north africa this week. anger grows among survivors in libya's flood—ravaged city of derna as authorities in the east of the country blame nature for the disaster. the united nations says the number of people known to have died has reached around 11,300. the antarctic sea—ice has declined to its lowest winter level on record, according to satellite data. now on bbc news, the briefing.

when the storm came, fractured libya was ill—prepared. half a year's rainfall fell in 2a hours. in daylight, as much as a quarter of the port city of derna was revealed to be gone. engulfed by flood water after two mountain dams failed. families were washed out to sea as they slept. the grim work to retrieve the lost is underway. with terrible force, the floods swept through this city. destroying homes, cars, bridges. there was no warning, no evacuation order. gently, the body of a child is recovered from the rubble. few here are being found alive. derna and libya are overwhelmed.

it's too much for those left grieving. entire families were swallowed by the deluge. translation: i already lost six people. - we managed to take out three and we did not find the other three people. we are searching for the bodies here. we could not find them. translation: this is| god's will and destiny. i lost my sister and her daughters. may god have mercy on the dead and bring back the lost. derna has long been marginalised. it was once a base for the islamic state group. years of neglect and conflict and two rival governments have seen libya fall apart. translation: it has been - an enormous shock and i don't want to point the blame at anyone or create controversy. even if all measures had been taken, there would have been losses. massive losses. but more could have been done.

translation: we had warned - the authorities since last week, no, for years, that the dam had cracks and needs to be maintained. we said it and nobody listened to us and now the whole of derna is flooded. what remains here already barely functions. this hospital in al bayda is struggling, deep in water and flooded with casualties. international help is on the way. these planes are from jordan, but with many of the roads in eastern libya washed away, aid will struggle to get through. this is libya's third day of national mourning and still the corpses keep coming. after a decade of chaos, this fresh tragedy is one the country can't bear alone.

vladimir putin and kimjong un. is this now a fine romance? at the very least, both leaders believe they'd benefit from a closer relationship. their day began with a tour of a russian space centre — launch pads and rocket systems. north korea's reclusive leader was all ears. no surprise there, he wants help to develop his space and missile programmes. later president putin said their talks would be on the economy and humanitarian issues. but was there a hidden agenda? in its war in ukraine, russia has been burning through ammunition. us officials believe that the kremlin has been trying to do an arms deal with north korea for munitions. if it has been, this former russian foreign minister is unimpressed.

it's very humiliating that a russian ally is now north korea again. a great power would not go to north korea for an alliance of military supplies. but the kremlin seems to believe that a great power is one that stands up to america. so was there an arms deal or wasn't there? we simply don't know. but what is clear, i think, is that the kremlin is using closer ties with north korea to send a message to washington that russia may be under pressure, under sanctions, but it still has the capacity to cause problems, big problems, for the west. in other words, is moscow using north korea to scare russia's opponents? that is what we are going to show you, that you disregard us, but we still have this incredible leverage around the world

and we haven't even scratched the surface of how much we can do damage, potential damage, or at least freak you out. if that happens, that is vladimir putin's greater weapon than actual physical weapons. kim and putin, it's a marriage made, not in heaven, but in a geopolitical maelstrom. having a shared enemy, the west, has brought them together. the grief was unbearable. and found in every corner of this tiny community. their spirit crushed a little more

every time news arrived of another body recovered. the bricks and stones of their traditional houses no match for the size of this quake. this village was levelled in seconds. abdul rahman was being comforted by everyone who saw him. he tells us he has lost his wife and his three boys. he wants to take us to where his family lived so happily until friday night. a walk through the rubble of this remote atlas mountain wilderness. "our house was up there", abu rahman tells us, "you can see the white blankets and the furniture too. "everything else has gone". he ran home after the earthquake and said he started screaming out for his kids, but there was nothing. "we buried them yesterday" he says.

"i felt so sorry for them. "when we found them, they were all huddled together, "the three boys asleep. "they all went down with the earthquake". we've been told that about 200 people used to live here in this village. of those, 90 are already confirmed to have died and many more are missing somewhere here beneath the rubble. others are in hospital. when you look at this and try to take it all in, you realise people simply didn't stand a chance and this scene of devastation is replicated right across this vast mountainous region. sitting amongst the only possessions she now has left, we meet one woman mourning her son—in—law. translation: we pray for god to help us, - and the government too and the king.

the first professional emergency teams to arrive here are spanish firefighters. it's not a search for signs of life, but for the dead. there are no miracle rescues here, this epicentre of pain and suffering. suwayda in southern syria. this is a city under the control of basher al—assad. for the fourth week, protesters are out on the street in defiance of the authority and regime.

what makes these protests so striking is that they are the largest to take place in areas under assad's control since the government violently crushed the uprising against him. a brutal civil war that has levelled cities and displaced 14 million syrians from their homes.

yesterday, as protesters entered the local branch of assad's political party, shots were fired. but, so far, there has been no major response by the regime. how long this might last, no one is sure.

suwayda is a home to mostly druze people, a minority religion in the middle east, their rainbow flag widely carried by demonstrators. president assad has attempted to present himself as a protector of minority groups, a claim rejected by these protesters who say that they believe in unity with their fellow syrians, but with assad out of the picture. in the protesters' eyes, the entire apparatus of the syrian state has been captured by powers that do not have their interests at heart.

after using chemical weapons on his own people in the civil war, assad is now being reintroduced to the international community. returned to the arab league, he'll also attend cop this year. defiant. fearless.

the citizens of suwayda have been witnesses to a terrible civil war and yet have made the decision to stand up and be counted. now a bloody regime trying to present a new face to the world holds theirfate in its hands. it's amazing what you can pick up at ikea these days. for art detective arthur brand, it's a big moment. bundled up in the famous blue and yellow bag, a pillow case and a bit of bubble wrap is the stolen treasure he's been hunting for for more than three and a half years. "hopefully, this is it", he says. and it is.

vincent van gogh's1881i masterpiece parsonage garden at nuenen in spring. "he's back", he says. "what a day". the work was stolen in 2020 during covid lockdown, when a thief used a sledgehammer to smash into the singer laren museum near amsterdam, making off with the painting under his arm. he was arrested a year later and eventuallyjailed, but the painting was never recovered, until now. arthur brand says the piece was perhaps too well known to be of any value to criminals wanting to try and sell it on, and after 3.5 years of trying to track it down, he was contacted by a man who wanted to give it back. it took 1,300 days, but here it is and i will hand it over in a few moments to the museum director

and i think he will be happy. i'm sure he will. the painting, thought to be worth up to £5 million, is expected to be back on display next year. under 18s are the biggest audience on youtube. my favourite youtuber is a gamer called dantdm. i like, like, animalvideos. mrbeast. and parents and schools now rely on it as a tool to access great science content. but there's a new type of content creator using artificial intelligence to create videos full of false information. voiceover on youtube video: . , this never happened to him, this woman doesn't exist, these conversations

didn't happen. our research shows that these creators take advantage of kids' clicks to cash in, while spreading misinformation to classrooms around the world. and the kids seem to be buying it. i find it really interesting that pyramids can make electricity. bad science videos are flooding youtube, optimised for the algorithm with catchy titles and controversial topics. voiceover on video: imagine being told that the world - you live in is not real? full of pseudoscience and false information. unpredictable patterns of highs and lows that might not be directly correlated with the effects of human activities and greenhouse gas emissions. creators are tagging these videos as educational content. and they're often beating legitimate science videos in the race to be recommended. these videos do well because they are potentially in some way maybe conspiratorial. you know, we're all fascinated by things that run counter to what we're officially

told, and children obviously may be more susceptible to this perhaps than adults. we wanted to see if these videos were reaching children so we created an experiment. we set up four children's accounts on youtube. each account watched 50 sides videos from legitimate creators. after only four days one of the bad science channels cropped up in the recommended videos. once we clicked these videos they flooded our recommended feed — and it's in every corner of the globe, with channels translating the videos into more than 20 languages. but would kids in the real world believe what they were seeing? we showed two examples of bad science videos to two groups of children. one in the uk and one in thailand. voiceover on video: no-one knows when they were built, i how they were built, who built them, and most importantly, why were they built. with the right amount of pressure, the great pyramid could generate a tremendous amount of electricity.

