As Israel continues its genocide on Gaza, it is ramping up its attacks in Lebanon and Syria while the US strikes Iraq and Yemen, bringing the Middle East closer to the brink of regional war. 

To discuss this and more, Rania Khalek is joined by veteran war correspondent and analyst Elijah Magnier for a special live episode of Dispatches.  

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A look back on some of the best bits of News Quizzing from 2023

In this compilation episode Andy Zaltzman casts his satirical eye over the highs and lows of the year, in which the UK managed to hold of a Prime Minister for more than a year (well done us), The Economy moved about as erratically as a paper plane in a snow storm, and there were some events in the Middle East that made doing a light-hearted topical news show a bit of a challenge at times...

Hosted and written by Andy Zaltzman.

Producer: Sam Holmes Executive Producer: James Robinson Production Coordinator: Jodie Charman

A BBC Studios Production

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis present the week via topical stand-up and sketches. Featuring Geoff Norcott looking in the proposal of a Minister for Men, Harriet Kemsley on Kim Jong Un's pleas to North Korea, and an original song from Peter Rugman.

The show was written by the cast with additional material from Adrian Gray, Miranda Holms, Rajiv Karia, Cameron Loxdale and Laura Major.

Voice Actors: Daniel Barker and Chiara Goldsmith.

Producer: Rajiv Karia Production Coordinator: Katie Baum

A BBC Studios Production for Radio 4

Our friend Séamus joins us from Beirut to discuss the escalating regional elements of Israel’s war on Gaza. We look at Israel’s recent strike on a Hamas leader in Beirut, Yemeni actions restricting cargo shipping in the red sea, and the deadly bomb attack on a Soleimani memorial in Iran. We also touch on the differences between American and Lebanese media’s treatment of the events, including the recent media circus around Harvard’s president.

Find Séamus’ writing on international affairs at his substack here: https://www.seamus-malekafzali.com/

And pick-up the new game from the TrueAnon crew at: http://trueanon.com/stc

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Ryan and Emily discuss Israel assassinating a top Iranian leader in Lebanon, family member tears into NYT for inaccurate Oct 7th report, Harvard President Claudine Gay Resigns, Jimmy Kimmel threatens Aaron Rogers with lawsuit over Epstein allegation, Congress caught profiting from Israel war, and tech leader Paul Biggar exposes the industries Pro-Israel bias.

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By Dan Gearino

EV shoppers woke up on Monday to a market in which fewer vehicles than before qualify for the U.S. government’s $7,500 federal tax credit.

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America runs its war in Afghanistan on the cheap — and subcontracts to crooks, kingpins, and gangsters.

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Stavvy baby joins us to ring in the New Year with some talk on Christmas gift-giving, review some recent comedic offerings from Israeli TV and Tucker Carlson’s X show, and finally to look at some of recent political developments in the great city of Baltimore and state of Maryland.

Watch Stav’s special “Fat Rascal”, streaming now on Netflix.

And listen to the Stavvy’s World podcast wherever you get podcasts.

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Did you know that every time you perform a Google search, you're using technology invented by a medieval polymath in Oxford? That's just one of the many interesting insights in Phillip Adams' conversations about how the index, the crossword and the encyclopedia were invented - and why they stuck. 

Krystal comes with a breaking segment on Israel's war hawks demanding US attack Iran.

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Finding enough quiet focused time to record audio is a challenge. I often have to re-record segments in order to correct brain hiccups or to restart after interruptions. It's also hard for me to sit still and listen to my recordings looking for mistakes to edit out. I'm not familiar enough with Audacity to zip around with keyboard shortcuts, and I don't like listening to myself again and again in order to find my way around an audio file.

Sure, I could take the transcript, align it with subed-align and Aeneas to get the timestamps, and then use subed-convert to get a CSV (actually a TSV since it uses tabs) that I can import into Audacity as labels, but it still feels a little awkward to navigate. I have to zoom in a lot for the text to be readable.

Figure 1: Audacity labels

So here's a workflow I've been experimenting with for cleaning up my recorded audio.

Just like with my audio braindumps, I use Google Recorder on my phone because I can get the audio file and a rough transcript, and because the microphone on it is better than on my laptop. For narration recordings, I hide in the closet because the clothes muffle echoes. I don't feel as self-conscious there as I might be if I recorded in the kitchen, where my computer usually is. I used to record in Emacs using subed-record by pressing left to redo a segment and right to move on to the next one, but using my phone means I don't have to deal with the computer's noises or get the good mic from downstairs.

I start the recorder on my phone and then switch to my Org file in Orgzly Revived, where I've added my script. I read it as far as I can go. If I want to redo a segment, I say "Oops" and then just redo the last phrase or so.

I export the transcript and the M4A audio file using Syncthing, which copies them to my computer. I have a function that copies the latest recording and even sets things up for removing oops segments (my-subed-copy-latest-phone-recording, which calls my-split-oops). If I want to process several files, I can copy them over with my-subed-copy-recording.

