Global News Podcast - Israeli security cabinet ratifies Gaza ceasefire deal

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Some Israeli ministers have threatened to resign over the agreement. Also: Imran Khan is sentenced to a further 14 years in prison. And a Russian court jails Alexei Navalny's three lawyers.

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I'm Alex Ritzen and at 14 HoursT on Friday 17th January these are our main stories. Israel's security cabinet has approved the Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal. The full cabinet is meeting to give its verdict which, if agreed, will likely see it come into force as planned on Sunday. Three of the lawyers for the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny have been convicted of extremism. Also in this podcast, we get a tour of a Roman bathhouse unseen since lava from Vesuvius covered the Italian city of Pompeii.

You can kind of start imagining the people in this room and the noises, the sort of splashing of water, people discussing how they're getting clean or the politics of the day. But first, the Israeli security cabinet has just ratified a ceasefire deal signed by negotiators from Israel and Hamas. As we record this podcast, the full cabinet is convening to approve the ceasefire deal. In Gaza itself, Israeli warplanes kept up intense strikes and Palestinian authorities said at least 86 people had been killed on the day after the truce was unveiled. The ceasefire is meant to begin on Sunday with the release of the first three Israeli

hostages. Daniel Lifshitz, whose grandfather remains in captivity, urged the Israeli government to accept the agreement. It is the agreement that it is. I mean, it could be better. Yeah, we wish everyone come back in one day and all the hostages are back here. But it's not the situation. It's Biden, you know, exposed it on the end of May and then they just worked on that proposal. So changing to another agreement will just take a month of administrative issues. So I'm really thankful for President-elect Trump and President Biden for their cooperation together to get this deal done.

Our Middle East regional editor, Sebastian Asher, joined me just after the security cabinet recommended approving the deal. The news we're just getting from the Israeli Prime Minister's office, but the security cabinet, which has been meeting for, I think, two or three hours now, has given its ratification, has approved the deal. Now in the next half hour, the full cabinet, the full government is due to meet,

and it too has to give its ratification order for Israel to fully endorse and approve the deal. What we were hearing earlier, again from the Prime Minister's office, was that with these two events happening, there had been speculation that potentially the full cabinet meeting wouldn't happen until after the Sabbath on Saturday evening, which would potentially affect the schedule of the first release of hostages. We heard from the Prime Minister's office that that now seems unlikely, that the schedule should go ahead. So, as you were saying, the first three hostages, Israeli hostages, should be released. On Sunday afternoon, as has been scheduled, now you speak about the momentum and can this

still be pushed off course? Yes, certainly there are very dissenting voices within the Israeli cabinet we've heard from, two far-right parties essentially saying that they would pull out of the government if they didn't get some commitment from Ms Netanyahu that after the first phase of the ceasefire Israel was not ready to go back and complete what they see as its task to eradicate Hamas. So that's one element right there. And there are many others. I mean, this is going to be releases on a weekly basis, three hostages every week. And depending on whether they're alive or

dead, 30 Palestinian prisoners released for each one of those hostages. So this is going to be a difficult kind of dance to make sure that it works out. It will be, I think, quite nervous each time this happens. Also, Palestinians will be wanting and be given the opportunity to move back to the areas they've had to move away from many displaced many times, but again, questions over what they will find there. will the absolute key question will the military side of what's been happening in Gaza will that go quiet for long enough both Israel and Hamas in this next 42 days will we see an end to the fighting between them? Middle East regional editor Sebastian Arshad the World Health Organization says it plans to put up a number of pre-fabricated hospitals

in Gaza within the next two months should the current ceasefire plan be implemented. An official said they hope there would be an acceleration of medical evacuations out of the territory. Gaza's healthcare infrastructure has been destroyed during the conflict, with Israel accusing Hamas of using hospitals as bases. Huda Matrabi, a young Palestinian woman living in Gaza, told us about her hopes and fears for the future. As a person living in Gaza, it's difficult to find the right words to describe really the complex feelings.

So after so many years of conflict, after 1,467 days, after 15 months of destruction. Seas fire can feel like a fragile moment where we can breathe without the constant sound of bombs, without the sounds of gunfire. So for many of us, it brings a sense of hope, a hope that perhaps returning to a normal life even if just for a while. So we displaced so many times, so many months, we don't have water, we don't have food, we don't have a place to be sheltered on.

