Global News Podcast - Trump and Netanyahu meet at the White House

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Israel's PM Benjamin Netanyahu has met Donald Trump at the White House, the first foreign leader to visit in the US president's second term. Also: scientists in Spain work to save olive trees from a deadly bacterium.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Nicola Cochlan and for BBC Radio 4, this is history's youngest heroes, rebellion, risk and the radical power of youth. She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself. 12 stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them. That resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now. Follow History's Youngest Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Jackie Leonard and in the early hours of Wednesday, the 5th of February, these are our main stories. Donald Trump has said during talks with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would support moves to permanently resettle all Palestinians from Gaza to neighbouring countries. The US says the first flights deporting migrants to Guantanamo Bay are underway. And Sweden's prime minister says around 10 people have been killed in a shooting at a college campus.

The gunman is thought to be among the dead. Also in this podcast. Unfortunately, you are constrained by the law, which is rather paternalistic over its own people, but also over tourists. And they treat everything like a school trip. North Korea is reopening itself after the Covid pandemic as a holiday destination. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has met President Trump for talks in Washington with discussions focusing on Gaza and the next stage of the ceasefire agreement in the territory.

Mr Trump wants the deal extended, but Mr Netanyahu, who's under pressure from his far-right coalition partners, said Israel would not give up on its war aims, which include the military defeat of Hamas. Benjamin Netanyahu is the first foreign leader to meet President Trump in his second term of office. So on Tuesday evening, Washington time, the two men met in the Oval Office at the White House in front of a roaring fire. On Gaza, Mr Trump had this to say. The Gaza thing has not worked. It's never worked. And I feel very differently about

Gaza than a lot of people. I think they should get a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land, and we get some people to put up the money to build it and make it nice and make it habitable and enjoyable. And make it a home. You say they don't want to leave, though. How can you say they don't want to leave? I don't know how they could want to stay.

It's a demolition site. Then there was this question by a journalist to Benjamin Netanyahu. Prime Minister Netanyahu, what is your message to the families of the hostages that look at this deal, that worry that this deal won't go through? What do you say to them in this moment? Same message I said from the beginning of the war. Get them out, get them back. We got over 70 percent close to 75 percent

of the people who everybody believed we will not get out. We got them in successive deals. And most recently, with the help of President Trump, we're not going to give up on any of them and we're not going to give up on our other war aims. Hamas is not going to be in Gaza and we're going to get everyone back. Just before we recorded this podcast, we got this update about the meeting in the White House from our correspondent, Karl Nasman, who's in Washington. Was one of those kind of frantic scenes where you see the two leaders sitting side by side, a fireplace there in the White House, Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Trump, and then

these questions just being kind of rapid fire thrown at both Trump and Netanyahu. But these are comments that we've heard President Trump make before. He's kind of reiterating the stance that he thinks that Gazans should essentially be given land elsewhere, that this isn't a place that he thinks they could return to or that they would want to return to. He has suggested and he kind of underlined this again that neighboring countries, Egypt or Jordan, could take on some Palestinians. You know, he was throwing out numbers off the top of his head, but he said something like 1.7, 1.8 million people. Obviously, this is something that those countries have flat out rejected as of now.

He then said, you know, there could be up to six different locations where Palestinians could go to. said, you know, there could be up to six different locations where Palestinians could go to, you know, and he sort of said, look, returning to Gaza, in his words, is a guarantee that they're going to end up dying. And he suggested, and we heard there in that clip from President Trump, but saying that, you know, people don't want to go back. And we obviously saw at the first moment that the northern part of Gaza was reopened and people were allowed to start to return. We saw these really impactful scenes of hundreds of thousands really of Palestinians returning

for the first time in months to that area of Gaza. If you ask many Palestinians, of course, they would say that this is where they live. This is their homeland. They don't want to leave. But so these are controversial statements and it's probably fair to say that hearing a president of the United States utter these words is definitely a shift in terms of the political stance, the actual policy of the United States in terms of what especially what we saw from President Biden. He was very clear that he saw a solution to peace in this region as a

two-state solution, Israel and some sort of land for the Palestinians living side-by-side. As you say these are hugely controversial remarks and the countries Mr. Trump is suggesting as a destination for Gazans have flat out rejected the whole idea. Mr. Netanyahu was sitting next to Mr. Trump in front of the fire. Did he react to anything that Mr. Trump said? What did he say? What we're expecting from the two of them is we heard this quick, you know, five or 10 minute what's called a bilateral meeting.

This was with reporters. And a lot of this was was, you know, kind of staged for the cameras. You're not going to necessarily hear Benjamin Netanyahu lay out his entire case at this moment. They're now behind closed doors. They'll be having more private discussions. What we did hear from the prime minister was kind of laying out how he sees his goals here because a lot of questions coming in on the Israeli side were how he would address the next stage of this ceasefire deal which is designed to happen in three stages. We've

seen the first stage playing out, and this is the release of hostages being held in Gaza by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. The second stage, everyone watching knows this is going to be a very difficult one. This won't be as easy to implement. So the question is how will Netanyahu go about this? There are people in his government more on the far right who don't want to see the ceasefire continue. They don't want to see stage two happen at all. It's a difficult balancing act for him. But what we heard from Netanyahu was saying, you know, he said, I'm not going to give up on any of the hostages, which the second stage of this deal would see the release of those remaining hostages

that are still there in Gaza. But he also said, you know, I'm not going to give up on our war aims. So how exactly that's possible, we're not sure. That's a balancing act that the prime minister's been trying to walk for a long time. The second stage of that ceasefire deal would also see the complete withdrawal of the IDF, of Israeli forces from that territory. But it was interesting to hear him balancing those two points, saying, you know, we're not giving up on freeing the hostages but at the same time they consider their war aim which of course is the complete elimination of Hamas and he's saying he's not going to give up on that either.

That was Carl Nasman in Washington. Last year the United States donated more than 73 billion dollars worldwide in aid for causes like women's health in conflict zones and access to clean water. On Tuesday key United Nations agencies warned of the consequences of Washington's freeze on foreign aid. Some organisations have already been forced to close down or lay off staff. The UN Population Fund says cuts would force it to close maternal health clinics in Afghanistan, a move that could see many Afghan women die from pregnancy-related causes. This assessment from our correspondent Imogen Folks in

Geneva. The United States is the single biggest contributor to United Nations humanitarian work. We're talking tens of billions of dollars. In some areas, I mean think about the Democratic Republic of Congo, where we've seen a really serious upsurge in the conflict in the last couple of weeks. The United States provided more than half of the aid funding there last year. We're talking about programs against sexual violence, support for victims, food, vaccination, all that kind of stuff. Interestingly, proportionately though, in terms of its own wealth and the size of its economy, the US is not the most generous contributor at all. But because it's such a big economy, the actual loss in cash

terms is absolutely huge. So, given the scale of the US contribution, tell us a bit more about the consequences of the freeze, the impact on places like Afghanistan for instance. Afghanistan was actually one of the countries we were hearing about this morning. Now it is a country in humanitarian crisis. It has one of the highest levels of maternal mortality in the world. And I think about this. Every two hours a woman dies in Afghanistan because of complications in pregnancy. A small UN agency, or one of the smaller ones, the UN Population Fund, it runs maternal health clinics in Afghanistan and they serve hundreds of

thousands of women. They are mostly women-led services, which is not easy to do in Afghanistan nowadays, but this agency does do it. They have been told not just that their future funds are cancelled, their current funds must not be spent anymore. And what about other projects around the world that could be affected? Well, there's another one which hasn't been getting too much attention at the moment, which did for me personally cause some shock and that is demining. So we know that unfortunately mines and unexploded ordinance lie around in countries from Ukraine to Bosnia to Syria, but many of those programs

are also now the funding has been suspended. Given how shocked people have been by this development, is this a done deal? Are negotiations still underway to try and get these funds unfrozen? Well, I think we know if we look at the back and forth about trade tariffs over the last 48 hours, that what is said from the White House doesn't always necessarily end up a done deal. But I think that the humanitarian agencies, they are all frantically assessing the consequences and really expecting, knowing really that they will have to make cuts and that these will affect some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. Imogen folks in Geneva. The US says the first flights carrying migrants to its

military base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are underway. The base became notorious for holding detainees accused of terrorism following the September the 11th attacks in 2001. David Willis is in Washington. The US government is moving swiftly to implement President Trump's order to turn facilities at the naval base into a migrant detention centre. Immigration raids have been ramped up across the country since Mr Trump took office and officials are said to be making as many as a thousand arrests a day. Those with criminal records will be held in tented facilities separate from the Guantanamo Bay Military Prison

which acquired a reputation amongst human rights groups for conditions that were deemed degrading and inhumane. 15 suspects are still being held at the prison in connection with terrorist related offences. David Willis. Next to Sweden and more details have been emerging about what's been described as Sweden's worst mass shooting in which at least ten people were killed. It happened on Tuesday at a community college in the city of Örebro and the perpetrator is said to be among the dead. Ingala Bak Gustafsson took shelter in a neighboring shop. I was having lunch with my colleagues when suddenly a group of students came running,

saying that we needed to get out. I don't know why, but I instantly realised it was serious. We ran out of the school and then I heard gunshots. We were screaming, run, run, and we're running for our lives. The motive for the shootings at the Riesbergskirche College remains unclear. Police said the suspected attacker was not previously known to them and had no known connection to a gang. The Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson offered his condolences to the victims and their families. Jonas Klaassen is the head of health services in the Örebro region. Tim Franks asked him how many casualties they're dealt with.

We've admitted six patients to the hospital, five of them with gunshot wounds. Of the five that received gunfire, four have been admitted for surgery and they all have major injuries. One of them have sustained life-threat threatening injuries. The attack unfolded through the afternoon. Obviously it was difficult for the police to get to the scene of where this was all happening. I mean, presumably that has complicated the medical response. Yeah, that's true. The patients that we've admitted, five of them were receiving in the first hour and the last patient we received within three hours something like that so of course there might have been patients that would have been salvageable that we couldn't reach

because of the ongoing life-threatening violence. And I just wonder how far you know the hospital is able to cope with this number of casualties and the type of injuries that they have sustained. We have a university hospital with many hundreds of beds, so we could quickly really free up services for surgery, services for intensive care and also hospital beds. Are you able to give me any details as to whether the patients are all adults? Yeah, all are adults. Just in terms of what now for the medical staff and the medical response more broadly, how far is there going to be a

question of trying to get support to those who maybe need emotional or mental help? That is very true. That is our major challenge now. There are so many get support to those who maybe need emotional or mental help. That is very true. That is our major challenge now. There are so many people that have been touched by this traumatic incident. It's for many of the people in Örebro, this is really something life-changing. We have never seen violence like this before. So now we're focusing on actually acute crisis support, you could say, for the many people that have been touched by this.

J.S. Yonash-Klassen. As the third anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine approaches, the Kremlin is pushing hard to capture more territory. Moscow now controls 18% of its neighbour and is continuing a slow, grinding advance on the eastern front. The city of Pokrovsk, a key supply and transport hub is in Russia's sights, with forces just two kilometres away. Our senior international correspondent Ola Gierin reports on the emptying of another Ukrainian city. We're driving towards Pokrovsk, a frontline city and along the road I can see damaged houses, areas that have been bombed, just passing another flattened building now.

We're traveling in an armored car with a volunteer organization called Base CUA. They carry out evacuations, getting civilians out of harm's way. My name is Anton Janemczuk. I'm active here in the East since the very first days of the invasion. We're going to Pokrovsk, basically on the front line. It's been heavily attacked day and night. There are around 7,000 people still in the city,

so we'll try to get some people out of that nightmare. We've stopped now at the first address on the team's list for today. They're not sure if the woman living here will be willing to evacuate, but they're going to try. We've been hearing explosions in the last few minutes. Anton climbs over a locked gate to check the house but there's no one home. A few streets away he finds 71-year-old Olga already waiting by the road. Olga has just left her house. She's come out and got into the van.

Olga, what has the situation been like here? It's not life anymore. It's like being in hell. life anymore. It's like being in hell. I've been in this house for 65 years. My children grew up here. My grandchildren. It's been a long time. It must be very hard to live. You know, in the beginning it seemed possible. We thought we'll see it out. But already the ground is shaking. And it seems to be that it's dangerous to stay here. Pokrovsk is coming under heavy Russian attack. Today is extremely cold, snowy. There's fog. Visibility is very poor.

That's actually good for the evacuation team. It means that they'll be less visible to Russian drones. Along the way, whenever Anton spots a civilian, he urges them to go. There'll be street battles, I promise you. He warns a group of three who have been collecting water. I'm doing this from the very first day, he says. It's the same everywhere. This is the final stage. The last pick-up of the day is 75-year-old Luba, who looks bereft and flinches at every explosion we hear. It's been bad, bad. We've been left alone under the clear sky. There are no authorities

here, just nothing. People are getting killed under the sky. There is no gas, no water, just nothing. Everyone has abandoned us. Luba, ending that report by Ola Giren. Anton's group, Base UA, has now suspended evacuations from the city for the time being, although evacuations by police volunteers continue. Still to come...

It was actually always quite easy to take a sick leave and I think people were kind of just doing it quite a lot. Burnout was quite a common thing. The impacts of Germany's generous sick leave policies. I'm Nicola Cochlin and for BBC Radio 4 this is history's youngest heroes. Rebellion, risk and the radical power of youth. She thought right I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself. 12 stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them. That resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now.

Follow History's Youngest Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Next to Greece, thousands of people have been fleeing the island of Santorini in the southern Aegean Sea, which has been hit by more than 300 earthquakes in the past few days. No major damage has been reported so far, but emergency measures are being put in place as a precaution. Nikki Cardwell reports. Millions of people visit Santorini every year to see its historic sites and whitewashed buildings. But with tourism at a low this time of the year, many of the locals are trying to find a way off

the island. We're going to leave because I'm afraid there are constantly earthquakes. We have to leave for the kids so they'll calm down. Over the past few days, the island has been shaken by dozens of tremors, local schools have been closed for the week and the authorities have warned residents not to hold large indoor gatherings because of fears that the tremors could have damaged buildings or caused landslides. Santorini's Mayor, Nikos Zourzos, says they have plans in place should the worst happen.

We must deal with this with patience and calm. This seismic activity may last many weeks. We have places for shelters for the population without structures and on level surfaces. There are eight places that can accommodate people. Santorini and the islands that surround it were formed when the crater of a volcano collapsed. It's also the site of one of the biggest eruptions in history. But experts say these current earthquakes do not appear to be linked to volcanic activity and they don't know what's caused them. That was Nikki Cardwell. Spain is coming to the end of its olive harvesting season. In 2021 the world's

biggest producer of olive oil began suffering a punishing drought. Production plummeted and you might have, the price of what's been called the country's liquid gold soared. The 2024-25 olive season has been better in Spain but farmers are still watching the sky. And apart from climate change, there's another cause for anxiety. Xylella fastidiosa is a deadly and hard to detect bacterium that's killed millions of olive trees in southern Italy. In the Spanish city of Cordoba, Dr Blanca Landa leads an international project at the Institute of Sustainable Agriculture dedicated to stopping the spread of the microbe. Linda Presley met her at her laboratory. It's a biosecurity facility, a quarantine level 2 facility. So the exclusive under positive

pressure is to avoid any escape from the laboratory inside or some entrance from outside from the street. Inside, Dr. Landa and her team keep a collection of deadly strains of the Zilella microbe. It's considered one of the most dangerous quarantine pathogens. This is due to the huge number of diseases that can cause it, very important. And the big fear of course, especially here in Andalusia, is the olive industry. Only in Andalusia we have over 1.6 million olive hectares, so you can imagine the concern of the olive industry.

Zilella kills slowly, clogging the vessels through which a plant absorbs water. And the only way it spreads is through insect vectors. They feed on an infected tree, then carry the microbes to the next tree they land on. It's believed Zilella first arrived in Europe in ornamental coffee plants from Latin America. Dr. Landa remembers her first sight of the havoc wreaked by the killer bacterium when she visited southern Italy in 2014. I was completely astonished. So it was like being in a field of like atomic war or whatever because all the trees were completely died and drying so all the area is affected. The dying trees generated conspiracy theories. Scientists and oil pipeline, large companies, even

the Mafia, all of them were blamed for the demise of countless olive groves. Farmers were distraught, chaining themselves to their ancient diseased trees to prevent the environmental authorities from removing them, the only way to counter Zilella. It was a very, very sad situation. They said that some of the farmers, to me, that they take care of the trees even better than their own child, you know, because they was the way of living.

Everywhere you go, you see symptoms of Xylella everywhere, yeah. And have they managed to stop it yet? No, not at all, no. Italy's lost more than 20 million olive trees to Xylella. Part of the end game would be to develop olive varieties resistant to Xylella. Second approach is to inoculate the plants, for instance, with the beneficial communities of microorganisms that can protect the plant of not getting infected. And then there are efforts to attack Zillela itself.

We have some collaborators in the project that are searching for viruses that can infect the bacterium. I asked Dr. Landa if the gravity of her research project gives her sleepless nights. No, I mean otherwise I won't sleep any day but sometimes I have been very concerned especially when we detected the bacterium in Spain. So is it a question of when not if in terms of the olives in southern Spain? I don't think that is a matter of when. I will be optimistic. Now we are more prepared than before. We know exactly how to monitor our

territory. I think farmers now are aware of what can be the problem. Dr Blanca Landa ending that report from Linda Presley in Cordoba in southern Spain. Germany has one of the most generous sick leave policies in the world. The average employee takes 20 days off sick each year. Economists working for the German Association of Pharmaceutical Companies say they think that the country wouldn't be in recession if its workers had taken fewer days off. Hannah Mullane has been trying to find out what's going on. It's 8am in Berlin, Germany's capital city. Commuters busily making their way to the office. But how would these workers feel if they needed to take time off sick?

My name is Mariana. I work as a production designer. It was actually always quite easy to take a sick leave and I think people were kind of just doing it quite a lot. Burnout was quite a common thing. My name is Denis and I'm a copywriter in the agency. I think we have a quite fair policy for the employees. I don't have to feel bad if I feel sick. I don't have to feel bad if my kids are sick. My name is Julia and I'm a trainee for a company that works for the German pensions. I think I needed two weeks sick last year, but it was no big deal.

Where I worked before I think it was an issue, but at this kind of company no. We have so much employees. Germany's generous sick leave policy means you can take six weeks off at full pay, paid for by your employer. After that, your health insurance will pay 70% of your salary for the next 18 months. But what does such a generous policy mean for the economy?

Nicholas Zebarth is professor of economics at the University of Mannheim and the Center for European Economic Research. There's no doubt that the sick pay system is a burden on the economy, especially in crisis times like now. We have a huge shortage of workers already and you can imagine if in addition to let's say 30 days of vacation, we have a very generous parental leave system, now people take more say 30 days of vacation, we have a very generous parental leave system. Now people take more than 20 days of sick leave a year. That is a huge burden not just

in companies on their labour costs but also in consumers and people not getting services delivered when they need it. And it's a burden that's very much on the employer, having to pay workers for up to six weeks whilst they're not working. So how do they manage? I think it's just baked in. I think it's in a similar situation as you assume that obviously everybody has 30 days of vacation and you just bake this into the overall structure. Stefan is the CEO of software company SDA and employs around 40 people. For him, the flexible working policy that came in during the pandemic is helping him manage when staff are off sick.

What I see is that people are first they say, hey, I will be working from home because I feel a little bit under the weather. And I think this is quite good because previous to that people would be a little bit sick, come to the office and then you would have a lot of sick people. So that's better. And you also see more flexibility around this. I would say also Sick leave is also part sometimes if your child is sick and then people need to stay home to take care of the

child. A lot of people say, hey, my child is sick, I cannot come to the office, I need to be at home, but I'm still able to work. But if you're a much smaller business, how do you cope? I'm Henry von Wagenburg. I'm one of the CEOs of Balgarden, the math and science world building game. And we have seven employees in our little team. If one employee is sick at Balgarden, we definitely feel it. It can ricochet through the rest of the team. Henry's small team find it harder to manage sickness. But can he see the policy changing? Yes, I could see it as something that could change.

I do think that while it could change, it is also a deep part of the work culture right now. It wouldn't just be a policy change, it would be a cultural change. Making any changes to the country's sick leave policy would certainly be unpopular with workers, but Germany is soon to hold a general election. And will the new government, with a struggling economy, feel the pressure to make some changes? We'll have to wait and see.

That report by Hannah Mullane in Germany. As the world recovers from the Covid pandemic, tourism and travel are again on the rise. One destination is opening again this month for the first time since Covid-19 and that's North Korea. On offer is a trip to the port area of Rason, a special economic zone near the borders of both China and Russia. Simon Cockrell is the general manager of Corio Tours, offering trips to celebrate a holiday in North Korea, the birthday of the leader Kim Jong-un. He explained more to Evan Davis about the destination. That area, Rason, as you said, it's a free trade zone and it's very remote, but it will be the first part of North Korea to reopen to foreign tourists since they closed about

five years ago. So the offer, as it were, is the resumption of tourism, organised tourism, which is the only kind there, to take people in to see what it's like, see as much as they can, hopefully resuming next week, but still exact details to be confirmed. Okay. What do you see when you go to a place like that? Do you get a picture of North Korean life? Is it a nice place to go and have a rest? What's the appeal? Well, nobody goes there for a rest. The appeal is mostly for people who are intrigued by an intriguing country, really. You get a picture of life that you can experience there, which of course is limited by your time and your access and infrastructure, but also by the nature of

the North Korean system, which is to keep their own people and influence from outside, including human influence, separate. So what you see and experience is perfectly real and normal life, but it's not the totality of reality and normal life. And nobody should really expect it to be either. But also, the lifestyles of people in Ra'san are quite distinct from those of people in the capital,

Pyongyang, or in other parts of the country. There's quite a bit of a range there. Of course, you don't really see and experience the worst of the worst, but intelligent people go there and they can infer what things are really like, or they can just have a trip and leave more confused than when they arrive, which is a, that's a common experience too. How many visits have you made? I have been there 182 times. 182 times to North Korea? Yeah but people always ask so it's just counting in increments of one, it's not too

hard. You must be getting a medal of some kind but to what extent if you go on a trip, you go to the hotel, you gather, you all have dinner, in the evening to what extent could you just wander around the streets of Razon on your own, unaccompanied? Well, it's not permitted under the law there. So in terms of the practicalities of it, you could, of course, just walk out of a door, most people can manage that. And really, the law in Rasson technically provides for that. But the reality is that if you go very far, you could end up causing some trouble for the people who host you there, who are a local travel company. It's not the government. It's not some kind of

nefarious organization of security or military personnel. And that's not a particularly good thing to do. You wouldn't want to cause trouble for anybody in North Korea. So unfortunately, you are constrained by the law, which is rather paternalistic over its own people, but also over tourists. and they treat everything like a school trip really. Everything has to be organised in advance. But this is all understood in advance as well. Nobody has ever shown up there and thought, you know, I thought I could do what I wanted. Simon Cockrell, General Manager of Corio Tours.

And that's it from us for now but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you'd like to comment on this edition or the topics covered in it, do please send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on x at global news pod. This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll. The producer was Liam McSherry. Our editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jackie Leonard, and until next time, goodbye. one way, your body's trying to go another. Land's troll. It's very extreme in the sense of how close you're racing wheel to wheel. We've been given unprecedented access to two of the most famous names in Formula One, McLaren and Aston Martin.

I'm Landon Aris. They build a beautiful bit of machinery that I get to then go and have fun in. They open the doors to their factories as the 2024 season reached its peak. I'm Josh Hartnett. This is F1, back at base. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.