Global News Podcast - Saudi Arabia accuses Israel of genocide

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

The Saudi Crown Prince says Israel's actions in Gaza amount to "genocide". Also: COP29 gets underway amid warning 2024 will be hottest year on record, and scientists rethink chances of life on Uranus.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. The head teachers of all the primary schools in the Irish town of Greystones got together. Concerned by anxiety levels among pupils, they asked parents to delay buying their children's smartphones. I'm Beth MacLeod and I'll be asking what the reaction has been from parents and peoples. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts. You're listening to the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway and this edition is published in the early hours of Tuesday, the 12th of November. Saudi Arabia says Israel's actions in Gaza amount to genocide.

The UN climate summit has warned that this year is likely to be the hottest on record. And have scientists all been wrong about Uranus? Also in the podcast. or been wrong about Uranus. Also in the podcast, thousands of young people in China take to the streets in search of dumplings. Last month, a key Trump ally suggested that Israel and Saudi Arabia could reach a deal to normalise their relations by the end of the year. That looks a little less likely after the Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed

bin Salman accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. MBS, as he's known, also called on Israel to respect Iranian sovereignty, despite Saudi Arabia's long-running rivalry with Iran. The Crown Prince was speaking at an emergency summit of Arab and Muslim leaders in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Our security correspondent, Frank Gardner, was there. I asked what he made of the statements coming out

of the meeting. Well, they were very strong. I think this is probably some of the strongest unified Arab and Islamic condemnation of Israel's actions that we've seen so far. And it certainly makes it very unlikely, extremely unlikely that there can be any kind of a formal public rapprochement and full diplomatic recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia. That was always going to be the deal that the U.S. wanted, that Israel wanted, and actually Saudi Arabia wanted, the Saudi rulers wanted prior to October the 7th. But it's looking further and further away at the moment because the Saudis make it very

clear that they must have a pathway to an independent Palestinian state before they can recognize Israel, and that's something ruled out by the current Israeli government. One of the people who was pretty strong in his condemnation of Israel's actions was the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud bin Farhan al-Saoud, and I have the opportunity to ask him a question. Have we been able to stop the conflict in Gaza? Unfortunately, not.

This is a failing of the international community as a whole. Where we have been successful is we have reaffirmed the commitment of the international community to the two-state solution, where the international community primarily has failed, is in actually ending the immediate conflict and putting an end to Israel's aggression. And that's something that really has to happen immediately. I think there is an element here in all of this of domestic consumption. In other words, the rulers who have gathered here today for this one day summit from all over the Arab and Islamic

world, they are very conscious that their own populations are, in many cases, seething with anger at what's going on in Gaza, in Lebanon and elsewhere, but primarily there with a very high death toll in Gaza. So they need to be showing that they are trying to do something about it. The message I'm getting is very much that they want the current rules-based order to change because they think that through the United States, Israel effectively has some kind of a veto on their opinion,

and they want to shout very loudly that that has to change, because I put it to them that, look, you had this summit last year, nothing's changed. If anything, things got worse in the Middle East. They are very much looking to Donald Trump, and I know this is going to sound counterintuitive for a European audience, but to stabilize the area. They see him as somebody who is a strong leader, who's got good relations both with Riyadh here in Saudi Arabia and with the Israelis. And they're looking to him to end these conflicts and restore some stability as they see it.

And yet the election of Donald Trump has led some to suggest that he might give Israel a freer hand in targeting Iran, but I guess Saudi Arabia now wouldn't want that? Yeah, this is a real turnaround this, because up until March last year Saudi Arabia and Iran were the two big regional heavyweight rivals. They didn't like each other, they still don't really trust each other, but as of March last year there's been a China brokered handshake, which has meant that the two countries are accepting that they've got to be good neighbors to each other even though they've got different aims and only yesterday the head of the Saudi

military was in Tehran having talks with his opposite number about deepening their defense cooperation so you're right I don't think Saudi would feel comfortable at all if there is renewed Israeli hostility with an exchange of missiles from Iran to Israel or vice versa." Our security correspondent Frank Gardner in Riyadh. Deadly floods, powerful hurricanes and devastating forest fires. Scientists say the kind of extreme events seen in the past few months will become more likely as a result of climate change. UN weather experts say this year and this decade are set to be the hottest on record. So can the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan do anything about it? A key aim is to reach

