Global News Podcast - The Happy Pod: The hug that stopped a bombing

Episode Date: March 28, 2026

A patient who stopped a bomb attack at a hospital has revealed he hugged the would-be-attacker to calm him down. Nathan Newby spent two hours talking to the armed man and persuaded him to abandon his plan. He received the George Medal for bravery from King Charles this week.Also: how a viral video of pack of dogs has captured the attention of animal lovers across China and beyond.England's Football Association has apologised to a women's team who defied its fifty year ban on female players. The sport's governing body praised the Manchester Corinthians as trailblazers.And: Millions of people are flocking to see Washington DC's beloved cherry trees in full bloom. The National Cherry Blossom Festival celebrates international friendship, as the trees were a gift from Tokyo over a hundred years ago.Our weekly collection of inspiring, uplifting and happy news from around the world.Presenter: Holly Gibbs. Music composed by Iona Hampson.

This is the Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. I'm Holly Gibbs and in this edition... I didn't have time to think about how I felt. You know what I mean? We're just thinking about others and trying to get them away and try to protect them. The man rewarded for his incredible bravery after he hugged an armed man and stopped him setting off a bomb. The canine adventure caught on camera.

The dogs made up of golden retrievers, Labradors, corgis and mixed breeds quickly went viral after a local driver, surnamed Lu, posted footage of them on Doyin, which is China's local version of TikTok. We look at the viral video of seven dogs walking together on a main road in China. Also in this edition, do hummingbirds get drunk on nectar? And? I feel absolutely at top of the world. Absolutely.

Because to me, it's Corinthians want F8 now. and it's the best win we've ever had. The trailblazing footballers who received an apology from the sports governing body. We start with an extraordinary story of bravery, a patient who hugged an armed man to stop him setting off a bomb at a hospital in Northern England. Nathan Newby spent two hours talking to the would-be attacker outside the St James' hospital in Leeds and persuaded him to abandon his planned attack.

This week, Nathan has... been given a medal by King Charles in recognition of his bravery. The BBC's Emma Glasby has the story. For intervening in a potential terror attack, the George Medal to be decorated, Mr Nathan Newby. Receiving one of the highest honours for his remarkable bravery, Nathan Newby has been awarded the George Medal by the King for an act of kindness that saved lives. This was 5am in January 2023, outside a Leeds Hospital and armed police arrested a man with a bomb. What is it? What's it made from? A pressure cooker and what's in it? There's gunpowder in a pressure cooker. Described in court as a self-radicalised lone wolf terrorist,

Mohamed Farouk had been waiting around at St James's, planning to detonate the bomb and kill nurses. but he'd been stopped by Nathan Newby, a hospital patient who spent more than two hours with him in the car park, talking him down. So if I hadn't it, what were your intentions? To make half you say? Why do you think that's okay to do? Farooke is serving a 37-year jail sentence

after being found guilty of preparing acts of terrorism. Before receiving the George Medal from the King, Nathan spoke for the first time about that night. I remember going outside for a vap and told this guy, he was just anxious, if you know what I mean, hands in his pockets and fiddling about and swaying backwards and forth. Just looked out of a place. I just went over to see if we were all right and have a chat

and see if I could turn him up and make it feel better. But Farooke eventually confessed to Nathan he had a bomb in a bag and showed him the pressure cooker device. When I saw what were in the bag, that's when it's reality it, then, I'm like, well, I'm with it, I'd have been killed anyway. If I run, he'll panic, could set it off. There's no way getting away now, we're not to stay with the guy. In fact, Nathan moved Farooke and his bomb device further away from the hospital building.

So he asked me to stand up and give me a hug, so I said, yeah, I could have an hug, mate. And then he said, right, I want you to phone police before turning the mind. He was just about to kill a lot of people. Whereabouts are you? Outside St James' Hospital. Whoa, no, right, put outside there. Ultimately, yeah, he just pulled the gun out. He just pulled a gun out?

Yeah, yep. You sounded very calm. How are you feeling inside? You don't have time to think how you're feeling. You're just thinking about the people around you and thinking about the hospital, him. I didn't have time to think about how I felt. You know what I mean?

You were just thinking about others and trying to get them away and try to protect them. As the police operations swung into action, Nathan returned to his hospital bed to relieved nurses who wondered where he'd been. Just crazy. If I hadn't have been there, if I hadn't I been in hospital, if I hadn't had got a chest infection and got washed in, and I've been at home, and I've been seeing that news.

I hate going to hospitals, but on that day, I were in there for a reason, not to get better, I were in there because that weren't happening, right place, right time. Nathan's mother, Tracy, spoke to the BBC after meeting King Charles. She says she first found out about Nathan's bravery when she saw it on the news. We heard that from the hospital that had gone missing, we didn't know where he was. I'd reported, I'd asked his girlfriend, I'd asked everybody. Nobody knew where it was.

Well, clearly obviously we're down there. And they just said, next minute it was just on the news. I think it was six o'clock news without, you know, and I just thought, hey, what's he doing, idiot? But, yeah, he deserves it. He's a good guy. Nathan Newby's mother, Tracy. Next, the viral video showing seven dogs walking together along a main road in China. The pups can be seen walking in a tight group,

and many people online have suggested that the animals are heading home after escaping capture. We can't confirm that Hollywood-style ending, but we certainly do know the video has captured the hearts of millions online, as the BBC's Kerry Allen explains. The dogs made up of golden retrievers, Labradors, corgis and mixed breeds, quickly went viral after a local driver, surnamed Lu, posted footage of them on Doyin, which is China's local version of TikTok.

Mr. Liu told a local newspaper, they looked like a group of helpless little brothers in distress. The pack of dogs were travelling in a formation with a German shepherd in the middle that appeared to be injured, and the others were surrounding him. He said that he was worried that they might get hit by a car or that a driver might have an accident trying to avoid them, so he tried to lead them to a safe area of the road.

road. Mr. Liu said, though, that the dogs did not respond to his calls or come closer to his car, so he posted his video online, alerting the local authorities. After Mr. Liu posted footage of the dogs on Doyin, dog lovers in the vicinity formed a volunteer team and sent out drones to find the missing dogs. One volunteer has since told Chinese media that all seven dogs have been found and returned to their respective owners, who lived about 10 miles or 17 kilometres from where they were found. The dogs came from three different households in the same village and they typically roamed around freely together. Social media users in China have fallen in love with the dog's tail and their lucky escape after what could have been a huge tragedy. Users have been commenting things like,

this is a story that deserves a movie. Kerry Allen there, I spoke to Heather Thomas. She's a clinical animal behaviourist and I started by asking her for her interpretation of the video. The thing that stood out for me the most is that the dogs clearly are choosing to be together. as a group. And particularly from a behavioural science perspective, is that dogs naturally synchronise their movements with other dogs. So coordinated group movement like this doesn't necessarily require a leader as such, and it can emerge simply from dogs just responding to those around them. When you look at that video, though, there does appear to be some loose formation at times, and you can see some of the dogs moving close to proximity towards the German Shepherd.

that could give the impression that they're shielding or protecting that individual. However, from that footage alone, I couldn't clearly identify any injury. What we're really observing is social cohesion. And the research shows that they tend to align their behaviour with the groups around them. That's so interesting and really important context to add. Somebody who was an eyewitness said that they tried to lure the dogs away to what they thought would be safety. and they said that the dogs weren't so responsive.

Is that that kind of herd mentality kicking in there? Quite possibly, but it may just be that they are in a fearful state of mind as well. We don't know what's happened to them, so they may be a bit more fearful about approaching someone that's a bit new. That said, they may not want to come out of their social construct because they feel safer and more secure in that sense. And in the video, it seems that the little corgi is the one that's, leading the pack. Is that natural to have one dog leading the rest? So in terms of the idea that

the corgi is the ringleader, I wouldn't say that I can confidently draw that conclusion from the clip. So lots of behavioural research actually shows that dogs don't operate in a fixed hierarchy or a strict leadership structure in the way that people might assume. Instead, social relationships are much more fluid and context dependent, a bit like a group of friends that, you know, us humans. Some dogs may appear to lead simply because they're just a bit more confident. But we know from studies on group movement that dogs will often follow or align with others automatically without any clear leader dictating the group. And if you look at the video, the corkies not always in the front, but often herding around the shepherd, I noticed. So what looks like leadership is often just

individual variation within a group. And to this idea that they led themselves home, how do dogs and other animals navigate their way back? So this is quite an interesting topic and something that I've explored before but with cats. The really easy way to understand a little bit about how dogs work is by thinking about their noses. They are highly coordinated and in terms of navigation,

they have an extraordinary sense of smell and that is really the key system that they rely on. So research does show they are able to detect and follow scent trails over long, vast distances, even when those cues are extremely faint or fragmented. They also build up what we might think of as a mental map of their environment. They combine scent information with visual landmarks and then repeated experience and exposure to those things. So rather than actively planning a route home,

they're probably just following layers of familiar sensory information. What this story really highlights is how socially intelligent and adaptable dogs are. And I don't think we give them enough credit for it. Heather Thomas. In Ghana, preschool has been free and compulsory from the age of four for almost 20 years. While it means attendance levels are high, bigger class sizes and teaching styles have meant that children's educational outcomes are not improving. Now a new approach is being introduced to try and tackle that

by making kindergarten lessons more fun and accessible with the help of mothers. Justice Beidu went along to a school in Sarnihani in western Ghana to find out more. The school has no toys or building bricks or craft materials that you might expect to see in a kindergarten in Europe or North America. Instead, each of the mothers has a game in front of her on her mat and is interacting with the children. I start by sitting with a mom called Cecilia. She speaks to children in the local language.

The mother is showing the photographs of cattle and a deer. For a Ghanaian school, this is really unusual. I mean, it's amazing. At my school, we learned the names of things in English from books. Cecilia never saw those books because she never went to school. So here, speaking this language, she is the expert. She is treated with respect by the teacher and called Madame by the children. The children do still study English in classes,

but the playgroup always takes place in their own. own language. The fan carries on outside. Because of the large class sizes, children alternate between indoor and outdoor playbooks. The games were all developed and designed by an international charity called Lively Minds. The organization has been in Ghana for 18 years working on this kindergarten process, but now they are in the process of handing it over to the Ghanaian government. Okay, so my name is Fahuda to Yaakou. I work for lively minds, Ghana, as the country director.

In Ghana, people actually enroll their children in school, and for the entire life of their child in the school, the parents never step a foot there. And at lively minds, we believe that parents are the sleeping giants of education. They can drive change in the early childhood development

of their children. But it's not just focused on teaching at school. There are simple activities such as counting trees on your way to the farm, such as identifying vegetables in the kitchen when you are cooking, simple things that you can do with your child. That helps the child to learn, even though you have not been in school, but also it's part of your daily activities that you already do.

And so those parents have been empowered to believe that they have their skills, they have what it takes to support their children to learn, and they are doing that amazingly. The main aim of this project is to improve education for the children. children. But the women who I have met taking part in this project have also reported that their confidence and self-belief levels have gone up. And they feel now that they are more respected at home and in their communities. I have never been to school in my life. When this project started, I said, not me. I can't do that. Now, I am very very, very, much convinced that I know

many things. So now I am very confident woman. When we started, nobody believed in us. But since we started, it's really helped us. We've learned a lot that also

helps us to teach our children. This program has brought a lot of happiness for someone who didn't even know what number one was. Now I know about numbers. Nowadays, I even have a watch. And so, at early as 6 a.m., I tell my kids,

guys, hurry up, hurry up. Or you will be late for school. I have become so happy knowing I am also a teacher now. And you can hear more about this story on people fixing the world wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Coming up in this podcast, I believe that no matter what else is going on in this world, this is something you can rely on to happen that the blossoms will bloom, no matter what the weather is or no matter what's happening. Why visitors are flocking to Washington, D.C.'s tidal basin.

Welcome back to the Happy Pod. Here in the UK, England's most powerful sporting organization, the Football Association, has apologized to a women's team who defied its 50-year ban on female players. Myra Lipnisky is one of them. I feel absolutely at top of the world. Absolutely. Because to me, it's Corinthians want F8-0 and it's the best win we've ever had. The FAA also praised the team, Manchester Corinthians,

for blazing a trail for women's football around the world. Our reporter Will Talk has more on this story. Women's football in the UK today is absolutely massive, with tens of thousands of supporters packing out stadiums for matches. It's been an incredible growth from where the sport was even a few years ago with funding, fans and media coverage all on the up. Except, more accurately, it's not growth, but a return to the world of a century ago.

A summer Sunday, 1914, the established order was not widely questioned. Father at the head of the family, the monarch at the head of the nation. The outbreak of World War I had upset, that established order. And with men off fighting at the front, back in the UK, women's football matches were drawing in crowds of 50,000 plus. That is until 1921, when the FA, deeming football quite unsuitable for women, banned it from being played on official grounds. A ban that wasn't lifted for half a century.

What that meant was any team that let women play on their grounds was kicked out of the FA. Any coach that helped them, any referee that helped them, was struck off. That's Helen Tither, the director of a new documentary about a women's football team established in Manchester in England in 1949, who defied that bat. The Corinthians were a ladies' football team. Corinthians from Manchester. We never seem to lose. The Manchester Corinthians were so successful they travelled the world,

playing teams such as Sporting Lisbon and Juventus, and even in 1960, touring South America. Myra Lipniski, who's now 90 years old, used to play for them. I didn't even know that a woman's football team ever existed. I watched these girls playing. I'd never seen anything like it before. So I spoke to the manager and he said, well, come next week and we'll see how you go. I went next week and I was in the team and I stayed in the team until I packed it in.

We played on cricket grounds. We played on fields where cows had been grazing. Yeah. But when we went abroad, we played on the real national stadiums. And really, you know, coming from a public park where you've got the spectators of like half a dozen underdogs.

