The series, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, is whether there is any spot, or place, that has not been subject to man’s effects. The series consist of five fifteen-minute programmes that were broadcast last Monday to Friday.
They are still available on BBC Sounds and if you can please listen to them.
We live in a world that is rapidly becoming more and more digital. But we also live in a world where the criminals are becoming better at carrying out their crimes. So a recent article in The Conversation seemed appropriate to republish.
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Scams and frauds: Here are the tactics criminals use on you in the age of AI and cryptocurrencies
Scammers often direct victims to convert cash to untraceable cryptocurrency and send it to them. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Scams are nothing new – fraud has existed as long as human greed. What changes are the tools.
Scammers thrive on exploiting vulnerable, uninformed users, and they adapt to whatever technologies or trends dominate the moment. In 2025, that means AI, cryptocurrencies and stolen personal data are their weapons of choice.
And, as always, the duty, fear and hope of their targets provide openings. Today, duty often means following instructions from bosses or co-workers, who scammers can impersonate. Fear is that a loved one, who scammers also can impersonate, is in danger. And hope is often for an investment scheme or job opportunity to pay off.
AI-powered scams and deepfakes
Artificial intelligence is no longer niche – it’s cheap, accessible and effective. While businesses use AI for advertising and customer support, scammers exploit the same tools to mimic reality, with disturbing precision.
Deepfake scams use high-tech tools and old-fashioned emotional manipulation.
Criminals are using AI-generated audio or video to impersonate CEOs, managers or even family members in distress. Employees have been tricked into transferring money or leaking sensitive data. Over 105,000 such deepfake attacks were recorded in the U.S. in 2024, costing more than US$200 million in the first quarter of 2025 alone. Victims often cannot distinguish synthetic voicesor faces from real ones.
Fraudsters are also using emotional manipulation. The scammers make phone calls or send convincing AI-written texts posing as relatives or friends in distress. Elderly victims in particular fall prey when they believe a grandchild or other family member is in urgent trouble. The Federal Trade Commission has outlined how scammers use fake emergencies to pose as relatives.
Cryptocurrency scams
Crypto remains the Wild West of finance — fast, unregulated and ripe for exploitation.
Pump-and-dump scammers artificially inflate the price of a cryptocurrency through hype on social media to lure investors with promises of huge returns – the pump – and then sell off their holdings – the dump – leaving victims with worthless tokens.
Pig butchering is a hybrid of romance scams and crypto fraud. Scammers build trust over weeks or months before persuading victims to invest in fake crypto platforms. Once the scammers have extracted enough money from the victim, they vanish.
Pig-butchering scams lure people into fake online relationships, often with devastating consequences.
Scammers also use cryptocurrencies as a means of extracting money from people in impersonation scams and other forms of fraud. For example, scammers direct victims to bitcoin ATMs to deposit large sums of cash and convert it to the untraceable cryptocurrency as payment for fictitious fines.
Phishing, smishing, tech support and jobs
Old scams don’t die; they evolve.
Phishing and smishing have been around for years. Victims are tricked into clicking links in emails or text messages, leading to malware downloads, credential theft or ransomware attacks. AI has made these lures eerily realistic, mimicking corporate tone, grammar and even video content.
Tech support scams often start with pop-ups on computer screens that warn of viruses or identity theft, urging users to call a number. Sometimes they begin with a direct cold call to the victim. Once the victim is on a call with the fake tech support, the scammers convince victims to grant remote access to their supposedly compromised computers. Once inside, scammers install malware, steal data, demand payment or all three.
Fake websites and listings are another current type of scam. Fraudulent sites impersonating universities or ticket sellers trick victims into paying for fake admissions, concerts or goods.
One example is when a website for “Southeastern Michigan University” came online and started offering details about admission. There is no such university. Eastern Michigan University filed a complaint that Southeastern Michigan University was copying its website and defrauding unsuspecting victims.
The rise of remote and gig work has opened new fraud avenues.