(defun my-subed-copy-latest-phone-recording (destination)
  "Copy the latest recording transcript and audio to DESTINATION."
  (interactive
   (list
    (file-name-directory
     (read-file-name (format "Move %s to: "
                             (file-name-base (my-latest-file my-phone-recording-dir ".txt")))
                     nil nil nil nil #'file-directory-p))))
  (let ((base (file-name-base (my-latest-file my-phone-recording-dir ".txt"))))
    (rename-file (expand-file-name (concat base ".txt") my-phone-recording-dir)
                 destination)
    (rename-file (expand-file-name (concat base ".m4a") my-phone-recording-dir)
                 destination)
    (find-file (expand-file-name (concat base ".txt") destination))
    (save-excursion (my-split-oops))
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (flush-lines "^$")
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (subed-forward-subtitle-id)
    (subed-set-subtitle-comment
     (concat "#+OUTPUT: "
             (file-name-base (buffer-file-name))
             "-cleaned.opus"))))

(defun my-subed-copy-recording (filename destination)
  (interactive
   (list
    (buffer-file-name)
    (file-name-directory
     (read-file-name (format "Copy %s to: "
                             (file-name-base (buffer-file-name)))
                     nil nil nil nil #'file-directory-p))))
  (dolist (ext '("m4a" "txt" "json" "vtt"))
    (when (file-exists-p (concat (file-name-sans-extension filename) "." ext))
      (copy-file (concat (file-name-sans-extension filename) "." ext)
                 destination t)))
  (when (get-file-buffer filename)
    (kill-buffer (get-file-buffer filename))
    (dired destination)))

I'll use Aeneas to get the timestamps for each line of text, so a little bit of text processing will let me identify the segments that I want to remove. The way my-split-oops works is that it looks for "oops" in the transcript. Whenever it finds "oops", it adds a newline afterwards. Then it takes the next five words and sees if it can search backward for them within 300 characters. If it finds the words, then that's the start of my repeated segment, and we can add a newline before that. If it doesn't find the words, we try again with four words, then three, then two, then one. I can also manually review the file and see if the oopses are well lined up. When they're detected properly, I should see partially duplicated lines.

I used to record using sub-record by using by. Oops,
I used to record. Oops,
I used to record an emacs using subhead record, by pressing left to reduce segment, and write to move on to the next one.
But using my phone means, I don't have to deal with them. Oops.
But using my phone means, I don't have to deal with the computer's noises or get the good mic from downstairs. I started recorder on my phone

(defun my-split-oops ()
  "Look for oops and make it easier to split."
  (interactive)
  (let ((scan-window 300))
    (while (re-search-forward "oops[,\.]?[ \n]+" nil t)
      (let ((start (min (line-beginning-position) (- (point) scan-window)))
            start-search
            found
            search-for)
        (if (bolp)
            (progn
              (backward-char)
              (setq start (min (line-beginning-position) (- (point) scan-window))))
          (insert "\n"))
        (save-excursion
          (setq start-search (point))
          ;; look for 1..3 words back
          (goto-char
           (or
            (cl-loop
             for n downfrom 4 downto 1
             do
             (save-excursion
               (dotimes (_ n) (forward-word))
               (setq search-for (downcase (string-trim (buffer-substring start-search (point)))))
               (goto-char start-search)
               (when (re-search-backward (regexp-quote search-for) start t)
                 (goto-char (match-beginning 0))
                 (cl-return (point)))))
            (and (call-interactively 'isearch-backward) (point))))
          (insert "\n"))))))

Once the lines are split up, I use subed-align and get a VTT file. The oops segments will be in their own subtitles.

Figure 2: Subtitles and waveforms

The timestamps still need a bit of tweaking sometimes, so I use subed-waveform-show-current or subed-waveform-show-all. I can use the following bindings:

• middle-click to play a sample
• M-left-click to set the start and copy to the previous subtitle
• left-click to set the start without changing the previous one
• M-right-click to set the end and copy to the next subtitle
• right-click to set the end without changing the next one
• M-j to jump to the current subtitle and play it again in MPV
• M-J to jump to close to the end of the current subtitle and play it in MPV

I use my-subed-delete-oops to delete the oops segments. I can also just mark them for skipping by calling C-u M-x my-subed-delete-oops instead.

Then I add a #+OUTPUT: filename-cleaned.opus comment under a NOTE near the beginning of the file. This tells subed-record~compile-audio where to put the output.

WEBVTT

NOTE #+SKIP

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.319
Finding enough. Oops.

NOTE
#+OUTPUT: 2023-12-subed-record-cleaned.opus

00:00:10.320 --> 00:00:36.319
Finding enough quiet Focused. Time to record. Audio is a challenge. I often have to re-record segments in order to correct brain hiccups, or to restart after interruptions.

