Global News Podcast - Los Angeles firefighters battle to contain a large wildfire from spreading

Episode Date: January 12, 2025

The authorities in Los Angeles say the strong winds that have spread wildfires over a wide area are likely to continue for several more days. Also: is A.I. dubbing the future for foreign-language dramas and films?

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Nicola Cochlan and for BBC Radio 4, this is history's youngest heroes, rebellion, risk and the radical power of youth. She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself. 12 stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them. That resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now. Follow History's Youngest Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Jackie Leonard and in the early hours of Sunday the 12th of January these are our main stories. The authorities in Los Angeles have warned that strong winds fanning some of the city's worst-ever wildfires are likely to continue for several more days. People in parts of Sudan have been celebrating on the streets after the army said it had captured the city of Wadmadani, one of its biggest gains in the war against the paramilitary rapid support forces. And Iran has shut down schools and other public buildings across the country as winter weather worsens energy

shortages and pollution. Also in this podcast, How artificial intelligence is being used in the film industry to continue the legacy of famous voice actors. We begin in the US state of California, where firefighters are racing to make progress against the catastrophic wildfires before the return of very strong winds. Anthony Moroney is the LA Fire Chief. Elevated to critical fire weather conditions are predicted to continue through Wednesday.

Moderate to locally strong Santa Ana winds will affect Los Angeles County. These winds combined with dry air and dry vegetation will keep the fire threat in Los Angeles County high. The number of uncontained wildfires burning around LA has been lowered to four. However, they are said to be very significant in size. Two other fires are now said to be contained. Evacuation orders remain in place and a public health emergency has been declared due to concerns over smoke. As we record this podcast, officials have confirmed that 11 people have died, 13 more are missing and dogs and search crews are scouring the scorched rubble. The BBC's correspondent John Sudworth is in the suburb of Brentwood.

They ran out of here in a hurry. We literally saw them speeding through the flames. In a reminder that this disaster is far from over, the helicopters have been working relentlessly. They are making water drops at the same time. Dropping water to try to contain the latest flare-up with large areas of vegetation on fire and nearby communities now under new evacuation orders. On the other side of the city, in the neighbourhood of Altadena, as people return to their destroyed homes amid the shock and grief, there's mounting anger too. There was no water, not enough water.

You turn on the hydrants and there's drips and drops coming out. So somebody had to figure that out. How the heck did that happen? I mean, the water pressure, the reservoirs were not properly filled from what I understand. It's not only residents. The city's fire chief, Kristen Crowley, in an interview with a local TV network is also demanding answers from politicians.

What I can tell you is we are still understaffed, we're still under-resourced and we're still under-funded. So with that, whether it's 7 million, 10 million... But was the budget cut? Yes, it was cut and it did impact our ability to provide service. This is a disaster that has affected the wealthy, burning the LA homes of actors like Anthony Hopkins and theinary alike.

The priority is not the politics but the crisis itself. Many thousands have been made homeless with the fight still far from over. Well just before recording this podcast we heard the latest from our correspondent Peter Bowes who's also in LA. There's a race against time now because there is a bit of a lull and we've had that for the last 12 hours or so. The winds haven't been so bad but we have this rather ominous sounding forecast for the next few days that the winds are really going to step up again. Maybe not as bad as we had a few days

ago at the beginning of this crisis but they'll certainly be very strong and they could go on for several days. The middle of the week is what they're saying and that's the last thing that the firefighters want to hear. They're currently trying to douse the flames with water, fire retarding chemicals from the air using fixed wing aircraft and helicopters and if the winds get so strong that kind of attack on these fires simply isn't possible. There was a 24 hour period a few days ago when they simply couldn't get in the air and that

allowed these fires to spread rapidly and we've seen some spread in the last 24 hours especially the main fire, the Palisades fire has been spreading towards other densely populated areas Brentwood and the San Fernando Valley which is to the north of Hollywood and people in those areas have been told they might have to evacuate their homes at a moment's notice. We heard about the problem with fire hydrants, reports saying that some in the Palisades area were completely unusable. The Governor of California has been talking about it, hasn't he? What has he had to say?

