Global News Podcast - Footballer Diogo Jota dies in car crash

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

Liverpool and Portugal footballer, Diogo Jota, killed in car crash in Spain, aged 28. He had three young children and had just married his long-term partner. Also, Thailand gets a second caretaker prime minister in a week.

This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson and at 13 Hours GMT on Thursday the 3rd of July, these are our main stories. The celebrated Liverpool and Portugal footballer, Diogo Jota, dies in a car crash in Spain. Thailand has a new Prime Minister after days of political turbulence. A UN rapporteur accuses some of the world's biggest companies of complicity in war crimes in Gaza. Also in this podcast a Zimbabwean journalist is arrested for a satirical article about the president and after the Dalai Lama says China shouldn't have any say in choosing his successor this is Beijing's response.

The reincarnation of the Dalai Lama must take place inside China and with final approval from the central government. The Liverpool footballer and Portuguese national player Diego Jota has died in a car crash in Spain. His younger brother Andre, also a footballer, was also killed when their Lamborghini went off the road overnight in north-western Spain. Spanish police say a tyre blew out while he was overtaking another car and the vehicle then caught fire. Diego Jota was 28. Just days ago he married his long-term partner with whom he had three children.

The footballing world and in particular fans in Liverpool are mourning his death. Our correspondent Mireille Smith is at the Liverpool Stadium. Here at Anfield in the last months fans were gathering because this was a place to celebrate the league win and today it is a place where fans are gathering to lay flowers to pay their respects to their lad from Portugal. He was just 28 years old and he had such an important role to play in the club. He signed for the team in 2020, that was when Liverpool last won the league behind closed doors during COVID. But fans took him under their wing. They created a song for him almost instantly and it was

sung right throughout this stadium when he played here and when he travelled for away games. But today it is tragic here. Fans in tears as they remember what he meant to them. Flowers from other football clubs, scarves from other football clubs as well as people gather here today and just in the last few minutes even more flowers, even more fans gathering in silence in front of that shirt bearing the number 24 Diogo Giotta. Football commentator Nigel Adderley interviewed Diogo Gajota during his rise to the top of English football. He told me he was an exceptionally selfless player. If you speak to anyone who played with him,

whether it was for Wolverhampton Wanderers, for Liverpool or for the Portuguese national side, he was somebody who always put the team before himself and while he scored plenty of goals, he made even more for others and he was someone who seemed to overcome every challenge that was put in front of him. He arrived in English football in the second tier at Wolverhampton Wanderers as a very young player, quickly helped them into the Premier League, helped to establish them at the highest level, then moved on to Liverpool and was part of a very successful team. Last season they won the Premier level, then moved on to Liverpool and was part of a very successful team.

Last season, they won the Premier League, he played his part in that. And also for the Portuguese national side, he won the UEFA Nations League with them only last month, alongside Cristiano Ronaldo. His passing will be mourned right across the football world because he wasn't just a very fine footballer, he was a very popular one as well.

And this is going to leave a massive hole in both the Liverpool and the Portugal sides? It certainly will and I think that his importance to both teams was writ large when you look at the success that they've had. He's been part of a successful team wherever he's played, both at club and international level. And while he's had his at club and international level and while he's had his injury problems in recent years when he's come back into the team for Liverpool in particular he has always made an impact and he's always been the sort of player that Arna slot their coach last season could really rely upon

because he was a very clever footballer, one of the true modern footballers who could drop into space and create opportunities for others. Nigel, you interviewed Diego Giotto, didn't you? A couple of times, I think. I did when he was playing for Wolverhampton Wanderers in the championship, but he was just an incredibly likeable figure. He was always happy to give time to the media. He spoke very well about football. And even in some short, snatched conversations with him, you could see just how dedicated he was to improving himself day by day,

and also helping to improve his teams in every game he played. So tributes are already pouring in from the world of football. And I think they reflect just what a good footballer he was, but also just what a decent footballer he was but also just what a decent human being he was as well and Diego Jota's loss will be felt across the world of football for some time. Nigel Adderley on the passing of Diego Jota. It's been a turbulent year for Thailand, slow economic growth, a slump in tourism, the looming threat of Donald Trump's tariffs and this week a political crisis. Veteran politician Puntam Weichayachi has

been sworn in as the second caretaker Prime Minister of the week following the suspension of the actual Prime Minister Petontan Sinawut on Tuesday. She was dismissed following a leaked telephone call with Cambodia's former leader Hun Sen during which she criticised the Thai army. I heard more from our Southeast Asia correspondent Jonathan Head. A complete political ingenue and she had no qualifications apart from her family name. Her father Thaksin of course is the patriarch of the party. She was only put into the job because her predecessor,

