--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Charlotte Gallagher.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: At 6 Hours GMT on Friday 14th November, these are our main stories. The BBC has apologised to Donald Trump for a documentary that spliced together parts of his speech on the day of the Capitol riots, but has rejected his demands for compensation.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: The former Prime Minister of Bangladesh denies committing crimes against humanity during a deadly crackdown on an uprising last year. Environmental campaigners at the COP30 climate talk say 1,600 delegates from the oil, gas and coal industries are in attendance, outnumbering most countries' delegations.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: Also in this podcast, the row between the Israeli government and the army radio station and... A rocket owned by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is headed to Mars.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: We begin with a story about the BBC itself and Donald Trump's threat to sue the corporation for a billion dollars over a news programme broadcast last year. An episode of the documentary series Panorama put together two parts of President Trump's speech on the day of the Capitol riots.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: In a way, the BBC itself has said gave the mistaken impression he had made a direct call for violent action. The BBC's Director General and Head of News have resigned. Mr Trump's lawyers have demanded an apology, a retraction and financial compensation, saying they will file a defamation lawsuit if those conditions are not met.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: On Thursday, the BBC released this statement, laying out its response to President Trump. Lawyers for the BBC have written to President Trump's legal team in response to a letter received on Sunday.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: BBC Chair Samir Shah has separately sent a personal letter to the White House, making clear to President Trump that he and the corporation are sorry for the edit of the president's speech on 6th January 2021, which featured in the programme.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: The BBC has no plans to rebroadcast the documentary Trump, a second chance, on any BBC platforms. While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.
--:-- Katie Razzle: The first point that they make is that the BBC did not distribute the Panorama programme on American channels. And they point out that when it was on the iPlayer, it was geographically restricted to viewers in the UK.
--:-- Katie Razzle: Essentially, what they're saying there is people couldn't have watched it in America or on any of the American channels. So if Donald Trump is claiming it would affect American voters, for example, because it was put out ahead of the election, well, they're saying it couldn't have done that.
--:-- Katie Razzle: They say he was talking in this legal letter, it was about the injury and overwhelming reputational and financial harm to Donald Trump. And the BBC is saying in this letter, it didn't cause you overwhelming reputational or financial harm, effectively because you were re-elected. So where's the harm?
--:-- Katie Razzle: Then there's this talk about malice, whether it was malicious. What they're arguing, the BBC in this legal letter, is that the editing of that clip, it was used to convey a much broader point about what happened on the day and how that speech was received at the time.
--:-- Katie Razzle: They're pointing out it wasn't designed to mislead anybody. It was simply an edit made to shorten a long speech into a shorter, tiny bit of speech and convey the way the speech landed. It wasn't done with malice. It was done, they say, by someone who thought they were condensing Donald Trump's message.
--:-- Katie Razzle: They're also pointing out that the clip was never intended to be considered in isolation. So the BBC is saying it is 12 seconds of an hour-long programme and that programme followed Donald Trump's supporters and contained lots of pro-Donald Trump messages within it.
--:-- Katie Razzle: So they're saying you can't consider it in isolation. This was a programme where we heard a lot from people about why they support Donald Trump and why they follow him and why they wanted him to be president.
--:-- Katie Razzle: And then their last argument in this legal letter is a slightly more technical one, but essentially the threshold for defamation if you're a political figure in the US is really high.
--:-- Katie Razzle: And so what the BBC lawyers are saying is under US law, or sort of put it like this, an opinion on a matter of public concern and political speech is heavily protected under defamation law in the US.
--:-- Sarah Smith: We haven't yet heard from the president or from the White House since the BBC sent that apology. We did hear from him a couple of days ago when he said he felt obligated to sue the BBC because it had defrauded the public, he said, and you can't allow people to do that.
--:-- Sarah Smith: He claimed the BBC had butchered what he called his very calming, very beautiful speech on the 6th of January and made it sound radical. And we heard from his press secretary who said the president now believes the BBC is a leftist propaganda machine who had dishonestly edited that Panorama speech and that that was very clearly fake news.