Well, this was a problem right at the beginning of this crisis and as you say the fire hydrants simply dried up. Now there are lots of possible reasons for that and the Governor Gavin Newsom wants to get to the bottom of what happened. He was actually accosted in the street the other day by a woman who was furious about this situation, was demanding answers from him and well he promised that he would try to get to the bottom of it and now he has announced this full independent review. One, just briefly, one of the explanations could be that the sprinklers that come on in homes activated by heat, by fire, they simply kept flowing with water even if the

home eventually burnt down but you can imagine street after street after street house after house all of this water flowing that could be one reason why the the reserves that the firefighters would have used was rapidly depleted. That was Peter Bowes. Among those battling the blazes in LA are some 900 prisoners who sign up to fight fires in exchange for additional freedoms and reduced sentences. They live and train in minimum security facilities known as fire camps, earning between $6 and $10 a day with extra pay for each hour they spend responding to incidents.

Matthew Hahn was a volunteer firefighter with the LA County Fire Department while he was incarcerated for drug-related burglaries. He's now an electrician and meditation teacher based in San Jose, California. He told Julian Warica more about the program. Once prisoners in the state of California meet certain requirements and drops in security level, some of them are given the opportunity to do wildland firefighter training in a specific prison. And that usually takes a couple of months to do, and then we can get assigned to one of the many fire camps throughout the state of California.

These are minimum security facilities that are kind of out in nature. They're certainly not behind prison walls. And we respond to fire calls. We respond to wildfires, we respond to other types of incidents like flooding and when we're not responding to incidents we're essentially doing community service like trail maintenance or tree felling and other sorts of things we can do to help out the community.

And looking back when you decided to volunteer to do this, what was the appeal for you? Well initially the appeal for me was that I would go home from prison earlier. I knew that if I got to fire camp that I would be allowed to parole from prison roughly 18 months earlier. So that was the initial impetus for me wanting to go to fire camp. And once you started doing the work, how challenging was it? What comes to mind for you now as you look back of some of the more difficult fires you had to tackle? Well, I'd say that fighting wildfires is likely the most difficult physical work I've ever done in my entire life. And I work in the trades today. There's nothing quite as exhausting

as fighting a wildfire, at least not in my experience. I think the first fire or the first major fire that I was sent to on fire crew, required that we work a 36-hour shift. And so not only was it physically demanding, it was exhausting and tiring. And we might work eight or 10 hours straight, cutting fire line, cutting trees, cutting brush, and then maybe we catch an hour or two's nap before the next assignment. And that first 36-hour shift was pretty remarkable and pretty exhausting. So when you look at the efforts being made by firefighters in these current fires, you must immediately understand the challenges they face.

Absolutely. And with the current fires that were in Los Angeles, these were high wind driven fires, which of course are the most dangerous type of fires that are out there. The Califire program does everything that you've described. There are those who have doubts about it, aren't there, because they talk of it as being exploitative, because the pay is very, well, people volunteer, there is a small payment, but it's a very small payment. How do you respond to that exploitative charge? Well, I understand the argument certainly. And I think from one perspective, it is. People in

prison are not living in ideal conditions, they're living in inhumane conditions, and they're not making very much money whatsoever. And to offer people the opportunity to leave those conditions, leave the walls, make more money than anybody else in the prison system, and enjoy a certain degree of freedom for the remainder of their prison term. It's a hard thing to say no to. At the same time, the fire camp program in California prisons is the most humane place one could live. There's so many things that go along with fire camp other than just kind of being outside prison walls that make it an ideal place to live, whether it's good food, whether it's humane visits with family, whether it's the opportunity to go hiking in nature, or probably most importantly, the opportunity to do a type of work that feels valuable,

that we know the public values, there's a certain redemptive quality to it. Finally, I think, and this was not the case when I was in fire camp, but it is the case for people now, folks who serve as a firefighter, an incarcerated firefighter, have the opportunity to have their entire criminal record expunged when they go home. And I had that done recently because I'd been in fire camp and I had all of my criminal record expunged just last month. Former LA firefighter and prisoner Matthew Hahn. Well, as we heard a little earlier, throughout the crisis, firefighters have been struggling with a lack of water. Among the possible contributing factors, a

reservoir which helps to supply water to the Pacific Palisades area was undergoing maintenance when the fires broke out. Jeffrey Mount is senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California's Water Policy Center. So what does he think about the problems of getting enough water to firefighters? The intensity of the fire is so high it has overwhelmed LA's capacity to fight it. And in many of the Southern California communities they have a tank system that is usually at the highest end of the community and feeds water by gravity into the fire hydrants.

