Global News Podcast - Roof collapse at Dominican Republic nightclub kills scores of people
Episode Date: April 9, 2025Hundreds of people were inside the Jet Set nightclub in the Dominican Republic's capital, Santo Domingo, when the roof collapsed. Also: major David Hockney art exhibition opens in Paris....
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
I'm Janet Jalil and in the early hours of Wednesday the 9th of April these are our main
stories.
Rescuers are searching for survivors after a roof collapse at a music venue in the Dominican
Republic killed scores of people.
The Trump administration escalates its trade war with China with tariffs of more than 100%
coming into effect today.
The UN Secretary General accuses Israel of violating the Geneva Conventions in Gaza by
blocking aid supplies.
Also in this podcast, we talk to the renowned British artist David Hockney about his biggest
ever exhibition. I mean I've always said I want my work to be seen but I don't have to be seen.
We start this podcast in the Dominican Republic, where throughout the day the number of people
killed by the sudden collapse of a nightclub roof has been steadily rising. As we record
this podcast, at least 66 people are confirmed to have died and more than 150 have been injured.
It's thought that many more may be buried alive by the huge mounds of rubble.
Rescue workers are continuing to search for survivors at the music venue in the capital
Santo Domingo.
The president, Luis Abinader, said they weren't giving up hope.
The main objective is still to save lives, which is what we're doing.
We've been following this tragedy minute by minute so that all the resources and emergency
rescue workers can be available, but we still have a way to go.
We have trust in God that we will still rescue more people alive from these ruins.
I heard more from our Americas editor
Leonardo Ruscha about what could have caused this disaster. It's very strange
that the whole roof collapsed in one go. That's what people are saying that there
is something wrong because you might have bits of the roof for collapsing
people running the other direction. The building was a 1970s building that began as a disco,
a nightclub and then became a music event, you know, a venue later where they had concerts.
So there are many people online, there are people I saw on local TV, neighbors saying what happened
is that there was a fire there a few years ago. I don't know if there was structural damage.
There were reports of water leaks and also because it was closed during the COVID pandemic
that when it reopened, it reopened with new infrastructure on the roof, air conditioning,
generators and that might have put a strain on the roof.
It's been investigated and what witnesses said, survivors, is that they thought it was
an earthquake.
It felt like an earthquake trembling and the whole thing came down on them.
There's dozens of people who are outside, they're praying, they're sharing pictures,
asking for people to inform.
Is my husband, is my daughter, is my brother here or in some hospital?
So the rescue efforts are going on and we have to say that the Dominican Republic has
a history of hurricanes and earthquakes and they have a very developed team, very well
trained and very well equipped and they're doing all they can to find survivors.
Leonora Roscha, as we record this podcast, the US President Donald Trump is poised to
further escalate his trade war with China in a move that will reverberate
around a world still stunned by the past few days of steep stock market falls. The White
House says the US is imposing another 50% tariff on Chinese imports from today to punish
Beijing for imposing its own reciprocal tariffs on US goods. This means that Chinese products entering the US
will face duties of more than 100%.
The White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt,
said this could all change if China decided
to reach out to Mr. Trump.
He believes that China wants to make a deal with the United
States.
He believes China has to make a deal with the United States.
It was a mistake for China to retaliate.
The president, when America is punched, he punches back harder.
That's why there will be 104 percent tariffs going into effect on China tonight at midnight.
But the president believes that she and China want to make a deal.
They just don't know how to get that started.
And the president also wanted me to tell all of you that if China reaches out to make a
deal, he'll be incredibly gracious, but he's going to do what's best for the American people.
But while the White House says around 70 countries have contacted it wanting to negotiate deals
before tariffs on them also come into effect, so far the world's second biggest economy has remained
defiant, with China vowing to fight to the end in its trade war with the United States.
Our Washington correspondent Anthony Zirka reports on a likely fallout.
China is one of America's largest trading partners and so you can strike deals with Bangladesh,
you can strike deals with South Korea, even the EU, Japan.
But if there's a trade war with China, that is going to put at risk the global economy
and also have a very real domestic impact here in the United States.
