Global News Podcast - Syrian rebels celebrate capture of Hama

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

Islamist rebels celebrate the capture of the Syrian city of Hama. Also: US Police search for the gunman who shot dead a health insurance boss on the streets of New York, and a faster way to predict the weather.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. You're listening to the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. This edition is published in the early hours of Friday, the 6th of December. Islamist rebels in Syria celebrate capturing a second city from government forces. It is the first time the insurgents have controlled Hamas in nearly 14 years of war. US police are investigating whether words written on bullet casings may provide a clue about the killing of a health insurance boss in New York. And the French president Emmanuel Macron rejects calls to step down after his prime minister

is forced to quit. Also in the podcast, Sparkling sake is one of the youngest category in restaurants 30 years old. Let's open it. Let's see if it's not gonna... A famous Japanese drink gets UNESCO World Heritage status. We give it a try. Rebels in Syria are preparing to push further south after capturing the central city of Hama for the first time in nearly 14 years of war. It is the second major city they've seized in a matter of days and means they are now only 200 kilometres or so from the capital Damascus. Their lightning advance poses the biggest threat to the Syrian leader,

Bashar al-Assad, since 2015 when he was forced to call in the Russians to prevent the collapse of his regime. Hugo Bachega on the border between Syria and Turkey told me more about the fall of Hamas. It is another major victory for these rebels after they captured Aleppo last week. Hamas is home to one million people. It is going to be more difficult now for regime forces to try to launch any kind of offensive, to try to recapture Aleppo. And for the rebels, it puts them very close to Homs, which is a strategically significant hub that connects the capital Damascus to the north of the country, to the coast as well. And I think what is very interesting is that, you know,

this is an offensive that is being led by Islamist rebels of a group known as HTS and HTS is saying that they're not going to stop in Hamar and that Homs is the next target so if that happens it is going to be a huge challenge for President Bashar al-Assad and his regime. Yeah I I mean, how precarious is his position given that his allies, Iran and Russia, are somewhat distracted at the moment? Yeah, so back in the most violent phase of the civil war in Syria, Bashar al-Assad relied on the help of Russia and Iran to crush the opposition and turn the tide in the war. And this is not happening now.

You know, Russia is busy with the war in Ukraine. Iran is still reeling from an intense campaign of attacks by Israel. Hezbollah, which is the Lebanese movement, which had supported Bashar al-Assad in Syria, is also reeling after being severely weakened by Israel in the war there. So Bashar al-Assad is not relying on those key allies. And I think it is, we still don't know how or if he's going to be able to come up with any kind of response to stop this advance by rebels. And reports tonight suggesting that the army has left its positions in the city of Homs.

So the next chapter is likely to play out in the next few hours as this advance is likely to continue. Hugo Bishaga on the Syrian-Turkish border. It sounds like it might be an important clue in the murder of the boss of America's largest health care insurer in New York early yesterday. Investigators say the words deny, defend and depose were written on the shell casings recovered at the scene of the fatal shooting of the

United Health Care Chief Brian Thompson. A manhunt is still underway and police have released further CCTV images of the suspected gunman. Our New York correspondent Michelle Flurry is following developments. So what's the relevance of the words written on the bullets? There was a title of a book that basically identified those phrases as being associated with tactics used by health insurance companies to avoid paying claims. And this is one of the theories. Policers yet have not revealed a motive for the killing, but his role as the boss of one of America's biggest insurance companies, there has been speculation as to whether or not that may have played into his death and whether it was someone who was

frustrated with America's healthcare system. Now as I say, we don't know the motive yet, but it is one avenue that police are exploring and that is why people are leaping on the significance of those words on the gun shell casings. Yeah, one of many avenues, they seem to have quite a lot of information and they've released a new picture. Yes, so if you think back to 24 hours ago, the footage that we immediately all saw was of someone in a hoodie with them face pretty much covered by a mask. This latest photo that police in New York City have released, in fact two photos, show his full face. The mask is lowered around his neck and in one you can even see him sort of smiling slightly. What police have

been doing is trying to pull in as much video footage as they can from security cameras and so over the last 24 hours they've been busy scouring through that and that has yielded these two pictures which they've released to the public hoping that this will lead to more leads. There's also been talk about potentially a youth hostel that they're looking at as to whether or not the suspect may have stayed there but again this is very early on in the investigation and so things are still pretty fluid. Yeah and 24 hours on from the initial shooting, how are New Yorkers taking all this? I think it was pretty shocking because although we've seen gun violence in America, it's

fairly rare in New York City and certainly in the centre of Manhattan like that. Just to kind of familiarise our listeners, this was a couple of blocks away from Rockefeller Centre where the Christmas tree lighting was taking place that evening. So it was an area where there are lots of tourists. There was also lots of security in terms of police. I think that was partly why people were able to get to the scene so quickly to respond. But it gives you a sense of that's why it was so shocking. That being said, it's been fascinating to see how people have been responding.

There has been a lot of anger at least on social media and I think it speaks to the frustration that Americans feel towards America's health care system and the suspicion that perhaps this was somehow motivated by that. Michelle Flurry in New York. Each year thousands of people die and millions are displaced as a result of extreme weather events. These can be hard to predict, but a new AI tool has shown it is better at weather forecasting than any current system. It can look ahead up to 15 days, and the analysis takes as little as 8 minutes rather than the hours current models need.

Alfie Haberschen found out more from Ilan Price, a research scientist at Google. This is a real advance that allows us to get much faster predictions, about eight minutes on a few chips a bit bigger than a laptop as compared with hours on bus-sized supercomputers and also more accurate forecasts. So we did a rigorous evaluation of this, and we compared it against the kind of gold standard

for traditional forecasting. And we found that Gencast was significantly better forecast. And I understand that it's quite good at particular types of weather, hurricanes and cyclones in terms of when they might hit landfall. Are there certain types of weather that the gencast is better or worse at predicting? Yeah we did a rigorous evaluation of different applications of interest and one of them is predicting the tracks of tropical cyclones and we showed that in terms of assigning probabilities to where

we'll be hit, that GenCast is giving better predictions of the tracks of tropical cyclones. But one of the limitations at the moment is that it tends to underpredict the intensity of cyclones. And that's a consequence of the particular data that GenCast was trained on, which happens also not to represent very high intensity cyclones as well.

Yes, and it's interesting that you mention data. I understand that this AI tool relies on many years of historic data about the weather, but obviously with climate change posing the threat of more unpredictable weather, can this tool keep up with that? Now one benefit of machine learning models is that we can retrain these models always with the most up-to-date data. And what we've seen internally when we're doing research like this is that as you keep adding more and more recent data, that helps it generalise into the near future in the hope that, you know, that allows it to recognise recent trends in the weather and generalise

better going forward. And you mentioned this can predict the weather faster and in some examples more accurately with climate change bringing up unpredictable weather in the coming years. How do you think this could help? I think the impacts are really far reaching. Certainly the more frequently cyclones are coming up where we see extreme heat or extreme cold, you know, these are going to be happening more and more and the further in advance we can be warned of them, the better. But it can also apply in other cases. So for example, we did an experiment which showed that GenCost gave superior predictions of the total wind power

that's generated by groupings of wind farms around the world. And improved predictions of wind power can help accelerate adoption of that sort of technology into our energy grids. Elan Price, a research scientist at Google, talking to Alfie Haberschen. Japanese cuisine is hugely popular around the world these days, with sushi restaurants found even in some of the smaller towns. Now, Japan's traditional alcoholic drink sake has gained UNESCO World Heritage status. Natsuki Kikuya is a Japanese restaurant consultant here in London. She sat down to a tasting with James Menendez. I think this is a huge monumental news for all the Japanese sake or even international sake makers around the world. I think this would not just only protect the category that's been made in Japan but I personally think this would recognise the whole culture

of sake. It holds lots of history, traditions and customs of Japanese for a long time, so I think that would be a great opportunity for us. What in your view then makes sake so special as a drink? What is its unique character, if you like? Every prefecture of Japan, 47 of them make sake. I think that really reflects the regionality, the you know landscapes on the culture of Japan and it's also been made by Koji. It's a type of fungus, a type of mold. It's a national model Japan actually, very proud mold. The main thing is it

contributes the glucose that's essential for creating alcohol for the yeast to ferment but it does also create lots of a wonderful flavour profile like umami, you know, there are savoury, delicious flavour profiles, and kind of chestnutty, nutty characteristic as well. Okay, well we have a couple of sake that we're going to try. Now this first one, you told me that this is a classic sake. There is a sort of mushroomy smell to it. It does.

Is that from that mould that you were talking about? That's right. And you've also brought in, and I've never heard of this, sparkling sake. Is that a new thing? Sparkling sake is one of the youngest category in Eston's 30 years old. Let's open it. Let's see if not gonna... A little hiss there. We were a bit worried about it going all over the place and it almost did. Unlike sparkling wine, is this sparkling sake for celebrations? Is that the association? That's right. Here we go. It's quite fizzy. I mean, there's quite a big mousse, I think you call it, isn't there?

Yeah. Cheers. Kanpai. This smells sharp, sharper than the classic one, less of that sort of yeasty smell. Yeah, maybe a bit floral and fruity. Sweeter. Why is it that sake has, well, has it diminished in popularity in Japan, but why has it been produced less? What's happened to the reputation of sake in Japan? So unfortunately in the past 75 or 80 years it's just constantly declining to one-third of what it

used to be. It's to do with the modernisation of Japanese young culture. So people see sake as what, an old-fashioned drink to them? Yes, my grandfather's generation, it was the only alcohol available, but now it's becoming mighty, you know, the wines and beers, spirits, all these drinks available. Is it possible that it's more popular, more fashionable in some, well, Western cities for example, than it is in Japan? It's growing every year together with Japanese restaurants' popularity overseas as well. We have about 150,000

Japanese restaurants overall around the world, which has been tripled within six years. And do you think then this designation may give it a boost within Japan? That's what I hope, you know, this is a proud drink of national culture and I think within the bottle it really holds the Japan itself. So I really hope the Japanese people realise that it's something that we should be proud of. Natsuki Kikuya. And still to come on the Global News Podcast. What were the most mispronounced words of the past year? A day after his government was toppled by MPs, the French president Emmanuel Macron

has delivered a live TV address to the nation. He accused MPs from the far right and left of throwing French politics into disorder. The national rally MPs chose to vote against the government, which contradicts their own platform. It's an insult to their own voters. By doing so, they chose chaos, and that's the only project they share with the radical left. This with the support of the rest of the left wing alliance to undo everything, to wreak havoc. President Macron said he would appoint a new Prime Minister in the coming days to replace

Michel Barnier, who became the shortest-serving Premier in modern French history when he lost a vote of confidence over planned budget cuts. Mr Macron is under pressure to step down himself but said he would serve out his full term. Our correspondent in Paris, Hugh Schofield, watched his address. There are no big announcements. I mean, if we're waiting for the Prime Minister, that's not what we've got. What I think is interesting is, first of all, a first hint that he's taking some responsibility for the dissolution of the parliament back in June and therefore that it's he himself that's at the rouge of all this, but it's a very Macronian apology if you can even call it that. He's saying that

it wasn't understood. He dissolved the parliament in order to introduce clarity by going back to the people, but people now held it against him that he's done that and that's a fact. So it's as close as you're going to get from Macron to a mayor-cult, I think. And then he kind of launched into an attack. And I think this is very predictable on the extremes, on the far right and the far left, in his view, acting irresponsibly in ending the government. He said Michel Barnier's government was going about the task in a sensible and moderate way of drawing up a budget, but it had been brought down by what he called this anti-Republican front that had chosen disorder, that chose to undo rather than to do, to unmake rather than to

make, to create chaos. So a kind of predictable attack on the extremes. And then a promise of a new government of general interest, he says, which will be put together in the coming days. But nothing concrete really there at all. Hugh Schofield in Paris. Scientists are working to identify the cause of an unknown illness that's killed dozens of people in the southwest of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Health teams there are mapping symptoms and collecting samples from the most affected

area. I got an update from Dawkus Wangira, the BBC Africa's health correspondent. Today the Africa Centers for Disease Control director general said, we don't know what this disease is being caused by. We know that it has flu-like symptoms. But we don't know whether it's caused by a virus, bacteria, fungi, or a parasite. We don't know how it is being transmitted. So far, at least 79 people have

died according to the DRC's government. More than 300 people have been infected. For those who have died, we are seeing children aged above 15 to 18. And also for those who are being infected, we are seeing children who are below the age of five and women. But we also do know that this area, it's known as Kwango in southwestern DRC, it has experienced a lot of flu outbreaks before. It's a very remote area and also the scientists are speculating that it could be a flu, a severe flu, but in essence it's only the laboratory tests that will tell us what this disease is.

But when you hear about a new respiratory disease, obviously many people's minds will go back to COVID. Could it be linked to that? So that's a very poignant question because that was the first thing that they did suspect. The Minister for Health did have a briefing earlier today and he said what they were looking at when they were trying to compare this to COVID-19 was the fatality rate and they saw that those two weren't similar. They did advise people however to just maintain the same preventive measures they did with COVID, social distancing, don't touch items of somebody who has been infected. However when you look at the symptoms we're also seeing anemia, people

with difficulty breathing, but the anemia is what is also concerning. They have seen a lot of patients with malnutrition as well. You mentioned malnutrition. This is the area in Congo with one of the highest rates of that. So could people perhaps have weakened immune systems and be more vulnerable to diseases? This is a very vulnerable area, so much so that they do not have the capacity to test.

They even have to take their samples 500 kilometers away to an area known as Kikwit for the laboratories to actually test their samples. So in terms of even just being having access to laboratories, health care response, it is very vulnerable. They've had other previous flu outbreaks, very severe ones as well, because the health officials say October to December is actually flu season, so they're not ruling that out. However, one thing that did come out strongly from the briefings that we've had today is that it took so long for an official notification. Cases were being reported from as early as October, but then it's only on December the 4th that we're having an official government notification. So the surveillance has been concerning.

And briefly, when might we get some answers? So Africa CDC's Director General, Dr Jean Cassell said that they expect them at the earliest on Friday, but to make them public on either Saturday or Sunday. Dr Swangira, BBC Africa's health correspondent. The US state of California has long been braced for the so-called Big One, a huge earthquake that could devastate the region. Well a few hours ago came news of a powerful quake of magnitude 7 off the coast of California that sparked a tsunami warning which was later called off.

The quake caused major disruption to public transport in San Francisco and power cuts across the area. I got an update from our correspondent in Los Angeles Peter Bose. It was serious in terms of magnitude 7 as you say it was offshore about 60 kilometres offshore about 400 kilometres north of San Francisco so the northern part of California the nearest town being quite a small place called Ferndale which is a small very picturesque town very popular with tourists. Interestingly and historically this is one of the most seismically active parts of California. It's near what is known as the Triple Junction where three tectonic plates meet. So such a large earthquake should happen in

this area, not coming as a huge surprise to those that follow these things and especially people who live there. It was felt over a vast area, it was felt in San Francisco many many kilometers away. The public transport system as you say was stopped in that city. There was a tsunami warning for people to get to higher ground which was lifted relatively quickly. Not a big surprise but how did people react when they heard about the earthquake and indeed the tsunami warning? Well, nearer to the epicentre, at least nearer to the coastline where it happened, people reacted very quickly. Those that were in a position to get in their cars and to do exactly what instructed by the messages that flashed up on their phones and that is

to get to higher ground. That is the most important thing to do. You don't want to hang around at the beach when there is potentially a tsunami coming. This tsunami warning though, as I say, was over pretty quickly within an hour and there's nothing that unusual in that. A tsunami warning Generally in coastal areas where there's an earthquake is triggered automatically or pretty much automatically after a magnitude five. And then as the governor Gavin Newsom said just a short time ago, once it is triggered,

it allows them once having evaluated the situation to back away from that until people will actually, it is relatively safe to maybe stay in your homes providing you're not right on the coastline. And does it mean that there could be more tremors to come? It does. There have been more than a dozen quite significant aftershocks in the last two or three hours and the potential for that with such a large original earthquake happening, the potential for that is to go on for days,

possibly even weeks. And that's why people who live right on the coast are still being told that for their own safety they should stay away, at least for the time being, while this unfolds. Peter Bowes in Los Angeles. Next to a mystery that astronomers have been trying to solve for decades. How were the universe's biggest galaxies created billions of years ago? A team of British scientists think they may be close to a solution. Anagrazia Puglisi is from the University of Southampton. I was quite excited because this has been something that a lot of scientists have been working on.