I can test short segments by marking the region with C-SPC and using subed-record-compile-try-flow. This lets me check if the transitions between segments make sense.

When I'm happy with everything, I can use subed-record-compile-audio to extract the segments specified by the start and end times of each subtitle and concatenate them one after the other in the audio file specified by the output. The result should be a clean audio file.

If I need to compile an audio file from several takes, I process each take separately. Once I've adjusted the timestamps and deleted or skipped the oops segments, I add #+AUDIO: input-filename.opus to a NOTE at the beginning of the file. subed-record-insert-audio-source-note makes this easier. Then I copy the file's subtitles into my main file. subed-record-compile-audio will take the audio from whichever file was specified by the #+AUDIO: comment, so I can use audio from different files.

NOTE
#+AUDIO: 2023-11-11-emacsconf.m4a

00:10:55.617 --> 00:10:58.136
Sometimes we send emails one at a time.

NOTE
#+AUDIO: 2023-11-15-emacsconf.m4a

00:10:55.625 --> 00:11:03.539
Like when you let a speaker know that we've received a proposal That's mostly a matter of plugging the talks properties into the right places in the template.

Now I have a clean audio file that corresponds to my script. I can use subed-align on my script to get the timestamps for each line using the cleaned audio. Once I have a subtitle file, I can use emacsconf-subed-split (in emacsconf-subed.el - which I probably should add to subed-mode sometime) to quickly split the captions up to fit the line lengths. Then I redo the timestamps with subed-align and adjust timestamps with subed-waveform-show-current.

So that's how I go from rough recordings with stutters and oopses to a clean audio file with captions based on my script. People can probably edit faster with Audacity wizardry or the AI audio editors that are in vogue these days, but this little workflow gets around my impatience with audio by turning it into (mostly) text, so that's cool. Let's see if I can make more presentations now that I've gotten the audio side figured out!

Links:

• https://github.com/sachac/subed
• https://github.com/sachac/subed-record
• https://github.com/sachac/compile-media (which subed-record uses to make ffmpeg commands)
• https://readbeyond.it/aeneas - forced alignment tool

By targeting hospitals and doctors while cutting off water, food and electricity and concentrating Palestinians into smaller and smaller zones of death in Gaza, the Israelis are creating a public health crisis that will kill even more Palestinians with infectious diseases. 

To discuss this and more, Rania Khalek was joined by Lebanese medical doctor and public health researcher Anis Germany. 

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis present the week via topical stand-up and sketches. They're joined by David Eagle unpacking the Advent, Jessica Fostekew looking into the repeal of the New Zealand smoking ban, and an original song from Archie Henderson, performed with Becky CJ.

The show was written by the cast with additional material from Alex Garrick-Wright, Jade Gebbie, Rhiannon Shaw, Miranda Holms and Cody Dahler.

Voice Actors: Jason Forbes and Lola-Rose Maxwell.

Producer: Rajiv Karia Production Coordinator: Katie Baum

A BBC Studios Production for Radio 4

Ryan and Emily sit down with Israeli historian and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Raz Segal to ask him about Genocide and Gaza.

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Krystal gives a breaking update on Israel announcing a 7 Front War in the Middle East. 

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Democracy Now! 2023-12-27 Wednesday

• Headlines for December 27, 2023
• "Axis of Resistance": Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis Challenge U.S. & Israeli Power Amid Middle East Tension
• Who Funds Canary Mission? James Bamford on Group That Doxxes Students & Profs for Palestine Activism
• As Phone Line Breaks Up, Palestinian Journalist Akram al-Satarri Describes "Dire" Conditions in Gaza
• Palestine Exception: U.S. Colleges Suppress Free Speech, Academic Freedom for Students & Professors

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What does the genocide in Gaza mean for the surrounding Arab states? Do their oppositional responses even matter or is it all just symbolic? How will this impact the Abraham Accords and other normalization efforts? Why won’t the Gulf states use their oil as leverage to pressure the United States? How does the genocide in Gaza impact countries like Jordan and Syria? How is it affecting America’s standing in the world? What does it mean for Russia and China in an emerging multipolar world? 

To discuss this and other regional developments, Rania Khalek was joined by Giorgio Cafiero, the CEO of Gulf State Analytics, a Washington, D.C.-based geopolitical risk consultancy.

This is just part of this episode. The full interview is available for Breakthrough News Members only. Become a member at https://www.Patreon.com/BreakthroughNews to access the full episode and other exclusive content.

Copper turned comic Alfie Moore takes an audience through real-life crime scenarios. The topic, crime at Christmas. What's it like to be a bobby on the beat in the festive season?

This merry jaunt introduces us to a fun cavalcade of Christmas characters, including a gas station Grinch, an inebriated Mary and Joseph, and a Christmas Eve saviour...

Written and presented by Alfie Moore Script Editor: Will Ing Production Co-ordinator: Becky Carewe-Jeffries Producer: Sam Holmes

A BBC Studios Production