So while it does seem like Donald Trump is making progress in some areas, there seems
to be room for accommodation.
If China doesn't play ball and China doesn't seem to want to play ball, at least for now,
that is going to be really difficult to overcome.
I think there is tremendous unease and you're starting to see it publicly voiced. Ted Cruz,
a Republican senator from Texas, was openly critical of Donald Trump's trade policies,
warned that it could lead to economic harm. You saw other Republicans join together to sponsor
legislation in the Senate that would curtail Donald Trump's trade powers, give Congress an ability to have to sign off on any tariffs that extend longer than a
set period of time. So there's nervousness. You know, China is thinking
that they may be able to tolerate economic pain longer than the United
States just because there are politicians in the United States that
are open to or going to have to answer to the voters in a matter of days or
months or years.
Anthony Zirka.
So what's it like for stockbrokers in the trading floor who are having to grapple with
these head spinning financial twists and turns?
Mark Lohan has been speaking to three of them.
Jack Stickley, a stockbroker at Morgan's Financial in Brisbane in Australia.
Luca Della Rocca, head of trading at Intermonte in Milan in
Italy and to Steve Burns, a stockbroker in the US state of Florida. First, Jack Stickley.
Yeah, it's certainly been a busy couple of days. First and foremost, we really try our
best to get on the front foot and talk to clients. That's really the best way to communicate
how you're seeing things
and making sure that each client is comfortable with what they've got in their portfolio.
If we're deploying a client's portfolio, we're making sure that we're keeping updated with
how we're going with that. But yeah, communication is the utmost, most important factor in days
like we've seen the last couple of days.
I mean, without asking you to break your confidence of your clients, I'm
guessing that some of them may have been losing a pretty significant amount of
money in the last few days.
Yeah, no doubt. If we get a phone call from a client and given the last couple
of days saying, sell the portfolio, I'm really struggling to handle this
volatility. We haven't really
done our job in that initial onboarding phase. We do spend a fair bit of time running through
with each client what their appetite for risk is and really trying to build out a portfolio
that is tailored towards their needs. But obviously, that's a perfect world.
Are we talking about some clients losing millions just in a matter of minutes?
Oh, look, I don't want to dive too far into the numbers.
But yeah, look, most of my clients, it's not the first time that they've seen these type of market drawdowns.
I mean, it wasn't too long ago that we had COVID.
Luca, what's it been like for you over the last few days watching all of this?
Yes, I think it has been pretty much similar to what Cech has described. In particular,
we do focus on institutional clients. So yes, indeed, they're very much used to the situation.
They might be, as you mentioned, losing significant chunks of money, but it is part of their business.
They're definitely used to it, which means probably on our side, we need to be able to offer also
a bit of, let's say, moral support to the PMs and traders.
Steve, has it been stressful for you? I mean, $6 trillion were wiped off the US stock market since the tariff announcement
last Wednesday.
In my world and personally, I leaned so much in the active trading world towards my own
risk management stop losses since I'm active. So I had to two drawdowns and two of the drops,
but I had such a low cost basis when I bought the first dip that I didn't get hit as hard
as many other people did.
It was a good lick on one day, but it was one day.
While other trend followers and swing traders that I've seen held for multiple days and
took much bigger hits on this, I've seen a lot of trauma in the active trading world,
especially for the long bias traders that were buying stocks and holding stocks
for multiple days or buying the initial dip, because this was so traumatizing because it
was like we had the deep seek and we had the AI crash initially where so many of the AI
stocks 50% down from their peaks before the tariff event and the tariff event escalated
everything.
That was the view of stockbrokers on the current
market turmoil. It's been known for some time now that Moscow has been using thousands of North
Korean soldiers to try to oust Ukrainian forces who've seized territory in the Russian region of
Kursk and in Ukraine itself using attack drones from Iran. But now the Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky
has made the dramatic claim that two Chinese soldiers fighting alongside
Russian troops have been captured in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region. He said
they had Chinese documents and bank cards and he's demanded an answer from
Beijing. In a social media post that included a video of one of the men speaking Mandarin, Mr. Zelensky appealed to the United States to intervene.
I believe this is an important moment that we need to discuss with our
partners urgently. I understand that we are a strong country but we cannot fight
multiple countries at the same time, all of whom want something on our land. We really
hope that after this situation the Americans will talk more with the
Ukrainians and then with the Russians. We truly hope the Chinese side will also respond.
I asked our correspondent in Kyiv, James Waterhouse, about the
significance of this announcement and if it was the first time Ukraine had
accused China of supplying troops to Russia. It is the first time Ukraine had accused China of supplying
troops to Russia.
It is the first kind of claim. I mean, for President Zelensky, he is certainly looking
to frame this as significant. Why? Well, he wants to reiterate what he sees as the widening
geopolitical footprint of Russia's invasion. He wants to say to America, and he did so
in a press conference, he wants to say to America, you need to pay attention to what is happening. You need to
consider your response if Beijing is now helping Moscow in its invasion. But there is no evidence,
according to Western officials, that Beijing is directly helping Russian troops. And we
don't know what those Chinese soldiers may have been doing. They might have been in in Ukraine in a mercenary role
or they could have simply been mobilized from inside Russia. So there are a lot of
unanswered questions, but Zelensky did post a video showing an Asian soldier in a Russian uniform
handcuffed talking to his captors. So it's a sizable significant accusation
but at the moment, you know, we
wait to hear to see what Beijing and Washington say in response. But there's no further evidence
despite Kiev saying there is and that there may well be more Chinese soldiers fighting
on Ukrainian soil.
And just remind us what Beijing's position is on the war in Ukraine.
Well, they have always stopped short of condemning the invasion,
but nor have they spoken publicly in support.
Now, before the full-scale invasion, Beijing and Moscow,
President Xi and Vladimir Putin announced a relationship without boundaries
against what they described as external threats, i.e. America.
They are united ideologicallyologically and in the three years
since their economic ties have only deepened. You know, China now makes up
the bulk of Russian imports and Western officials are worried about Chinese
technology flowing to the front lines in the form of missiles or other weapons
systems. It is a relationship that has changed but has become
all the more significant for both. So for this relationship to spill into direct military
involvement like we've seen with North Korea, I don't think there is enough evidence to
say that at this stage. And in the case of North Korea, yes, a few thousand troops were
deployed but it was the provision of ammunition which proved to be significant in some areas of the battlefield. So of course it would be significant if this
was more. And I think what's interesting is how President Zelensky is framing this. He
is trying to generate that urgency to keep the pressure on America to care about Ukraine.
James Waterhouse in Kyiv. The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has strongly condemned
Israel's ongoing blockade of Gaza, saying it violates the Geneva Conventions. Mr. Guterres
said the floodgates of horror have reopened, leaving civilians in what he called an endless
death loop. He rejected a new Israeli proposal to control aid deliveries in Gaza. Let me be clear, we will not participate in any arrangement
that does not fully respect humanitarian principles,
humanitarian, humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality.
With more, here's Imogen Folks in Geneva where several UN bodies are based.
No supplies, humanitarian or commercial, have been allowed into Gaza for more than a month.
The Fourth Geneva Convention requires Israel as the occupying power to ensure the population has food and medicine.
Hospitals and health workers must be protected. Essential services like water and
sanitation must be maintained. None of this, Antonio Guterres said, is happening
in Gaza. He urged a renewal of the ceasefire, pointing out that previous
pauses in fighting had allowed Israeli hostages to be released, and he paid
tribute to aid workers in Gaza, describing them as heroes who were doing all they could
to help people. He demanded an independent investigation into the deaths of 15 aid workers
who were killed by Israeli forces last month.
Imogen folks, now to the country with the world's lowest birth rate, South Korea. With
declining fertility rates, businesses there
are facing a serious shortage of workers. So the government is now looking at increasing
immigration, a move that's not exactly popular with some South Koreans. David Kan visited
the country to find out more.
Osan in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea is a city with amongst the highest percentage of foreign
workers in the country, mainly from other parts of Asia.
And it's here where I meet Jones Galang, a Filipino missionary who is also the head
of the Osan Migrant Workers Center.
Compared to other countries, Korea is very popular.
Why?
It is very near to Asian people and the salary is more compared to other countries
like Saudi, Hong Kong, UAE, like that. Especially the non-skilled workers. The second, of course,
it is a push from their own countries because no job and poverty. So, for example, the Filipinos,
nobody will come here if we can find work in our country.
It is very ashamed.
So, okay.
And then, of course, the third one is Korea needs workers.
Korea needs workers to maintain his image
in the national and international market
and then to maintain the economic flow.
So, they need workers. And then for the workers, Korea is like a heaven.
Korea does really need its workers, especially young workers.
Jaehyun Yoo is a professor of social welfare studies at Gacheon University in South Korea.
He also sits on the advisory board for the presidential committee on aging society and
population policy. the advisory board for the Presidential Committee on Aging Society and Population Policy.
South Korea now has more job seekers in their 60s than those in their 20s. With the ongoing
low birth rate, fewer teenagers are transitioning into adulthood. It's inevitable that the working
age population will drop significantly. That is, unless we have immigration. It'll take
time for the birth rate to increase, and even if more babies are born, it will
take 20, 30 years for them to enter the workforce.
On the other hand, immigrants can make an immediate visible impact, quickly contributing
to the economy."
And the South Korean government is keenly aware of this.
In August last year, Hyemi Yoo, senior secretary of law birthrate, spoke about immigration
in an interview with the national radio station KBS.
One potential solution to address the rapid decline in working age population is to utilize
foreign labor.
I believe we need to develop a medium-to-long-term plan for this.
Foreign workers have already been contributing significantly by filling the short-term labor
shortages.
However, we need to look beyond this.
While concerns remain, those wanting to move to South Korea have been steadily increasing,
with the immigration application numbers almost tripling between 2022 and 2024.
A welcome increase for a country that's facing depopulation unprecedented anywhere else in
the world.
That report by David Cann in South Korea.
Still to come...
Dire wolves went extinct more than 10,000 years ago.
It's thought they died out because of the decline of large herbivores
such as mammoths as well as climatic change.
Now it's being claimed that they have been brought back into existence.
Is that true?
Unless you've been hiding under a very large pixelated rock, you've probably heard of Minecraft. It's the best-selling video game of all time and the franchise's first feature
film is in cinemas now. But how much do you know about the game's creator, software
developer Marcus Person? Find out about the man behind Minecraft on Good Bad
Billionaire, the podcast exploring the minds, motives and money of some of the
world's richest individuals. Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.
Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
You're listening to the Global News Podcast. The social media giant Metta has been facing
increased scrutiny from various governments, including Britain and the US, for not doing
enough to protect young people online. In response, it's now expanding parental controls already available on Instagram to Facebook and Messenger.
The restricted teen accounts, which have been on Instagram since last September,
will now be available on Facebook and Messenger in the UK, the US, Australia and Canada.
Our North America technology correspondent, Lily Jamali, told me more.
What we're seeing is the expansion of recent changes that were made by Meta to Instagram
for teen accounts, now going to Facebook and Messenger. So it won't just be Instagram where
users will see the types of changes that were introduced last year. So what are those changes?
Going forward, we'll see built in restrictions on who can get
in touch with teens, what they see on the platform, as well as limits being placed on how much time
they can spend on these platforms. There are also expected to be changes to Instagram itself coming
in the next few months. So teens under 16 will be blocked from going live unless their parents allow
it. Parents will also need to turn off a feature for that to happen.
So that's another thing that's coming through.
And teens under the age of 16 will also be required to have parental permission
to turn off a feature that automatically blurs images that contain
potential nudity in their DMs or direct messages.
So taken together, what the company is
really doing here is making teen accounts more restricted by default.
I suppose the big question is, is this enough? I think we ought to frame this
for what it is, which is a preemptive approach by Meta to basically put in
guardrails on its own before governments do it for them. The announcement about
those Instagram teen accounts
was made notably right around the time
when kids online safety legislation
was looking like it was making traction last summer
here in the United States.
That actually didn't end up going anywhere,
but Meta had made this announcement
and they rolled it out with these Instagram teen accounts
with slick advertisements that were plastered on billboards and they took out full-page
ads in major newspapers across the US. The Molly Rose Foundation which was set
up after the death of a young girl back in 2017 has taken an advocacy role in
this space. They've been saying that there's been relative silence from CEO
Mark Zuckerberg on what the
changes have been so far.
How have the changes that the company has instituted done?
Have they actually worked?
What kind of sensitive content is actually being tackled here?
Parents still don't know.
For example, settings stop their kids from being algorithmically recommended certain kinds of content, content deemed inappropriate or harmful by a lot of parents.
Others say this is a step in the right direction.
This is an area that a lot of these social media companies have been remiss to tackle on their own.
And I think there have been some expressions of appreciation that Metta has done something instead of just sitting
on its hands.
Lily Jamali. Prince Harry, the younger son of Britain's King Charles, who's made a new
life in California over the past few years, made a rare public appearance in the UK on
Tuesday in a British court. He's fighting the government's decision to downgrade his
security during his visits to Britain in the wake of his dramatic split from the British royal family and his subsequent move with his wife, Megan, to North America in 2020.
Prince Harry says his fears about security are the reason he rarely returns to the UK now.
But the government says he is still getting protection, albeit not that of a working royal.
Speaking to us from outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, our reporter Charlotte
Gallagher told us why the Prince was pursuing this case.
He thinks the security isn't quite tough enough as he would like because he still says that
he faces threats not just from being the son of the King but also the fact that he served
in the British Army in Afghanistan and actually fairly recently
there was a death threat made against him by a terror group so he says look
with these threats against me it's just not right that I don't have the same
security as other members of the royal family.
And this comes as Prince Harry is embroiled in yet another dispute over the
charity Centibale that he founded in honour of his late mother, Princess Diana.
It does. I mean, I think this is quite a difficult time for Prince Harry.
This charity was really close to his heart and it appears to be crumbling.
There was this row between the chairwoman of the charity and also the trustees.
They resigned, she stayed, and they wanted her to resign and them to stay.
Prince Harry stepped back from his role as well and the charity commission are going to be looking into it.
There's going to be an investigation into this charity.
I mean this was a charity that was set up in order to help children particularly that had been affected by HIV in Southern Africa.
And at the moment
it doesn't appear that there seems to be any resolution to this row about this
charity, I mean there's accusations that have been made by the chairwoman of racism,
misogyny, not particularly involving Prince Harry but other members of this
charity so it's been a very bitter row indeed and at the heart of it is a
charity that was set up that was supposed to help people.
And Prince Harry's father, King Charles, is currently on a state visit to Italy. Do we
know if the Prince is going to be visiting any other members of the royal family during
his trip to Britain?
We have no idea and it would be very rare for us to find out about any other visits
if it wasn't his father or perhaps his brother. Now a couple of people did shout, some journalists did shout at Prince Harry
when he was going into the court saying have you seen your father? Because there
is a chance that there could have been like a little bit of a crossover before
King Charles left and when Prince Harry was in the country. When he comes here it
tends to be an in-and-out trip, he doesn't really stay here for any longer
than he needs to but yes it's very interesting timing isn't it that the King isn't in the country and Prince Harry is here. I mean we
believe the last time they met in person was February last year when they had a
45-minute meeting after the King was diagnosed with cancer. I mean they have I
think a very different relationship to the one they had you know even a decade
ago when Prince Harry was very much at the centre of
the royal family and very much at the centre of public life in this country.
Charlotte Gallagher. They've been extinct for more than 10,000 years, but now it's
being claimed that dire wolves have been brought back into existence. The species, made famous
by the TV series Game of Thrones, were much bigger than their closest living relative, the grey wolf.
Scientists in the United States at the Texas-based company Colossal Biosciences say they have
used gene editing to create three healthy pups.
But as Theo White explains, experts say these beasts aren't quite what they're claimed to
be.
