This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service.
Among readers signed at 6 hours GMT on Wednesday the 12th of November, these are our main stories.
Donald Trump sends his most advanced aircraft carrier to the Latin America region,
escalating tensions with Venezuela. California Governor Gavin Newsom tells COP 30 that President
Trump will reduce the US to a footnote on climate policy. And the mayor of Istanbul faces 2,000
years in prison. His party say the charges are politically motivated.
Also in this podcast, China wants young people to spend more money.
Some of my friends are unemployed, still living at home and looking for a job.
The economy is a bit off right now. I hope it gets better so we can all have a better life.
And we look at the Israeli bill that would impose the death penalty for terrorism.
For months, Donald Trump has been massing US Navy ships in the Latin America region
near Venezuela, ordering strikes on boats that he says are running drugs to the US.
Now one of his most advanced warships has arrived in the region.
The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. At least 76 people have been killed by the US
operations, described by some human rights observers as extrajudicial killings.
On Tuesday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said he was suspending intelligence
sharing with the US until the attack stopped, adding that the fight against drugs must be
subordinate to the human rights of the Caribbean people. Our South America correspondent,
Ioni Wells, has been telling me why the arrival of this latest US ship is so significant.
It's the world's largest warship and the world's largest aircraft carrier. And it is the newest,
most advanced aircraft carrier that the US Navy has. It is essentially kind of like a floating
airport. It's a ship which fighter jets can land on and take off from. And I think its arrival in
the region is certainly being seen as the latest escalation by the US when it comes to its military
buildup in the Caribbean, which many observers believe is not just about targeting alleged
drug trafficking vessels, but it's also about putting military pressure
on Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela. So Ioni, a lot of speculation about Donald Trump
trying to force Mr. Maduro out of power. How did the relationship between the two presidents reach
this point? Well, there has been a lot of international combination of Nicolás Maduro over
the last couple of years, not just because of the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela that has triggered
large amounts of migration to the United States. Millions of Venezuelans who have fled
Venezuela in recent years, but also because of the fact that the last election in Venezuela last
year was widely recognized internationally as neither free nor fair. And that has led to the
US, for example, not recognizing Nicolás Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela. Now,
another factor that has played into this is that the US has for some time accused Nicolás Maduro
of being the head of a drug trafficking ring in Venezuela. Maduro has repeatedly denied these
allegations and for his part, he has always accused the US of imperialism and of worsening the country's
economic crisis through imposing sanctions on Venezuela. So there has been this long-standing
tension between the two nations. Now, why many people think that this isn't just about drugs,
but also about trying to put military pressure on Nicolás Maduro is that Venezuela itself doesn't
produce large amounts of cocaine. That mainly comes from Colombia, Peru, Bolivia. There is some
cocaine that is trafficked through Venezuela, but certainly it isn't the biggest drug trafficking
route in the region. And that is why many feel like given the US defines Nicolás Maduro himself
as the head of a drug trafficking organization, this might be part of a wider plan to essentially
try to put military pressure on him and his inner circle.
Only Wells reporting. Well, Venezuela's southern neighbour, Brazil, is hosting the COP 30 climate
talks this week. And the US, one of the world's largest producers of carbon emissions, has not
sent a delegation. The White House said in a statement that President Trump would not jeopardize US
economic and national security goals to pursue what it called vague climate goals that are killing
other countries. But dozens of state and local officials from across the US have traveled
to the meetings in Belém to present their own message on climate, including California Governor
Gavin Newsom. He's a leading figure in the Democrat Party and a possible presidential candidate for
2028. Our environment correspondent, Mac McGraw, is there.
To warm applause in a hot and humid pavilion, California's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom
came to the COP to reassure participants that the US was still committed on climate at state level.
However, it didn't take him long to renew his war of words with US President Donald Trump,
who has described climate change as a con. Governor Newsom told supporters at the COP
that Mr. Trump was a bully and an invasive species who would reduce the US to what he
termed a footnote on climate change policy. And reacting to newspaper reports that said the
president was going to allow drilling for oil in the waters of California, Mr. Newsom said it was
never going to happen. As it relates to offshore oil drilling, it's overwhelmingly opposed by
members of all political parties in the state of California. It's dead on arrival. And I also think
it remarkable that he didn't promote it in his backyard at Mar-a-Lago. He didn't promote it off
the coast of Florida. That says everything. Governor Newsom wasn't alone. Around a hundred
state and city officials from different parts of the United States came to show their commitment
to tackling rising temperatures. Among them was the governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham.
We're doing the work. We're making a difference. We're going to stay focused. We're going to do
more. We're going to work to add states. And oh, by golly, looks like we might add Virginia. And we'll
stay the course with New Jersey. So that's our commitment. We're here. While the American politicians
were welcomed, some delegates were a little bit wary, having seen the United States enter and
leave various climate agreements over the past two decades. Long time climate talks participant
Mohammad Adow from Kenya said that while he understood that many people in the U.S. were
still committed on climate, the rest of the world wasn't going to sit around and wait for them to
come back. The rest of us are not going to wait for the U.S. At the end of the day, it requires
the rest of the world to get on with a job at hand to tackle climate change. Ultimately,
this isn't going to just hurt the most vulnerable nations. It's also going to
force the U.S. to miss out on the energy of the future. And so this is an act of self-supportage
and we can't let one man wreck the planet that we share.
Kenyan Mohammad Adow ending that report by Matt McGraw.
Prosecutors in Turkey have announced 140 new charges against the opposition
mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoglu, who is the main rival to the Turkish president Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. Mr. İmamoglu, who strongly denies allegations of corruption, has been in jail
since March, when his arrest sparked the largest protests in Turkey in over a decade.
His party says the four charges are politically motivated.
From Istanbul, our senior international correspondent Ola Gerrin reports.
Istanbul's jailed mayor now faces yet another legal case, and this one is on an epic scale.
The indictment runs to 4,000 pages and names 400 suspects. It alleges that Ekrem İmamoglu
is the boss of a crime group involved in embezzlement, extortion, and money laundering.
Prosecutors have demanded a sentence of more than 2,000 years if the mayor is convicted.
They have also asked the courts to close his Republican People's Party,
which is Turkey's main political opposition.
Mr. İmamoglu has already been accused of everything from espionage to forging his
university degree. His party says his only crime is running for the presidency of the country.
As the cases against him multiply, it seems safe to assume he will remain behind bars,
unable to stand in the next election, due by 2028. The authorities here insist the courts
are independent. Human rights groups say they have been weaponized.
Ola Gerrin reporting. China's once-surging economy is struggling with exports falling,
ongoing trade tensions with the US, and record high-youth unemployment.
The government is under growing pressure to turn things around.
One idea is to encourage younger consumers to increase their spending
in order to give the economy a shot in the arm. But as China corresponded
in Stephen MacDonald reports from Beijing, rather than buying more,
many young people seem to be embracing fragility with great enthusiasm.
It's lunchtime in Beijing, and workers at this shopping and office district just east of the
foreign ministry have poured into the street under in search of some food along Chowai Nanjing.
It's an area with lots of small service sector businesses, as well as retail, wholesale clothing,
and some big chain outlets. I'm here to try and get an idea of the attitudes of younger people
when it comes to their purchasing patterns in the China of 2025.
One young woman, if it's more important for her to save or spend money at the moment.
Right now, making money is more important to me. I actually need to expand my income sources
and cut my costs. She works in insurance and says she's now earning less than she used to.
I changed jobs, and it doesn't pay well. Also, I don't know for how long this new job
can sustain me in the future. A bad economic environment like this makes people feel down,
because we are not earning very much. This woman's comments encapsulate three of the big reasons why
the Chinese government is finding it hard to get younger people to consume more. They're worried
about job security. Their wages are stagnant or going down. They don't feel good about their future
prospects. A young man who works in the food and beverage industry says there are low level jobs
available, but that it's hard to find decent work related to a specialty area. Some of my friends
are unemployed, still living at home and looking for a job. They had all kinds of majors at university,
from financial services to product sales. The economy is a bit off right now.
I hope it gets better so we can all have a better life. The United States has a problem
with consumers binge buying on their credit cards using money they don't have. In China,
it's the opposite challenge. People are already inclined to save rather than spend,
and this only increases when there are perceptions of tough times ahead. Helena Lofgren has been
studying China's consumption patterns for the Swedish Institute of International Affairs,
and believes this economy is relying too heavily on selling products overseas
in a time of geopolitical uncertainty. People save more than they consume,
and you need the consumption to make up a bigger share of the economy than it's doing today in
China. So you have a very export oriented and investment driven economy, and what we see now
is that these parts are too big for the economy to stay healthy. Vloggers have exploded across
China's social media platforms, filming themselves showing young people where they can buy cheap
clothes, cheap food, cheap everything. It's feeding into a kind of minimalist consumption
subculture for an age with so much uncertainty, and with would-be customers waiting for the price
of goods to keep falling. Desperate companies keep slashing their prices. This is driving
deflation, which is also dragging down growth. The government might have to expand the social
safety net, get graduate wages back up, or find another way to spread optimism amongst China's
youth. If it does nothing, the stresses will continue to grow on an economy already under
considerable pressure. Stephen MacDonald reporting from Beijing. Still to come on this programme?
