Global News Podcast - The Happy Pod: country star Jordan Davis wants more good news

Episode Date: March 16, 2024

This week, the singer Jordan Davis tells us how the need for more positive and uplifting stories inspired his latest song, Good News Sold. Also: the school children surfing the web without internet access, and the birth of a rare, bright orange baby monkey.

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service, with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Thank you. Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. Unfortunately, I think we all live in a world where the bad news sells. It's not the good stuff that's being heard. It's almost like my wish, my hope, that going forward,

we start focusing on the positive and not so much on the bad. A call to action for more good news stories from this American country music star. I'm Jordan Davis and this is The Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Harry Bly. This week we also hear from the team bringing online education offline to children in Senegal. In the box is a small portable server. Anyone nearby can connect their tablet computer, phone or laptop and start browsing. The bright orange baby monkey. It's quite odd because they almost look like they don't belong.

Born at a zoo here in the UK. And speaking of babies, is there a doctor on board? You know, it's a difficult enough childbirth in general, but 30,000 feet in the air, you know, I can only imagine how stressful this must have been for her. We meet the man who helped ensure a mother and baby came back down to earth safely. I'm Dr Hassan Khan, and I helped deliver a baby on a plane. You're listening to The Happy Pod. Let's begin with some music, country music. This is Good News Sold, and it's all about how much better we'd all feel

if there was less doom and gloom in the news. You can see why we like it. It's by one of the biggest stars of country music, Jordan Davis. He's been speaking to Adam Porter and said he liked the synergy with the happy pod. Definitely a perfect fit. That was a song that came to me a couple of years ago. You know, really kind of when I felt like the news was nothing bad. And unfortunately, I think we all live in a world where the bad news sells.

It's not the good stuff that's being heard. It's almost like my wish, my hope, that going forward we start focusing on the positive and not so much on the bad. So how did the song come to you then? Because I know you normally have a hand in writing your songs, but not this one. My brother's the co-writer on it. He wrote it and sent it to me the same day they wrote it. And I remember thinking like, hey man, why don't you bring this to me whenever we write? He's like, man, I was going to, but I threw it out in the room. He was writing with two great songwriters, Jordan Rowe and Cole Taylor. And we just started writing

it. It just kind of fell out so we had to finish it. So I was like well I wish I was the writer on it but I'm gonna cut it. Now we as journalists know that news avoidance is a big thing. People not wanting to turn on the news because they think it's going to be really bad. So do you think we could do more to put good news stories on? I think we probably all could. You know, it's not just journalists or news anchors. I think it's even just everyday people like myself. You know, if you see somebody that needs some help, help them out. You know, I think that's what my favorite thing about the song is.

It's helping somebody that needs help on a flat tire. Because a soldier came home and his son didn't know. It's sharing a story about a reunion with a son and a father. It's been years since he's been back. We'd all be crying watching that. It's those little things that I think are just as important as the big things. I don't think it's necessarily on y'all. You know, that's not fair.

I think it's on us to kind of highlight that stuff. And me personally, I think it's somebody that has the platform, you know, gets a chance to stand on a stage every night. You know, that's my chance to kind of highlight some of those things. And kind of combat the papers or the news channels that is kind of maybe just trying to get clicks or sell some story. It's on all of us. I mean, to be fair to you,

some of your biggest songs are really positive, aren't they? I'm thinking Next Thing You Know or By Dirt. A few days before he turned 80 I mean, people think country music is all heartbreak and murder ballads, but it doesn't have to be that way, does it? I'm definitely guilty of having a few of those myself, but I think what really I took a turn in my career as a songwriter, as an artist,

was whenever I just started writing really honestly. You know, writing about my life, my kids, the struggles I was going through, you know, that's when I felt like I really started connecting with people. Add a few limbs to your family tree and watch their pencil marks. You know, it's fun to write, as we call them in Nashville, the up-tempo hits that maybe lyrically aren't that deep. But it's more fun to write a song like Good News Soul and see it impact and see it connect. So I'm very grateful for the way people have been grabbing onto this one. Jordan Davis speaking to Adam Porter.

