Global News Podcast - Nato steps up efforts to protect cables in Baltic Sea

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

Nato steps up efforts to protect cables in the Baltic Sea after a power line is cut between Finland and Estonia. Russia accused of sabotage. Also: Another impeachment in South Korea, and NASA sun probe makes history.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. You are bound to devote yourself to the long conflict between the light and the dark. The Dark is Rising, an immersive audio adventure, adapting Susan Cooper's classic fantasy novel into a gripping 12-part family drama. Everything had changed. The dark is rising. Find it wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Rachel Wright and at 14 Hours GMT, on Friday the 27th of December, these are our

main stories. NATO steps up efforts to protect cables in the Baltic Sea after a power cable is cut. Russia is accused of sabotage but denies any involvement. Chaos in South Korea as the acting president is impeached after just two weeks in the job. And Israel orders staff and patients out from one of the last remaining hospitals in northern Gaza. Also in this podcast, a convoy of food arrives in the south of Sudan's capital for the first time. There were tears, tears of laughter and joy and tears of a lot of effort and exhaustion. It was quite a moment, I mean for everyone it was big.

And NASA says its solar probe has made history. NATO has said it will increase its naval presence in the Baltic, after what officials suspect was Russian sabotage of an undersea power cable linking Finland and Estonia. The Estlink II cable stopped working on Christmas Day. Now, the Estonian Navy has launched an operation to protect the remaining working cable, which supplies the country with power from Finland. Finland's president Alexander Stubb spoke about the incident at power from Finland. Finland's president Alexander Stubb spoke about the incident at a news conference.

Our message is quite clear. We've got the situation under control and we have to continue work together vigilantly to make sure that our critical infrastructure is not damaged by outsiders. It's too soon to draw conclusions yet why this happened. We know who did it. Our Europe regional editor Paul Moss told me more. The S-Link 2 cable, as it's called, stopped working on Christmas Day and it didn't really require a major investigation to guess why this happened because at exactly the same time it stopped, a ship passed overhead, slowing down as it did so.

This was the Eagle S, registered to the Cook Islands in the Pacific, but Finland believes it was controlled by Russia. They boarded the ship and they found evidence that the anchor had been dragged along the seabed to sever the cable. And you could have forgiven them for having a sense of deja vu, because in November a communications cable just off Sweden was also severed, just as a Chinese ship passed overhead and slowed down. Now we should say that undersea cables do sometimes malfunction,

but these two are just the latest in an increasing number, way too many, many think to be a coincidence. And what are the Estonian Navy and NATO going to do about it? Well they're just launching patrols they say to have ships to protect the remaining cable the S-Link 1. The Estonian Defence Minister, Hanno Pevko, has described this as critical marine infrastructure and you can see why the two cables S-Link 1 and 2 carry electricity from Finland. If the S-Link 1 was also cut, well, you know, they could carry on. They would still have electricity in Estonia, but the price would rise.

And Mr. Pevko called for other NATO countries to help protect the cables. As you say, this looks like it's going to happen. NATO has said within the last hour it will step up patrols in the Baltic. This sounds like it's becoming a bit of a military matter and I don't suppose really we should be surprised. I mean if a Russian aeroplane dropped a bomb on a NATO member states power station we would see that as a direct attack. It is not particularly different though less violent perhaps if it uses a ship to cut a power supply. This is

allegedly a direct physical attack by Russia on a NATO country's infrastructure and it follows what seems to have been a similar Chinese one. So what have the Russians said about this incident? Well, you know, I think Russia's been rather busy the last 24 hours denying that it was responsible for shooting down an Azerbaijani plane, hasn't had much time to deny severing a cable. But the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday brushed off a question about this, said it had nothing to do with Russia. But then you've got to remember Russia often is in a sort of strange situation of double-speak

with these things, where it denies any responsibility, but actually doesn't want you to believe the denial. It would suit Russia if the Baltic countries believe their cables are under threat. They have to divert their navy equipment, navy boats as it seems they're doing to protect these cables. Now this is just as NATO member states are under pressure anyway to supply all the tanks and fighter planes they're giving to Ukraine. It really doesn't help if, as Russia may want, it now has to divert navy boats to the Baltic. Paul Moss. Now to South Korea, where politics has been in turmoil since former President Yoon Seung-yul tried to impose martial law three and a half weeks ago.

He was suspended after an impeachment vote. Now MPs have also voted to impeach the Prime Minister Han Dok-su, who's been acting as president. There were angry scenes in parliament with protests by MPs from the governing party. Our correspondent in Seoul is Jean McKenzie. Those absolutely dramatic scenes that you were just playing there and that we were just hearing from the parliament. Now this is really the opposition party who have managed to remove the Prime Minister Han. They have a huge majority in parliament and when they voted to impeach

him the members of the ruling party, Mr Yoon's party, got up and they surrounded the Speaker of the House and they started shouting at him as you heard. They are angry that this vote has even been allowed to go ahead. There is now such political animosity between these two parties and total political deadlock here in South Korea. How we got here was that over the past couple of days this row has erupted between the opposition party and Prime Minister Han. Mr. Han has refused to appoint these judges that Parliament had chosen to oversee President Yoon's impeachment trial. This is the court case

that is going to decide whether Mr. Yoon should be permanently barred from office or whether he should be reinstated. And the opposition party have decided that because Mr. Han was blocking the appointment of these judges, he was essentially protecting Mr. Yoon and therefore wasn't fit to run the country. And what's been the reaction of the Prime Minister or the acting president to the impeachment vote? Well, Mr. Han has said that he is going to step aside. acting President to the impeachment vote? Well, Mr Han has said that he is going to step aside. He listens to the vote.

He's going to follow the legal processes. So what that means now is that the country's finance minister is now going to be in charge of running the country. He is the third in command. But all this does really is just add to this political vacuum that we've got here in South Korea and this uncertainty that has been playing out really since President Youn unleashed it three and a half weeks ago when he imposed martial law. And people here are asking, well, where does this now end? Because if the finance minister comes in and he too refuses to appoint these judges, then

the opposition party could just impeach him as well and they could continue doing this again and again, effectively rendering South Korea without a government. And briefly what effect does it have economically on South Korea? It's had a big one. South Korea's economy is really struggling. The stock market has taken a hit, the currency has plunged. Even just today the South Korean won, fell to its lowest level against the dollar since the financial crisis. So in 16 years. And this is having a real impact on people's day to day lives. And so they are nervous. They are feeling this political uncertainty, this political instability. Yet

while this is unfolding, you have the two parties just shouting and blaming each other. Jean Mackenzie in Seoul. The Israeli military has forced staff and patients to leave one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza, calling it an Hamas terror centre. The Kamal Adwan hospital has been under siege by the Israelis for weeks. Staff say airstrikes overnight that targeted the area killed 50 people. The Israeli military says it's investigating. Our correspondent Emeon Nader is monitoring events from Jerusalem. We've been speaking to medical staff from the Kamal Adwan hospital this morning who said that at around 7 a.m. the Israeli army gave them direct orders to leave the facility within 15 minutes. After those 15 minutes were up, the Israeli

army entered the hospital and made those remaining inside the hospital leave. One doctor, Aitza Bah, who was the head of the nursing department, told us that there are some patients who are in the ICU who are in a coma, they need special equipment such as ventilation equipment, and he's worried about them being moved without specialist vehicles to move them. We've approached the Israeli military who have told us that the hospital itself was a Hamas terrorist stronghold and claimed it's been used throughout the war as a base by Hamas, and they've said that they are now moving the patients and staff from inside there but didn't specify to where. Now we've had a statement from the Ministry of Health, the Hamas

Ministry of Health in Gaza this afternoon saying that they don't know where the staff and patients are going to be taken to but they understood that they were made to remove most of their clothes and stand in the extreme cold. Emea Nada. Israeli troops have been engaged in many different theatres since the Hamas attacks in October 2023. Gaza, Lebanon and now Yemen. But because its army relies heavily on reservist soldiers, questions are being asked about the strain this is putting on families and businesses. Our Defence correspondent Jonathan Beale reports from Jerusalem.

Israel's war on multiple fronts has not just worn down its enemy, not just taken the lives of thousands of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. It's also extracted a price from its own people. So up until October 7th we would do only a week or two a year. Since October 7th I've been 250 days. Noam Glukhovsky, an IDF reservist, is counting the cost in days. We met in a Tel Aviv park during a brief respite from his military duties and trying to keep up with his studies. Being a medic in a reservist unit has already pushed back plans to become a doctor by another year. He's repeatedly been called up, but now he's had enough.

