Global News Podcast - Netanyahu tells Lebanese people 'reject Hezbollah or face destruction'

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

Israeli Prime Minister tells Lebanese people 'reject Hezbollah or face destruction'. Also: Florida braces for ‘worst storm in 100 years', and the piece of art that was almost lost after being mistaken for rubbish.

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service, with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Thank you. Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Jackie Leonard and these are our main stories. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told Lebanese people to reject Hezbollah or face destruction like that seen in

Gaza. President Biden says a hurricane that's expected to hit Florida on Wednesday could be its worst storm in 100 years. And the head of MI5, Britain's domestic security service, warns of a rise in threats from Russia and Iran. Also in this podcast, one of the examples the Attorney General of New York gave was about the use of beauty filters, which lets users appear thinner and younger. More bad news for TikTok as the US comes for the platform again with mental health in its crosshairs. As Israel expands its operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made a direct appeal to the Lebanese people. In a televised address, he said his forces had killed the presumed successor of the Hezbollah

leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated last month, and he urged the Lebanese people to rise up against Hezbollah in order to save their country. Don't let these terrorists destroy your future any more than they've already done. Stand up and take your country back. You have an opportunity that hasn't existed in decades, an opportunity to take care of the future of your children and grandchildren. You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza.

Fadi Alameh is chairman of the Lebanese Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee. He sits with the Development and Liberation Bloc of the Amal Movement, a party which is traditionally allied with Hezbollah. This was his reaction to Mr Netanyahu's appeal to the Lebanese people. I think it's the Lebanese internal affairs strictly belongs to the Lebanese themselves. The issue that we have, the war that we have, might be with some Lebanese not in agreement with what's happening now. But I think the Lebanese, once they're pressured, they can sit down and they can resolve all their issues together.

They've done it over the years. But for that to happen, given the current circumstances here, I think the whole country is unified around one thing, which is to bring about an immediate ceasefire. Mr Netanyahu also said Hezbollah was weaker than it had been in many years. So how does Mr Netanyahu think that the Lebanese people can overthrow Hezbollah? Here's our Middle East analyst Mike Thompson. It's not exactly clear how he intends the Lebanese people to rise up because that would be very difficult. Hezbollah is an extremely powerful

group. It has not just MPs, it has ministers in government. And indeed, its force is considered more powerful than the Lebanese army. So they also, by the way, run schools and hospitals and charities and all those sort of things across Lebanon. So it really would be an enormous challenge for the Lebanese people to do that. And also, we've had these reports about the death of the Hezbollah leader's presumed successor. What do we know? This is referring to Hashim Sefayuddin. Now, he's the cousin of Nasrallah, and he's chair of Hezbollah's executive council. And there was an Israeli strike on the southern suburb of Beirut, Dahir, on Friday.

And nothing was heard from him by Hezbollah officials, apparently, for some time. Although they dismissed rumours of him being killed as worthless. But it's now turned out that indeed, according to the Israeli prime minister, anyway, he has been killed. And earlier, Hezbollah's deputy leader said that he was supporting attempts for a truce. And he didn't say that they were demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, as they have done before. How significant is that? Well, that is quite significant, because all the way along, Hezbollah have insisted that they'll stop firing at Israel when Israel stops fighting in Gaza, and more latter naturally, of course, in Lebanon. And so that

is very significant. And this man is a veteran of Hezbollah. He's been there more than 30 years. And so currently is really the de facto leader of Hezbollah. So yes, it's very significant, although we don't know its sort of formal policy of the group. And meanwhile, today, more missiles fired into Israel. Israel says it's expanding its ground operations in Lebanon. Just give us a round of what's been going on today. Well, we've seen more incursions now into a different part of southern Lebanon, the southwest Lebanon by another four divisions. And it's now around 15,000 Israeli soldiers involved in that. There's also been talk of Israel launching a maritime

offensive. So what is said still to be a limited and very targeted operation is looking increasingly expansive. That was Mike Thompson. After a year of the war in Gaza, many are asking where this conflict is heading now. Young people on the ground have been telling our correspondents that a generation is being lost when it comes to being able to live side by side with their neighbours after everything that's happened. Our international editor Jeremy Bowen went to meet Palestinians and Israelis and asked whether they think there's any chance of putting aside the hostilities. In a very turbulent place, I'm in actually quite a peaceful spot right now, which is the main park in the middle of Jerusalem.

