Global News Podcast - US National Guard troops arrive in Illinois

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

Members of the Texas National Guard are gathering at an army facility outside Chicago, after orders from President Trump. Hundreds of troops have been deployed to the US's third largest city to support the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. The president has called Chicago a "war zone" following protests against federal immigration authorities. Illinois state officials accuse Mr Trump of an unconstitutional overreach and say he's using American troops to punish his political enemies.Also: the US government shutdown is putting extra strain on understaffed airports, causing travel delays. Five people have been detained after an attack on the Ecuadorian president's car. The Japan based company using drones and artificial intelligence to detect malaria-carrying mosquitoes. An international trio of scientists is awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in physics. The couple putting their collection of 8,450 teapots up for auction, and why did so many women in a tiny Hungarian village poison their husbands?The Global News Podcast brings you the breaking news you need to hear, as it happens. Listen for the latest headlines and current affairs from around the world. Politics, economics, climate, business, technology, health – we cover it all with expert analysis and insight. Get the news that matters, delivered twice a day on weekdays and daily at weekends, plus special bonus episodes reacting to urgent breaking stories. Follow or subscribe now and never miss a moment. Get in touch: [e-mail]

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These are our main stories. Hundreds of US National Guard troops are now in Chicago in a move that caused the state to sue the Trump administration. and the city's mayor isn't rolling out the red carpet. I pray for Donald Trump, his soul, he's lost. And that's why it's important that we help find a way to protect our democracy and our humanity, not some brittle, insecure human being. The U.S. government shutdown hits air travel with severe delays at major airports,

and Ecuador is rocked with violent clashes and protests, and an alleged assassination attempt against President Daniel Naboa. Also in this podcast, how A.R. and drones are helping tackle malaria by eliminating high-risk mosquito breeding grounds and... So it looks like they'd been scoping out in advance and that they'd come for specific items. These items they took are very, very special. We're absolutely devastated. Police make arrests, but the search continues for bronze age gold jewellery stolen from a museum in Wales. We begin in the US where Donald Trump appears to be executing his plan to

but National Guard troops on the streets of Chicago. The state of Illinois is currently suing him over it, but hundreds of troops have been gathering at an army facility just outside of Chicago. The Trump administration has portrayed certain Democratic-led cities as war-ravaged and lawless amid its crackdown on illegal immigration. The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, has called the move illegal, unconstitutional and dangerous.

I pray for Donald Trump. His soul. He's lost. and that's why it's important that we help find a way to protect our democracy and our humanity. That's what I'm motivated by. Not some brittle, insecure human being who has expressed a degree of lawlessness that would make Vladimir Putin blush. Earlier at a tense Senate hearing, the U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi was asked about the move, one usually reserved for extreme emergencies in the U.S.

Mr. Dick Durbin, the senior Democratic representative from Illinois, criticized the action as an unconstitutional overreach and accused the Justice Department of politicizing law enforcement to target President Trump's political opponents. This was Ms. Bondi's response. I wish you love Chicago as much as you hate President Trump. And currently, the National Guard are on the way to Chicago. If you're not going to protect your citizens, President Trump will.

Our North America correspondent David Willis gave me the latest. Well, over the weekend, anchor, President Trump authorized about 700 National Guard troops to be deployed to Chicago, and it's understood that around 200 of them have now arrived, sent there from Texas, and they're currently holed up. It appears at an army training center on the outskirts of Chicago. They're due to be joined by fellow officers from Texas and hundreds of other officers from the state of Illinois National Guard. and a Pentagon official has been quoted as saying that the National Guard troops are being deployed to, as that spokesperson put it, protect federal government immigration facilities and personnel for an initial period of 60 days. Precisely where they'll be stationed in and around Chicago, however, isn't entirely clear. And why is the President so determined to deploy his troops to different U.S. cities and in this case, Chicago?

