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Today, the authorities in eastern Iraq say they'll take legal action against the owners of a shopping centre where a fire has killed dozens of people.
The latest on the way for you.
We'll also hear why the boss of NVIDIA has swapped his leather jacket for a tang suit in Beijing and how the takeover of 7 -Eleven by a Canadian rival turned out to be not so convenient.
One is operating in Canada based on sales of good through gasoline stands, whereas in the case of 7 -Eleven and I, they're focusing a lot more on foods in Japan where the consumers tend to be very, very picky.
First though, that fire at a newly opened shopping centre in Iraq which has killed more than 60 people.
The blaze in the eastern city of Qut broke out in the Hyper Mall and rapidly engulfed its walls.
Videos on social media showed flames engulfing a five -storey building as firefighters tried to contain the fire and reach people standing on the roof.
Some listeners might find this audio distressing.
Now what you can hear there is people shouting and screaming as they watch people on that roof trying to escape from the flames.
Ali Al -Zargani lives nearby.
My house is behind the mall.
The fire started around 8pm and continued burning until 4am.
The flames were raging.
The civil defence did their best, my God, toward them, but they were limited by a lack of resources.
They don't have modern vehicles.
The building lacked even the most basic safety measures.
None of the safety protocols were in place.
It was truly a disaster in every sense of the word. We have never experienced anything like this in the history of Qut.
More than 100 people are either missing or injured and the numbers of injured people is more.
Even now, we still don't know the fate of many people.
Let's go live to my colleague, Sally Nabil, who's got the latest. What do we know, Sally, about what happened in the investigation at this early stage?
An investigation is already underway, but we don't know yet what exactly happened and caused this fire to take place, which ended up in having many casualties.
At least 67 are killed, and we understand that the death toll might rise, as many people are still lost and a lot of families do not know the fate of their loved ones.
But the videos coming from the scene were really harrowing.
You see bereaved families gathering, whether next to the mall or outside the hospital, where the bodies are carrying caskets that has the bodies of their loved ones in it.
Some bodies are too charred to be identified.
The local authorities have been calling on people to undergo DNA tests so that they can identify the charred bodies.
It's a total mess and anger is piling up because people are bringing into question whether or not there were proper safety measures in place, whether or not there were fire exits that allow people to escape.
We've seen videos for people being trapped inside the mall and on rooftops, not knowing where to go, No proper fire extinguishing systems were used, although this mall is very new.
It was just opened a few days ago.
So one of the people in Al -Quds was saying you've invested billions of dollars to build such a mall without taking into consideration people's lives and putting some money into having a proper fire extinguishing system.
I mean, that seems surprising.
We imagine that the newest buildings are the safest buildings, wherever they are in the world.
Actually, this is not necessarily true, especially when it comes to the Middle East and in Iraq in particular.
It's not necessarily that the newest are the safest. But sometimes the people happen to have to set up a building in a hurry and invest a lot of money in having a glamorous facade.
And I mean, very attractive elements like big fancy shops without considering the safety measures that should be employed.
And they believe that, oh, nothing bad will happen.
So let's just stick to the main elements that attract people to go out shopping and spend money.
But now that the tragedy has befallen the place, it could have been avoided, according to what we heard from many eyewitnesses.
It could have been avoided if the people have some exit routes that they could escape through.
And over the past few years, Iraq has been building a lot of cafes, malls and restaurants.
They have been enjoying relative safety.
So, people go out, especially at night, escaping the heat of the morning where it is more than 50 degrees.
So, they happen to find a really safe haven in the air -conditioned mall to enjoy their times.
We understand the fire happened around 9 p .m. so it's a peak time in Iraq I've been there quite a few times to this country and I know how busy it can be at night in summer and this is kind of explains why the casualty numbers are quite high Sally thank you Sally Nabil's got the latest for us now live to Ammar Rahim who's chief strategy officer at Ibn Yateen which is a construction company live with us from Baghdad on World Business Report.