--:-- Sarah Smith: The other thing we know is that the president has taken on two media companies in the last few months, ABC News and CBS News. He sued them and he ended up settling those cases for $15 million and $16 million each.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: The former prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, has denied committing crimes against humanity during a deadly crackdown on last year's uprising that ousted her. She told the BBC her trial in absentia was a farce orchestrated by a kangaroo court.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: Anvarasan Atarajan reports. A tribunal in Dhaka is due to give its judgment against the former Bangladeshi premier and two other officials on Monday. Prosecutors have demanded the death penalty.
--:-- Anvarasan Atarajan: In her first interview with the BBC since she fled to India in August 2024, Sheikh Hasina claimed that the trial was destined to deliver what she called a preordained guilty verdict.
--:-- Anvarasan Atarajan: She said the hundreds of killings during the anti-government demonstrations last year were tragic, but categorically denied personally ordering security forces to fire at protesters in the weeks before she fled UN human rights investigators have said up to 1400 people were killed when security forces used systematic deadly violence against protesters
--:-- Anvarasan Atarajan: Asked about the discovery of secret jails holding prisoners who had been detained for years without any legal process, she said she didn't have any knowledge of them.
--:-- Anvarasan Atarajan: She also called for the ban on her Awami League party to be lifted so that it can take part in national elections scheduled for early next year.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: Ms Asina and other senior members of her former government are also facing trial for corruption in a separate court, charges they deny.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: The COP30 climate talks taking place in the Brazilian city of Belém have brought together politicians, scientists and activists from around the world. But they've also attracted more than 1,600 delegates from the coal, oil and gas industries.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: That's more than has been sent by any single country apart from Brazil. Our environment correspondent Matt McGrath reports.
--:-- Matt McGrath: Well, security is tight here at the COP and everybody who comes in and out has to have a badge. And that badge shows a lot of information, including where you're from, who you work for, what country you're from.
--:-- Matt McGrath: Every year, environmental activists analyse the information on badges and they use that information to work out who are the people who work for coal, oil and gas companies.
--:-- Matt McGrath: A little earlier, I spoke to Adrian Salazar from the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance. That's one of the groups that's involved in compiling the data.
--:-- Adrian Salazar: This year sees the highest proportion of fossil fuel delegates at a COP since 2021. It has increased substantially in the last several years. And because this is a smaller COP in total aggregate numbers, we're also seeing a higher proportion.
--:-- Adrian Salazar: So about 1 in 25 participants here are representing fossil fuel industry. That sounds like a big number when you say it all together. That's the 1,600.
--:-- Matt McGrath: What's so worrying about having 3% of people here representing coal, oil and gas or banks associated with that? What's wrong with that?
--:-- Adrian Salazar: I think what we have to look at is the amount of power these corporations and fossil fuel representatives are able to yield in their presence here.
--:-- Adrian Salazar: And many of them, I think about 599, are on party badges, meaning that they have access to the negotiations. They may be sitting in delegations that are representing countries.
--:-- Adrian Salazar: And so fossil fuel industry, and this has been the case for years, is in fact colluding with governments in order to influence this process.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: We haven't yet heard from the president or from the White House since the BBC sent that apology. We did hear from him a couple of days ago when he said he felt obligated to sue the BBC because it had defrauded the public, he said, and you can't allow people to do that.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: He claimed the BBC had butchered what he called his very calming, very beautiful speech on the 6th of January and made it sound radical. And we heard from his press secretary who said the president now believes the BBC is a leftist propaganda machine who had dishonestly edited that Panorama speech and that that was very clearly fake news.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: The other thing we know is that the president has taken on two media companies in the last few months, ABC News and CBS News. He sued them and he ended up settling those cases for $15 million and $16 million each.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: Germany's government has agreed a new military service plan to boost troop numbers as Berlin aims to create Europe's strongest conventional army.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: The plan, which politicians will vote on later this year, comes amid the looming threat posed by Russia and other security concerns.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: But many Germans are wary of the country rearming and inching towards conscription. Our correspondent Jessica Parker sent this report from Dortmund.
--:-- Jessica Parker: I'm just walking through an army training base in West Germany where we've been watching recruits do a variety of exercises.
--:-- Jessica Parker: And it comes as the German government, the governing parties, have struck a deal on military service. Now, what they're planning to put to Parliament is that 18-year-olds would be sent a questionnaire about their willingness, their ability to serve.