Well, that's a good question, and President Trump has made no secret of his desire to send troops to Chicago. He's consistently claimed that the country's third largest city is a war zone, as he's put it, riddled with violent crime. And indeed, the Homeland Security Secretary, Christy Noah, claimed recently that protesters were being paid to disrupt the operations of federal officials who have been sent to Chicago as part of. of the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration. And this follows the deployment, of course, of National Guard troops, thousands of them, to this city, Los Angeles, as well as Washington, D.C. Other cities, or both cities, where the president has claimed that crime and lawlessness are running amok.

The president's opponents, however, accuse him of manufacturing a crisis by first sending in federal immigration officials to round up and deport illegal migrants. We've seen a lot of these mass deportations, prompting protests against the presence of those agents, which the president himself was then used as a pretext for deploying the National Guard. Well, today President Trump threatened to use emergency powers. That's authority granted to him under the U.S. Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy the military within the country over the head of local officials in order to suppress rebellion.

Okay, and just briefly, you touched upon the Interaction Act there as well, but we talked about the other states, the likes of California, suing Trump for sending troops there. Oregon were able to get a judge to block a deployment there. In terms of the legal protections, how would that work for the states that are being targeted? Well, as far as this latest deployment is concerned, And officials there in Illinois have accused President Trump of using U.S. troops to punish his political enemies. And, of course, he's made no secret President Trump, that is, of wanting to send troops into the city of Chicago.

And he's also ordered troop deployments in Memphis and Portland as well. A judge has temporarily blocked the deployment of troops to Portland, however. A North America correspondent David Willis. But there's a high chance that the troops currently set up. up outside of Chicago won't be getting paid as the US government shutdown enters its second week. During the stalemates, some federal employees are still expected to work without pay or a guarantee of being reimbursed later. In the US, most air traffic controllers are employed by the government and the impact is now being felt. Stephanie Prentice has been following this and told me more.

The US was already facing a massive shortage of air traffic controllers. It's of course a key role. They're preventing collisions in the sky. their managing safe takeoffs and landings. But the workforce has been running short after recruitment challenges and now even more issues are arising. So this association that represents them has said the shutdown has basically pushed an already overstretched workforce to breaking point. The transport secretary Sean Duffy said some are now calling in sick due to stress

and fatigue. He estimates that staffing has at times dropped to around 50%. And flight trackers seem to indicate that more than three, thousand flights have been delayed so far at major airports. Some estimates are actually double that. And the Federal Aviation Administration has had to order temporary ground stops because the control tower of some airports has been completely empty. Now, what's interesting is that cancelled flights do have political clout. So back in 2019, during that 35-day shutdown, the number of absences by controllers went up in line with missed paychecks and the slowdown of air traffic into New York

was one of the reasons attributed to lawmakers eventually ending the standoff. Okay, interesting stuff. So it's not just the aviation industry though. There are other sectors also struggling. Yeah, across the board. So federal land like national parks, national forests shut down, social health programs being impacted by a lack of staff. Food assistance programs are predicted to rapidly run out of money. And at least one of those programs, the Maryland Food Bank's book to us and said it's already seen a rise in federal workers turning up to get food support.

Megan Kimmel is the CEO. Federal workers, it will take time for their family finances to stabilize again. If you think about the government shutdown, several people with jobs who are now finding themselves looking for food resources. We are definitely taking it day by day, but if this is done in two weeks,

it's going to be a small blip. If we're still talking about this five weeks from now, it's going to be a much more serious situation. And actually the latest we have heard from the White House is that federal workers who are being impacted by the shutdown may not be entitled to back pay once it all gets resolved. The newsroom Stephanie Prentice reporting. The Ecuadorian President's convoy has again been attacked

amid nationwide mass protests. According to the government, about 500 people through rocks at President Daniel Naboha's car and there were reportedly signs of bullet damage on his vehicle. The top minister, Ines Manzano, said it was an attempted assassination. This will not go unpunished. The police have arrested five people

and they will be charged with a crime of terrorism. We will not allow this. Ecuador says yes to peace, yes, to work. But these kinds of demonstrations, which are not peaceful, are not what we need at a time of progress and development. The president was not hurt. Protesters accused the government of cracking down on dissent.

