Jonathan Van Ness is a podcaster, a hairdresser, and host of the Game of Thrones webseries Gay of Thrones. But he’s best known as one of the “Fab Five” on Queer Eye, the incredibly popular Netflix makeover show. He came into talk to us because he’s just written a book. It’s called Over the Top and as well as the fun and bubbly “JVN” that people have come to love, it addresses some very serious, very difficult issues: abuse, addiction and the impact of HIV. In today’s episode we hear about both s...
Oct 29, 2019•25 min
Donald Trump announced over the weekend that the fugitive leader of the so-called Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been killed in a raid in Syria. During the press conference he described the ISIS leader “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way” to the back of a tunnel in his compound, where he detonated a suicide vest as he was surrounded by three of his children. The president also went on to say that “it was just like a movie”, and that this moment is bigger than the death of ...
Oct 28, 2019•20 min
“Love is not a permanent state of enthusiasm.” These are the words of one of the most famous therapists in the world: Esther Perel. She is internationally renowned for creating and presenting ‘Where Should We Begin’, the ground-breaking podcast about love, sex, intimacy and infidelity. She also has two best-selling books and videos of her TED talks have been viewed tens of millions of times online. This month she launched the third season of her podcast, which focuses on marriage by telling the ...
Oct 25, 2019•23 min
Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK and Scotland has the highest suicide rate in Britain. Chris Clements and Calum Mckay have looked into the figures for BBC Scotland's Disclosure programme. They travelled to Lanarkshire, in south-central Scotland, where they both grew up and discovered Motherwell Thistle, an amateur football club scarred by suicide. Since 2017 four people connected to the club have killed themselves. Through the pain of their loss, the club has found a way t...
Oct 24, 2019•21 min
Facebook helps connect people, but now it’s on a new mission to get people to fall in love. Facebook users in the US — it will be available in Europe next year — can create a dating profile and curate a list of secret crushes from among your friends. The dating industry is massive — estimates say that it will be worth $12 billion a year by 2020 — but Facebook has said its feature will be free. So, why is the social network getting into the business of love? Could it be after even more data about...
Oct 23, 2019•21 min
In a court case that is gripping Asia, a Malaysian wealth fund is accused of robbing the country of $3.5 billion US dollars. It is the world’s biggest white-collar heist involving government corruption at the highest level, an abuse of power and international money laundering. It's also a case that drags in one of the most successful Hollywood movies of all time: The Wolf of Wall Street, a Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio film about corruption and multimillion-dollar theft. Investigators in...
Oct 22, 2019•20 min
Was this the worst Monday morning ever for MPs? They were forced into work over the weekend to vote on the Brexit deal, and they couldn’t even do that properly. Now they’re back trying to hammer it out again. They’ve been doing this for months, stuck because there’s no majority for any agreement on Brexit. That might now be changing, there might now actually be enough MPs who will vote for the deal Boris Johnson agreed with Brussels. Passing a deal to leave, however, is just the first phase of a...
Oct 21, 2019•19 min
Christopher Wylie is a 30-year-old Canadian data specialist who moved to London a few years back, started working in political campaigns, and then became deeply involved in two of the biggest political events of his lifetime: the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. He worked for Cambridge Analytica, the company that was caught harvesting data from millions of Facebook accounts and using it for political advertising purposes. We’d been warned for years it could happen, and it was ...
Oct 18, 2019•21 min
Nike spends a lot of money sponsoring and marketing some of the best athletes in the world. It doesn’t just back global superstars like Serena Williams and Cristiano Ronaldo on the field, but off them too. It made the American football player Colin Kaepernick as the face of an advertising campaign after he protested against racial injustice by kneeling during the US national anthem. The events of the last few days don’t fit Nike’s preferred narrative. The firm has shut down the Oregon Project, i...
Oct 17, 2019•23 min
A British woman is on trial in Cyprus, where she is accused of causing public mischief by allegedly falsely claiming to have been sexually assaulted at an Ayia Napa hotel in July. The woman has told the court she was raped, but then "forced" to retract her statement by the Cypriot police 10 days later. 12 young Israelis were arrested in connection with the allegations but were later released and returned home, where some of them celebrated with champagne at the airport. Tom Bateman and Anna Holl...
