Bangkok's famous 50-year-old soup

In Bangkok, a restaurant called Wattana Panich attracts big crowds of tourists and locals alike, who sit down at shared tables to sample beef broth served with noodles or rice. Wattana Panich has been run by the same family for three generations and the cauldron of beef broth at the heart of the menu is similarly long-lived. For 50 years, a portion of the soup has been kept back at the end of each day to form the base of the following day’s soup, with fresh water, stock and spices added to create what has become a world-famous broth. Thuong Le from the BBC's Bangkok Bureau has visited Wattana Panich.

Alejandro Betancourt's name is familiar to many Venezuelans. He's one of the most prominent of the so-called 'bolichicos' - a term coined by Venezuelan media to describe a group of young, well-connected entrepreneurs who amassed huge fortunes during the early 2000s by securing lucrative state contracts. When President Donald Trump announced last month that the US had struck a deal with Venezuela to control more than 65 billion barrels of its oil reserves, many were surprised that the company overseeing the agreement was a little-known Barbados-registered firm, headed up by Alejandro Betancourt. Juan Francisco Alonso from BBC Mundo has been following the story.

Elderly citizens across Taiwan have recently become the target of a new genre of online video content which is reportedly flooding their group chats. In the video, a man in a white uniform introduces himself as Dr. Zheng. He asks, "do you panic that you won’t make it across the road in time when the green light flashes?" Or, "do your legs start to shake when you walk downstairs?" According to him, it’s because your muscles are wasting away and that most of the protein in food like eggs and tofu are never absorbed. But Dr. Zheng isn’t a real doctor at all. He's an AI generated one whose advice is not to be taken seriously. Ting Chiang of BBC Chinese has been looking into this phenomenon.

This episode of The Documentary comes to you from The Fifth Floor, the show at the heart of global storytelling, with BBC journalists from all around the world.

Presented by Faranak Amidi.

Produced by Laura Thomas, Caroline Ferguson and Hannah Dean.

(Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich.)