Israeli settlers attack West Bank village

This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson and at 15 hours GMT on Tuesday 29 September, these are our main stories. Spain's government says it will ban evictions until 2030, as it tries to tackle a housing crisis that has caused widespread public anger. Israeli settlers attack a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank, preventing a family from returning to their home despite a ruling from the high court. Open AI scraps the launch of its next model due to safety concerns. Also in this podcast, a new film about Facebook. What began as a cool idea became something huge and, frankly, monstrous. A machine for pumping out misinformation and making people angry. A sharp upsurge in violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank has been gaining international attention. The latest example is an assault by 100 Israeli settlers who attacked a Palestinian village there, preventing a family going back to their home which had been seized by settlers. The return of the Palestinians to the village of Jalud had been coordinated with the Israeli army after a high court ruled in their favor. A correspondent in Jerusalem Yalan Nell told me more. The Tabassi family would be forced to leave their two homes on the edge of the village of Jalud, which is just south of Nubblers in the West Bank. That was back in July and they had been subjected to months of harassment and settler attacks when they fled. Now, the Israeli high court had ruled in their favor earlier this month, really putting out a strongly worded statement calling for the rule of law to be reinstated and calling on Israeli authorities to get this family back to their homes. Now, we were told by Mahmoud At-Tabassi that he was called late at night and told that that coordination had come through it around midnight local time. So he, one of his sons and his wife, rushed off to these houses. They were being escorted by Israeli soldiers and Israeli police. But it seems that what happened at the same time. So one of the WhatsApp groups used by these extremist settlers to coordinate their actions put out an alert saying that the family that they had managed to force out was indeed returning and calling on settlers to come and join an action to stop that return from happening. The family told us that they had just inspected the extensive damage to one of their properties. They sent us a video where you could just see how, you know, settlers have torn it apart, smashing the toilet, smashing up the doors, pulling out the electrical fittings. And just as they were in the process of that inspection, settlers started to throw stones at the house they were told. They said there were more than a hundred of them. That is the same as the statement that has come from the Israeli military. The family said that there were actually five or six soldiers that helped them initially to get into an Israeli military vehicle so that they could leave the scene. That vehicle was attacked with its tires slashed, they said. And then they were put into an armoured vehicle and taken away. After they left, their houses were set on fire. How are the Israeli authorities reacting to this Ulan? Because this happened following a high court ruling that the family should return? That's right. And I think it just is a very clear illustration of how the Israeli authorities are struggling or, indeed, failing to deal with settler violence, particularly under the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, you know, with the far-right elements in his government has really promoted rapid settlement expansion. And the U.N. is saying that settler violence in the West Bank is at an all-time high. Now, the Israeli Prime Minister did put out a statement strongly condemning what had happened. But he was referring to the attacks on the Israeli security forces. Three border police were lightly injured. We're told. The Israeli president has said there has to be decisive action and said this is a moral stain, particularly coming at the time of the Jewish high holiday of Sukkot. Ulan Nell, in Jerusalem. This managed government has approved a proposed ban on evictions until 2030, amid protests across the country overhousing. The SU came into sharp focus when an 87-year-old woman who'd lived in her Madrid apartment for decades was evicted when she could no longer afford the massive increase in her rent. Her situation drew huge publicity, and our ministers have decided to introduce new housing decrees which they say are in response to the demands of the people. The case of pensioner Mary Kamant Abaskel seems to have been resolved. Her lawyer, Beatriz Duro, said that she would be allowed to return paying a rent similar to the old one. This agreement obviously comes rather late. It was reached days after the eviction, and it was reached through intervention of lawyers to resolve the situation in which nobody should find themselves. With our signatures, this agreement has been concluded, and it means a better and happier result for everybody. I spoke to our correspondent, Guy Hedgeko, in Madrid, and asked him to tell us more. These measures include protecting vulnerable people from eviction through until 2030. That was a measure that had been in place for several years previously, but it expired earlier this year and was not renewed by the Parliament. So there's not a totally new measure, but it's one that had been certainly been demanded by activists and protesters. Another measure was the automatic renewal of contracts to the currently rental contracts, to the currently in place. The idea there being to prevent abuses by landlords who might want to raise rents before they agree to the renewal of a contract, so they're automatically renewed. Also, there's a clamp down on tighter restrictions, tighter regulation of tourist rental properties like Airbnb. That's long been a bone of contention and the target of activists here. And single room rentals have also been part of that regulation as well. Guy, any doubt about these new laws being passed and coming into force? Well, yes, I think there is, and that's because they need to go through Congress. Probably at the end of this week, that's when we're expecting a vote on them. This is a decree, but it doesn't need to be approved by lawmakers. Now, the people where I am, the people who are out on the street who are protesting and demanding these kinds of measures, I think certainly a number of these measures will be to their liking. We're still waiting for an official response from activists. But political parties on the right, for example, are much more reluctant than the parties on the left to agree to intervening in the housing market. And that's where you might see problems for the government. It might quite difficult to persuade some of the parties on the right to agree to some of these measures. Guy, you're there. I mean, how serious is the housing crisis in Spain? Well, it's very difficult to find affordable housing, certainly in the big cities and in particular in the centre of big cities, but across Spain, really, recent data showed that on average across Spain, people spend 50% of their salary on rental. And that rises to around 70% in places like Madrid and Barcelona. So it's a real problem, particularly for younger people, who find it difficult to find affordable housing in particular in the cities. Guy Hedgecoe in Madrid. One of the biggest issues in the news is artificial intelligence. And one of the biggest questions is how much of a threat AI poses to us. Now, a key player in the world of artificial intelligence open AI says it's scrapped the planned release of its next model due to safety concerns. It says GPT 6.1 astra, which performs tasks like browsing the web and using apps by itself didn't quite meet the bar of the company's standards. Our business correspondent Morafogate told me more about the concerns that the company revealed about its new model. Open AI said that this new model, one, went beyond the boundaries that had been established. So, for example, it did things that was beyond the line and did not ask permission to do so. The second thing, and this is also quite worrying, is this particular model, when they were testing it, was not being truthful in telling the user what it had and what hadn't done. So, the actions that it had or had not taken, it basically did not tell the truth. I think this is pretty scary, I have to say. So, with agentic AI, and this is what it's all about, these are AI systems that can autonomously, without prompting by humans, do very complex tasks. They also have very complex reasoning abilities as well, and that's very different from the other types of, say, artificial intelligence, like the large language models, which were much more used to dealing and interacting with, when we, you know, for example, ask a question or search something. The agentic ones actually break it down into different tasks and do them autonomously. Open AI has a conference in San Francisco, where they've been expected to unveil this new model, very unusual to stop it so close to the event, isn't it? Does that suggest huge concern at the company, do you think? They never definitively said they were going to launch this model at the conference, but yes, considering they're pulling the plug, not only that, they're not saying we're delaying the release. They're saying we're not releasing it at all. It does suggest that the concern is perhaps a bit sharper. And a genteak is that what is being developed by other companies? That is sort of the new frontier in terms of the artificial intelligence models that are being developed. Open AI and anthropic in the United States are at the forefront of this, but there are companies in China, for example, they're also developing this, and many others, you know, around the world they're trying. But these two anthropic and open AI are leading the way because they've had the most success with them so far. We have had an increasingly loud chorus from the CEOs of both anthropic and open AI, suggesting that perhaps the pace of development of these artificial intelligence models should be slowed down just a little bit because they're worried about the repercussions of, you know, the agentic AI being out there and not fully understanding what those consequences could be. Morafogity. For many years there was strong public sympathy in Malaysia for the approximately 750,000 Rohingyas driven out of Myanmar by the Ministry in 2017. Many of the Muslim minority made their way eventually to Malaysia in search of sanctuary and work, and it's thought about 200,000 are there, eking out a living. But now the Malaysian government has started repatriating around 5,000 asylum seekers from Myanmar, including many Rohingyas under a controversial deal agreed with Myanmar's military ruler. As