Anmar, thank you very much indeed for joining us.
What sort of rules are there when it comes to health and safety in brand new buildings like this, just having been through a construction project?
Hello, thanks for having me.
So the rules actually, contrary to the view, they do exist. They are decent, to be honest, and they are really moulded after international national standards in many areas, specifically fire safety.
So you have the fire extinguishing system guidelines, which is published by the Central Organization for Standardization and Quality Control from the Ministry of Planning.
I think the problem here is the enforcement of the law, to be honest. I mean, there is a big gap between what's really on the paper and what what happens on site.
I think there's a weak oversight, a lot of cordon cutting and frankly, really limited consequences when violations happen.
So even though the law requires the fire systems in practice, the buildings can operate for years without really meeting the minimum safety criteria set out by the guidelines.
So in theoretical terms, the rules there are at international standards, but it sounds like they're not really enforced and therefore they're not really observed no yeah yeah not not in the majority of buildings or at the very least like the buildings that are not less known let's say privately owned buildings uh small shopping malls all of these things but for big hospitals um governmental um governmental buildings you can find uh the um fire extinguishing systems in place right and I'm trying to get a handle on how common you think this would be so i get that there's rules that aren't properly
enforced do you think there's therefore a load of buildings in iraq that are unsafe or a small number i think it depends really um firstly on the size of the building because obviously bigger buildings like new malls they people tend to hear about it so the people building the mall tend to take into into consideration, the safety aspects of it, because it's going to be a big scandal if something happened of that sort.
Governmental buildings, you know, big corporates, they take these things into account.
But let's say for a privately held building, right?
Such as this one, it's this one is not really big, big building in that sense.
So the people who own that, well, I don't know what happened exactly, if there is a fire extinguishing system or not, or was it really dysfunctional when that incident happened.
For such a building, I would expect it's highly likely they didn't put a fire extinguisher in the first place, or even though they put it, there is no maintenance.
It didn't pass the inspection.
That's what I think personally.
Well, we'll see what happens.
Obviously, there'll be an investigation.
Our colleagues at BBC Verify are seeing what we can work out from satellite imagery, that kind of thing.
We'll keep you in in touch with it here on the bbc world service that was anmar rahim from ibn yateen after a year of prolonged negotiations with dramatic twists and turns the canadian retailer alimentation kushtar said it was abandoning its multi -billion dollar bid to acquire the owner of the 7 -eleven convenience stores so why didn't it work out when the owner of circle k trying to take over 7 -eleven Is this a widespread resistance in Japan to the idea of Western business takeovers?
Sejiro Tashkita is professor of management at the University of Shizuoka.
Well, actually, the management of 7 -Eleven, the founder as well, didn't want this to happen in the first place.
You can tell from their very, I say, backpedaling type of attitude from last year.
So obviously, this is the outcome that they want.
In other words, for the merger to basically evaporate.
But of course, as the stock market is showing a double digit decline for the company, it's very clear that there's a very mixed feeling about this move as a whole.
OK, now it's not uncommon for the existing management of a company not to want a takeover and to resist it and think they can do a better job themselves.
How have they prevailed in this situation, though?
There's a very big difference between the two, the cultural difference, particularly amongst the M &A on Japanese companies, especially if you're dealing with things like retail.
The aim of the governance style is totally different from the West. And well, in that sense, 7 -Eleven is very much a Japanese company still.
And for that reason, things are quite different.
But, you know, obviously there's a lot of growth perspective, which they aren't utilizing.
That's one of the reasons why people have been putting an offer for this company.
And also because of the weakening of the yen, it's being very attractive for the foreigners to basically buy into the Japanese companies.
And also there is an overall trend that the shareholder had been far too less, I should say, emphasized in Japanese companies.
So now things are basically turning around to basically answer the needs of the shareholders a lot more than it used to be.
And also, you know, this is a retail company, so it doesn't have any of the claws that could block the merger, for example, for security reasons or whatever, as was the case in companies like telecommunications.
So obviously, I think Seven and I had been a pretty good target from that point of view as well.
OK. I'm really interested in this cultural thing.
Explain the differences in the internal culture of these two companies, which on the surface do very similar things.
Well, you know, on the surface, they may seem similar, but one is operating in Canada based on sales of good through gasoline stands, whereas in case of Seven and I, they're focusing a lot more on foods, on daily stuffs in Japan, where the consumers tend to be very, very picky and where the competition tend to be very, very severe.
year. So things are quite different from that perspective.
And also the governance style is different.
The Japanese companies basically focus very much on perpetuity and the management seeks that to be the goal.
But obviously for Canadian companies or American companies or British companies, the target that they have is obviously profit.
Of course, I'm not saying Japanese companies don't look at profit, but I say the majority of the aim is not necessarily profit, profit.
It's perpetuity for many of these companies.
And for that reason, when we have these Western type of takeover bids, there tend to be a lot of resistance, not only amongst the management, but a lot of companies that are surrounding it.
It's pretty easy to find white night in Japan for that reason.
And community as a whole, society as a whole, really do not see these M &A to be necessarily a good thing.
So the concept around the whole issue is quite different from that of the West in Japan.
Sanjira Takashita from the University of Shizuoka.
This is World Business Report with Andrew Peach here on the BBC World Service.
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That's odoo .com. Emma Wall is Head of Platform Investments at Hargreaves Lansdowne and with me today.
Let's start with Facebook and what's going on with some shareholders trying to sue Mark Zuckerberg.
Well, it was a trial that started yesterday and has abruptly concluded with an out of court settlement for $8 billion, which sounds like a lot of money, but hasn't moved Meta's share price because it is of course worth 1 .77 trillion dollars not all of um the settlement has been disclosed as is typical in this case but it has ended what would have been quite a public and potentially embarrassing trial with the settlement out of court what was it in delaware well it's a bit complicated here so this is actually about a court case about another court case it was about about a fee that Facebook paid
in order to get out of trouble for privacy claims. So, it's a court case on a court case.
But that because of the nature of the case, that's what it's based.
Okay. Donald Trump has been talking about sugarcane, which has led to what on the markets?
Really interesting.
Firstly, because he's talking about full fat Coke.
And actually, the thing that he loves is diet Coke, so much so that he had a tap actually put into the Oval Office, so he can press a button and get Diet Coke whenever he wants to.
But what he's tweeting about today on social media is the fact that Coca -Cola tastes better with real cane sugar instead of the corn syrup that it currently uses in the U .S. It uses cane sugar in other jurisdictions, including Mexico.
He says it tastes better.
And he said that Coca -Cola have agreed to use cane sugar in the U .S. production instead of corn syrup.
Coca -Cola have not exactly confirmed firm this, but they have. So, they're looking into other product types.
What's really interesting is normally Trump is all about US and America first. And actually, a lot of the corn syrup that's used in Coca -Cola is produced in the US.
And because of this, actually, we've seen a large US manufacturer or processor of corn syrup, Archer Daniels Midland, its share price fell 5 % in after -hours trading.
It's down 2 % today.
So, not exactly America first, but we can't quite get to the bottom of why he's so keen on sugar.
He's a bit of presidential overreach going on here.
I don't know. Just finally back to Iraq, where we started and drone strikes have closed some oil fields in Iraqi Kurdistan.
What's the impact of that been?
Well, this is around 6 % of Iraq's output.
So it hasn't moved the oil price, but it is a warning really to what potentially could happen in the region.
So the output has been cut by around 150 ,000 barrels a day.
And this represents the output of around three different firms. But if this continues, you can see how quite quickly actually global supply of oil gets disrupted.
And that really is what, you know, commodity traders are focusing on today of what this potentially could mean to the oil price if it continues.
Eyes always on oil prices every hour of every day.
Thank you very much indeed, Emma, for being with me Emma Wall head of platform investments at Hargreaves Lansdowne.
Now the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia Jensen Huang has been on a trip to Beijing this coincides with news that the company is expecting that the US will allow it to resume sales of an AI chip to China.
He's been giving a speech at the opening ceremony of the third China International Supply Chain Expo instead of wearing his iconic leather jacket he was wearing a Tang suit and he gave part of the address in Mandarin, praising China's belief in innovation and flourishing craftsmanship spirit.
I grew up in the United States and I learned Chinese along the way.
And so I'm very, very nervous.
And so let me let me do my best. so what do we make of all this then stephen witt is in los angeles the author of the thinking machine which is the history of nvidia and a biography of its chief executive stephen thank you very much indeed for joining us it looks a bit like nvidia might be trying to woo beijing here Oh, for sure.
The play here is, as Jensen and the Trump administration has described, is to get Chinese customers addicted to American technology, with the hope being that if they're buying NVIDIA chips, they won't rely on homegrown solutions that could compete with NVIDIA.
Okay. And he's, you know, leaning on his Chinese heritage, but you'd think the Chinese government weren't going to be taken in by this.
Maybe we're all taken in by a bit of charm i don't know well you heard the halting speech there jensen did not grow up speaking mandarin uh he speaks taiwanese and english but mandarin was a language he learned in his 20s um so there's a little bit of razzle dazzle there uh but you know jensen's a very charismatic executive he's great on stage and people people do tend to follow him where he leads okay and and the chinese government may be seduced by his charm but and by all of that that they may may also, of course, be looking at the business potential that he brings.
Yeah. Well, what's really the one is these very high -speed AI microchips.
I mean, Jensen has built the entire kind of like microchip infrastructure for the modern era.
Around the world, people are building these enormous data centers.
They're the size, half the size of Manhattan, and they take several gigawatts of energy.
energy it's all for processing ai requests um companies are going to spend about a trillion dollars building these things and most of that money is actually going to end up in with jensen it's going to end up with nvidia because these microchips are the only thing that can handle the workload okay now nvidia jensen specifically but the whole company's also been lobbying lobbying lobbying in washington what's it trying to achieve at the other end yeah this is a new thing for Jensen.
Historically, he didn't have to think much about politics, but now he runs the world's largest firm and his two most important markets are the US and China.
So he's really been kind of shuttling back and forth between Beijing, Washington, DC, and Mar -a -Lago, where Trump spends a lot of time, on almost a campaign of private jet diplomacy.
He's really trying to get Trump to lift export bans for his company and to guarantee him certain markets.
In China, he's He's really attempting to remain as the preferred provider for their massive, massive AI development push.
So he's kind of playing both roles.
He's still the chief executive of the company.
He's not a diplomat necessarily, but he's having to play the diplomatic game, and that's new for him.
Right. I was wondering to what extent he's sort of representing the U .S. in China.
To what extent is he doing Donald Trump's work for him?
I think that's a question that Trump has, and I think it's a question that Beijing has, and I think it's a question that a lot of people have. Jensen ultimately is the chief executive of NVIDIA.
That is his baby. He will do whatever it takes to make NVIDIA's stock price go up.
Sometimes that's going to align with US interests, and sometimes it's going to align with Chinese interests, and sometimes both.
I think probably in the latest instance, he's looking for some kind of detente in this trade war.
And I think he's actually achieved it.
It's a remarkable accomplishment.
And I mean, he strikes me as the kind of character that kind of, you know, dominant, charismatic character that Donald Trump certainly would warm to, would want to, you know, see as a man he can do business with, that kind of thing.
Sure. I mean, look, Jensen is a winner.
He's a big winner. He's the biggest winner of the modern era in business.
And so Trump wants to be next to him.
That's just Trump's MO.
Jensen going to Trump, you know, Jensen thinks like an engineer.
And Trump's erratic and can be a little difficult to predict what he's going to do.
I think Jensen is approaching it, well, if I say these things to Donald, will he come back and do what I want?
So he's thinking about it very much like a process engineer.
If I put these inputs into the Trump administration, maybe I'll get the outputs I need.
And if that doesn't work, I'm going to modify or change or even A -B test my approach to politics until I get what I want.
That's how Jensen would think about it.
Very interesting analysis.
Thank you very much indeed for being with me.
That's Stephen Witt, who wrote The Thinking Machine about NVIDIA, as well as a biography of its boss, Jensen Huang.
He was with us from Los Angeles on World Business Report.
Now, President Trump wants the US to have a Golden Dome missile defence shield.
It's expected to cost $175 billion.
It's being developed by the newest part of the US military, the US Space Force, which was set up five years ago and has now 16 ,000 staff.
It's already proved pretty crucial in intercepting Iranian ballistic missiles and helping that US strike on Iran's nuclear programme a few weeks ago.
My colleague Jonathan Beale, the BBC's defence correspondent, has this exclusive report now on how the US is keeping itself at the cutting edge of defence technology.
Mission, this is the cape with countdown.
In a dark and secure military facility in Colorado, lit up by computers and giant monitors.
Launch out of the Cape.
The countdown to a rocket launch. Copy, valid track one.
This is the first time the US Space Force has allowed international media into an operations centre for missile warning.
And this is what they're doing every single day, detecting launches, whether fired from Russia, Israel, Yemen or Iran.
This is America's first line of defence.
Lieutenant Colonel Anne Hughes oversees the operations room.
They are able to track the point of origin as well as the predicted impact location.
So that's the data that they send or they collect and then send downrange.
This is just a drill.
The coordinates for the launch are 28 north by 80 west. But a few weeks ago, they were doing it for real when Iran fired a salvo of missiles at a US military base in the Middle East. We saw Iran launch against Al -Yadid air base in Qatar.
Ultimately, we saved the entire installation and the personnel that were there.
How did that feel? Heavy.
It was absolutely great to make sure that we're safeguarding our US and coalition forces.
outside are these massive big what look like golf balls and they're covering a large radar which is how the u .s space force talks to their satellites up in the sky and this is is part of what will be America's Golden Dome.
How they provide missile defence for North America.
It's in response to growing concerns about Chinese and Russian hypersonic missiles.
This is the Wolf Den.
This is the entrance to where we conduct our advanced tactics analysis for space.
I'm Colonel Phoenix Hauser, the commander of Space Delta 7.
We are Space Force's intelligence in targeting Delta.
But the US is also worried about their actions in space.
We're talking satellites with grappling arms that can pull other satellites out of orbit.
We are already sparring in the cyber domain and the space domain.
I think one of our Space Force senior leaders talked about dogfighting in space.
That's happening already?
ready? I don't know that we're quite there in the type of top gun like dog fighting perspective but it's something certainly that we need to be ready for.
I'm shown a China People's Liberation Army video by Lieutenant General David Miller.
So this is what you're up against you think?
You've got to be prepared, if directed, to contend against adversaries like this, should they choose to threaten the U .S. or our allies.
Next chart. We will no longer assume that just goodwill will ensure that an adversary will not attack us.
So to put it very plainly, you are developing offensive weapons for space?
I think what we're advocating for is the development and fielding of capability.
The only way to deter conflict is through strength.
and we have to have our own systems and capabilities in order to defend those assets and it has to be made plain to potential adversaries.
Are you able to tell us what those options are?
I am not. America's military relies on space for its communications, navigation and precision strikes.
Launch from CENTCOM in five minutes.
And its Space Force is stepping up its ability to defend those interests against any adversary.
That report came from our defence correspondent, Jonathan Beale, on the latest on the US's plans to have a Golden Dome missile defence shield.
There's more online at bbc .com slash news, including why filmmakers can't get enough of the Republic of Ireland.
Read that now, bbc .com slash news.
From me, Andrew Peach and the team, thanks for listening to the programme.