So with this hope comes fear that this is fire could break down, the fear is not just of the immediate danger, but of the emotional toll, the constant uncertainty and the ever-present feeling that our lives are not truly our own. So can you imagine that our lives are not truly our own? We hope for stability, but we know how quickly things can change, how quickly everything can be taken away.

And my message is we want to live in peace. We want to live like other people in all the world. We deserve life. Huda Matrabi. In Pakistan, Imran Khan has been sentenced to a further 14 years in prison in relation to a land corruption case. His wife Bushra Bibi has also been sentenced. The former Prime Minister has been in jail since 2023 and has called all the charges against him politically motivated. Our Pakistan correspondent is Azadeh Mashiri. She told me more about the details of the case.

Well, they were both indicted nearly a year ago in February. That was shortly after the national elections here in Pakistan and the verdict had actually been postponed three times. But now we obviously do have a sentence. Now, prosecutors had alleged that hundreds of hectares worth of land were donated to the Al Qadir Trust, an organisation that had only two main trustees, Mr Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi. And the court has ruled in favour of the main allegation that this was a bribe.

In return, Imran Khan has been found to have assisted business tycoon Malik Riaz, who is a prominent figure here in Pakistan, of having some connection to money laundering. Now, just to sum up what Mr. Khan's lawyer says about this, he's insisted not a single penny of this alleged scheme went into the pockets of the accused and that this is about quote political revenge, but we obviously do now have the court's decision. Yeah he's been given the maximum sentence. He has now he's been given 14 years as you said that was the maximum sentence for those charges of corruption he's also been fined more than $5,000 and Bushra Bibi his wife was found to have assisted aided and abetted in those corruption

charges, which means she received seven years as her sentence and nearly $2,000 as a fine. He says the charges are politically motivated, are they? He has questioned the legitimacy of the case. He's questioned why his wife is involved. He's argued for some time now that this is about political revenge. Remember that he has been in jail since August 2023. Many of his sentences have been suspended and yet there are many charges against him. The backdrop to all of this is that there are ongoing talks between Mr. Khan's PTI party and the government and one of the key demands that his party are making is his release.

The release of what they, those that they're calling political prisoners. But of course given the news today, if Mr. Khan was hoping for any sort of step towards an early release, it's instead another difficult day in custody and a setback for Imran Khan. Azadeh Mashiri in Pakistan. Beware the rise of the tech oligarchs and their influence. That was perhaps the most eye-catching message of President Biden's farewell address earlier this week.

But the involvement of the ultra-rich in politics is nothing new. America's golden age was shaped by the likes of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and JP Morgan over a century ago. David Nasser specialises in the cultural, social and business history of the early 20th century. Darshini David asked him if the tech barons have replaced the bankers and industrialists given their wealth and proximity to power. There's so many similarities and there are so many differences that stand out. You know, the generation that we call the robber barons or the gilded age or the Wall Street tycoons, at the end of the 19th century, the early 20th century, they went to Washington to defend themselves because they didn't want Washington interfering with them.

The railroaders didn't want any congressional committees to set rates for them or set standards for safety. The manufacturers, the steel manufacturers, like Andrew Carnegie, wanted to keep up their high tariffs so that American steel could absolutely destroy British steel and French steel and German steel. And then from the 1880s through to the turn of the century and a little bit afterwards, there was a coalition of Americans who wanted some change in the way business was run. There were working class parties, socialists, anarchists, populists, progressives, greenbackers, grangers, the Knights of Labor. I can go on and on. They posed a clear and distinct danger to

the railroad tycoons, to the steel manufacturers, to the Wall Street bankers. And how do you deal with these people? Because these people had to vote and they were organized. How do you deal with them? You go to Washington, you buy your way in and it was easy to buy their way in because senators until 1913 were elected by state legislators. So it's the equivalent of what we'd call lobbying today and when you get a taste of that, then you start getting ambitions about your role in government. The parallels, when we look at Elon Musk, he's got a grand title, but is he set to be ultimately disappointed when it comes to his sphere of influence over government policy?

