Global News Podcast - European leaders meet a day after Trump's win
Episode Date: November 7, 2024Europe's top brass are weighing up a way forward as the American prepares for power. Also: we find out about migrant workers on the streets of war-torn Lebanon, and it's goodbye to the world's most fa...mous breakdancer.
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I'm Alex Ritzen and at 14 Hours GMT on Thursday the 7th of November, these are our main stories.
Donald Trump's victory will have serious consequences for European security.
The ominous words of one prime minister as European leaders gather
in Budapest. 2024 looks set to be the hottest year on record and there's more chastening
news on the environment. And some of the biggest stars in women's tennis are heading to a mega
money tournament in Saudi Arabia. But not everyone's on board.
Also in this podcast.
Violence and singing on the streets of Mozambique as voters question election results.
The meeting was set to happen anyway, a gathering of the European political community which brings European countries together to discuss issues of common interest. But there's one
subject that's clearly of more interest than any other right now and that's Donald Trump's
victory in the US election. This is a man who has never hidden his disdain for NATO and has threatened
to impose tariffs on European manufactured goods imported into America. Not surprisingly,
it's Mr Trump's name which has been on the lips of the politicians as they arrived in
Budapest. Our Europe regional editor Paul Moss gave me the latest.
I think what's distinctive is they've all had a bit of a change of tone. You know Tuesday was election day, that was all about diplomacy when leaders phone up
Donald Trump, say off of their congratulations, perhaps jostle for favour a bit and say do
you remember when you visited our country, what a wonderful time you had and we all had
tea together.
It hasn't taken long for all that bonhomie to vanish and for politicians to start saying
what they're really thinking.
First out of the trap on Wednesday morning was Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
He said that Donald Trump's election presented a serious challenge for European security.
He described Donald Trump as unpredictable.
Most of the leaders haven't been criticizing Donald Trump explicitly, but more just focusing
on what they're going to do now.
I mean, you had the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and now was the decisive moment when
Europe had to seize its own destiny.
In other words, we can't rely on America to come to our rescue anymore.
We also heard from the European Union's council and its president, Charles Michel.
In some ways, he was interesting because he too emphasized the need for Europe to take
charge of its own affairs but he also seemed to be pleading with Donald Trump not to abandon his old partners.
We want to deepen our ties with the United States, it's very clear because there is
a lot in common but we also want to be more master of our destiny. We want to strengthen
our economic base and we want to act in a way where we are respectful
and respected partner.
This is the basic principle.
And Paul, the location of the meeting in Budapest
is rather pointed.
Just extraordinary, isn't it?
I mean, this really is a coincidence,
but yes, Budapest, the capital of Hungary.
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán
is perhaps Europe's biggest fan of Donald Trump.
He was one of the first to congratulate him on winning.
He called it a victory for the world.
But, you know, during the American election campaign, journalists kept saying how divided
the US was.
Well, Europe is divided too and on similar lines between people who are broadly sympathetic
to Donald Trump's agenda, his views on immigration, his views on the so-called culture war, you
know, these attacks which sort of like to portray things as the burger eaters versus
the tofu munchers.
And that division in Europe is among ordinary people but also among politicians.
So you have European governments very happy about Donald Trump's victory.
Hungary, as I've mentioned, but also Slovakias, the Austrian Freedom Party, which just came
top in an election, members of the governing coalition in Italy and the Netherlands.
They're very sympathetic to Donald Trump so you're not going to find it easy to
have a united opposition, a united front position on what to do about Donald
Trump's election. Our Europe regional editor Paul Moss. Officials in Lebanon
say 55 people were killed on Wednesday during Israeli raids in the eastern
Baalbek region.
The Lebanese Minister of Culture says the strikes also caused significant damage to
a historic building, calling it an irredeemable loss for Lebanon and for world heritage.
The Israeli military said it killed 60 Hezbollah fighters in targeted attacks in the Baalbek
area. Lebanon has been criticised in targeted attacks in the Baalbek area.
Lebanon has been criticised in the past for its treatment of migrant workers.