And I've come here to talk to young soldiers about how they see what's happened and how it might affect their future as Israelis. And so I've joined Sally, Oz and Shlomo, who've all served in different ways in the last year in the Israeli military. We don't know. We don't have any uncertainty in terms of what the war is going to look like in one year with Gazans and the hostages. So it's just a big question mark. We can't afford an enemy on our borders that work in trying to destroy us and to kill us. So your message is you can't trust the neighbors? Not in the meantime. I think that is just more complicated than that. I think that it's just very, very hard for us to say he has to be innocent. It's just really, really, really, I would say, unnatural for Israelis now

to say that there are some innocents over there that don't support Hamas, that don't support what happened on October 7th. We've experienced a national trauma. We're still healing. I mean, they too are going through a massive trauma. I know. Both sides are tragically been hurt, but we're still healing and we can't just play with our lives like that anymore. We just can't. What about Palestinian choices? We traveled to Nablus, a Palestinian city in the West Bank that is proud of its reputation as a stronghold of opposition to the Israeli occupation.

At Seeds, a community organisation, we met its director, Raed Dibi, a supporter of the two-state solution, and two young activists, Zaid and Yasmin. The international community shown very big solidarity with the people of Ukraine. And from the very first moment, they denounced 7th of October. But we didn't see the same international community denounce where we are the main victims and where the international community, instead of having a rendezvous with the courage, they prefer to stay in the comfort zone where our people are dying every day. How do you see the future?

Very blurred. You cannot see it. It's very gloomy. Because you don't really know what will happen in the next hour. Not in the next week, but in the next hour. We spoke to some young Israelis, similar ages, 20s, to you guys, and they said, look, we cannot trust the Palestinians after the 7th of October. What's your response? I would say the same, because after what they did with the 7th of October, the killing of the Palestinian in Gaza, and also not Gaza, in the West Bengal. So getting Palestinians, kids being shot in the head, elderly people, women walking in the checkpoints and then being killed. All I can say is that I can't think the same.

I cannot trust an Israeli, especially IDF. Voices of some young Palestinians and Israelis, and they were talking to Jeremy Bowen. Florida is preparing for the second ferocious storm to hit in as many weeks, as Hurricane Milton is due to make landfall on Wednesday. U.S. Air Force planes known as Hurricane Hunters have been flying into it to take measurements. And as we record this podcast, it's again been upgraded to a Category 5, the highest on the scale. President Biden has been warning it could be the worst storm to hit

the U.S. state in a century. Most importantly, I urge everyone, everyone currently located in Hurricane Milton's path to listen to local officials and follow safety instructions. You all have been reporting on the highways, shoulders being open, everybody's heading out. And if you're under evacuation orders, you should evacuate now, now, now. You should have already evacuated. It's a matter of life and death, and that's not hyperbole. It's a matter of life and death. The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, said it's still not known exactly where the hurricane will make landfall, but its effects will be felt on both coasts. There's pretty much warnings or watches on almost the entire Florida peninsula. A lot of attention is being paid to the storm surge on the west coast

of the Florida peninsula, and rightfully so, because that's probably the most serious threat to people's lives and property. But this storm is going to go across the Florida Peninsula, and it's going to exit on the east coast of Florida into the Atlantic Ocean, likely still as a hurricane. Our correspondent Gordon Carrera is in the city of Tampa on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and he gave Nick Miles this update. The mood is certainly one of real concern about what's coming. There's a sense that time is ticking ahead of Milton's arrival. Now, actually, the city is eerily quiet. There's not many people, not many vehicles on the streets.

