Business Matters

The BBC has exclusive evidence of the large-scale destruction of a reef in the South China Sea by Chinese poachers and the theft of valuable and endangered giant clams. The Philippines, which is pursuing its own legal claim to many of the islands, says the Chinese navy is allowing the poachers to plunder the reefs with impunity. Rupert Wingfield-Hayes has the story. All public schools in the Los Angeles area were closed on Tuesday after a ‘credible threat’ was received via email. Almost 700,000 students were affected. A similar threat was received by police in New York, but was not deemed credible - schools remained open. We hear from families caught up in the California alert. Also in the programme, the US central bank the Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates tomorrow, for the first time in almost a decade. Our economic commentator Roger Bootle offers his assessment. We discuss big data, as the EU announces new laws requiring companies to ask permission to keep clients data. Customers are also given the right to demand their details are removed from a company's database. However, a breach of the rules could see firms fined around 4% of global revenues. And the artists from a Grammy shortlisted album who definitely won’t be attending the awards ceremony – because they’re all behind bars. We speak to the producer of the Zomba Prison Project in Malawi. We're joined throughout the programme by Mark Miller, Managing Editor at Marketplace in LA and Madhavan Narayanan, columnist and tech writer on the Hindustan Times in Delhi. (Picture: Reef in South China Sea. Credit: BBC)