Global News Podcast - Israeli air strikes in Lebanon spread to Beirut

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Officials say two days of attacks have created carnage across the country. Also: US IT firm CrowdStrike apologises for the world's worst computer glitch, and the country with a growing number of mountain gorillas.

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. Life and death were two very realistic co-existing possibilities in my life. I didn't even think I'd make it to like my 16th birthday, to be honest. I grew up being scared of who I was. Any one of us at any time can be affected by mental health and addictions. Just taking that first step makes a big difference.

It's the hardest step. But CAMH was there from the beginning. Everyone deserves better mental health care. To hear more stories of recovery, visit camh.ca. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free.

Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Paul Moss, and in the early hours of Wednesday, 25th of September, these are our main stories. Lebanon's health minister says two days of Israeli airstrikes have created carnage across the country. The United Nations meets in New York with the Middle East top of the agenda. And CrowdStrike, the company responsible for the world's worst

computer glitch, is held to account. Also in this podcast, the new sound being used to start races in Ukraine. When airstrikes hit southern Lebanon on Monday, many people fled northwards, some of them heading to the capital, Beirut. But Tuesday saw Beirut also hit by deadly airstrikes. Six people were killed, and among them, according to the Israelis, was a senior Hezbollah commander, Ibrahim Mohamed Koubesi. He was in charge of the group's missile and rocket force, but whether or not he was successfully targeted, the Lebanese MP Ibrahim Nemne said civilians were directly in the firing line. We cannot accept the kind of attacks that are taking place on our nation. We have tens of

thousands of Lebanese people being displaced right now. They have nowhere to go. And for the Israelis, they seem like they are just collateral damage. If they see a target, they just go out and they attack. It's unimaginable the amount of damage and the repercussions that is having on our people and on our economy and as a whole, as a nation. Israel says it warns civilians to leave areas it plans

to attack, sending messages to people's mobile phones. Of course, for obvious reasons, some Lebanese are now rather wary of using any kind of electronic communications equipment. And as these people explained, the messages cause considerable confusion anyway. We all receive messages at home, but from different numbers and names. The message said that we had to flee our neighbourhood because it was close to the sites that would be hit and close to weapon depots as well. Afterwards the whole of southern Lebanon began to be hit. More than a hundred towns were rocked by blasts. It was a massacre. They sent us a message threatening us to leave our land, our villages and our homes.

But we will not leave the land, the houses, the family or the villages, even if we suffer a lot of losses. The gas stations have been traffic jammed as the service pressures on them increased. People are afraid that this war will last and their displacement will last longer. They do not know where they will go then. We are tired and afraid because Israel does not differentiate between us and anyone else. It does not differentiate between civilians and non-civilians. Israel, of course, continues to deny this. As with its assault on Gaza, claiming it tries to avoid civilian deaths. And in any case,

according to Moshe Turpaz, an Israeli member of parliament, his country has a right to respond to the aerial attacks emanating from Lebanon. There's a hundred percent consensus in Israel that Israel has to fight back Hezbollah, which has been shooting at Israel missiles from the 7th of October. When we are shot on an everyday basis, there's no question about the need to react and to overcome the missiles that are shot at Israel. Well, it seems there were more airstrikes on Lebanon later on Tuesday. Our correspondent in Beirut, Anna Foster, told me what she witnessed. The sounds here in Beirut tonight are really distinctive.

I've been hearing the sound of conflict for the last few hours, mainly in the sound of drones. And actually, even as I'm looking up in the night sky, you can see these little points of light, but you can hear that very, very distinctive sound of a drone. It's something that I'm more used to hearing actually in southern Israel, being right next to the border with Gaza, because that is a sound that they've had there for months now.

And hearing them in the Lebanese capital feels so unusual at the moment. It really shows you the level of escalation that we're at now. In that situation, it might sound odd to speak of restraint, but we know that Hezbollah has these much longer range missiles that they haven't been firing. Presumably, that's the fear at the moment that they will let these off and attack Israel with them. Well, these are questions that are being asked constantly. You just, you know, people at home, people in the street. And yes, exactly.

Wondering why. Now, Israel will say that they have worked very hard in the last few days to degrade Hezbollah's capability. They say that all of these airstrikes that they're carrying out in the Bekaa Valley, in the south of Lebanon, they say they've been destroying these weapons stores. And Hezbollah is quite clearly in a more difficult position than it perhaps expected to be if it does use some of those long-range weapons.

But again, we're just in a situation that so many conversations had, so many theories, but yet you still feel that we will wake up tomorrow morning and nobody quite knows what the next step is going to be. Hezbollah draws most of its support from Lebanon's Shia population. And I'm wondering what other communities think of what they're doing. Are they sowing solidarity with Hezbollah for attacking Israel or are they angry at the movement because it's bringing down all this destruction on Lebanon? That is an interesting question.

Actually, it gets to the heart of one of the key issues in Lebanese society, which, of course, is these sectarian splits, which you see often now in the politics of Lebanon, which was created after the civil war, where you have these different political parties, you have different positions in the government that are held by Shias, by Sunnis, by Maronite Christians. And normally those different groups, they struggle to agree. But one thing that does unite people is their hatred. It's a strong word, but their hatred of Israel. And so that is why I think you will see more popular support for Hezbollah in this moment than you would do for anything else,

because the history between Lebanon and Israel, it runs deep, it is bitter, and it is difficult. And people will support anything that they see defends them against Israel. Anna Foster in Beirut. It's an odd coincidence of timing that just as a full-scale regional war seems to be getting ever more likely in the Middle East, a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly was being held in New York, one obviously scheduled long in advance, but made perhaps more necessary than ever. The situation in Lebanon featured high in the speeches.

The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, warned that Lebanon was on the brink. Joe Biden was addressing the Assembly for the last time as US President and said that further escalation was in no one's interest, though he made clear who he thought was to blame. Hezbollah, unprovoked, joined the October 7 attack, launching rockets into Israel. Almost a year later, too many on each side of the Israeli-Lebanon border remained displaced. Full-scale war is not in anyone's interest. Even if the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible. Joe Biden has, of course, talked about de-escalating the conflict in Gaza,

and his administration came up with several peace plans, only to see them rejected by Israel. Critics said he didn't push Israel hard enough, continuing to supply it with military aid, even as he urged restraint. So I asked our correspondent at the UN, Neda Tawfiq, if Mr Biden had said anything on Tuesday about Lebanon that gave people hope. Delegates here were listening to Joe Biden's speech for any signs of that, or perhaps just new ideas to prevent an all-out war engulfing the Middle East. But Joe Biden really didn't kind of offer anything different in his speech to the General Assembly, very much still expressing commitment to Israel as the U.S.'s ally, and instead kind of having this tone of optimism, this sense that a diplomatic solution

is still possible, he says. But I would just have to note that there has been a very different tone from others who have spoken. You mentioned there the UN Secretary General warning that the world can't afford for Lebanon to become another Gaza. But we also heard from Turkey's president, for example, President Erdogan, saying that the values of the UN system and the Western world were dying in Gaza and calling for an alliance of humanity to stop Israel and claiming that the UN is just dysfunctional and needs to be reformed. Also, the King of Jordan, King Abdullah, also saying it's no surprise

that those in and outside of the UN feel like its ideals are crumbling. Despite that tone of optimism from President Biden, very much real frustration being expressed by other members here. I was going to ask you if the UN can really achieve much with Lebanon. It sounds like either people there don't think the UN is up to this task. Well, I think there's a realization that the UN is only as strong as its members. And what we have seen over nearly a year is just how paralyzed the UN Security Council can be on Gaza and in the Middle East, because again, the United States holds a veto-wielding

power, regardless of the resolutions that have gone through the Security Council, in fact, with the support of the US. We haven't seen that being implemented on the ground by Israel or Hamas. So when there is this kind of failure to have respect for UN Security Council resolutions, for decisions coming out of the International Court of Justice, there has been comments by UN officials here that there has to be a reforming of the actual UN system so it's not tied to just the permanent five members of the Security Council. Neda Tafik in New York. How was July 19th for you? You may remember that as the day that your train or bus wasn't running or that you couldn't take any money out of the bank. It was the day a

company most of us had never heard of made a mistake with a software update. This then disabled vast numbers of computers around the world which used the Windows operating system. CrowdStrike was the company concerned, and Tuesday saw one of its senior executives, Adam Myers, hauled before a US congressional committee. He began with an apology. We let our customers down. CrowdStrike was in the process of updating our customers on a new threat, or at least a content configuration update for the Windows sensor that did not work as expected. This resulted in Microsoft system crashes for a number of our users. On behalf of everyone at CrowdStrike, I want to apologize. We're deeply sorry, and we are determined to prevent this from ever happening again.

Sorry was, of course, not the only thing the committee wanted to hear, but also some kind of explanation. I asked our tech correspondent, Lily Jamali, who's in Washington, what we learned. There was plenty of tech speak there. In fact, the company had initially been asked to send its CEO. It did not. It actually sent a different executive who is very high level in the technologist realm and ended up debriefing with members of Congress, has been doing so for a couple of weeks now. So they sent him instead. Adam Myers is his name. And a couple of lawmakers had questions about artificial intelligence. That came up a few times, whether

that played a role here. Today, we learned that it did not, that this was a standard update, the likes of which get sent out 10 to 12 times a day, so not AI. But there were a lot of things that we already knew that were sort of discussed again, including the fact that the issue that caused that July 19th outage is now incapable of recurring, that particular one. Doesn't mean something else might not bring systems down. And we also heard again about the fact that this was not a cyber attack, which was very early on something people were wondering about on that day. This was an internal error, which, again, they say with confidence will not recur. I think what astonished so many of us that day was to find out that, as I said, a small company you've never heard of had

the power to bring down all these computer systems. And I guess what we want to know is, are there other companies like that out there? I mean, it may well be that this one's got its affairs in order, but others don't. Yeah, I mean, you're talking about the known unknown there. And I think that's absolutely a concern. One of the issues that I found very interesting that was raised today, this was from Congressman Eric Swalwell, who is a Democrat from California, was the issue of market share. So 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies were affected by this outage. And Swalwell talked about how with market share like that, this company has to ensure that they secure against this type of risk. I mean, you're never going to get it 100 percent right. You're never going to completely eliminate risks, but you need to come a lot closer than what we saw on that particular day. And what we heard from Swalwell was a plea for cooperation. He said that companies in this

very sensitive cybersecurity space, which can bring entire companies down, bring entire sectors down, these cybersecurity companies really need to work together. Even though they are competitors, you know, Microsoft and CrowdStrike are competing. But in this case, they've actually showed a lot of cooperation to try to strengthen the system so that something like this doesn't happen again. Lily Jamali. The Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most dangerous places on earth. Dozens of armed groups rampaging through the region. Conflict has been going on for decades.

But despite all this, there is some rare good news from there. Conservationists say they've seen an increase in the mountain gorilla population in the Virunga National Park. The newsroom's Richard Hamilton has actually been to Virunga and first told me what it was like. It's staggeringly beautiful. I went there in the early 1990s, before the Rwandan genocide and before all this armed conflict kicked off. It's set amongst the foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains, which are also called the Mountains of the Moon.

It's very lush, it's volcanic. There's something like 3,000 different species of plants and, of course, the famous mountain gorillas. And within about an hour, the park rangers pointed out a silverback and a female gorilla, and there was a rustle in the leaves and this sort of ball of fluff landed at our feet and it was a baby gorilla playing around our legs.

So we got really close to them and it was so moving to see these magnificent creatures in the wild in their own natural habitat. It's something I'll never forget. We're used to hearing about wild animals, including gorillas, being killed maybe by poachers. Why is the gorilla population in this park apparently increased? I think that's a bit of a conundrum and we don't really know and it may be a glitch because as you say it's so dangerous there and there's armed groups and there's been poaching but one of the things that the park rangers have trained up about a hundred local people to act as community trackers

and they have been going into the park every day and checking on the welfare of the gorillas. I think that's made a difference. Just in this year alone, there have been 10 baby gorillas born and the population has now increased from a low point of about 350 in the 1980s to over a thousand individual mountain gorillas and a third of them are in the Virunga National Park. At the same time you do have not only poachers but different armed factions fighting, you have the threat of disease, they still face huge challenges don't they they, keeping these guerrillas alive?

That's right. And for the last 30 years, there's been armed conflict. There have been Hutu militia that came from Rwanda. There's the M23 that's supposed to be backed by Rwanda. Over 2 million people have been displaced in North Kivu. Many rangers have been killed. So it's so dangerous for people to even do their jobs to look after the gorillas. And of course, tourism, which used to bring in a lot of money,

that's out of the question at the moment because there's too much fighting over the resources. And there are traps that poachers set for other animals like antelopes and pigs, and then baby gorillas who are inquisitive get caught in those snare traps as well. So there's still a very precarious existence for these wonderful creatures. Richard Hamilton.

Still to come. What lunch have you made? It's a tomato sandwich. Just a tomato sandwich? It's a tomato sandwich. The British sandwich maker who became a surprise hero in China. Life and death were two very realistic coexisting possibilities in my life. I didn't even think I'd make it to like my 16th birthday, to be honest.

I grew up being scared of who I was. Any one of us at any time can be affected by mental health and addictions. Just taking that first step makes a big difference. It's the hardest step. But CAMH was there from the beginning. Everyone deserves better mental health care. To hear more stories of recovery, visit camh.ca. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts.

But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. The good news for American would-be slimmers is that the weight loss drugs, Ozempic and Wegovi, do seem to work. The bad news, apparently, is that Americans are paying more than anyone else to shed those all-important kilos. A month's supply of the drug can cost over

$1,000, despite costing less than $100 in countries like Germany or the UK. That was the issue under examination at a US Senate hearing on Tuesday, led by Bernie Sanders. The committee grilled Lars Jürgensen, CEO of the drug company Novo Nordisk, which makes us Empik and Wegovy. Mr Sanders lost no time in cutting to the chase. Bottom line is you are charging the American people substantially more for the same exact drug than you are charging people in other substantially more for the same exact drug than you are charging people in other countries. And my question is, why? Lars Jørgensen was ready with an answer. The US, he said, had a complex health system,

which was to blame for the high prices. He defended his company and its record of tackling obesity around the world. For decades, our public discourse about obesity, and to some extent two diabetes, was based on misinformation and blame. These conditions were treated as a personal choice, a failure of willpower. No one was talking about how these are chronic diseases and treatable diseases. With the discovery of semaglutide and the development of Osympic and Regovi, our collective understanding of these diseases fundamentally changed. While watching the hearing was Dr. Melissa Barber, a researcher at Yale University who studies pharmaceutical markets.

What did she make of Novo's argument? At the end of the day, Novo Nordisk sets the price, right? It's been a useful excuse because we do have a very, very complicated payment system, but it's been very much an excuse. Right now, the U.S. government, so the federal health programs we have, are on track to spend more on Wegovino Zempic than they spend on all of the prescription drugs put together. That's about 170 billion. If you look at the private market, it's the same number. About 400 billion is projected to be spent if only half of the adults who are eligible for these drugs take them. Novo Nordisk doesn't have the production capacity to serve demand in the U.S. or globally. And this, of course, affects patients. It also has downstream effects on not just people that are using GLP-1s, but people that are using insulin. GLP-1s refer to a class of drugs, of which Ozempic and Wigoli are a part of. So Novo has pulled out of making human insulin pens

and insulin denomere. And why are they pulling out? Well, when you have limited manufacturing capacity, you're going to prioritize the most profitable drugs. So GLP-1s have a profit margin of about 30,000%. Insulins have a very paltry profit margin of just 2,000%. I think it's important to note that these drugs are not available at any price in low and middle income countries. Novo Nordisk is not selling them. They're not available. So if you're saying, oh, you know, you're charging a lot in the U.S., you can afford to be able to make these drugs accessible elsewhere. Not only are they not selling them, they're also cutting back on insulin.

So about a few months ago, Novo Nordisk stopped supplying the South African public health system with insulin. Very abruptly, hugely catastrophic for the health system, really dangerous for patients to have to transition really quickly, not necessarily have supply. This is not about taking care of the global South. This is very much just making as much profit as possible. Dr Melissa Barber. After years of campaigning by LGBTQ activists in Thailand, it's finally happened. The country has become the first in Southeast Asia to legalise same-sex marriage. It's the third in Asia overall, following Nepal and Taiwan. A new bill, which also includes adoption and inheritance rights, was signed

into law by the country's king. Klitsia Sala has this report. It was the last hurdle in a legislative process that took several months. Thailand's parliament passed the same-sex marriage bill in June and now King Mahavajira Lomkorn has given it royal approval. It marks the culmination of long years of campaigning, often overshadowed by the country's recent history of political outstings and mass street protests. But Thailand is also known for its vibrant LGBT community and culture of tolerance, with strong public support for equal marriage. The new law will come into effect early next year, with the first same-sex marriages expected in January.

In the past 40 years, the Amazon rainforest has lost an area about the size of Germany and France combined to deforestation. That's according to a new report by RIASG, a campaign group of science researchers. They found the rainforest was replaced by pasture and soya bean fields for animals to graze in, or else it was dug up for gold mining. Meanwhile, the region has also suffered particular devastation this year from wildfires, several of which are currently ravaging the forests. Michael Sweet is Professor of Molecular Ecology at the University of Derby in the English Midlands. He warns that the rate of destruction is still increasing.

Previously, people have been talking about deforestation of around 17%. So it's not unsurprising, this value. But it's the first time that it's been cataloged in such a reliable method. So that's one fifth of the entire Amazon, which is now gone. But it gets even worse than that, because unfortunately, more and more hectares are at threat. So it's thought to be about 38 percent of the forests as well, on top of of that are actually in a degraded state it's mostly deforestation associated with agriculture for the most part um but then it's also uh entwined and linked uh with aspects of climate change which again are anthropogenically driven so human

derived climate change um and that's causing the the forests to to dry out a lot more, so they're witnessing less rain. And so the Amazon, on top of losing the trees, the important tree aspect, and obviously the biodiversity which goes with that, the rivers are starting to dry out as well. And obviously the Amazon is famous for its river, as well as being the lungs of our planet. And we're now starting to see devastating effects with this recently 120 of the endangered river dolphins being found dead as the river subsides. Professor Michael Sweet. It was in 1904 that a pistol was first fired to start an Olympic race. Since then, that sound of a gunshot's been used at track events around the world. But of course, gunshots have other associations for some people. There are countless stories of war veterans having very serious

reactions to the sound of a gun being fired. And some of those veterans might well be involved in sporting competition. That's particularly likely in Ukraine, where so many men of fighting age have been sent to the front. For that reason, at the Kiev Marathon last weekend, there was an alternative sound used to tell the runners when to start. Well, that sound was created by Gus Coven, a sound designer from Los Angeles. He told James Kumarasamy what motivated him to make it. I do have a daughter who has special needs and she has sensitivities to loud sounds, as do a lot of her friends. So when I was told about this sound, I immediately

jumped at it because it has so much meaning for me. So how did you approach this? Well, we didn't start with a blank slate. There were a series of requirements. So the sound needed to be clear. It needed to do a lot of the things that a pistol shot would do, but without traumatizing people. In this marathon in particular, you have a lot of war veterans. They had people in wheelchairs and people who were neurodiverse. And so it needed to be an exciting sound, but it needed to also have the components that one would need to have at the beginning of a race, right? Where you have a really loud burst that everybody can hear and that it's crystal clear. And how did you test out different versions to work out whether people could hear it, whether it had the effect of actually getting them to start running?

So we ended up making probably close to 50 sounds. And then we narrowed those sounds down to four or five sounds that were then tested at a university in Kiev on people who were war veterans, some of whom were suffering from PTSD. And the sound that was eventually selected was the sound that met all the criteria, but also caused the least amount of trauma. And beyond countries like Ukraine, where, as you say, people are traumatized by war, are there any other places where you think this could replace the old gunshot? I hope so. I mean, I'm a runner myself. And, you know, you're there on the starting line, right? You've taken your gels, you've drunk your electrolytes, you're ready to go. And then there's this sound that all of a sudden stresses you out as you're about to start. I feel like there's room, there's a place for

replacing the pistol sound everywhere. I mean, certainly here in the US, we have a lot of gun violence. So I think it's not just war, it's everywhere. Gus Coven. There's been an outpouring of sadness on social media in China after the death of a British man who'd become an unexpected online sensation. Keith Brown went viral after his Chinese wife started filming him making what many consider to be rather unexciting sandwiches. Our China correspondent Stephen McDonnell reports from Beijing. That's Keith Brown, or Old Dry Keith, as he became affectionately known in China

by more than a million followers who took pity on him for what they thought was the hilariously bland nature of his sandwiches. His Chinese wife, Jung, started filming him making lunch for a bit of fun and posting the videos on China's version of TikTok, Douyin. As it turned out, viewers became fascinated not only by Keith's basic diet, but also his gentle accepting philosophy on life. Sadly, though, they were told this week that old dry Keith had died from bone cancer. He wasn't able to travel to China recently as he'd planned. But he leaves behind an army of friends here who never had a chance to meet him. Stephen McDonald.

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 Global News Pod. This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll and the producer was Alfie Habershon. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Paul Moss. Until next time, goodbye. Life and death were two very realistic coexisting possibilities in my life. I didn't even think I'd make it to like my 16th birthday, to be honest.

I grew up being scared of who I was. Any one of us at any time can be affected by mental health and addictions. Just taking that first step makes a big difference. It's the hardest step. But CAMH was there from the beginning. Everyone deserves better mental health care. To hear more stories of recovery, visit camh.ca. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free.

Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts.