it's been described as britain's greatest coding success since bletchley park. high praise indeed. it's an interesting debate, isn't it? alan turing, i wonder what he think about it? well, it's a very good question, actually. i often wonder the same. we take listeners from those very humble beginnings you were talking about a game being developed by a very small team in dundee, and this is right at the infancy

of video gaming as well. let's not forget that they were desperately trying to keep the whole thing on track. they were called dma design then, and to this kind of genius like figure in gaming terms, a guy from london called sam hauser, he would take it to another level. he would change the name of the game that they were creating to grand theft auto. and he would form this company called rockstar games. they would have an office in new york. they've still got a big presence in edinburgh as well and it would be this company. and they are hugely successful and really nobody outside the gaming world has ever heard of them. i mean, you know, which is incredible, really. did you try to get an interview with them? of course. and they don't do interviews, right? that's why we've never heard of them. famously elusive and too busy being rockstars. hardly. well, that's part of it, but hardly ever give interviews. you know, we went to rock star and said, look, this is what we are doing. these are our aims. we will touch on these themes. here's an opportunity. come and speak to us at the bbc. they didn't, we weren't expecting them to. but i think the point is they don't need to do these things.

katie, you know, a more elusive strategy has worked just fine for them up to now. i'm going to have to say that's the end. i'm afraid that's all we've got time for. but thank you so much to everybody, particularly you just now, chris warburton. we will be back on the media show next week. but for now, thanks for listening. goodbye. hello there. we had a lot of cloud streaming our way for the first half of the weekend on that easterly breeze. that breeze probably is going to be stronger on sunday, and it may well feel a bit colder as well. we'll continue to find some more showers heading our way. we had some rain earlier in the north—west of scotland. that is getting pushed away, that easterly breeze setting up, and although we've got more breeze at the moment and, on the whole, a lot of cloud, temperatures are going to be close to freezing because it is still cold air, so we may well find the risk of a touch of frost, maybe one or two icy patches as well. and it is going to be a colder start to the day on sunday for western scotland, but this could be the place to be.

with more shelter, it should be dry with some sunshine. eastern scotland, the breeze off the north sea means more cloud and showers, and the wind off the irish sea will bring in cloud and showers to eastern parts of northern ireland. more showers for england and wales, mainly for northern england and north wales. further south, the showers will be fewer but there will be a lot of cloud. we've all got that brisker easterly wind and temperatures may be a bit lower on sunday, typically five or six celsius. factor in that wind and it will feel a bit colder than that if you are going to be out and about. heading into monday, for most places, temperatures should be above freezing first thing in the morning. we are likely to have clearer skies across mainland scotland. that will lead to an early frost and maybe some sunshine on monday. for many places, though, still cloudy skies and some more showers as well, although not as many showers on monday, and the wind probably isn't going to be quite as strong, either. temperatures may actually be a shade higher on monday, peaking at around nine celsius in the south east of england. after that, though, it does get colder — much colder. we are going to change the wind

direction from that easterly to a strengthening northerly wind that will push down across the whole of the country on tuesday onwards, and that will bring some widespread frost as well. and you can see how temperatures are going to be dropping through the week ahead. for many inland areas, it may well be dry in that northerly wind with some sunshine around. showers will be running on to exposed coasts, exposed to that northerly wind, and we will see most of the showers coming into some northern parts of scotland. and there is an early warning from the met office — a yellow warning at this stage — for northern areas of scotland on wednesday — a couple of centimetres of snow to lower levels and over the higher ground we could see as much as ten centimetres, the first significant snow of the season.

good morning. welcome to breakfast with rogerjohnson and nina warhurst. 0ur headlines today: england prepare to face senegal tonight in the knockout stage of the world cup. manager gareth southgate says they're ready for extra time and penalties if needed. if we need to go 120 minutes, if we need to go beyond that, then we've got to be ready for that mentally and physically and i believe we are. yes, a very good morning from zohar where england fans will be gathering later in the hope that there side can continue their world cup journey

—— doha. winter in ukraine as russian attacks leave some families in makeshift