Later Nancy Pelosi has been elected speaker of the u.s. House of Representatives as her party takes charge of the chamber ushering in a new era of divided government under President Trump It's the 2nd time as Pelosi has held the position and she is still the only woman in u.s. History to do so addressing Congress she said she was looking forward to working with Republicans in a bipartisan way but added that the lower house would work as a check on other parts of government and nation is a stark moment 2 months ago the American people spoke and demanded a new dawn they called upon the beauty of our Constitution our system of checks and balances that protects our democracy Russian news agencies say a former u.s. Marine arrested in Moscow last week has been charged with spying the authorities said Paul Whelan was caught carrying out an act of espionage unconfirmed Russian reports say he is accused of receiving a data stick containing the names of Russian agents James Landale reports Paul Whelan was arrested by Russian state security officers last Friday and now faces more than 10 years in prison if convicted of espionage Mr Whelan's defense lawyer blood images that a bank of told the state run news agency here Novosti that he had appealed for bail Mr Whelan who's 48 was born in Canada to British parents he served 14 years in the Us Marine Corps doing 2 tours in Iraq before being discharged for bad conduct in 2008 he's currently head of global security for an American company supplying vehicle parts Pope Francis has said the credibility of the Catholic Church in the United States has been severely damaged by the ongoing child sexual abuse scandal there in a letter to u.s. Bishops on a retreat in Chicago the pope said that efforts to cover up the crimes are caused even greater harm he urged the bishops to end internal bickering and show unity as they try to tackle the crisis the pope's comments on child abuse have got. Stronger over time in late December priests who defended to surrender to the law in preparation for divine justice the Catholic Church in the Democratic Republic of Congo said that based on results as seen from Sunday's elections there was a clear winner among the $21.00 presidential candidates Louie's the us has the details a group of Catholic Bishops who deployed more than $40000.00 election observers said that the data be compiled from polling station ballots reveal a clear winner but did not name the presumed Victor nearly half of the country is Catholic and the group of bishops hold powerful influence they have on the Election Commission to reflect will be referred to as the truth and justice and the vote provisional results are meant to be published by Neil actual commission on January 6th Louise to us there you're listening to the world news from the b.b.c. The United Nations special envoy to Somalia Nicholas hasten has briefed the Security Council for the 1st time since the Somali foreign ministry ordered his expulsion from the country this week Mr Haye some told the council that a government decision to arrest a political candidate who wants to be and been an al-Shabaab leader could deter others from choosing politics over violence American Scientists say they've genetically engineer tobacco plants that can grow up to 40 percent larger than normal they say the method developed could eventually be used to boost Yildiz in other important crops such as rice and wheat. Archaeologists in Mexico have discovered the earliest known temple and sacrifice altar dedicated to the pre as tech God she paid Toltec or flayed Lord the site in the southeastern state of Puebla is believed to about be about a 1000 years old America's editor Leonardo Russia reports sheep are thought it was one of the most revered gods in the region until Spanish colonize ation began in the 16th century but until now Mexican archaeologists hadn't been able to find a temple dedicated directly to his adoration which dates to pre Aztec times priests used to make human sacrifices at their site and where the skin of the victims to worship their flayed Lord they believed he would help renew the cycles of fertility culture and war and further questions have been raised about a start up ferry company awarded a British government contract to provide extra freight capacity if there's no deal breaks it one of the terms and conditions initially listed on the seaborne freight company's website was apparently cut and pasted from a takeaway restaurant business is vice customers to check the goods before paying for any meal the governments of the area have been corrected and highlighted the independent expert checks on seaborne freights financial technical and legal underpinning before it was given the $17500000.00 contract. B.b.c. News. You're listening to the inquiry on the b.b.c. World Service I mean the result. Started as a pinprick of light just another star in the firmament over months it grew brighter becoming more and more distinct. And it grew a tail like a comet and then it grew larger and brighter still. It could be seen by day. Finally it lit up the sky in a brilliant molten moment. And then darkness. Life on Earth would never be the same. That happened 66000000 years ago and asteroid more than 10 kilometers wide slammed into earth starting a mass extinction wiped out the dinosaurs. Some see the same thing happening now but this time the asteroid is us. So today we're asking are we heading for another mass extinction. Hocked one back might get done. A lot of people find them creepy our 1st expert witness loves bugs but I think as soon as you feel a little bit more intensively with them and study them more in detail you'll start to fall in love because they behave very much like other animals do the. Axle Hawk Kirsch is Professor of biogeography at Trigger university in Germany so if you start just sitting in front of a grasshopper and watch him displaying in front of the female for example and waving its antenna and its hind legs making a small dance and then you see the female not interested in all and just kicking in the way then you have a different feeling for insects however much sympathy we may have for the jilted grasshopper many of us will never want to bugs it's not just because they're creepy some of them are nasty too when we think about bucks we think about the best buck when we think about roaches we think about the cockroach so we usually just consider the pest species and these are a minority the majority are pretty useful essential even. If we use insects without even knowing it because of the part of nation service because a lot of foods would not be a way to build without insects and of course they also. We provide some other services like decomposition they are recycling nutrients remove the dung and the carrion which is on our fields otherwise we would be completely swamped with these . Estimates that 90 percent of all species are bugs we don't even have names for most of them yet we know so little about life on our planet and we are searching for a life out of space somewhere in trying to find aliens but we don't have not even found all the species on our planet and this means that we really need to intensify also the research on the species because we only can preserve what we know take the mystery of the Rocky Mountain locust. It's produced very very large swarms which are described as a largest Ekuban lay sions of insects ever seen on our planet so these row billions and trillions of in the video and even covering surface larger than France during one of our Get France Yeah that was at the beginning of the 20th century and in 1000 of the species became extinct we don't know exactly why we assume that these breeding places were destroyed by the transformation of the natural habitats into eco cultural farmland there are pleasure ways to get at the health of today's bug population hock Kirsch leads teens which tracked grasshoppers Well my favorite one is the Crow plain grasshopper which is endemic to step in southern France it behaves like a stone it looks like a stone it doesn't really jump if you come closer so we found that when we want to monitor the species that it was very very difficult so what we did is now to use detection dogs which are much better in finding these insects dollars that yeah dogs so you can actually train dogs very well for finding everything and they're even good in finding. A single insect species so they are maybe 50 different the grasshopper species in this area but it only finds this one species we research for there's a picture of one of the dogs on our website Her name's Hera and there's a crow playing grasshopper sitting on her nose the team's work has helped establish that that species is now critically endangered. There are other ways to get at the health of the bug population Researchers in Germany have been setting traps in nature reserves and weighing the bugs caught they found that actually the biomass dropped in the warmest least since they started this study in 1809 so it was a 75 percent decrease of biomass from 189 to 2016 that's a big number that's a really big number yeah this means that if you hadn't had a really large jar full of insects a couple of years ago and now you only have a very small number of insects. Doesn't loss of biomass necessarily mean species are going extinct so I think that this reduction in biomass is actually shows that there's a global trend of decrease in all insect populations and this means for common species they become rarer and for rest pieces they become extinct. The German study isn't the only one showing that bugs are in trouble there's I'm only touring projects in the Netherlands which look for butterflies and they show exactly the same trend in the crease and there was a recent study also from Puerto Rico where they found that there's even a 90 percent reduction in biomass So this appears to be something which is happening across our planet in very different parts of our planet the main reason is driving us are thought to be a loss of habitat and pesticide use actual hawkers estimates that one species goes extinct every hour most he says are bugs. Part 2 goodbye Chumba. Yes Yes I'm very close to the lake at the moment you. Meet force Wira like malaria is called Lake of stars way when you sit on the beach your beer boat to see like when the winds are blowing when they went to the lake you are able to see some stars so it's a very beautiful lake. Very beautiful and very big one of the biggest It's in southeastern Africa with Mozambique in Tanzania on the eastern shore and allowing on the western one it's reckoned to have more fish species than any other link that's the way of bone and glowing of grown up with and that's where I have a big job our lake is looking like. I'm coming from a fishing family where my father when I was young he used to tell my mom that preparing lines come bugs or drill bring things that we can use for lunch his father would paddle his canoe no more than shouting distance from shore and catch big fish My father used to catch a lot if I can remember very well he was able to catch up to fish he was able to catch a tumble he was able to catch or does. Has about 1000 feet speeches and all those of his vision where the variable in those days when I was young but at the moment you know we struggling just to find some other this officials I used to see them on when I was I was young. People pressure is driving the change I was born in 973 and the population of my was about 5 media and I need to have grown now up to about 20 media so the publisher and I will hate it going to Butte did 2 degrees of the scene make money because the window Brisson grows you have more fisherman and again when you have more fish or many more pressure on things. Resource how many people rely on Lake Malawi for food it's Isn't the whole country's they want country because it's not just along the lake if you go to a distinct like Museum which is a very far from Lake you go to their market so they are also using the same fish they are selling fish in these markets right so this is this is the key protein for people in Malawi and yes yes the lakes Maine fish is the silvery chambre Oh a staple of Malawi's national diet but you know this fish you get even it in the bones in the head then you enjoy that's where you like most the appetite for like Malawi's fish forced fisherman further and deeper into the lake the canoes of his father's generation were no longer enough that to ours alone the 8 days when people started now using Indian bought the ones you know fish was depleted in leg. Bigger boats meant bigger nets and there was a cheap ready and surprising supply. Well as a country this is the only we have received about it mainly media and mosquito nets and what is happening at the moment instead of these mosquito has to be used for malaria prevention mostly they're used for fishing and the they can make very big fishing nets of from these mostly tornadoes which can catch any size of fish that average the size of mosquito right so even baby fish then presumably Oh yes that can catch any sort of fish including the bed the fish. Malawi's government estimates that the Lakes fish population has declined by 90 percent in the last 20 years. The chambre and other species are listed as critically endangered. Today forcing we're a country director for a charity called ripple which helps communities better manage natural resources because the prob. Arms for fish start on land when Noah was a brewery their order was green because you know we had a lot of trees in it in the Maori but now because you know there is a big soil erosion because of deforestation in the country that is affecting our Lord and in Iran it says on when you go along the leg you'll find that the order of Jane the guy into Blount from blue to Brown. 