Settar Tawason, was booted out by the courts after only a year. She's now been suspended and I suspect the courts are likely to disqualify her as well. The current Prime Minister, Pum Tam, is a very experienced hand. He's one of the veteran operators inside Ms Peton Tan's party, Pu Tai. He's probably as good a pair of hands as they could hope to have. But even he's only in the job until the court makes a ruling. When that happens, then a new Prime Minister must be found among a very limited list. And all of this goes back to a constitution that was written under military rule and which

tightly prescribes Thailand's democracy. It makes it very difficult for elected governments to operate. This episode also underscores just how interventionist Thailand's courts are. These courts have sacked five prime ministers linked to Mr. Thaksin. They've dissolved reformist parties. They've intervened time and time again on what in most countries would be viewed as the smallest technicalities. And if it isn't the courts that intervene, of course Thailand then has military coups, of which it's had more than most countries. The fact is that democracy is only allowed to operate in Thailand as long as the courts

and the military are comfortable with who's sitting there. So what do we know of this phone call that became, you know, what's undoing? It was an extremely ill-judged move, and one wonders whether she really had advice from the more senior members of her party to actually confide in a wily old operator like Hun Sen, one of the great survivors in Southeast Asian politics, a man who still pulls all the strings in Cambodia, his son is Prime Minister. She effectively appealed to the long-standing friendship between Hun Sen and her father, Thaksin Shinawat, to help resolve a border spat between the two countries and in doing so she complained to him about her own soldiers, her own army. She clearly assumed he was a close friend, which he has been in the past. He's chosen for his own reasons to

leak that conversation, causing a devastating political crisis for her. At any rate, I think her political career is now over. How is this going down in Thailand? I know some people are calling for a snap election, but from what you're saying, that wouldn't make a lot of difference. Oh, there's such weariness here. There really is.

I mean, there was only two years since we had an election which finally ended around a decade by the military or pseudo-military rule. More Thais than any others voted for a really ultra-reformist party. by the military or near a pseudo military rule, more Thais than any others voted for a really ultra reformist party. That party predictably was barred from holding office by the Senesh and then dissolved by the courts. And I think many Thais feel, well, whatever we vote for, the courts and the military, of course, all allied to the very powerful

palace will always intervene. And I don't think they feel there's any real hope of getting an elected outcome to current Thailand's almost sort of unending political turmoil. Jonathan Haid in Bangkok. The UN's special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories has accused more than 60 companies, including major arms manufacturers and tech firms, of being complicit in war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. Francesca Albanese says the firms are complicit in what she describes as a

genocidal campaign against Palestinians. Member states must impose a full arms embargo on Israel, suspend all trade agreements and investment relations and enforce accountability, ensuring that corporate entities face legal consequences for their involvement in serious violations of international law. Imogen Folks reports from Geneva. Francesca Albanese names companies she says are profiting from and therefore complicit in war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. She includes arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin for selling weapons, Alphabet, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon for providing technology which allows Israel

to target Palestinians, Caterpillar, Hyundai and Volvo for vehicles used for demolishing homes and banks BNP, Paribas and Barclays for underwriting Israeli Treasury bonds throughout the conflict. Their involvement is lucrative, the report says, and helps Israel to continue the war. Ms Albanese says all the companies should stop dealing with Israel immediately. Israel rejects the charge of genocide and has called the report groundless, defamatory and a flagrant abuse of office. Imogen folks, you may have heard in a previous edition of this podcast that the spiritual leader of Tibet,

the Dalai Lama, has announced he will have a successor after his death and that China should have no part in selecting who that will be. Journalists are restricted from reporting in Tibet and the BBC has been continually denied entry to the region. But our China correspondent Laura Bicker has visited the town of Aba in Sichuan province, which has been at the centre of Tibetan resistance against the Communist Party for decades. We head to the monastery before dawn to avoid detection in this tightly controlled part of China. The monks gather for their morning prayers. Their low, sonorous chants reverberate through the hall as rain pounds the roof. You'll find no portraits of the Dalai Lama here.

That would be illegal. Even talking to us is a risk, but it's one some are willing to take. Things are not good, he says, but stops there. Others are more candid. are more candid. The Chinese government has poisoned the air in Tibet. We Tibetans are denied basic human rights. The Chinese government continue to oppress and persecute us. It is not a government that serves the people.

That's just the way it is. That's just the way it is. That's a reality. China maintains Tibetans are free to practice their faith. But monks we spoke to claim their Buddhist culture, their very identity, is being eroded. Here in Abba and throughout Tibet, all children under 18 must be taught in state-run schools and learn Mandarin. Surveillance is pervasive. I'm outside the Aguardin monastery. Our team is being followed by at least eight, maybe ten people. The reason they're keeping a close eye on this one is because reportedly the monks here have tried to push back. The Communist Party has

tried to assimilate Buddhism with its own beliefs, its own ideals, and they say they're doing this in the name of party unity. Thousands of miles away in exile, Tibet's spiritual leader is celebrating his 90th birthday. After spending his life campaigning for religious freedom from the homeland he fled, the Dalai Lama announced that China will not choose his successor. Beijing has other ideas. Mao Ning is the director of the Foreign Ministry Information Department. The reincarnation of the Dalai Lama must take place inside China through a process of evaluation

and with final approval from the central government. For any religion to survive and develop, it must adapt to the country's social environment and cultural traditions. Tibetan Buddhism was born in China and has its Chinese characteristics." There are fears the spiritual future of Tibet could become a geopolitical battleground. Inside the region, China has almost complete control over the flow of information, says Tibetan scholar Robert Barnett. They're trying to remove elements of Tibetan culture that they think are threatening to China's rule over Tibet. They're trying to get rid of Tibetans' memories of their history as an independent country. They want to keep certain parts of Tibetan culture, like Tibetans

singing and dancing or beautiful monasteries in the mountains, this kind of touristic image. But of course, there is a risk that they could end up destroying or at least emasculating much of Tibetan culture as we know it. In Aba, a line of ladies, most of them over 50, spin the prayer wheels clockwise on their way to work, singing as they go. Beijing claims it's not destroying Buddhist culture, it's investing in it. On the road to Abba, a new high-speed railway is being built, connecting the remote town to major cities and three other provinces.

Beijing also says sending Tibetan children to state-run schools prepares them for a life in a country where Mandarin is the main language. But despite decades of effort there are still two worlds underneath this Himalayan sky where heritage and religion collide with Communist Party hopes of unity and control. Laura Bicker in Tibet. Still to come, the UK's Finance Minister responds to questions about why she was crying in Parliament.

Clearly I was upset yesterday and everyone could see that. It was a personal issue and I'm not going to go into the details. But how will voters react to her tears? The Trump administration says Haiti is now safe enough for half a million Haitian migrants in the US to lose their protected status and return to the impoverished Caribbean nation. But according to the UN, Haiti remains extremely dangerous and the security situation has in fact got worse. The Assistant UN Secretary General for the Americas Miroslav Jenka says gangs

had tightened their grip and the capital, Port-au-Prince, was paralysed and isolated. We have continued to witness a sharp erosion of state authority and the rule of law. Brutal gang violence affects every aspect of public and private life. Without increased action by the international community, the total collapse of state presence in the capital could become a very real scenario. Our Central America correspondent is Will Grant. What I think stands out most about this is the stark nature of the language used by Mr. Jencker to the Security Council. Of course, we know that the gangs in Port-au-Prince have

near complete control of the city, but it's the fact that he said after a visit to Haiti that the country and the city is becoming both isolated as there are no international commercial flights and paralyzed because the strength of the gangs is now so absolute that he warned of a near total collapse of the state authorities. But we can tell from the numbers just looking at ourselves how dire the situation is. More than 5.6 million people facing acute hunger. Some 1.6 million people have been internally displaced. I think in essence what this does is remind the Security Council just how severe the situation is coming from one of their own people as it were.

Now you have been to Haiti. What would life be like at the moment for people living in the capital Port-au-Prince? Just a day-to-day struggle. I mentioned there just how difficult it is to find enough food for hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis. When you combine this humanitarian situation with the security situation. The combination is extremely severe, extremely dangerous for tens of thousands of families. Young people simply can't go to school in many of the gang-controlled areas. Getting in, whether or not that's international aid agencies, journalists or ordinary people, Haitians who want to go home and maybe bring funds and support to their

families back in Port-au-Prince. All of that is extremely difficult. So taken together, the situation is about as bleak as it can be. Yeah, can anything be done to improve security? I mean, there are several hundred Kenyan police trying to do their best. Yeah, I think that is exactly the point, isn't it? That this is all being said when the international community and the United Nations has backed a deployment, which was supposed to bring some measure of security back to the capital. I think there was an initial sense that it was doing something, it was stabilizing the airport, a base of operations was created

around the airport in the capital, but things don't seem to have moved much further forward. The difficulty is, of course, is that this coincides with a period in which the Trump administration is reducing to the minimum expression its international aid support for anything that's considered not in its own interests. There is a suggestion by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Haiti and the operations in Haiti will remain funded. But the truth of the matter on the ground is that aid is a problem, security remains a problem, and a kind of coherent international response remains simply absent. Will Grant speaking to Oliver Conway. A Zimbabwean journalist has been remanded in custody for

publishing a satirical article criticising the president, Emerson Mnangagwa. Faith Zaba is editor of the Zimbabwe Independent newspaper and was arrested on charges of allegedly undermining the authority or insulting the president. James Copnellnall heard more from Nkaba, Matt Sharzy from the Media Institute for Southern Africa. I'll first describe it as the media on trial. It's a very unusual arrest. Not that I'm seeing a pattern, but it's worrying that this is the second journalist to be detained in the past few days of articles or the work that they are doing.

So it's really scary and we are literally going back to where we were a few years ago when we thought we had made progress, but we're going backwards. On another note, it's very strange that we still have insult laws undermining or insulting the authority of the president because those laws shield the president from criticism, they shield them from public scrutiny and they can be abused to bring journalists to trial. So it's really scary times and we feel that the independent media, what is left of it at least, is seriously under threat here in this country. Why do you think that is, if there is a challenge to independent media? Why particularly now?

It's coming, if I can speculate, at a time when the president is literally consolidating his power. If you look in the past few years, he has enacted a law that makes it illegal to criticise some aspects of governance. We call it the Patriot Act. As part of our penal code, he has also come up with a private voluntary organisations act, which makes it difficult for civil society, for charity organizations to hold into account and the registration process means that the washdog role of civil society, the washdog

role of the journalists is now also under attack. So I think the last wall now is journalism and the independent media, which is really, really tiny. It has to be dealt with, unfortunately. So that is my thinking about that. Presumably the government would say that there is a legal framework in place that Faith Zabah, from their perspective, broached the laws by the article that was there. It's a satirical article and nobody has ever been charged. This column has been run for more than 30 years and nobody

has ever raised an eyebrow. It's an opinion piece. It's a satirical piece that is in the back pages. Actually, after she was arrested, that's when most people started asking what article is it about? Because some people don't read it and it's published in a niche newspaper, which is for mainly business executives. But really, it looks like an innocuous article. It doesn't even, well although it's unfair as the president, it doesn't name him and it's meant to be a joke and we are allowed as a society to critique ourselves, to laugh at ourselves and to joke about those in power and if that is taken away we could be a very dull and unexciting country. Journalist Nkabar Machaasi. It's been a difficult

few days for the British government. The Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer had to row back on his welfare reform policy in order to avoid a rebellion within his own party. He faced a tough Prime Minister's questions in the House of Commons on Wednesday but all eyes were on the Finance Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, who had tears rolling down her cheeks. The image went viral on social media and was the main picture on most newspaper front pages and impacted the financial markets. Rachel

Reeves has now spoken about the incident. Clearly I was upset yesterday and everyone could see that. It was a personal issue and I'm not going to go into the details of that. But my job as Chancellor at 12 o'clock on a Wednesday is to be at PMQs next to the Prime Minister supporting the government and that's what I try to do. I guess the thing that maybe is a bit different between my job and many of your viewers is that when I'm having a tough day it's on the telly and most people don't have to deal with that.

So what could be the reaction of voters to seeing her in tears? Nick Robinson asked Luke Trill, director of polling for the pollsters more in common? For some voters, I think what will concern them most is the sight of the Chancellor in tears, but also the wider welfare row, the U-turn on winter fuel allowance. You'll have some people thinking, gosh, part of the reason that we got rid of the Conservatives was that we were fed up of the sense of perapolitical chaos. Are we in fact just going to see more of it with this government? And I think that can be quite dangerous for perceptions of this administration. On the other hand though, we know that actually British people are generally fair minded. They appreciate that someone like the Chancellor has a hard

job. And I think both Stammer and Reeves have somewhat struggled to connect with the public on a personal level. And I just wonder if seeing those images might make some people think, you know, actually she's got a hard job, she's doing her best and like all of us, she's human. So I think it's a bit of a balance. I remember when John Prescott, you remember attorney Blair's deputy, through that punch, people said that he had lost it, that that was the end of his career. I think it rather boosted his reputation in the end. It is hard sometimes to predict. Absolutely. And of course, one of the other examples is Hillary Clinton during the 2008 presidential race after losing the Iowa

caucuses. She had a teary moment before the New Hampshire primary and actually that moment is credited with humanizing her and helping her to win that primary because I think a bit like Rachel Reeves, Hillary Clinton is a politician that people sometimes struggle to see if she had that empathy and connection and it helped her there. So it is really difficult to predict where this will pan out. Polster Luke Trill. Headaches will affect the majority of us at some point in our lives, but now researchers say they've got to the bottom of why a certain group of people suffer from them and it's all to do with having a neanderthal-shaped skull.

Oliver Conway spoke to Professor Kimberly Plompe from the University of the Philippines, Dilliman in Quezon City. Who's behind the research? About 10 years ago a group of scientists came up with this hypothesis that the reason why certain humans get this malformation called the K-1 malformation, essentially what happens with that malformation is that the base of your skull is a bit too small to hold a modern human brain and so a bit of the brain gets squished out the spinal canal. They hypothesize that the reason why some people get this malformation might be because in our lineage, in our history, we interbred with earlier hominins, hominins

that were related to us such as Neanderthal. We know that all humans that have ancestry outside of Africa have about 2 to 5% Neanderthal DNA. We also know some of those genes code for the shape of the human skull. And these abnormalities can lead to headaches, is that right? So essentially what happens is that part of the brain just starts to pinched and if it's less than five millimeters of brain that herniates you get you can get headaches, you can get dizziness, you can get numbing of the hands. If it's more than five millimeters and you can get more severe symptoms like paralysis, and if it's too much, it's not compatible with life and it's actually a fatal condition.

And now you have taken a deeper look at this theory and actually you've managed to confirm it. Exactly. So we thought when we read this paper, we thought we actually have the technology managed to confirm it. Exactly, so we thought when we when we read this paper we thought we actually have the technology nowadays to test this. So what we did was took CT scans of living humans with and without the malformation and we ran statistical shape analyses which is just a fancy way of saying that we use the computer to look at the shapes and look at patterns of the shapes and we compared that with fossil hominin cranias, such as Neanderthals. And what we found is that the humans with the malformation are closer in shape to the Neanderthal skulls than the humans without the malformation were.

And so what we interpreted this as is by supporting this hypothesis that there's some genes in modern humans that come from neanderthals, come from those interbreeding events that happened a long, long time ago, that cause us to have a back of the skull that's a bit too small for a modern human brain. Interestingly, neanderthals actually have larger brains on average than modern humans, so it's not about the size of the brain, it's about the shape of the brain and the shape of the skull. And what comes next? Eventually down the line if we get funding we would like to run a DNA analysis to see if we can actually identify genes that are related that are similar within people with the Chiari that we might be able to identify as Neanderthal and influence the shape of the

skull. That might help us in terms of identifying people who might be predisposed to the condition. Professor Kimberley Plompe. And that's all from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag globalnewspod. This edition was mixed by Abby Wiltshire and the producers were Judy Frankel and Alice Adderley. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ridson.

Until next time, goodbye.