--:-- Jessica Parker: 18-year-old men would in future also have to attend a physical to see about their fitness, things like that.
--:-- Jessica Parker: For now, the government is not introducing a mandatory element of conscription, not making young people join the army.
--:-- Jessica Parker: But they've left that door open if they don't get enough recruits to boost numbers through volunteers.
--:-- Jessica Parker: But it's a big moment for Germany because due to its role in the past as an aggressor in Europe, in that post-war period there's often been this sense of a shyness, a military meatless, not wanting to show military might.
--:-- Jessica Parker: It feels like that is partly changing, although plenty of people in Germany are still pretty worried about what they see as rearmament and expanding Germany's military.
--:-- Jessica Parker: More troops is only part of the picture, as Germany looks to step up its role in European security.
--:-- Jessica Parker: Last week I spoke with Armin Papberger, the boss of German defence giant Reinmetall.
--:-- Armin Papberger: Chancellor Mertz has talked about wanting Germany to have Europe's strongest conventional army.
--:-- Armin Papberger: That's going to require manpower, but it's also going to require hardware.
--:-- Armin Papberger: It is realistic. It is realistic. Do you think Germany could get to that position?
--:-- Armin Papberger: In five years. In five years.
--:-- Jessica Parker: Many people, including in Germany, fear rearmament, remilitarization can lead to war, as Germany's own history has shown.
--:-- Armin Papberger: We have democracy. I'm very happy to have this democracy.
--:-- Armin Papberger: And what I see at the moment is that more than 70% of the people in Germany say that we have to do more to defend our country, to defend Europe and to help NATO.
--:-- Armin Papberger: Looking at some of what Chancellor Mertz has spoken about, about the state of peace or war, is it your sense that we're in a cold war in Europe at the moment, experiencing even a hybrid war?
--:-- Armin Papberger: It doesn matter how you call it at the end of the day The only thing is what for me is important we are not in a very peaceful time
--:-- Armin Papberger: The reason is also very clear because we see every day that there are some smaller attacks from some countries or only from one country which is testing us if we are prepared or if we are not prepared.
--:-- Jessica Parker: Do you fear a future conflict involving Germany?
--:-- Armin Papberger: I have no glass ball. Nobody knows that.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: Still to come in this podcast. I have a little terrier that's eight inches off the ground and has a sort of round, floofy head.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: His jaws really wouldn't survive, I don't think, having to sort of scavenge and predate in the wild.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: how dogs evolved from prehistoric wolves to our cuddly companions.
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--:-- Erin Andrews: For me, it was my dad, my mentor, who believed in me when I was just getting started in journalism.
--:-- Erin Andrews: A real-life example that showed me when you work with someone who knows a lot and cares even more, you're unstoppable.
--:-- Erin Andrews: At Truist, that's exactly how they approach banking. Truist, leaders in banking, unwavering in care.
--:-- Erin Andrews: See what knowledge and care can do for you at truest.com slash unstoppable.
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--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: The McDonald's snack wrap is back. You brought it back. Ranch snack wrap. Spicy snack wrap. You broke the internet for a snack.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: Snack wrap is back.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: This is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show.
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--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: Every day for 75 years, the Israeli military's own radio station has broadcast news, music and talk programs to thousands of listeners.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: Israeli Army Radio has become one of the most popular stations with soldiers and civilians alike but the defense minister Israel Katz has announced it'll be shut down on March the 1st next year he said Army Radio was established as a voice for IDF soldiers and their families not, in his words, as a platform for opinions, many of which attack the IDF and its soldiers.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: Nakhaman Shai is a former editor-in-chief of Army Radio and later served as a member of the Israeli Parliament.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: My colleague Tim Franks asked him what he made of Mr Katz's decision.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: There is another big camp of Israelis, I would say at least half of the Israeli public that like the station very much and would like it to continue with the broadcasting.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: It's odd though, isn't it? I mean, to have a sort of an arm of the Israeli army broadcasting to the nation.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: That's a very unique radio station. I'm sure that if we ask today whether we should start a radio, a military radio or army radio, we won't do it.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: But it started in 1950. It was a different Israel with them. David Ben-Gurion was the prime minister and the situation was totally different.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: But the fact is that it became an extremely popular radio station, which serves and caters to the center of the Israeli population, to audiences of hundreds of thousands of sometimes millions of people.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: There is no reason. The reason is not professional. I have no doubt. The reason is political, not professional.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: But you must agree, Nachman, that, I mean, just on principle, I mean, it must be moments of awkwardness for the IDF.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: I mean, if you've got journalists asking really tough questions of it.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: Yes, I can remember some situations very, very strange in the past when a young soldier wearing a uniform asked to interview the prime minister, but in the past few years, they've changed the system and only civilians are dealing with the political staff, not soldiers, not young men and women in uniform.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: So they themselves understand the abnormality of the situation.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: But at the same time, again, the point is that Galeiza, the Army Radio, is a public service.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: This government has launched a kind of a war on what I believe is a basic democratic institute.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: And freedom of expression and freedom of press is extremely important ingredients and components of freedom of the press.