i find it really interesting that pyramids can make electricity. voiceover on video: pyramid power plants were and are possible. i was quite surprised to find out thatjust a pile of rocks can form electricity. video voiceover in thai. i thought it was really cool because i, like, i love aliens - and stuff like that. voiceover on video: the only thing missing for the great pyramid of giza to function as a power plant was a source of energy. i didn't know that people so long ago would be able to make electricity and use modern technology. voiceover on video: di? to the recent surge in sighting reports from all around the world, the ufo community entered a period of extreme heat. the objects are said to have

been of exotic origin or nonhuman intelligence. whether alien or ancient in origin. the person who was talking sounded very professional and knew what he was talking about. we found more than 50 channels creating these bad science videos and they are getting hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of views. but how are they multiplying so fast? we found out that these channels are being created using artificial intelligence. a video needs a script and with al it can be generated in seconds. then it needs a voice. ai generated voice: it no longer needs to be human. j it's not quite there yet but eventually we won't be able to tell the difference. then ai can find footage from across the internet, taking from different sources and piece together the finalfilm. some footage and graphics has been stolen from legitimate educational creators and repurposed into false information. kyle hill, a science communication specialist, educator and youtuber began to notice these videos cropping

up in his feed a couple of months ago. so being a youtube creator, i always try to have my ear to the ground for what other science and to related channels are doing. but it wasn't until one of my viewers actually pointed out that it looked like a lot of the channels they were getting recommended after watching my videos started looking very the same. and these videos all do look really similar. the logos look alike, the same subjects and near identical thumbnails. and they're full of false information like this. voiceover on video: weather patterns have seen some - remarkable changes in the past decades — something which many might attribute to climate change but these changes might not be caused by climate change at all. once the footage is taken, the ai channels change or even ignore the original meaning. here, they took old footage from a nasa expert's video. they took out his voice and replaced it with al narration, saying climate

change isn't caused by humans, which isn't in the original. here, they've taken a james webb telescope animation from a legitimate sides creator. the ai video used it to say scientists are covering up that the telescope disproved the big bang theory, which it never did. these channels seem to have identified the exact right thing and how to do that thing to maximise views with the least amount of actual effort. and more views equals more money through advertising revenue, with channels often getting thousands of pounds per video. with new ai tools, anyone can create channels in a matter of hours and there's hundreds of tutorials on new tubes. voiceover on video: em, you want to make money with al and youtube? i created this faceless youtube channel using only ai... another voiceover: . .t0 script, edit and create a faceless - youtube channel. with each video getting tens of thousands of views, these channels can mean massive

pay—outs for creators. and creators aren't the only ones profiting. youtube takes nearly half of advertising revenue from every video. i think the idea that youtube and google making money off the back of adverts being served against pseudoscience, ai generated news, that's really — that seems really unethical to me. that video was actually all fake. i'm actually... ..really confused. i thought that was 100% real. i would have probably believed it if you hadn't have told us it was fake. i think i did believe it. until a few minutes ago. i'm just shocked. i think children will often take what they've seen as fact first and foremostly, and then maybe when they're a little older start to question it but it's not your starting point. if you're watching something educational, you're watching it so that you learn, and we don't question, do we? it's just not in our wiring to do that. so that's why it's such a concern.

youtube told us that they recommend youtube kids for under 13s which has a higher bar for videos shown. they said they're committed to removing misinformation from their platforms. they also directed us to information panels that show additional context on conspiracy—related content. we found this was only present for a few of the videos across the 50 channels. they didn't comment on advertising revenue they may receive from these videos. we reached out to some of the channels for comment. one responded saying their videos were intended for entertainment purposes and that they didn't

target children. they also said the majority of their scripts were not written using ai. good information is probably going to be pushed out. we will have so much ai generated content that you will not want to spend the time or the effort ever sifting through it. i think this is an emerging threat. i think that we don't have a really clear understanding yet of how ai and ai—generated content is really impacting children's understanding. but some of the kids were able to spot that there was something not quite right about the videos. maybe because of the.. like, voice, like, the choice of voice they had. yeah. they used like an ai voice. i thought it was fake because, like, you could tell, like, that it was not edited properly. as teachers we need to have conversations with our children about what they're watching and the media that they're absorbing, so that we understand that.

ai is evolving fast. as these videos continue to multiply, bad science could drown out good content. hello. it's still quite warm and humid, particularly across the south of the uk. we've scattered showers and thunderstorms and we will see two rounds of storms through the course of today. we've already had the downpours in the south—west of the country. they are moving through parts of wales and into the midlands and you can see on the satellite picture these clumps of cloud here, these storm clouds, drifting in from the warm south. later on today we'll see another round of storms possibly reaching south—eastern areas.

but this is what it looks like around the middle of the afternoon, that thundery rain moving northwards through wales into the midlands and into east anglia. the south may actually have some sunshine, but the risk of thunder and lightning continues through this evening and overnight. in fact, you can see this next area of storminess affecting the south—east. actually, there will be plenty of cloud and outbreaks of rain in other parts of the country as well. in the north—west, outbreaks of rain, western parts of scotland too. with the air coming in from the south, it's a mild night — ii in stornoway, 16 degrees celsius in the south. monday is that transition day. cold fronts, a couple of them, crossing the country. by definition the air, at least relatively speaking, is colder behind the weather front. it's this westerly push of atlantic air. behind it sunshine and showers for many western areas of the uk as this cold front sweeps across the country. it's not particularly cold air because, look at that, temperatures are still around 17 to 20 degrees across

england and wales. in northern ireland and scotland, closer to 15. midweek, tuesday into wednesday, quite a strong jet stream is going to push an ex—tropical cyclone, or ex—tropical storm hurricane, our way. some strong winds in association with this area of low pressure. gale force winds around some coasts, really blustery inland, but because this is an ex—tropical system there's a lot of warm and humid air mixed in it. that's why, despite the wind and the rain, temperatures in some spots could still nudge up to around 18 or 20 degrees celsius. it's a broad area of low pressure, meaning that it will take time for it to sweep across the country, so i think on wednesday, once again, another blustery day with a spell of heavy rain as this cold front moves across the country. again, look at that, 22 in norwich, around about 16 expected in belfast. a turbulent week on the way.

live from london. this is bbc news. the bbc and banijay, the company who employed russell brand while he was presenting big brother spin off shows for channel 4, are both investigating his behaviour after allegations of rape and sexual assault are made against him — he denies the claims. the president of the european commission visits the italian island of lampedusa, amid a huge surge in migrant arrivals.

these are live pictures from derna, where officials in libya say the number of people killed in last week's floods has reached more than 11,000 with around a quarter of the buildings there destroyed or damaged. the antarctic sea—ice has declined to its lowest winter level on record, according to satellite data. hello, i'm gareth barlow. the bbc and an independent producution company who made programmes for channel 4 are both investigating allegations of serious misconduct against the comedian russell brand whilst he was presenting radio and television shows in the uk in the mid—2000s. it follows allegations of rape and sexual assault in a joint investigation by the sunday times, the times and channel 4 dispatches. the report claimed concerns about brand's behaviour whilst

working on spin off shows from hit series big brother were reported