2 2 2 2 2 like Malawi is not an isolated case 2 we could have as easily talked about extinctions in Lake Geneva or Lake Victoria or China's like. Or the Caspian Sea or the Mekong River I could go on freshwater habitats are some of the most endangered in the world it means freshwater fish declining even faster than bugs are. Parked very red meat. We've established that conservation work can take you to some pretty beautiful places but they can also be dangerous. Now we're in the virgin forests of southern Mexico it's near the end of the day and professor a dolphin tears of suddenly realizes he's been watching. We were in the shadows of the jail were individual was actually checking us up the story of a what of a jogger right this gigantic cat that we have in the nootropics the Jaguar Jaguars are top predators they can chew you up like a pretzel. With awful gears as response I felt an incredible emotion affairs so excited about the fact that there are still places on a planet where we have those and most ill that is a very exciting feeling this might explain why he became a conservation biologist in the 1st place but it's excitement was changed with sadness to think that not every. He has this wonderful opportunity this motion and that perhaps our children and grandchildren will not have the support and it is read often deers attracts the decline of mammals and says they follow the same pattern is that a fish and bugs he published a paper which calls it biological and Nial ation with used a very very large sample of animals from databases and we found that a great proportion of the animals had evidence of reduction in the geographic range meaning in a number of locations animal is not present anymore meaning that you loosing populations were dolphins says losing local populations is a prelude to extinction He looked at $180.00 mammal species and found half occupy 80 percent less territory than they did just a century ago is a terrible situation hence the term biological and I lay Jand right but saying if an animal is actually extinct is harder than it might seem How would you say that a species is going extinct when you have not seen the last animal in the last 20 years or when the last couple if is an animal that has you know 2 genders when the last couple is seen or when the last 20 animals have been seen so it is a little bit tricky to find the global extension from the face of the earth the reasons for the decline are more straightforward and by this point in the program familiar habitat loss and hunting in other words human activity is wiping them out but Rudolf and there's 0 says dwindling mammal populations are creating opportunities and risks for those that survive. You reduce or eliminate species such as elephant 00 Volos those big animals there then obviously the vegetation in this case the savannah so going to change shrubs are going to be much more abundant more lush grasses are not going to be grazed upon interests are going to be growing in exuberance you know you're creating a paradise ecologically speaking for animals who are just rodents rats mice chipmunks they carry please take those kinds of things and those animals can carry a borne of these eases nasty ones including plague or the Black Death. So for him the pattern is clear a mass extinction is not only underway it's gathering pace $340.00 species of vertebrates went extinct says you know 1560 percent of those went to the last 100 years so those rates are really really high. This issue that we've seen in the last 100 years should've taken even 10000 years under normal circumstances so that gives the perception of the money 2 of the rate of extinction. So far we've heard from people studying the living and looking for the vanishing. But the Earth has already seen 5 mass extinctions does today's situation really compare. Heart Full blast from the past most pet intelligence think of it as a given that we are currently going through a mass extinction. Jennifer both of brink is a paleontologist and expert in mass extinctions because of the number of species that are disappearing and how quickly it's happening it is marrying what we have seen in the fossil record. She's based in South Africa's Carew Basin which is a world renowned cites for preserving fossils that date from around 260 to 190000000 years ago and it preserves an almost complete record of the ancestors of mammals the evidence of extinction is all around her I will look around to find pieces of bone or fossils sticking out of the ground around these hilly our crops and then excavate the religion they just poking out of the ground they are really any part of the animal can stick out and you might see a tiny piece of bone perhaps it's looks like a white object against the on dirt and it may only be a few centimeters wide and when you dig it out it's a 3 metre long animal and in these bones she sees species come and go we have background extinctions all the time that have occurred throughout his history where numerous species often go extinct but when we see a spike in the number of species and a significant spike where at least 40 to 50 percent of the species are disappearing we can that a mass extinction and we've had about 5 mass extinctions in Earth history no 2 are the same but they are characterized by incredible change Jennifer both the brink focuses on one about 250000000 years ago called the permanent Triassic mass extinction which she says holds up the best mirror for today gases has suffered oxide and carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere and these different gases and chemical cause a change in the atmosphere there is acid rain there is global warming and many plants for example counts of Ivo's and then you have a chain reaction where the animals that need to survive on these plants also go extinct. After the. Attention it became extremely dry so we go from a lush seasonally weight environment to a drought stricken environment such as what you might find in the interior of a straight Leah and when it