Nobody wanted to go over the parapet, so my great grandfather struck up his pipes, and it was only
when he started to play blue bonnet over the border that the men actually started to follow.
We mark the life of the first World War backpiper who won Britain's highest military honour.
President Trump has reiterated his intention to sue the BBC over a documentary about the
events leading up to the storming of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. in 2021, saying he
had an obligation to do so. At the weekend, the BBC's director general and head of news resigned
after it was revealed that a BBC documentary had edited two parts of a speech by the US president,
making it appear that he had explicitly encouraged the January the 6th riots.
The BBC chairman, Samir Shah, has also apologised. But Mr Trump's lawyers are threatening to launch
a $1 billion lawsuit against the corporation unless it makes the full and fair retraction
of the documentary by this Friday and appropriately compensates him for the harm caused.
In an interview with Fox News, Mr Trump was asked if he planned to carry out that threat,
and this was his reply. I guess I have to, you know, why not? Because they defrauded the public,
and they've admitted it, and they're top echelon. Director General and the CEO, Bob resign. This
is within one of our great allies, you know, this is supposedly our great ally, BBC. The government
has a chunk of that one, I guess, but that's a pretty sad event. They actually changed my
January 6th speech, which was a beautiful speech, which was a very calming speech,
and they made it sound radical. I asked our North America correspondent, David Willis,
what he made of the president's latest interview. Well, I think it suggests that he believes he
has to sue Anker in order to protect his reputation, and that he is determined to treat
the BBC no differently than the American media, despite the fact that it is a foreign broadcaster.
He says he believes that he has an obligation in his words to sue, because the panorama program had
butchered, I use his words again there, his speech, leaving the BBC, in his view, guilty of
dishonesty, and in their letter to the BBC on Sunday, Mr Trump's legal team claimed that the
panorama program had caused the president overwhelming financial and reputational harm,
and asserted that his client's intention to sue the corporation for no less than a billion dollars
was real if he didn't receive a retraction and apology and compensation by this Friday. Now,
the BBC has said that it will reply to this in due course, but this interview is a further
reminder of the fact that the clock is ticking in that regard. So how possible is it for him to
launch a lawsuit against the BBC from the United States? Well, the letter from Mr Trump's lawyer
made mention of his intention to sue the BBC in Florida in the courts there, and because the
panorama program was broadcast on the 28th of October last year, Mr Trump and his team have
missed the one-year deadline for suing in the British courts, but in Florida the statute of
limitation is two years, although one key thing that his lawyers would have to prove if the case
came to court was that the documentary had been available to watch here in the United States,
and they would also have to show that the president suffered significant financial harm
as a result of the panorama broadcast. And of course, in order to get the sort of payout
that Mr Trump's legal team is seeking, they would have to prove that he suffered a billion
dollars in losses. That said, there have been some very large defamation awards here, the highest
to date being the $1.4 billion that the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay to the
families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, which he and Mr Jones had claimed
was a hoax. And Mr Trump, of course, has a reputation for making legal claims for eye-watering
amounts of money, including the $10 and $20 billion he sought from CBS News over the editing
of an interview with Kamala Harris, only to settle out of court for significantly less.
In that particular case, anchor CBS settled with him for $16 million.
David Willis speaking to me from Los Angeles. The Israeli parliament has passed the first
reading of a bill that would impose the death penalty on people convicted of terrorism against
the state. The National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gavir, whose far-right Jewish power party
proposed the bill, has said it's aimed at deterring Arab terrorism and that terrorists
will be released only to hell. That last remark appears to be a reference to the recent deals
with Hamas, which saw Israel release Palestinian prisoners in exchange for hostages. Dr Amir
Fuchs is a lawyer and senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank.
He told my colleague James Kumrasami about the bill.
It's very vague, but at least on the surface, this is a discriminatory bill that's supposed to catch
non-Jews, terrorists who attacked Jews with terrorist intentions.
And what is the intention behind the bill, do you think?
The intention is, first of all, to start executions in Israel, which we didn't have for more than
60 years. The only time the criminal system sent anyone to death in Israel is Adolf Eichmann in
1962. So Israel has no tradition of executions of terrorists, although we had many terrorists
in our history. So the idea here is to start it. And the people who suggest this bill,
they know that there's a big majority in the people that support it. So it's also
a populist suggestion. And the aim is deterrence, though, isn't it, I guess?
