This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Episode twice a week. Find the haunted library wherever you get your podcasts. Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. She believes in miracles. Her job is to examine the evidence. Angel Larson visiting Lorde to meet the doctor investigating extraordinary claims of healing. The miracle doctor of Lorde. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Miles and at 13 hours GMT on Thursday the 1st of October, these are our main stories. Christopher Pike, a female prisoner on death row in the US state of Tennessee, has been taken to hospital after surviving two lethal injection attempts. Global bond markets come under pressure as US borrowing costs reached their highest level since 2002. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it's too early to say who was behind the attempt by a co-pilot, the crash of flight from Dubai to Israel. Also in this podcast. The regime will have really been suffocating many years ago, but actually nobody took up on themselves to do it. The objective is to be in Cuba once the regime falls. After President Trump told the US he wants fundamental change in Cuba, we meet the exiles in Florida, planning for the future. We begin in the US state of Tennessee, where the debate around the death penalty has been brought once again into focus in the most dramatic of ways. Christopher Pike, a female prisoner convicted of murder, had been due to be executed, but she survived not one but two lethal injections at a prison in Nashville. The governor of Tennessee has ordered a temporary halt to executions. Christopher Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of her classmate. If she'd been executed, she would have been the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years. John North is a producer at WBIR television in Knoxville and was present as a witness at the attempted execution. He had this to say at a press conference later on. It appeared this did not go like they thought it was supposed to go, but we don't know that. When we left the building, so far as we knew, she was probably still alive. You just saw the emergency vehicles pull up. We don't know her status and I think it's fair to say we have a lot of questions. Why was it that by the time the blinds went down for the second time at 805, she was still breathing and her breathing at points was very rhythmic. Now, at times it appeared labored, she was snoring at times, but she was still breathing. Prison officials say they followed every step of the state's protocol. The attempted execution followed a day of legal limbo as the US Supreme Court overturned a reprieve granted by an appeal court hours earlier. Our World Service correspondent, Stephanie Hagerty told me the latest. We still don't know how she is right now. Her lawyers haven't been given any update. Last I heard from them, they didn't know anything about her condition just that she was in hospital and being treated. What one of the reporters who witnessed this execution said is that Christopher Pike at one point said that she felt a burning sensation in her arm that felt like it was about to explode and she asked the room if this was normal. That may suggest that the doctors didn't manage to get the pentabarbital into her veins. We know as well that Christopher Pike's legal team had argued before this that she had small veins that they might struggle to find a vein. So that could be what happened here. What happens to Christopher Pike's case now? The governor of Tennessee has issued a stay in any execution until the end of the year, so she won't be executed before the end of 2026. But we know from a case in May also in Tennessee where a man called Tony Corothers also experienced a failed execution. They couldn't find a vein in his case. He received a stay of execution for one year. It's not clear what exactly is going to happen in Christopher Pike's case, but that is the precedent here. Now even before this botched execution attempt, the case of Christopher Pike had caused huge amounts of controversy across the United States and beyond. Tell us why. Even yesterday this execution had been delayed by several hours because of a last minute please. So the court of appeals had issued a stay about an hour before the execution was about to take place at 10am. And then the state of Tennessee appealed to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court vacated that stay really late and the execution started at about 6.30pm. So there was legal wrangling right up until the very end here. The reason that that stay was put in place by the court of appeal was that Christopher Pike's lawyers argued that her history of really extreme neglect and sexual psychological physical abuse in her childhood was never taken into account by her original trial jury. And also that the state of Tennessee had argued that she'd lied about that abuse throughout her childhood and in her trial. And that became a key point of concern for the court of appeal. But the Supreme Court overruled that and didn't give the judges in the court of appeal time to consider those arguments. Now Stephanie, those are the specifics of her case. But what has happened over the last 12 to 24 hours? To what extent will that feed into the debate about the death penalty as a whole across the states? In the state of Tennessee, there had been a very live debate about the death penalty, about the use of this drug, Penta Barbatol, how the state was accessing it, whether the Penta Barbatol was getting degraded. So this was a really live debate already. This will only continue that debate and perhaps it will widen across the U.S. Stephanie Heggity. Well, just before we recorded this podcast, the UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk urged the Tennessee government not to make another attempt to execute Christopher Pike. The U.S. Turan conflict concerns about whether there's an AI bubble about to burst. Just two of the reasons the world economy is rather jittery at the moment. Now those concerns have contributed to a key interest rate in the U.S. reaching its highest level since 2002. Our economic senator, Dashini David told me more. What we're talking about here is the rate on the instruments governments use to borrow to fund their plans, because quite often, as we know, they spend more than they actually take in in tax. And what we're seeing is that cost of borrowing, rising, and that is because of nerves about debt levels around the world, but also about the inflation and interest rate prospects around the world as well. And that's why you've got this perfect storm, which is pushing up those borrowing costs, not just for the U.S. government, but we should say for governments in Europe too, and here in the UK. So this is very much, you know, a little local trouble in the Middle East, you might like to say causing very global implications. And that causes implications for government's borrowing costs and therefore for taxpayers around the world. Well, yes, you're going to say that about taxpayers as well, interest rate rates go up, explain the process, how it filters down to it to you and me. Yeah, absolutely. You know, what we've got here is the government says, well, this is what we want to do. These are our plans for the years ahead, but we might need to find some extra money. They go to the financial markets. They borrow this money. And it's long-term borrowings. Sometimes you're paying back the interest to investors for decades. Now, those interest costs have actually crept up higher and higher as governments have borrowed more in recent years, just to give you one snapshot here in the UK. If the debt interest was a government department, we'd spend more on that than any other department apart from health. That's how big a problem it has become. So that means there is less money elsewhere to spend on other plans, public services, for example, and it tends to mean that governments have to raise taxes to cover those costs as well. So, you know, what might seem an issue, a storm in a tea cup and financial markets has implications, both the public services and for taxpayers further down the line. So, yeah, this is our problem. So, taxpayers are going to have higher interest rates that has an impact on mortgage rates and the rest of it as well. Absolutely. You raise that really important point because, again, what happens in those bond markets tends to be linked to those costs when you take out mortgages that are fixed for any period of time. So, if you are taking out a mortgage that is fixed for five years, ten years, it is that bond, what they call the yield, the interest rate, which really influences those costs, which is why many borrowers around the world say, hang on a minute, why is it getting more expensive to take out a mortgage in this way? So, how does this whole process get slowed down or even reversed? How does it get slowed down and have a reverse? You've got to calm the markets down, ultimately. That is the answer. And when you look at what's happening around the world, I mean, here in the UK, we've got a situation where the government is putting together its next budget and it's trying to make sure it keeps the markets on-site. Make sure it doesn't do anything too bold or drastic that's going to make them worry about the amount you're spending. In France, they are invading plans to talk about cutting the budget deficit. So, those are the kind of ways they're trying to change sentiment. We should say there is no shortage of appetite for these bonds out there. I mean, there's no shortage of money. It's just that we're having to pay a higher price to get that money for governments to spend. But, ultimately, what is really going to calm these markets down? Guess what? It's going to be peace breaking out in the Middle East. Our economic senator, Dashini David. The Northern Ethiopian region of Tigray has been fragile for decades. Milletons there want far greater independence from America.
Addis Ababa, and it looks like a peace deal side four years ago is unraveling. Since September, federal forces and Tigrayan fighters have been battling across three regions to Gry, Amhara, and Afar. Now, it appears government forces have captured the strategic town of Alamata. More than 50 people live in there as said to have been killed. I spoke to Dara Tugabana from BBC Monitoring, who's in Nairobi for more. - The latest we have in terms of the fighting is the reporting on the number of civilians that is increasing, of course, in daily bases. The Itaupan army and its allied and also on the other side, the rebels and the allied groups, they continued fighting specifically in Tigray, Amhara, and Afar regions. We have the first clashes break out on 23 September in those three regions and the fighting, of course, continued intensifying. We do not have numbers or casualties coming from the federal government side so far, but the rebel groups, they continued claiming battlefield victories. And of course, we have civilian casualties happening in those three regions so far. - And Dara Tugabana, there was a dramatic instance where there was an attack as a live television broadcast was out. - Yes. So a drone strike hit to Gry region's main broadcast at Gry TV. It's also functions basically as the main reformation source coming out of Tigray, but unfortunately, since the drone strike hit the broadcast on Sunday, 27 September, the broadcast also discontinued its broadcast, its news, there hasn't been anything coming out of Tigray TV. However, the next day on Monday, 28 September, the TV station resumed its broadcast from a temporary studio. However, it was not able to continue its regular news and program services so far. But we continue to monitor how it will unfold, whether Tigray TV will be back on air again or it will continue like that. - There are times mentioned that this conflict has been going on for 40 years or so. Why is it so difficult to resolve? - You know, the conflict that broke out now is not something that just happened out of the blue. We've been seeing tensions escalating specifically between the Tigray and forces led by the Tigray, the TPL left, Tigray people's liberation front. Also between the federal government, there have been implications that we might actually go back into the conflict. Remember, we also had the civil war that broke out between 2020 and 2022. We continue to have this conflict because some of the pre-tory agreement that ended, that the civil war in Tigray, which was signed in South Africa back in November 2022, the implementation of the pre-tory agreement was not going well. Where the two signatories, mainly the federal government and TPL have accused each other for the failed implementation of the pre-tory agreement, which also led into the escalated confrontation between the TPL left and the federal government. So all those tensions, the point implementation of the pre-tory agreement and some of the fighters who are involved during the Tigray war was also not involved during the pre-tory agreement. So you can imagine the animosity is from everywhere, basically. - Derartigabena, when will Havana fall? That's a question that Cuban XR has been asking ever since the revolution ended in 1959. They have a key ally who's promised to make that happen. President Trump, last week, he told the UN that he wants a fundamental change on the island. Now, Cubans living in Florida have created an organization to plan for investment in a post-communist Cuba or what they call the day after. Will Drart reports from Miami. At the lavish home of one of Miami's top plastic surgeons, overlooking the Biscan Bay, some of the wealthiest Cuban-American families in Florida gather to thrash out their vision of Cuba's future. Ramen, hand, and Rolex is on wrists. It's the fourth meeting of the newly created Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce. The group's president is 82-year-old real estate developer, Juan Omar Sexton. - The intention of this group is to gather on the one roof the most prominent Cuban-American entrepreneurs in Miami-day County. And the objective is to be in Cuba once the regime falls. The guests are convinced that the moment of regime change that they've spent almost seven decades hoping, praying, and indeed pushing for is nigh. After countless false daunes, this time, says Mr. Sexton, is different. - I've been here in Miami for about an hour, 62 or 64 years. This is the first time that Michael Rue, the Cuban-American, is doing what you have been done 20 or 30 years ago. The regime have really been so located many years ago, but actually nobody in the Department of State took up on themselves to do it. - It's an absolutely failed state. - On hearing those words from President Trump at the UN General Assembly, the Cuban delegation stood up in unison and left the chamber. As they walked out, he had a final message for them. - Communism will never be coming to America, but freedom will be coming to Cuba. - The Trump administration has heaped new sanctions on the island, including a near-total oil blockade to force that change. Yet although President Trump has repeatedly said Cuba is next after Iran, it's far from clear what the change might be. - There has been reporting that essentially the U.S. government asked Cuban government privatize your oil company under U.S. hands, convince your president to step down and free political prisoners, and then we can play ball. The Cubans have rejected that. - In the University of Miami's leafy campus, I caught out with Mike Bustamande, an associate history professor there, who's also part of a Harvard working group on the Cuba crisis. - I don't understand how someone like Marco Ruebio sells that kind of interim arrangement with the very government that he and the community is from has opposed for so long. - I don't see how they sell that in South Florida. And yet the kind of more full-frored military action that I think it would take to maybe decisively unroot this government, I just don't think there's appetite for it. - The Cuban government recently passed 176 economic liberalization measures into law. President Miguel de S. Cannell told the Cuban Congress they were to advance the defense of socialism to support and widen social justice. To his critics, though, they look like little more than full-blown capitalism. They lift the cap on the number of workers in a private business and permit ownership of multiple enterprises at once, including by Cuban Americans in Florida. - Agriculture, what needs to be done with agriculture? There's a number of people here tonight that have volunteered already. - But Miami real estate developer Juan Omar Sixthor sees the changes as purely cosmetic and says they offer no guarantees to any potential investors in his homeland. - We will not put a foot in Cuba unless there's a regime change. - So really nothing less than the Trump administration pushing through full regime change will be accepted. - That's it, that's all it is. Michael Rubin was that these group of people are the ones that cannot go back and invest in Cuba unless that regime is out of power. - On one of my trips to Cuba earlier this year, the tour guide took me around the empty streets of Havana in his car to show the total collapse of the tourism industry amid the fuel embargo. There's since been an exodus of international hotel companies and financial entities like Visa and MasterCard. Miami's ambitious plans aside, Cubans will endure more acute shortages in food, water, fuel and medicines. Most just hope their days get a little easier sometime soon. - Will Grant. Still to come in this podcast. As Japan celebrates world sake day, we find out why sales of the national drink are in decline. - After Japan opened up to foreign trade, beer, wine and whiskey entered the market. Let's reduce the reliance on sake. Also today, young generations don't drink as much as we do. (dramatic music) - Welcome to the Haunted Library. Have you come in search of a tale? This podcast invites you to browse the shelves and find stories that will linger long after you've left this place. From gothic masterpieces to pulpy penny dreadfuls. Join me, Colin Morgan, with new episodes twice a week. Find the Haunted Library, wherever you get your podcasts. - Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. - She believes in miracles. Listen now by searching for the documentary, wherever you get to your BBC podcasts. So, uh, quick summer recap, heat waves, data leaks, AI hacks, folding phones and a viral spinally challenge track here. Yeah, I think that, uh, that covers it, right? I'm Thomas Germain. I'm Jess Maddox and the Interface is back from its summer break. New season, new co-host, same deep dives into the tech that's shaping our world and our lives. So, before AI wipes out all of humanity, uh, allegedly, join us for the Interface. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcast. They were taught to obey, people truly deeply respect him, but they learnt to resist. Not to stay silent, not to become another victim. In the new season of World of Secrets, our investigation follows a group of students as they fight to expose a dark secret inside their Islamic boarding school. I am not the only one. There are other girls too. We have to hold him accountable. World of Secrets, catching my teacher. Listen now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast. To Israel now, where the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been talking about the apparent attempt to crash a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv. The captain was stabbed as the plane was entering Israeli airspace, but was still able to open the door to the cockpit so the passengers could help him out. Mr. Netanyahu praised the captain in the highest way possible. I think what happened is a tremendous act of heroism that prevented another 9/11 style crash of an entire airplane. Mr. Netanyahu said he would present heroism awards to four of the passengers. He referred to one of them in particular. In Israeli passenger, a civilian, I met this guy. He's an incredible hero. Look at what he did under impossible circumstances. I spoke earlier today with President Trump, who really was appreciative of this. And he said, you know, when a plane is nose diving, the passengers, including 30 children, are already saying their prayers, they know they're gone from this world. And this young man just acts with incredible, incredible heroism and saves the day along with the Indian