--:-- Celia Hatton: This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Celia Hatton, and in the early hours of Tuesday, the 9th of September, these are our main stories.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The French Prime Minister, François Bayrou, has lost a confidence vote in Parliament and will now be forced to resign. Benjamin Netanyahu is telling residents of Gaza City to leave immediately as the Israeli military intensifies its assault. Democrats in the U.S. Congress have published an image of a sexually suggestive letter purportedly sent by Donald Trump to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Mr. Trump denies being the author.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Also in this podcast, a mural by the street artist Banksy surfaces in London before it's quickly covered up. It depicts a judge in a wig and black robe hitting a protester who is lying on the ground holding a blood-splattered placard.
--:-- Celia Hatton: We begin in the French capital, Paris. The French government had lost a vote of confidence in Parliament, and the Prime Minister, François Bayrou, will resign on Tuesday. He'd wanted to cut public spending to shrink the budget deficit, but failed to garner enough support. On Monday, French MPs voted against him.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The National Assembly has not approved 194, full 264 against. The Prime Minister must now tender his resignation to the president. The result in the French parliament was expected, but the extent of the government's defeat, perhaps not.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The National Assembly voted by a margin of almost two to one to eject François Bayrou from office, bringing down his minority government. You might think you've heard this before. In the last three years, France has had four prime ministers.
--:-- Celia Hatton: It must now find another person to fill that role. French money problems are at the heart of much of this. François Bayrou addressed Parliament on Monday before the vote. He had this warning for MPs on the country's ballooning deficit.
--:-- François Bayrou: 3,415 billion euros of debt at the time that I am speaking to you right now. But this debt has a price. What we need to pay to the brokers, what we need to pay to pay back. And we must do it, because otherwise it's a shutdown. Otherwise it's a shutdown, and we cannot leave in this country without keeping on boring to pay our civil servant, to pay the people who keep our state running.
--:-- Celia Hatton: I spoke to our correspondent in Paris, Hugh Schofield, and I began by asking him to summarise what happened in the French Assembly with Mr. Bayrou calling the vote himself.
--:-- Hugh Schofield: It was an act of suicide, according to some, because it was quite clear that he was going to lose it. Let's not forget the background of all of this is a parliament in which no government can have a majority. It's split three ways.
--:-- Hugh Schofield: Whoever's in power is hated by the other two blocs and they can unite against him. And it was quite clear from the start of all this that Bayrou, by staking his government's future on this issue of debt and on a stringent budget to come, would run into the opposition of the left, the left wing alliance and of the populist right on the other side.
--:-- Hugh Schofield: And once again, though they hate each other, they came together to vote him out. And that's what happened. They said that his budgetary warnings and his dire Cassandra-like prognostications about the debt were exaggerated and that his policies were those of President Macron, who they all hate, and therefore he should be defeated.
--:-- Hugh Schofield: And he was. So can you put this into perspective for us then? How big is this crisis? Politically, there's a massive crisis, obviously. We still don't have a government.
--:-- Hugh Schofield: That means after the snap elections called by Macron in July last year, we're now on to another third prime minister in just a bit over a year with no prospect of whoever takes over being able to command a majority in parliament either.
--:-- Hugh Schofield: It's all happening at a time when public dissatisfaction, disillusion with politics is at an all time high when people just simply turning away from it. And that obviously poses questions about the democratic future of France.
--:-- Hugh Schofield: And it's at a time of debt, of growing worries about whether the level of debt is sustainable. All of this is a kind of concentration of worries, which means that many people regard this as potentially a worse crisis, as bad a crisis as it has been since the Second World War.
--:-- Hugh Schofield: And so what are we expecting now? Is this really a threat to Emmanuel Macron's presidency himself? Not really. I mean, there are people calling for him to resign, mainly on the hard left.
--:-- Hugh Schofield: Clearly, it means that the rest of his presidency, there's another two less than two years to run, probably going to be as marked as there have been up to now by this kind of drift and inability to do anything. Domestic politics will no longer be will remain out of his grasp as he concentrates on on international affairs.
--:-- Hugh Schofield: But what will happen immediately is that he'll have to name a new prime minister.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The UN has demanded a swift and transparent investigation into the killing of at least 19 people in Nepal during protests against corruption and the decision to block several social media platforms.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets on demonstrators in Kathmandu, who carried placards saying, shut down corruption, not social media. Rebecca Kesby spoke to our global affairs reporter, Embarasan Etarajan.
--:-- Embarasan Etarajan: Now, what happened today in Kathmandu and other parts of Nepal was quite extraordinary because thousands of youngsters, they were mostly demanding accountability and against political corruption.
--:-- Embarasan Etarajan: Of course, the ban on social media provided the trigger for this protest. Now, it all went on very peacefully, people raising slogans and holding placards saying, shut down corruption, not social media. So they were singing.
--:-- Embarasan Etarajan: But then when the protesters tried to breach some of the barriers, trying to enter into high security areas like parliament building, and that's where many eyewitness accounts say that the clashes started.
--:-- Embarasan Etarajan: Now, if thousands of people are going into key government buildings, you know, people saw what happened in Sri Lanka. We were covering it quite extensively and also in Bangladesh, how they toppled the governments at that time.
--:-- Embarasan Etarajan: So this is a trend being watched close because the social media has also given power to these youngsters who think that now they have a say in how the country is being governed. They're mobilizing. So the governments are afraid about any mass uprisings.
--:-- Embarasan Etarajan: And that is one of the reasons why the critics would point out the restrictions are being brought in for social media or a way to contain dissent. So what is the government going to do now?
--:-- Embarasan Etarajan: Because I notice, well, the interior minister has resigned. I guess, would he have been under pressure to do that? This has taken everybody by surprise.
--:-- Embarasan Etarajan: And I've been speaking to people in Kathmandu. They said they couldn't believe that the number of casualties, hundreds injured with bullet injuries, according to the doctors.
--:-- Embarasan Etarajan: And the government says that, you know, it regrets. And now the first casualty we are seeing, the Home Minister has stepped down following this violence.
--:-- Embarasan Etarajan: But the government has come under a lot of criticism. And even though Nepal has seen you know various protests pro protests in the 90s and later on and during the Maoist time nowhere in the history that so many people were killed in a very short span of time during a public protest This is the first time.
--:-- Embarasan Etarajan: So people are like trying to grapple with this enormity and severity of the situation. The concern is whether this is going to trigger more anger because home minister resigning can be one part of it.
--:-- Embarasan Etarajan: People would want answers, accountability from the whole government, because already there are demands for Prime Minister K.P. Oli to step down as well.
--:-- Celia Hatton: In the Middle East, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has told residents of Gaza City to leave now. He said Israeli forces were organizing and assembling to enter Gaza City for what he called ground maneuvers.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Last week, Israel said it had established control over 40% of the city. Mr. Netanyahu's warning came after gunmen in Jerusalem killed at least six people in an attack on Monday, which Israel blamed on Palestinians from the occupied West Bank.
--:-- Celia Hatton: From Jerusalem, our Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson sent this report on the attack.
--:-- Lucy Williamson: From the dashboard camera of a nearby car the sound of israel's fragile security shattered then chaos as crowds surge in panic down the road a taxi driver dazed in the confusion helps his passenger out as a bullet whizzes past inches from his head hitting the vehicle behind him
--:-- Lucy Williamson: Emergency teams found the dead and wounded scattered on the ground, along with the bodies of the two gunmen shot dead by armed bystanders.
--:-- Lucy Williamson: Daniel Katzenstein is a first responder with the United Hatzalah volunteers. One of the first people that I treated was one of the bus drivers, his name was Muhammad. He also ran to help.
--:-- Lucy Williamson: This is not a battle of Islam versus Judaism. This is a battle between the people who wish to do harm and the people who want to live life.
--:-- Lucy Williamson: Visiting the site, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country was in a war against terrorism on several fronts.
--:-- Lucy Williamson: I would like to state as clearly as possible. These murders and attacks in all sectors will not weaken us. They will only increase our determination to complete the mission we have taken upon ourselves in Gaza, Judea and Samaria and everywhere.
--:-- Lucy Williamson: Hamas voiced its support for today's attack, describing it as a natural response to the crimes of the occupation and the genocide Israel was waging.
--:-- Lucy Williamson: The Palestinian Authority quickly condemned the shooting of civilians.
--:-- Lucy Williamson: On the hill above the attack site, 18-year-old Pinney from Tottenham in London was watching the scene with his yeshiva teacher, Pinhas.
--:-- Lucy Williamson: In a couple of hours, the world is going to forget about this and be shouting at us why we are doing stuff to keep us safe in Gaza or in Lebanon or in all different places.
--:-- Lucy Williamson: Mr. Netanyahu has made Israel's security the central justification for expanding the war in Gaza and Israel's military occupation of the West Bank.
--:-- Lucy Williamson: His supporters will see today's attack as proof that he needs to go further. His critics will see it as evidence that his actions aren't keeping Israelis safe at all.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The shooting in Jerusalem came as both Israel and Hamas consider President Trump's latest proposal to end the fighting in Gaza.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Here's our diplomatic correspondent, James Landale.
--:-- James Landale: The latest US peace plan would, according to reports, involve the immediate release of all 48 remaining Israeli hostages, both alive and dead.
--:-- James Landale: At the same time, a ceasefire would begin and thousands of Palestinian prisoners would be freed. Only then would talks begin to end the war.
--:-- James Landale: Donald Trump urged Hamas to accept his terms or face the consequences in what he called his last warning.
--:-- James Landale: Gideon Saar, Israel's foreign minister, said his country accepted the US deal.
--:-- James Landale: Hamas said it was discussing some ideas from the American side. The group has previously insisted on an Israeli commitment to end the war and withdraw its forces as part of a ceasefire deal.
--:-- James Landale: But there's little trust on both sides. Israel's defence minister, Israel Katz, threatened Hamas with what he called a mighty hurricane, telling it to release the hostages and lay down its weapons, or Gaza would be destroyed and the group annihilated.
--:-- James Landale: All the while, international diplomacy continues.
--:-- Celia Hatton: In a separate development, Spain has withdrawn its ambassador to Israel in an escalating dispute between the two countries.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Earlier, Madrid announced new measures against the Israeli military and more aid funding for Gaza.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Israel has accused Spain of being anti-Semitic.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the move was aimed at stopping Israel from exterminating a defenseless people.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Next to the United States. Monday was not a good day for Donald Trump.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Two matters haven't gone his way. First, the U.S. president lost his legal appeal against an earlier court judgment that ordered him to pay more than $83 million to the advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.
--:-- Celia Hatton: He'd been found guilty of defamation for his repeated social media attacks and public statements denouncing Ms. Carroll after she accused him of sexual assault.
--:-- Celia Hatton: And also on Monday, a screenshot of a sexually suggestive drawing allegedly sent by President Trump to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, to wish him happy birthday, has been released by Democrats.
--:-- Celia Hatton: President Trump denied the note from 2003 ever existed.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Our New York correspondent, Netta Telfiq, first told us more about the drawing.
--:-- Netta Telfiq: So originally, remember, the Wall Street Journal put out a report about this note that Donald Trump allegedly sent for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday.
--:-- Netta Telfiq: It was a book put together by the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein. And at the time, Donald Trump said he was suing the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion, saying it didn't sound anything like him.
--:-- Netta Telfiq: It's not something he would write. You even had Vice President J.D. Vance saying the same thing, his children saying his dad doesn't doodle.