--:-- Nakhaman Shai: And that's why I believe the decision was made on that background.
--:-- Helen Briggs: Scientists say tens of thousands of southern elephant seals have been killed in an outbreak of bird flu on South Georgia, a remote island in the South Atlantic.
--:-- Helen Briggs: It's the site of the world's biggest population of the seals, but researchers estimate that half of all breeding females could now be dead.
--:-- Helen Briggs: Our science correspondent, Helen Briggs, has been speaking to my colleague, Janat Jaleel.
--:-- Janat Jaleel: Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey have been looking at populations of elephant seals on South Georgia.
--:-- Janat Jaleel: These are the largest known species of seal. They have these sort of trunk-like noses, which is why they're called elephant seals.
--:-- Janat Jaleel: And they spend most of their lives at sea. They dive really deep into the ocean, spend most of their lives out there on the ocean waves.
--:-- Janat Jaleel: But then they come to beaches to breed. So South Georgia is a really important breeding ground for these seals.
--:-- Janat Jaleel: So it's quite remote. It's difficult to actually do research there. But they've been doing drone surveys from the air and they found this dramatic decline.
--:-- Janat Jaleel: So they looked at the data in 2022. They know that this avian flu arrived late in 2023. And then they seen this massive decline in numbers when they measured them in 2024
--:-- Janat Jaleel: So they looked at three large breeding colonies on the island So if you extrapolate out the colony as a whole 53,000 is their calculation of missing females across this entire population of elephant seals.
--:-- Janat Jaleel: And they're saying that this really could have very serious repercussions for elephant seals, the population for years to come, for decades to come.
--:-- Janat Jaleel: And Helen, these are absolutely massive creatures. They're up to nearly six metres in length. They can weigh as much as 3.7 tonnes.
--:-- Janat Jaleel: So why would they be so badly affected by avian flu?
--:-- Helen Briggs: So we know that this particular type of avian flu, H5N1, has been around for decades and it's spreading all over the world.
--:-- Helen Briggs: Primarily it spreads between birds, but now migratory birds are still spreading it across the world.
--:-- Helen Briggs: So it's gone from North America to South America and it's got into marine mammals.
--:-- Helen Briggs: So we now know that it can affect other wildlife other than birds.
--:-- Helen Briggs: And it's caused mass die-offs of seals in other parts of the world, notably in Argentina recently.
--:-- Helen Briggs: And what's happening here in South Georgia seems to be mirroring that situation.
--:-- Helen Briggs: Elephant seals, they're top predators, they're the top of the food chain.
--:-- Helen Briggs: So if you have a big decline in them, then it will affect other species as well, because everything is interconnected in this complex web of life.
--:-- Anna Aslam: Blue Origin, the space company owned by Jeff Bezos, has launched its largest reusable rocket and successfully landed its booster at sea.
--:-- Anna Aslam: It comes as the Amazon founder is trying to challenge Elon Musk's grip on the market.
--:-- Anna Aslam: 3, 2, 1 That's the moment the New Glenn rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
--:-- Anna Aslam: It successfully deployed NASA satellites that will reach Mars in 22 months to measure the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field.
--:-- Anna Aslam: It's the first science payload Blue Origin has launched for a paying customer and the company had another breakthrough too when nine minutes into the flight, the reusable booster powering the rocket separated and touched down on a floating barge in the Atlantic Ocean.
--:-- Anna Aslam: The control room cheered as the 17-story tall booster landed.
--:-- Anna Aslam: It's a huge engineering feat and a first for Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, which has faced severe delays during development.
--:-- Anna Aslam: The company celebrated the milestone, but sea landings are a norm for its rival SpaceX, which pioneered the manoeuvre and has completed it 500 times.
--:-- Anna Aslam: Analysts say Elon Musk's company has had a more aggressive approach to launches and testing and that Blue Origin is now adopting a more risk-taking culture to try and catch up in the space race.
--:-- Victoria Gill: Scientists looking at skulls dating back thousands of years have now found our canine companions began changing shape and form much earlier than previously thought as they evolved from wolves to domestic dogs.
--:-- Victoria Gill: Dr. Kali Amin from the University of Exeter explained that their finds date back to the Middle Stone Age or Mesolithic period.
--:-- Victoria Gill: Almost half of the diversity we see in modern dog breeds today is already present in dog populations by the Mesolithic which is what we found which is really surprising and really starts to challenge the ideas about where dog diversity has come from.
--:-- Victoria Gill: We know that dog domestication is a big part of the human story. There's evidence of wolves and humans started living alongside of each other 30,000 years ago.
--:-- Victoria Gill: But there's still lots of questions about just how that changed us, changed our societies, changed the dog.
--:-- Victoria Gill: And what these researchers have looked at is actually the physicality of the dog by looking at skulls.
--:-- Victoria Gill: So they actually carried out an analysis, an examination of hundreds of dog and wolf skulls over tens of thousands of years.
--:-- Victoria Gill: Some of them were up to 50,000 years old.
--:-- Victoria Gill: And what they've seen is that 10 or 11,000 years ago, between 10 and 11,000 years ago, the dog started to change shape.
--:-- Victoria Gill: Its head started to change shape. So as dogs were domesticated, they physically changed.
--:-- Victoria Gill: But not only did they change, they became very diverse.
--:-- Victoria Gill: There was a lot of different sizes and shapes of dogs.
--:-- Victoria Gill: So much of the diversity that we see today that we think is driven by lots of very deliberate selective breeding, by, you know, the Victorian tastes and their kennel clubs.
--:-- Victoria Gill: Actually, a lot of that was evident thousands of years ago in the Middle Stone Age.
--:-- Victoria Gill: And why do we think that happened? It's a really good question.
--:-- Victoria Gill: There's loads of theories about why dogs and humans came together.
--:-- Victoria Gill: And, you know, being able to see human intent and motivation from the archaeological record is not so easy.
--:-- Victoria Gill: But there's theories about how wolves maybe started living around communities of people because they were scavenging for food.
--:-- Victoria Gill: And maybe humans must have had some kind of benefit from that.
--:-- Victoria Gill: Dogs might have cleaned up messy carcasses that otherwise would have attracted pests.
--:-- Victoria Gill: They might have raised the alarm and barked and howled when there were predators coming by.
--:-- Victoria Gill: So we started to get this kind of mutual benefit that then developed into wolves becoming the first domesticated animal.
--:-- Victoria Gill: They obviously brought us so much benefit as working animals, as companions, that we started to bring them into our lives and breed them.
--:-- Victoria Gill: We can't tell from this study whether people had some kind of intention to actually breed dogs that had a particular shaped head.
--:-- Victoria Gill: You know, the way that we do these days where we have a particular breed that we find cute and appealing, we kind of we can't see that from the archaeological record.
--:-- Victoria Gill: But what we can see was that was happening.
--:-- Victoria Gill: That was happening millennia ago, you know, way before we had any kind of breeding standards that we have today.
--:-- Victoria Gill: So something was going on that meant that people and their actions and their living alongside humans was physically just transforming the dog fundamentally.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: And that's all from us for now. But there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag Global News Pod.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: This edition was produced by Peter Goffin and Stephen Jensen.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: It was mixed by Martin Baker.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: The editor is Karen Martin.
--:-- Charlotte Gallagher: I'm Charlotte Gallagher. Until next time, goodbye.