I see Asia correspondent Jonathan Head gave me the details. This is the first stage, the first 1,476 people who have been taken by bus already to the Malaysian port of Lumut. So Navy ports, they're being put on board three Myanmar Navy ships and will then have a very long, we think it might take them a week journey across the annum and sea to take them back to Myanmar. What we don't know is exactly who these people are. They've been held in detention centres. There are more than 10,000 people being held in detention centres around Malaysia. They are Myanmar nationals. Prime Minister Amwai Ibrahim has said they include Rohingyas, but at this stage of Malaysian authorities are not confirming or denying. Because Rohingyas are not viewed as citizens by the Myanmar government and are not allowed to live anywhere in Myanmar aside from Rakhine state, which currently is a war zone with intense conflict going on. No one can work out how Rohingyas could be sent back. But the real issue in Malaysia relating to immigrants from Myanmar is particularly focused on the Rohingyas. There have been some very nasty social media campaigns against them as a lot of public hostility. And so that's where the focus has been. So we're waiting to see what the composition of these attorneys is. Perhaps we might get more information when the rest of them get sent back in the next few weeks. But human rights groups have condemned this repatriation, haven't they? They have. And the UN Refugee Agency, the UNHCR has said it has been barred from having any involvement at all in this. Malaysia is increasingly keeping the UN Refugee Agency out. I wanted to control the process of whether somebody is or isn't a refugee itself. Because there's been no independent screening, it's impossible to say that this is voluntary. Now human rights groups also say anyone going back to Myanmar now is vulnerable either to persecution, to getting caught up in the violence of the civil war or being dragged into forced conscription, which the Myanmar military imposes if they're men. But obviously if Rohingyas were included in that, the fact that they cannot even go back to most of Myanmar and that if they went to even the small part of Rakhine state under government control, they'd be confined to miserable camps would make their plight even greater. But the Malaysian government has said we've got too many. They have to go. It's not been listening. Is it surprising it's happening under Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim himself, a political prisoner and a defender of human rights in the past? Well some of his former supporters have called him out on this and said you're betraying the very principles you've stood by. But he's not alone in the past all Malaysian leaders when there was a lot of public sympathy for the Rohingyas tended to say we need to support them and there was an unofficial policy of tolerance. The public mood has shifted sharply. There's been a real increase in hostility towards Rohingyas that are about, thought to be about 200,000 of them in Malaysia. And Prime Minister Anwar himself is politically embattled. He leads a fragile coalition. He's been in power for nearly four years. His popularity has plunged. I think the reason they're not saying whether Rohingyas are not on board this first consignment is precisely because he wants people to believe they are on board and that he's addressing these public concerns about immigration. Jonathan Head in the Thai capital Bangkok. Still to come in this podcast, the US journalist Evan Gershkiewicz online for after being released from a Russian prison. You're overwhelmed by the sights and sounds. I would freeze and have panic attacks from crowds of people in prison. I'd made this decision to through it stoically. I thought that if I ever let myself break down to tears in prison or everything would collapse. This is the Global News Podcast. The deadly Ebola outbreak in the democratic Republic of Congo is continuing to spread with confirmed cases now surpassing 8,000 with nearly 4,000 deaths. Two more areas have been affected, one near the Central African Republic and another on the border with South Sudan. But it's emerged that the number of people exposed to Ebola could be much greater than official figures suggest. The Africa Centers for Disease Control says only around 30,000 potential contacts have been identified. The CDC Director General Dr Jean-Casea told Catherine Berahanga that could be a fraction of the true figure. We look at the number of confirmed cases, community deaths and transmission patterns. We estimate that the real number of people who should have been identified and followed is really underestimated. It could be several hundred thousand people. We think that there are some reasons for this gap. The first one is too many cases are detected late. The second one, many deaths still occur in communities rather than the treatment facility. And the third one is the outbreak is in an area where insecurity, displacement and population movement is so high. I can also add the community engagement is not really strong enough. Without communities driving the response, leading the response, there will be a lot of suspicion and will not contain this outbreak. The outbreak has spread to towns close the borders with South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Countries that have faced years of conflict also have weak health care systems. How confident are you that the virus won't spread into those countries and that they are prepared to deal with any potential outbreak? I had the opportunity to visit South Sudan, also Central African Republic. We are providing you support for preparedness to these two countries. In terms of preparedness, we are doing our best, but the issue related to this health system in these two countries is still a major one. And I cannot ensure you that the outbreak will not cause the border, will not be in car or in South Sudan. This one I cannot say, but we are doing our best to support the DRC government to control the outbreak in DRC. And if unfortunately we could have cases in these two countries would provide the appropriate support to contain that. Dr Jean Casseire. Next to a story from the United States that started tragically with the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995 and may end on Wednesday with the execution by lethal injection of her killer, Krista Pike. She was just 18 at the time and has been on death row for 30 years. On Monday the governor of Tennessee said he would not intervene in the case and barring a last minute reprieve, Krista Pike, who's now 50 years old, will be the first woman to be executed in the state in more than 200 years. The BBC's Stephanie Hegerty has been looking into the story for us. Colleen Slemmer and Krista Pike met at a training camp for troubled teens in 1995. Colleen was 19, Krista was 18 and they came to blows. Krista at the time accused Colleen of trying to steal her boyfriend to Darryl Shipp and to Darryl and Krista, Lord Colleen, into a wood where they really brutally murdered and tortured her. There was a huge media frenzy around this story at the time because to Darryl Shipp later said that he carved a pentagram into Colleen Slemmer's chest. This was the time of the satanic panic in the US where there was a lot of fear around teenagers engaging in satanism. So it was a very big trial in Tennessee at the time. To Darryl Shipp was 17. So though he took part in the murder and torture as well, he was never eligible for the death penalty and he got life with the chance of parole and he came up for parole last year that was denied. Whereas Krista Pike in the other hand was 18 so she was eligible for the death penalty and she was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996. There have been years of failed appeals haven't there and her defence team have all was said that she was a victim. Tell us about her case. So this didn't come up so much in the trial itself, but in the years since several defense teams who've been representing Christa have uncovered a lot of evidence of really severe and traumatic childhood abuse. Now this was available to her defense team at the time, but it wasn't presented at least not in great detail in the sentencing part of her trial. So it's emerged that she was sexually abused right back to when she was a toddler by one of her grandmother's boyfriends that she suffered severe neglect at the hands of her father and her mother. Her mother had many different husbands and boyfriends, some of whom abused Christa sexually and physically. She was raped at 11 at 14 and again at 17. So this was a young person who was experiencing extreme trauma at the time of the crime. The last rape that she experienced was almost to the day a year before the crime and Christa Pike's current defense team have said that all of this contributed to her mind at the time. She's also since the trial been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She's been treated for that in prison and her defense team say since she's had the appropriate treatment, she's a much different person. Well, she'd say the family of the wound who was killed, Colleen Slammer, they want the execution to go ahead. Yes, Colleen's mother, Mae Martinez has been saying that she won't find peace until Christa Pike is executed. She's certainly encouraging it to go ahead and she said she will travel from Florida where she lives to Tennessee to witness Christa Pike's death. Stephanie Huggity. For 16 months, the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkiewicz was held in a Russian prison, the first US journalist to be charged with espionage in Russia since the Cold War. He was arrested in March 2023, a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, and was eventually released in a prisoner swap. It was the images of a young man in a glass wall dog and his newspaper's attempts to free him that made news around the world. And now he's turned that experience into a book. That first appearance in court was about three and a half weeks after my first arrest and nobody had gotten any images of me by that point. And I, within about a week, we can have starts settling into this idea that okay, it's going to be for a swap, being held in the conditions of the Fourth of a prison in Moscow, which is this really isolating experience. You only have one cellmate removed around without seeing any other prisoners. That really wears on you psychologically, but I was allowed to sleep. The food was fine. I'm being treated okay, so I sort of set a line, but prisons in black box for everybody else around. Your loved ones are worried about you, your colleagues. And so I thought of that appearance as a way to show people I was doing okay and give them a sense of belief and calm around. And I also wanted to smile as much as I could, but really more than a smile, I guess, a smirk, because I wanted to show people this kind of defiance. All of us understood. All of us are in on the joke in a way. We know that this is a fabricated case. And so if this is a game of theater, let's not let them have it play out the way they want it to. And then you had this period of time, this three weeks where you knew that the swap was going to happen. When it comes, what is that moment like? It's a bit of an overwhelming feeling because you're so used to being an institutionalized person that you're sort of scared of getting out into the real world. And then those three weeks until the swap happens is excruciating, because now every day is painfully long. You're just hoping that that swap is going to happen tomorrow. And then when it takes place, I mean, it's just pure joy. I don't think I've ever experienced joy like that before. And what about the days and weeks afterwards, where suddenly you're back in your normal life in many ways, but everything's changed. Yeah. And then the joy fades, the adrenaline subsides in your face with the reality of having returned to normal life again. You know, if you're overwhelmed by the sights and sounds, I would freeze and have panic attacks from crowds of people in prison. I've made this decision to sort of go through it stoically. I thought that if I ever let myself break down into tears in prison, you know, everything would collapse and I wouldn't be able to deal with it anymore. And so that all started flowing out once I was outside. So I had to get therapists. I worked with psychiatrists who dealt with PTSD. And we worked on that for six months. And, you know, doing this book, this book is a kind of product that I think is therapy in a way. You know, it's both personal and what I want for public consumption at the same time for the public. It memorializes not just my story, but this period in Russian history. On a personal level, you're sort of looking at this traumatic event and having to process it, having to speak about it. So now I'm looking at it from a couple years later. It feels like any old experience in a way. It informs your daily life, but it's not something you think about consciously. Evan Gershkovic, talking to Anna Foster and his book, has called this cursed, beautiful land, a Russian story. Back in 2010, the film The Social Network was released. It explored the rise of Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. 16 years later, there's much more to say. And so the Oscar, Emmy, and Golden Globaling writer and director, Aaron Sorkin, has picked up the story once again in a new film The Social Reckoning. Its focus this time is Facebook Whistleblower, Francis Hagen, and journalist Jeff Horwitz. The movie delves into the story behind the company's genesis, looking at what social media has become. Facebook wants you to stay on the site for as long as possible. And two years ago, the algorithm was changed. Wait, Mark, we're trying to address hate speech and we're going to amplify and turbocharging. The debate is over. Aaron Sorkin told the BBC what drew him to revisit the Facebook story. What began as a cool idea, a way to keep in touch with the people he went to school with, for guys, and sort of an easier introduction to girls, became something huge and, frankly, monstrous, a machine for pumping out misinformation and making people angry. Francis, who's played by Mickey Madison in the film, she's a young engineer at Facebook. She went to Facebook specifically because they had this one division, the civic integrity team, which every other team at Facebook is concentrated on growth. And the civic integrity team was supposed to be the one team that wasn't. They were concentrated on, frankly, on civic misinformation. And she became shocked at what she found when a friend of hers had become completely radicalized by Facebook in a very short period of time. That's what sent Francis on her journey. And she engaged the help of Jeff Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal investigation reporter. He's played by Jeremy Allen White. And together, they uncovered these incredible secrets. You know, people asked me as they were signing up for the film, whether it was our cinematographer or set designer or actors, by being part of this movie, is there a chance that I will be rendered to an El Salvadoran prison? The fact is, though, that I think that Sony, the studio, making the movie, has been in times like this, you have to call it brave, you have to call it courageous to make the movie. It shouldn't be, but it is. Like writing about institutions. The people in those institutions, but institutions. In this case, the social network was about how Facebook was invented. The social reckoning is about what it's become. And specifically, Facebook's role in the rise of extremism, divisiveness, and violence. I wasn't like I was looking to do a follow-up to the social network to do another story about Facebook or another story about Mark Zuckerberg. I was looking for a good story to tell. And there was this. Aaron Sorkin. And that's it from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at [email protected]. You can also now watch our episodes in full just search for the global news podcast on YouTube. This edition was mixed by Rosennemond Doral. The producer was Adrian White. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Valerie Sanderson and till next time, bye-bye.