an agreement on providing funding to help poorer countries curb greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impact of global warming. The head of the Association of Small Island States is Dr Pao Luturu. Everyone is expecting this COP to be the finance COP. This is an issue that is of critical importance. We do need the resources to mitigate and adapt to the adverse impact of climate change. It's really about our survival. It's very possible within the next 10, 20 years, some of these countries will disappear. But the meeting is set to be overshadowed by fears that Donald Trump will make good

on his promise to quote, drill baby drill for oil. So what is at stake? Let's get the view from California and first the Antarctic. My name is Tom Chitson and I'm currently living and working at the British Antarctic Surveys, rather a research station. You don't usually associate rain with Antarctica but here the number of rainy days per year is rising. This in turn is decreasing survival rates of seabird chicks, as they freeze to death before developing their waterproof feathers. The rain is also affecting the melting rate of snow, and we have observed the retreating of local glaciers,

leading to more hazardous travel around the local area. Marine life here is dominated by phytoplankton blooms that fuel the ecosystem. These blooms are highly sensitive to sea temperature changes and as a result some species are becoming less common whilst others thrive in new environments. My name is Alex Wigglesworth and I'm an environment reporter with the Los Angeles Times. In many ways California is on the front lines of climate change. In the summer that included the fourth largest wildfire to hit the state which destroyed more than 700 buildings in Northern California. And we now have a devastating fire that's burned through several neighborhoods in Southern California. Our fire seasons have

become more of a year-round occurrence. Although earlier this year we were in a much different place, we had some devastating storms. San Diego saw catastrophic flooding in February. Heavy rain and snow caused floods and landslides in multiple places around the state in March. And experts say these extreme shifts from wet to dry, from fires to floods, are going to continue to become more common as the climate continues to warm. The situation in California and Antarctica. Well, COP29 opened on Monday and after managing to resolve a row over the summit's agenda, the delegates reached a deal on a long-running issue, as I heard from our environment correspondent, Matt McGrath. It's become a little bit of a tradition at these conferences now, certainly last year and this year,

that the hosts like to set the stage by announcing some progress on some big item and here in Azerbaijan they've managed to get agreement on carbon markets. It's the final outstanding component of the Paris agreement and it essentially means the ability of richer countries to invest in projects in poorer countries as a means of offsetting their own emissions at home. This has been a very contentious issue, it's been running for a decade, lots of concerns about it, that there could be fraud, that these reductions in carbon mightn't be real or permanent. Anyway, after a lot of discussions they've managed to come up with a set of rules that

most people feel happy with, grudgingly in many cases, and it sets the scene now for a big escalation of these types of carbon offsets over the next number of years. Of course the goal of the Paris Agreement was to get the world to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and preferably below one and a half degrees. What do you make of these latest warnings about the temperatures? The temperatures have been going in the wrong direction for a number of years now. This year is virtually certain to be the warmest year on record as we heard today from the World Meteorological Organisation and likely also to be very close to or slightly above 1.5 degrees Celsius. I would slightly caution that is just a figure for one year. When the Paris Agreement talks

about 1.5 degrees Celsius they mean over a 20-year period as being a permanent breach of that level. So we're not at that yet, but obviously the direction of travel is in the wrong direction. And I think we'll hear from leaders who are arriving here today and will be here tomorrow and the UN Secretary General and many others that this is a stark warning of where we're going and the impacts that we've seen across this year associated with that type of temperature rise. I think they'll be pointing those out as the kind of future that the world needs to avoid and that the actions of the people meeting here can help to avoid that future.

And how does the return of Donald Trump to the presidency affect the battle against climate change? I know the US climate envoy, John Podesta, has been there trying to reassure delegates. Yeah, he has been trying to reassure delegates that the US was still in, still involved, and there was a number of months left in President Biden's term, and that he would use that time to reinforce the actions he's taken in the last number of years on climate, such as investing in turbines and solar panels and a whole range of other measures. But obviously he was realistic about what anything that might be agreed here with the United States that Donald Trump would likely not honour. But it was a strong defence of the record to date and he was saying that just like the

last time President Trump was in for four years in 2016, the world survived and climate change survived even though the US pulled out of the Paris Agreement. He feels this will be the same, the US emissions will continue to go down, he says, even if they go down at a slower rate and that the climate crisis will outlast a Trump presidency and the US will be back in at some stage in the future. Matt McGrath at COP29 in Azerbaijan. And we'd just like to make a correction from our earlier podcast. We mistakenly said that the United States is the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide

rather than the biggest historic emitter. The biggest current emitter is China. Apologies for the error. Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, is at least two and a half billion kilometers away from Earth. As such, it's been visited just once nearly 40 years ago by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft. At the time it was dismissed as a dead sterile world. This was British astronomer Patrick Moore on BBC TV way back in 1960. Uranus then is an extraordinary place. It's made up of gas and that gas is mainly hydrogen, so it's intensely cold and certainly nothing can live there. It's a world where the light must be very much less than on Earth,

a gloomy place, lifeless, remote, deserted and slow moving. But new research suggests that Voyager 2 visited on a bad day and scientists may have got Uranus all wrong. I got the details from our science correspondent, Palabgos. It was a terrible day that Voyager 2 flew past in 1986. The Sun was raging and it was emitting a powerful solar wind that distorted the readings from Voyager 2. Normally around a planet there's a magnetic field just as there is in Earth that protects our planet from cosmic rays and so forth but also it bottles up all the stuff from the planet. And other spacecraft have

visited planets in the outer solar system, Saturn, Jupiter and its moons and so forth, and they found ionised gases, plasmas, which are an indication of activity, possibly of underground oceans, and they found them around all these other planets, but Voyager 2 found nothing. And so, for a long time, scientists thought that Uranus and its five largest moons were dead, sterile worlds. But some scientists decided to have another look, not so much at the data, but when the data was taken. And they found indeed that there was a powerful solar storm going on, which probably blew away the ionised gases. And so they're calling for a rethink. And it's far more likely that

Uranus and its five largest moons probably are active. And its moons in particular might have a subsurface ocean which may make them habitable. Yes, so tell us more about how they looked at this data anew and what it tells us. It explains why the results from Voyager 2 was such an outlier, such a mystery. Uranus is a weird planet anyway because probably during the creation of the solar system a big lump of rock slapped into it and knocked it on its side, so it spins lying down. But another weird thing about it, it seemed, was the fact that it seemed inert as did its moons. So now it fits into the normal picture

of the outer planets of the solar system. Its moons may well have plasma around them. And this was a result that delighted Dr. Linda Spilker, who was a mission scientist at the time. I find the new results very fascinating and I'm really excited to see that there is potential for life in the Iranian system and that so much is being done with the Voyager data. That is really amazing that scientists are going back and looking at this data collected in 1986 and finding new results and new discoveries. Dr. Linda Spilker and Palab when will we know for sure that these new theories

about Uranus are correct or not? Well, it's a bit of a wait. NASA is due to launch a spacecraft in 10 years time to not just fly past Uranus, which Voyager 2 did, but to actually orbit it and perhaps send a probe down onto the planet. And it will have a long time to observe these moons but it won't get there until 2045. But we do have lots of telescopes which might be able to give us some indication now that we know there is a possibility of life on some of the moons of Uranus.

Our science correspondent, Palab Goesh. And still to come on the Global News Podcast. You have something in you, Rage. Never let it go. Did gladiators really ride rhinos? A new film raises some historical questions. The Archbishop of Canterbury is facing mounting pressure to resign after a damning report into a prolific child abuser who ran Christian summer camps. The review said Justin Welby should have taken stronger action when told of John Smythe's abhorrent abuse of more than 100 boys and young men.

The Archbishop, spiritual head of the Church of England, has apologised but said he won't resign. Our religion editor, Alim McBool, has the details. John Smythe abused dozens of boys in the UK in the 1970s and 80s at Christian summer camps, some of which Justin Welby attended. A report last week described the abuse he perpetrated as brutal and horrific, but also said that from the early 1980s church officials knew and were involved in an active cover-up, and that by 2013 Justin Welby had been informed.

But the abuse continued in the years leading up to John Smythe's death in 2018. Justin Welby's apologised for not pursuing the case more rigorously but said he decided against resigning. Today the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen Ann Hartley, became the most senior member of the church to join calls for the Archbishop to step down. It's very hard for the church as the nationally established church to continue to have a moral voice in any way, shape or form in our nation when we cannot get our own house in order with regard to something that's critically important, something that would be asked of any institution, let alone the Church.

And given that, what do you think about the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury? I think sadly his position is untenable, so I think he should resign. But the Archbishop of Canterbury stepping down is not going to solve the problems, is it? It's not going to solve the problem, but I think it would be a very clear indication that a line has been drawn. The issue is not only is there a suggestion abuse could have been prevented if adequate action had been taken, there's also the fact the Archbishop of Canterbury previously didn't tell the truth about how

much he knew and when. This is what he said to Channel 4 only after their journalism in 2017 brought John Smythe's abuse to light. I genuinely had no idea that there was anything as horrific as this going on. And the kind of story you showed on the clip. If I'd known that I would have been very active but I had no suspicions at all. He had known at least four years earlier. Survivors of John Smythe's abuse have also called for Justin Welby to step down and other victims of church abuse say they've also been re-traumatised by the events of the past week

and the church's failings so plainly laid bare. Matthew Inerson is one such victim and it's clear where he stands on Justin Welby. You should go, definitely go. You cannot learn of abuse, take no further action about it and then expect there being no repercussions. Supporters of the Archbishop of Canterbury say he's brought about a lot of improvements in the way abuse is handled by the church, but with not just the institution but the man who leads it now so plainly to have been shown to be culpable, the pressure continues to mount.

Our religion editor, Alim McBool. Many Americans remain sceptical about cryptocurrencies, but fans of bitcoin are delighted after Donald Trump's victory sent prices surging. A single coin is now worth more than $87,000, more than double the value a year ago. Joe Tidy is our cyber security correspondent. Things were looking pretty good for bitcoin the last few months, but if things were kind of stalling a bit, everyone's getting very excited about breaking an all-time high and then it didn't really happen. And then in the final stages of the US presidential election, the excitement began to grow in the Bitcoin world that if Donald Trump gets elected, he

could bring in much more friendly crypto policies. Sack the head of the SEC, the Security Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, who's been very anti crypto over the last few years, and then potentially even start buying up a reserve of bitcoins for the US economy as a kind of like a similar to a gold reserve really. So a lot of promises were made on the campaign trail by Mr. Trump and the Bitcoin has got behind him. I think in the short term, things are going to keep going up because if you go on social media, and if you've been on today, but it's absolutely crazy. Everyone's getting very, very excited. And the pump is happening as they call it,

the pump of Bitcoin. And we're hearing lots of noises from the presidential elect campaign group and from his kind of new team coming in about the potentials for new policies that could make Bitcoin adoption increase around the country. But then again, of course, it remains to be seen what actually happens. Lots of promises are made, of course, on the campaign trail and whether or not they actually lead to concrete policies when in position, that remains to be seen. But certainly

for now, the short and medium term, we're seeing a lot of excitement growing. Joe Tidy next to a new craze in China. Young cyclists bringing a main highway to a standstill as tens of thousands took part in a 50 kilometre night-time bike ride to go for breakfast dumplings. The so-called night riding army was part of a trend of young Chinese people trying to travel as cheaply as possible in the face of high youth unemployment. Now the authorities in central China have brought in traffic restrictions to try to halt the rides.

Here's our China correspondent Laura Bicker. This all started when four students made the cycle from Zhengzhou city to the ancient city of Kaifeng for very famous breakfast soup dumplings. It went viral on social media and on Friday, tens of thousands of them turned up to make the journey, which is around 50 kilometres or 30 miles, and most of them did it on public hire bikes. You can see them on social media. They were cheering each other on. Some of them were singing and some of them were carrying Chinese flags, an act of patriotism. However, the authorities have now clamped down on this because the

six-lane highway between the two cities were filled with young people and even the public hire bike companies have now said that they will automatically lock a bike if it's taken out of the city of Zhengzhou. Now while for many young people this is a little bit of a lack, a little bit of fun, a chance to take part in a viral social media craze, for others it may have been more of a freedom of expression right because it's very rare that young people get the chance to gather in very large groups. The authorities get nervous here when young people do that. They

remember 1989, they remember Tiananmen Square. So even if it's not political, you can see the authorities clamping down. We saw this just a couple of weeks ago in Shanghai with the Halloween celebrations. Police lined the road and many Halloween parties were cancelled. Many people in costumes were told to go home. There is an extreme nervousness when young people gather. And the second thing really is Generation Z in China are experiencing reshaping of the Chinese dream.

They were told for years that if you worked hard, if you studied hard, there would be a job at the end of it. That's not necessarily the case anymore. Around 19% of young people are the latest figures. It showed that they are facing unemployment. That's nearly one in five of under 24-year-olds. So now they're trying to find a different way to confront their future, a future that they've not prepared for. And how they do that may very well shape the future of the world's second largest economy. Our Beijing correspondent Laura Bicker. Finally, to a tale from ancient Rome.

You have something in you, rage. Never let it go. The film Gladiator 2, starring Irish actor Paul Mascall is out this week, but a trailer featuring baboons in the Colosseum and a Roman noble reading a morning newspaper has raised questions about its historical accuracy. Evan Davis has been speaking to Daisy Goodwin, writer and producer of the ITV PBS show Victoria and Kathleen Coleman historical consultant for the first Gladiator film. He started by asking her if gladiators really rode rhinos. I would imagine not. I should think that anybody out in the bush could

probably tell you whether it would be suicide to ride a rhino. Then there's another one the Coliseum is full of water, like a giant bathtub, with sharks in. Now did that kind of thing happen? They couldn't have filled up the Colosseum, could they, with water? Well, they didn't fill it, but they were able to have aquatic enactments in the Colosseum, and if you're hoping somebody will drown, you actually don't have to have more than about a meter's depth of water for that to happen. But as far as I'm aware, the Romans were not at all familiar with the shark as a beast. Let me go to Daisy. Daisy,

in Victoria, does it matter whether it's historically accurate? Well, it mattered to me that we get things like, you know, the Irish potato famine, vaguely right, because if you get that wrong, then 4 million Irish people will be very upset. I don't think it matters if, you know, the ceremonial isn't completely on point, because actually, nobody knows and even then they were making it up. But I think historical advisors can be a wonderful resource when you want them and really annoying when you don't. So you had historical advisors on Victoria. Yes, I mean I claimed to be my own historical advisor but we did have one woman who was very helpful until when the

producers were urging me to write a physical love scene between Victoria and her Prime Minister Lord Melbourne and I said oh I don't think we can do that I better just check with the historical advisor who said absolutely not I was able to use that to my advantage and write a much better scene well look Kathleen tell me as a viewer when you watch a movie on a Saturday night for entertainment does it matter to you whether it's historically accurate whether the costumes are authentic or whether they elaborated the plot to make it a little bit more interesting, for example? It matters to me if I know anything about the period and what actually happened.

But of course I'm as gullible as the next person when it's all taking place in a period and a place that I know nothing about. Kathleen Coleman and Daisy Goodwin talking to Evan Davis. And that is all from us for now, but the Global News podcast will be back very soon. This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll and produced by Alfie Haberschen, our editors, Karen Martin. I'm Oliver Conway. Until next time, goodbye. Witness the stories that have shaped our world. On the launch pad, in the dawn light, a towering symbol of an ambitious nation. Three, two, one.

The whole of India was watching. Told by the people who were there. I still don't regret that I was part of the Royal Revolution. I was a witness of very exciting days. Witness History from the BBC World Service. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. The head teachers of all the primary schools in the Irish town of Greystones got together.

Concerned by anxiety levels among pupils, they asked parents to delay buying their children's smartphones. I'm Beth MacLeod and I'll be asking what the reaction has been from parents and pupils. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.