Global News Podcast - Israel blockades part of northern Gaza

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Israel blockades part of northern Gaza, dashing hopes of a ceasefire after the killing of the Hamas leader. Also: a nationwide power cut in Cuba, and the start-up offering Americans a chance to produce smarter children.

Hello, this is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. This week on Witness History, in 1970, Gary Gygax was fired. And that event, believe it or not, changed the gaming industry forever. He went on to create Dungeons & Dragons. In the 50 years since its release, the tabletop roleplay game has generated billions of dollars in sales and now boasts more than 50 million players worldwide. Search and subscribe to Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcast.

This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Rachel Wright and in the early hours of Saturday the 19th of October these are our main stories. Israel blockades part of northern Gaza dashing hopes that the killing of the Hamas leader might bring about an early ceasefire. An electricity outage plunges the whole of Cuba into darkness and leaves it without power. And the US startup offering Americans the chance to have smarter children by testing

the IQ of their embryos. Also in this podcast... We are working on our apartment, as well as a party or pub. It will include conversations within the scenario. ...using virtual reality headsets to treat cocaine addiction. It took a day after Israeli troops said they'd killed him, but Hamas has finally confirmed the death of its leader Yahya Sinwar, the man believed to have masterminded the brutal massacre and hostage-taking in southern Israel on the 7th of October last year. Despite hopes from leaders in Europe and America that the killing might present an opportunity for progress towards a ceasefire and the return of Israeli hostages, both Hamas

and Israel appear to be stepping up a gear. Amichai Chikli is a minister in the Israeli government. He told the BBC that Israel was now blockading part of the north of Gaza. It is the northern part of Gaza. We are speaking about the region of Jebal, Yabet-Lahi, Yabet-Hanun. We've created a blockade with our forces. We allowed the civilian population to escape into the safe zone. And we prevented supply to enter the blockade region,

which was a very specific region where Hamas was trying to recover its administration and its military capabilities. Georgios Petropoulos is the head of the UN's Office for Humanitarian Assistance, or OCHA, in Gaza. He says the death of Yaya Sinwar has done nothing to ease the plight of those suffering the most. I still see children dying on the floor of hospitals for lack of a hospital bed. I still see people with shocking injuries from explosions not being able to have a CT scan or MRI because not a single one of those machines exists still.

Dialysis patients dying because there's no fuel allowed to get to hospitals. We don't see a path to peace from where we are here in Gaza. What we're asking for and what we're asking directly to the Israeli authorities is to allow the safe and sustained and unimpeded access to Jabalia and to beneficiary populations, and to have some meaningful shift change in the volume of the humanitarian supplies

that are allowed to come into the strip. That has to be based on the number of people that are suffering and their needs, not political decisions and expediency. Our correspondent in Jerusalem, Weirah Davis, told me more about the partial Israeli blockade of northern Gaza. Well, it's just confirmation that Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu are determined to carry on with the war. They think and they say there are still significant amounts of Hamas weaponry

and Hamas and Islamic jihad fighters in the area of northern Gaza, an area known as Jubalia. They've been pounding the area for well over a week now. There have been hundreds of civilian casualties. But Israel says it will continue to do this despite the success of killing Yahya Sinwah. Netanyahu has acknowledged that it's a significant moment in the war, but a moment when he wants to strike further and militarily defeat Hamas. Defeating Hamas militarily is and always has been his number one objective. Now after the confirmation of Yahya Sinwah's death, there's been renewed international

calls for a ceasefire and some in optimism that might happen but let's hear from Hamas's deputy leader Khalil A'Haya who's currently based in Qatar. The martyrdom of our brother Yahya Sinwar and all the commanders of our movement who preceded him will only boost our movement and our resistance, giving us power and steadfastness to continue in their path. We will be loyal to their blood and their sacrifice. We Palestinian people, we tell those who are crying over the prisoners of the occupation, these captives will not return until the aggression against our people in Gaza ends, the total

withdrawal from Gaza and the release of all our heroes held in the jails of the occupation. So Wirra, are we back to square one? No, because Hamas is much, much militarily weaker than it was on the day when this war started. Israel has got the dominant upper hand and that is why Mitter Netanyahu wants to finish the job, of course not just in Gaza but against Hezbollah in Lebanon as well. Of course what Hamas does have is 101 hostages, that is his perhaps last bargaining chip and that matters to the Israeli public. Many of course families of the hostages do want Netanyahu to take a pause now,

to listen to his international colleagues, restart talks about a ceasefire and the release of the hostages. Some people in Israel, in cabinet, you know, the defence minister, Yav Galant, had said a few months ago that Israel was nearing the completion of its military objectives, but I think given the successes he's had in recent weeks against Hezbollah in Lebanon and now against Hamas in Gaza, I do not see it happening at the minute despite calls from members of the families for those hostages to be released. We're a Davis in Jerusalem. An electricity grid fault has led to a complete power failure in Cuba.

It comes less than a day after the government in Havana stressed the need to save electricity in the face of major fuel shortages. It's said to be the worst electricity crisis in the island's history. BBC Monitoring's Pascal Fletcher is in Miami and used to be a correspondent in Cuba. It's certainly very bad. And if you consider that this came today on top of what was already an emergency situation regarding the energy situation. The government had announced measures basically shutting down, you know, any factories, any

workplaces that were not considered absolutely necessary for the next few days. So this sort of came on top of that just a few hours after those emergency measures had been announced. And then you have the entire power system going off from the west right down to the east of the country. And so, yeah, a very serious situation and the prospect for most Cubans of not having power perhaps for the next few days. And what caused it? Well, they haven't been very clear about that. They basically said that one of the most important power generation plants in the country, Antonio Guterres, the largest, in fact, the power

generation plant, just unexpectedly came offline. That suggests there may have been some kind of sort of surcharge over pressure on the system. There is a report that initially the energy ministry said that this was due to the conditions under which the grid was sort of operating under. But apparently that initial posting was then removed and another posting offered no explanations. But it does look as if the major power plant, the pillar of the system that was still operating just basically went down. Are Cubans used to power cuts or do they have a plentiful supply of electricity normally? No, no, they're absolutely used to power cuts.

I mean, you know, even dating back to, you know, I think the last worst time for power cuts was in the 90s, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the interruption of power and fuel supplies from there. Then Cubans got very used to overnight power outages, half days of outages, full days of outages. Things improved a little bit since then, but in the last few years we've had another descent into these very long power, rolling power cuts. And certainly in the last few weeks and days, they've been very severe. Cubans are definitely used to them. It's almost part of life in Cuba now. That doesn't mean that they're happy about them. You know, we've seen quite a lot of protests against power sort of

shortages in the last few years, some more serious than others. But Cubans have sort of learned to live with it. I mean, it's certainly extremely uncomfortable. This is still a very sticky time of the year. Hurricane season is still around. So, yes, it's very uncomfortable. That doesn't mean that people are not very frustrated about it. Pascal Fletcher. An ethical minefield, the words experts are using in reaction to an investigation by the British Guardian newspaper. It found that a US startup, Heliospec Genomics, is offering prospective parents a rare $50,000 service, testing the IQ of different embryos before they undergo IVF so they can have smarter children. Jason Wilson is an investigative reporter at the Guardian.

They say that they can look at the embryo's genome and look at the genome for markers, which are associated with, say, higher intelligence or with, you know, favourable personality traits. Now, that's a very complicated trait. It traces back to a lot of markers in the embryo. So there is some doubt because of that. Because also, a lot of researchers will of that. Because also a lot of researchers will say that it's got a lot to do with the environment as well as your underlying genetic

markers. And currently, is there anything that prevents a company from trying to identify the IQ in an embryo? No. And in fact, it's perfectly legitimate practice in the US and the UK to screen embryos for certain kinds of trades. And in the US, there's nothing preventing them from doing that for intelligence or personality traits. So this, of course, raises the possibility that people with money, and let's face it, $50,000 is what it costs. There's not a lot of people have that, that people with money will be able to produce kids or children with a higher intelligence, which raises enormous ethical questions.

That's right. Wealthier people would be able to select among embryos generated in an IVF process to select the one with the highest likely intelligence. Now, that is interesting because these ideas about genetic screening, about IQ and genetics are becoming more popular, especially in Silicon Valley, where a lot of wealthy people would like the opportunity to have the most intelligent offspring by way of a process like this. So is there a sense that therefore more regulation, more legal regulation needs to be put in place to stop this? Or is there a general sense

that the Wild West, it doesn't matter? Well, I'd say two things in response to that. One is they could be prevented from doing it by some kind of future regulation that's devised, but that's not even a conversation in the political discourse here in the US. The second thing I'd say is what this should provoke is a kind of broader discussion about whether we want to go in this direction. You know, eugenics fell into disrepute at the conclusion of the Second World War because of its association with, you know, Nazi Germany.

Now it's coming back, it's being powered by different technologies. It's not the same as the eugenic practices before World War II of sterilizing people who were judged not fit for breeding. But it is more of a positive form of that practice. And is that something we want to allow? Is that something we want as part of our, you know, landscape of family life and rearing children? It's a discussion that we're going to need to have if we don't think that this kind of thing should go ahead. Jason Wilson from The Guardian. Virtual reality headsets might seem like the kind of extravagant technology that's confined

to fantasy films and video games, but it has practical uses too. One of those, according to new research, is helping overcome cocaine addiction. The lead author and professor of addiction research at King's College London, Paolo De Luca, has been speaking to Julian Marshall. The treatment for cocaine dependence currently relies heavily on psychological interventions, also known as talk in therapies like CBT. And what happens at the moment is that there's a very poor engagement and high rates of relapse. And what we are trying to do with this study is to address the craving experience. So Q-exposure treatment is a therapeutic approach that involves exposing someone to an object or situations that make them want to take

any substance but in this instance cocaine without obviously letting them actually do it. And this repeated exposure to these situations reduces or even extinguishes this automatic response or current. So you encourage your subjects to put on a VR headset and then you conjure up perhaps a party scene for them? Yes, we are currently working on our apartment scenario as well as a party or pub scenarios and the decision on using these environments will be based on the patient's

preferences. So in this sense, the intervention will be even more personalised to the actual situations that they find more triggering. So when the subject is in this virtual pub, this virtual party, do you speak to them or is it simply the repetition of this imagery that reduces the craving? Two things there. One is how engaging the environment can be and we are planning to make the environment as engaging as possible. It will include conversations with other virtual agents within the scenario and that will increase the immersive experience they are witnessing in virtual reality. But how QSPosure works is that by exposing people to these situations frequently, their craving is lower than before

the interventions was delivered. I don't quite understand how this is different from the person going into a pub again and again and again. How does the virtual experience differ? Well, the difference is essentially that they are exposed to craving situations, they are practicing coping skills in a safe therapeutic setting and they are also not using cocaine in response to the craving situation. So they are able to reduce or even distinguish this automatic response that they have learned by using cocaine in their own environment. And do you know that this potentially could work, as I understand it,

because virtual reality has been tried with alcoholics? Yes, conventional QS-Porsio treatment has been used successfully with people with alcohol dependence and also with other mental health conditions. So we know that it works. But the evidence for cocaine is emerging and this would be one of the first studies that will provide further evidence that it can be implemented but also is an acceptable and feasible approach for treating cocaine dependence. Professor Paolo di Lucca. Still to come. You are accepted, you are part of the club, you are a member of the club as long as you share values of freedom, liberty, equality and solidarity. Threats to free expression make techno clubs the place to talk politics in Georgia.

This week on Witness History, in 1970, Gary Gygax was fired. And that event, believe it or not, changed the gaming industry forever. He went on to create Dungeons & Dragons. In the 50 years since its release, the tabletop roleplay game has generated billions of dollars in sales and now boasts more than 50 million players worldwide. Search and subscribe to witness history wherever you get your BBC podcasts. But first, being bullied when you're young seems to alter your brain structure for years to come with different changes seen in males and females. That's according to the largest brain scanning study of its kind. Previous research had identified some parts of the brain affected by bullying.