The internet, it's a vast source of information for the more than 4.5 billion of us who use it. Its uses are almost unlimited too. Social media, music streaming, podcasts, and arguably, more importantly, education. But many millions of schoolchildren and students around the world can't get online and for them this is a crucial learning resource that has been unavailable until now. A new system that allows children to browse millions of pages from the internet

whilst offline is being introduced in classrooms in Senegal where nearly half the population doesn't have access to the internet. The BBC's Borso Tal has been finding out more. I've travelled to a small tree-lined village in the remote far south-east of Senegal. There's no electricity here and no internet connectivity. I'm here to visit the local primary school. In front of me, the teacher, Mr. Diao,

has a large silver-lined black box about the size of a suitcase which he puts on the desk before opening. In here, I've got 12 tablets, an online server, a video projector, and a solar panel to charge the tablets. This is the Ideas Cube, a solution designed by the French NGO Bibliothèque Sans Frontières, or Libraries Without Borders,

so that students and teachers could still benefit from the wealth of information found on the Internet without having a proper connection. In the box is a small portable server. Anyone nearby can connect their tablet computer, phone or laptop and start browsing. But unlike a normal Wi-Fi hotspot, it's only possible to access a very limited offline version of the internet. Essentially, the Libraries Without Borders team have decided which bits of the internet will be the most useful for primary schools like this one.

And they've downloaded all of that data in advance. After powering up the server, Mr. Zhao hands out a tablet to each child. In this classroom, we have 35 students, 13 boys and 22 girls. My name is Aysa. What are you learning? What are your favorite subjects? Community life, history, awareness of the slave trade. They showed pictures, photos of people. I am happy to learn with the tablets.

It's fun and easy. But teachers like Mr. Zhao, whom we met earlier, being able to use educational resources like these without having to connect to the Internet has been a game changer. The kit is easy to use and it saves us time while teaching. Using the tablets or projector not only allowed us to get through more learning, but for the children to engage with the course. The videos in particular enable the student to grasp idea and concept much quicker than they would have otherwise. Since the project started in November 2023, Ideas Cube kits have been delivered to 70 schools

and used by around 15,000 children in this part of Senegal to learn everything from history to math and French. Borsotal in Senegal. And for more on that story and other innovative ways of improving access to education, including a textbook-sized science lab in Ghana and a night school for children in Pakistan, listen to BBC People Fixing the World wherever you found this podcast. Now, have you ever heard of a Francois Langer? Well, now you've heard one.

They're also known as Francois leaf monkeys and are native to China, Laos and northern Vietnam. But their numbers are dwindling. It's believed the population has halved to just 2,000 in the past four decades due to habitat loss and hunting. So you can imagine the excitement when a Francois Langer was born at a zoo here in the UK. The bright orange baby is being hailed as a sign of hope for the endangered species. I spoke to Sarah Forsyth, who's in charge of mammals at Whipsnade Zoo and started by asking her about that astonishing hair colour. Yeah, it's quite odd because the adults are black with a small amount of white on their faces, but they're predominantly black.

But the babies are born like a bright orange, so they almost look like they don't belong. Possibly just so that the adults can see them easier and can give them care easier. But that colour will gradually change to black over the first year just so that the adults can see them easier and can give them care easier. But that colour will gradually change to black over the first year and then they look the same as the adults. Tell me about the characteristics of these Francois Langers,

because we've talked before about monkeys like macaques. We talked a few weeks ago about an escaped monkey, which was a Japanese macaque. What are Francois langers like? I mean, like most monkeys and primates, they do have a tendency to be a bit cheeky and like to cause us a few challenges every now and again. But generally, Francois langers are pretty laid back. They're not overly aggressive and they're very nice to each other. They create a lovely, lovely family group. And although they like to make a lot of noise, I would say for a primate, they're actually

quite nice, quite chilled and really pleasant to work with. And what kind of noise do they make? So depending on what's going on at the time, if there's something they're not particularly happy about or they've seen something that worries them, whether that's another animal in another enclosure or something that's just going on around the exhibit, they kind of do like an alarm call, almost like a barking noise. So not quite like a howler monkey, but certainly not a quiet monkey either. No, they're not quiet. So certainly Wang, our male, who's dad, he's barking quite a lot on the top of his enclosure, looking out, surveilling

his kingdom and just kind of telling everybody that this is his area and sort of protecting the females. So yeah, he'll do quite a loud barking noise to let everybody know he's about. What does this mean for the future of the species here and also in its native countries? Well, we're a part of the European breeding program for this species so what we're basically trying to do is ensure we have a genetically stable and healthy population in a captive situation so that if things do improve in the wild and there is an opportunity for us to be able to send individuals back to the wild where it's safe to do so then we can do that.

But whilst obviously they are still facing challenges out in their range countries, then we know we've got a really healthy, stable population in our zoos. So the more babies we can have born and healthy and we know that, you know, we're providing them with the right diet and the right environment and that we can breed them and look after them properly, then we're ticking all of the boxes for ensuring that we're conserving this species for the future. Sarah Forsyth. And if you'd like to see this rare baby for yourself or help choose its name, you can go to whipsnadezoo.org. Staying with baby animals, vets at a wildlife centre in the US state of Virginia have devised an ingenious way of comforting an abandoned fox cub or kit, donning fox masks when they feed or handle it.