Victims are offered fake jobs with promises of high pay and flexible hours. In reality, scammers extract “placement fees” or harvest sensitive personal data such as Social Security numbers and bank details, which are later used for identity theft.
How you can protect yourself
Technology has changed, but the basic principles remain the same: Never click on suspicious links or download attachments from unknown senders, and enter personal information only if you are sure that the website is legitimate. Avoid using third-party apps or links. Legitimate businesses have apps or real websites of their own.
Enable two-factor authentication wherever possible. It provides security against stolen passwords. Keep software updated to patch security holes. Most software allows for automatic update or warns about applying a patch.
Remember that a legitimate business will never ask for personal information or a money transfer. Such requests are a red flag.
Relationships are a trickier matter. The state of California provides details on how people can avoid being victims of pig butchering.
Technology has supercharged age-old fraud. AI makes deception virtually indistinguishable from reality, crypto enables anonymous theft, and the remote-work era expands opportunities to trick people. The constant: Scammers prey on trust, urgency and ignorance. Awareness and skepticism remain your best defense.
Graham Greene, the Canadian First Nations actor who starred in films including Dances With Wolves, has died aged 73, his manager says.
“It is with deep sadness we announce the peaceful passing of award-winning legendary Canadian actor Graham Greene,” Gerry Jordan said in a statement to CBC News. The outlet reported he died of natural causes.
Greene scored an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Kevin Costner’s 1990 epic western, where he played Kicking Bird.
He was a member of the Oneida Nation, part of the Six Nations Reserve in southern Ontario.
Greene worked as a draftsman, civil technologist, steelworker and rock-band crew member before starting his career in theatre in the UK in the 1970s.
In a 2012 interview with Canadian publication Playback, he credited theatre with giving him a grounding for acting.
“It helps you build a character. When you get into film you don’t have that luxury. The discipline of theatre is what I recommend to all actors.”
In the same interview, he said a key moment for him came when he married his wife Hilary Blackmore, which led to “the best time of my life”.
His breakthrough came in 1990 when he played Kicking Bird, a Lakota medicine man, in Dances With Wolves. Greene won widespread acclaim for the role.
He also appeared in the 1992 western thriller Thunderheart, playing tribal officer Walter Crow Horse.
In the 1999 fantasy drama The Green Mile, Greene played Arlen Bitterbuck, a Native American man on death row in prison.
He also starred in Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995), Maverick (1994), The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) and Wind River (2017).
He picked up numerous awards through his storied career, including the Earle Grey Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Academy of Canadian Film and Television in 2004.
In 2016, he was inducted into the Order of Canada, the country’s second highest civilian honour.
Came across this a few days ago and you will love it!
The new world comes up with some marvellous treats. Here I was listening to the radio (BBC – Radio 4) from Southern Oregon and they had this item about a Scottish thatcher using a variety of plants to thatch roofs. The thatcher had been thatching for years.
Then a quick search on the internet found this video:
As many of you know I flew during my years when I was based in England. I flew as a hobby. Very quickly I realised that looking at the ground from a few thousand feet up gave one a unique view of the landscape.
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50 Years of Flying for Heritage
Damian Grady
Damian Grady is the Historic England Aerial Reconnaissance Manager. He joined the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England in 1990 to map archaeology from aerial photographs and from 1998 became responsible for managing the aerial reconnaissance programme.
Published 8 February 2017
On Wednesday 8 February 2017 Historic England celebrated 50 years of our flying programme. Since those early days in 1967 much has changed, but reconnaissance, the act of flying to record and monitor sites and landscapes of archaeological interest, is still at the heart of the work carried out by our research teams.
This article was originally written in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary but we have kept it live as it continues to be read and enjoyed.
On a cold February afternoon in 1967 an Auster, four-seater, light aircraft took off from Fairoaks airfield on the outskirts of south west London. This was the first test flight of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME), one of the predecessors of Historic England. On-board was the pilot, a photographer, Ron Parsons and John Hampton. John was responsible for setting up the RCHME Air Photo Library in 1965 to implement the commission’s resolution (1964) to “use air photography to build up rapidly a record of field monuments throughout England.”
In the beginning this involved acquiring aerial photographs to build up a library of images of archaeological sites. By 1967 it was felt that RCHME should take its own oblique aerial photographs in support of its field survey work. Oblique photographs are taken at an “oblique” angle to the ground, as opposed to directly from above. They are usually taken with a hand held camera through the open window of a plane. The main target at this time was cropmarks; the walls and ditches of buried archaeology can affect the rate at which plants grow over them, causing differences in colour and height. These cropmarks are not always visible on the ground, so the best way to look for them is from the air.
This first flight was very much an experiment. Flying from Fairoaks to Basingstoke, Tidbury Ring and back they photographed prehistoric sites on the chalk soils of Hampshire. Many of the sites had been ploughed recently and were seen as colour differences in the soil and germinating crops. During the 1.5 hour flight John Hampton learned a number of valuable lessons, such as the best height to fly, the best angle to use and to make sure there was plenty of film! The lessons learned from this and subsequent flights formed the foundation of 50 years of flying by the aerial reconnaissance team in RCHME, English Heritage and now Historic England.
Growth of the archive
At about the same time as this first flight the collection of aerial photographs grew with the arrival of the Crawford Collection from the Ordnance Survey. Later, in the 1970s, the Air Photo library acquired many more aerial photographs from archaeologists and private fliers keen to discover archaeological sites. One such flier was Derrick Riley who took this photograph of an Iron Age/Roman field system in Nottinghamshire.
The oblique photographs acquired and taken by RCHME were ordered by kilometre square and stored in distinctive red boxes. Then in the 1980s there was a rapid growth with the acquisition of the Department of the Environment collection of vertical aerial photos. This collection included all prints taken of England by the RAF since the start of WWII such as the image below. This shows the airfield at Biggin Hill, near London with evidence of the many bomb craters sustained during German air raids. Further expansion came in the 1990s with the acquisition of the Ordnance Survey archive and in 2007 with the Aerofilms collection.
Photo mosaic of RAF images of Biggin Hill airfield taken on 27 June 1941, showing a camouflaged runway and filled in bomb craters (RAF_241_72 and 73). Source: Historic England Archive (RAF collection).
Mapping from aerial photographs
In the 1970s John Hampton and his team looked at various ways of interpreting and mapping from the aerial photographs taken by RCHME and acquired from local fliers. Along with others, they experimented with a variety of mapping techniques from sketch plotting to photogrammetry. An important step in the development of this process was the project to map the archaeology around the Iron Age hillfort of Danebury. This approach was scaled up by RCHME to map the prehistoric archaeology visible as cropmarks on the Yorkshire Wolds. This project used computer aided rectification of oblique aerial photographs, a process that was being developed.
In the late 1980s, as the archive acquired more aerial photographs, RCHME developed a systematic methodology to interpret, map and record all archaeological features, not just cropmarks, visible on aerial photographs. Pilot projects in Kent, Hertfordshire and the Thames Valley were set up to develop the methodology further.
In the 1990s the range of subjects photographed increased as RCHME used aerial photographs to record the large building complexes they were surveying that were undergoing major changes at the time. These included textile mills, hospitals, prisons and Cold War military sites. For some of these sites such as the textile mill below in Leeds, these photographs are the last record we have as development pressures have since led to their demolition.
The 1990s also saw new discoveries across the country especially in the hot summers of 1995 and 1996. Below is just one such site, a “banjo” enclosure, so called because of the shape; a circular enclosure with a long funnel neck leading into it. See other examples of new sites discovered in the 1990s and at other times in the gallery below.
In the 1990s the political changes and opening up of eastern Europe led to archaeologists visiting the survey and archive teams to learn from our experience of flying, mapping and archiving aerial photographs. This led to us joining forces with other aerial archaeologists from western Europe to set up training courses in Hungary and Poland. This in turn led to further work exchanges and training courses across Europe.