To 50,000 people, I never felt that I was a pioneer. I just wanted to play. My husband never stopped me playing and my parents never stopped me playing. So why should some faceless person in the FA tell me I couldn't do it? Now the FA has apologised.

to the Manchester Corinthians and other teams like them for that ban. The Association said the Corinthians blazed a trail for women's football around the world. It's been too long for some of us that are no longer with us. Good players who felt so ridiculed that they were ashamed to ever admit they'd played.

But still they say better late than never. Myra Lippniewski, ending that report by Will Chalk. Next to one of the world's smallest birds. That's a hummingbird. They are known for their colourful feathers and incredible flying skills, but it seems there's also something else remarkable about them. A study has found the alcohol in the nectar they consume is the equivalent of a human drinking a pint of beer.

Virginia Vardianathan spoke to Alexei Morrow, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and the lead author of the study. Well, it hasn't been studied before. We have all of these studies about how, bees and hummingbirds respond to alcohol and lab settings that assume that there's alcohol in flower nectar or somewhere in their diet. But the concentrations before have just been too low for previous methods to detect. And so that's new. We didn't know how much alcohol was in the

flower nectar before. Tell us a bit more about how you went about your research then. Yeah, we went to the botanical garden at the University of California and we ended up sampling around 29 species of flowers using these very tiny amounts of nectar. And we used an enzyme assay chemical reagents to very accurately estimate these seemingly very low concentrations. So low concentrations, but do hummingbirds show signs of being drunk? Yeah, so they end up really adding up because hummingbirds consume something like one and a half times their body mass and nectar.

And so when you're drinking that much volume, even a little bit of alcohol adds up. When you correct for body mass, they're consuming something similar to a 5%, you know, half a liter per day, but they're doing it very slowly over the course of the day. And hummingbirds, they evolved drinking nectar. It's been over 100 million years that flowering plants have been around, and they do it their whole life. So I imagine they have a slightly different relationship to it. But that doesn't mean they don't enjoy it.

If it's a dietary signal like we think it is, it may play that kind of role. When you smell alcohol, you know that there's yeasts and there's not spoiling. bacteria in the nectar. Alexi Morrow from UC Berkeley. We end with a celebration of international friendship. Millions of people in Washington, D.C. have been enjoying its beloved cherry blossom trees in full bloom. The trees were a gift from Tokyo more than a hundred years ago. Riley Farrell went along to find out more.

Each spring, Washington, D.C.'s tidal basin turns briefly into one of the most photograph spots in the United States. Do you all want any together or anything? Oh, sure, yeah. Okay. One, two, three. These are so good. That's when the cherry blossoms arrive, bloom, and fall within days.

And yet, the crowds gather reliably year after year. Diana Mayhew has spent decades at the center of it. She first became executive director of the National Cherry Blossom Festival in 2000. The first time I saw the cherry blossoms, I definitely fell in love with everything they represent and the feeling, the emotions that come from it, and people that are down at the tidal basin just seemed to be happy and connecting to community. What is it that keeps people returning to the cherry blossoms? I believe that no matter what else is going on in this world, this is something you can rely on to happen that the blossoms will bloom no matter what the weather is or no matter

what's happening. But the flowers are also a form of soft power. The original trees were a 1912 gift from Tokyo, a gesture of diplomacy that the festival still honors. It is our great responsibility to continue to communicate the history of the National Cherry Blossom Festival. These trees were given by the mayor of Tokyo, more than one. 100 years ago, 114 years ago on March 27th, to be exact. So it is very important to remember our culture and heritage. Japan's relationship with D.C. and the National Chair of Blasin Festival continues to be very strong. They, in honor of America's 250, have donated another 250 cherry trees to be planted at the tidal basin. So that is a tremendous gift. And the gift that continues to keep

on giving over the years. And out on the basin path, those visitors are clear about why they showed up. Well, you know, here exactly, this is one of my favorite spot, because you can see the flowers and the sherry, and you can see also Thomas Jefferson Monument. This is just a fantastic view.

I don't know, I always encourage everyone to come during this season to leave sea. I think there's a magic place. This is our third year coming together, probably our, well, my, like, tent, probably. We love the cherry blossom. For anyone who's never seen the blossoms, would you mind describing them and what it's like to be here? They're very beautiful and pink, and it's really surreal to see them with all the monuments around the Taipa Basin. I see a lot of like these nice cherry blossom pictures from Japan and lets you live a little bit of that here.

The trees remind us that good things can pass fast. They're fleeting. So when they come, It's just something people to stop and pause and just take a quiet walk. So I think it's the appreciation of that, just reminding us that life is fleeting. And so enjoy what you have in front of you. Diana Mayhew, ending that report from Riley Farrell. And that's all from the Happy Pod for now. We'd love to hear from you. As ever, the address is global podcast at BBC.co.uk.

This edition was produced by Rachel Bulkley. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Holly Gibbs. Until next time. Goodbye.