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. This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Valerie Saunderson. And at 14 hours GMT on Wednesday, the 10th of March, these are our main stories. We look at the impact of Syria's civil war on the country's young people, and we find trauma and pain, but also hope as Russia slows down Twitter, our correspondent in Moscow tells us what's behind the decision.

Also, whatever happens, the younger generation is smart. They'll figure out a way human race staff and passes are tougher. So we will survive and we will prosper.

Confident words from a leader of an ancient Indian community but cannot avoid extinction.

Also, this podcast, the military officer in charge ordered us to shoot at groups of more than five people. I have to desert the police department because I couldn't open fire on innocent people.

As protests continue in Myanmar, we hear how several police officers fled abroad after refusing to obey orders and how Japan's award for most sexist remark has been won by a woman MP. Is it a generation scarred forever? New research carried out by the International Red Cross underlines the deep trauma and loss experienced by young people in Syria and in exile in Lebanon and Germany after 10 years of war. Almost half of those surveyed, aged between 18 and 25, have had a close family or friend killed, and huge numbers have no income, while two thirds have been forced to leave their homes.

And ICRC spokeswoman in Beirut, Sara Azikiwe, told us about some of the challenges faced by young Syrians.

You've got millions of young Syrians pay a very heavy price. In the last 10 years, they've experienced more lives than one can ever endure, whether it's loss of loved ones or loss of their homes, loss of opportunities, control over their life as well. So between running from fighting to losing homes to missing on school, unable to get by, it has been very tough and they carry much heavier burdens and more responsibilities than their age.

Correspondent Mike Thompson has been speaking to Sara Kaseem, a student at Idlib University. Syrian regime forces may the siege of the area that we were living in by airplanes, missiles, rockets, and we lived for two years under that siege and we lost many people around us. So we agreed to leave Homs and we came here to Idlib.

What happened when you got to Idlib? When I came Idlib, I was very depressed. I refused to continue my study, but my family supported me, encouraged me to start once again from the beginning.

A survey carried out by the International Red Cross has found that the war has impacted badly on the mental health of many young people in Syria who suffer from things like sleep disorders, depression, anxiety and many other problems. Has that affected you?

Yes, for a period of time I was affected like I lost my home and I lost my faith even in myself. And I thought terrible thoughts. My little sister, she suffered a lot when she was very young in the bombing and the shelling that were going on in my city. So she became a very scared person, frightened all the time. And now my sister couldn't even continue her studying.

Sara Kaseem, a Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen has reported extensively from Syria and asked him for his thoughts on the impact of the civil war on young Syrians.

I think it's pretty hard for anybody who hasn't personally experienced it. You know, journalists like myself, we dip in and deep out. It's you know, if you think of the effects of the pandemic on people's lives in the last year and multiply it by about a thousand and then multiply it by 10 years instead of one year and with no end in sight, will you get some notion? You know, the numbers in that ICRC survey are quite extraordinary.

40 percent said they were illiterate, never went to school, or at best only got to primary level. Two thirds said they'd had anxiety and as said, they had depression. One in seven young men have been wounded during the years of war. And, you know, you spoke to university student there. The vast majority of university students are female for some reason. Men don't make it in there. Possibly, I don't know, maybe some of them end up having to carry guns.

You're talking about a broken country and millions of lives which have been destroyed in ways which it's really very hard to get your head around.

And yet these young Syrians, I mean, they say they're optimistic about the future, 70 percent of them. Are you surprised by that?

Well, I think it's a remarkable tribute to their resilience. I think part of it is youth. You know, they've got a lot of years ahead. Things can only get better. I think when you've seen the worst, then you can hope for the best. Those who are in Germany, I think, say that in the survey said that they felt very accepted there. And they have got access, of course, to the kinds of things you'd expect in a first world country.

But you know that the issue with Syria is that while the regime has saved itself, the country has been destroyed. The legitimacy of the regime, such as it was, has not been restored. Stability has not been restored. There are foreign powers occupying parts of the country. There are renewed waves of violence and instability and a regeneration as well of ISIS.

I mean, you name it, it's bad that Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen Russia says it's restricting the speed of Twitter on the. Signs that the social media giant has failed to remove banned content in recent months, Moscow is Western tech giants like Facebook and Twitter under increasing pressure for failing to take down calls to participate in anti-government demonstrations. Vitaly Shevchenko of our monitoring team told me what's been happening this morning.

Russia's media regulator said it was slowing down access to Twitter because it had failed to act on demands to remove illegal content such as child pornography, calls to commit suicide or to use drugs. Shortly after this. Twitter users started to report problems with accessing photos and video content and simultaneously a number of government websites, including Kremlin DOT Are You? The Parliament's website and the media regulator's own website went down and some saw this as an unintended side effects of the Twitter slowdown.

But the authorities denied that the two events were linked.

How much do you think it is a political decision, though? Because Twitter is used a lot, isn't it, by supporters of the opposition figure Alexei Navalny?

Well, yes, the authorities say they're fighting illegal content on social networks, but the fact remains that with the exception of a number of relatively small media outlets, social networks remain the main platform available to the opposition in Russia. The history of the Kremlin's relations with social media, the only type in Russia, which it does not yet control, also fueled speculation that this move may the political key. Social media, such as tick tock, for example, have come under pressure from the Russian authorities this year for sharing content related to opposition rallies.

Last month and in late January. And in June last year, the Russian media regulator Mazor gave up efforts to block another platform, Telecom, which it also accused of sharing illegal content after Russians, including key government figures, continued using it using circumvention tools such as virtual private networks.

And is that what people are doing now? At the moment, the effect does not seem to be that dramatic. The regulator said only 50 percent of PC computers, desktop computers will be affected and the slowdown only affects.

That's according to the regulator pictures and videos.

So so far, what I've seen on Twitter, people are still able to use the platform. It's just a bit slow. Vitaly Shivshankar.

Officials in Niger state in north central Nigeria have announced they're going to arm local vigilante groups with pump action rifles. They say they want to improve local security in a state where there has been an upsurge in attacks by bandits armed with AK 47 assault rifles. There's no police presence across much of the state, so it's hoped the vigilantes will fill the gap. But there are concerns that this measure will lead to more violence rather than less. Nnamdi Abbasi is a senior adviser on Nigeria for the International Crisis Group.

And Claire McDonnell asked him how limited is the police presence in the state?

The estimate is like one policeman to 6000 people. The population of the state and the state government says there's a security presence in only about 30 percent of communities in the state, and therefore it needs to do something to bridge that gap to make up for the deficit. And it's out of a desperate situation that it's taking on this action. But, of course, there are several issues arising from the action. Yeah, of course.

And just one of the most obvious ones that you've just raised is why aren't they addressing the deficit in the police force? Why are they finding that so difficult?

Well, it's not very clear. Why is that Nigeria doesn't have them state and local politics. It has a federal police force that is controlled by the federal government in Abuja. And that force all over the country now is terribly, terribly undermanned. But unfortunately, we haven't seen a step up in recruitment, in boosting the numbers, as you would expect, given the scale of the security problem. So there's a disconnect between federal government efforts and state government efforts, and most of the state governments are taking their destiny in their hands, given that the federal government isn't as responsive as it ought to be.

It's a risky endeavor.

Isn't that you know, you give AK 47 assault rifles while the bandits have got hold of them. So you give these vigilante groups pump action rifles.

That sounds like a bit of a recipe for escalating violence rather than the opposite.

Yes, indeed. It is about several issues involved. The first issue is even the legal basis for this action, because you may recall that in 2013, the Zamfara state government had embarked on a similar action, five 1500 double barrel guns that were to be issued to vigilantes. But then the federal Senate, you know, objected to the action and eventually the police refused to allow those guns to get to the. Vigilantes. So we are not sure exactly how the negative government is going to navigate through that legal hurdle this time, but secondly is the point you make about the mismatch between the rifles that funded so-called are using AK 47, PGS more recently RPG use and so on.

And then we're sending people with double barreled guns and pump action rifles to go and fix them. I mean, it's a very unequal match and it's going to lead to a much more complicated situation than we have at the moment.