You cannot keep doing this war for much longer. You have to understand what is the objective, have an end date, have an end goal, because otherwise you're not going to have a reservist army. If you're called up again, will you go back? No. Unless something dramatic happens. More than 300,000 reservists answered the call to duty when Israel was attacked last year. Along with conscripts, reserves formed the backbone of Israel's military, boosting the IDF's ranks in times of war. But there is now growing frustration, not least because one group's long been exempt

from the draft. Call-up papers have now been issued to some of Israel's ultra-orthodox Jews. Prompting protests like this, they believe their lives should be dedicated to religious study, not military service. Our history is full of Jews who have given up their lives in order to remain religious. Our youths over here, our boys, young men over here are saying exactly the same. We will die. We will stay extended periods of time in jail, but not go to the Israeli army, which means becoming religious.

It's an issue that's also divided the government. But many senior military officers say Israel can no longer afford to allow a section of society to dodge the draft. Ariel Hyman had to juggle his job as a geologist with military service. He was the IDF's first chief reserve officer. ARIEL HYMAN, Israeli Chief of Staff, IDF, Israel After a year of fighting, we need more soldiers in the army. There is no other choice but for them serving in the army. And if they don't want to do it, we have to deal with it.

And my opinion is just take the right from them. There's also the huge economic cost of relying on so many part-time soldiers. Even today, just this morning, I was texting one of the employees that is still in reserve. She came back for a while. In her kitchen in Tel Aviv, Shali Lotan is counting the costs of the war on her business and family. It's not just her husband who's been called to duty, but key members of a food tech start-up company.

Like many small businesses in Israel, it's struggling to survive. We had to let go for reserve duty, two of them, and then we hired another student to fill in for one of the ladies that went to reserve duty and even him was drafted. Is that sustainable? I don't think so. I don't think for much longer. Shelley Lotan ending that report by Jonathan Beal. On Tuesday, NASA scientists held their breath as the Parker Solar Probe went out of communication

for a few days. It was attempting to make history for the closest ever approach to the sun. Now it has re-emerged. It's thought the spacecraft endured temperatures of up to 982 degrees Celsius. Pallab Ghosh is our science correspondent. They thought the spacecraft would emerge but they didn't know whether it would emerge intact. But so far so good it sent back a little bleep to say that it was in good health. It won't be sending back any

data for a few days. We'll have to wait until the 1st of January, but a huge sigh of relief because not only has it broken records, it's hopefully gathered new data on how our Sun actually works. And that presumably was what the main purpose of the mission was. That's right. You'd imagine that this thing that's up in the sky every day we know so much about. Astronomers have been studying it for centuries, there have been so many missions that have gone, but none have got so close. The Parker Solar Probe came within four million miles. Now that seems like a very very long way away but in space terms that's

really close, touching the Sun if you like. And so it needed a powerful heat shield, an experimental heat shield, to protect it. And believe it or not, so close to the Sun, somehow the instruments were kept at room temperature. I don't know where this room was but it must be a pretty hot room. But the long and short of it is that the instruments are intact. We'll have to wait and see the data because sometimes during a solar eclipse you must have seen pictures of it. You see the sun's atmosphere. Normally, you know, you don't look at the sun but pictures of it show it this kind of featureless disk in the sky. But when the moon

passes overhead and covers that disc you see this beautiful shimmering atmosphere and a few red things emerging from it and then you see what the sun is really like. This beautiful but violent process is going on on it and it's understanding those processes that the Parker Solar Probe is there. There are magnetic fields that twist and turn the fiery surface, the corona, the sun's atmosphere. The sun also spits out a solar wind which comes over and hits the earth, calls those wonderful new northern lights that we experience from time to time. So a lot to learn, a lot to look forward to in the coming days, weeks and months. lot to look forward to in the coming days, weeks and months. Pallab Ghosh. Still to come on this podcast. So he says the appropriate number is perhaps 150. That will keep them within the forests

and there'll be no conflicts with humans. What is the right number of tigers? What do Tiger Woods, Mark Zuckerberg and Taylor Swift all have in common? Well, their lives and fortunes are all being discussed on Good, Bad Billionaire, the podcast exploring the minds, motives and the money of some of the world's wealthiest individuals. I'm Zing Zing and each week my co-presenter Simon Jack and I take a closer look at the world's mega-rich and we try to decide whether they're good, bad or just another billionaire. From celebs and CEOs to sports stars and tech titans, find out how billionaires made their money and how they use it.

Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. All episodes of season one and two are available now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Now, here's some rare good news from Sudan. For the first time since the start of the war in April last year, a convoy of food trucks has arrived in the south of the capital Khartoum. Famine has been spreading in the country with almost 25 million people in urgent need of food aid. The convoy was arranged by UN agencies as well as neighbourhood groups known as the Emergency Response Rooms. Dua Tariq is a Sudan human rights activist who works with the ERRs and was there when the trucks arrived.

There were tears, tears of laughter and joy and tears of a lot of effort and exhaustion from arranging this. But I'm very excited to be here to share this news with the world and with you guys. It was quite a moment, I mean, for everyone, for the drivers of this convoy, for the even, for us, for everyone. It was big. And this is a part of the capital where people presumably are in desperate need of food, where even local food kitchens are struggling to provide enough for people. Yeah, this is the only remaining part of the city that haven't received any aid since the beginning of the war because it's a siege area. So this means that also for us, it has two sides.

First of all, the humanitarian side that an effort started to happen towards the famine and also politically it means that there is sort of arrangement and safe routes for other services for people. Yeah, and I was going to ask about that, the sort of coordination needed, both with big international agencies, United Nations agencies and so on, and also with commanders from the rapid support forces and the Sudanese military, the warring parties on the ground. How do you actually go about making such a journey of food trucks possible? I mean, it took almost six months.

We've been arranging this. We have ups and downs, the permits from the military side, the trust issues between the two fighting parties, and even the recognition from United Nations, from local response groups. So it's a lot of effort. It took so many meetings, I mean, like dozens of meetings. The trucks, some of them were lost, some of them stayed for like a month in one area, it has to like move very slowly because of the fighting and the battles happening. It was quite a lot of work and especially it was the first time for us to do this. It was such an even emotional roller coaster to go through arranging this. But finally

when it happened, it felt like now we have some sort of technique to deal with the two fighting party Especially it's unpredictable. It was very difficult But now it's a very positive because it happened and this convoy. What does it actually contain? What are the sort of items that you have now that are gonna keep people going? It has basic food supplies and it has life-saving medicines, it has recreational tools for children and productive health items for women. It's supposed to help like 15,000 people with food, I mean like in Khartoum, with food and 200,000 children with these tools because it has the malnutrition kits. That's a huge amount of people who are going to be helped.

What happens from now? Congratulations on the achievement, but presumably the idea then is to get other convoys coming in that this won't be the last. Yeah, we hope so. But now it's for the ERRs to distribute, because we have these communal kitchens and these grassroots groups in every neighbourhood. So it's up to the ERRIs now to distribute this. We already have a distribution plan, everybody's ready and in a matter of days, till this end,

we'll be with the people it deserves, hopefully. Dua Tariq, talking to the BBC's James Coughnell. The amount of AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery online has passed the point of no return. That's according to the Internet Watch Foundation here in the UK. It says the number of such images it's discovered has quadrupled in the past year. The organisation's chief executive is Derek Rayhill. What you have to visualise first and foremost is is visualize a group of sinister, sick, and evil people whose hobby, if you will, is to collect images of children

being raped and sexually abused. And then the second you introduce artificial intelligence into that equation, you are then able to replicate images, invent images that don't even exist to perpetuate this absolutely sick habit of collecting this material. So what it does in terms of our mission is there's a huge expanse of material out there.

And we will never know exactly how much material there is. We only know what we know. We can only see what we can see. But what we are saying is we have seen a quadrupling of this material by our analysts in the last year. The point of no return really applies to the fact that you and I would struggle sometimes to differentiate the artificial image from the real image. And that makes the job of identifying, categorizing, and removing child sexual

abuse material much, much harder because you just don't know at first glance whether it's a real image, a fake image of a real image or a fake image altogether. So it is not illegal to train AI to generate these materials and it's not illegal to have a handbook about how you can train AI to generate these materials, which we just think is morally debased and legally absurd. The BBC's cyber security correspondent, Joe Tidy, told us more. This year they found nearly 250 images, if you count all the webpages they found with

this illegal abuse material. That's 250,000 webpages. So it is a very, very small amount, but it was only 51 last year. So there's the trend they're seeing. And they did warn of this. I went to visit them last year and they said that this is going to be a big problem and it's going to come fast because it's just so easy to make these images. And that's certainly what we're seeing. The problem is, of course, the law hasn't caught up with just how easy it is to create these images and how fast they are and also how realistic they they are. Because the issue the RDF are having,

and this is the same with other charities around the world, like NetMek in the US as well, for example, they're tasked with not only taking these images offline, but sometimes safeguarding some of these children in the images. And if they're chasing their tails looking for children that don't exist, that adds a whole other layer of complexity to the law and to the authorities. Because when they're finding these images, they have to work out, is this real? Is this child

actually in a situation where we need to protect them? Is the child real? So the difficulty is very, very complex for these organisations. Jo Tidy. Germany's president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has dissolved the country's lower house of parliament. The move follows the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's coalition and clears the way for snap elections in February to decide who will lead Europe's largest economy. Speaking in Berlin, Mr Steinmeier said Germany needed stable government. Especially in difficult times like these, stability requires a government capable of acting and dependable majorities in parliament.

That's why I'm convinced that for the good of our country, new elections are the right way forward. Simon Jack found out more from Michaela Kufner, the chief political editor at the Deutsche Welle News Channel. You hardly ever hear from Frank-Weiter Steinmeier because his role is largely ceremonial. He holds speeches, he represents Germany. He actually though holds the highest office in the country and the reason being that whenever a constitutional crisis looms or that's when his role becomes pivotal. We saw Olaf Scholz ask parliament for more trust to stay in office. Parliament said no, that does not immediately lead to the dissolution of parliament.

That's when the president decides whether it's worth talking to all political parties again and pushing them to try and form a coalition. He has spoken to all of them again. And today we're expecting to hear from him in the interest of political stability, and today we're expecting to hear from him in the interest of political stability, that is the benchmark. He is calling fresh elections and not trying to hold these parties to their democratic

responsibility of forging some kind of coalition. And obviously the big question is who's next? The favourite appears to be the CDU leader, Friedrich Merz. Yes, he's a former political adversary of Angela Merkel. He was one of those few critics and he left politics altogether over a huge row with her. Now he's back and he is sounding a lot tougher on issues like migration. He's sounding a lot less centrist on issues like the economy, much more pro-business. And just a final thought, we will also get a litmus test of the advance of the AFD, the

far-right alternative for Deutschland. That'll be an interesting moment to see how big their appeal has swelled. Absolutely. They just scored some psychologically important victories in regional elections in the East where they cracked the 30% benchmark. We will learn in these elections whether they will max out at around just under 20%, which is where they are in the polls right now. Whatever happens, they have no chance of joining any kind of government coalition for the simple

reason that all the other parties don't want to work with them. They refuse to do so despite the fact that they are currently the second-largest political force here in Germany. Michaela Kufner. And finally, how many tigers are too many? Well, according to the Prime Minister of Nepal, 350. KP Sharma Oli surprised his audience by suggesting his country's conservation efforts had been too successful. The tiny country now has the fourth largest number of tigers after India, Russia and Indonesia. I've been speaking to the BBC World Service environment correspondent Navin Singh Khadka.

350 tigers in a small country like Nepal, to borrow his words. There's too many and actually he's also mirroring what many locals including community forestry users farmers are saying that they're being attacked by tigers increasingly loss of cattle and all that. So he says the appropriate number is perhaps 150 that will keep them within the forests and there'll be no conflicts with humans. So how come there are too many? In the past, since 2009, Nepal has been able to triple the population of tigers. Now, 355 plus. And how did they manage to do that?

Because they were nearly extinct, weren't they? Nepal, as you know, has a solid track record when it comes to nature conservation. So many national parks, protected areas, and there are several wildlife corridors even between national parks and those protected areas. So, poaching is pretty much controlled. And of course, local communities also have played a role, they have cooperated, and not to forget Nepal's community forestry, another smash hit feat.

So all these have kind of held tigers in terms of their habitat but many experts are saying that tigers have competition between themselves, the tigers, because you know 355 plus tigers are fighting for space so they come out to villages and then that's where they attack people, they even kill cattle, livelihoods gone, people are migrating. That is why this is a problem they are saying. And what is Nepal's prime minister suggesting that you do about this problem? He was suggesting that Nepal can give the tigers to foreign countries. But when I spoke to officials, then they're saying that, well, yes, there might be this suggestion, but how does it

work? Who is interested? The tiger diplomacy is here to gain the momentum. Navin Senkardkar. And that's all from us for now, but there will 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 Ricardo McCarthy. The producer was Anna Murphy. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Rachel Wright. Until next time, goodbye. Do you ever find yourself missing out on episodes of your favourite podcast because you didn't know a new one's out? Well, here's an easy way to get new episodes automatically. Whether it's World of Secrets or any of your other favourite BBC World Service podcasts, just find the show on your podcast app and click follow or subscribe. And if you switch on notifications, you'll get a reminder too.

It's that easy. Follow or subscribe and never miss an episode.