Melissa Stanley is the founder and director of the Richmond Wildlife Centre. We're always utilising masks to conceal us as humans. You don't want them to think that you're a mom. If we think about how a human baby, or even chimpanzees and other mammals, how they're relating with their mothers through eyesight, I think it's really important that if she were to open her eyes,

I don't want the first thing for her to see is to be a person. Such a young fox is not something that we see often at our wildlife center and so this is our first neonate and so I needed an emergency mask. We put a plea out and a great donor bought the mask and we got it 24 hours later. She was admitted at 80 grams. This morning she weighed 144 grams so she's eating really well. She's doing much better now that she has a fake stuffed mom fox to nurse on. The exciting news is that we did find some fox kits that are similar in weight and age for her and we will be transferring her in the upcoming days to get with those

kits as quickly as possible. And you can see this baby fox and Melissa in her mask. Just head over to the BBC website and search fox mask. Coming up in this podcast, a pregnant stingray, but how? People have written and said, well, they can hold male sperm, you know, for years. And I'm like, she's never been around a male. Take a listen to this. This is Notes of Chai featuring Prakash, one of a series of tracks that's been created at a recording studio in Germany using the tremors of people with Parkinson's disease. The project, called Tremors vs Tremors,

was designed to help provide relief for people with the condition. Wanda Betten is one of the sound engineers who worked on the tracks at Dachaus in Berlin. The role of the tremor in these songs is to make each one of the instruments that it's applied to sound unique. We put a lot of efforts in writing their own stories, in sounding, and also using the uniqueness of their tremors. I think we created something very special and unique for each one of them and still enjoyable for everyone that wants to listen to the tracks.

More than 10 million people around the world have Parkinson's and while tremors are perhaps the best known symptom, there are many others like pain, stiffness and loss of balance. Dr Chris Lambert from the UCL Queen's Square Institute of Neurology in London was one of those behind the project. We approached five individuals with Parkinson's who were affected by tremor in different ways and really took their narratives and their personal stories combined with recordings of their tremor to create the tracks. Our volunteers' responses were all quite unique. They all took very, very different things away from it. Parkinson's itself is an extremely

variable condition. How it affects one person is not how it affects another. And many of the symptoms are indeed hidden from view, which is part of the point of doing this project, was really to highlight that and bring attention to the hidden face of Parkinson's. So how did the music make the people who inspired it feel? Let's hear from Kuhan, Claire, John and Steph. I liked it. It was very me. I feel a physical change in my symptoms when I have an emotional reaction to things and there's nothing more emotional than a music that's based on me. This has given me the confidence to share that with other people and to explore, I guess, what my Parkinson's means to me

and how it affects or doesn't affect other people and just feel more confident about it, yeah. Isn't she incredible? I can also hear the tremor in the background in the intro, and it's obviously relaxing, and it drags me into it, so I can feel it. It made me think about how strong I am, really. And I think I'm learning

not to be self-conscious about it. There'sorsvstremors.com There are a few statements no one wants to hear when on a plane. One being, is there a doctor on board? Last weekend, a flight from Jordan to the UK had to be diverted to southern Italy after a woman went into labour mid-flight. When cabin crew asked if there was a doctor on board,

seven stood up. Dr Hassan Khan was one of them and I spoke to him about the mile-high birth. So we all went up to see what was happening and that's when we gathered that there was a lady who was seven months pregnant and her waters had broken. So we were possibly expecting a delivery in the air. There was an extra level of complexity here, wasn't there?

Because the woman who was giving birth, she doesn't speak English. Yeah, absolutely. I didn't think we need any more complicating factors but uh but there was the big one i did have to work through other fellow passengers who were helping me translate so that i could sort of gather some more information and get get sort of the message across to her about my level of experience and what i think might need to be done as fortunate as we were to have seven doctors on board none of us have actually had direct experience in that work capacity in obstetrics so then you know the next question became who's had experience dealing with neonates and very very young babies immediately after birth and I was the only one so therefore the sort of responsibility fell on my

shoulders to take charge of the situation. Right so you took the lead because of course this baby was born at seven months not nine. Yeah absolutely and that was sort of the main thing that was a bit of a worry in the initial situation, because seven months, of course, we're two months premature. So at that point in time, a number of different things are running in my mind about things we need to exclude, things I'm hoping aren't a problem in the air. I think you'd agree any kind of medical emergency on a flight in the air is scary. This must have been terrifying for this woman, given the extra complexities with not speaking English and obviously an early birth. It must have been terrifying for her. Yeah, definitely. I mean, that was my main sort of concern. You know, it's a difficult enough childbirth in general, but 30,000 feet in the air with not a way to speak clearly to the person or persons who are

trying to look after you and also being early at seven months, you know, I can only imagine how stressful this must have been for her. This situation is exceptionally rare. There aren't many babies born on planes in the air. The information that I had received at the time from airline staff was that there's only 74 previous births in the air that have happened in commercial aviation history, which was another thing that just shocked me because I knew it was rare. I knew this was not an unusual situation. I didn't think it was that exceptionally rare. And baby and mother, how are they doing now? Have you been able to see them again or speak to them since you handed them over to the paramedics? Yes, I've had a couple of

updates actually. About eight to ten hours after the birth, late afternoon on Saturday, we got an update from the hospital, from the family, that the baby and the mum were doing really well and the baby wasn't requiring an incubator or anything along those lines at that point in time, which is really, really good news. And that was a big sigh of relief. We got an update a few days later after that as well, again, to say that the baby and mum are still doing really, really well. And the doctors are happy with their progress so far, which again, is just really great to hear such positive news. Dr. Hassan Khan. Now, staying with unusual births, let's go to North Carolina to meet a stingray named Charlotte. She's become a bit of a celebrity because she's expecting four pups in the coming weeks, but hasn't been in a tank with a male stingray for eight years. How she became pregnant

is quite the mystery, as Nikki Cardwell has been finding out. My name is Kinsley, ultrasound name of Charlotte this afternoon. She's been nicknamed the miracle of Main Street. When the aquarium and shark lab in Hendonsville in North Carolina announced on social media that it was expecting the pitter-patter, or should that be splish-splash, of tiny fins, news of what could be a virgin birth went viral. The footage shared on social media of celebrity mum Charlotte

clearly shows her bump, and an ultrasound scan has confirmed that she was carrying a litter of pox. We did see some movement already. The question is, who's the daddy? Brenda Raymer from the aquarium told ABC News that they weren't sure at first because she had shark bites on her body. People have written and said well they can hold male sperm you know for years and I'm like she's never been around a

male until we put those two little boys in here. The scan has ruled out the two sharks who are Charlotte's only companions. The only other option is parthenogenesis, a process where cells spontaneously split inside a female's eggs and create an embryo. We think Charlotte is her own daddy. Parthenogenesis has never been documented in captive stingrays. Kevin Feldhain from the Field Museum in Chicago will test the pups when they're born, just to be sure. In hybrids of other species, sometimes you can tell because they're morphologically in between the two parent species. If this is in fact a shark-ray hybrid, we will be easily able to tell that it is in fact a hybrid. If it's by parthenogenesis, the only way is through the DNA testing. I would

stake my reputation that it's parthenogenesis and not hybridization between a shark and a ray. The question now occupying social media is when will the pups be born? Stingray gestation can vary dramatically, and because the keepers don't know when conception was, no-one is entirely sure when Charlotte is due. And still no babies. That is our update for today. Nicky Cardwell, and we will keep you updated when we find out more. If you ever feel like you're having a bad day at work, spare a thought for the tennis player Carlos Alcaraz. His match against Alexander Zverev was interrupted by bees.

They swarmed onto the court at Indian Wells in California, and when Alcaraz tried swatting them with his racket, he was stung and ran off court. When the match resumed two hours later, the Spaniards showed no ill effects, winning in straight sets. I've never seen something like that, so I think I will remember that match because of that. I think everybody will remember this situation and we found it as a funny thing, that's for sure. A beekeeper was called to remove the swarm. And that's almost it from us for now. So let's end on some more of that Jordan Davis song we heard at the start, which could almost have been written about the happy pod. Good news sold.

Thank you to all of you who've sent in your own rare and endangered languages. It's been a joy learning about them and the ways you're keeping them alive and teaching others. We hope to include them in a future edition. If you want to share yours or anything that made you smile, really, email us, globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. This edition was mixed by Lewis Alsop. The producers were Rachel Bulkley, Jacob Evans and Anna Murphy. The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Harry Bly. Until next time, goodbye. a woman. So what's the podcast about, Sachi? It's all about where in the world women are living their best lives, what female wellness looks like globally, and what the rest of us may be able to learn from it. And where can people find it? Just search for Where To Be A Woman wherever you get your BBC podcasts. And follow or subscribe so you never miss an episode. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. Thank you. from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts.