 It's been over 11 months since the beginning of the civil war in Sudan and the humanitarian situation has drastically deteriorated. UN officials say that 222,000 children could die of malnutrition in the coming months. The civil war between powerful and brutal generals has already created the world's largest displacement crisis. Around 8 million people are either internally displaced or have been forced to leave the country. To remind our viewers, this war began due to the rivalry between the Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary rapid support forces. These two forces had earlier been in cahoots and had staged a coup against a civilian-led government in 2021. We go to Abdul to find out what has been happening in Sudan. Abdul, thank you so much for joining us. A very disturbing situation in Sudan has become one of the biggest humanitarian crises in the world right now and that's saying a lot considering the number of conflicts taking place. But first of all, could you tell us a bit about what is the latest information on this situation? We've had a couple of reports coming from the UN now. Well Prashant, if you see the numbers which are coming from the UN and from other agencies, it is quite, you can say stark. In the same, we can see similar situation as we saw a few years back in Yemen and in other parts of the world. UN is claiming that if the situation is not curved right now, Sudan will soon become the world's greatest humanitarian tragedy given the fact that almost half of the population around 25 million are basically on the level of starvation facing phase four of what we call the level of basically lack of food or famine there in that country. And there are also reports coming that around 18 million people, which is around 40% of the entire population, which is already acutely food insecure, which would mean phase five of the IPC. We have discussed that. So, and it also includes a large number of children around 4 million children, around 3.9 4 million children, which are basically starved. And that would mean that future generations of Sudan would be will have a stunted growth. And that will lead to a kind of a generation which will not be able to in any way much productive and much. So that is the condition overall. There are also reports coming that as per the UN claim in the Security Council, there was a presentation which claimed that around 200,000 plus children will die sooner if a soon in Sudan if the situation continues. And it also says that almost 90% of the population will fall into the phase five of the IPC. So if you see the numbers, all of these numbers together, it is clearly saying that the overall humanitarian situation in Sudan is becoming bad every day. And this war, which is basically reaching one year anniversary, which basically lead to further complications primarily because now there are reports coming that the areas which were considered to be the food basket of Sudan, Al Jazeera or Jazeera region, which used to produce most of the food grain for the country is basically under war. And a large number of farmers have been either killed or displaced because the war is right now going on there. And since this is summer is coming, and if this situation continues, of course, there is no grain production in Sudan. And of course, there is no much import coming out from outside. So that you can imagine that how the situation is going to unfold in the coming days. Right, Abdul, now to come to the fighting, could you maybe take us through what has been, what is the kind of fighting that is taking place in the region as a whole? We know that fighting began between the Sudanese armed forces and the rapid support forces. A lot of changes have taken place since the last year. But where is, what is the situation on the ground now? Well, Prashant, the situation on the ground is quite stark on that front as well. Initially, when the RSF and the Sudanese armed forces started fighting, this was a fight between the two Earthwide Alliance partners. But gradually, there are also reports coming that the resistance committees, which are the People's Committee who have been involved in a kind of rescue and relief operation for the people, they are also been targeted increasingly by both these parties. Because they think that the People's Committees or the Resistance Committees may create some kind of threat to their claims over power. So it is, you can say, it is a kind of three-pronged fight which is happening. And there is a claim made by the Sudanese army that the RSF is basically getting a huge external support from countries such as UAE. And because of that support, RSF has been able to get hold of control of not only a large part of capital Khartoum, but also, of course, Darfur was there a stronghold. But there are also fights happening in December. They got control over most part of Al-Jazeera or Jazeera, as I said before, the main food producing region. So most of the Sudan is now under war. And it seems that RSF is still quite strong and in fact, gaining ground and different parts of the country. That would mean that the Sudanese army is in no position to kind of, at this moment, at least to basically counter and kind of claim any kind of consolidation of territories under it. And that would mean that the war will prolong further because RSF, when it is in advantageous position, it seems that it is not in mood to kind of have any kind of political solution to the problems. And that would mean that more and more Sudanese will continue to suffer if this continues. Right. Thank you, Abdul Farah, for that update, a very disturbing situation. France is fined Google 250 million euros in a case related to paying companies for reproducing their content online. Now, the ever-present question of AI has also come up in this case too, as Google is accused of training its product, Gemini, on content published by news organizations without informing them. This is the latest instance of a long battle between news organizations and publishers and digital giants like Google over the rights and profits to content. And it is an issue that will escalate in the future as AI's role in our lives increases. We go to Bapa for details. Bapa, thank you so much for joining us. Could you maybe first take us through what this verdict is? We have seen a lot of discussion on the question of who owns this content or how much do digital companies have to pay, for instance. So, what are the reasons for this 250 million euro fine? Right. So, this is a long-standing battle between really Google and various authorities in the EU. This particular one is with France's competition authority. And there have been previous encounters between these two entities. I think in 2021, the competition authority had fined Google around 500, close to 600, I think 592 million euros at that time, saying that Google was infringing on copyrighted material from the content publishers and not giving them adequate compensation for that. So, Google, as you know, kind of scrapes a web and then uses content which publishers put on the web and then kind of shows them in various platforms, which Google has, right? Like the most obvious one which most people use is Google search, but it's not just search. It's also Google news. There is a service called Discover which is on your mobile phones. These are stories which come up. And so, at that time, Google had initially appealed, but then later they had reached a settlement. And as a result of the settlement, what they had said was that they would sign these fair agreements with content publishers so that they get compensated adequately for their content, right? The key issue is Google using the headlines and the tech and the kind of news snippets and then putting them as is on their Google news and Discover and the top stories in the search results, right? So, at that time, Google had done that and Google had committed to enter into this fair agreements with various content publishers. Now, this is yet another fine on pretty much on the same issue. The France's competition authority is saying that Google is again not adequately compensating these publishers, right? Or not entering into fair agreements with them. And this one is for 250 million euros. What is interesting this time around is that they have added on a new angle to this. And they have said that Google has used the content from news publishers for training their AI. So, Google has this AI called Bard, which they now have renamed into Gemini. And Gemini is like being used in, Google is pushing it in multiple services, including Gmail, right? And so, what the competition commission of France is saying is that Google has used copyrighted material from news publishers to train its AI without notifying the content publishers. And that is a violation of copyrighted material and copyright laws of you. This is the very preliminary, the second part of training the AI. This is, I think, in a very preliminary state. And the competition authority has said that it's in a preliminary stage of investigation. But I think this is the really big area of the future, because we have seen multiple such lawsuits from various news publishers taking on, not just Google's AI, but the chat GPD from opening, they have been cases we have heard about regarding this. Right, but actually that was my next question, because New York Times chat GPD case was also very prominent in the news. It seems that we are heading towards that kind of territory, which we have not gone into before. And earlier it was just about the content itself. Now it's also, this is not just showing the content, but actually maybe rephrasing the content. So, the kind of questions that come out are much more larger in dimension, they're much more larger in scope. So, how do you kind of see this fault line developing in the future? Yeah, so I think this is this training the AI part. This is a very interesting battle, which will be fought over in the next few years, right? Because with the popularity of chat GPD, and now similar chatbots being offered by various of these offerings, right? Bing has, it's a copilot, right? And then Google is being paired with Gemini. So, we are going to see more of these offerings and like these big tech companies are betting very big on these offerings, right? So, see that the kind of the positioning from the big tech companies is that these are intelligent kind of, they are approaching human intelligence and they can communicate with you or converse with you as humans do. And for that they need to be trained and they've been trained on various content that is available on the web. That, I think, is not the full story, right? I mean, frankly, these chatbots that we have seen, they are really nowhere close to human intelligence. What they instead do is they ingest pretty much all the text that is freely available on the internet, which includes text from the major news publishers, right? And that's like a bulk of the, well, I wouldn't say bulk, but a huge amount of text is, content is generated by news publishers all over the world. And that content is ingested by these chatbots. And what the chatbots effectively do is that they kind of repeat that content, but they change the, they rephrase it, right? They change the sentence structure, but the content is effectively repeated. And so, I mean, so that's, I think it's fair ground for the content publishers to say that their content is now going to be produced by other, by these chatbots and they should really get a part of the compensation. And that's all we have in today's daily debrief. We'll be back with a fresh episode tomorrow. Meanwhile, do visit our website peoplesdispatch.org, follow us on all the social media platforms. And if you're watching this on YouTube, please hit the subscribe button.