--:-- Netta Telfiq: This note allegedly was an outline of a naked woman with a kind of imagined conversation between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
--:-- Netta Telfiq: Well, now we have the oversight Democrats in Congress of this oversight committee. They put out a subpoena to Epstein's estate to get this birthday book.
--:-- Netta Telfiq: And on X now, they've actually released the image of this alleged note. And in it, the note alludes to a wonderful secret that the two of them share.
--:-- Netta Telfiq: But even now, Celia, you have some in the White House still suggesting that this was not a note that Donald Trump made, that this is a fake.
--:-- Netta Telfiq: So it's going to be very interesting to see how his base reacts, because remember, the Epstein crisis really is what it has become now in the MAGA base is such a sensitive issue.
--:-- Netta Telfiq: Donald Trump is desperate to move past it. But you have those in his base who are very confused by his turnaround, because remember, he campaigned on exposing Epstein and all of his clients.
--:-- Netta Telfiq: Now he's saying it's a Democratic hoax. So they want to know what's the story there.
--:-- Celia Hatton: And also today, earlier, a court upheld an award made to E. Jean Carroll over this civil action she launched against the president.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Can you tell us what happened there?
--:-- Neda Talfik: Yeah, look, Donald Trump has certainly been having some court victories. But when it comes to E. Jean Carroll, the former writer, he has really lost all of his appeals.
--:-- Neda Talfik: This one was for a civil judgment of $83.3 million that he had to pay to E. Jean Carroll for defaming her.
--:-- Neda Talfik: And what we saw from this three-judge panel, Court of Appeals, was that they felt that that judgment was fair because they called Donald Trump's behavior reprehensible.
--:-- Neda Talfik: They say he acted with malice. And for over several years, he repeatedly defamed her.
--:-- Neda Talfik: And that that award was just because the jury felt it needed to be that large of an amount to deter him from defaming her in the future.
--:-- Celia Hatton: And here in London, a new work by the elusive street artist Banksy has appeared on the side of the Royal Courts of Justice in the centre of the city.
--:-- Celia Hatton: It shows a judge hitting a protester who's lying on the ground. Banksy's art is often critical of government policy, war and capitalism.
--:-- Celia Hatton: This latest piece comes after almost 900 people were arrested at a demonstration in London against the banning of the campaign group Palestine Action.
--:-- Helena Wilkinson: The latest work by Banksy appeared on an external wall of the Queen's Building, which is a listed building at the back of the Royal Courts of Justice complex.
--:-- Helena Wilkinson: It depicts a judge in a wig and black robe hitting a protester who is lying on the ground holding a blood-splattered placard.
--:-- Helena Wilkinson: Not long after it was unveiled, the artwork by the world-famous graffiti artist was covered up.
--:-- Helena Wilkinson: It's also been guarded by security officials.
--:-- Helena Wilkinson: An HM Courts and Tribunals spokesperson said that the Royal Courts of Justice was a listed building and they're obliged to maintain its original character.
--:-- Helena Wilkinson: Court officials say the work will be removed.
--:-- Helena Wilkinson: The Metropolitan Police said it received a report of criminal damage to the side of the Royal Courts of Justice today and that inquiries continue.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Still to come, the writer Ian McEwen imagines a man 100 years in the future and how he might view our world now.
--:-- Celia Hatton: And he looks back on our time and of its immense energy and the risks it took and the craziness.
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--:-- Celia Hatton: According to a nationwide survey conducted by GeneSight, Nearly 9 in 10 Americans who've been diagnosed with depression or anxiety believe that mental health medications are somewhat or very effective.
--:-- Celia Hatton: However, despite that belief, more than half of those individuals say they have avoided taking medication due to concerns about potential side effects.
--:-- Celia Hatton: That's why Dr. Whitney Brown, a family and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner based in Alabama, often recommends genetic testing to our patients as part of their treatment journey.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Dr. Brown explains, As part of my treatment plan, I offer the GeneSight test, which analyzes how a patient's genes may influence how they metabolize or respond to certain mental health medications.
--:-- Celia Hatton: It gives me insights and takes out some of the guesswork that can be associated with prescribing them.
--:-- Celia Hatton: If you or someone you love is facing challenges with depression or anxiety, talk to your doctor about how genetic testing may help.
--:-- Celia Hatton: To learn more, visit GeneSight.com. That's GeneSight.com.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Next, to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The health ministry in the country has intensified efforts to stop the spread of Ebola after confirming a new outbreak near the Angolan border.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Officials say cases of the highly infectious Zaire strain have risen to 43 with 15 deaths.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Emergency response teams are already on the ground in the affected areas.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The BBC's global affairs reporter and Africa specialist Richard Kagoe gave us this update on what the DRC authorities are doing to stop the spread of the Ebola virus.
--:-- Richard Kagoe: They've got a considerable experience and this is quite evident in terms of how they handled the last outbreak.
--:-- Richard Kagoe: That must have been around 2022. We only reported cases of six people who died.
--:-- Richard Kagoe: But before that, between 2018 and 2020, we lost almost close to about 2,300 people in the Equitia province.
--:-- Richard Kagoe: But you can see that there's a lot of capacity building and I guess also support that has really come through.
--:-- Richard Kagoe: Also in terms of public education and awareness on how to deal with this disease.
--:-- Richard Kagoe: They've got sufficient stockpiles, about 2,000 of the available vaccine, and they've requested for more.
--:-- Richard Kagoe: So you would say maybe because of the partnerships that they've been having with various organizations, they would be in better positions.
--:-- Richard Kagoe: But the DRC is a very expansive country because from the capital, Kinshasa, to the site where the outbreak was confirmed, it's slightly over 1,000 kilometers.
--:-- Richard Kagoe: So it's quite really a task for the Ministry of Health officials in the DRC.
--:-- Celia Hatton: And one other note on what's happening in that region.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Neighboring countries, including Uganda and South Sudan, as well as Nigeria, have increased health checks at airports and border posts to prevent cross-border transmission of Ebola.
--:-- Celia Hatton: We'll keep an eye on this developing story.
--:-- Celia Hatton: In Argentina, the markets tumbled on Monday in response to a major upset for the president's party after it lost an important provincial election.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Javier Mille acknowledged what he described as his party's clear defeat after the opposition Peronist movement triumphed in Sunday's ballot in Buenos Aires province.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Argentina's stock and bond markets dropped sharply, and the national currency, the peso, also fell by about 5%.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Since becoming president in December 2023, Mr. Mille has slashed public spending and dismissed tens of thousands of public employees.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The provincial result comes just six weeks before midterm elections across Argentina.
--:-- Celia Hatton: So what area did this election cover and why was it so important?
--:-- Celia Hatton: That's a question I put to our Latin America analyst from BBC Monitoring in Miami.
--:-- Luis Fajardo: This election was in Buenos Aires province, which is by far the largest province in Argentina.
--:-- Luis Fajardo: It contains nearly 40 percent of the population of the country. It does not include the capital itself, Buenos Aires, which is a federal district, but it does include a large part of the metropolitan area, nearly 10 million people living in the metropolitan area, which are part of this province and are normally considered a stronghold of the Peronists.
--:-- Luis Fajardo: This time, President Javier Milley, as you mentioned, had put a lot into this election. He had made it almost a referendum on his administration.
--:-- Luis Fajardo: And the results are clearly very negative for him. It is seen as a bellwether for the rest of the country, for how the rest of the country might vote in the elections next month.
--:-- Luis Fajardo: And certainly it's not a very good situation right now for President Millet.
--:-- Luis Fajardo: Indeed. I mean, tell us more about what President Millet has said.
--:-- Luis Fajardo: He mentioned mistakes. Any details?
--:-- Luis Fajardo: Well, yes, he said that it was due mainly to tactical mistakes from the political operatives of the province, of his party in the province.
--:-- Luis Fajardo: He has clearly said that he does not want to change course in his very controversial, very tough economic measures.
--:-- Luis Fajardo: However, the economic reality is, according to many critics, moving against him, even in the last few hours, because most people now think that the Malays Party is going to have a difficult time in the legislative national elections, and he's going to have a very difficult time in having a parliamentary majority that could continue passing his reforms.
--:-- Luis Fajardo: There has been what some people are already calling a Black Monday of intense financial speculation and problems with the country currency a big fall in the country stock exchange and a strong devaluation of the national currency against the U dollar
--:-- Luis Fajardo: All of this seen as a reflection of people not really trusting that he might be able to continue with his very harsh economic policies, which he has been trying to pass in the last couple of years.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Earlier this year, the U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled plans for selling a $5 million gold card visa that will offer wealthy buyers permanent residency in the United States and a path to citizenship.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Globally, these schemes have often been considered controversial.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Do the super rich use them as a tax plan, an insurance plan, or something else?
--:-- Celia Hatton: And should jet setters with deep pockets be able to skip the queue?
--:-- Celia Hatton: More from the BBC's Josh Martin.
--:-- Josh Martin: Migration to the United States has been symbolised by the green card for more than a century, but US President Donald Trump's latest announcement on visas took a more optimistic tone and a more eye-catching colour.
--:-- Josh Martin: The gold card, remember the words, the gold card. While cracking down on undocumented migrants, the White House launched a plan to hand out residency visas to any foreign investors who passed background checks, so long as they paid up.
--:-- Josh Martin: We're going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million, and that's going to give you green card privileges plus. It's going to be a route to citizenship, and wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card.
--:-- Josh Martin: But a few months on, after the gold card website has launched, it's still waiting for further details.
--:-- Josh Martin: Despite what the president told reporters in the Oval Office, residency by investment and its relation, citizenship by investment, have existed for decades.
--:-- Josh Martin: They even share a similar nickname as Trump's gold card, commonly called golden visas and golden passports, respectively.
--:-- Josh Martin: When Portugal launched its golden visa program in 2012, it hoped that foreign investors would revive its property market after a crash.
--:-- Josh Martin: The program caught the eye of Hong Kong citizen Lily Chan.
--:-- Lily Chan: We travel to Europe at least once a year for holidays and things. So I have been to Portugal before. It was peaceful, safe, good weather, good food, and it's cheap.
--:-- Lily Chan: 2017, I was thinking about retirement and tried to diversify my money. It's an EU passport, so I will be free to go to different countries.
--:-- Lily Chan: I don't have to live in Portugal there, even I get a passport. And I only need to spend seven days out of a year there.
--:-- Lily Chan: The property is cheap. And although golden passports might grab the headlines due to alleged criminals exploiting them, golden visas can offer an insurance policy for citizens living in politically dicey circumstances.
--:-- Lily Chan: No wonder then that historically they've been purchased mainly by citizens of mainland China and the Middle East.
--:-- Lily Chan: Hong Kong's political situation also influenced Lilly.
--:-- Josh Martin: The golden visa program that Lilly used for Portugal, which was based on residential property investment, helped channel 7.5 billion euros or 8.7 billion dollars into the Portuguese economy.
--:-- Josh Martin: But it no longer exists, in part because of the overheating housing market in places like Lisbon, where Lilly bought and renovated her apartment.
--:-- Josh Martin: The list of places that'll grant you a golden visa is actually growing, even as the EU pulls up the drawbridge on a back route into the bloc.
--:-- Josh Martin: But one country at the bottom of the world is drawing the type of wealthy people President Trump would like to invest in the United States.
--:-- Josh Martin: And they're not from China or the Middle East, they're from the US itself.
--:-- Mark Bergman: I had been traveling to New Zealand for quite an extensive time, more than 30 years, and I made the decision to move my business there and also to move there full time.
--:-- Mark Bergman: So it was natural for me to enter the country as part of a program to bring investment into New Zealand.
--:-- Mark Bergman: I view it more as opportunity. I'm investing in New Zealand and I'm expecting to see significant economic return.
--:-- Mark Bergman: It's sort of up to me if I do a bad job. Obviously, I won't see those returns, but my hope is that I will make significant return and create great value within New Zealand.
--:-- Josh Martin: Mark's level of commitment is somewhat of an anomaly of these programs.
--:-- Josh Martin: For the poor island nations of the Caribbean and Pacific, who first started selling passports, it was a near perfect product.
--:-- Josh Martin: Selling official documents boosted government revenues, while the super-rich would rarely relocate or put pressure on public services.
--:-- Josh Martin: New Zealand's investor visa was designed to be the opposite of that.
--:-- Josh Martin: The vast majority of the world's population will live, work and die in the same country they were born into.
--:-- Josh Martin: Golden visas offer a way around this for the wealthy few.
--:-- Josh Martin: But countries joining the multi-billion dollar marketplace offering residency and then passports to the highest bidder may find that investors are not necessarily loyal shoppers.
--:-- Celia Hatton: With war in Ukraine and Gaza and President Trump upending many of the expected norms in international relations, the world, for many, feels like an unsettling place at the moment.
--:-- Celia Hatton: But will future generations look back and think the same?
--:-- Celia Hatton: Well, the British prize-winning author Ian McEwan has written a new book that imagines just that.
--:-- Celia Hatton: It's called What We Can Know, and it tells the story of a literary historian. a hundred years from now, looking back on the present day.
--:-- Ian McEwan: The 21st century is already looking pretty ragged set of two and a half decades.
--:-- Ian McEwan: And I imagine it will continue that way. But my expectation, or rather hope, is that we will kind of pull through somehow with a lot of damage along the route.
--:-- Ian McEwan: So I imagine someone rather like me, passionate about literature and history, looking back on our time, filled not only with dismay at the decisions we took or didn't take, but also with envy, because there are many wonderful things about our civilization, especially in the first world, that he no longer has.
--:-- Ian McEwan: Britain is an archipelago due to a nuclear accident in the mid-Atlantic.
--:-- Ian McEwan: The world's supply chains, the industrial civilization has been much disrupted.
--:-- Ian McEwan: Population has been halved to four billion. And he looks back on our time and of its immense energy and the risks it took and the craziness from, you know, flying several thousand miles for a week long holiday to cheese rolling competitions and four billion people watching a television for an Olympic event.
--:-- Ian McEwan: The extraordinary output of its science and its own literature and biography and history and so on. It's bookshops crammed with new books.
--:-- Ian McEwan: I call it the derangement in the novel. In other words, we're all implicated in this, especially in the first world.
--:-- Ian McEwan: Our lifestyles, you know, the plastics we throw out every day, the mode of living. It's wonderful to be a person, say, with a reasonable income living in the first world.
--:-- Ian McEwan: And a medieval king would envy many of the things that practically all of us have. Hot water spewing out of taps, oranges in winter, etc. Anesthetics.
--:-- Ian McEwan: And he lives in a rather moribund world that's very oppressed by its past.
--:-- Ian McEwan: It's very conventional. I suppose I'm wanting to reach through the idea of what we can know.
--:-- Ian McEwan: What will the future know of us? How accurate will it be?
--:-- Celia Hatton: And hopefully we won't have to go a hundred years into the future to be able to judge how accurately he's been able to capture our current age.
--:-- Celia Hatton: Not an easy task, for sure.
--:-- Celia Hatton: And that's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later.
--:-- Celia Hatton: If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.
--:-- Celia Hatton: You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag Global News Pod.
--:-- Celia Hatton: This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The producers were Leah McSheffery and Michael Bristow.
--:-- Celia Hatton: The editor is Karen Martin.
--:-- Celia Hatton: I'm Celia Hatton. Until next time, goodbye.
--:-- Asma Khalid: America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
--:-- Asma Khalid: I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is The Global Story.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet.
--:-- Asma Khalid: Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