Our South America correspondent Ione Wells has more details. There have been protests and violent clashes in Ecuador for more than two weeks. They started after the country's largest indigenous group announced a national strike in response to the government cutting diesel subsidies. The government has defended the cut, saying the money saved will go towards farmers and transport sector workers. The president's office shared a video with the BBC showing people throwing rocks at the president's convoy and three holes on a car window.

The BBC hasn't confirmed independently if bullets. were fired. The government says those arrested would be processed under terrorism and attempted assassination charges. The Indigenous group has accused the government of arbitrary detentions and a violent crackdown on protesters. Iron Ewell's reporting. This year's Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three scientists for their pioneering work in Stay With Me, demonstrating macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in electrical circuits. Yes, made it. along with Michael Devereaux from France and the American John Martinis

made the discoveries in the mid-1980s. The Nobel Jury said their research had created opportunities to develop the next generation of quantum technology. Our science correspondent, Palab Gouche, reports. This year's prize is for demonstrating that something called quantum tunneling can occur in electrical circuits. The arcane terminology belies quite a straightforward phenomenon and its implications are profound.

There is no advanced technology used today that does not rely on quantum mechanics, including mobile phones, cameras and fibre optic cables. But Professor Clark and his team's achievement with quantum tunneling paves away for even greater advances. Quantum mechanics are the bizarre rules that tiny particles like the electron follow in the subatomic world, such as seeming to be in several places at the same time. Another odd thing that happens in the quantum realm is that particles go through energy barriers that they don't have the energy for. The barrier can be thought of as a hill

with the electron not having enough energy or petrol to go up it. But using quantum tunnelling, it burrows through it. Professor Clark and his team demonstrated that tunneling can be reproduced not just in the quantum world but also in our world in an electrical circuit that can be held in the palm of one's hand. He told a news conference that he was shocked to receive the award. Well, first of all, like, completely smart.

It has never occurred to me in any way that this might be the basis of a no-law prize. Many people are working on quantum computing, and our discovery is in many ways the basis of this. Professor Clark and his team's discovery has enabled technologists to study and refine quantum tunneling at non-subatomic levels. The race is now on to fully harness it, and to develop a new generation of vastly more powerful computers. Nobel Prize Science Awards are given years,

often decades after the discovery has been made, in order to fully assess its long-term impact on the field. Palab Ghosh reporting. Still to come? Everywhere we went, we looked for teapots. We had them hanging from the ceiling. We had them up the walls. We had them everywhere.

Yes, Governor, we spill the tea on a couple selling their museum, collection of 8,000 teapots. America is changing, and so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the global story. Every weekday will bring you a story from this intersection, where the world

and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Every year, about 250 million people get malaria, primarily caused by being bitten by an infected mosquito, and 600,000 people die from the disease. Most of the cases are in Africa. Now, one Japanese startup is trying to combat the illness by using drones and AI to identify and eliminate high-risk mosquito breeding grounds.

Marina Ishikawa works for Sora Technology who made the tech. We fly drones. We create the map of the landscape of the land that we're trying to target. We basically capture the photos of the water bodies there, especially the puddles. And we send that landscape data to our AI. and then after our AI decides that it is a high-risk water body, then we spray the lava size there so that we can kill the mosquito larvas there. So how does the AI identify high-risk bodies of water?

We look at like temperature, that's the size of the water body, the vegetation around, and there's so many factors that I cannot like say all of them. And we also have sent the people to check each of the water body that we captured to see if AI was precise or not. And we have a data that more than 80% of AI has very high accuracy. And before drones and AI, how were people looking at potential malaria sites and bodies of water? Was this work being done at all? In the traditional way, they were spraying to every single water body they can find. We have figured out that 70% of the water bodies that is there does not have the malaria mosquito lavas.