Nnamdi Abbasi from the International Crisis Group speaking to Claire McDonnell. In India, the ancient religion known as Zoroastrianism is under threat. The faith goes back as far as 4000 years. Its beliefs include the existence of heaven, hell and a day of judgment, as well as a single God. But there are fewer than 60000 believers remaining across India, and the U.N. warns the religion is facing extinction. A global religion reporter, Suddaby Hadari, looks at efforts underway to give it a life.

25 year old Kasar Patel is a music composer.

My name and my dream has always been Hollywood. It's always being on the Oscar stage.

He has another ambition to find as a Western wife, but it's not easy. His small community of Zoroastrians known as Parsis in India are fighting for their religion, survival and no conversion rule. And restrictions around interfaith marriage means their numbers are dwindling. Some say dating and marriage within the faith is the solution. But with only a small pool of potential partners, finding the one is tough.

Oh, no, I haven't found the one for myself yet.

And that's where Zarine Heavy Wiler comes in. For the past 10 years, she's been working for free matching passes the year singles in the hope they will marry and have children to increase their numbers. Cassard is meeting matchmaker Zarine to help him find the Parsi wife.

I'm just doing my bit, trying my level best to get somebody within the community to protect their religion. If you've been Bonwit, you want to pass Mizrachi and go, Oh, I mean, I would love to have my fingers crossed. So yeah, I hope it works. Yeah, I hope so.

Zoroastrians fled religious persecution in ancient Persia over a millennia ago. When they first arrived in India, they made a promise not to convert others to their religion. Over the past eight years, the Indian government have been funding the new policy initiative, which gives free fertility treatment to posse's so they can have more children. Charmaine and Raymond have had two sons through the scheme full of water.

I have polycystic ovary syndrome and my parents were irregular. We wanted to have kids but couldn't. Then we found out that Jill Barshay could help us, so we asked for her treatment here.

Year after two years of treatment, we had our boy Mireia.

But under Indian law, women who have married outside the faith can't take part in the new policy initiative. 20 year old Kirishima would like to marry a policy in the future, but if she marries outside her religion, her children won't be recognised by her community. She thinks relaxing rules could help the faith survive.

I think the policy community is declining mainly because of the restrictions on partly women. But if a woman marries a non policy guy, their child cannot be raised as a pastor. So it has to be raised according to the religion of the guy, but for other purposes to relax.

Marriage rules are too much of a departure from their core beliefs, Zork says. Dustour is a priest and Parsi community leader.

And it's our traditions and our fabric which has survived over the years. And if we had married outside, then all this uniqueness would have been lost.

Despite these differences, Zoroastrians in India all agree the priorities to ensure their faith lives on.

Whatever happens, the younger generation is smart. They'll figure out a way human resources staff and policies are tougher. So we will survive and we will prosper, Pisey community leader Zech says.

Dustour ending that report from India by Sadoway Heydari.

And still to come in this edition of the Global Podcast, we take a trip to a shop in Sweden.

All right. Well, inside it looks like a regular convenience store. Milk, butter, biscuits, fresh vegetables, pineapple here, some cucumbers, but it's not like other shops.

We find out why and we hear how some people are happy with it, while others are not.

In Myanmar, security forces have been responding to daily protests with increasing violence, including the use of live ammunition.

That's the sound of demonstrators in Mandalay running for cover from gunfire in the country's biggest city, Yangon.

Hundreds of soldiers and police swooped on a railway station to arrest workers on strike in protest at the military coup which ousted the civilian leader on Sunday, Suu Kyi. Activists say the Burmese military are forcing strikers to go back to work at gunpoint. Meanwhile, on the border with India, our correspondent Rajini Vaidyanathan has been speaking to police officers who fled after refusing to shoot at protesters.

I'm standing in the northeast Indian state of Mizoram, but just on the other side of the banks here is the country of Myanmar. This river, which runs for some 400 kilometers, separates the two countries.

It's a cross here that dozens of people fleeing the military crackdown in Myanmar have fled.

We met a group of them, policemen and women, all in their 20s who say they fled the country after refusing to use violence against protesters.

Here, the military officer in charge ordered us to shoot at groups of more than five people. They said they take responsibility for all. I had to desert the police department because I couldn't open fire on innocent people.

