Russian attacks leave 600,000 Ukrainians without power

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. For goals or appetite for investing, Schwab has everything you need all in one place. Visit schwab.com to learn more. No bouncing between tabs. And best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hi, I'm Ankur Desai, and at 15 hours GMT on Wednesday the 14th of October, these are our main stories. Russia launches another massive OECD. Overnight attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Ignoring an energy ceasefire announced by President Trump. The Ukrainian accused of organising the blowing up of the Russian-German Nord Stream gas pipeline goes on trial in Hamburg. And a Saudi court overturns the death sentence of blasphemy imposed on a Sri Lankan migrant worker. Also in this podcast, the Chinese loneliness economy, in which people hire themselves out as companions who can help solve problems or just. The elderly treat us like their children, and we treat them like our own parents. We are trying to really understand their needs. And the world's oldest shipwreck found so far. The vessel was built about 4,700 years ago and sank off the coast of modern-day Turkey. The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Russian missile and drone attacks over the past year have been a great success. Russia has left at least 600,000 people there without power. He said critical energy infrastructure in Kyiv and in the north-eastern city of Kharkiv had been damaged for the second night with no advance warning about Russian ballistic missiles from its partners. At least six people were killed. President Trump denies that Washington's intelligence sharing with Ukraine has stopped. But a week of increasingly frustrated exchanges between Kyiv and Washington has demonstrated the strain on NATO over the conflict. The alliance's Secretary General Mark Rutte, who's in the Estonian capital Tallinn, said Ukraine's allies needed to do more to bolster Ukraine's air defences as Russian aggression towards Ukraine was unrelenting. With winter coming and with Russia's aggression unrelenting, allies need to do more, especially in support of air defence. Russia continues its attacks on Ukrainian civilians. And it continues its hybrid campaign against NATO allies. Our Ukraine correspondent Dan Johnson was in the capital Kyiv at the scene of one of the overnight attacks. He gave us this update. I'm right on the furthest edge of Kyiv to the northeast of the city centre. This is one apartment block that was hit by Russian missiles late last night with very little warning. People say the sirens were going as the missiles actually hit, so there was no time for them to take shelter. That's why two of the residents of this block were killed, many more injured, and those who survived are going through the wreckage now. And seeing what's left of their homes in the main. These are homes that are destroyed and will be unlivable. People have been throwing out all the rubble, all the smashed glass, the splintered furniture. The emergency services are still here in huge number. They're just starting to board up the windows here. But this is not the only place that was hit last night. The energy network, the power grid, has also come under renewed Russian attack, despite that energy ceasefire that Donald Trump announced. And the issue is that without that intelligence, that early warning, Ukraine can't sound the sirens. Can't tell people to take shelter and can't do anything to try to shoot down those incoming missiles, even if it has the air defense interceptors to do that. So its skies are vulnerable. And the message is that for the past two days, that intelligence has not been shared in the reliable, open way that Ukraine needs. The Americans are denying that they've stopped sharing that intelligence, and the EU has just issued a statement saying it has no indication that intelligence sharing has stopped. But the Ukrainians certainly feel like they're not getting the flow of information that they were. And that is leaving people vulnerable to this sort of attack. Zelensky is in London today. He's visiting the British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, at Downing Street. They're going to have talks. He's gone there, presumably. It's the kind of thing he's done before when relations with the Americans have hit a low. He's gone to the European allies that he believes he can count on. The British are going to bring forward a delivery of interceptor missiles that Ukraine can use to shoot down Russian jet drones. But there is that desperate shortage of Patriot interceptors. That are needed to defend against the sort of ballistic missiles that hit here and targeted the energy network last night. But for those, even if they had the Patriot interceptors, for them to have any impact, they do need that intelligence from the satellite system that gives them the early warning of what is being fired, how quick is it moving, what trajectory it's on, and where is it being aimed at. That is the puzzle of intelligence that Ukrainians rely on to even try to keep themselves safe. They are desperately vulnerable without that. And there is also disruption to the Starlink system, which Ukraine's military relies on heavily, not just to defend against incoming drones and missiles, but also to launch its own long-range drones towards Russian targets. That system has also been limited and restricted overnight, we are told. That's the system that Elon Musk runs. The suspicion is that this is all coordinated. Sources are saying it can be no coincidence that these two things have happened at the same time, after such a bitter weekend of recriminations between the American president and Volodymyr Zelensky. He will be trying to repair that relationship because it is so important. Often geopolitics, diplomacy, that sort of high-level discussion can feel a long way from the ordinary lives and the ordinary homes of normal Ukrainians, but the people here have had such a vivid illustration of just what risk they are under if those sorts of discussions don't produce the results that they need to keep them safe. Dan Johnson in Kyiv. Four years after one of the most dramatic acts of sabotage in modern European history, the trial is underway in Hamburg of a Ukrainian man accused of blowing up Russia's Nord Stream gas pipelines into Germany. Sergei K., as he is identified by German prosecutors, is accused of plotting with other Ukrainian military personnel to destroy the pipelines and stop Russia financing its war with gas revenue. For more on the trial, I spoke to our correspondent, Jessica Parker, who is at the court in Hamburg. According to information about the indictment that was released earlier this year by German prosecutors, and I join you, by the way, from the Hanseatic Higher State Court in Hamburg, prosecutors allege that a plot was hatched by order of Ukrainian state agencies. They didn't specify which agencies, and Ukraine has denied involvement. And then the plot itself, it's alleged that Sergei K., as he's known under German privacy rules, led a small team, including professional divers and an explosives expert, chartering a yacht from Germany's Baltic coast and sailing to waters off the Danish island of Bornholm for laying explosives on the pipelines back in September 2022. That is the allegation. Sergei K. has denied involvement. We're here with a lot of other media. There is, of course, considerable interest in this trial as it begins and will, of course, carry on over the coming weeks. And, Jessica, what information is there about whether there's any Ukrainian state involvement at all? Well, as I mentioned, prosecutors say that this was done on behalf, or by order, of Ukrainian state agencies. They have not specified which agencies they mean. I don't know if we'll get more details about what the prosecution is alleging in that regard during this trial. Ukraine has denied involvement. But, of course, this is politically sensitive. Germany, the German government, led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, is an extremely significant, prominent backer of Ukraine following Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. And here in Germany, there are political voices, particularly when you're looking at the Russia-friendly anti-immigration alternativa for Deutschland party, who wants to cut military aid to Ukraine. So this case, I think, is politically sensitive here in Germany, as well, of course, as being of huge international interest, because many people, I'm sure, will remember back in 2022 with those very stark pictures of gas gushing to the surface of the Baltic Sea, as we gradually learned that three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, Nord Stream 1, Nord Stream 2, because both are twin pipelines, three of the four had been ruptured by explosions. And, of course, there was a lot of speculation as to who might be behind this. And now we have a trial getting underway where prosecutors, at least in Germany, believe they have a case to make. Jessica Parker reporting from Hamburg. To Saudi Arabia now, and in a rare move, the Supreme Court then has overturned the death sentence, imposed on a Sri Lankan migrant worker last month for blasphemy. Affairs correspondent Sebastian Usher told me more about the man. This is a construction work called Anujan Sivarasa, who has been in Saudi Arabia for about 10 months. And he got involved, as people do, in a heated exchange online on Facebook, in which people started trading insults about their religions, Hindu and Islam. Now, he posted defamatory comments about Prophet Muhammad. He quite quickly deleted it. He issued a little video with an apology, but a screenshot was taken, sent to his employer, got to the Saudi authorities. He was arrested. Now, he was originally sentenced in the first court that this was heard into five years and a big fine, about half a million dollars, massive for someone like him. I mean, no way he'd be able to pay it. Then again, as often happens, there was an appeal, an appeal, both the prosecutors and the defence wanted the appeal. This can be dangerous in Saudi Arabia. I've seen a number of instances where people have had much smaller sentences suddenly jump. And in his case, massively, to a death penalty. Once that was announced, which is just last month, there was a huge outcry, as you can imagine, in Sri Lanka, human rights groups, two, of course, but in Sri Lanka, with people demanding that the government, the authorities do something about this. Now, there's been a delegation from Sri Lanka in Saudi Arabia. We don't know the details of this, but it does seem that that would have had some effect. So the Supreme Court, the highest court in Saudi Arabia, to which a final appeal will go to, has, from the Sri Lankan side, we have issued an update that the death sentence has been overturned. We don't know what sentence he's still facing, whether it goes back to the five years, whether he'll be released. How rare is that for it to be overturned? It's quite rare for sentences to be overturned. But there is an appeal process, like I say, and it doesn't always go badly. I mean, it can go that your sentence gets less rather than more. Also, blasphemy cases are pretty rare in Saudi Arabia. But it's all quite oblique. I mean, it's not exactly as if the Saudis are broadcasting this in their media. So we don't normally learn a lot about this. Occasionally, a foreigner becomes a big international issue like this. Just briefly, while you're here, the latest with the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia? They managed to hit, in one of their missile attacks in the past few hours, the HQ of the oil giant in Saudi Arabia, Aramco, in Dahran. One, that's a huge distance. That's very east coast. That's about far more than a thousand kilometres. And two, that's, of course, a high profile target. Now, no one that we know was injured. We haven't heard there's been massive damage. But to hit that is pretty strong. And there've been more missiles fired this morning, although no indication that anyone has been killed and nor of injuries. There were four injuries recorded last night in Riyadh from debris which came down from missiles that were intercepted. A Global Affairs correspondent, Sebastian Usher. China, which has the world's second largest economy, has seen exports grow significantly according to new data. Shipments of electronics related to the growth of AI, including electronic chips, components and data processing machines, are driving the boom, as well as the sales of electric cars. But the soaring amount of exports are causing tensions with Beijing's trading partners. Our business correspondent, Archana Shukla, told us more. September exports growth has been about 36% year on year. And it's largely driven by factories that are churning out AI components, electronics, as well as electric vehicles and even solar panels. But largely, it's the AI-driven demand for products, for electronics, things like semiconductors or integrated circuits, which are, you know, really the brains behind the massive data centers, but also cars and smartphones. Those exports have gone up around 136% in the month of September, largely because of the higher value of these products, not so much by the volume. But also, you know, EVs have seen a big jump, about 60% growth in the month of September, largely driving this boom for China. It is coming under some scrutiny, though, isn't it, in some parts of the world? Absolutely. You know, with especially the electric vehicles and the Chinese technology, several countries, including like the, you know, the European Union, they are wanting to limit imports of Chinese vehicles into their market because they feel it is hurting the domestic industry. And in fact, very recently, last month, we had Beijing and Brussels come to a term that there will be a limit on how many cars, you know, EVs that China can export, to the EU countries that will come into effect by later this month. But then China is also looking at newer markets like in the Southeast Asia, Latin America, even Middle East, where demand for electric vehicles is increasing. And, you know, demand for affordable green cars is going up. So China is looking to push out more and more electric vehicles. And Arjuna, what does it say about the Chinese economy and the state of it? Because on one hand, you have these great exports, but it's also offset by a property slump. And weak domestic consumption too. Absolutely. You know, one set of data really puts this very clearly. Exports for electric vehicles and hybrid cars in the month of September grew 62%. The domestic car sales fell by 28%. That clearly shows that China's economy is really depending on exports and foreign consumers to drive because its own people aren't buying goods and services as they would. And that really is hurting the overall pace at which the economy is moving. And I think that's a really important thing to think about. You know, China's economy is growing. In fact, even IMF said today that China needs to boost domestic spending. And, you know, only depending on exports and supplying this, you know, oversupply of products into the global market is not going to help. Arjuna Shukla there in Singapore. Still to come in this podcast. When we track animals in the ocean and we see where they go, where they are migrating, then we can see where they overlap with harmful human activities and create protected areas in the ocean. A plan to use tracking devices for protecting penguins. To manage the currencies you need around the globe. Fed up with losing out to hidden fees when you send money abroad with your everyday bank? Choose the smart way. Wise. You can count on the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google. No unwelcome surprises. Plus, ditch that where's my money feeling. Most transfers arrive in under 20 seconds. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get wise. Download the Wise app today. T's and C's apply. This is the Global News Podcast. In some of China's massive cities, despite the huge crowds, or maybe because of them, residents can feel very isolated and depressed. It's made worse because loved ones often live far away, chasing employment. Now a new industry, being dubbed the loneliness economy, has emerged with people hiring themselves out as companions who can help solve problems or just be there to listen. My China correspondent, Stephen McDonnell, reports from Beijing. Riding on Beijing's underground train network is the place you really get a sense of how heaving this city is, as crowds pile on and off trains, up escalators through walking tunnels. Yet for some, this travel experience is not one of community, but isolation. This is one of 18 cities in China with more than 10 million residents. There are people everywhere, and yes, in these mega centres, you can still feel lost and alone. In fact, so many people feel this way that a new loneliness industry has sprung up here to serve their needs. Yang lives on the outskirts of Beijing. Her kids and grandkids are also in the city, but they're all busy with their own lives. Loneliness is my biggest difficulty. When I want a conversation, I talk to the TV. Yet now, the 91-year-old says her life has turned around because of the support she's getting from a new service. On the day we met Yang, she had a visit from Yingwei. He set up a company which not only delivers meals daily to elderly people in his area, but can also pick up medicine for clients or fix something in the house, and importantly, will sit down for a chat. The elderly treat us like their children, and we treat them like our children. We treat them like our own parents. Often, they don't realize there are solutions available for many of their problems. I can't lose Yingwei and his team. They've got a good heart. This company is part of a wave of services which are appearing in China, designed to help the lonely. Securities company SinoLink valued this new sector last year at around $7.4 billion, and the nature of modern society seems to be driving it ever more. In China, family members often live apart as loved ones chase employment. This can make something seemingly mundane a source of panic and depression, like dealing with hospital bureaucracy in a new city. 23-year-old Liu Yanyan is available to pick up test results, give advice on booking a specialist, and will accompany her often young client on a doctor visit. People have no one to talk to after work. If they go to the hospital, they go alone and can feel scared or anxious, so they turn to medical escorts like us for company during this time. In China, now you can even hire a hiking companion to talk to for many hours during a trek. A former soldier who goes by the name of Brother Zhou offers this service at the famous mountain Huangshan. He takes people up as many as 30 times a month and says that sometimes a stranger can be the best listener. Take the many young women who reach out, for instance. They might be afraid to go alone, are looking for a reliable hiking partner, or maybe they just don't have anyone to go with. Or perhaps they've gone through a divorce or they're heartbroken and simply want to clear their heads in the outdoors. I'm the perfect fit for them. Pressure cooker life of China's big cities. Long hours of work and high-rise living can leave little time for community connections. Those getting into the loneliness industry here think all of this is pointing to many years of even greater demand for what they have to offer. Stephen MacDonald in Beijing. But what if one can't find a human companion? Would an artificial friend do? And if you could add it to your children's genes to improve their intelligence, would you? Those are some of the questions tackled by the Nobel Prize. Nobel Prize-winning author Sakazua Ishiguro in his best-selling book, Clara and the Sun. It has now been adapted into a film and has its first night at the British Film Institute London Film Festival on Thursday. Here's a clip from the film. The teenager Josie is in an artificial friend storm with her mother, where she chooses her robot companion Clara. This one. She looks tired. Do you have a hard night? No, not tired. She just has solar depletion. Recharge once she gets a little bit of sunlight. She's an older model, though? Uh, yes. A B-1, a great model. But discontinued. Discontinued? No. But they did stop making them. I read that people found the B-1s almost too human-like, too empathetic. Ah, did they? Oh, wow. Sakazua Ishiguro told Emma Barnett why he had written about artificial friends. Well, it's a kind of a device on my part, you know. You throw something like this. Yes, into a normal family. You have a super intelligent, rather pretty, bubbly, very cheerful, childlike robot come into a family full of crises and tension. I thought it was an interesting way to look at our lives. I mean, I told the book from the point of view of the robot. She's the narrator. And in this movie, Jenna Ortega plays Clara, and it's very much seen from her point of view. So this isn't one of these stories about, you know, how apparently a benevolent AI or robot turns up and they become more and more sinister and they end up sort of doing something horrible to human beings. It's not that story. What happens if you bring in somebody that's almost conditioned to love? Well, you know, love unconditionally. And you put them into the human context. What's that going to do to the human relationship? What does that show us as a kind of mirror about the way we live? And when, I suppose, devising that strategy, that technique, you will have had to research how perhaps these things could have worked. I mean, and you were doing this in 2020, 2021, when the book came out. Things have obviously come on since then. And we do see, you know, we had a really interesting article on the BBC News website on our in-depth section the other day only about the rise of these companions and actually China changing the rules around what, how close they can get. Or how much they can be in your lives. What do you make of how that has advanced? Well, obviously, AI has now come into the general conversation in a huge way now. When I was first researching this book, people weren't really talking about it. It was just a slightly nerdy subject. But I became quite fascinated in it per se. And I was very lucky. I was shown around Deep Mind by Demis Hassabis. And, you know, I was invited to a very interesting seminar and things. Is that one of the perks of being a Nobel Prize winner? I don't think I'd won the Nobel Prize at that point. Oh, fine. Yeah, maybe it was somewhere around that point. But it must have been fascinating to get this early insight because people weren't talking about it. No, people weren't. And I would say that the other thing, other big scientific breakthrough thing that the world of Clara and the Sun supposes has happened, which hasn't yet happened, is in the area of genetic editing. That, I think, we are not nearly aware of. We're not nearly as aware of as we are aware of AI at the moment. But I think that's another dimension. That's something I think that could profoundly change the way we relate to each other and think of each other, particularly when we can actually edit out hereditary traits. And, you know, effectively, you know, parents can, if they can afford it, create sort of superior children. You know, we do need big charters, international charters, and we need to be able to rally around them. And debate these issues, but both in terms of AI and in terms of things like gene editing, I think. Would you ever take an artificial friend? Well, I mean, right now I have a wonderful wife and a wonderful daughter and some great friends. So there isn't a pressing urgency to replace them with machines. But the more disturbing question this story asks is if I thought I was going to lose somebody very precious to me and somebody said, here's a machine that would actually almost entirely replicate, or it could actually be more or less an exact copy of the person you are about to lose. So would you like this machine? That would be another matter. I can see that would be a more difficult decision to make. So Kazuo Ishiguro talking to Emma Barnett. Now for something completely different. That's the sound of little blue penguins. A plan is needed to protect penguins from the impact of climate change, the El Nino weather pattern, deep sea mining, and oil development. So says the founder of the Global Penguin Society, Pablo Borboroglu. He's a world-leading expert in penguins and has been studying the animals for 40 years. He told me more about the plan and the penguins. It is important to know that there are 19 different species of penguins. They all live in the southern hemisphere and they have this dual life. They spend some time in the ocean and also on land. So they are facing threats in both environments. As you mentioned, one of them is climate change, fisheries, oil development. But also when they get on land, they're affected by human disturbance and also the introduction of new predators. So in terms of the tracking system that's been mentioned, what is that? How does that work? So the thing is like we've been working for decades on penguins and one of the most powerful things, we've seen is that we've been able to protect 13 million hectares of penguin habitat because we counted with good information, with sound information. And one of the powerful evidence that we have is when we track animals in the ocean and we see where they go, where they are migrating, because then we can see where they overlap with harmful human activities like the ones we mentioned and create protected areas in the ocean. So in that way, we minimize the impact of human activities and we give penguins a chance. We're more resilient to cope with the effects of climate change that is something that we cannot manage in the short term. How can we raise greater awareness of this? How can we as a society help them? Yeah, so, you know, that information, we use satellite devices. It's very difficult because we work in very remote places. But we are launching today at the Wheatley Fund for Nature event this afternoon here in London, a multi-continental penguin tracking initiative. So we're going to work with. Four species of penguins in three continents. And we are starting right now with the emperor penguins, the largest and the most iconic ones. So we use satellite devices. We go there by planes and helicopters. You can imagine the conditions are very difficult for our team. We put satellite devices and the penguins are transmitting online. Pablo Borboroglu. Let's finish the podcast with a rare discovery. Archaeologists say they found the world's oldest shipwreck. It lies off the coast of southern Turkey and could be as much as. 4,700 years old. No wood from the original ship has survived. But ceramic pots from the vessel were found on the seafloor by a team from the Mediterranean Archaeology Association. Our science editor, Rebecca Morrell, has more. The ancient wreck was found off the coast of Kokova Island. It lies just 30 metres beneath the waves with artefacts scattered across an underwater slope. Divers discovered three large stone anchors and more than 30 ceramic storage pots, which are called amphorae. The distinctive shape of these ceramics – the pots have two handles, a ridge around the middle and a flat bottom – have been used to date the ship to between 4,400 and 4,700 years old, which was the early Bronze Age. The archaeologists were surprised to find the pots still contained traces of what they once held inside. More tests are needed to identify the residues, but they're likely to be olive oil, wine or tree resin. Professor Hakan Ernez from Akdeniz University in Turkey led the experiment. expedition. What we know about the wreck is this is the earliest trade shipwreck of the world. We are underwater archaeologists and we spent almost more than 30 years to find these shipwrecks. And they are something like time capsules at the bottom of the sea. We are the first human who touched these objects after about 5,000 years. The team believes that this was a trade ship about 10 metres long and it was travelling from the Levant, which today is the Mediterranean coast of the Middle East, and heading to either the ancient city of Troy in what's now northwestern Turkey or to the Minoan people in Crete before it sunk at Kokova Island. Our science editor Rebecca Murrell. And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch you can email us at globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also now watch our episodes in full. Just search for the Global News Podcast on YouTube. This edition was mixed by Robin Schroeder and the producers were Alice Adly and Oliver Berlau. The editor is Karen Martin and I'm Ankur Desai. Until next time, goodbye.