But amid the chaos of war, many domestic workers from abroad have been left on the streets by their sponsor families,
and in many cases without their passports.
Emir Nader reports from Beirut.
We've just arrived at a huge warehouse in the centre of Beirut, next to one of the main
motorways that cuts through the city.
And inside there's one great room with around 200 women, all from Sierra Leone, some children.
They were domestic workers who came to work in Lebanese families' homes.
And since the war started, they've been either abandoned or they've had to flee.
I came in Lebanon in 2022.
Surrounded by children playing and women chatting and reading their phones,
we meet Aisha Koroma, 23 years old and still shaken by her close experience of the war.
In front of our house, they leave me there.
They leave me and run away because these people do not care about me.
So they left you alone in the house?
Yes.
And they left Lebanon?
Yes.
They just take their things and go.
When Israel began expanding its airstrike campaign on Lebanon at the end of September,
many Lebanese families started fleeing the targeted neighbourhoods, often leaving behind
their domestic workers, like in Aisha's case, forcing them to sleep outdoors.
The very day in September 26, close to me, the bomb exploded.
Zeynep Bangura worked for a family in the south of Lebanon.
We decided to leave the area, to stay in the beach for one week, to sleep outside to save
my life.
Most of the women at this shelter are stuck here. Under Lebanon's kafala system, families
sponsor the residency of a migrant worker, but they regularly hold on to the workers'
documents as a method of control. In many cases, when they fled the war, employers didn't
return the passports, so women here are now trying to get new documents from their consulate.
We're arriving to meet the representative of the syndicate of companies that brings
migrant workers to work as domestic workers. Should the syndicate, should the government
be doing more to take care of women who say they've been abandoned in the street?
Suddenly one day people, Lebanese and foreigners, were in the street.
Here's Joseph Saliba.
So it was not well planned from us to be ready for such a huge something going on.
The families that have kicked their domestic workers out since the war started,
that's a huge abandonment of their responsibility to the women who have been in their homes, no?
I can tell you the disaster that came from Israel
is not only on the domestic helpers.
Some families, they abandoned their brothers
and sisters and mothers.
The shock that came to the Lebanese people,
in a two-minutes time, leave your house with nothing.
You know, some of the houses they have left
without their own documents.
The gold of the money, they just run away.
Do you think the fact that there has to be these charities like the shelter that's been
set up for these hundreds of women who don't have anywhere to go suggests that politicians
or the sector here in Lebanon needs to do more to care for guests who are here in this
country?
Financially, we are broken. We appreciate what our government is trying to do. We are
asking it to do more but at the end this
is Lebanon and this is what's going on. It's not only some of Lebanon's 170 000 domestic workers
who've been made homeless. Over a million people have been displaced by the conflict here. But it's
domestic migrant workers in a foreign country at war who are among the most vulnerable.
who are among the most vulnerable? Emea Nader.
It is now virtually certain that 2024,
a year punctuated by intense heat waves and deadly storms,
will be the warmest on record,
according to the EU's Copernicus climate change service.
It says that global average temperatures are likely to end up
more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The
figure that the UN has long suggested was the limit to avoid the worst effects
of climate change. How countries adjust to the changing climate is also coming
under scrutiny. The United Nations adaptation report has just been
published. Navin Singh Khadka is the World Service Environment
Correspondent. He told me more about it.
When there are climate-related impacts, disasters, extreme weather events or even
sometimes slow things, for example drought, it takes time. What they've
found is although you know many countries have made plans, half of those
projects, particularly those under the UN climate
convention, either have not worked satisfactorily or are not sustainable.
Basically they're not working. For example, not being able to assess what is
it, what they really want. And then sometimes getting the wrong prescription,
wrong solution. It's called maladaptation. For
example, you know, what kind of species of trees that should have been there, they
got the wrong ones. And as a result, that forest or those trees, instead of
becoming protector, they are susceptible to wildfires. And then they aggravate the
situation. Compared to mitigation, which is about how do you
make the transition to clean energy so installing solar voltage solar panels or
windmills or you know turbines and all that. Securing money for adaptation is
very difficult because the rate of return is not easy and finances tell me
securing fund or getting investors let's, for adaptation project is not easy.