So by using our solution, we can just spray the 30% of those water bodies that actually has a high risk. So therefore, the cost of larvae side and also cost of the labour has been dramatically decreased. How else can your technology be used to treat diseases then? The same solution can be used for other infectious disease such as dengue. So now we have already started a piloting in Philippines to see if we can eliminate the number of dengue mosquitoes. And Jika, Jika is also a disease that can be carried by mosquito. Marina Ishkawa speaking to Shona McCallum. Here in the UK, two men have been arrested on suspicion of burglue after,

Artifacts thought to include bronze age gold jewellery was stolen from a museum in Wales. Police say they're still searching for the items. Jane Richardson, the chief executive of St Fagin's National Museum of History, told us more about the heist. I mean, it was just startling how quickly it all happened. They were actually in and out of the building in four minutes. We believe they entirely knew what they were after.

They were so focused. Because we have CCTV everywhere, we could see them making their approach. So my colleague called the police. The police were there within five minutes with a helicopter. But unfortunately, they were so organised. They got away before the police were able to apprehend them. You can see it on the CCTV.

They knew exactly where they were going. They didn't look left and right and try and work out what's worth taking here. So it looks like they'd been scoping out in advance and that they'd come for specific items. These items they took are very, very special. And they didn't bother trying to take anything else. We're absolutely devastated. These items, we want people to share them, to see them, to learn from them,

and to do that, you have to put them on display. And even with, you know, top-notch, specially designed cases like we have at St Fagans, nothing can ever be totally secure. So there's always going to be an element of risk, but better that and that people can see the items that belong to them than to have them hidden away in cupboards. Jane Richardson, at the turn of the 20th century, Women in the small Hungarian village of Nigeria became part of a mass poisoning network, targeting their husbands.

The women saw this as the only way to escape the violent behaviour of these men, many who had returned from fighting in the First World War. Over a period of 20 years, an estimated 300 men died from arsenic poisonings and a number of women were eventually put on trial. Journalist Hope Rees has now written a book about why these women went to such extremes and how they got away with it for so. long. She told Nula McGovern first about a midwife who played a major part in helping these women to murder their husbands. Auntie Jouji was the lead midwife in the village. She had a position of authority. She was paid a nice salary, had a nice home, was treated with respect. Midwives at the time were one of the few roles women could have where they could lead an independent life. She would go to the Kochma. She would brag about her exploits. She would carry vials of poison with

her. Men were afraid of her, but she would also listen to women. How the poison was made, fly paper, it was basically boiled up and the liquid used, for example. Give us an idea of how widespread this was in this particular area. We're talking about a small village. So yes, the fly paper, common everyday item, they could go to the general store and just boil it in water. The earliest known poisoning was in 1911. That was connected to the midwife. However, the trials didn't, happen until 1929. That's almost two decades of poisonings. People were very reluctant to bring attention to the authorities. They were afraid. Some were writing anonymous letters, but often they were fearful. Did the women take on poisoning their partners lightly? It's a really tough

question to answer. We can't kind of get into their minds. We have a lot of evidence that shows that Women sometimes were enduring abuse for decades before they began poisoning. Rosalia Takach was one of the older poisoners. She was married in 1886, I believe, and she had been abused for three decades before she turned to a neighbor for help. She poisoned her own husband, and then she started helping other abused women. There were about five of those that we know of who were later found to be connected with her. But that is also quite shocking that it continued for a couple of decades. And Susie killed herself before she was caught, I think, with the police coming after.

But some of the others were convicted. Yes. So we had 28 people on trial in 1929 for over 100 deaths, although, as you said, up to 300 were killed. Maybe more even that we don't know that. So this is what people in the village say. Even today, they're saying, OK, Najraiv is the only town, the village that, the village that was found out. I was also intrigued about the line that poison is often the choice of women to kill. Right. I think they considered poison a bit differently. First of all, poison is the main

way that women have killed over time. I think it was easier for the women to let themselves off the hook to have the illusion that they were helping the husband. They often use that language in the court. They would say, I was helping him or I was putting him to sleep. I think there's no way not to be sympathetic to their plight in general. So their plight, but you could say they, you know, committed. Of course. Mass murder. They did.

And the thing is that this is so intrinsically connected to the domestic violence. And we see this even today. So many women are in prison today for protecting themselves from abusive partners. So really that kind of drove my interest in the story. There's this flip side. It's all connected. The men had experienced violence. They became even more violent towards their wives after the war. And the women really were doing what they had to do to protect themselves. I can't imagine this was an easy situation to be in. Journalist Hope Reese. And we end this pod with a terrific story for you. An old school traditional teapot may have fallen out of favor in some parts of the world, but they're still very popular. as collectibles. And while owning a few is one thing, a British couple are looking for buyers for their collection of eight and a half thousand teapots. Sue and Keith Blazy started collecting

them 40 years ago and even opened a museum to show them off. They now plan to auction off these precious memories to fund their retirement. Keith told Tony Livesey how one gift resulted in such a large trove. We had a house and we had a new kitchen put in it and it come with a glass cabinet and the wife's man came around to see the new house and we said what you're going to put in there

we said I don't know yet well about a week or so later she bought around a teapot so we thought rightly I always put it in that cabinet and then about a week later her aunt come round and she gave us a teapot as well

I said well I don't believe this this is silly two teapots and that's what's fake and it's fate and it's fate so you decided everywhere you went you were going to buy a teapot everywhere we went we looked for teapots

and we filled our house. We had them hanging from the ceiling. We had them up the walls. We had them everywhere. We made the museum and it's gone crazy ever since. They're not just normal round teapots. We've got teapots in the shape of a smokers pipe, cars, trains, planes and automobiles of all different sites.

So you've got it over 8,000, Keith. What's the best one you've got? What's the most memorable? If there's a fire, which teapot are you picking up? The teapots, I've got two teapots that I'll pick up and run out They're called Mr and Mrs House And one's a house shape of a man And one's a house of a shape of a lady

When we go abroad, we used to go and find teapots From some countries we bought so many teapots We've had to have boxes sent back to the house Because we couldn't get them in our suitcases And we've met so many famous people And so many people We've had thousands of people come around and go around in the museum We've had Charles and Camilla

They come down and went around a museum And Camilla bought a teapot And now you're hoping someone's going to buy the teapot museum collection as a whole rather than break it up? Yes. I'd love to see the teapots be kept in England, but I know there is inquiry with some other countries apparently about them. But we just want to keep them together because it's taking us forever to collect these teapots. We spent so many hours and miles travelling around picking up teapots. It'd be a shame to let them be separated now.

Dare I ask, I mean, how much is it going for, Keith? Can you tell me? Well, we don't know. I don't know. It's so whatever the bids go for. No one might bid on it whatsoever. But we've had so many people inquiring about it. Every day the phone's ringing.

What we said is that yes, we were buying all these teapots, but all they are going to be is our retirement savings. And we've had lots of enjoyment. As I said, we've loads of people have been around and gone around the museum. They come out. And even the men, we call it the wow factor. The men go in the door. And you can see their faces.

They do not want to go and look at teapots. They couldn't think of anything. worse to go and look at. And I can't say, I cannot believe that I've had so much fun just looking at teapots. Well, it's the novelty, isn't it? Keith, I'm just hoping you're not going to retire and then start buying teapots again. I mean, have you got the habit out of your system? No, no, we're definitely not buying any more teapots now. We're still going to have some. We'd not be able to have a house without teapots in them. But we won't have nowhere near as many as what we've got. Only teapots that have got a special meaning to us that we

had a lovely story that went with them. Teapot, Stan, Keith Blazy there. And that's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast a little later. If you want to comment on this episode, all the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is Global Podcast at BBC.co.com. And you can also find us on X at BBC World Service, and you can use the hashtag

Global NewsPot. This edition was mixed by Philip Ball. and the producer was Stephanie Zacherson and the editor is Karen Martin. I'm Ankara to Sye. Until next time, goodbye.