Now, authorities in Myanmar have written to some local officials here in Mizoram asking that police officers are sent back to the country. Now, the ones we have spoken to are living in fear at the moment, but they believe that they are far safer here in India, even though many are separated from their family as the violence continues. Now, we're also hearing that security is being stepped up along this border. But from what we have seen, it looks fairly easy for people to be able to make that journey.

And some locals saying that they are expecting more and more people to cross over into India as a military crackdown in Myanmar continues to worsen.

Virginie Vaidyanathan, a Russian researcher who set out to discover who executed his grandfather in a gulag or one of the prison camps in the former Soviet Union, is now on the receiving end of a lawsuit. Denise Carrageenan put together a website that listed every individual he deemed to be complicit in the murder. Now, a relative of a person on that list is pressing defamation charges against him. It comes as opinion polls suggest nearly half of young Russians are unaware of the brutal history of the gulags.

Were up to eight million people were detained under Soviet rule and were huge numbers of them died. And Appelbaum is a senior fellow with the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and author of Gulag A History of the Soviet Camps. Claire MacDonell asked her about Dennis carrageenan search for the truth about what exactly happened to his grandfather.

Dennis Kerrigan is an amateur historian who began doing research about his family and in particular his grandfather, who was a victim of Stalin's purges. And in the course of doing the research, he uncovered a lot of names of local people, local policemen, who decided he had documentation that showed they were they were connected to his relatives death. He published all of this and began talking about it and attracted attention to it and made it a kind of cause. But in doing so, he angered some local people who were themselves relatives of the former perpetrators.

And one of them has threatened to sue him. And it seems he's also been interrogated by local police on this issue. So it shows that there's no consensus about Russia's past. There's no consensus about the history of the gulag. There's no agreement about who was a victim and who was a perpetrator. And there's no agreement about whether the history should be told.

And it's interesting, isn't it? Because two weeks ago, a Russian court rejected an appeal by another historian, Yuri Dmitriev, who exposed Stalin era crimes. He was ordered to be kept in jail and serve out a 13 year sentence. His supporters still say that's fabricated charges.

So it would seem there is a real problem with anyone bringing up recent history and asking questions about it.

The Yuri Dmitriev case is actually far more serious because he's somebody who's been working in his region of Russia, in Karelia for many, many years. And I actually met him there myself in the 1990s. And it seems that the local authorities there just don't want him investigating the past. They want to cover up the crimes of the past and they don't want any kind of reconciliation or any kind of acknowledgement of what happened.

We know through the system millions died and many more families were broken up through the gulag system. And there is this recent survey that says. Young Russians still seem unaware about the history of it and haven't a lot of them haven't heard of this Stalin era purges, don't even know what a gulag was. How is how important is it that that is rectified?

The loss of this history will, I think, prolong the trauma of the story for generations of Russians and who won't have any way of understanding why their country is the way it is, why their criminal justice system looks the way it does, why the power structure in their country looks the way it does. Everything about their current reality is very deeply bound up with the past, with the history of the gulag and the history of of mass arrests in Stalin's Russia.

These stories aren't banned in Russia for the most part. I mean, there are differences and different reasons, but it's simply not talked about is not a favorite topic. The leadership of the country wants people to focus on positive elements of the Soviet past. They want to talk about Stalin winning the Second World War, and they don't want to talk about what he did to Russians. So it's not even it's not even a story of of the mass murder of somebody else.

It's it's something that happened at home. And the lack of that, I think, will go on marking and distorting Russian politics and and really Russia's self-image and consciousness for many years to come.

Author Anne Applebaum speaking there to Claire McDonnell in Japan. The award for most sexist comment of the year has been won by a female MP from the country's ruling party and is Jonathan Savage explains. In Tokyo's Olympic year, it was a highly competitive field.

Ask most people outside Japan and they'd have thought one man was the runaway favorite to take the gold medal. Yoshiro Mori remark that women talk too much during meetings resulted in his resignation as the head of Tokyo's Olympic organizing committee. But in the eyes of Japanese voters, the 83 year old former prime minister didn't even come close. The winner was Mosquita, a female conservative politician who finished second last year for calling gay men and lesbians unproductive because they cannot have children.