The late 1990s saw RCHME and EH working together to supply aerial photographs to help Field Monument Wardens monitor the condition of scheduled monuments. Following the merger of the two organisations in 1999 this became an important aspect of the flying programme. In the image below the World War Two anti-aircraft battery might appear to be safe since it has been removed from the cultivation that surrounds it. However, it is still at risk from being overgrown by scrub.
The new century saw important technological developments taken up by the flying and mapping teams. The reconnaissance teams began experimenting with digital cameras in 2003 and the archive developed standards for the long term preservation of digital data. The last negative film shot in the air was 2006. The archive now holds over 200,000 digital aerial photographs taken by the reconnaissance teams.
In 2001 English Heritage used lidar, a system of airborne laser scanning, for a review of mapping of the Stonehenge World Heritage site. Since then HE have developed our use of the data and now use it as a regular source for any mapping and interpretation projects.
The discovery of new archaeological sites is still the most exciting part of the flying programme, but since the first flight in 1967 the scale, range and scope has changed. New sensors and camera technology are allowing us to look at new ways of taking aerial photographs. New software and access to other aerial data such as lidar allows us to see, map and understand the historic landscape in ways that could only have been dreamed about in 1967.
Since our systematic analysis of new and archive aerial photographs began in the late 1990s we have discovered over 122,000 new archaeological sites like the one above.
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I very much hope that republishing this article is in order. An email to the Press Office of Historic England requesting permission has been sent last Sunday afternoon.
This morning, 30th July, I received the following email:
To use the aerial images you have seen on our webpage ’50 Years Flying’ athttps://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/research/50-years-flying/ , please make a note of the image reference numbers and then visit our Aerial Photography Explorer website at https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/archive/collections/aerial-photos/ . If you then navigate to the oblique image search screen and fill in the reference number under the ‘file contains’ tab you will be taken to that image. By then hovering over that image a share/embed option will appear that will allow you to use the images free of charge on non-commercial websites and some social media sites such as X and Facebook. Our reference is 150356.
As many of you know I was born exactly six months before VE Day on May 8th, 1945.
We soon moved from Acton to 16 Toley Avenue, in Preston Road, Wembley. A short distance down Toley Ave was Ledway Drive that led up to Barn Hill Pond.
A review of Barn Hill Pond by a dog walker, Tara Furlong, in 2020.
It’s a pond on top of a hill, which gets smaller depending on how hot and dry the summer is. It has been known to have sightings of its own grey heron, mallards on occasion, etc. Fish may lurk in its depths, and frogspawn in the spring. There are views of Wembley, and across to central London from the trig point nearby, and aspirations to open up the view to Harrow-on-the-Hill. Take a little wander and you may spy St Paul’s Cathedral. A small number of benches are available, and the bins overflow in fine weather. There’s nothing but green space and houses nearby. It’s accessible via a fairly short, steep uphill walk on uneven ground from the unserviced car park, which can get very busy; or from Wembley Park. Photos on a typical British day – i.e. a bit cloudy and soggy.
As a young boy I well remember looking out from Barn Hill and seeing the devastation of the property from the Nazi bombers.
There are twenty programmes on Radio 4 that are about this postwar period in Britain. I have listened to the first three and have found them deeply interesting. Anyone interested in British history is recommended to listen to them. That is the link.
To my mind, nothing beats the sights of the World’s oceans.
In the past, I spent four years living on a yacht, a Tradewind 33, out in Cyprus. During that time I cruised to Turkey, to Greece, to Algiers, and loved it.
Here’s an extract from World Oceans day website.
Why Earth’s oceans are so important
Earth’s oceans are critical to human survival. Indeed, more than half the oxygen in our atmosphere is generated via photosynthesis by phytoplankton and seaweed in oceans. In addition, millions of people depend on fish and other marine animals for food. Research on some marine organisms has led to the development of new medications. Moreover, ocean currents, known as global conveyor belts, help regulate Earth’s climate.
Sir David Attenborough has produced a film Ocean and the trailer follows:
There is so much more to view on the World Oceans Day website. Please go to it.
Learning from Dogs 