And what happened in a number of places in this particular fire is they just ran out of water. They either emptied their tank and were unable to refill it quickly enough or there were so many straws in the glass, I mean so many hoses hooked up to the hydrants that basically there was no pressure. Now in some places the storage was empty at the beginning of the fire. This time of year we don't expect fires in January in Southern California so oftentimes they're doing maintenance on their systems and they'll just drain it and do maintenance. That

seems like the appropriate time. Meanwhile Hollywood stars and others have begun pledging and raising money for those left homeless by the fires, which have destroyed more than 12,000 structures. The cost of rebuilding after these fires could run into tens of billions of dollars. Amy Bach is the executive director of United Policyholders, which provides consumers in the US with resources and information about insurance specialising in natural disasters. So how likely is it that people have been able to insure their homes against fire in an area known to be at risk? A little bit less likely than it had been in the past. If we weren't

in the middle of a crisis in our insurance market here before this tragedy unfolded, you know, we're gonna be in one now, but a lot of people had been dropped in the last year by the brand name insurer that they had been with for years. And most of them found their way to the state sponsored fair plan or some other insurer, but there's definitely going to be some people that fell through the cracks and are going to be bare without insurance. We have a lot of laws in California that require them to make payments and investigate pay within a certain set

amount of time. We also have laws that require them to give cash advances to their policyholders. But for sure, the magnitude of this catastrophe is going to cause insurers to have to dig deep into their reserves, which of course they're never enthusiastic about. So we are going to be seeing some fights. There's no question about it. Amy Bach from United Policy Holders. On to other news now. Iran has closed down many schools, universities and government offices across the country due to worsening pollution and shortages of gas and electricity as temperatures drop. Many Iranians blame the government. Here's Kazran Adji. The gap between production and consumption has been growing over the years. Iran has

the second biggest reserves of natural gas in the world. But mismanagement and lack of investment in the gas industry because of US sanctions have meant that it cannot pump enough gas to homes or industry. Many power plants that run on gas have been forced to shut down. Others are using heavy fuel oil, adding to the worsening pollution. Also, many factories have stopped working, throwing the economy already on its knees into further trouble with plunging value of the currency. President Pezyshkian says he hopes things will get better next year. Kazanagi.

Now to Ukraine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces took the first soldiers of North Korea into captivity. A clip from a video posted online by Ukraine's security service appearing to show two captured North Korean soldiers detained in Russia's Kursk region, which is partly occupied by Ukraine. Kiev says North Korean troops entered the war on Russia's side in October. Ukraine and South Korea also say that Pyongyang has sent at least 10,000 troops

to Russia. But this is the first time the capture of North Koreans as prisoners of war in the current conflict has been announced. Eastern Europe correspondent Sarah Rainsford is following developments. Well they've released photos and video and one of the videos shows what Ukraine is calling a special operation by its elite forces to go into the Kursk region of Russia which of course is partially occupied by Ukrainian troops and then to pinpoint and to capture North Korean soldiers. You can see in the video that one man is being dragged from some trenches and then taken away.

There are then photos and video from in a prison cell or two prison cells, which we're told are here in Kiev, where the men were then interrogated. And what Ukraine has announced is the successful capture of two North Korean soldiers. The SPU intelligence agency is saying that they were both professional military members from North Korea and that they have both told

their interrogators that they were taken to Russia where they thought they were going to undergo training but where they then ended up in the war involved in fighting Ukrainian forces on Russian territory. So this is all information coming from Ukraine but we have seen the the photos and the video they show two men both with injuries one to their hands and one with his face bandaged up but there is also a doctor who says that other than those visible injuries, both men are physically in reasonable shape. What's Russia saying about the involvement of North Korean soldiers in the region? Well, the last time Vladimir Putin was directly asked about it, he didn't deny that there

were troops being deployed. He said that there was a mutual defence pact between North Korea and Russia and that it was up to Russia to decide how to implement that. But there's never been any direct proof of North Korean soldiers actually operating alongside Russian troops and that's why Kiev is really bigging this up and pointing to it as a very, very successful operation which they say is definitive proof that those North Korean soldiers are fighting alongside Russians. That was Sarah Rainsford. Germany has been using three tugboats to try to move an oil tanker away from its northern coast. The vessel is believed to be part of Russia's Shadow Fleet, which is used to avoid Western

sanctions. Moscow hasn't commented. Here's our Europe regional editor Paul Moss. With 100,000 tonnes of oil on board, the 275 metre eventin clearly represented a threat to the environment. It had suffered a total power failure and began floating out of control. Tugboats had been trying to drag the vessel to safe waters but were hampered by high waves and stormy weather. The vessel's registered in Panama but Germany believes it's really part of Russia's so-called shadow fleet used to break international sanctions. There'd been repeated warnings that this illegal marine force is made up of

unseaworthy vessels. Germany's foreign minister Anna Baerbock said Vladimir Putin didn't care about the risks these posed while Ukraine's president Zelensky called the event in an oil bomb, which fortunately hadn't detonated. That was Paul Moss. Still to come. 61-year-old man visited a seafood market, which seemed to be the center of a cluster of cases

in the city of Wuhan in China. Five years on since the first reported death from Covid-19. I'm Nicola Cochlin and for BBC Radio 4, this is history's youngest heroes. Rebellion, risk and the radical power of youth. She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself. 12 stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them. That resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now.

Follow History's Youngest Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Next to Sudan, the war between the army and paramilitary rapid support forces or RSF has been raging since April 2023. Now the Sudanese army says its troops have entered the city of Wad Madani, the capital of Al Jazeera state in the east of the country, which has been under RSF control for more than a year. So just how significant is this development? Andrew Oceang is our Africa editor. It's very significant. A lot of analysts are saying that it's the biggest gain for the army in a year, in two years, since they recaptured Omdurman, just the twin city of Khartoum. So it's a significant win. It will boost their morale in the civil war. So yeah, the biggest win in a very long time since the civil war began.

Could it potentially be a turning point? Probably not. The RSF still controls a large part of the West, the areas of Darfur. If you remember, the only place they don't control in that area is Al Fashir, that's the city which they've been fighting for so long to take a hold of. So it might be a while before the army controls the whole country. And what do we know about how the city was taken? The army has been taking a few cities in the state, in Al Jazeera state, for a few days now and yesterday and today morning they've been saying they've made some gains here and there,

some small towns. In the morning, they said they're taking a key bridge, getting into the city. And the army said they had entered the city, the Minister of Information saying they have liberated the city. The army is saying that they're trying to remove the remnants of the RSF that are still inside the city. So maybe that will take some time to complete. Remember that RSF is more or less a militia that is embedded in civilians as well sometimes.

So it might be difficult to completely get rid of them from the city. Andrew Oceang. It was the biggest rape trial in French history. Giselle Pellico, the wife, mother and grandmother who waived her right to anonymity and became a global feminist icon. And Dominique Pellico, the man who drugged and raped her. He had invited 50 men into their home to abuse her while she slept. Caroline Darien is the daughter of Giselle and Dominique Pelico and believes that her father also drugged and assaulted her. After standing alongside her mother in court and facing down her father, she's written a book about her experience. Entitled

I'll Never Call Him Dad Again, she's spoken in an exclusive interview with the BBC. Our reporter Anna Collinson listened to it and a warning her report deals with the theme of sexual abuse. I don't really remember the father that I was, that I thought he was. I look straight to the criminal, to the sexual criminal he is. Caroline Darien's life changed forever in November 2020. She discovered her father, Dominique Pelico, had repeatedly drugged and raped her mother

and encouraged dozens of other men to abuse her too. She's been speaking to the BBC's Emma Barnett. I was so close from my father. I was so close from my father, you can't imagine how hurt it is. It was a nightmare. That nightmare became even darker when police told Caroline they'd found semi-naked pictures of her on her father's laptop. And I was shown two pictures of me, totally unconscious, with a pants which is not mine. So you know I was in shock. At the trial she hoped her father would admit he'd sexually abused her, but he's always denied it.

I'm convinced that he raped me, yes. The only difference between my mum and me, I don't have any evidence like she did. Giselle Pellico has been hailed as a feminist icon while her ex-husband and dozens of other men are in prison. Caroline says the public needs protecting from the man she no longer calls dad. He should die in prison. He is a dangerous man. He is dangerous.

I don't want to think that I'm Dominique's daughter. I want to be proud of the rest of our family. I think we all have a responsibility to speak up. Caroline Daria ending that report by Anna Collinson. Five years ago, on the 11th of January 2020, health officials in the central Chinese city of Wuhan announced that a 61-year-old man had died from complications of pneumonia caused by a previously unknown virus. It was the first reported death of COVID-19 and the beginning of the pandemic, which the World Health Organization says has claimed more than seven million lives. Our Asia Pacific editor Mickey Bristo told us more. I've just dug out the original press release

issued by the World Health Organization about this first death which happened five years ago and obviously I'm looking at it with hindsight but it seems a little bit naive, underplaying what was going on. This death when they described it a 61 year old man who'd visited a seafood market which seemed to be the center of a cluster of cases in the city of Wuhan in China. They describe this man as having underlying health conditions and there'd be no clear indication of human to human transmission. So at that point, the World Health Organization weren't really sounding too many alarm bells. They were concerned that they were working on it, but they certainly weren't expecting the deaths which were to come. And we're talking about

now more than 7 million officially registered, perhaps many millions more died. Is China marking this anniversary? No, in a word. And really that fits in the way that China's tried to control the narrative throughout the whole of the pandemic. There's very little I've had a look on the state media in China, which is very, very controlled by the authorities. There's nothing about the COVID anniversary and considering the number of people who've died, the amount of suffering, the isolation

that people went through, the testing, the effect it's had on the economy, on the psychology of people, there's none of it. No discussion at all. The only discussion I can find in any of the press about a virus is the Chinese government complaining about a virus we already Chinese government complaining about a virus We already know about people are hyping it up and they shouldn't be talking about it

That's that's the only article I can find in today's papers in China about Any kind of virus and that's nothing to do with kovat. It's interesting. You talked about the original news release from the WHO You said it sounded naive. What more do we actually know five years on than we did then? Certainly, there have been advances in the terms of delivering inoculations. I'm presuming there's been advances in preparation for future pandemics. I'm hoping that's the case. But I'm not a doctor, so I can't really talk about the very specific events taking place. But what I can say is that when you look at a press release released by the World Health Organization just a week or so ago to mark the start of a series of anniversaries, five year anniversaries, they say this. They say they want China, they continue to call on China to

release and share data and give access to data about the origins of Covid. Mickey Bristo. Despite the wildfires in Los Angeles, Oscar voters are in the midst of casting their ballots to determine this year's slate of nominees. Three films from the Middle East, made by Palestinian filmmakers, have already made it onto the preliminary short lists. While these movies have been garnering critical acclaim, some Israeli film industry figures claim there's been an imbalance and say the Israeli narrative is being shut out. Tom Brook reports. The Palestinian film from Ground Zero has made it onto the preliminary shortlist for

Best International Feature of the Oscars. It's an ambitious undertaking, an anthology of 22 short films made by filmmakers in Gaza, detailing life in the midst of war. The anthology was curated by Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi. He spoke to me from a film festival in Tunisia. To him, the aim of his Gaza anthology was not to create a film full of political rhetoric. We are not going into any political debate. We are going to deal only with the daily life and personal stories of the human being,

how they are facing these days of this war. So these short films tell a variety of stories of routines being interrupted amid the chaos of war. The stand-up comic who goes to a venue where he is to perform only to find it's been bombed. In another short there's dark humour on display when we meet a young man who sleeps in a body bag, knowing that is where he may end up. The anthology opens with a young woman who uses makeup to maintain a positive outlook amid the stress. The film has impressed critics who believe it's offering images from Gaza quite different from topical news journalism, stories of lives that audiences

can relate to. From Ground Zero is just one of three films and Palestinian filmmakers shortlisted for an Oscar. There's also No Other Land, which chronicles efforts of the Israeli military to demolish homes and evict Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, what is often referred to as forced transfer. The film is made by an Israeli-Palestinian collective that includes Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. We are a collective, so it's two Israelis and two Palestinians, and we filmed it over

five years together, so we really captured this process of forced transfer. And we also filmed ourselves, so the story is also about our own activism and our own sort of co-resistance and work. The other film from a Palestinian director shortlisted for an Oscar in the best live action short film category is An Orange from Jaffa, which details the frustrations of a young Palestinian and a taxi driver at an Israeli checkpoint. At times these Oscar shortlisted films are conveying harsh images of Israeli military action. Those who care how Israel is being perceived globally maintain only one side of the narrative

is being embraced by awards events and film festivals, because in the wake of the Israel-Gaza War Israeli films, they claim, are being shut out. Isaac Zablocki is director of the Israel Film Center in New York. In the film festivals, the major film festivals around the world, they were taking Israeli films constantly, and suddenly there are no Israeli films being accepted to these international film festivals and not being seen by anyone outside of Israel.

It is so important to see, first of all, sides that you don't agree with, see the other side, but to see both sides is crucial. The film industry likes to think of Oscars night as a celebration, as an occasion for Hollywood to dress up and pat itself on the back. But if any of these Palestinian films wins, it will have a sobering effect, puncturing the merriment if only for a moment, to remind

audiences that one of the world's most intractable conflicts still remains unresolved. That report by Tom Brook. Netflix and other streaming services have broadened our entertainment horizons with their selection of foreign language dramas and films. And although there's always the option of subtitles, many have broadened our entertainment horizons with their selection of foreign language dramas and films. And although there's always the option of subtitles, many viewers prefer to watch the dubbed version. But what happens when a well-known voice is no longer available? That's the dilemma that movie executives in France have been facing, as the voice of Sylvester Stallone for 50 years, Alain Dorval, died last February at the age of 77.

Instead of a new voiceover artist being chosen, a cloned AI version of Mr. Dorval's voice is now being used. My colleague Caroline Wyatt has been speaking to the TV and film critic Siobhan Sinnott. Alain Dorval has been the voice of Stallone for the best part of 50 years. The problem is that he passed away last year, so the choices were find a sound-alike or collaborate with Eleven Labs, the AI technology, and synthesise Dorval's voice. How hard is it to get the dialogue, those dubbed voiceovers, right? So they reflect not just the words of the script, but the idiom and the meaning of them. You look at Squid Game, for example, a huge hit for Netflix during lockdown,

but the dubbed voices were definitely not a big selling point. I started watching the dubbed version and switched to the subtitled version because the dubbed voice actors were so, so bland and really failed to match the emoting of the acting that was going on on screen. That's great. Building an egalitarian society. Oh, about that, Grandma, Why did you get kicked out? Grandma? Don't you ever call me that! And there is, as you mentioned, now a much wider conversation about the use of AI in the film industry.

If an actor agrees to live on in film even after their own death, do you think an AI voice can ever get the tone and the character of that actor right? I think it's significant that for example at Christmas time there was a new adventure for Wallace and Gromit and it was the first full-length feature film where Wallace's voice wasn't provided by the actor Peter Salas because he died in 2017. And rather than looking towards AI, which Aardman Animations had experimented a little bit, but they used the actor Ben Whitehead, who grew up as a fan of the first film, Grand Day Out. He did impressions of the characters and by 2009, you know,

he was very much the heir to Wallace. Morning, Gromit. How's my favourite pooch? Another great day of inventing beckons. So there you had not an AI solution but a real live actor. TV and film critic Siobhan Sinnott. And that's it from us for now but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you would like to comment on this edition or the topics covered in it, do please send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find

us on x at global news pod. This edition was mixed by Ben Martin. The producer was Liam McSheffrey. Our editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jackie Leonard and until next time, goodbye. What do Tiger Woods, Mark Zuckerberg and Taylor Swift all have in common? Well, their lives and fortunes are all being discussed on Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast exploring the minds, motives and the money of some of the world's wealthiest individuals. I'm Zing Zing, and each week my co-presenter Simon Jack and I take a closer look at the world's mega-rich, and we try to decide whether they're good, bad, or just another billionaire. From celebs and CEOs to sports stars and tech titans, find out how billionaires made their

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