But it's also like this is a piece of the puzzle and there is also obviously still a lot of work to do and this will keep us busy for a long time anyway. I heard more about the discovery from our science correspondent, Pallabgos. We're in the Milky Way galaxy and many listeners will have seen pictures of it. It's got these lovely spiral arms. Not surprisingly, it's a spiral galaxy. There are other types of galaxies which are called elliptical galaxies and they aren't quite as beautiful. They tend to be either spherical or the shape of a cucumber. Now, astronomers can explain how spiral galaxies form because when the stars started forming and continue to, they're rotating. So you can imagine that as you turn something round, you'll get a nice spiral shape with lots of arms and that sort of thing. But how on earth do elliptical galaxies form?

That's been the big mystery and that is what the scientists are beginning to solve. So what they did was they looked at some very early galaxies about five billion years after the Big Bang and they saw that some of them were forming in tight spherical clumps. So if enough of them are close enough together they could join together to form a cucumber shape or stata spheres. So that's what they think is how the elliptical galaxies formed. And other interesting problem that it solves is that elliptical galaxies formed. And other interesting problem that it solves is that elliptical galaxies have all got really old stars. They're all pensioners and there's

not a lot going on in them. Whereas in the Milky Way there are still stars forming. So what this suggests is that star formation in these galaxies happened very quickly and they gobbled up all the hydrogen fuel and there's nothing left to create new stars. Whereas in the Milky Way we still spiral away and we're creating new stars. Our own sun is in mid-life. Eventually it'll expand and die but we're a far more varied population of stars. Whereas the elliptical galaxies, not a lot going on and all the stars are really quite old. Now there are many more spiral galaxies than the elliptical ones. Do we know why they form differently? That's the next thing to answer. One of the most powerful ground-based telescopes was used to look at these stars from five billion years

after the Big Bang, but what scientists now have is the James Webb Space Telescope, which is even more powerful and has got infrared lenses able to see through space dust and can look much further back. So that's exactly what they want to find out why some became elliptical while others became spiral and look back even further in time to find out just how the universe was built brick by brick. BBC science correspondent Palab Goche. Now it's one of the pitfalls of podcasting, having to pronounce tricky words. Well this year has been a big one for verbal slip-ups and we now know the names that we got wrong the most. Isabella Jewel has this report.

They were explaining to me you can say Kamala, you can say Kamala. I said, don't worry about it. It doesn't matter what I say. I couldn't care less if I mispronounce it or not. I couldn't care less. US president-elect Donald Trump on the campaign trail in August repeatedly mispronouncing the name of his democratic rival and current American vice president, Kamala Harris.

Her name has tripped up many a pundit, presenter and politician, with the sound of the vowels and where the stress falls varying from person to person. And now Kamala Harris has topped Babel's 2024 rap for being the most mispronounced word of the year in the US. That's despite the fact that Ms Harris even enlisted the help of her nieces at the Democratic National Convention. First you say comma like a comma in a sentence. Then you say la like la la la la. Put it together and it's one two three.

Comma la. For president! But she wasn't the only US politician to appear on the list. Pete Buttigieg caused widespread confusion with his Maltese surname. And several artists have also featured near the top. American pop singer Chappell Roan and actress Zendaya, who's caused a buzz this year for her roles in Challengers and June 2. Despite the fame though, Zendaya is often wrongly called Zendaya, as in this interview

with a French journalist. Start with you Zendaya. Zendaya, sorry. And Timothée. I'm trying to get it right. It's like, we've got the French way of saying it, the English way, the mixture of both. I've never called him Timothée. Names aren't the only words on the list.

For the UK, several words of foreign origin have been catching us out. The Swedish tobacco pouches, snooze, that have boomed in popularity in recent years are regularly called snus. And an age-old frustration for Italians has been reignited by Sabrina Carpenter's hit song, Espresso. While the song topped the UK's summer charts, lots of us clearly weren't listening closely enough. To many, the small cup of coffee remains an expresso. Isabella Jewel. remains an expresso. Isabella Jewel.

And that is all from us for now, but the Global News podcast will be back very soon. This edition was mixed by Lee Wilson and produced by Alfie Haberschen, our editors Karen Martin. I'm Oliver Conway. Cook Islands, where we're taking a deep dive into the Pacific. This small island nation has grand ambitions to mine its seabed for metals used in green technology. But a community that's defined by its ocean has found itself at the centre of a global debate. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Katie Watson in the Cook Islands, where we're taking a deep dive into the Pacific. This small island nation has grand ambitions to mine its seabed for metals used in green technology. But a community that's defined by its ocean has found itself at the centre of a global debate. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.