Global News Podcast - Hundreds of thousands head home in northern Gaza

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

Palestinians displaced during the conflict are on the move as the ceasefire holds. Also; survivors gather at the Auschwitz concentration camp to mark 80 years since liberation, and why Paul McCartney thinks new musicians are missing out.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Discover how to lead a better life in our age of confusion. Enjoy this BBC audiobook collection, written and presented by bestselling author Oliver Berkman, containing four useful guides to tackling some central ills of modernity. Busyness, anger, the insistence on positivity and the decline of nuance. Our lives today can feel like miniature versions of this relentless churn of activity. We find we're rushing around more crazily than ever.

Somewhere, when we weren't looking, it's like busyness became a way of life. Start listening to Oliver Berkman, Epidemics of Modern Life, available to purchase wherever you get your audio books. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Miles and at 14 Hours GMT on Monday 27 January, these are our main stories. Thousands of Gazans are heading back home in the north of the Strip.

Rwandan-backed rebels take over parts of the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo and what really happened to a snapped undersea fibre optic cable running between Sweden and Latvia. Also in this podcast. I don't know how is this possible to do something one human being to the other because animals don't do it. The world remembers 80 years on from the liberation of Auschwitz. We start in Gaza, where the coastal road has been packed with people. As many as 100,000 Palestinians displaced during the conflict are returning to their homes as the ceasefire agreement holds. Young parents with babies in their arms, the elderly being helped along.

Many people are weighed down with huge bags containing all they've managed to salvage after more than a year of escaping from place to place. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to follow them in the coming days. Among those making the journey is the family of our Gaza correspondent Rushdie Aboualouf. He spoke to us from Cairo. Very emotional day for me and my family. Very relieved that my father and my rest of the family will be starting their journey back to Gaza City. Most of their homes were destroyed, but it's a big day for all Palestinians. We are talking about more than a million people are in the move. Not sure if all of them will manage to cross today because, you know, it is going to take a very long time to walk

this road. It's a dusty road, seem to destroyed road. They made some progress in bathing out some of the rebels yesterday, the Qataris and the Egyptians and the Americans who are in the ground to facilitate the rebels yesterday, the Qataris and the Egyptians and the Americans, who are in the ground to facilitate the return back for the people. They started walking on a coastal road early in the morning, but in the last hour, they started to allow cars to cross into northern Gaza. The process is that they allow 20 car each time to a certain area, and they are checked by scanner first and by hands.

Make sure that no military equipment inside the car but people are walking freely without any obstacles, without any Israeli troops in the place because the army has withdrawn its forces from the coastal road early in the morning allowing people to return back. Well as we heard there for those making the long walk back home there's huge uncertainty over what they might find when they arrive. The UN estimates 60 percent of buildings in Gaza are badly damaged or totally destroyed. Our correspondent John Donison in Jerusalem gave me the latest. I think the figure could end up being well over half a million people who end up heading back to their homes in the north. Now before the ceasefire came into effect there were around 50 trucks of aid getting

in. Now it's thought to be 600, that's the aim every day, but the aid agencies say the real priority is shelter because many, many people will not have a home, they're going to be setting up in the rubble and they're going to be living in tents for some considerable time. John, there was huge controversy over the weekend when Donald Trump suggested that Gazans should be going to live in neighbouring countries and there's continuing reaction to that isn't there? Yes, I mean that has gone down like a lead balloon with Palestinians. I heard one man today in Gaza saying, you know,

We will rebuild Gaza. We will never leave. Now what Donald Trump actually said that he suggested He floated the idea as he often does that Gaza should be cleaned out as he put it now for be cleaned out, as he put it. Now for Palestinians, other people watching around the world, that will raise, if that were to happen, further accusations of ethnic cleansing. And I think for Palestinians, for the neighbouring countries Donald Trump said people should go to, so Egypt, Jordan, they've all said it's a non-starter. Just a point about the ceasefire. Obviously, people going back to the north of Gaza will be extremely vulnerable if there are any breaches of the ceasefire to bombardments by Israel.

Presumably both sides at the moment are pretty confident this is going to hold. There have been hitches in the last few weeks in wrangling over which prisoners, which hostages would be released first, but the ceasefire has largely held. I think there is a hope that it will hold at least for the first six weeks but then it's the second phase which is meant to be about ending the war that still has to be negotiated and I think it's going to be a key moment what happens after six weeks. John Donnison. Auschwitz in Poland was the biggest Nazi concentration camp. Today marks the 80th

anniversary of the liberation of the camp where more than a million mainly Jewish people died between 1940 and 1945. Today is also International Holocaust Memorial Day remembering the six million Jews and countless other members of minority groups murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Holocaust survivors accompanied by the Polish president Andrzej Duda laid flowers at the camp's death wall where SS officers executed thousands of prisoners. He said Poland must keep the memory alive. Because representatives of one nation could inflict such horrible, unimaginable harm on other nations and especially the Jewish nation is something unprecedented in human history and among other things we cultivate this

memory in order to never let it happen again. One of the survivors who's made the journey to Auschwitz for today's commemorations is Eva Umlauf. She was one of the youngest survivors of the camp. Katja Adler spoke to her alongside her son Eric and granddaughter Nadia about how she feels going back. It is a very emotional moment this day. I'm so sorry. It may be strange to say that, but I feel incredible pride actually to be here with my mom. You know, she's 81 years old. It just brings back the memories of everything that she went through. And it's special to have my older daughter here too, to be here as a family is really special.

And Nadia, you've walked in here for the first time. What's going through your mind? It's very emotional. I think when I got out of the car and I stepped here, there was just a feeling of a pit in my stomach. It's almost hard to describe. But I think for me being here, it reminds me of the importance of remembering her story, making sure to share her story so that none of this happens in the future again.

Eva, it's a commemoration day. What should we remember and what shouldn't we forget today? That people are lost here, the life. More than one million. It's hard to believe it was possible, really, for human beings to do this to other human beings. I don't know how it is possible to do something, one human being to the other, because animals don't do it. So the Germans, the fascists, the murderers, they thought they were superior race.

They thought they were something better than those minorities that they have eliminated here in Auschwitz. They wanted to eliminate 11 million people. That didn't happen. It was only 6 million. And I say that in quotation marks. And still, this is a crime that you cannot compare to any other. This dehumanization means that they made people into non-humans. They thought the Jews are rats. And rats you have to poison.

At least 10,000 a day they poisoned like rats. Old people, young people, kids. These didn't exist for them. Jews are the lower race and we are the superior race. That is sometimes still there today. In Auschwitz-Birkenau there's a memorial in different languages to represent the victims and where they came from and it says this should be a warning for the world. Is it just 80 years ago or is this a warning for now? It is a warning for now because... Because we live in times that are very dangerous.

It is a warning for now because we are living in times where it is very dangerous that history repeats itself. We vote for undemocratic parties. We have presidents who are dictators. We fear that history repeats itself. And this is what I want to say here at this place. Our correspondent Jessica Parker is at the commemorations. I actually stood in the Auschwitz-Birkenau site looking over at a huge tent that has

been constructed here and inside that tent, yes there will be world leaders, yes there will be European royalty as well including Britain's King Charles III, but they will be the audience, the ones being addressed, and the people who will be addressing them and speaking will be the survivors. We think around 50 survivors have made it here today. Obviously, those numbers dwindle as each anniversary passes. But they will be the ones speaking, sharing, I don't know of course exactly what they're going to say, but sharing their memories, sharing any words of warning they may have and sharing their thoughts about

how important it is to remember what happened here and remember the past and learn from it. And we heard there the post leader saying look Poland is going to keep this memory alive. No feeling there that as those survivors do pass away over the years that these commemorations will diminish? No, although I think there is always an anxiety and a fear amongst people I've spoken to before who are involved in these kinds of commemorations or the preservation of what happened here, that with time memories can fade. And I think that's why actually today is regarded as particularly important

the 80th anniversary. As time goes on, as I say, there will be fewer survivors over the passage of time. So you begin to lose that opportunity to hear directly, there'll still be of course recorded testimonies, but directly face to face in moments like this from survivors, whether they are addressing international media and international audiences essentially at an event like this one, or whether they're doing something like going into schools in the countries that they live in to tell people about what they went through and educate young people who now have, you know, generations of distance from what happened in Europe. So I think that is partly why today the

80th anniversary is getting so much international attention. Jessica Parker. Rwandan-backed rebels who have taken over much of the city of Goma in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, although some gunfire can still be heard there. There's been a prison breakout with part of the facility there set on fire. In less than a month the rebel advances displaced more than 400,000 civilians. Our Africa regional editor, Will Ross, reports on why the conflict has escalated so fast. Throughout January the M23 advance has been rapid, perhaps deliberately timed to take advantage of when the world was distracted by politics in

America and conflict in the Middle East. By the time the UN Security Council rang the alarm bell, the Rwandan-backed rebels were already knocking at the door of Goma. President Paul Kagame's government says this conflict is about protecting Rwanda from the threat of Hutu rebels based in eastern Congo. But Kinshasa sees that as a convenient excuse and accuses Kigali of trying to annex part of eastern Congo to exploit the minerals. What happens next will partly depend on whether Rwanda faces any threat of sanctions. Will Ross, back in December a plane overshot the runway at Muan Airport in South Korea.

All but two of the 180 people on board died. Now investigators say they found bird feathers and blood stains in an engine. Our correspondent Jean McKenzie has the details. This report really sets out what the full investigation is going to do and it says that it's going to focus on two main things. So that is the role, as you say, that a bird strike played in this crash, but also the role that this localiser, this guidance system at the end of the runway, which the plane then crashed into, what role that played as well. But in terms of the bird strike, this initial report has already set out some of the findings. So, it details how the pilots, when they were coming into land at Muay Thai Airport that day, they were talking, they were discussing this flock of birds. The plane then goes around to attempt a second landing. And that is when the air

traffic controllers warn these pilots about the birds. And it is just seconds later really that they then make this emergency May Day landing warning. So that is the point at which we know that something has gone wrong and the plane then comes into land, it lands on its belly, it speeds along the runway and it crashes into this localizer, this guidance system at the end. Now since the crash the investigators have also looked at the engines and what they have found is feathers from birds and blood stains on both of the engines. So although this is an initial report it suggests that birds got into both of the planes engines, perhaps they caused both

of those engines to fail and this could then explain why the plane wasn't able to get its wheels down when it came into that landing. But of course this is an initial investigation and much more work is going to be needed to establish the exact cause of this crash. Gene McKenzie in Seoul. Still to come in this podcast. If it gets a bit like the Wild West, then the people who created these copyrights don't benefit.

Help! Paul McCartney warns that up and coming musicians are being ripped off. WC Audiobook Collection, written and presented by bestselling author Oliver Berkman, containing four useful guides to tackling some central ills of modernity. Busyness, anger, the insistence on positivity, and the decline of nuance. Our lives today can feel like miniature versions of this relentless churn of activity. We find we're rushing around more crazily than ever. Somewhere, when we weren't looking, it's like busyness became a way of life. Start listening to Oliver Berkman, Epidemics of Modern Life, available to purchase wherever you get your audiobooks.

Now what really happened to an undersea fibre optic cable between Sweden and Latvia, which appears to have snapped sometime on Sunday morning. The incident caused alarm because it's the latest in a series of severed undersea lines in the Baltic region and often the finger is pointed at Russia. Now the owners of a Bulgarian ship have said their vessel may have been responsible but that it was an accident. Here's our Europe regional editor Paul Moss. There's been a cat and mouse chase in the Baltic Sea this past 24 hours. When a Latvian broadcaster's telecoms cable suddenly stopped working on Sunday morning, a Bulgarian ship, the Vezhen, was spotted nearby. The Swedish Coast Guard went speeding after it and ordered the crew to bring the ship back into shore to be inspected. That inspection seems

to have uncovered the maritime equivalent of a smoking gun. The Vezhen's anchor was damaged, suggesting it had been dragging along the seabed. Now, the head of the company which owns the Vezhen, Alexander Kulchev, has admitted possible responsibility, but no criminal intent. responsibility, but no criminal intent. The ship was sailing in very bad weather conditions. When the wind stopped, the crew discovered that the left anchor had fallen and it had been dragging on the sea floor. It's possible the ship caused that problem with the cable, but in my opinion there's absolutely no way that we're talking about an act of sabotage by our crew." The Vezhen had just left Russia when the cable was damaged. And Russia has been repeatedly

accused of targeting undersea infrastructure. So the Bulgarian shipowners' protestations of innocence may not convince everyone. Only this month NATO launched a naval mission to protect Baltic Sea cables. Whoever or whatever was responsible for this latest cable failure, it's clear the NATO mission has a tough task ahead. Paul Moss. In recent days and weeks, President Trump has threatened tariffs on nations that don't control the flow of undocumented migrants into the United States. Now one such trade dispute has been averted.

Colombia had been refusing to allow in two military planes carrying people being repatriated from the United States. Washington said if it didn't let them land it would impose 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian goods. Well it now looks as though Bogota has blinked first. Luis Fajardo, Latin American specialist from BBC Monitoring in Miami. What seems to be clear is that Petro has accepted to the return of these deportee flights that they are going to return to Colombia and that the crisis apparently at this moment seems to have subsided. Petro had said during this day of multiple social media interventions

that he could not prevent the US from removing Colombian nationals living irregularly in the US if the US didn't accept them. But he insisted that there had to be a protocol respecting the dignity of Colombian citizens. He objected to what he was describing as unfair treatment of the Colombian citizens and the facted to what he was describing as unfair treatment of the

Colombian citizens and the fact that they were returning in military planes. So this seemed to be one part of the discussion that Petro had said he even offered to send him the Colombian presidential plane to pick up the Colombian deportees in the US and fly them back to Colombia. World Finance Lewis Fajardo, artificial intelligence has been held up as the technology that can transform the way we live. American companies like OpenAI took an early lead with its chat GPT chatbot. But China is catching up. In fact, now just a few weeks after it was launched, a Chinese company called DeepSeek has overtaken chat GPT

to become Apple's most popular free app in the US. Our senior technology reporter Chris Vallance told me more about it. It was top of the Apple app store charts in the US, UK and in China. Why has it been so successful? Well, I suppose there's one very simple reason, which is that it's free. That's obviously a big draw, but of course if it was free and not very good, that might not be such an attractive proposition. But there are a lot of people are saying, you know, this is a pretty good AI and works, you know, what the responses they're getting from this AI app aren't so different from some of the big Western companies and of course that's also causing some shockwaves amongst those Western companies. Yeah so if it's as

good as open AI's chat bot CPT what can the big US tech firms do in the short term? I mean I think the first thing is you know the measures that the test have been done so far you know know, we're taking the companies, the Chinese app developers word for it. But I think one of the things that's very striking about the claims they've made is the amount of money they've spent on training this. They've talked about $6 million. Well, the big Western companies spent billions training AI models. So I think there's quite a concern amongst investors in those companies that the AI race, if you like, between the West and China is a lot closer than they might

have thought. It's certainly true that the US government has over the years attempted to stop the flow of high technology to China. Again, if the stats, if the company's claims about this being almost as good as the, or as good in some cases as the top Western models, if those pan out, it raises questions about how effective those restrictions on say the export of advanced chips have been or whether in fact, you know, these have encouraged some clever innovation. Chris Vallance. Now let's stay with artificial intelligence because ministers here in the UK are suggesting that tech companies can hoover up music from the internet to develop their own AI models

without having to pay for copyright, in other words, for free. But for thousands of people making art, it is not just a passion, it is a job of course. Not least for Beatles legend Paul McCartney. He reckons it's a threat they shouldn't have to bear. He's been speaking to the BBC's Laura Koonsberg. Just worried about the copyrights not being protected because if it gets a bit like the Wild West then the people who created these copyrights don't benefit. And I think that takes away a lot of incentive, you know, because when we were kids in Liverpool

we found a job that we loved but it also paid the bills. What do you think the risk is for the next generation of musicians coming through? So for instance you get young guys, girls coming up and they write a beautiful song and they don't own it and they don't have anything to do with it and anyone who wants can just rip it off. I mean, the truth is the money's going somewhere, you know, and it gets on the streaming platforms,

somebody's getting it and it should be the person who created it. And if you hadn't been paid then maybe the world wouldn't have ever heard yesterday or Let It Be or Pay Jude. You know that is really true because you like to think of art as the muse, you know it's just the muse comes to me. It's not like that. And actually you use the kind of machine learning technology to help produce the song you put out last year to recreate John Lennon's vocal performance from something from 1970. So what would you say to someone who say, well, you're being a Luddite, you're just,

you know, sticking your heels in because you don't like the idea of progress. Yeah, I get that, you know, and I think AI is great and it can do lots of great things. As you say, you know, we took an old cassette of John's and cleaned his voice up, so it has its uses. But my worry is in this rip-off area. You know, that was John's thing. He was in The Beatles. His widow gave us the tape.

So there was no question of sort of copyright. But when you get, if you take that and then rip it off. See for instance, I think I'm on the internet singing God Only Knows by the Beach Boys, but I never sang it. But AI made me sing it. So somebody's getting some sort of payoff there. And it's not me, I'm not interested. But I was talking to someone and I said, you know, it didn't sound like me, not quite. But to casual observers, it's me singing God only knows. But I said to this person, I said, yeah, but you know,

give it five years and it's going to sound exactly like me. And the guy said, one. Give it one year. And it's true. It's going so fast that, you know, you are going to, I'm going to be able to put my voice on anything, anybody's voice on anything. So I think you just have to worry about the ripoff. AI is a great thing, but it shouldn't rip creative people off. There's no sense in that. Why would a government want to do that? I don't get it. We're the people.

You're the government. You're supposed to protect us. That's your job. So if you're putting through a bill, make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you're not going to have them. As simple as that? If there's such a thing as a government, it's their responsibility, I would think,

to protect the young people, to try and enhance that whole thing so that it works, so that these people have got jobs and can enhance the world with their wonderful art. So protect it. Paul McCartney. More than 30 years since the end of apartheid, South Africa is still a nation coming to terms with its past and struggling with racial integration. Now a play called A Good House, which uses satire, humour and a touch of fantasy to investigate how attitudes to race in the Rainbow Nation have changed. It's just opened at a theatre in London after which it will be performed

across South Africa. Our arts correspondent Vincent Dowd met the playwright. The upmarket gated fictional community of Stillwater in Cape Town or possibly Johannesburg. Cicle, a black 30 something businessman, encounters a white neighbour. And who are you? Cicle Mba. We're renovating. Who's renovating? We are.

You're moving in here or something, what? Yeah, we just bought the place. Congrats! Chris, Chris Sharp. The usual calm of Stillwater is shaken when a mysterious rundown shack somehow appears on a vacant patch of ground. Writer, Amy Jefter. I come from the Cape Flats, which is a sort of area where black people were moved to during

apartheid and black people were moved from the beautiful areas, the suburbs, into this like low-lying, arid community, township. And that's where my family is from, Bishop Leavis. The design and Femi Tumowo's music suggest Stillwater's comfortable way of life. It sits in South Africa's southern suburbs, which is quite a wealthy enclave of middle-class, upwardly mobile, ambitious middle-class life. And Stillwater is an amalgamation of many kinds of gated communities or closed suburbs that exist in South Africa, and they're very tightly curated and quite exclusive.

What's happening in South Africa at the moment is that there's obviously an upwardly mobile class of economically privileged black people who are now able to move by virtue of their class into these enclaves, which have traditionally been all white. Good House is about a shack that goes up in a very conservative gated community.

And what happens when that shack starts to sort of infringe on the lives of the neighbors? I mean, a neighborhood is worth nothing if we don't have some order, you know? We're very welcoming here in Stillwater. We've lived alongside one another for a long time. There's a way of coexisting. C. Clay and Bonolo, the black couple in the play, have to cope with moments of condescension

from their white neighbours, but not outright aggression. Jephter doesn't portray any character as totally good or bad. What I wanted to do was write a story about the state of the nation, sort of have a racial temperature gauge and write about how we relate to each other now in post-apartheid South Africa but make it naughty. I think the tendency is always to overly romanticise or to purify, especially I guess black characters, make them too dignified or make them without blame, I guess, for upwardly mobile young economically sound black people who are moving into like a different class

status who are reaping the benefits of what a post-apartheid South Africa looks like. I think there's a lot to critique there and there's like a lot to say. The play's ambitious and funny. We need the humour and we need the satire and we need the send up really. We need to be able to make fun of these things and to be able to laugh at race relations because they're so often absurd. The conclusions we draw, the prejudices we tap into,

they're hilarious at times and they make for some really uncomfortable and awkward moments. Those uncomfortable and very incisive moments are on stage now in London and Amy Jefter's new play should reach South Africa later this year. Vincent Dowd. And that's all from us for now but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later on. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X, of course, at Global News Pod. This edition was mixed by Daniela Varela, the producer was David Lewis. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Nick Miles and until next time, goodbye. Discover how to lead a better life in our age of confusion. Enjoy this BBC audiobook collection written and presented by bestselling author Oliver Berkman, containing four useful guides to tackling some central ills of modernity. Busyness, anger, the insistence on positivity, and the

decline of nuance. Our lives today can feel like miniature versions of this relentless churn of activity. We find we're rushing around more crazily than ever. Somewhere, when we weren't looking, it's like busyness became a way of life. Start listening to Oliver Berkman, Epidemics of Modern Life, available to purchase wherever you get your audiobooks.