And then, of course, there's this issue of experts
coming from somewhere else, trying to help them out,
but they don't know the ground situation.
And the ground people, they have some idea what's going on,
but they have not been able to thrash out
the solution themselves.
So for the sake of the planet, are they going to be able to get out of this rut? Can they
get out of this rut?
We're approaching 1.5. You know, that's the threshold.
The tipping point.
The tipping point.
Beyond which everything collapses.
Yes.
Or let's say, you know, it'll be a runaway case of...
It's got worse, yeah.
... runaway climate change case. Catastrophic. Because we are reaching there, well, actually, the other report from Copenhagen has shown
that the whole year, this year, past 15 or 16 months, the UN report says, if we are approaching
1.5 for good, then what happens is we'll have to be able to adapt more.
We'll have to be more resilient, you know, build that resilience.
And that is where adaptation becomes so important. But the problem is, A, there's a huge funding
gap because, you know, the figure here is we need between around 190 billion to around
360 billion dollars a year. Whereas what we are getting, the figure they have is for 2022 was 28 billion.
So the gap is massive. That gap needs to be addressed. And be more importantly, how do
we do it? The mild adaptation chapter. That is the question. Will we be able to identify
our problems and then also bring in the right solution?
Navin Singh Khatka, the World Service Environment Correspondent.
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, has appointed a new director to lead
its mission to discover the essence of the universe.
The 70-year-old project, based near Geneva in Switzerland, is home to the Large Hadron
Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. Professor Mark Thompson is a British scientist who will be
leading the project and he's been speaking to the BBC and my colleague Amol Rajan.
The Large Hadron Collider is the world's preeminent infrastructure for
unraveling the mysteries of the universe and at the moment we're going through the
stage of actually upgrading it, making it more powerful. So in many ways, we're right at the beginning of the journey of discovery
for the Large Hadron Collider. And my first priority will be completing that and actually
bringing that into operation as soon as possible, because it's such an exciting machine. It will
deliver more data. But actually, the other thing that's exciting is our scientists are becoming
more imaginative, adopting advanced technologies like artificial intelligence. data. But actually, the other thing that's exciting is our scientists are becoming more
imaginative, adopting advanced technologies like artificial intelligence. So the data we take in
the future is going to be even more powerful than the data we have now. So huge discovery opportunities.
The second priority is all of these very large infrastructures. The Large Hadron Collider is 27
kilometers in circumference. It takes a long time to plan, to construct.
And we're now looking at what happens
after the Large Hadron Collider.
So in the next five years during my mandate,
one of the highest priorities is really to converge
on what comes after the Large Hadron Collider.
And that really is a question
of what are the big scientific questions we want to address
and what is the right machine to do that.
The prime candidate is something we currently call the future circular collider, which is
about three times as large as the Large Hadron Collider.
What would success look like from your mandate, from your five years, in terms of getting
us to a better understanding of what's inside the atom?
No, I think that you're absolutely right. The essence of what we do at CERN, put crudely, is smash particles together as hard as we can to
create conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang and in that way we explore the building
blocks of the universe. As I say, I think the thing that really excites me in terms of the
science that we'll be delivering in the next five years, is the opportunity
not only to measure the properties of the Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider,
but also to explore the unknown. As I say, we're going to have more powerful machine,
more data, better techniques. There really are exciting discovery opportunities here.
Now, of course, with discoveries, you don't actually know what you're going to discover.
Otherwise, they wouldn't really be discoveries.
So I think the real excitement for me is that opportunity.
We're taking a leap into the unknown, we don't know what we will find, but I'm really excited
about the chance of actually finding something completely unexpected.
So that would really be my biggest hope in the next five years.
Professor Mark Thompson.
Clashes between protesters and police have broken out in the capital of Mozambique.
Police fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators in Maputo.
Post-election protests involving thousands of people have engulfed the country since last month's disputed presidential election.
At least 18 people have been killed in the violence. Our Africa regional editor, Will Ross, has
been following this.
This is all about last month's election and there's a particular opposition leader, Venasio
Montlan, who has really rallied the protest movement. He's got a pretty big following,
especially among young people, and he's called for a week of protests. And this is now kind of the climax of that whole
week of anger against the government. And it's a very, very tense, kind of worrying
situation really right now, because the defence ministry has threatened to bring out the army.
There are already some army trucks on the streets streets but we've seen a lot of tear gas from the police but they're
facing a vast number of people who are simply not accepting the result of the
election and in fact election observers did point to a lot of discrepancies.
It's possible that there might be a recount of some sort if the courts push
that through, but
at the moment there's this kind of very worrying standoff and the fear, having
seen at least 18 people killed already, the fear is that if the police and
possibly the army decide to simply use force to try and crush this, we could see
a lot worse in terms of the number of casualties on the streets.
Yeah, as you say they threatened to bring in the troops, would they really do that?
Well quite possibly, you've got a party here, the Frelimo Party that's been in power for
49 years is clearly determined to stay there and this is not the first time this party's
been accused of using rigging tactics to get through an election. And there are people with a lot to lose.
So if they do rely on the police and the army,
there is a fear that there could be a lot more violence.
But it's interesting that this man, this opposition man,
Mr. Montland, he's talking in kind of revolutionary language
and he clearly does have a following.
And it's not just the capital Maputo.
We've seen right across the country in the provincial capitals and smaller cities a lot of anger
there have also been reports of sort of revenge killings
they're calling them against the police because the protesters feel that the police have simply killed people for protesting peacefully
Africa regional editor will Ross
Still to come in this podcast.
I went out there and I had fun.
I did take it very seriously.
I worked my butt off.
It's all over for Reagan, the Aussie Olympic break dancer who made waves this summer.
My talent as an athlete is swimming long halls over the curvature of the earth.
Lives Less Ordinary is the podcast with astonishing personal stories from across the globe.
My past is very bad and I survived.
You have to tell the story.
Expect the unexpected.
All of a sudden the car exploded.
Lives Less Ordinary from the BBC World Service.
Here's a thing that happened to me.
Find it wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
Find it wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
This weekend in Saudi Arabia, one of the top stars of women's tennis will lift the WTA Finals trophy and pocket $5 million. It's the first time that a major professional women's sport event has been held there but women's rights are restricted in the kingdom and the decision to stage the event there
has unsurprisingly proved highly controversial. Our sports news
correspondent Laura Scott reports from Riyadh. As the stars of women's tennis
serve up a show in Riyadh, a lot's resting on the promise of sport driving
positive change.
With a record £12 million in prize money for players who've been put up in a luxury hotel and have a beauty salon on site, no expense has been spared. But for some, the kingdom's
reputation has prompted some soul searching. This was world number three Coco Goff speaking ahead of the tournament.
Obviously I'm a woman and I was very concerned and my dad honestly was very concerned with
me coming here but you know it's one of those things where I want to see it for myself and
see if the change is happening and if I felt uncomfortable or felt like nothing's happening
then maybe I probably wouldn't come back.
This country's no stranger to hosting top-level sport,
but what makes this significant
is it's the first major women's sports event to be held here.
Whilst there have been recent reforms,
human rights issues remain,
and critics claim the WTA has sold its soul
by allowing Saudi Arabia to host the crown jewel of women's tennis.
The promotion of this event has angered Fawzia Al-Hatabi, whose sister Manahel is currently
serving an 11-year prison sentence in Saudi Arabia over social media posts supporting
women's rights and photos
showing her head uncovered.
For me, yes, it is sports washing.
And as for the people promoting it, I see them as partners in crime.
I don't only see them as getting paid money to promote sport for Saudi Arabia.
On the contrary, I see them as influencing girls to believe this publicity and fall as
victims like my sister Manahel."
The WTA said it was sensitive to concerns about bringing the final somewhere where women's
rights are restricted and homosexuality is illegal. But it said its three-year deal was
justified by players receiving equal prize money to the men and their plans to leave
a legacy.
Their aim is to get a million Saudis engaged in tennis by 2030.
Yet with Sunday's action watched by only a few hundred fans, there are already questions
about the appetite for tennis in the country.
Ahead of the final starting, we met young budding tennis players taking part in the
Future Stars camp.
Open it again!
15-year-old Zaina told us what it was like to train on the same courts as her idols.
We never really had these kind of tournaments and events in Saudi, so for them to finally
come is like life-changing.
Former legends Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert wrote to the WTA earlier this year,
urging them not to bring the event to Saudi Arabia.
It's just amazing what Saudi Arabia has achieved in the past eight years since it started this transformation.
I put their comments to the head of the Saudi tennis federation, Arish Mutabagani.
We're on a transformation journey and we invite anyone and everyone.
I really would love them
to come and see for themselves. Seeing is believing.
The promise of the WTA is that their top athletes haven't just gone to Riyadh to play and pocket
millions in the process, but that they can be a force for good in Saudi Arabia. The critics
will take some convincing that prize money hasn't come at the expense of principles. Rafael is the latest and worst blackout to have plagued the Caribbean island in recent weeks.
Weather forecasts predict more rains and flash flooding to hit Cuba,
which is also struggling with old and decaying infrastructure as well as fuel shortages.
So what's it like to be there right now?
freelance journalist Ruri Nicol was able to send us this message from his home in Cuba.
Just before its arrival the lights went out and the electricity union, the state electricity
suppliers said that the whole grid had gone down again, which is something that happened
two weeks ago plunging the island into darkness for nearly four days as they struggled to
get it going again. The hurricane itself seems to have done quite a lot of damage.
You could hear masonry falling. There's rumors of buildings. Certainly one building fell,
which is something that have happened in a very dilapidated state. So it's something
that happens quite regularly if there's a lot of rain that build entire buildings fall
down. Things were falling from roofs, trees were
falling everywhere. The city right now is completely black, completely dark because
of course there are no lights. But the winds have reduced a little and now we're getting
hit by a lot of rain. There's a lot of disquiet about the grid collapsing again because of the hurricane.
It's something that traditionally hasn't happened.
They do turn off the electricity during hurricanes, but for the grid to collapse, it's a big
deal, which is adding to a great deal of uncertainty here.
The country was quite traumatized after the last power cuts, and this is not helping at all. In fact one
comedian has appeared online saying to the hurricane saying to Rafael please
don't come they'll blame you for everything. Journalist Ruri Nicol in Cuba.
Deep fake images generated by AI artificial intelligence are being used
to influence the outcome of elections
around the world.
But there are new ways of detecting the images
and warning people about them.
Here's our North America technology correspondent,
Lily Jamali.
Maybe you've seen images floating around social media.
Fake hurricane victims, fabricated celebrity endorsement
of Kamala Harris was even shared by Elon
Musk on X back in September. It's quite a high quality image but it's definitely
fake. That's Oren Etzioni, founder of truemedia.org, one of at least a
dozen deep fake detection tools that aim to help users identify AI generated
content on social media. Media processed by the site gets color
coded tags to in theory alert users to potentially false information. Red, fake,
likely to be manipulated. Yellow, inconclusive, uncertain or green. It's
likely to be real. On social media often images are compressed, you're looking at
them at your phone screen. The bottom line is people often cannot tell.
To test the tool out, we made some short deep fakes of our own.
We have three models saying, fake, fake, fake.
We even have 100% confidence.
With this deep fake video, however, the tool wasn't as certain.
And it looks like the models came back and were uncertain about the face.
One detected with middle-income confidence and one said there was little evidence.
Ezioni is open about how these models don't catch fake images 100% of the time, but he
argues true media is still a valuable tool to the average voter trying to tell truth
from fiction. Others say deep fake detection tools oversimplify what is actually a very complicated process.
Forensic analysis is hard. It's not a push-button solution and on a good day,
individual tests, it's gonna be wrong 10% of the time. You can't operate at that
scale at the Internet. There are billions of uploads every day.
Digital forensics expert, Hani Fareed of UC Berkeley says these tools have the can't operate at that sca are billions of uploads
expert honey for read of
tools have the potential
good. The nightmare situa
gets out there. One of th
which has happened and no
lie or a fake piece of co
it's real. Now you've emp
now you have, hey, this t it's real. Now you've empowered the lie because now you have hey this technique said it's real or this technique said it's fake and that now you've made
things worse. We got mixed results as well. Take this Instagram photo of the actress Jennifer
Aniston. True media clears the original post is real but this screenshot of it shared on X is
marked as uncertain. True media says being transparent about that kind
of uncertainty helps. They also have humans step in as needed. But the internet isn't
known for nuance. So in the meantime, Fareed says the best way to limit exposure to deep
fakes is…
Get the hell off of social media.
And seek out reliable sources.
Lily Jamali, this year's Olympics in Paris offered up many viral moments,
including the Turkish shooter celebrated for his casual style while winning a silver medal,
Team USA's Rubik's Cube-solving pommel horse competitor,
and the French pole vaulter who knocked off the bar with his...
crotch. None of these, however, surpassed the Australian break dancer, Reagan, who became world famous overnight
after that routine in her green and yellow tracksuit.
Now though, she's announced her retirement from the sport.
Stephanie Prentiss told me more.
Well, Alex Rachel Gunn, also known as Bee Girl Reagan,
she didn't have the best time at the Olympics.
She represented Australia in the break dancing or breaking, as they call it, competitions.
But her moves, which included things like the sprinkler and the kangaroo hop...
I've been practising.
We've all done the kangaroo hop.
They weren't quite well received by judges, but really that was the least of her problems because the internet
seized on the routines and suddenly she was world famous.
She was subject to thousands of memes, people screen grabbing bits of it, adding their own commentary,
mocking her, mocking the sport and actually questioning how she qualified in the first place.
So she did defend that back in August. I went out there and I had fun. I did take it very seriously. I worked my butt off preparing
for the Olympics and I gave my all, truly. I'd really like to ask the press to please
stop harassing my family, my friends and the broader street dance community.
Yeah, people can be so cruel. The dance actually reignited debate on whether breakdancing,
breaking as it's known, is really suitable for Olympic competition.
Well actually, yes. So what actually happened? Raegate has now said the level of scrutiny
has been so upsetting that she no longer wants to compete.
She said the idea of people filming her in the future, then posting it online, has really
taken the joy out of it for her.
And she said she will still dance, she loves to dance, but she'll do it in smaller community
competitions and from the comfort of her living room.
And as you just said, that performance did reignite this debate about
whether break dancing or breaking is particularly appropriate when it comes to the Olympics.
Now we did see it in the 2018 Youth Olympics and it went down a real storm there, but Paris
was its big debut as a proper Olympic sport. And because of the way that it's so creative
and it is quite hard to score, I mean there are categories like originality,
like execution, but it is more fluid and it's harder to judge. So it did make a big splash this
year as a sport, got a lot of attention, but it's not on the agenda for the 2028 games in Los Angeles.
Reagan gave me hope that I might one day be a break dancer. Stephanie Prentiss with that report.
hope that I might one day be a break dancer Stephanie Prentice with that report.
And that's all from us for now. If you want to hear more about how the impact of a second Trump presidency could be felt internationally, why not check out another podcast from the BBC World
Service, The Global Story. In their latest episode, What Trump's Victory Means
for the World, they discuss how US policy might change on Ukraine, the Middle East,
China, Europe and beyond. Just search for The Global Story wherever you listen to us.
If you want to comment on our podcast or the topics we covered, send us an email. The address globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk.
You can also find us on x at global news pod.
This edition was mixed by Sid Dundon and the producer was David Lewis.
The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Alex Ritz and until next time, goodbye. Goodbye. the world's largest tropical wetland, full of extraordinary animals and birds,
including its apex predator, the jaguar.