--:-- Valerie Sanderson: This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: At 15 Hours GMT, these are our main stories. The day after the ceasefire deal came into force, what now for Gaza? Humanitarian organisations say aid can't come soon enough. Who's running Madagascar now the president has left the country? Will efforts to reduce the impact of global shipping on the environment, discussed today at Talks in London, be scuppered by the US? Also in this podcast, British security officials warn cyber attacks on businesses have surged to a new record.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The cost of some of these breaches, the financial cost, is significantly above that's what we faced in the past in the UK. There are fears about the fragility of the US-backed ceasefire in Gaza, which came into force yesterday. As we record this podcast, hospitals in Gaza say seven people have been killed by Israeli fire since midnight on Monday.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Israel has accused Hamas of reneging on President Trump's plan by only releasing four bodies of the 28 hostages who are thought to have died. And there are also videos emerging of what appear to be extrajudicial killings by Hamas. Meanwhile, the humanitarian need is overwhelming. An estimated 80% of the Strip is damaged, and the impact on the lives of children there has been almost unimaginable.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Ricardo Perez is a spokesperson for the United Nations Children's Agency, UNICEF. The last two years have been a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, fixing and starting to rebuild the infrastructure that was destroyed, the lives of children that have been absolutely affected in a very destructive way.
--:-- Ricardo Perez: They've lost parents, they've been orphaned, they've lost loved ones, they've lost their homes, their schools, they've been killed and maimed at a scale that we haven't seen in many conflicts, especially in the region, especially in Gaza.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: So the task is colossal. Our international editor Jeremy Bowen spoke to the BBC's Sarah Montague about the situation in Gaza.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Ceasefires always start with difficulties, even ones that become successful. There are always violations of ceasefires. However, the way that people who are monitoring ceasefires and trying to make them work get over that is by having backing them up a really good foundation of agreements and detail and procedures to make them keep going.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: And this is lacking because the thing about the Trump plan for the future of Gaza, which was done really very quickly, was that it points to where they want to go, but it doesn't say how you get there.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: There's so much that hasn't been decided in advance, particularly things like how a ceasefire would work, how Gaza becomes demilitarized. You know, the list goes on.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: President Trump, we've obviously gone home. Who's in the has the job of overseeing all this? Well, it's not entirely clear because a formal process of negotiation, as far as I understand, has not commenced as yet.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Now, the initial phase, phase one, which was the the ceasefire and the hostage prisoner exchange, was decided in with a great deal of pressure on both sides from, first of all, Trump on the Israelis on Hamas.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Hamas, it was the Qataris, the Egyptians, the Turks, they've got leverage. As well as that, European allies were involved. Britain was involved. The various countries sent their heads of intelligence, their spy chiefs.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: It was, you know, in a sporting term, a full-court press to try and make it happen. But the intensity of that cannot keep going for more than a couple of days.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: And there isn't as if there is now a series of meetings that are going on about trying to work all this stuff out. Let me give you an example.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: In the deal, it says that Hamas will give up its weapons. Hamas have indicated they might give up some heavy weapons, but they want to keep their lighter weapons.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: The Israelis say Hamas needs to be totally disarmed. Now, in the deal, there's talk of an international stabilization force and that might include some people have said the indonesians maybe the as a zebizan might send troops egypt has talked about it and others but they will not be sending their people in there unless they are disarming by consent they're not going to go in there and try and seize hamas weapons if hamas agrees and they haven't to giving up certain things putting them on the ground here they are then that would be an encouragement to send those troops in they will not be sent in to fight a war against Hamas.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: I mean, there are other issues. I mentioned the hostages, the bodies of the hostages who have not yet been returned.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: We saw 1,700 Palestinian prisoners released back to Gaza yesterday, and these were people who'd been picked up in Gaza. How many more Gazans do we know were taken and are still being detained without charge?