Her victory came about because of what she said in a private meeting of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party last September. Women can lie as much as they like about sexual violence. The organizers of the ballot, a group of academics and campaigners called no to all sexist public speeches. Noisettes said the statement was misogynistic and unjustifiably presumes women's reports of sexual violence are false.

Diameter, diameter, the pole was organized to mark International Women's Day Monday when around 100 women and their allies marched through Tokyo.

It's an increasingly hot issue in Japan, ranked lowest of all developed countries in the World Economic Forum's 2020 Global Gender Gap Index and 121 first out of 153 in the world.

That said that even with the same educational background as men, there's still a gap such as not being able to go to the same university or get employed. I think there are many women who are upset now because of this, and I hope that women of the future can be proud to be women and that the world can exist without social inequality.

Despite public protests over her comments, MeOh Sugita remains in the diet and the Liberal Democratic Party. But campaigners point to Mr. Mori's resignation from the Board of Tokyo 2020. They say it shows that highlighting such comments can bring about social change.

Jonathan Savage. The global pandemic has highlighted the value of having grocery stores close to where we live. In Sweden, a new start up has come up with a solution to help neighborhoods that lost their local shops before covid-19. It's been opening stores that don't cost as much to run because they don't have any staff working there. Marty Savidge has been to one store in Hummelstown in eastern Sweden.

Dark clouds loom over the pine forests surrounding this small town where there's a school, a pizzeria, but for years, no local shops. Now, a red wooden container about the size of a mobile home is offering a lifeline. You open the door using an app.

All right. Well, inside, it looks like a regular convenience store. Milk, butter, biscuits, fresh vegetables, pineapple here, some cucumbers. And if you want to buy something, you open the up again, scan the barcode and what you want. And I just click pay and that's done. Haven't come across any stuff, any checkouts or any other customers yet.

Many of us have pressed, we have forgotten to buy potatoes. So it's nice to just be able to go two kilometers instead of going 10. Some people are worried that not everyone might be able to get the hang of the technology. I think it's very easy. It's like two clicks on the phone. My parents are 60, but they don't have a problem with it.

Critics argue to the idea wouldn't take off because it makes shopping a less sociable experience. But during the pandemic, when people have been encouraged to limit contact and distance from others, that's been a bonus. And the chain called Lifts has opened 20 new shops in rural neighborhoods.

A manager does come in once a week to restock and clean. There are cameras to help catch shoplifters because every purchase is tracked by the app. The company knows a lot about its customers. City neighborhoods are the next target for the business, and they're not alone in the U.S., Amazon has launched unmanned urban stores. And I'm now in central Stockholm, where a major supermarket chain, Coop, has set one up next to a coworking space. The idea is that members can grab snacks on the go and act as a test group for new ideas.

My name is John and says we have an office upstairs the first time I used it. It took a while to get the idea how it would work. I think you could improve it with, like, face recognition. Hello.

Cecilia Johansson, an entrepreneur working in tech and retail, also says there are challenges, of course, the older generation that have a habit of go to store and meet the person.

So that's definitely a hinder. But I also think we have seen like a rapid growth due to the covid. So we are open to new innovations.

How do you think this will affect local communities, though, if there isn't someone that you can go to chat to face to face?

I think the new door will open. There will be other ways to interact and other jobs in the societies.

And Coop says it's not planning mass job cuts if it does roll out more unmanned shops than existing staff will focus on providing better customer advice and experiences in its biggest stores.

With coronavirus cases on the rise here, though, that kind of sociable shopping experience will need to wait until after the pandemic. Marty Savidge reporting.

That's it from us, Fanaa. But there'll be an updated version of the Global News podcast later if you want to comment on this edition. While the topics we've covered in it, send us an email. The address is Global Podcast at BBC Seerat UK. This podcast was mixed by Emma Halligan, the producer. Rahel Sinak, the editor. As always, Karen Martin. I'm Valerie. To the next time. Bye bye.

Why do you get deja vu? Why are you attracted to symmetrical faces? Why do you listen to songs that bum you out?

I'm dusa the host of Deeply Human. When you cry, it can sometimes help you irrigate your emotions. We were attempting to induce deja vu through virtual reality.

I'm finding out what we all want to know. Why do you do it? To do deeply human. A BBC World Service and American Public Media co-production with Hard Media.

Just search for deeply human.