I think he will be a little bit disappointed because he wants the sky, he wants the moon, he wants Mars, and he's not going to get it all. He also wants to be recognised not only as a genius, not only as the richest man in the world, but as the most powerful man in the world, as we're seeing. And that's not going to happen. Trump isn't going to let that happen. Because what does history tell us about the experiences of those Gilded Age tycoons and the reality? Yeah, history tells us that they get half a loaf. They don't get the full loaf. Nonetheless,

what's going on now is that the Silicon Valley moguls, they want it all. They want two distinct things. They want government to lay off them. Musk does not want anybody interfering with his rocket ships or with his Tesla driverless robot taxis. Facebook doesn't want anybody interfering with them. But at the same time, they want huge government grants. So they want government to serve as a bank, but not as a jailer, not as a regulator. And they're going to get pretty much what they want, I believe.

In the meantime, though, we know that Elon Musk has this grand ambition to be at the centre of policy making. Even if he's disappointed, when we look at him, we've got Mark Zuckerberg, they have their own sphere of influence. They have these platforms, social media. Does that set them apart from what came before in terms of their ability to hold governments to account? I think so, but more than that, money plays a much larger role in political events now than it did 50 years ago or 100 years ago. And they've got the money and there's no oversight over how they spend that money. And they have threatened. Musk has made it very clear. You oppose me or you oppose my president and I'm going to get you defeated in your next election. Carnegie didn't do that. Rockefeller didn't do that. Morgan didn't do that. They stayed in the background. They stayed quiet. And the politicians they supported

didn't want the world to know what the connection was between big business, big corporations and politics. Historian David Nassar. Coming up in this podcast, do you have a favourite child? So you study siblings, so who is the favourite child? Is it me? Is it you? Is it your sister? Well, yeah, turns out it is my sister. The longtime critic of the Russian President Vladimir Putin, Alexei Navalny, died suddenly in an Arctic penal colony in February last year after being convicted of extremism. Now, three of his lawyers have been found guilty in a Russian court of belonging to an extremist group. They've been sentenced to between three and a half and five and a half years in jail. I heard more from our Russia editor Steve Rosenberg who

was in the court in the town of Petushki outside Moscow. These three lawyers, Vadim Kobtsev, Igor Sergunyan and Alexey Liptsev, they went on trial last September on extremism charges, a trial that was held behind closed doors. The media were let in today for the verdict. They'd been accused of using their status as lawyers and their access to the late opposition leader in prison to relay messages from him to his associates and to the outside world, allowing Alexei and the Violently allegedly to engage in subversive activity while he was behind bars. As one of the lawyers, Vadim Kobzev, summed it up a few days ago when he

addressed the judge, we are on trial for passing on the violently's thoughts to other people, summed up in one sentence really. So today the verdict guilty, said the judge, and the three lawyers were given between three and a half and five and a half years in prison. Despite the pressure currently on Russian civil society, some of their supporters were in the courtroom today. Once the verdict and the sentence had been read out, these people applauded the three men who were in a sort of metal cage as they heard the verdict. Alexey Navaly's organisation, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, had been declared itself extremist back in 2021. And when he died last year, Mr Navaly himself had been serving a 19-year prison sentence

on extremism charges, charges widely viewed as politically motivated. When opposition figures end up in court it's going to be pretty hard in future to get anyone to represent them isn't it? Anyone meaningful? Yes I mean when you have three defence lawyers actually in the dock that sends quite a strong message doesn't it? That in today's Russia it's not only people who are fierce critics of the authorities who potentially can be put in jail but also people who are ready to stand up and defend them. When he was alive Mr. Navalny was clearly the Kremlin's fiercest

critic, he was the most prominent opposition leader in Russia. Nearly a year after his death it feels as if the Russian authorities continue to view Mr. Navalny, or at least his memory, as some kind of threat. According to his widow, Yulia, Russia's financial watchdog recently rejected a request to remove her late husband from its list of terrorists and extremists, and she herself has been added to the extremist and terrorist list in Russia, and a warrant issued for her arrest, and individuals connected in some way who were connected to Mr. Navaini have been arrested and put on trial.

Not only the three lawyers that I saw today in court, another two of Mr. Navaini's lawyers by the way were also charged but they fled the country. Also some of Mr. Navaini's former associates have come under pressure, and Russian journalists who had reported on his trial have also been arrested and put in the dock. So a lot of pressure being brought upon people who were in some way connected to the late Russian opposition leader. Steve Rosenberg. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has surged to a new record. According to scientists who monitor the gas that's heating Earth, the concentration of

CO2 is up 50% on pre-industrial levels, which will accelerate global warming and climate change. Rob Jackson is a professor of Earth system science and chairs the Global Carbon Project. The most troubling thing about the increase this year is that it's not caused primarily by a surge in fossil fuel emissions. The El Nino last year meant thousands of additional fires in the Amazon, record droughts in the Amazon and elsewhere. Plants are not growing as fast and we're seeing forest death in places. So the earth is starting to rebel, if you will, and that's deeply troubling.

A study by the British Met Office says that makes it almost impossible to keep climate change within the target of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Our climate editor is Justin Rowlatt. We measure the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in parts per million. Parts per million molecules that is. And the figures that we've got, these shocking figures that show CO2 levels increasing more quickly than ever before, show it's up by nearly 3.6 parts per million to 4.26 parts per million. Now

that is 50% higher than pre-industrial levels, so before humanity started pumping huge volumes of fossil fuels into the atmosphere. Just to set that in context, records from ICICOR show CO2 levels at the highest for at least 2 million years, so we're way out of trend. But people often say, how can such a tiny proportion of gas in the atmosphere make a difference to global temperatures? Parts per million. Well, 400 parts per million is about the same proportion as the caffeine in your coffee.

Now if I increase the amount of caffeine in your coffee by half as much again, be honest, you probably would notice, wouldn't you, Alec? I fear so. And this is really bad news in terms of what it's going to do to the climate going forward, isn't you, Alec? I fear so, and this is really bad news in terms of what it's going to do to the climate going forward, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Now the rise in CO2 varies year to year. Natural kind of fluctuations, it's known as the Keeling curve, a sort of zigzag, a saw-shaped curve that was described by a scientist in the US, varies year to year depending

obviously how much CO2 is produced naturally in the world but also the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the activities of humanity as well as how much the natural world itself absorbs. There's a kind of balance between emissions and the absorption of natural, we call them carbon sinks. We know emissions from fossil fuels were at record highs last year. And then a combination of climate change, so warming temperatures and the El Nino weather pattern, which is a kind of recurring weather pattern which causes the tropical Pacific to warm and adds a kind of extra blast of heat to the atmosphere.

Those two effects combined meant less carbon dioxide, CO2, was taken up by those natural carbon sinks. So we're talking about less additional plant growth, for example, or less CO2 being dissolved in the ocean. So that's why we're seeing this record rise. So it is very worrying if we go through that. And the rate of increase in CO2 means we are going to punch through that boundary unless there's a really dramatic reduction in CO2 emissions. So really worrying data coming through from these studies. BBC's climate editor, Justin Rowlert. An extraordinary discovery has been made in the latest excavations in the Roman city of

Pompeii, which was buried beneath volcanic rock and ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted 2000 years ago. Archaeologists have unearthed a beautifully preserved bathhouse inside a luxurious private residence. The private spa-like complex is the first to be found in 100 years and is one of the largest ever discovered in the city. Our science editor Rebecca Morell was given exclusive access to the site and she was shown around by Pompeii archaeologist Dr. Sophie Hay. We're starting the tour in the hot room, the calidarium. It's a sort of relatively

large room considering it's a private residence. So there's a basin in front of us. It would be filled with water, they would dip in and get clean. You've got what would have had marble floor, marble on the walls, a beautiful niche as well with potentially a little hole in to let light in. And you can kind of start imagining the people in this room and the noises, the sort of splashing of water, people discussing, you know, how they're getting clean or the politics of the day. It's very, very evocative of that era. So you start with the hot room, so you get warm, and then we're going to move through

to quite a different space. This is the warm room. Yes, and underneath our feet there's a whole other level because we've got hot air coming from the furnace room. So this is a suspended floor and underneath us is what is called a hypercorp system. So it's on little pillars and so hot air would be underneath us. So it would feel a bit like a sauna essentially.

This is probably where you would, you know, put oil on your skin and have your slaves sort of scrape it off with a strigil. And we're just going to keep on moving through because it's a sequence of rooms going through a very narrow doorway here. So this would be the changing room essentially and around us we have these huge red panels of wall plaster but in them you can see these little holes and they would be the fixtures for a little shelf so you can sit down and take your sandals off and then go in for the bath experience. The floor is very beautiful as well, little mosaics and larger, is it marble?

It is, all different marbles from all around the Roman Empire so you can really see the Roman Empire on the floor here. And Sophie, we're going to cross this pretty threshold into another room, which is absolutely spectacular. Wow. It is. It's a really magical space. This is basically the frigidarium of the bath complex. So it's like a plunge pool almost. Exactly that. Deep enough to plunge into, but there's also a little ledge so that the guests

who are invited by the owner could come and sit and on a hot day dangle their legs in the cold water and cool off. Bath houses in Pompeii in a private residence are really rare, we only know of a handful and so for one to be on this scale must mean the owner is super rich. This is one of the very top of the elite. He had power, he had money and wanted to show it off to clients and impress people. Yeah, power, money and a private bathhouse. Indeed. Dr Sophie Hay. And if you want to see some pictures from Rebecca Morel's exclusive tour of that bathhouse, they're on the BBC News website.

Now, do you have siblings? And if so, have you ever felt that one of you gets treated better than all the rest? Well, a new study has found that while parents may claim to love their children equally, they often do have favourites. Professor Alex Jensen from Brigham Young University in Utah led the study and he told Rachel Wright who is most likely to be the favourite. There are a few different categories here. First we found that daughters tend to be favoured, at least parents see it that way, and then conscientious children, some meaning children are more responsible, as well as children who are more agreeable and those are your children who are more compliant. The gender part and the kind of

responsibility part, those really are actually separate, right? It's girls and then separately it's those who are compliant and responsible. What about the part of your research that found that extroverts weren't necessarily rewarded, which you would be surprised at in America, which, you know, people who are extroverts generally tend to get on Tallymore, for example. Exactly. That did surprise me too, right? As you alluded to, American culture really prioritizes and rewards being extroverted and outgoing. But within families that didn't matter. And some of that might be that not every parent

is extroverted themselves. So maybe introverted parents don't prefer their extroverted kids. And unfortunately, we didn't have the parents' own personalities too, which would be a really important piece of that puzzle. And what about the children that were not favored? What happens to them? Yeah, good question. So this particular study didn't look at that, but I've done a lot of work in that area. And the children who get that short end of the stick, the less favored treatment, they tend to be, they tend to have worse mental health, they get in more trouble at home and at school, they tend to report having worse family relationships. As teenagers,

they're more likely to have issues with substance abuse and those types of things. I'm sure you didn't study this, but are parents not aware that their behavior towards different children in a different way is going to affect them? I think parents are aware of their behavior towards different children in a different way is going to affect them? I think parents are aware of that. Part of the challenge though is that kids in every family are different. So you do have to parent them differently. But it's maybe that as parents, we don't always know when that crosses the line from being appropriate and okay to when it becomes harmful.

I hope that parents would take this and be self-reflective and ask themselves, right, where am I treating my kids differently? And do I tend, right, to favor the daughters or people in other situations and be more thoughtful about their parenting. Why did you conduct this research? Was it something in your own family that has been sort of bugging you or interested you for, you know, and that and you wanted to find out why? You know, to some degree. I'm the youngest of six kids and so that has driven me to be interested in sibling dynamics and all

those processes. But for this question in particular, it's one of those that everybody asks me. They're like, so you study siblings, so who is the favourite child? Is it me? Is it you? Is it your sister? Well, it turns out it is my sister. Professor Alex Jensen. 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.bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at Global News Pod. This edition was mixed by Chris Kousaris and the producers were Tracy Gordon and Ed Horton. I'm Alex Ritzen, until next time, goodbye. There's a divide in American politics between those who think democracy is in peril and those who think it's already been subverted, hollowed out from the inside. As President Trump returns to the White House,

we go through the looking glass into a world where nothing is as it seems. The coming storm from BBC Radio 4, listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts. There's a divide in American politics between those who think democracy is in peril and those who think it's already been subverted, hollowed out from the inside. As President Trump returns to the White House, we go through the looking glass into a world where nothing is as it seems.

The coming storm from BBC Radio 4. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.