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Something approaching a thousand who were picked up as what Israel calls unlawful competence.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: Now, those include people like the directors of hospitals. There have been absolutely hair-raising and well-sourced reports of terrible mistreatment of prisoners by the Israelis, including mistreatment up to and including rape and starvation.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: And a lot of Palestinians have died in custody. As well as that, Israel holds more than 3,000 detainees on remand, and 3,500 Palestinian administrative detainees.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: In other words, people interned without trial. About 1,500 have sentences. These figures are quite widespread, but the one I'm looking for specifically is from an Israeli human rights organization called Ham O'Ked.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: And also there are question marks about the way that convicted prisoners are even tried, because they're tried in military courts, which don't have the same kinds of standards of evidence and procedure and representation that you'd expect in a civil court.
--:-- Jeremy Bowen: So question, have all these people who have even been sentenced had fair trials? There are massive questions about the way that Israel has imprisoned and continues to imprison a lot of Palestinians.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: You might think with Donald Trump focusing his attention on the Middle East, he's had less time for some of his other concerns, including the US trade war with China.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: But on Tuesday, the world's two largest economies are beginning to charge port fees on ocean shipping firms, making the high seas a new front in the trade dispute.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Beijing announced the levies last week, alongside moves to tighten controls on its rare earth exports. The US president responded with the threat of an additional 100 tariff on Chinese imports
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: So as tensions rise which side can hold out longer Deborah Elms is head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore
--:-- Deborah Elms: China's been preparing for a potential conflict for quite some time, has been readying its own stockpiles, has been building up its expertise, has been trying to diversify its trade.
--:-- Deborah Elms: You can see that trade volumes from China to the United States were falling before Trump came into office, and that's just accelerated since then.
--:-- Deborah Elms: Obviously, they would prefer not to have a trade war. But if one happens, you need to be ready. And I think China would say they are ready.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: I asked our business correspondent, Nick Marsh, whether the latest announcements mean the trade war is ratcheting up or whether they can calm it down.
--:-- Nick Marsh: They probably can calm this down. We've seen it before. We've just gone through a period of relative calm, actually.
--:-- Nick Marsh: Over the summer, there was representatives, quite high-level representatives from Beijing and Washington meeting all over Europe. And it kind of declared a truce.
--:-- Nick Marsh: The agreement was that we're not going to take this any further. We're going to come down from the precipice. You know, all the really sort of inflamed rhetoric that we heard earlier this year, there wasn't going to be any more 100 percent, 200 percent tariffs, that sort of thing.
--:-- Nick Marsh: You know, not not the wild stuff we were hearing earlier this year. Now, as you say, things have kind of ratcheted up a little bit due to these export controls that China's put in due to the US as well.
--:-- Nick Marsh: A couple of weeks earlier, expanding its blacklist of Chinese companies, American firms, especially chip firms were banned from selling too.
--:-- Nick Marsh: So there is always going to be these sorts of bumps along the road. And when you have Donald Trump in the White House, it's going to be quite bombastic.
--:-- Nick Marsh: And when you have the Chinese leadership in Beijing, who were always pretty resolute when it comes to this issue, talking about fighting to the very end if they have to, but being prepared to negotiate if they have to as well, we're kind of getting back into slightly familiar territory where we were slightly earlier this year.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: So it's pretty problematic for businesses, isn't it, and consumers, because nobody knows where they are regarding prices.
--:-- Nick Marsh: Yeah, it's massively problematic. I mean, you mentioned earlier the new port fees, for example. I mean, pretty astronomical when you actually dig into the numbers.
--:-- Nick Marsh: There might be different sort of, you know, loopholes that firms can get around. I mean, if a ship isn't US built or registered, then they're not going to be subject to these sorts of fees.
--:-- Nick Marsh: But I mean, just so long as both sides keep invoking new regulations, then revoking them, it just leaves businesses in China, in the US and all around the world, frankly, caught in between scratching their heads, not knowing what to do and just sort of praying for a bit of calm.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: And staying with the topic of shipping, negotiators from more than 100 countries are gathering in London for talks on how to reduce the environmental impact of the global industry.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: They were expected to adopt a treaty to slash emissions by moving away from fossil fuels, but the Trump administration appears ready to sink such a deal.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Our climate and science reporter Esme Stallard told me more about the industry's impact.
--:-- Esme Stallard: Estimates are that shipping accounts are around 3% of global emissions. That's according to the International Maritime Organization.
--:-- Esme Stallard: That's the UN body that's overseeing these negotiations this week, but also collects a lot of data on this. 3% doesn't sound like a lot but shipping like aviation is one of two sectors that has really struggled to curb its emissions whilst other sectors have really accelerated their move away from fossil fuels the reason for that is that shipping relies on a particularly dirty type of fossil fuel with kind of what's left at the bottom of the barrel if you like and hasn't really come up with good alternatives or certainly cheap alternatives that they could use instead so that is the concern that that 3% will continue to grow.
--:-- Esme Stallard: And effectively, that growth has very much been in line with global trade. 90% of global trade is now carried by ships. So that's why it's such a concern for some countries.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: More than 100 countries gathering in London for talks on this. What kind of deal could be worked out, do you think?
--:-- Esme Stallard: So this global deal was actually agreed back in April. As you said, what it committed to was moving ships towards cleaner fuels. If they didn't do that, they will face fines that will incrementally increase over time.
--:-- Esme Stallard: It's anticipated that those fines would be paid in the early few years as ships made that transition. And that would go to a central pot to kind of help developing countries invest in their own infrastructure.
--:-- Esme Stallard: The meeting this week effectively was sort of to sign on the dotted line, approve that deal, and then move into the kind of nitty gritty details of how does this all work in practice.
--:-- Esme Stallard: But actually, that's kind of been thrown into disarray with the US's increasing intervention in this. And there's now questions whether this deal will even be approved this week.
--:-- Esme Stallard: And what does that mean if the US doesn't play ball? So it's interesting, the US doesn't actually flag many ships. So it's not actually kind of controlling that many ships.
--:-- Esme Stallard: So you'd think they wouldn't be that interested. But actually, back in April, when this deal was first being negotiated, they sent a number of letters around to embassies in London where these talks are taking place, threatening countries that agreed to the deal with tariffs.
--:-- Esme Stallard: That was ratcheted up again on Friday when the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy threatened port bans for any ships coming to the US and visa restrictions for mariners for those that supported it.
--:-- Esme Stallard: I think the reason they're so interested is going back to the fact that 90% of trade happens by shipping. Effectively, if you control the siege, you control global trade.
--:-- Esme Stallard: China's pushed back on that and they've urged countries that supported the deal back in April to stand firm. So I think really the talks this week could just be another arena for these two countries to go head to head on the issues of trade.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Still to come on the Global News podcast, how the state of North Carolina dramatically reduced the number of its opioid-related deaths.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: I do believe that it's a combination of all those things, the curriculum that we have here, the Suboxone. I don't know that I could have done it without any one of those factors.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Now to Madagascar, the island nation off the southeast coast of Africa, where there's some confusion about who is in charge.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Over the past couple of days, it was thought a military coup was underway. At least that's what the sitting president, Ange Radzowell, posted online.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: His whereabouts weren't clear at the time and rumours were swirling that he'd left the country. Now Mr Radzowell has confirmed he has left Madagascar, he says, for his own safety, but he'd insisted he would not resign.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Then, he said earlier today, he was dissolving Parliament. Now Parliament has voted overwhelmingly to impeach him.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Mama Rabbe Nirina is an MP and Secretary General of Madagascar's main opposition party, Tim.
--:-- Mama Rabbe Nirina: He says there's now a political vacuum in the country. According to the Constitution, it should be the President of the Senate who replaces the President in case of vacancy.
--:-- Mama Rabbe Nirina: But even the President of the Senate has been blown away by the Senators very recently. And still according to the Constitution, after the President of the Senate, It should be the government which should run the country.
--:-- Mama Rabbe Nirina: But the prime minister is just appointed a few days ago and there are only three ministers appointed so far So there is no complete government yet
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The BBC's Sami Awami, who's in Madagascar, gave us the latest.
--:-- Sami Awami: It's quite chaotic because, like I say, the events here are happening extremely fast.
--:-- Sami Awami: I was with the colonel at 2pm. I asked him, is the army in charge? Will it take power? And they said, no, they are not interested in that.
--:-- Sami Awami: And then one hour later, here they've announced that they've taken power now. They've said they're going to suspend key institutions such as the Senate, the High Constitutional Court and the High Court of Justice.
--:-- Sami Awami: But they're going to retain the National Assembly, which earlier today they impeached the president. Now, they've said they've waited for a while now, but there's been repeated violation of constitutions.
--:-- Sami Awami: And they feel like now they need to move in and do that. But a lot of people here believe as well that they've tried their best to exercise restraint, but they feel like the void is just going on and they need to step in.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: OK, so for total clarity, you're saying that it seems the army chief, and I think this is the chap that runs the CAPSAT, elite military unit that we've been speaking about the past couple of days.
--:-- Sami Awami: It seems as if they are keeping the lower house of parliament. That's going to stay in place. That's correct.
--:-- Sami Awami: But everything else, the Senate, the high constitutional court and other institutions. And what about the president?
--:-- Sami Awami: The president's whereabouts are known. He addressed the nation last night. Many people here had hoped that he would say where he is, but at least he confirmed that he is out of the country.
--:-- Sami Awami: Again, there were lots of rumours about where is he in the country, is he outside, but he didn't say where he is. Now, that came after he said that he decided to leave the country because his life was in danger.
--:-- Sami Awami: I asked the colonel earlier today, were they planning anything to harm the president? He said that claims is absolutely not true and that they've never planned anything to harm the president.
--:-- Sami Awami: So he dismissed those claims as well. So the president is not in the country. And the colonel said because he's in the country, even his speech for them is almost nothing.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: And Sami, do we know whether the lower house of parliament will accept these moves by the military?
--:-- Sami Awami: That we are not sure, to be honest, because even themselves were not sure how even to do this impeachment.
--:-- Sami Awami: Early in the morning, I'd spoken to the leader of the opposition, and he wasn't even sure how they're going to go about it. Because for them to launch this impeachment process, they needed approval from the government, which the government does not exist.
--:-- Sami Awami: So they are really in a very difficult and very new situation. They've never been in this kind of situation before.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: And in the US, the opioid crisis has wreaked havoc on families and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: But some states seem to have turned things around, with fewer people dying from using synthetic opioids such as fentanyl in 2024 than in the previous year.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: North Carolina has seen a dramatic drop and many credit the so-called harm reduction approach practiced there, which includes allowing patients to come off hard drugs with the help of medication like methadone.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: But it's a controversial approach. Linda Presley visited Healing Transitions, a rehabilitation clinic for women, in the wooded suburbs of the state capital, Raleigh.
--:-- Linda Presley: When Healing Transitions opened, it was based on a philosophy of abstinence. So you go cold turkey and stop taking illicit drugs literally overnight.
--:-- Linda Presley: If you have an opioid use disorder, you can get very sick from withdrawal, vomiting, diarrhoea, pain, anxiety and insomnia in varying degrees.
--:-- Chris Budnick: Abstinence didn't work for everyone. Some of the people that we serve weren't being helped and recognising that if you've died, there's no way to pursue any type of change.
--:-- Chris Budnick: And so the focus shifted to harm reduction. That is allowing residents to take medication to treat their addiction, to stem cravings and stop an unpleasant withdrawal.
--:-- Linda Presley: But this is controversial in some circles. You are replacing an addictive product with another addictive product. It is still addictive. This is Mark Pless.
--:-- Mark Pless: He's a member of the North Carolina legislature and believes abstinence is the only way to tackle addiction.
--:-- Mark Pless: Mark Pless believes addiction is a choice. It's a conscious decision. At a point, whenever folks were taking these narcotics and they were saying, oh, I got this because of a surgery I had.
--:-- Mark Pless: But there's a conscious point to where you choose to continue. At Healing Transitions, Alicia tells a different story.
--:-- Alicia: She says one of the keys to her recovery was suboxone, a medication that eases withdrawal.
--:-- Alicia: I had tried other avenues and I was not successful. So you tried abstinence before, had you?
--:-- Alicia: Yes, ma'am, but I was not terribly committed to it the way that I am now. I do believe that it's a combination of all those things, the curriculum that we have here, the Suboxone.
--:-- Alicia: I don't know that I could have done it without any one of those factors. Because we've met somebody here who was talking about, you know, abstinence the only way, drug use is a choice, and then you have to choose to stop.