Oct 16, 2019•19 min
President Trump’s order to pull US troops out of northern Syria last week was a little like pushing over a domino: it meant that Turkey could start an offensive against the Syrian Kurds who live in that region and who they see as a terrorist threat; it meant that the Kurds, who have been a crucial ally of the West in the fight against the Islamic State terror group, had to refocus on defending their own people against the Turkish onslaught, and it has plunged an already volatile part of the worl...
Oct 15, 2019•23 min
The Queen opened parliament today and set out the government’s main priority: to leave the EU by October 31st. Boris Johnson has set up his whole premiership on this very message, and one reason why is Nigel Farage. Now leader of the Brexit Party, Farage has always campaigned to get us out of the EU. Boris Johnson and the Conservative party are worried that if they can’t do this by the end of October they will lose votes to Farage in an election. To understand his enduring appeal we went to a Br...
Oct 14, 2019•19 min
Tech and the way it is shaping our future is a theme we cover a lot on Beyond Today. We’ve looked at facial recognition, sex bots, and the new tech cold war. Underpinning all these are rapid advances in artificial intelligence which are changing the power dynamics between states and citizens, companies and consumers. In this special live episode recorded at the BBC Media Tech and Society conference, Tina Daheley discusses the future of AI with Stephanie Hare, an independent researcher and histor...
Oct 11, 2019•21 min
We have never lived in a more closely monitored world. Facial recognition technology is being rolled globally, including across the UK. Data can be acquired without a person’s knowledge, let alone their consent. There is a creeping paranoia and concern among human rights experts that advanced surveillance technology could fall into the wrong hands. We speak to Lokman Tsui, a tech expert and university lecturer in Hong Kong, who is living the midst of an increasingly violent protest movement para...
Oct 10, 2019•18 min
*** Update: Adnan Ahmed's conviction was quashed on appeal after three judges ruled the verdict was a miscarriage of justice *** BBC reporter Myles Bonnar spent two days on the streets of London with "pick-up" coaches, being “trained” in how to chat up women and get them into bed. “Pick-up” culture goes at least as far back as 2005 when American author and journalist Neil Strauss released a book called The Game. Myles, who made a film for the BBC’s Panorama programme, tells us what he learnt on ...
Oct 09, 2019•22 min
In August a young man called Harry Dunn died when a car driving on the wrong side of the road crashed into his motorbike. The only suspect has left the country, and there’s nothing the police can do to get her to come back. Anne Sacoolas' husband works for the US government at RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire, and because of diplomatic immunity she currently cannot be prosecuted. The BBC’s Duncan Kennedy has interviewed Harry’s parents. And BBC diplomatic correspondent James Landale explains wh...
Oct 08, 2019•23 min
In April 2018 the Home Secretary Amber Rudd resigned and delivered an unprecedented apology for the “appalling” actions of her own department towards Windrush-era citizens. It came 5 months after an investigation by a Guardian journalist into what has become known as the Windrush scandal. The scandal affected an unknown number of people who arrived in the UK as children from the Caribbean but were never formally naturalised or hadn’t applied for a British passport. We speak to Amelia Gentleman, ...
Oct 07, 2019•20 min
“I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces”. This week Prince Harry released a strongly-worded statement attacking the way the press treats his wife Meghan. At the same time the couple announced they were taking legal action against the Mail on Sunday for publishing a private letter Meghan sent her father. And today we found out Harry is also suing the Sun and Mirror over alleged phone-hacking. Harry’s distrust of the press runs deep: as a child he witne...
Oct 04, 2019•20 min
With four weeks to go before the government’s deadline for leaving the EU, parliament is still discussing the best way forward. Was this crisis inevitable? One of the go-to places to decode all this has been the Talking Politics podcast. Helen Thompson is one of the hosts. She is also professor of political economics at the University of Cambridge and she came to the Beyond Today studio to untangle our uneasy and complicated relationship with Europe. She tells us about the key moments in our rec...
Oct 03, 2019•18 min
Saudi Arabia’s 33 year-old Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has been described as a reformer. What he is selling to the outside world is a modern, forward thinking country that’s no longer dependent on oil. But one year ago today, the Saudi journalist and human rights campaigner, Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in Istanbul. Now we’ve got the details of exactly how it happened. Jane Corbin who has spoken to some of the very few people who know about the hit squad who killed him and the cover up that...