But the few people you do see are there because they're boarding up their homes or their businesses to try and prepare for what they know could be a very serious storm surge, which will hit with Milton's arrival and with the waters, you know, coming up potentially up to 12, maybe even 15 feet. It's astonishing. I mean, really, because I mean, they're warning people don't think you can even just go upstairs in a building. If you're going to stay, they're saying go up, you know, and have an axe to be able to access your roof because you might need it to be able to get out if you get trapped. So, you know, the warnings are pretty clear that people should be concerned about this and should get out

and I think people are taking those warnings seriously. So no wonder they are heeding those warnings. Where are they going to and are those places prepared for them? We saw lines of traffic going out of Tampa today as we came in and there was a sense that this was looking serious and people were putting in place evacuation plans to go to places further away in order to deal with that. But I think the other thing that's noticeable where I am

is you've still got the damage here from a previous hurricane, Hurricane Helene two weeks ago and just around me I can see I mean there's tons of debris from people's homes kind of flooring, you know furniture I can see, a mattress you know people's possessions which is just lying on the streets and that's the aftermath of two weeks ago and the worry is another storm surge is going to pick up all that debris and throw it around and do even more damage. And I think, you know, Helene was bad, but I think they know Milton is worse. And so people are moving out of Tampa and the place is really emptying out fast. Gordon Carrera speaking to us from Tampa in Florida. The head of MI5, the UK's domestic intelligence agency, has warned of the most complex and interconnected threat the UK has ever seen. In a rare briefing to the media,

Ken McCollum said Russia was trying to commit mayhem in Europe and that both Russia and Iran were using organised criminals to do their dirty work for them. The UK's leading role in supporting Ukraine means we loom large in the fevered imagination of Putin's regime. The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets. We've seen arson, sabotage and more. Dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness. Our security correspondent Frank Gardner listened to that speech by the MI5 chief, and he told us more about the changes Russia appears to be making in its clandestine operations. from Europe. Britain expelled the last Russian military intelligence officer from the Russian embassy in Kensington early this year, which has meant that if Russia wants to get up to anything, according to him, they have to use proxies. And he said that's exactly what they are doing, that both Russia and Iran are turning to criminal gangs, recruiting members online,

offering money to do what he calls their dirty work for them. I'm sure this will be denied by Russia, incidentally. And he says that, look, you know, because there is this war going on in Ukraine and Britain is very much helping Ukraine defend itself, we are in Putin's sights and therefore this stuff is going on. The GRU, by the way, is the formal acronym for Russian military intelligence. The same people who Britain believes carried out the Novichok nerve attacks, nerve agent attacks in Salisbury, if you remember, in March 2018, that they were targeting Sergei Skripal, a former KGB officer. And he also highlighted the continuing threat from terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and IS. Yes, he said that terrorism hasn't gone away, that if anything, it's sort of resurgent, that IS, so-called Islamic State Group, are looking to, in his words, export terrorism back here.

He said it's changed. In the old days, there would be a sort of central command that would send out people, as they did in 2015, if you remember the horrific Bataclan attacks in Paris, it's not like that anymore. It's more the biggest threat, they say, comes from lone individuals who are radicalized online by material they see online. And on the terrorism front, really worryingly, he said that one in eight, 13% of counterterrorism investigations that they do are children under 18s. And that is because they are viewing material online. There's nobody policing them, as it were, in their bedrooms or on their laptops and on their phones.

And this is the head of MI5, of course. This isn't just a problem for the UK, though. How are other governments trying to deal with changing tactics and this sort of threat? Well, you're right. I mean, the thing that has improved, I think, markedly in the last few years is cooperation between different states. It used to be very stovepiped. Intelligence officers don't like or spies don't like sharing material very widely. So whenever there's been, for example, a NATO intelligence centre, nobody gives it anything of any value, because they just think, well,

it's just going to be, you know, if it's given to, say, the Hungarians, there's a risk that it might end up in Moscow and so on. But there is much better cooperation between different states. That was Frank Gardner. TikTok is being sued by more than a dozen US states for harming young people's mental health. The lawsuits allege the video sharing app is designed to be addictive and keep children and teenagers glued to the screen, as well as causing depression and body dysmorphia. Our New York business correspondent, Michelle Flurry, told us more. Well, the lawsuits were filed separately in 13 states,

including 14 states, the District of Columbia, and they argue that TikTok violated consumer protection laws with regards to children in terms of how their data is handled. This bipartisan group of attorneys general also complained about the algorithm saying it was too addictive, that they kept teens there for hours and hours in ways that were detrimental to their mental health, whether that was things from depression or self-image. And in fact, one of the examples Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York, gave was about the use of beauty filters, which lets users appear thinner and younger. And she said that that has been harmful, in particular to young girls,