Of course, what they say that it will deter the terrorists. But when I read research from the
United States, which is the only Western democracy that has the capital punishment for murders,
we see that it's very hard to show that there's any deterrence at all for the capital punishment.
And of course, at least from my point of view, that when someone is who is committing a terrorist
attack, it's taking such a big chance for his life anyway. So the chances that the capital
punishment will be something that deters him are very, very low. And also the position of the
officials of the heads of security services for years in Israel was that it will not deter,
and even it will probably be counter effective with fighting terrorism.
It's still got a couple more parliamentary votes before it becomes law. What is your sense of
whether it will eventually find its way on the statute books?
There is a big chance that it will be ratified because there is a big public support for it.
And we even saw in the first reading that most of the opposition were reluctant to come and to
vote against and some of them even voted for. So there is a big chance still there will be
deliberations and the legal officers will try to persuade them that this is unconstitutional.
And if it will be ratified, it is probable that the Supreme Court will say that it is
unconstitutional. It still has a lot of obstacles until we will see someone who is convicted and
sentenced to death. Dr. Amir Fuchs, a senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute.
You might remember the story of two NASA astronauts who became stranded on the
International Space Station after the capsule that was supposed to take them back to Earth,
experienced a series of technical problems. They came home in March after nine months on the ISS.
Now three Chinese astronauts were stuck in space after their craft was hit by debris.
They had been due to return to Earth last week after a six-month mission on the Tiangong Space
Station. The space journalist Leo Enrights told us more about this delay.
There's three tachyonauts, as they call them, who are stuck aboard the space station with three other
cosmonauts. So many different names for them who will be living and working on the station
as a replacement crew for the next six months or so. The station isn't built for six people,
so it's all a bit cramped, but hopefully they'll be able to return home soon.
This is not the first time that this has happened where a crew have been stuck in orbit because
their spacecraft was hit by debris. It happened to the Russians several years ago, and they had to
send up a replacement spaceship to bring that crew home. I think, I mean, reading the tea leaves,
that on this occasion Chinese officials are reasonably satisfied they can get the crew back
using the vehicle that was damaged. But I'm watching Chinese state television as I'm speaking to you,
in case they break in to programming with a launch out of Inner Mongolia because they do
have a replacement spaceship in Mongolia standing by ready to launch if needed.
Space journalist Leo Enrights. Tuesday was Remembrance Day here in Britain. That's Veterans
Day in the US and Armistice Day in France and Belgium. It's the anniversary of the end of the
First World War, a day to look back at the sacrifices of past generations and consider
the horrific cost of armed conflict. For Kevin Laidlaw of Scotland, it's also a day to think
about family. His great-grandfather Daniel Laidlaw was a bagpiper in the First World War
and won the Victoria Cross for rallying the troops at the Battle of Luce. He was one of only three
pipers to win Britain's highest military honour. Now Kevin is campaigning to have a statue of him
built in his hometown. He told us about Daniel's acts of bravery.
This was in 25th of September in 1915 at the Battle of Luce in France and it was the first
time that the British were going to use poison gas. The Germans had actually used it in Ypres
in April 1915. The gas was just released from cylinders so it was basically relying on the
weather, the wind, to carry the gas out over the trenches to release the gas about 6.30 in the
morning but it was actually falling into the Allied trenches and gassing our own men. Of course,
nobody wanted to go over the parapets so my great-grandfather Piper Laidlaw struck up his pipes,
played over the parapet and it was only when he started to play blue bonnets over the border,
which is the regiment of March, the King's Old Scourge borderers, that the men actually started
to follow. You have to remember this is playing a musical instrument. That's what he was armed with
and trench warfare was just horrific and the Germans would be raking machine gun, you know,
inches off the ground. So to get up in that sort of environment, which must have been hell, to
play a musical instrument to rally the men is unthinkable. I have vivid memories seeing the
medals. They were actually displayed in my grandparents' house but my overall memory was
there was this big picture of them at the top of the stairs and I always stopped to look at this
funny man with this big sort of handlebar moustache on it and now that picture hangs on my wall.
Kevin Laidlaw and that's all from us for now but there will be a new edition of the Global News
Podcast later. If you want to comment on this episode or the topics covered in it,
you can send us an email. The address is
[email protected] and you can also find us on
X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag #globalnewspod. This edition was produced by Peter Goffin and
Stephen Jensen and it was mixed by Martin Williams and the editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Uncle Desai, until next time, goodbye.
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