Dire wolves went extinct more than 10,000 years ago.
It's thought they died out because of the decline of large herbivores,
such as mammoths, as well as climatic change and competition from other species.
Now, Texas-based Colossal Biosciences claims to have brought them back.
That is the howling of the six-month-old pups Romulus and Remus and a three-month-old girl
called Khaleesi. To create them, scientists took DNA from a 13,000-year-old dire wolf
tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull. They identified genes they believed accounted for the species'
distinctive characteristics, such as its powerful build and white coat, and inserted these into The research team then made embryos which were put in the wombs of domestic dogs and brought to term.
Pontus Skoglund is the group leader of the Francis Crick Institute's ancient genomics
laboratory.
He says these hybrid beasts can't be called direwolves.
They made 20 changes seen in the direwolf DNA or in the DNA of the wild animals.
They were then put in the wombs of domestic dogs and brought to term. Genomics Laboratory. He says these hybrid beasts can't be called dire wolves.
They made 20 changes seen in the dire wolf DNA or inspired by how dire wolf
looked but really there would have been millions of differences between the gray
wolf, you know, the normal wolf people think about and the dire wolf.
And there's another problem. Even if they were dire wolves, some scientists argue they
wouldn't know how to act like them without parents or a pack to learn from.
Theo White. A blockbuster exhibition of the work of the British artist David Hockney opens
today in the French capital, Paris. The 87-year-old has long been renowned for his vivid use of
colour, joyful celebrations of springtime and iconic images of Californian swimming pools. The artist who still smokes
despite his health problems told the BBC's culture editor, Katie Razzle, that
when he was first approached two years ago to do the show he hadn't expected he
would still be alive to see and enjoy the opening of his largest ever exhibition. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha sitting in this room, it is. It's your biggest show ever.
Do you think it's your best ever?
Yes.
I am nearly 88 years old, so it should be.
And the last painting in it was made just this year.
There were moments as he struggled with health problems
that David Hockney didn't think he'd
live to see his new show. But Britain's best loved artist tells me he still paints every
day and remains defiant about his smoking habit.
I'm still a smoker, a happy smoker, fed up of bossy people telling you what to do.
How many people are you expecting?
I don't care how many come.
I mean, I'm very, very pleased with it.
This is about 70 years' work in here.
I'm looking at the very first picture in the show.
It's a portrait from 1955 of David Hockney's father
who is sitting in a bare room.
He's wearing a dark frock coat
and it's very somber coloring.
And you can see just over his shoulder
the edge of a picture frame.
One of the first times, perhaps the first time
where Hockney was playing with this idea
of a picture in a picture.
In amongst the show's celebration of Yorkshire landscapes, Hockney's many joyful representations
of spring in Normandy, the vast LA vistas and those swimming pools are around 60 portraits,
mainly of family and friends.
David has got a piercing look, you don't really know where he's looking, it's kind of like he's looking through you. His great nephew Richard has
sat for Hockney ever since he was four. He always gets your personality out and
that's why he chooses to paint people that he loves, his family, his friends and
he always likes my cheeky grin. What's it been like for you all to arrive on mass
all the family with him.
I mean the night before we were just sat there, we played five different variations of April in Paris,
the Ella Fitzgerald version, and we got him in the mood, we did the same in the morning.
And I think the painting keeps him alive to be honest, so as long as he paints he's fine.
Downstairs there's these beautiful paintings, the one you did early on at the Royal College of Art we two boys together clinging at a time when being
gay was illegal and then you moved to LA there's this incredible sense of
liberation did it feel like you were at the vanguard of something new I just
moved to LA because I wanted to go there, and somewhere I'm not known.
And that was fine with me.
I mean, I've always said I want my work to be seen,
but I don't have to be seen.
That was the artist David Hockney talking about his new exhibition at the Louis Vuitton
Foundation in Paris.
That's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast
data. If you want to comment on this podcast, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk. This edition was
mixed by Martin Baker. The producer was Liam McShepard. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm
Janet Jaleel. Until next time, goodbye.