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If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed?
In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed.
Hundreds killed, but even now we still don't know for sure who did it.
It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories.
I'm Helena Merriman and in a new BBC series I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.
What did they miss the first time?
The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs.
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
TikTok secures its future in the US.
It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service.
I'm Gideon Long.
We'll give you a rare glimpse into life on board one of the ships in Russia's Shadow Fleet.
And remember that ban that Australia imposed on under-16s to stop them accessing social media?
We'll hear how it's going.
The social media platform TikTok has finalised a deal to allow it to continue to operate in the United States.
For the past year, TikTok's been at the heart of a dispute between its Chinese owner ByteDance, and the US government over data privacy.
Under the deal in the United States, TikTok's famous algorithm will only be trained on US user data.
The BBC's technology editor Zoe Kleinman told me more.
This has taken such a long time, hasn't it, to come together.
President, Donald Trump has posted on social media that he's saved TikTok, but actually it was him who put TikTok into jeopardy in the first place, back in 2020, when he suggested banning it.
Since then, there's been repeated deadlines and extensions that have come and gone, as there were, I'm guessing, quite tense negotiations with TikTok's owner ByteDance, over whether or not it was prepared to sell its sort of golden goose, if you like.
You know, TikTok in the US, which is used by 200 million Americans today.
There was also doubt about whether or not ByteDance would part with its algorithm, which is a really essential part of how TikTok works.
It's that sort of secret sauce that drives you to see more content that you like.
I was looking for a while like they weren't going to sell that, that they were saying well actually, that's so valuable to us.
We want to keep hold of it.
But now...
What we've heard today is that it sounds like they are going to let go of that.
And so these companies there's quite a number of companies that are coming together to take joint ownership of TikTok in the US.
And they will run it as a US-based social network, and it will be trained on US citizens' data only.
Yeah, tell us who those new owners are, the new companies that will be controlling TikTok.
There's quite a lot of them, Gideon.
So the biggest ones really are Oracle Silverlake, which is an investment firm MGX, which is another investor.
They're based in Abu Dhabi, and actually they've already invested in XAI.
So they are kind of, you know, in the tech US sphere, if you like.
Them along with ByteDance, which is retaining just under 20 of its stake, they're going to own most of it.
And there's another kind of mixture of US companies that will take ownership of the rest of it.
There'll be an American board of directors.
And how do you think this is going to change the user experience for TikTok users in the US?
So on the one hand, I don't think there'll be a dramatic difference straight away.
I think it will be business as usual.
I don't think things like the TikTok shop and all of those kind of features will be implemented at all.
What I suppose might happen is once the algorithm loses the sort of global feed that it currently has,
Will it slow down?
Will there be less churn of new content pushed out?
Will there be less global trends?
Will it become very kind of domestic in terms of only pushing content that you know other Americans have liked and are interested in?
Zoe Kleinman.
Now, on Thursday, the French Navy intercepted a tanker in the Mediterranean.
It's suspected of being part of a so-called Shadow Fleet, which Russia uses to export its oil, thereby evading sanctions.
Now it's obviously very difficult to speak to anyone who works on these ships, but the BBC's David Waddell tracked down one senior officer who's on a Shadow oil tanker carrying Russian oil anchored off the coast of East Asia.
It's been there for two months, and the officer said the scene on board was grim.
Out of respect for his welfare, we're not naming him.
We have problem with the salary.
It's not transferring for more than two months.
Now we already received for the November and are waiting on this week for December.
We have shortage with meat, grain, fish, these simple things.
For surviving, we have shortages, you know.
This is effective on our health, on our operational atmosphere.
The crew was hungry, the crew was angry, and we tried to survive only day by day.
He also said the crew was largely left in the dark about where they were taking the oil.
He said there were about three quarters of a million barrels worth on board.
Ordinarily that would fetch nearly 50 million, but Russia, it's thought, has to sell it at a heavy discount due to sanctions.
We are taking crude oil.
This is from Russia.
We still don't know what the destination is exactly.
We come from one port to another port and only waiting.
No exact information from the office comes to us.
A rare insight there into life on board a ship from Russia's Shadow Fleet.
Let's look at some other stories.
I'm joined by Randeep Somal, fund manager at M&G Investments.
And Randeep.
President Trump is suing the biggest bank in the US, JPMorgan Chase, and its CEO, Jamie Dimon.
What's this all about?
Hi Gideon.
Yes, so President Trump is now claiming that when he left office after his first term in February 2021, he was effectively debanked by JP Morgan for political reasons.
And that caused damage to his businesses and his person, and he's suing them for $5 billion.
And this all comes just a day after Jamie Dimon criticised the President's plan to cap interest rates on credit in the US, isn't it?
That's right.
So President Trump, when he came into office, said he would try and get affordability levels better for Americans.
And that hasn't really taken hold yet.
While inflation stabilised, it hasn't come off.
So one of his methods to do this is to cap all interest rates, which are on average about 22 at 10.
However, Jamie Dimon has said that this will effectively stop credit to those people with low credit ratings in the US.
And it's Friday, Randy, just sum up for us what the week has been like on the markets.
It's been a very volatile market, with the news of Greenland coming and then potential deal coming out.
Commodities are faring the best.
Gold approaching $5,000 an ounce and silver's just gone through an all-time high of $100 an ounce.
Randy Somol, Fund Manager at M&G Investments, thanks for joining us.
Now more than a month has passed since Australia became the first country to ban under-16s accessing some of its best-known social media sites in the world, including Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.
So how's the ban going and will other countries follow suit?
Julie Inman-Grant is Australia's e-safety commissioner and was one of the architects of the ban.
I think it's going pretty well.
It's certainly exceeded our expectations, but we are playing the long game here.
We've always had to play a bit of a dance with the tech companies.
Clearly they don't like to be regulated, but we need to work with them cooperatively, particularly when we're taking down cyberbullying content or deepfakes or image-based abuse.
But of course they're protecting the status quo and right now this is incredibly lucrative for them.
If you look at the discovery documents from the US litigation, some of this company research refers to tweens between 8 and 12 as having a herd mentality.
Get them hooked as quickly as possible, and then you've got customers for life.
So they're building a pipeline for the future, and they do not want this to be the first domino.
And what we will see if the UK and Denmark and France and Malaysia and Indonesia come on board and do the same thing will be a network effect.
And I believe that in the next four or five years, not only will kids learn to drive when they're 16, 16 will be the age that they are able to enter social media.
Julie in Mangrant there, and it will be interesting to see if other countries follow Australia's example.
One more story for you before we go.
US forward, Trinity Rodman, has become the highest paid female footballer in the world after signing a new three-year deal with her club side, Washington Spirit.
The contract's worth are reported $2 million a year.
That might sound like quite a lot of money to earn in one year, but she's still a long way behind the highest paid player in the men's game.
That's Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo, who earns around $230 million a year.
Yes, that's 115 times more than Trinity Rodman.
That's all from this edition of World Business Express.
From me, Gideon Long, and the rest of the team, thanks for joining us.
If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed?
In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed.
But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it.
It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories.
I'm Helena Merriman and in a new BBC series I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.
What did they miss the first time?
The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs.
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
