Global News Podcast - Myanmar earthquake kills at least 144

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

Rescue workers in Myanmar and Thailand are scrambling to find survivors, after a 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit the centre of Myanmar. Also: Vance scolds Denmark during Greenland trip as Trump says US must have island.

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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Rachel Wright and in the early hours of Saturday, the 29th of March, these are our main stories. Rescue workers in Myanmar and Thailand are scrambling to find survivors after a 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit the centre of Myanmar. The US Vice President has taken aim at Denmark on a visit to Greenland, accusing it of under-investing in the security of the semi-autonomous territory. And family members of Venezuelans deported to an El Salvador prison say they are trapped in a nightmare.

Also in this podcast... You take the sourest apples that you can find, roast them in a fire until they're soft and then mix Quicksilver, Mercury in with them and then slather this on your body. We look at medieval cures. As we record this podcast, it's the early hours of the morning in Myanmar and Thailand, where rescue operations have been continuing after the huge earthquake on Friday. In Thailand, attention is focusing on a high-rise building which collapsed in the capital Bangkok. At least six people have been found dead and around 100 people are missing. And we'll be hearing from there a little later. In Myanmar,

the picture is still unclear but the authorities say 144 people have been killed. There are fears that that number will rise much higher. The 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit the centre of the country in the early afternoon. The epicentre was in Surgaï, close to Myanmar's second largest city, Mandalay, where a historic pagoda collapsed. These people in Mandalay described what they saw to the Burmese service. All of Mandalay is now a scene of tragedy. It's like a ruined city.

Some are still stuck under rubble. The ornamental entrances to the big pagoda fell down. Private hospitals and hotels were damaged. All buildings were mostly damaged. It was so severe. So severe that I have never seen anything shaking like that. There are so many injured people at the general hospital."

He sat down on his knees in front of that house there as the quake started. The building collapsed on him. It killed him. When it was so noisy and banging, I had to balance myself not to fall. I also saw the damage and chaos. What's more, the country is in the grip of a civil war and in an unusual move, the head of the military junta asked for international help. As we're in the middle of a massive relief effort after this natural disaster, I would like to request all people to help as much as you can. I have declared a state of emergency in all the affected areas and have opened all ways for foreign aid.

Aid workers in the country say it will be difficult to get help to the affected areas because of the collapse in transport infrastructure. Dr Chi Min is the National Director of World Vision and based in the former capital and largest city, Yangon. The destruction is more near the epicentre in the centre of Myanmar, especially in Mandalay and a new capital, Naypyidaw. But we don't have any destruction in Yangon. But the road from Yangon to Mandalay is badly damaged. No car or buses can be able to go. The runway of the Mandalay Airport is also damaged and in Nehru Dhar airport the airplane controlling tower

is also collapsed and a few people died from that and the phone lines were also cut off. Only in the evening it slowly recovers so difficult to get information. Dr. Chi Min of World Vision speaking from Yangon. Our former Asia editor, Rebecca Henschke, has been monitoring the reports coming out of Myanmar and told us what she'd been finding out. We're hearing from people that there isn't enough help. Frankly people are saying that they're not getting the relief for the recovery

effort that they need, which is to be expected given the state of the country. The epicentre of the earthquake, Sagai, is an area where there's been fierce fighting. So it's basically a volatile battleground between pro-democracy rebels and the government. So even that area itself, the government has limited control of. So there's a real patchwork of people who should be doing things. We're hearing from the military government that they are going to get relief. We're also hearing from the rebels of the national unity government that they are trying to help. But what we're seeing from the footage

that is coming out is it's really people on the ground. I saw some quite extraordinary footage from my colleagues in the Burmese service of people literally with their hands helping a woman and a 10-month-old baby out of the rubble. That was in Napier Door. And you see them there lying. She talks about how she was lying there praying for help. But it's very local and very rudimentary at the moment. We heard a little earlier from the head of the military junta, how unusual is it for him to speak and ask for help? It is very unusual.

Since seizing power in that coup nearly four years ago, Min Aung Hlaing has plunged his country into isolation. So he has effectively shut the country off. So foreign journalists have been barred, independent media basically shut down, we haven't got foreign aid workers in there. So for him to say we need international help is a sign of how bad things are. But how easy will it be for international aid to get in? Very difficult because they're really starting from scratch. And one of the key things that I've been hearing from aid agencies who have tried to continue to have a presence in the country

through local partners is that they face intimidation from the military when they try to act. They're also operating in a very active civil war. So they also need to negotiate with the pro-democracy rebels as well. And the Myanmar military has a history of denying aid to opposition areas and blocking aid. So there's concern from aid agency people that I've been speaking to today that this open door request may not really lead to something on the ground that they can work with, but they're willing to try. We're hearing from all agencies that they're gearing up, they're going to go in, they're going to help. And looking at this from an optimistic kind of lens, this could be a window that the

country is craving for, for the world to pay attention to what's happened inside Myanmar. I have all the pro-democracy groups I speak to, the world's forgotten Myanmar. Now this earthquake has forced us to look at it. Perhaps this is the window where things change. Rebecca Henschke. Across the border, Thailand's capital, Bangkok, has been declared a disaster zone. As a result of the earthquake, a multi-storey building under construction collapsed in a tangled heap.

Nick Marsh is at the scene. I'm looking right now at the devastation that it's wrought here in Bangkok. There was a skyscraper that was being built. It was supposed to be a 30-storey building. It was going to be a government building here in the Thai capital. But it totally collapsed in a matter of seconds. There were around 400 workers believed to be on the construction site. When the building collapsed, many people were able to sort of scrabble out.

A lot of people managed to escape from the site, but it's thought that around a hundred people are still buried under the rubble and I'm just looking at it now I'm standing on a on an overpass about 50 60 meters away from me and it is vast it is a vast mountain of rubble there are sniffer dogs looking around there are lots of rescue workers just desperately trying to battle through this rubble, trying to find any sign of survivors. They've been doing this for hours, by the way, Rachel, and so far, apart from the immediate aftermath of that collapse, we haven't seen any survivors come out, so people really are bracing themselves for the worst here.

I understand Thailand's Prime Minister visited the site and held a press conference. What has she been saying? Yes she did and she declared the whole of Bangkok an emergency zone and there was some pretty dramatic images, footage coming out from around the city of buildings shaking. Bangkok of course has got many many high-rise buildings, lots of hotels, condominiums, skyscrapers, there was infinity pools spilling their contents off the top of rooftops, but the damage by and large has been superficial. There's not really been many reports of injuries outside of this one unfinished skyscraper that I'm looking at right now. And you just have to wonder about the workers who were here, who just found themselves on a normal Friday afternoon

at work in the wrong place at the wrong time on this unstable structure. And briefly, people earlier were frightened to go back into buildings. Are they doing so now? Well, some are cautiously making their way back home. If they live on a higher floor, it's less likely that they want to spend the night there. The authorities have actually set up a series of temporary encamps in parks nearby. A lot of people are still there and

some people might even spend the night there. Nick Marsh in Bangkok. The US Vice President JD Vance has accused Denmark of under-investing in the security of Greenland and leaving it vulnerable. He was speaking at a remote US military base during a brief visit to Greenland. The visit was scaled back after a public outcry over President Trump's repeated declarations that he wanted to take control of the semi-autonomous Danish territory. Andrew Harding is in Greenland's capital, Nuuk. Spring is on its way in Greenland and in Nuuk's harbour we found a few fishermen trying to steer their small boats out to sea past giant chunks of ice. Carl Peter was hoping to catch halibut, but his mind was on Donald Trump and America's

declared ambition to annex his homeland. I don't feel safe. I'm worried. Trump is trying to control the country. What do you think is going to happen? I have no idea. What do you want to happen? I want Greenland to control its own fate. President Trump underlined his intentions by sending a high-level delegation to Greenland uninvited.

The vice president, J.D. Vance, visited an American military base in the far north of the island. Greenland, as part of Denmark, is a close American ally, but that didn't stop Mr. Vance from lashing out at his hosts. Our message to Denmark is a close American ally. But that didn't stop Mr. Vance from lashing out at his hosts. Our message to Denmark is very simple. You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland. You have under invested in the people of Greenland and you have under invested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful landmass filled with incredible people. That has to change. And because it hasn't changed,

this is why President Trump's policy in Greenland is what it is. Denmark's Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, acknowledged the need for more focus on security in the Arctic. But she bristled at the suggestion that her country, a strong NATO ally, was not playing its part. Meanwhile, in Nuuk, there were celebrations to mark the formation of a new coalition government for Greenland.

The focus on steering this giant island slowly away from Danish control and towards independence. This is a small community with an emphasis on consensus and America's bullying style doesn't fit well here. Vivian Motzfeld is a local MP. All Greenlandic people have already shouted out to the world that the Greenlandic people is the one who's going to decide how the future is going to be. Not as an American state? Not as an American state. The hope here is that things will calm down and that Greenland can find a path towards closer ties with America without losing itself in the process.

Andrew Harding. Still to come on this podcast. Diplomacy is not the ability to deny the reality that you see. Diplomacy is not to flatter your host into liking you. Diplomacy is not to flatter your host into liking you. Diplomacy is not lying. I think they cannot be business as usual. After his expulsion from the United States, the former South African ambassador to Washington, DC,

tells us he stands by his criticism of the Trump administration. Israel. Now even some supporters are questioning its purpose. So is this a turning point? Join me, Hugo Bachega, as I travel to the heartland of the movement to find out. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Now to a controversial decision by the US to deport 240 Venezuelans to El Salvador instead of back to their country of origin. The Trump administration expelled the men under a little-used law, claiming they were Venezuelan gang members. But relatives of the detainees dispute that.

They're being held in a notorious high-security prison in El Salvador. Some see their detention as part of President Bukele's wider gang crackdown. From San Salvador, Will Grant reports. As 238 shackled Venezuelans landed in El Salvador, they were then bundled onto buses and taken to probably the most feared prison in the Americas. The Secot, or Terrorism Confinement Center, was set up by the Salvadoran president Naib Bukele to house hardened members of the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. The Trump administration accuses the men of belonging to a Venezuelan gang

and removed them from US soil without due process under the 1789 Alien Enemies Act. Some 1,800 kilometers away, Getrudes Pineda is growing increasingly desperate about the well-being of her son, Oscar. Having entered the US illegally, he was working as a carpet layer. She'd heard he'd been picked up by US immigration agents and was in Texas en route back to Venezuela. Her other son, living in Colombia, soon called her to say he'd seen Oscar's name on a list

of those sent to El Salvador. They're not from El Salvador, they're Venezuelans, said Detrudes. If they've committed a crime, let them face the charges in Venezuela, she added. Outside the Salvadoran Supreme Court, lawyer Jaime Ortega addressed the press after lodging a petition of habeas corpus to try to secure the men's immediate release, and argues that there are some major legal irregularities in the transfer of the men to El Salvador. This case is very sad and unheard of in our country.

The United States appears to have entered some kind of agreement with El Salvador, the proper documents of which we can't find, and we don't have. Three years ago, Mr. Bukele declared war on the gangs, using emergency powers granted to him under a state of exception. While human rights groups have criticized the methods and the suspension of certain constitutional norms, few can deny that the transformation of some neighborhoods has been

nothing short of extraordinary. The 10 de Octubre in San Salvador is one such formerly gang-controlled community. As I look around me, you could scarcely expect to see a calmer corner of Central America. There is three soldiers with long machine guns standing under the shade of a tree to my right. Everybody in this particular neighborhood credits the

difference in security to President Naib Bukele and his gang crackdown. Roxana, who didn't want to give her surname, says her family opened a shop since the state of exception was introduced. "'Things have changed a lot. We feel calmer having a business and we can stay open late,' she says. The constant extortion and demands for money by gang members have dried up too, she explains.

Yet Roxana admits that a lot of innocent people, as she put it, were rounded up in President Bukele's crackdown. On the third anniversary of the state of exception, protesters turned out on the streets of San Salvador, carrying photos of their relatives who they say were illegally swept up in the clan town. Many on the march identified with the plight of the families of the 238 Venezuelans. Three years on and they haven't once heard from their loved ones being held inside the Secot Supermax facility and some are beginning to lose hope that they ever will.

Will Grant reporting from El Salvador. And in the past few hours, a US federal judge has extended a temporary halt to President Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members. It's pretty rare for an ambassador to be expelled from their host country or declared persona non grata in the diplomatic jargon. It's a measure usually reserved for cases of alleged espionage. But that's what happened to Ibrahim Rasool, who until two weeks ago was South Africa's ambassador to the United States.

The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that he was being sent packing from Washington for being a race-baiting politician. It follows comments that Mr. Rasool made during an online forum. During the discussion, he said President Trump was mobilizing a supremacism and trying to project white victimhood as a dog whistle.

Here's some of what he said. I think what Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency, those who are in power, by mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency at home. And I think I've illustrated abroad as well. Those comments came against the background of already badly damaged relations between the US and South Africa over South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, over the Trump administration's cancellation of HIV AIDS programs in South Africa and

over accusations from Elon Musk who grew up in South Africa that the government in Pretoria was racist towards the country's white africana minority. Well Ibrahim Rasool flew back home to Cape Town this week when my colleague James Menendez spoke to him a little earlier, he asked him whether he still stands by what he said. I don't think that I come back with any regrets. I think that we are dealing with an administration in the US that is unapologetic about the stances it takes, the cost to human lives and so forth. And so in the scheme of things, I think my characterization

of the political phenomenon, not the personalities involved, not the government involved, but the political phenomenon is one that I think comes more easily to a South African, having been to a large extent the last nation that has felt and borne the brunt of supremacism. And especially when there is an unapologetic outreach to a very privileged, small, fringe white community and then alleging unapologetically that that community, that white Afrikaner community is under siege, is being oppressed.

There's a genocide against them and that their land has been confiscated. It's an unadulterated lie. But you're not drawing a parallel between the Trump administration and the old apartheid government, are you? I'm not drawing the parallel. They are drawing the parallel. They are drawing the parallel by embracing a privileged white community, giving them refugee status because ostensibly they are oppressed in the land. We have never drawn that parallel. That parallel has been drawn by that administration itself. Just to clarify your remarks about Donald Trump, but particularly that the MAGA movement, when you talk about mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency, I mean, what exactly

are you trying to say? What the MAGA is designed to, what, whip up white nationalism, white victimhood in order to take power? I think I'm describing a phenomenon. It's familiar to Germans who found a very surprising phenomenon of a vice president coming, embracing the ultra right, the alternative, we are Deutschland, mobilizing them ahead of an election. Everything is so obvious that only the blind or the timid will not call it out. So essentially you're saying that the Trump administration is racist?

I'm saying when a piece of wood has a hinge, you begin to suspect it's a door. And I think that the deportations that's happening, the abductions of particular people on the streets, the mobilizing of certain far-right communities, etc., I think it is self-evident. What about all the people of color, perhaps as many as one in three, the voter for Donald Trump? I mean, he increased his vote share with black people, with Hispanics in 2024. I think that that may be true. The fact of the matter is we had black people voting for apartheid,

and that doesn't mean that apartheid is non-racial. I think apartheid has the ability to co-opt because it has certain abilities to dispense patronage to certain communities and that's not to patronize the communities, but I do think that the presence of blacks in a particular movement such as homelands supporting apartheid does not make apartheid non-racial. Can you understand why, you know, making comments like you did and now explaining them to us, why? I mean, that is extremely provocative for an ambassador to a country to say. I mean, you can't have been surprised when they declared you persona non grata, can you? No, I think that the surprise is the thinness of the skin, the ability to dish out and not

to accept. We've smiled through a lie about white genocide. We've smiled through the punishment of cutting all aid, whether it is PEPFAR for HIV and AIDS, USAID, WHO funds, just energy transition funds. We've smiled through all of that. We've tried all the conventional ways to get that until you hit a brick wall and you begin to say, this is not

the normal phenomenon of diplomacy. I think it cannot be business as usual. The former South African ambassador to the United States. Europe's star-mapping Gaia space observatory has entered its final orbit after gathering cosmic data for more than a decade. The spacecraft's control team at the European Space Agency switched off Gaia's subsystems on Thursday and sent it into a safe retirement orbit around

the sun. The manoeuvre should minimise the chances that the craft gets within 10 million kilometres of earth for at least the next century. It will eventually burn up into dust. The craft's retirement has moved some of the project's scientists to lyricism. Here are a few of the adures read by our producers. Duty is done. It's time to be untethered, to wander free beneath those stars, no further measures to be taken. You'll hear no more from me, nor we from you, but you'll not easily be forgotten. Enjoy the peace, Gaia. Thank you for guiding us to the stars. Thank you for helping us, realizing

our dreams. Thank you for inspiring our future, almost family. We will never forget Gaia and Gaia will never forget us. Stefan Jordan worked on the Gaia mission for 20 years. So what is its legacy? It's really one of the most successful but also one of the more unknown space projects in astronomy because it's not taking nice pictures but we are taking very valuable data of the sky. It measures very precisely the position, the motions and the distances of stars. And these are so fundamental that it's for instance very, very difficult to measure the distances of the stars because you measure very, very tiny angular shifts of stars in the sky. And this can only be done with a space telescope like Gaia. And

only with this precision it is possible to find very tiny things in the sky which were impossible to measure otherwise. It was discovered that one can see in the sky which were impossible to measure otherwise. It was discovered that one can see in the motion of stars in our galaxy that certain groups of stars behave differently than other groups. And this is interpreted as that we had, for instance, about 10 billion years ago, a collision of our Milky Way with the other galaxy which is called Gaia and Kallados and this fundamentally changed also the Milky Way itself, whereby making the disk of the Milky Way thicker and we see still the remnants of such an encounter. This has

in part also been possible before Gaia. But now we can much more precisely compare this to models and understand these kind of interactions with other galaxies much better. Stefan Jordan from the Centre for Astronomy in Heidelberg. The world of medicine has certainly changed since medieval times when doctors here in England would confidently prescribe cures like burying nail clippings under elder trees to prevent toothache. Now a new exhibition at Cambridge University is going back in time to take visitors inside the minds of such medics and reveal the method behind what can sometimes seem like madness. Stephanie Prentice has this report.

Handwritten medical manuscripts, surgical diagrams and a brass rubbing of a plaque depicting a skeleton riddled with worms. Some of the items on display at the exhibition in Cambridge's University Library. The medical notes mostly from the 14th or 15th centuries, have all been translated into modern English, part of a passion project for Dr James Freeman, the curator of the exhibition. One treatment suggests women can cure infertility by burning weasel testicles in a pot with wild flowers and placing the mixture in the cervix for three days. The weasel testicles, one, the theory probably is sympathetic medicine, that this part of

an animal might have healing properties for a corresponding part of the human body. Medieval people lived in a world that was divinely ordained and created. So that's probably the theory behind that particular slightly odd treatment for infertility. Another one, a fruity homemade paste to treat lice on the body. You take the sourest apples that you can find, roast them in a fire until they're soft and then mix Quicksilver, mercury in with them and then slather this on your body and this will destroy all the lice on your body. I mean, I'm sure it will do a few other things as well and I don't recommend people try it.

But despite the curious concoctions described, the team at Cambridge say it actually wants to showcase how medieval people were reading, writing and learning and building up a bank of knowledge based on observation rather than just trial and error. It also highlights the role of astrology in magic in medieval medicine, as practitioners did things like tracking the moon when deciding when to let blood from their patients. There is no tidy, clear division in the medieval period between science and magic. They're not in their mutually opposing spheres like they are nowadays. So, medical practitioners were also trying these ritualistic treatments that involved reciting certain words, making signs of the cross. And there's one treatment for fevers

which involves writing certain formulae on a person's hand, washing it off the person's hand and then making them drink the liquid that's washed the writing off. While drinking words can probably be dismissed medically, Dr Freeman does stand behind one remedy that suggests dipping a man's testicles in a mix of cold water and vinegar to stop nosebleeds, saying he's tested and proved it. Stephanie Prentice with her curious concoctions. And that's all from us for now. But before we go, we have another special Q&A podcast with our colleagues from Ukrainecast coming up soon. So if you've got any questions,

please send an email to globalpodcasts at bbc.co.uk. And if possible, please record your question as a voice note. There will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later. This edition was mixed by Kai Perry and the producer was Rebecca Wood. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Rachel Wright. Until next time, goodbye. war with Israel. Now even some supporters are questioning its purpose. So is this a turning point? Join me, Hugo Bashega, as I travel to the heartland of the movement to find out. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.