causing body issues, encouraging eating disorders. New York investigators also talked about TikTok viral videos and the challenges where people are encouraged to kind of do an activity which at times can be dangerous. And they gave an example of a 15-year-old boy in Manhattan who rode on the roof of a subway car and ended up dying. And his mother later found out that he had been prior to that watching TikTok videos about subway surfing. So these are the sort of harms, they say, that are contributing to a much broader problem here in America, and that is a sort of mental health crisis amongst teens. And what does TikTok and its owners say? Well, they disagree with the claims. They've called them inaccurate and misleading. They say And what does TikTok and its owners say? They also say they voluntarily launched safety features like default screen time limits.

But despite the fact that the attorneys general and TikTok have been in conversation for the past two years, both sides seem to have reached an impasse. Michelle Fleury in New York. Still to come in this podcast, what happened when some pieces of art went missing at a gallery in the Netherlands. I started some detective work and eventually I found them in a bin bag. Life and death were two very realistic coexisting possibilities in my life. I didn't even think I'd make it to like my 16th birthday, to be honest. I grew up being scared of who I was.

Any one of us at any time can be affected by mental health and addictions. Just taking that first step makes a big difference. It's the hardest step. But CAMH was there from the beginning. Everyone deserves better mental health care. To hear more stories of recovery, visit camh.ca. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like

Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. To China now, and another announcement that more senior officials have been kicked out of the ruling Communist Party for corruption. This time, the former Justice Minister Tang Yijun is accused of helping family members obtain business deals while also taking bribes for himself. And he's just one of many ongoing corruption cases in what's become a key centrepiece of Xi Jinping's

time in power. Kerry Allen is BBC Monitoring's China social media analyst, and she told us more. So there are a lot of newspaper reports today saying that China's anti-graft agency, which is the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, has been given approval by China's central government to investigate at least three senior officials. And we're talking about officials at a provincial level. So yes, along with Tang Yijun, there's also a former political advisor for the Xinjiang region, and the former deputy head of Inner Mongolia's standing committee. And again, there's similar accusations. So things like accepting gifts, money, vouchers,

or taking advantage of their power to seek benefits. I mean, this all seems really routine, doesn't it, Kerry? What about Xi Jinping's campaign against corruption? He started it when he first came into power. It's one of the first things he announced, but no one, I think, realised at the time that it would drag on for so long. Well, absolutely. I mean, it is so routine that there are projections that there have been around 2.3 million government officials that have been prosecuted over the years. And Xi Jinping came, he became leader back in 2013. And yes, it was one of his big campaigns at the time to crack down on what he described as tigers and flies, which are both high-level officials and local civil servants.

So this is something that's been going on for a long period of time. And it's just so common for me to see media reports that say, yes, another official today is under investigation. Yeah, 2.3 million. That's just a staggering number. Now, you follow Chinese public opinion very closely. Is anyone questioning publicly how and why officials are so bold as to engage in corruption, even after Xi Jinping has punished so many already? Well, it's so difficult for people to do so because China's media environment is so tightly

controlled. And social media platforms like Sina Weibo, they're also heavily monitored. And if anybody tries to voice an opinion that's critical about China's leadership, and even if they're talking very small level officials, still, they are people in China's leadership. So any kind of comments that will be critical of government officials, they're very, very quickly wiped. And it's suspected that the government pays people to post messages that are positive of the government. So, yeah, if anyone wants to post anything critical, very, very difficult. Kerry Allen was talking to Celia Hatton.

Brazil's Supreme Court has lifted a ban on the social media platform X after it agreed to pay a hefty fine and block the profiles of dozens of people accused of spreading disinformation. Our South America correspondent Ione Wells explains. A Supreme Court judge had banned X in Brazil for failing to block the accounts of dozens of supporters of the former right-wing President Bolsonaro that were accused of spreading disinformation and for failing to name a new legal representative in the country. Elon Musk, X's owner, had responded furiously to Justice Mar new legal representative in the country. Elon Musk,

X's owner, had responded furiously to Justice Marais and accused him of censorship. Now the judge has authorised X to return to Brazil after the company settled millions of dollars worth of fines for failing to comply with previous court orders. Ione Wells, a computer scientist who warned that artificial intelligence could pose an existential threat to humanity has been jointly awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Physics. Professor Geoffrey Hinton, often touted as the godfather of AI, shares the honour with US academic John Hopfield for their pioneering work on machine learning, which powers AI. Celia Hatton spoke to Professor Hinton in Canada and began by asking about the phone call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, telling him he'd won. So my first thought was, how do I know this isn't a spoof call?

Because I wasn't expecting this. I never expected to win the Nobel Prize in physics. It means a lot. In particular, it means that people will take my warnings about AI safety more seriously. According to what they said in their press conference, it was for two pieces of work. One was work with Terry Sanofsky on something called Boltzmann machines that were showing how to take things called Hopfield nets, which are a kind of neural network,

and make them able to learn more complicated things. And Terry and I came up with a very neat algorithm. But that's not what led to the big engineering breakthroughs. So I also did work with another of my mentors called David Rummelhart on something called backpropagation. And backpropagation is a learning procedure that's used in all the neural networks now. And that's what's allowed us to build these great big chatbots. I wonder if you can tell us about your safety concerns regarding AI. Probably sometime in the next 20 years, we'll be able to build things more intelligent than ourselves. And we've never been there before. We have no idea what that's going to be like. Most people can't really imagine it. And a worry I have, and many other researchers have, is that if we build things more intelligent than ourselves, what's to stop them taking over? We're people and what we care about is people. So we'd rather stay in control. But we don't know

how to do that. And so we need young researchers to be with flexible minds to be working on that problem right now to make sure we can stay in control. And we need governments to force the big companies to provide them the resources they need. So if you look at what's happened with OpenAI, initially, they were very concerned about safety. But now they're much more concerned with profits, and most of their safety researchers have left. And that's a bad thing for the long-term future of humanity. You also worked at Google for a decade. You left Google so that you could speak out more widely. Are people listening to you now?

Yes, they are. I was impressed by the fact that governments did listen. It's not like climate change. With climate change, we know exactly what to do, which is stop burning carbon. It's just the big oil companies don't want to do that. With this, we don't really know how to ensure we stay in control. Professor Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate. Now we've all heard the sad tales of people who've accidentally thrown away valuable things, wedding rings, family heirlooms, that guy who's still

trying to recover his hard drive full of Bitcoin from a landfill in Wales. And now the Netherlands is home to the latest case, after a work of art that looked like two empty beer cans was thrown in the bin by a new staff member. The piece, entitled All the Good Times We Spent Together, was displayed on the floor. Our correspondent Anna Holligan takes up the story. Known for its playful boundary boundary-blurring approach to art, the Laam Museum, just outside Amsterdam, often displays pieces in unexpected locations to keep visitors guessing. Lovette's artwork, two dented, hand-painted beer cans in red, black, white and gold acrylic, was on show in a lift.

But a new technician, unfamiliar with the museum's unconventional style, promptly binned what he assumed was yesterday's leftovers. As soon as the curator, Elisa Vandenberg, realised the artwork was missing, a search ensued. I immediately knew that one of my colleagues or the elevator mechanic would have had the artworks because no one else can reach the spot where the artworks were placed. I started some detective work and just walked through every step that the lift mechanic would have taken in our building and eventually I found them in a bin bag. Lovette's meticulously crafted cans were eventually recovered

and the mishap has boosted their appeal. Now temporarily displayed on a traditional plinth, the cans have become the museum's main attraction, a reminder that in the world of art, true value lies in the eye of the beholder. Anna Holligan reporting. And that's it from us for now, but there will be a new edition

of the Global News Podcast later. If you would like to comment on this edition or the topics covered in it, do please send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at Global News Pod. This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll. The producer was Stephanie Prentice.

Our editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jackie Leonard. And until next time, goodbye. Life and death were two very realistic coexisting possibilities in my life. I didn't even think I'd make it to like my 16th birthday, to be honest. I grew up being scared of who I was. Any one of us at any time can be affected by mental health and addictions.

Just taking that first step makes a big difference. It's the hardest step. But CAMH was there from the beginning. Everyone deserves better mental health care. To hear more stories of recovery, visit CAMH was there from the beginning. Everyone deserves better mental health care. To hear more stories of recovery, visit CAMH.ca. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads?

Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts.