Global News Podcast - The Happy Pod: Cooking for togetherness

Episode Date: December 23, 2023

Our weekly collection of the happiest stories in the world. This week, how cooking is bringing generations together in the Netherlands. Also: how polar bear pawprints can help conservation efforts. And an unexpected visitor found in a Christmas tree.

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. Unmissable stories from around the globe. From the BBC World Service. My happy place, this is who I am.

Search for the documentary, Lives Less Ordinary, and amazing sports stories, wherever you get your BBC Podcasts. Hi, I'm Melanie. I'm in Sweden and you're listening to BBC's Happy Pod. She's right. This is the Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. I'm Jackie Leonard and in this edition, uploaded on Saturday 23rd December, soup and a cross-generational solution to loneliness. I didn't have my best day today, but now I'm here, and my whole mood has switched, so that's also really nice. How a university degree is offering prison inmates

a fresh start on their release. The learning experience, the personal instruction, it's like nothing else. Also, the response was amazing. I want to say across all platforms, tens of millions of views and so many people being like, I've been scammed like that. This happened to me. The online scam victim turned scam buster. Also in this podcast, how polar bear paw prints can provide DNA clues to aid conservation. It is a bit of a eureka moment. For us, I think the next step is to make sure that that eureka moment gets used by others.

And a very special Christmas tree ornament. Food brings people together. And in the Netherlands, where they take tackling loneliness seriously, the foodstuff doing a lot of the bringing together is soup. Ommers soup is just one part of the national initiative Eentechen Enzimite, or One Against Loneliness. It brings together older and younger people to socialise, to cook and to eat. Claire Bates went along. I'm at a community centre in Amsterdam. And in front of me there is a big long table with lots of people sitting around it, older and younger people together. And they've got chopping boards put in front of them and some big silver bowls and

they've all come together today to make soup. Hey, do you speak English? Yes. You did great. Can you explain to me what's happening here, what we're doing today? It's a cooking day and we're making a tomato lentil spinach soup. We're going to cut all other ingredients and then Marta is gonna make the soup and yeah we're gonna have fun and what's your name? Sanne and have you volunteered with OMOS Soup before? Yeah this is I think my third time. Why is it that you like to do this? Yeah well it's really nice to connect with everyone because you can learn so much from old people and it's really nice that they have so much fun being here and that you can talk to them about

a lot of things and they have so much to tell because they're lonely. I think everyone will feel lonely sometimes. It's just part of life. Yeah, it is. I didn't have my best day today but now I'm here and my whole mood has switched so that's also really nice.

Can you introduce me to some people that you've made connections with? Yeah, of course, yeah. This is Lenny. Lenny? Yeah, she's one of my best friends. How old are you now, Lenny? 88. She's 88 right now.

And can you ask her what she thinks of these sessions? What do you think of these sessions? Oh, so nice, so fun. Yes, we always have so much fun here. Very fun and very... Yes, fun. It's a Dutch word for cozy and warm and fun. I'm glad I'm here.

Yes, she's happy that she's here. Can I sit down and help with maybe cutting some vegetables? Yeah, of course. I can get you cutting words. Yes, please. Yeah, that'd be great. The cooking sessions take place around once a week in 12 cities across the Netherlands. Each city has a student board

that organises the sessions and finds volunteers. Louise is on the student board for Amsterdam. Well, it's definitely helped me step out of my comfort zone and right now I'm 21 and I tend to associate with people from my age. Was it hard to find common ground? I thought some people might be dull or might not be very interested but the opposite is true to be honest. They all have different stories. You get to hear about war stories, you get to hear about the bingo they had last week. They're always very enthusiastic. They're also quite cheeky, so I didn't expect that at first. So it's actually changed your whole view

of a different generation? It has, yes, definitely. They also give very good advice. I've had some very good love advice from them, so that was great. Thank you. It's really good soup. Is it? OK. Yeah, it's really nice. So I'm going to just try this soup. Mmm, yeah, no, that's really good.

Claire Bates in Amsterdam, and you can hear more about how the Netherlands is dealing with loneliness from our friends at People Fixing the World on BBC World Service and online. Now, to an extraordinary escape from a terrifying force of nature. When deadly tornadoes swept through the US state of Tennessee, a young couple were horrified to see their baby carried off still in his cradle. Chloe Kim reported on the story for the BBC. A four-month-old baby, after being ripped from its mobile home in a tornado, was found safe in a tree, considering all the things it had gone through, was largely unharmed and uninjured.

And the parents had said that when they're in their mobile home, which is outside of Nashville, Tennessee, they had not any warning, really, when the tornado was going to come through. And the mother, Sydney Moore, said she had lunged after her one-year-old baby to protect him. She had seen her boyfriend try to grab their four-month-old from his bassinet. And as soon as that had happened, the roof had been ripped off already. And as he's trying to grab the four-month-old, the tornado just comes in and picks him up with the bassinet. And then shortly after the tornado had ended, they had been searching for their four-month-old in the pouring rain. And miraculously, about 10 minutes later or so, 30 feet from their house or where their home used to be, they had found their baby in this tree.

And again, largely unharmed considering all the things that it had gone through. Absolutely terrifying. And for people who are not familiar with the sort of power of a tornado, just describe for us a little bit some of the devastation, because it is extraordinary, isn't it? This one had peaked at 125 miles per hour. Other toys from their home, other baby toys and play pens, had been kind of wrapped around a tree from the force of the wind. And so the mother, Sydney, had said, luckily, that he wasn't in one

of those play pens that was wrapped around a tree, but was in this bassinet that is obviously now, thrown in amongst the rubble and miraculous that he was unharmed. How are Sydney and her family now? They are, I think, of course, shaken, but all things considered, happy that the four of them are OK. That was Chloe Kim. Now, you might remember that a few months ago, back in July, we heard about a programme in the US to help prisoners get a college education, the better to build a new life once they get out.

Well, now the inaugural class has graduated. They have earned bachelor's degrees from Northwestern University in the state of Illinois, thanks to the university's prison education program. Peter Goffin has been speaking to some of the students and sent this report. I welcome you to the Fellowship of Scholars. One by one, 16 men were called to the stage inside a former cell house at Stateville Correctional Center. They'd traded in their prison uniforms for scholars gowns and mortar boards, ready to start the next chapter of their lives as graduates of Northwestern University.

To talk about something being amazing while living in maximum security sounds like a silly statement, but the learning experience, the personal instruction, it's like nothing else. This is Lynn Green, one of the students speaking from Stateville a few days before the ceremony. He now plans to pursue a master's degree in psychology. When our instructors come in and they teach us, we realize that we're not so rigid, that we're actually malleable, that we can still be formed and shaped all over again. Northwestern started its prison education program in 2018, and it's helped dozens of incarcerated people get associate degrees from a nearby community college. But this is the first time that students have received a full bachelor's degree from Northwestern, one of the most

prestigious universities in America. You have read novels, solved math equations, and completed chemistry labs. You have taken courses in psychology, philosophy, and political science. Sociology professor Mary Petillo gave the ceremony's closing address. Almost every crime reflects a cycle and often a circle of hurt and harm. Your stories highlight the complexity of what lands people in places like Stateville. The U.S. has the highest prisoner population in the world, with nearly 2 million people living behind bars. And it has a serious problem with recidivism.

Government figures suggest that two-thirds of Americans released from state prisons will be arrested again. And more than half will return to prison within just a few years. But studies have shown those rates of re-arrest and re-incarceration are drastically lower for people who've pursued higher education while incarcerated. It's when you don't allow a person to have that higher education opportunity and send them back out there ill-equipped, it turns around and backfires and creates a higher risk of recidivism. Bernard McKinley is one of the new graduates.

He's also the first person in the state of Illinois ever to take the entrance exam for law school while in prison, and he hopes to one day become a civil rights attorney. Education creates a way of provoking critical thought. You can't help but do self analysis unto yourself and see where you went and where you desire to be. Bernard says education has made him a better person. Now, like many of the graduates, he'll stay in the program as a teaching assistant, helping another group of Northwestern students to transform their lives from behind bars. That was Peter Goffin. Still to come in this podcast

In one of the photos it almost looks like it's smiling because it looks so cosy and cute But does it really belong in a Christmas tree? 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 Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen

to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. If we want to protect wildlife, we need to know which creatures are where, in what numbers and how they're doing. There are various ways of doing that, involving varying levels of interaction and intrusion. But now researchers have come up with something really clever. They've found a way to extract environmental DNA from paw prints left in the snow by threatened species, such as polar bears and lynxes.

Dr Melanie Lancaster is the lead researcher at the Worldwide Fund for Nature and is currently in Solna, Sweden. I'm very interested in making sure species like polar bears and lynx and snow leopards actually continue to thrive and exist on our planet. So that's really why I do what I do. And of course, I think many, many people around the world are captivated by animals like polar bears and snow leopards and lynxes. There's something that we seem to be able to relate to when it comes to other large mammals. And the couple of times I've actually been out into the Arctic and in quite remote settings, it's hard to believe that animals like polar bears can survive such conditions,

but they're just so beautifully adapted to do so. It's quite a wondrous thing. And now you can, we are told, extract environmental DNA from paw prints. What do you mean by environmental DNA as opposed to just regular old DNA? So we all have DNA and all living creatures leave or shed parts of themselves into the environment. And when we talk about environmental DNA, that's what we mean. So we can shed our skin cells and leave them in the environment and we can shed our hairs. And those parts of ourselves that we leave in the environment actually can contain our cells or cellular material. And it's from that cellular

material that we can actually access DNA. So what is it that you're actually looking for? And why was it you needed to find a new way to do it? I think one of the things that a lot of people don't realise is that we still don't know a lot about polar bears. So we know that they exist across the Arctic and we know that they're divided into about 19 subpopulations. But for about half of those subpopulations, we don't know much about them at all.

