Global News Podcast - Meta agrees $18bn social media settlement

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

Meta has agreed to pay $18bn to a group of US states that accused Facebook and Instagram of harming children, bringing a high-profile trial in California to an early end. The company will also introdu...ce new measures aimed at protecting young users, but has admitted no wrongdoing. Also: chip giant Nvidia beats expectations again as demand for its semiconductors continues to surge. Nearly 200 people are reported dead - and hundreds more are missing - after devastating flash floods and mudslides hit Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet. BBC analysis shows attacks by armed bandit groups in northwest Nigeria have risen sharply. Mexican media organisations urge President Claudia Sheinbaum to strengthen protections for journalists after a string of killings. A French court recognises a flight attendant’s breast cancer as an occupational disease, and we remember Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour, whose artwork helped define the Palestinian experience for more than half a century.The Global News Podcast brings you the breaking news you need to hear, as it happens. Listen for the latest headlines and current affairs from around the world. Politics, economics, climate, business, technology, health – we cover it all with expert analysis and insight.Get the news that matters, delivered twice a day on weekdays and daily at weekends, plus special bonus episodes reacting to urgent breaking stories. Follow or subscribe now and never miss a moment. Get in touch: globalpodcast@bbc.co.ukPhoto: Woman holds smartphone with Meta logo in front of a displayed Facebook's new rebrand logo Meta in this illustration picture taken October 28, 2021. Credit: Reuters

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Your sales order says one thing. Your inventory says another. Your spreadsheet says, good luck. Odu brings your business together on a single platform, from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing. Visit Odu.com to book a demo. It's O'DO.com.
Starting point is 00:00:25 Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Starting point is 00:00:45 And that's with Kyle Smith Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, Listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcast. Thank you. Bye. This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service.
Starting point is 00:01:14 I'm Will Chalk and in the early hours of Thursday the 27th of August, these are our main stories. Meta agrees to a multi-billion dollar settlement over claims brought by a number of US states that its social media platforms harm children. The world's most valuable company, Nvidia, which creates microchips for AI, sees a boom in revenue. Plus, They started shooting indiscriminately. If you run into a room, they set the room on fire. If you come out and start running, they shoot you.
Starting point is 00:01:45 How bandits are running, rampage and terrorizing residents in northwest Nigeria. Also in this podcast, rescue teams work through the night to locate survivors of the devastating flash floods that hit northern Nepal and Tibet, killing nearly 200 people. And we'll look back at the life of one of the leading figures in Palestinian art, Sleiman Mansour. $18 billion. The amount meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has agreed to pay a group of US states that had accused it of harming children.
Starting point is 00:02:24 The company has also agreed to bring in changes to better protect young people. Crucially, though, as part of this deal, the company has admitted no wrongdoing. And the deal also brings to an end early, a high-profile trial in California, in which lawyers for the states were arguing that Meta knew millions of 11 and 12-year-olds used their sites but did little to keep them off. Our North America correspondent, Lily Jamali, sent this report from the federal courthouse in Oakland, California. Multiple states had sued META, alleging it deliberately designed its platforms to be addictive, then misled the public about how problematic apps like Instagram and Facebook are for young users. The company had also been accused of improperly harvesting the data of young users without parental consent.
Starting point is 00:03:07 California's Attorney General Rob Bonta described the settlement as a watershed moment. This is a significant victory for families across the country, for parents, for children. This is a major breakthrough, a milestone moment, a watershed moment. We believe the proposed settlement filed today addresses some of the concerns at the core of our lawsuit and that it will force transformative changes necessary to protect our children. And importantly, these changes will be made within months. As part of this settlement, the company is set to pay up to $17.1 billion. It's also agreeing to a framework for change, including two-hour daily limits for teens on their apps,
Starting point is 00:03:47 as well as night mode and school mode with muted notifications during those times. Meta has not accepted any wrongdoing as part of this settlement. Matthew Bergman is a lawyer who represented a young woman who won a case against the company earlier this year. Their actions in agreeing to this monumental financial amount, but even more importantly, agreeing to make common sense changes to its design to make it safer for kids, speaks volumes in terms of their accountability and their acknowledgement of their role in contributing to the youth mental health crisis.
Starting point is 00:04:20 But this settlement is a first step. The company wants to see competitors, including Google's YouTube and TikTok, agree to daily time limits as well. They don't want to be at a competitive disadvantage. Lily Jamali there. Now, the settlement comes after years of California, campaigning from parents around safety on social media platforms. Amy Neville is the co-founder of Social Media Victims' Remembrance Day.
Starting point is 00:04:43 This is historic. This is a really big moment. But let's not give meta-credit for these changes. They certainly did not volunteer to make any design changes. This is being forced upon them that's been brought to court by 29 AGs. There's no apology with this. And this is the beginning of the fight. We're still in the early stages of this fight. This is definitely not the end of the fight for accountability.
Starting point is 00:05:04 We last our son, Alexander, in June of 2020, to FinCol poisoning after being groomed by a drug dealer on Snapchat. That going back to this case, how are predators still not going to reach our kids? That part's not clear. You know, we're talking about the addictive design features that they're going to fix, supposedly, which will need to go through rigorous testing to really see if they amount to anything. But what's going to keep the predators away from our kids? Let's get the perspective of Arturo Behar, a former Meta insider who turned whistleblower, because he was concerned about the company's handling of child safety.
Starting point is 00:05:37 During his time at the social media firm, he worked to combat cyberbullying. So what does he think of this settlement? It should not be interpreted as an all-clear son by parents or public officials, because while the settlement addresses a number of things, there's some significant problems which remain. It requires the other companies to join in. But then another part, which is also critical, is that it allows meta to define harm.
Starting point is 00:06:01 And behind my whistleblowing was this internal knowledge that Mark Zuckerberg knew, that the harm that the company was reporting publicly was 100 to 400 times less than what they knew people were experiencing, especially young people, suicide, all these kinds of things. And the agreement as it stands does not make that better. It could. There's still things that can happen. But our kids will not be any safer. They'll just get less exposure to things. The features that META has touters as its safety commitment are mostly theater, which can be independently tested and verified. And so ultimately, the grade that META should be given should not be based on what they claim their efforts are,
Starting point is 00:06:47 but by the measurement of the impact that they've had on the harm reduction that young people are experiencing. And until that is happening in any country that's thinking about this, our kids are not going to be any safer. and that's what really should matter in the way that this is approached. That was former meta-employee Arturo Behar. Now, we should tell you, a meta-spokesperson says the company works hard to keep people safe on its platforms and has been transparent about the challenges of removing harmful content. Well, let's move on from the difficulties of one tech giant to the seemingly never-ending good fortunes of another. The expansion of the world's already most valuable company, NVIDIA, is showing no signs of slowing down.
Starting point is 00:07:28 The firm, which makes the chips for companies such as Amazon and Microsoft that are used to power AI data centres, has reported a better-than-forecast quarterly revenue with CEO Jensen Wang, saying the industry is running at full steam. Our business editor Simon Jack told me more. So they made $96 billion in the three months at the end of July, which is about double what they made in the same period a year ago. And importantly, what people were looking for was what they're going to make in the future. And they said in the next quarter, they're going to make $108 billion, give or take,
Starting point is 00:08:03 one or two percent. And at that point, when those numbers first came out in after hours trading, the shares dropped a little bit because even though these are wowy numbers, they've got used to being totally incredible. But then when Jensen Huang started talking to people on the call around these numbers, he started talking about 70% increase in revenue by 2028, at which point. At which point, the shares started going up again. And this is important because I would say that not only is Invidia the most valuable company in the world, it's got a fair claim to being the most important company in the world
Starting point is 00:08:41 because it sits like a kind of sun in the middle of a solar system with all these other companies revolving around it because it supplies chips to the AI revolution. You know, it is a dominant player in that business. And of course, that is what is carrying the hopes and the fears of millions of people. Some people think it'll revolutionize the world. Some people think it'll ruin the world in terms of, you know, taking jobs. But people are worried about, at some point does this bubble burst? And I think that what happened tonight is that a little
Starting point is 00:09:15 bit of air was flown back into that bubble and say, actually, demand looks pretty strong and so on we go. But that's why people are so focused on Nvidia, because it's right at the center of this AI revolution. It's not just at the center, though, is it? It's because it makes the chips that power everything. It's also right at the start of the supply chain. So people often use it as almost a bellwether to see where they think the AI industry is going. And based on this, it just seems grow, grow, grow. That's right.
Starting point is 00:09:42 I mean, demand seems to be incredibly strong. They supply chips to all the sort of hyperscalers. That's the name they give to people like Google's, parent alphabet, Amazon, meta, etc. And on these numbers, it looks like things are going pretty well. Now, what people worry about, I guess, is that not only is Nvidia the biggest supplier of chips to these companies, it's also become, because it's riches and its incredible earning power. It's become almost like a private bank to some of these companies. And so it's done quite a lot of buying stakes or lending billions of dollars to its own customers, which has made people get a bit nervous because they think about circular financing. If you're actually giving your customers the money to buy the stuff from you,
Starting point is 00:10:30 given that people think they're going to be winners and losers in the air race, if they all own stakes in each other, do the losers bring down the winners? But on these numbers, I think those fears for now have been brushed aside. So our business editor, Simon Jack. Nepal is still yet to learn the scale of a devastating flash flood and mudslide. It hit the north of the Himalayan country, near the border of Tibet, at around 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday morning. The death toll has already reached nearly 200.
Starting point is 00:10:58 Among those missing, more than 600 are tourists. The Chinese authorities in Tibet say three people have been killed and more than 250 are missing. The footage we've seen is dramatic, to say the least. Huge brown waves of water, boulders and mud, surging across the landscape, smashing through villages and leaving destruction in their wake. When people living along the riverbanks heard the roaring sound approach,
Starting point is 00:11:22 they would have had very little chance to flee. At the Ging border crossing between Nepal and Tibet, in an area popular with trekkers and pilgrims, long-range CCTV footage shows people running for their lives before a wall of water slams into the huge building. Other footage posted online shows the desperate fear of those in sudden mortal danger. Azaday Mishiri has this report. In Nepal families scramble up the mountainous terrain, one man filming, yels aboui, I'm scared. highways, hydropower stations, bridges destroyed. A school bus in Trishuli.
Starting point is 00:12:06 Survivors, children, can do nothing but look on. I saw around nine trucks being swept away by the floods, including people. It's a heartbreaking incident. I've been teaching here for 18 years and I've never seen anything like this here before. My family members were swept away by the flood. in front of my eyes. My father, my mother, sister and her kids are all swept away. They could not escape the flood. There was no chance at all. The disaster hit a remote region, making rescue operations extremely difficult.
Starting point is 00:12:48 Here, rescuers reach a villager whose home has barely escaped the torrents of mud. Rope and a human chain pull others to safety. More than a dozen helicopters have been deployed. One of them a lifeline for this man. Areas downstream are on high alert, with rescue teams working through the night. The true scale of this disaster is yet to emerge. Azaday Mishiri there. Now it was initially thought that an earthquake caused the flooding,
Starting point is 00:13:25 but it's now believed it was triggered by a huge chunk of collapsing glacier ice that crashed into a river. Our correspondent in Beijing, Laura Bicker, gave me an update on the situation in Tibet just before we started recording this podcast. What we've heard is that 558 people are now missing on the Tibetan side, according to Chinese authorities. They're saying that three people have been confirmed to have died and two people have been rescued. Out of those missing, 260 are said to be foreigners.
Starting point is 00:13:58 Now, I think one of the things I have to explain to your listeners is this is one of the most control areas in China. To travel there, you need a number of different permits. It's one of the reasons why we can't go there ourselves and all the information we're getting is through Chinese state media. President Xi Jinping himself issued instructions yesterday for all out efforts to go ahead to try to ensure that anyone alive is rescued. We heard from the People's Liberation Army and the Air Force. They did manage to get an aircraft in the air to try to survey the area,
Starting point is 00:14:31 but it does seem that even getting near the effect, affected region is extremely difficult at this time. Not only are they dealing with high altitude, but they're dealing with the aftermath of this disaster, which seems to have blocked all roads and still communications are blocked. That's the situation in the Tibetan side, as we understand it. And how is this being reported in China? Is the sense of great tragedy being felt across the country? Yes. I think obviously Chinese state media are reporting it with gravity, but everything is very carefully controlled. Each message is coming to us in a carefully controlled manner. They're trying not to start any kind of panic. What we're hearing from experts on the Chinese side is they're
Starting point is 00:15:14 saying that they believe that after days and days of very heavy rain, after high temperatures in the area, it does seem that experts here believe that a glassier may have been to blame. Now, you said just a little while ago there that at first this seemed like a seismic event. I mean, I got the earthquake alert myself saying that there had been a seismic event at the border region. Now it seems that the landslide itself caused so much of a tremor, shook the earth so much that it did appear like an earthquake. So that gives you an idea of the force of the water, the force of the landslide that forced its way through the valley. Laura Bicker in Beijing.
Starting point is 00:15:54 On Tuesday, John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA, traveled to Moscow on a military plane. Given he runs the US's spy agency, it's perhaps fitting we still don't know why he went, exactly who he met or what they discussed. But a day on, our Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg, takes a look at what we do know. It's a Moscow mystery that has the world scratching its head and wondering where Russia and the West are heading. Unannounced, unexpected, there's been a high-level foreign visitor. He kept well away from the cameras.
Starting point is 00:16:27 But the military plane he flew on was spotted, arriving in Moscow, and then leaving a few hours later. On board was John Ratcliffe, the head of America's Central Intelligence Agency. What was he doing in Russia? Who had he come to see? Not President Putin, Kremlin Spokhov says. The CIA chief had been meeting Russian intelligence officials. And what do they talk about, I ask? Iran or Ukraine? And amid fears that Moscow may try to test NATO's resolve, I also ask, did he deliver a warning to Russia?
Starting point is 00:17:12 Mr. Peskov's reply, I have nothing to add. There are times when you just have to pull up your hands and say, look, we do not know, not yet what is going on here, because of the lack of information, and because of the cloak of secrecy, around what is happening. And that applies to this surprise visit by the head of US intelligence. Later, in an interview, President Trump gave few details of John Ratcliffe's talks, but hinted that the focus had been on Ukraine. William Burns was the last CIA director to travel to Moscow nearly five years ago. He'd warned Moscow not to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia went ahead.
Starting point is 00:17:55 Russia went ahead anyway. Now, US and Russian intelligence are talking again. So what will be the upshot of these conversations? Peace? Or further confrontation? Steve Rosenberg reporting from Moscow. Still to come in this podcast. There's certain occupations that have extreme exposures
Starting point is 00:18:21 cumulatively to this type of radiation. and pilots and flight attendants are two of those occupations. A landmark ruling in France as a court recognizes cosmic radiation as a factor in the breast cancer of a former flight attendant. Your sales order says one thing, your inventory says another. Your spreadsheet says, good luck. Odu brings your business together on a single platform, from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing.
Starting point is 00:18:58 Visit Odu.com to book a demo. It's O'DO.com. Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat
Starting point is 00:19:15 about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and The Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist discredited pseudoscience of Eugene. with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott.
Starting point is 00:19:38 So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcast. Thank you. Bye. This is the Global News podcast. On to a bandit crisis that's bringing terror to huge swaves of northwest Nigeria, with armed gangs on motorbikes, raiding towns and carrying out mass abductions. Analysis by the BBC World Service of attacks recorded by the act, led monitoring group show the problem is getting worse. Incidents between January and June were up 78% on the same time last year.
Starting point is 00:20:14 The World Service's Yemisi Adikek sent this report from Gussau in Zamfara, one of the areas at the heart of the crisis. Shots ring out as gunmen on motorbikes ride into a village in northwest Nigeria. This is the sound of Nigeria's bandit crisis. It's seen hundreds of thousands flee their homes. people kidnapped and murdered, and parents too scared to send their children to school. The military is still struggling to contain the crisis, which is now threatening to spread from the country's northwest to other areas. Zamfara is one of the states worst affected by the bandit crisis.
Starting point is 00:21:00 With no airport, the only way to get in is by road. Being escorted by the military because there have been some attacks in the surrounding villages. A lot of security personnel have been killed in this area. It's a sense that you just kind of want to make it past this zone. In the state capital, Gassau, we meet some of the 800,000 people across the northwest who fled their homes. Many of them are escaping bandit violence. Fatima breaks down as she recalls how her village was attacked. Her husband was killed, along with six of his brothers.
Starting point is 00:21:44 They opened fire without a care in the world. They started shooting indiscriminately. If you run into a room, they set the room on fire. If you come out and start running, they shoot you. What's left the Fatimus family now lives in a makeshift camp on the edge of the city. While they now have some protection, she says they find it difficult to even pay for food. sat on a motorbike by the side of the street with an assault rifle in his lap. We meet one of the men authorities are turning to to help combat the bandit problem.
Starting point is 00:22:19 But the security forces struggling to cope, fighters are being hired from local communities to help support the army and police. Let them understand that when they attack a place, they can kill, but they can also be killed. When we get told that the bandits are out, we try to get to where they are going. before they arrive. And with God help, we are successful in chasing them away. But there are concerns that arming more people could lead to a spiral of violence that authorities can't contain.
Starting point is 00:22:50 This is Malik Samuel from Good Governance Africa. At the end of the crisis, how are you able to disarm them, right? But if you look at the issues in the northwest, many of these communities don't have protection from the state. So what are they supposed to do? Authorities say they're taking the fight to the bandits. thousand new soldiers are being recruited, and President Bolatinebue announced a record four billion for defence and security in the latest budget.
Starting point is 00:23:16 To bandits, kidnappers and sponsors of terror, surrender of fear the full force of the Nigerian state. But in the northwest, the number of bandit attacks is continuing to rise. The return to normality that Fatima and her family in Zamfara desperately crave seems a distant possibility. We had peace, we had money. Now everything has changed. We have become beggars.
Starting point is 00:23:46 Fatima, ending that report by Yemisai Adikeke. Mexico can be a dangerous place to be a journalist. And now dozens of Mexican media outlets are calling on the country's president, Claudia Shanebaum, to do something about it. The Press Freedom Organization, Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, is backing the call as well.
Starting point is 00:24:05 It says at least 17 reporters have been killed since President Seymbaum took office nearly two years ago, despite her pledge to strengthen protections for the media. Ella Bicknell reports. According to reporters without borders, seven of 22 journalists killed worldwide so far in 2026, hail from Mexico. That's prompted more than 40 local media outlets to endorse the NGO's statement, urging President Scheimbound to take action. It says many the attacks go uninvestigated and unpunished.
Starting point is 00:24:35 calling for better coordination across all levels of government to find those responsible for the deaths. This was a recent information campaign video by the RSF. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Flight RA150 to Mexico City, Mexico. Should you report on organized crime, please remember to reach for the Bullock-Prove Fass located within your reach. When covering subjects linked to corruption, please take your belongings and return to where you came from as quickly as possible. The most recently documented murder was that of Francisco Alejandro Liva Aguila, a political columnist from the state of Oaxaca. In July, he wrote a column criticizing the local governor and several members of his administration.
Starting point is 00:25:17 The next day, he was shot dead at a food store whilst buy breakfast. The year earlier, he had told the local authorities that it had been receiving regular death threats. As well as general pressure to provide more press protections, Last week, President Scheimbaum's administration received condemnation for publishing the names of individuals and media outlets that had criticised the government. Miss Scheinbaum had denied that she was intimidating journalists. She said there had been incidents of fake news and said the names would not be circulated again. But journalists groups say the killings, attacks and threats continue to create an atmosphere of silence,
Starting point is 00:25:55 threatening the right of millions of people to be informed. Ella Bicknell reporting. For the first time in France, a flight attendant has succeeded in having her breast cancer recognised as an occupational disease. A court found that 59-year-old Sophie Lennon, who worked for Air France for decades, had frequently worked night shifts, been exposed to cosmic radiation and to cigarette smoke until the airline banned smoking in 2000. A study this month at the Harvard Medical School in the US found that out of hundreds of professions, flight crews and pilots had the highest level of radiation-related cancer deaths. Dr. Vishal Patel led the study.
Starting point is 00:26:32 There's certain occupations that have extreme exposures cumulatively to this type of radiation, and pilots and flight attendants are two of those occupations. So we looked at about 13 million deaths occurring across about 500 different occupations in the United States, and flight attendants and pilots came top and second for the share of deaths from radiation-associated cancers. Our correspondent in Paris, Hugh Schofield,
Starting point is 00:27:06 told us about the magnitude of this ruling. It is the first time that fresh cancer has been officially recognised in France as an occupational illness of flight crews. The connection spelled out, and the court is threefold. First, when this lady started, they were still smoking on planes. The other thing is night-time working.
Starting point is 00:27:25 There's evidence that suggests that night-time working disrupts women's body. body clocks and so on, which can be an aggravating factor in breast cancer. But the third thing is cosmic radiation. Cosmic rays, the same sort of things that cause, the northern lights, for example, which are of particular danger to flight crews. Why? Because they're flying at very high altitudes.
Starting point is 00:27:46 And also because a lot of long-haul flights are going over the poles, particularly the north pole for Air France, which is where these charged particles from cosmic radiation concentrate. the rest of the world is protected by the Earth's magnetic shield, but not at the poles. So this scientific detail is what's been adduced in this case. So doctors have examined her extensively, obviously, and there's no genetic particular risk in her family. There was no lifestyle risk attached to the way she was living and so on. So the court has decided that, therefore, there is enough evidence to suggest that it was occupationally linked.
Starting point is 00:28:26 And it is, of course, a big victory first. but more to the point in a way is how this might then open the gates for more similar claims. And there is growing evidence from medical studies that show that there is a higher level of risk of breast cancer attaching to flight crews than there is to the general population. Hugh Schofield in Paris there. A funeral for one of the leading figures in Palestinian art, Sleiman Mansour, has taken place near the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. The painter, sculptor and cartoonist died earlier this week at the age of 79.
Starting point is 00:29:02 For more than half a century, his work helped capture and define the Palestinian experience. Carla Conti told me more about him. He was born in the village of Berset in British Mandate Palestine in 1947, a year before the state of Israel was established and a year before the first Arab-Israeli war took place, during which more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in what is known as the Nakba, meaning the catastrophe or disaster in Arabic. And Mansur spent most of his career documenting the life of Palestinian people
Starting point is 00:29:37 using olive groves and citrus trees and traditional embroidered dresses and other vibrant imagery to bring his paintings to life. But above all, people will remember his art as a symbol of Palestinian resistance under the Israeli military occupation. And one of the most enduring and striking images to come out of his body of work is a painting from 1973 called the Camel of Hardship, which depicts an elderly Palestinian man carrying the city of Jerusalem on his back, the weight of it heavy on his body, which looks wary but perseveres ahead despite the burden. And during the first Antiphoda or uprising, which began in 1987, Munser helped fact. the new vision collective with fellow artists, turning to mud, straw, wood, and other natural elements after Palestinian artists boycotted Israeli made supplies. And this sparked a change in his career, a shift to a darker art, if you will, which is
Starting point is 00:30:41 something he discussed in 2018 while speaking to the BBC's Stephen Sacker. A big difference between these figures and the figures of the heroic people that I used to do in the 70s and 80s. It depends on the situation, you know, the political situation. I hope it will change another time because I love to make heroic paintings to reach again that feeling of being hopeful and optimistic. And an example of this shift that he just spoke about
Starting point is 00:31:14 can be found in his 1996 piece titled The Shrinking Object, which features a map of Palestine, built completely out of mud. And as the mud begins to dry out over time, it naturally begins to crack and break apart, much like the Palestinian territories at the time. Yeah, it's quite an incredible career. And I guess that that was reflected in the crowds at the funeral. Yes, the turnout was massive. And it was crowds of mourners followed the hearse from his hometown in Berset to a packed Anglican church, which was led by uniformed scouts, playing. backpipes and friends say they'll remember Mansour as a humble, soft-spoken man who loved to share
Starting point is 00:31:58 his work, who had a talent for turning complex stories into simple but effective artwork. And in a symbolic tribute, his coffin was straped in olive branches in a knot to the landscapes that defined his work. Carla Conti there. That's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at global podcast at BBC.co. UK. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. We have a sister podcast, the global story, which goes in depth and beyond the headlines on one big story. This edition of the Global News podcast was mixed by Massoud Ibrahim and the producer was Emma Joseph.
Starting point is 00:32:38 The editor is Karen Martin and I'm Will Chalk. Until next time, goodbye. Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith Bino joining us.
Starting point is 00:33:14 And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcast. Thank you. Bye.

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