pilot who was there and the others who came to help. Well, the UAE says it has now begun an investigation into the incident. Our correspondent, Yolanda Nell, who's in Jerusalem, gave us this update. The Israeli intelligence agencies have been looking into this as you would expect. I have interviewed many of those Israeli passengers who came back on the flight from Saudi Arabia. A short time ago, the Israeli envoy to the United Arab Emirates said that at the moment, the motivation of this alleged attacker is still not determined. Now we understand that the Saudi authorities were the first ones to interrogate the co-pilot. And an Israeli security source told us that there was initial information that was then passed across to the Israelis, even though Israel and Saudi Arabia do not have official diplomatic relations. Mr Netanyahu said that he expected the pilot, the co-pilot, to be handed back to the United Arab Emirates. And of course, the questions that will be asked are about his background, whether he could have been working with any kind of an armed group or any state actor. He is said to be an Omani national. And that is very important, too, because Omani is a country that does not have diplomatic relations with Israel, either. So there are questions being asked about why he was given approval to come on this flight to Israel. And at the moment, Israel has said it's increasing the security checks that it carries out on pilots, on crews. And we haven't had more clarification about exactly who this man was. He's not even been named at the moment, but all of this is really feeding into a very sort of sensitive moment in Israel. You've got the third anniversary coming up of the deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel just next week. And at the end of this month, it's going into a tightly fought election where security has been a major issue. You'll earn now in Jerusalem. Despite the US broke its ceasefire in Gaza, people there face almost daily attacks. According to Gaza's health ministry, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli strikes since the October 2025 ceasefire began. Much of Gaza's health care system has been destroyed. Doctors who have been traveling to Gaza say Israel's restrictions on vital medical supplies have placed further strain on patients. Israel's authorities deny this and say that they do not place limits on medicine imports. Dr. Nakhrin Ahmed is a critical care physician who returned earlier this month from volunteering in Gaza. He spoke to my colleague, James Coppano, about what he saw there. We're about one year out from the ceasefire and every single day, I was seeing victims of airstrikes of quadcopter shootings. I remember a four and a half year old in particular who was shot in the head by a quadcopter. And the CT scan, the bullet is still in his brain. I fall asleep seeing that image in my head and this child had so much brain swelling that unfortunately no neurosurgeon was able to do anything. Unfortunately, he didn't survive and he was not the only child. I remember being in the emergency room after an airstrike that happened close to the beach and there was a two-year-old who was alive for maybe a brief few moments when I walked into the emergency room and within minutes lost a pulse and his injuries were so severe that he didn't survive. And his body had to be moved out of the resuscitation area to another area because we were so swamped that there wasn't even a moment to grieve. What are the sorts of conditions you were working in, the facilities and medications and so on you have to deal with those kind of cases? The hard thing is we are at a point where we are not only just seeing death from traumatic injuries, but we're also seeing death from non-violent injuries just because we don't have proper medications. We had a patient that came in, she was 45 years old, she was actively having a heart attack and we didn't have the stents or the catheters to be able to save her life from having this heart attack. And this was a common theme that we were seeing. People coming in with cardiac arrest, meaning that their hearts had stopped because they didn't have access to medications, it's the moral injury that doctors and nurses are facing from seeing death from incredibly preventable illnesses is another type of trauma. I saw a woman die of a scalp infection which is a treatable thing, but it was because she didn't have access to her diabetic medications. The infection became out of control because she was chronically malnourished which is another problem we're seeing in almost everybody and that infection went absolutely uncontrolled and she died from multi organ failure within days. And not one child I've seen looks their state at age and so they're coming in with complex infections, pneumonia especially, these are complications that happen when they're severe malnutrition that is from prolonged food deprivation and so very basic infections that are completely out of control because effectively when your body is malnourished your immune system doesn't work properly. So we're seeing that across the board on pretty much every age group but the age group that's most affected by that is children, the elderly and then pregnant women especially. Dr. Nakhrin Ahmed it seems there are few areas where AI has not become a source of controversy. The winning entry of a prestigious scientific photography competition is being re-evaluated following criticism from other scientists that it was made with AI. The image is meant to show footage of tiny hair-like structures called silia moving inside the airways of a child with a rare disease. Our technology and AI editor Zoe Klyman has the details. So to the uninitiated it does look a bit like a few blades of grass waving about in this very short video but it is in fact these very tiny hairs in the airways of a child. But there has been quite considerable backlash actually, it won this competition won by Nikon which is a quite a prestigious award, it's called Small World in Motion, it's run every year for the last 15 years, it was submitted by an optical engineer in China called Dr. Nakhrin who insists that he hasn't done anything wrong. He says AI was used in some of the processing after the event but was not used to generate the image. That however is not satisfying a number of scientists who have taken to LinkedIn when Nikon published the results of the winner to say that there are a number of things that don't look right with this image, that structures don't look right, they're not behaving the way things like nuclei usually behave, one scientist has commented that the cilia look exceptionally large. Now of course this is a cell from a child who's unwell, so of course it's quite possible that they're not behaving normally, but the criticism has been so fierce, including from former judges of the competition itself, Nikon says it's now re-evaluating, it says Dr. Nakhrin is respectfully complying with its wishes, he has provided more documentation about how the image was created and at this time they don't think the rules have been violated, but we should hear more by the end of the week. Zoe Klymer, Sake is Japan's national drink, and on October 1st it is World Sake Day, it celebrated every year to mark the start of the Sake brewing season, but there is a little to celebrate at the moment, since the 1970s sales inside the country have fallen by more more than 2/3.
I found out more from our Tokyo correspondent, Kuromi Mori. Sake is Japan's traditional fermented rice alcohol. It's made with really four ingredients, so it's quite simple. And it's the first traditional real alcohol that Japan had. It's made with rice, water, yeast, and kōji, which is the type of mold that we use in Japan. But the industry is facing quite a longer term decline in Japan. I don't necessarily simply want to say it's dying. I would say it's changing, but of course Japan has had falling domestic sake production here on here for more than a decade now. The number of sake breweries has really fallen. I mean, it used to be around 30,000, although this is early 19th century, so quite a long time ago. But now we only have about 1,300 domestically. And so when I was talking to some of the sake brewers, they were saying, you know, it's just such a tough environment to be in. And not only that, there's a lot of craft involved craftsmanship and teaching these told you which are these sake masters. It takes a long time to train them up. And so they feel like they're kind of in a pinch at the moment. But the biggest problems here are Japan's aging and shrinking population. There's less people to make, of course, the sake, but people to drink the sake. Karim, do you've been speaking to the head of the Ishikawa brewery in Tokyo? A man called Yamashiro Ishikawa. Let's listen to a little about what your conversation entailed. After Japan opened up to foreign trade, beer, wine and whiskey entered the market. That's reduced the reliance on sake. Also today, young generations don't drink as much as we did. Yeah, so when I was speaking to him, he really alluded to the fact that, you know, that the trends have really shifted. And he's doing many different things to try to kind of revive this market. And what kind of things is he trying to do? Yeah, I mean, I think there are a few things that Japanese brewers are doing. The first thing I mentioned a bit earlier was going premium. So moving away from the cheaper everyday sake that a lot of people were drinking. That's all $12,000 you can pay for a bottle of this stuff. Yeah. I asked you before you go, do you like a little tipple? Do you like a little bit of sake? Absolutely. Who doesn't? I'm Japanese, so God always have a taste. Karumi Mori. And that's all for us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at
[email protected]. You can also watch our episodes in full. Just search for the Global News Podcast on YouTube. This edition was mixed by Nicola Braff and the producer was Ayra Khan. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Nick Miles, and until next time. Goodbye. Welcome to the Haunted Library. From Gothic masterpieces to poppy penny dreadfuls. Find the Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts.
PodcastTranscript AI