But Michael Connerton at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and his colleagues found that it seems to have an impact on 49 different regions, particularly those associated with memory, learning, motor movements and emotional regulation. I spoke to Michael to find out more. We were looking at brain scans of about 2000 individuals across three time points from the ages of 16 to 23. And what we were trying to do was look at the impact of bullying, because I think anyone who has been exposed to bullying, it's quite a visceral feeling and memory when you look back in it. So we wanted to see is there any brain

changes associated with that. Bullying is not just a temporal issue, it's not just an issue in the moment of feeling negative consequences but it may have long lasting impacts on brain development. So in the past we've always assumed that people who got bullied, it didn't make them happy. But now what you've found is it actually changed parts of their brain. So what we found here was that there's associated changes. So we found is that a lot of the associated changes are in areas involving kind of emotional processing and where typically in stress-related research you would see kind of reductions in brain volume but in

this what we found was actually enlargement. So individuals with increased exposure to bullying had enlarged areas in the brain such as the amygdala and hippocampus which are associated with emotional processing compared to individuals with less exposure to bullying. So what we think here could be a situation would be it might be an adaptive response. So the brain is trying to adapt the the environment it's in. Now while that adaptive response may help in the moment, it could have long lasting effects such as heightened sensitivity to emotional stimuli later on in life, interpreting neutral

stimuli as negative and it could help explain the increased risk of psychiatric disorder down the line. So basically somebody who's being bullied, you can actually see if by examining their brains, you can actually see what effect it has had and therefore put some kind of something in place to help that person? That's the aim. The way I like to phrase it is we're understanding the what so we can later explore the why and the how. Because to date there hasn't been a huge amount of research on this topic. So we wanted to basically see are there associated brain changes? Now there's a lot of interesting questions that come from this. So pulling apart, are there certain age ranges where being exposed to bullying could be particularly negative? Is

there a certain severity negative? Is there a certain severity threshold? Are there types of bullying? Because we also found certain sex specific differences. And which one? Was it girls or boys? So what was interesting with this was that it actually may reflect the personal experience or the typical bullying experience by girls and boys. Girls were associated with increased volume in emotional processing and kind of emotional control. So that could also reflect the increased exposure

to psychological bullying often experienced with girls. And then boys with increased exposure had increased volumes in sensor motor and motor control reasons. So men typically will experience more physical bullying where women will increase more kind of psychological bullying. Michael Connerton. For many people around the world, the dance floor is a place to forget their problems. But for some Georgians, it might be the only place they can talk about them. The community behind Tbilisi's most important techno club, Bassiani, see themselves as an integral part of the country's political activism. But they say their freedom of speech is under increasing threat from Russian influences

as the country prepares to go to the polls for a parliamentary election next Saturday. Our reporter Frank McQueenie went to visit. Just entered Bassiani, underneath the city's largest sports arena, a disused public swimming pool around two thirds of the size of an Olympic pool. I'm told it fits up to 1,200 people. I'm facing the DJ booth and stacks of huge speakers on either side, two rows of four strobe lights hanging from metal chains. This place itself is very monumental and very brutalistic. The club staff, event curator and guest performers are rehearsing for tomorrow's party.

The lights and the music and everything stalks your mind from the very first second. I'm with Gheorghi Kikonishvili, activist, music journalist and founder of this event. I will never forget the first time I entered Bassiani. It felt like I was not in Georgia. The level of empathy and the solidarity which I saw, I just realized that I was watching a better version of Georgia on the dance floor. People of my generation, I'm 35 years old, we are the first generation who were born after the breakup of the Soviet Union. We just started to speak about everything which we didn't accept.

Politics or religion or sexuality or gay rights or women's rights. It was totally different to what was accepted. Georgia was and still is a very religious country. We felt quite lonely, but then we found each other. You are accepted, you are part of the club, you are member of the club, as long as you share values of freedom, liberty, equality, and solidarity.

Georgi says that Basiani has never shied away from airing its progressive political opinions, even though this directly challenges the conservative ideology prevalent in Georgian society and government. There has been always a lot of Polish cars. Also, there's some actions from the religious groups. They held a religious ritual in front of Bassiani, actually, because they say that these clubs are the gates to hell. Many of Georgia's cultural figures are convinced that the ministry is on a mission to force loyalty to the government.

The Minister of Culture argues their goal is to clear up alleged inefficiency, nepotism and favor came down to the streets of Tbilisi to protest the new transparency of foreign agents' law. In response to the legislation, the EU formally suspended Georgia's accession to the bloc and froze $32 million in financial aid for the country's defence ministry, arguing that the way the law was adopted did not meet European requirements for democratic lawmaking. The demonstrations went on for months and reached unprecedented numbers of 100,000 on several occasions. It's Georgia Independence Day, celebrations across the country, but it's not just about celebrating today. I'm at Tbilisi Concert Hall where many people are gathering ahead of today's march.

