Rescue efforts after Tibet floods reach ‘critical phase'

**Uncle Desai** (0:00)
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hi, I'm Uncle Desai, and at 14 Hours GMT on Friday the 28th of August, these are our main stories. The Chinese President Xi Jinping has chaired an emergency meeting to coordinate rescue efforts following the deadly floods in Nepal and Tibet. Norway mourns as King Harald the Fifth dies at the age of 89 And we analyze the situation in the Middle East. Six months since the start of the conflict between Iran and the United States.
Also in this podcast, a new study reveals that our brains apply a special tag to events as they happen to help us prioritize our memories.

**Dan Dennis** (0:43)
Every day our senses are sort of bombarded by so much information that our brain needs a way to figure out what is actually important that we're seeing and we're hearing that needs to be committed into a long term memory.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:55)
And we are both male British voices for sure. However, I am not David Attenborough for anyone out there who might be confused.

**Uncle Desai** (1:06)
More than 80 actors are calling on the British government to give every person a legal right to own their voice because of famous voices cloned by AI.
We start with the devastating landslides and floods in Nepal and Tibet. Two days after the initial disaster, we've been hearing about a lake which was threatening to burst its banks, risking further devastation. Well, according to officials on the ground, that has now happened. But while Nepali officials say water levels are rising as a result, the fear deluge has not as yet occurred. Nearly 500 people are now known to have died in the disaster. Hundreds are still missing and relief agencies are struggling to help survivors.
Dr. Nithi Shrestha is an anesthetist who has traveled to the district hospital in Rasua to treat the injured.

**Nithi Shrestha** (2:00)
Many people have lost their loved ones, people they were trying to rescue but had to leave behind. People have run away from their homes just to save themselves without even their phones, with no slippers. Most of them are covered in mud because it was like a mudslide.
People have told me that they had to leave their relatives behind because they couldn't carry them or maybe they couldn't walk like elderly people.

**Uncle Desai** (2:26)
Well, relief operations on the Tibetan side had been suspended over the threat of renewed flooding, but have now resumed. Our China correspondent, Stephen MacDonald, told me more.

**Stephen MacDonald** (2:37)
Yeah, on the Tibetan side of the border, the situation has stabilized somewhat. The rescue and recovery effort has started again, that's because fears of this second round of flash flooding have subsided somewhat. People are not so concerned, and I'll tell you why. It's because there was this artificial lake, if I could describe it as that, created when mud and debris, rocks, et cetera, poured into a mountain valley, and this then filled up with water, a huge volume of water, creating what they call a barrier lake. And the concern was that this would burst, leading to another huge, gushing amount of water pouring down that valley.
But government officials are saying that the water level has subsided quite a bit in that lake, and because they've dropped, they've decided to resume the very difficult effort to try to find people who might still be alive, trapped underneath, I don't know, remains of buildings or something like that, after that huge wall of water and mud came crashing down a couple of days ago.

**Uncle Desai** (3:50)
Stephen, Chinese president has made an offer of help to Nepal. Is there much cross border cooperation on this one?

**Stephen MacDonald** (3:56)
Yeah, he said that Chinese teams can be available. I mean, a lot of other countries have also offered to help Nepal, but at the moment, the Nepalese government seems to be saying they don't need any help in terms of the immediate rescue. They've got their own military doing this.
What the government in Nepal has said is they might need help with is the recovery later on. So some sort of financial support to assist those areas that have been devastated by this terrible incident. And maybe China will be there to help with that, but China does have a lot of resources, especially when you compare the country to Nepal. However, at the moment, at least, we haven't seen any Chinese teams operating on the other side of the border.

**Uncle Desai** (4:40)
And Stephen, what do we make of the coverage of this story so far, based on what the Chinese state media is saying, and then what a lot of people in China are seeing on social media?