We don't even know how many polar bears there are. So that's why when we talk about the number of polar bears that there are, we have such a large estimate. And so we're always looking for new tools to help us to provide that sort of information. And why is it that being able to extract environmental DNA from paw prints that have been left in the snow is a better way to do it than the ways that have been previously used to find out about these creatures. I think it's definitely better in some ways because it means that you don't even need to see the animal to actually collect part of it and that part of it is the environmental DNA that's left from the skin

cells that are shed from the foot pads of the polar bear as it walks. And so in that way, the method is very good because it doesn't require contact with the animal. It also doesn't require the animal to be captured or sedated in order to obtain that information. It's a much less intrusive method of being able to collect that DNA. When you've made a discovery like this, that you are able to do something new and very clever and non-invasive to the animals, do you get a eureka moment? How does that feel when you realise that you've got something new and exciting? Yeah, I mean, it's very, very exciting to have this new tool that we can use. So it is a bit of a eureka moment. For us, I think the next step is to make sure that that eureka moment gets used by others. It's a

pretty groundbreaking method, actually. So that's what we really hope will happen next. And so what we really would like to do is make sure that this tool that we've developed actually gets out into the research community. Dr. Melanie Lancaster of the Worldwide Fund for Nature. Now, it might come as a shock to you to discover that the internet is not all cat videos. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of scammers out there who will lure you in with convincing websites, steal from you, then vanish. But now it's time for the scammers to beware. Meet Ryan Kelly, who's using his tech savvy to turn the tables, much to the delight of his millions of social media followers. This is a fake company set up as a front to scam people, and it got a follower of mine,

a guy that was just leaving the military who wanted to ship his car back home so he could get back to civilian life, and then they stole his money. And this is my master's degree in homeland security. Let's make the bad guys pay. So I emailed the company that scammed him, pretending that I wanted to ship my car, and I sent him a link. Hmm, that's weird that a guy claiming to be in the U.S. and working for a California-based company called me from India. Maybe he's on vacation and just dedicated to the job. So he gives me a quote saying he can take my car from Virginia to Missouri.

The pickup location is the FBI Academy. So I call him to confirm everything and also convince him to give me his company's M.C. and Department of Transportation number, which are publicly available to check. Aw, buddy, this you? It seems like you're not authorized to do interstate travel. And wait a minute, you have just offered to do interstate travel. Crazy. But it gets better. Bro, is this you with the name and the address? You didn't use that alias on multiple things, did you? That's not the house you bought under the same alias to front this business, is it? Spoiler alert, it is. Be a real shame if all that data got reported. And unlike that fake company, we'll just keep trucking along here.

So, Ryan, what was it that prompted this campaign? I was getting ready to move from Los Angeles back to St. Louis. I was supposed to be setting up so my car could get transported. So I went through a company that is supposed to be a broker to set you up with other people. And unfortunately, they set me up with a scam company. And so they stole $712.50. And so I was sitting there and I was like, well, I have the time and I have the degrees. So I kind of understand how this works. So I'm just going to start putting together who these people are. And by the end of the first day, I had their driver's license, home address.

And I realized that, OK, I need to turn this into the local FBI office for them. And how that story ended was essentially, you know, the FBI said that they would take action. And I actually messaged the CEO of the company that I had been set up with a scammer. He was really cool and actually refunded me my money. When and why did you start sharing these scamming scammer stories on TikTok? Well, it was after I got scammed the first time and I kind of got to tell the story as it was happening. And I wanted people to know that this is what had happened. And the response was amazing. I mean, it was, I want to say across all platforms, tens of millions of views.

And so many people being like, I've been scammed like that. This happened to me. And at that moment, I realized, oh, I can do this more often. And so I set up a scam submission form on my website. And since then, I've gotten, gosh, four or five thousand submissions. And tell me about what's been your favorite scam so far that you've managed to bust. Since then, I've gotten, gosh, four or five thousand submissions. And tell me about what's been your favorite scam so far that you've managed to bust. Oh, I managed to shut down a call center that was pretending to be PayPal,

which I think was very fun and rewarding because it was just such a mass scam. And I actually put that together by getting so many submissions from people that matched. And I was like, wait, this is way bigger than what I initially thought. What kind of reactions have you had to successfully, quote unquote, scamming a scammer? It's been varied, but very fun. I think that one of my favorite moments had to be I had a military veteran in the US who said, hey, I got scammed. I tried to ship my car home. I just left the military and I lost my money. And that obviously hit me very personally because that's how I got scammed.

And so I went after this guy's scammer, ended up finding the house they had it set up the business in that was actually a fake business and where they actually were, which was actually abroad. And I got an email from the Department of Transportation Investigative Division. I got to say, I was not expecting the federal government to reach out, but they apparently saw the video. And that was really cool. They were they were very sweet and very happy to have the information, which I was able to pass along. And online, we've seen a lot of support, a lot of people that are very happy that I'm going after these people. What I've also seen is, you know, a lot of these scams come from West Africa, specifically Nigeria.

And I have had so many Nigerians email me, DM me and say, thank you for getting these guys. They're giving us a bad name. It's just really cool that like a group of people that have been stigmatized by this smaller group of people in their country comes to me and goes, get them. And I love that. I think it's very fun. And moving forward, Ryan, what's your advice for staying safe online? Take your time. If anything feels rushed, don't do it. Most businesses will not try to rush you. That's not how that works. I would also say that look for inconsistencies.

If you see somebody coming through and they're like, hey, we work for this company and it's from a Gmail account, why aren't they using the company's website? You know, give it a Google and always check if something comes through that you didn't pay for. Check to make sure the email's number matches up with the actual company number. And sometimes I've had that happen, where I've had people send over a scam, and they're like, hey, this group tried to scam me. And I call it, and it's the legitimate power company of their local area.

And I'm like, sorry, guys, I was just checking. Ryan Kelly, scam hunter, talking to Harry Bly. Now, time for a scientific breakthrough. NASA has used laser beams to send an ultra-high definition video back to Earth from the depths of space, and they hope it'll eventually improve communications with remote parts of the solar system. And yes, this one really was a cat video.

Rory Gallimore reports. Tater's the ginger tabby is not hurtling through the blackness of space towards an asteroid. The cat's paws remain firmly on our planet. But a spacecraft making that journey has successfully transmitted footage of the pet playing on a sofa across a vast distance, complete with upbeat soundtrack. Using lasers, the brief clip travelled more than 30 million kilometres in less than two minutes. NASA says it's pleased with the results of the test. One of the lead scientists said the video streamed faster than most broadband internet

connections before adding, everyone loves taters. Yes, they do. Rory Gallimore there. Now, if you celebrate Christmas, the chances are you already have a tree in your house covered in decorations and with gifts piled underneath. But some people's tree decorations are more animated than others. Indeed, Michelle White from Kentucky in the US discovered that she had a small owl nestled in hers. Her daughter, Madeline, shared a video on the social media site TikTok and the little owl went viral, of course. It was like a tiny little greyish brown undertones owl. In one of the photos, it almost looks like it's smiling because it looks so cosy and cute. Okay, so you

didn't realise that you had this little visitor. Where did you get your tree from? And how long did it take you to realize you had a guest? So my family and I, we always go to the same local Christmas tree shop in Lexington, Kentucky. And so we got the tree delivered on Black Friday. And we did not realize there was an owl until that following Monday. So all of that time there was this little owl. I do know that the tree was in quite a busy room in your home. How did you not notice? That is the million dollar question because I mean the fact that it didn't make a peep the whole time, I'm just, my assumption is that he was buried deep into the tree, like near where the trunk is. And he was the same color as the trunk, which is why I assume he blended in so well.

But I guess he was sleeping during the day and active at night when everyone else was asleep. So do you feel bad for the owl because it was just sitting there minding its own business and suddenly discovers it's been owl napped? Well, there's multiple owls that we've seen in our neighborhood. So when we released him, because where my parents house is it's in a big foresty area with lots of trees so there's lots of wildlife living out there he um didn't seem to be injured or dehydrated at all and I mean the second he went outside he flew right away towards all the trees but I mean I assume he was drinking the water of the tree like where um you keep water in the bottom part of the Christmas trees and then I don't know if we have dog food I'm not sure if he was able to maybe sneak some some of that at night

but we did find some owl droppings behind the tree after we realized so and your mom is making sure you will still have an owl in your tree right oh yes she has needle pointed an owl ornament and then all of her friends have brought over little owl gifts so that we'll remember this Christmas forever Madeline Whitehill and we will share a picture of the owl on far too many social media platforms. And that's it from us for now. Remember, if you would like to be part of the Happy Pod and have a story to share, we would love to hear from you. As ever, the address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. This edition was mixed by Volodymyr Muzhechka. The producer was Anna Murphy. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jackie Leonard. And until next time, goodbye.

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.