Oct 02, 2019•22 min
Impeachment proceedings have been launched against Donald Trump after a whistleblower said the US president pressured the leader of Ukraine into investigating one of his main Democratic challengers. In a telephone conversation Trump asked President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into Joe Biden, the man Trump may well face in the 2020 presidential election, and connections Biden’s son had in Ukraine. The whistleblower’s allegations mention Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani as the person who was e...
Oct 01, 2019•19 min
Parents Jake and Hobbit have taken the unusual decision to keep the sex of their baby secret. They say "gender bias is unconscious" and that this is the only way to mitigate against it, not even telling the child’s grandmother their sex until they were 11 months old. When Beth Mcleod covered their story for the BBC’s Inside Out West programme the couple received a huge backlash. We look into why they decided to go public, and what it is about both gender and parenting that provokes such a strong...
Sep 30, 2019•20 min
At the end of another overwhelming week of news, it’s time for bit of perspective. Ten years ago philosopher Alain de Botton founded The School of Life, a collective of psychologists, writers and philosophers mulling over life’s big questions to its 5 million YouTube subscribers. Alain argues that the news doesn’t give us the information we need to live happy lives and explores why we feel lonely and why our relationships fail. He argues that secular societies have discarded the useful bits of r...
Sep 27, 2019•26 min
There were more than 700 allegations of sexual misconduct at British universities over the last academic year, according to an investigation by the BBC’s File on 4 programme. Since that documentary aired last week, the team has received a moving response from student survivors of sexual assault who came forward to speak about their experiences. The University of Leicester is one of the academic institutions which is trying to tackle the problem of sexual misconduct on campus. Despite investing m...
Sep 26, 2019•19 min
On January 17 2015 at California’s Stanford University a young woman went to a party. A few hours later, she was found unconscious beside a bin. She had been sexually assaulted. To protect her identity in court, the victim was known as Emily Doe. We knew little else about her. We knew a lot about her attacker: he was Brock Turner, a student and swimmer, and his sporting prowess became part of his defence. The case caught global attention when BuzzFeed published Emily Doe’s 7,000-word victim stat...
Sep 25, 2019•19 min
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg made a passionate speech at the UN this week, accusing world leaders of failing to act on climate change. She told them: "You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you." It’s hard to remember that a year ago we had not heard the name Greta Thunberg, that she was just a lone teenager staging her solo climate strike outside the Swedish parliament on Fridays. Now she’s having the c...
Sep 24, 2019•22 min
On Tuesday we’re expecting that the judges of the highest court in the land will rule on whether Boris Johnson’s decision to shut down parliament ahead of next month’s Brexit deadline was legal or not. Scottish judges have already declared it unlawful Just a few weeks ago very few of us could name the most recent Supreme Court case, but it’s suddenly the centre of attention. The live-stream of the first day of the hearing there last week was watched by more than 4 million viewers making this arg...
Sep 23, 2019•23 min
Emma Barnett’s becoming one of the most respected broadcasters in the country. She presents for 5 Live and Newsnight, and can make her interviewees - often politicians - feel very awkward just by asking them simple questions they stumble around trying to answer. Emma got in touch to ask us if we wanted to talk to her about periods, because she’s just written a book about them. And we said “yes please”. Presenter: Matthew Price Producers: Philly Beaumont and Jessica Beck Mixed by Nicolas Raufast ...
Sep 20, 2019•23 min
Dr Ruja Ignatova is the founder of the cryptocurrency One Coin that promised to change money forever. Within two years of launching the company she claimed to have 3.5 million members and hundreds of thousands of investors, with offices all round the world holding events and seminars in major cities. She even packed out Wembley Arena. But in 2017 Dr Ruja got a plane to Athens and hasn't been seen since. Georgia Catt, a BBC producer, and technology writer Jamie Bartlett have been on the search fo...
Sep 19, 2019•22 min
Purdue Pharma is the company that has become synonymous with the opioid epidemic in the United States. The firm, which is owned by the wealthy Sackler family, produces the highly addictive and highly profitable drug OxyContin. This week the company filed for bankruptcy. We trace the rise and fall of the dynasty from New York to Kentucky via Glasgow with Chris McGreal, author of “American Overdose: a Tragedy in Three Acts”. Presented by Matthew Price Producers: Jessica Beck and Harriet Noble Mixe...
Sep 18, 2019•22 min