--:-- Alicia: I do not believe that. At some point, it stops being a choice. There are many times that you don't want to use or you don't want to drink, but you can't not.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Alicia's recovery is going well. She's no longer being treated with Suboxone and she's looking forward to going home.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Brittany, Brittany. At healing transitions, they run regular overdose drills, in the same way you might have a fire drill at work.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Grab me some Narcan's. Narcan's the trade name for Naloxone, sometimes described as a miracle drug. It brings people back if they overdose on an opioid.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The wide availability of naloxone is believed to be another reason why the number of fatal overdoses has plummeted in North Carolina.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: It comes as a simple nasal spray. I'm going to go up the right nostril. She still is not responding, so I'm going to go with my second one.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Do the left. Two breaths. 30 chest compressions. And would she normally start breathing by now?
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: What happened? It really could take as many Narcans as it could take. Sometimes it could take up to 12. sometimes it could take one.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: It just depends on how much the person is used. And have you ever had to do it for real?
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: I had a friend that overdosed. I did have the Narcan her six times before she came back. But you saved her life?
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Yes, ma'am. And in this opioid overdose role play at Healing Transitions, Abby seems to have saved Brittany's life too. There she is. She's back.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: That report by Linda Presley. British security officials say the number of significant cyber attacks has surged to a new record this year.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: There's been a raft of high-profile hacks here in the UK, causing major disruption and costing global brands millions of dollars, such as the carmaker Jaguar Land Rover, the supermarket chain Co-op and the retailer Marks & Spencer.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Professor Kieran Martin is a former CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre.
--:-- Professor Kieran Martin: I think one of the things that really has hit home this year is the cost of some of these people. breaches.
--:-- Professor Kieran Martin: The financial cost of Jaguar Land Rover, when it's fully known, of Marks and Spencer's, the co-op, is significantly above. That's what we faced in the past in the UK.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Now, officials have urged businesses to turn to low-tech methods to protect themselves, including using pen and paper when computer systems are compromised.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The BBC cyber correspondent Joe Tidy told us more about the increase in attacks.
--:-- Joe Tidy: I think what we seeing at the moment is a wake up call in a sense to the general public because every single week there is a major attack.
--:-- Joe Tidy: I think this year with MNS and Co-op and Harrods and JLR, I think the public are sort of going through a bit of a realisation of just how impactful these attacks can be.
--:-- Joe Tidy: In terms of where the attacks are coming from, there's two real areas, I suppose. The first would be the creme de la creme of hacking groups. We call them advanced persistent threats.
--:-- Joe Tidy: They are run by governments. So the Chinese government, Russian government. Yes, the UK government. Yes, the US government. They have APT teams that will be hacking everything and everyone, but using a kind of rules based system of what's allowed and what's not.
--:-- Joe Tidy: This is kind of cyber espionage, power projection, that kind of thing. Then you've got the far bigger problem from organizations out there, which is ransomware, extortionware, criminal gangs.
--:-- Joe Tidy: And they are the ones that are making hundreds of millions every year from hacking companies around the world.
--:-- Joe Tidy: And they are, we think, because of a lot of evidence, largely based or headquartered in countries like Russia, Russian-speaking countries, former Soviet countries.
--:-- Joe Tidy: But we know, of course, there has been a resurgence in the last year or so of teenage hacking culture, subculture. English-speaking gangs are out there. They're very active, especially this year.
--:-- Joe Tidy: And we've seen already this year seven arrests of British teenagers. It isn't new, this idea that we need to prepare for when the hackers get in, not just try and stop them getting in with cybersecurity products, but actually prepare for when an attack brings down your computers.
--:-- Joe Tidy: So can you operate without any email? Can you operate without any systems that keep your production lines going? Can you operate with essentially pen and paper?
--:-- Joe Tidy: That's what they're saying. They're arguing companies to have those sorts of things in place, the contingency plans. So that's the message from the NCSC today, is to get those, as the phrase describes, resilience engineering, try and build into your system a way to bounce back quicker if and when they get in.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: I always remember I went and covered a major cyber attack on a Norwegian aluminium producer called Norsk Hydro.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: And they were fantastic. Ever since the beginning of the attack, it was a gang called Locker Goga, I think it was, and they were asking for €100,000 to unencrypt the servers and everything of this production company.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: And they didn't comply. They said from the beginning, we're not paying the criminals. We're going to try and get back on our feet.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: In the end, it cost them about €40 million to get back on their feet in about two years. But the hero of the hour for Norse Kydro was this quite an old worker who was down in the warehouse, down in the bowels of the production line.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: And he loved paper and he kept reams and reams of the different shapes and moulds that the company was producing for their clients around the world.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: And when everything went down, he became the guy that they went to because he had the plans to bounce back and get the production lines moving again.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The Nobel Prize for Economics was announced on Monday. The news was rather overshadowed on our output by the events in the Middle East.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: But it's gone to three economists, Philippe Aguillon, Peter Howitt and Joel Mocker, for their work on sustained economic growth that's improved living standards, health and quality of life for people around the world.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: We heard from Professor Philippe Aguillon from the Collège de France in Paris and the London School of Economics.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: I got a phone call at 10.30 yesterday morning and it came as a complete surprise. I could not, I was totally speechless.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: So, and right away you move into another world. And you feel that you're the spectator of a happy story, but you see it from outside first.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: You don't realise you are part of it. Well, the prize committee, absolutely glowing about your contribution to economics.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: This is all about the relationship between technological progress and sustained economic growth.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: And they said that they were awarding you and the others the prize. With the hope that your work could be steered in the direction to support humankind, can you tell us a bit more about it?
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: I thought there was a way to boost prosperity, a prosperity which is inclusive, which is consistent with a good social model and at the same time which is consistent with fighting the climate change.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: Some people believe that the only way to fight climate change is to have degrowth. No, I mean, you can have growth, but you need to have the right kind of growth.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: What kind of growth do you need? Also, the people who said, well, you know, it's true, growth is very much driven by creative destruction.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: But they are concerned that that might mean a lot of layoffs, a lot of, you know, social unrest and social unhappiness.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: And that has been always my concern, to reconcile growth and prosperity on the one hand with having a harmonious social model and a true commitment to green transition.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: We can't go into the exact details of your work. In a nutshell, what do you advise then?
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: Growth is driven by having all the time new talents, new entrants that challenge incumbent firms, that challenge incumbent interests.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: Yesterday's innovators, they turn into incumbents, incumbent firms, and they need to be challenged constantly by new entrants, new talents coming in.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: And a dynamic economy is an economy where all the time you have this new entry, refreshing, you know, renewing the blood.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: You see what I mean? So then the policy is to unleash the forces that favor growth.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: So first, you want to have a good education system. When you have a good education system, you are more likely to have more innovators.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: OK, so that's one thing. And then you need policies that favor the entry of new firms and the growth of new firms.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: But you want to make sure that as they grow, they don't prevent entry of new firms. You see what I mean? So that's where competition policy is important.
--:-- Philippe Aguillon: So I believe that the main pillars are a good education system, good competition policy, good financial ecosystem of innovation, good mixture between competition policy and industrial policy.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: And that's it from us for now. But before we go, a message from a listener.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: This is Barry McClary Hughes, now a US citizen, and someone living in the States.
--:-- Barry McClary Hughes: I am also someone who hasn't been a Trump supporter so far. If President Trump wants more credibility at a peacemaker, let them donate at least $1 million of his personal wealth into a Gaza restoration fund.
--:-- Barry McClary Hughes: If there isn't one, let them create it. They want to take great publicity and some sin in the game to help make his peace plan successful.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: And Barry got us thinking, how will the world rebuild Gaza? We're taking your questions and ideas for a special Global News Podcast.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: As ever, you can send us an email or a voice note. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: You can also find us on X at BBC World Service using the hashtag Global News Pod.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: This edition was mixed by Jack Wilfen and the producers were Richard Hamilton and Stephen Jensen.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Valerie Sanderson. Until next time, bye-bye.
--:-- Valerie Sanderson: The BBC News Channel streaming live 24-7. Subscribe to trusted independent journalism from the BBC. Find out more at bbc.com slash join.