Students, professionals, young, old, waving Georgian and EU flags. This day marks more than 100 years since Georgia became independent from the Russian Empire. Unfortunately, it only lasted for three years. And then the Soviet Union came. Legally, we are independent from Russia now but still there is a treat of coming back to Russian influence. I think that the only hope which is still left is in the elections. Turnout is expected to be the highest in over a decade but the outcome is uncertain. The

Georgian Dream Party, currently in power, calls itself the Party of Peace, focused on avoiding an unwinnable war with Russia and reminding citizens of the traumatic invasion of 2008 while glossing over its closer ties to Moscow. The opposition says it's about Europe and freedom versus Russia and repression. That report by Frank McQueenie and you can hear more from Tbilisi and other music scenes around the world in his global dance floor series available on BBC Sounds. We often rely on smart speakers such as Siri and Alexa to tell us information. It's quicker and easier than using search engines on your computer but now the Amazon voice assistant Alexa has been accused in some cases of spouting lies, misinformation and fake news. Richard Hamilton has been finding out more.

When you ask Alexa questions, you normally get factually correct answers like these. Alexa, how tall is Abraham Lincoln? Abraham Lincoln's height is six feet and four inches. Alexa, where's Mount Rushmore? The Black Hills region of South Dakota. Alexa, when is Presidents Day? That's according to an Amazon advertisement. But the UK's independent fact-checking organisation, Full Fact, managed to extract some misleading headlines from the smart speaker,

including the fake news that the American boxer Mike Tyson had expressed his support for Palestine, that the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer had broken off diplomatic relations with Israel, and that Britain's National Health Service had a million more people on its waiting list than is actually the case. Full Fact was even more surprised to find that Alexa was attributing these answers to none other than Full Fact. Claire Milne is an editor at the organisation. For example, we asked whether the Northern Lights, which were recently seen worldwide,

whether they were a natural occurrence. And the answer that the Alexa gave was that they were not a natural occurrence, but in fact, generated by a research facility in Alaska. And that information is incorrect, as we say in the fact check that we wrote about that when we first saw that claim going viral online. But that's just one example of a few that we tested on the Alexa to see exactly what it was attributing to us incorrectly. It's unclear how many Alexa users have been getting similar misinformation, how long these answers have been invalid or to what extent it's getting other things wrong as well. Full Fact also found that Alexa was not the only culprit as the Google Assistant

answered this Northern Lights question incorrectly too. Claire Milne explains why she thinks these anomalies may have come up. It appears that what might have happened is that particularly when it's been using Full Fact, which many people using Alexa may see as a trusted source of information. We are fact checkers and it's also using the Amazon brand there as well to give it extra credibility. It appears that what's happened is that it's used the wrong part of our article, basically, and repeated that information as though that summarized the entire fact check. So all of our fact checks have two boxes at the top, which summarize the claim, which we're checking, and then our verdict.

And we think that the Alexa may have pulled the wrong part of that summary and given the exact opposite. Full Fact has asked Amazon to provide more details on why these things have gone wrong. The US tech giant has said it's working to fix these issues. Richard Hamilton, a smart speaker, if ever there was one. Now before we go, the UN's annual climate change conference starts on November 11th in Azerbaijan. Ahead of that, we're recording a special edition of the Global News podcast.

And we have a request. Here's my colleague Nick Miles, who's going to be quizzing two of the BBC's top climate change experts. Record-breaking hurricanes in America, droughts and floods in China and around the world the highest sea temperatures on record. Climate change has never been so clearly with us but sometimes it can be confusing to say the least about what the UN climate change conference is trying to achieve and what it delivers, which nations are leading the way and which are dragging their heels. We need your questions to put

to our experts. Just email us globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. Thanks. And we'd be even more grateful if you could make that message a voice note. You can also find us on X at Global News Pod. This edition was mixed by Martin Baker and the producer was Alfie Haberschen. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Rachel Wright. Until next time, goodbye. This week on Witness History, in 1970, Gary Gygax was fired. And that event, believe it or not, changed the gaming industry forever. He went on to create Dungeons & Dragons.

In the 50 years since its release, the tabletop role-play game has generated billions of dollars in sales and now boasts more than 50 million players worldwide. Search and subscribe to Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts.