Global News Podcast - US shelves plan for Trump-Putin talks

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

President Trump has said he doesn't want a "wasted meeting" after plans for a summit on Ukraine with Vladimir Putin in Bucharest were put on hold. Also: a court in Colombia overturns two convictions against the former president, Alvaro Uribe; the US vice-president JD Vance says he's optimistic that the Gaza peace plan will work, despite the killings of dozens of Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers on Sunday; the tech company OpenAI launches a new AI-powered web browser called ChatGPT Atlas; and a 33-year-old socialist is leading the race for mayor of New York City. 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]

This is the global news podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Charlotte Gallagher, and in the early hours of Wednesday, the 22nd of October, these are our main stories. Donald Trump puts on hold a plan for face-to-face talks with Vladimir Putin on Ukraine, saying he doesn't want a wasted meeting. In Colombia, a high court has overturned criminal convictions against the former president, Alvaro Aribi. Also, in this podcast, the young socialist who's leading the race to be New York City's new mayor.

If New York truly is the city that never sleeps, we deserve a mayor who fights for those of us who labor at every single hour of the day. How a new AI-powered web browser says it will use the internet for you. And the German man who stumbled across a life-changing family secret after watching a documentary about the Nazis. First, talks between President Trump and Vladimir Putin were penciled in for next month in Budapest, raising hopes the Russian president might be ready to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. But those talks have now been put on hold, with Mr Trump saying he doesn't want a wasted meeting with the Russian leader. Mr Trump implied that a refusal to freeze the fighting in Ukraine along current battle lines was a sticking point.

His comments came after a phone call between the U.S. Secretary of State and Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, who rejected the proposal outright. Now, when we hear from Washington, that we must stop immediately and that we must not discuss anything further, stop and let history judge. If we simply stop, that will mean forgetting about the rude causes of the conflict, which Donald Trump's administration has clearly understood and voiced. Our State Department correspondent, Tom Bateman, has more. After a two-and-a-half-hour phone call between President Trump and Putin last week,

Mr Trump announced there would be this summit between the two leaders in Hungary, planned it was thought for the next fortnight or so. Now, since then, there have been at least two phone calls between Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State in this building, and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, in which these issues have been thrashed out. and notably the Russians sent a diplomatic note to the Americans at the weekend, basically sticking to all their long-term positions on the war, saying that they demanded the whole of the Dombas in the east

and even more territory than they currently occupy. This is in effect a rejection of Mr Trump's position. He said he wants a ceasefire, a freezing of the current battle lines in Ukraine. Now, an administration official telling me that there are now no plans for a summit between President Trump and Putin in Hungary in the immediate. future. And Mr. Trump confirming that news. I think I don't want to have a waste of time, so I'll see what happens.

But we did all of these great deals, great peace deals. They're all peace deals. Agreements, solid agreements every one of them, but this one. And I said, go to the line, go to the line of battle, the battlefield lines,

and you pull back and you go home and everybody take some time off because you've got two countries that are killing each other. Two countries are losing five to seven thousand soldiers a week. So we'll see what happens. Well, this would have been the second such summit between the leaders after that meeting in Alaska back in August. They did little really to drive forward. President Trump's hopes for an immediate end to this war. And it feels like we're returning to a familiar pattern where

Mr. Trump has issued threats to Moscow, including toying with the idea of giving the Ukrainians Tomahawk missiles, only to withdraw from that position. the Kremlin have learned that and in the meantime have arguably felt it more effective to play for time. And I think Mr. Rubio is an element here, much more hawkish on Russia than Mr. Trump traditionally. His involvement in this seems to have been part of the reason why the Americans now apparently don't want to reward Mr Putin with a second summit. Tom Bateman. While President Trump has turned his attention to Ukraine, his vice president has traveled to Israel. J.D. Vance says he's optimistic the Gaza's.

peace plan will work, despite the killing of dozens of Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers on Sunday. He also said the return of dead Israeli hostages by Hamas would not happen overnight, as some bodies were still under the rubble of buildings bombed by Israel. The World Food Programme says it's been unable to deliver substantial supplies to northern Gaza because the border crossings into the area remain closed. Our correspondent Lucy Williamson filed this report from Jerusalem. media in a cavernous concrete hanger laid with AstroTurf, the U.S. vice president delivered an upbeat message at a critical time for Donald Trump's peace deal. The choice of venue, a new U.S.-led coordination center for the foreign forces meant to secure Gaza in the next stage of the deal,

was meant as a sign that the deal was moving forward. J.D. Vance said he had real optimism the ceasefire would hold, despite it briefly fracturing two days ago, but that it would take constant effort, monitoring and supervision. Every time that there's an act of violence, there's this inclination to say, oh, this is the end of the ceasefire. This is the end of the peace plan. It's not the end. It is in fact exactly how this is going to have to happen when you have people who hate each other, who have been fighting against each other for a very long time. We are doing very well. We are in a very good place. We're going to have to keep working on it. Both Israel and Hamas have reaped rewards from phase one of the deal. Phase two requires them to make tough

concessions, including giving up their respective control in Gaza. Mr. Vance said the U.S. did not have an explicit deadline for Hamas to disarm, but that if the group did not comply, very bad things would happen. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has insisted that any violation by Hamas, including a failure to disarm, would allow Israel to return to the war. The U.S. has so far shown more tolerance for hiccups and delays. And several Israeli commentators have pointed out that the real decisions over Israel's military action in Gaza are now being made in Washington. That was Lucy Williamson in Jerusalem. New York City is two weeks away from choosing a new mayor and a 33-year-old socialist is leading the race. If elected, Surin Mandani would make history

and possibly shake the very foundations of America's financial capital. Our North America business correspondent, Michelle Fleury, reports from Wall Street. If New York truly is the city that never sleeps, we deserve a mayor who fights for those of us who labor at every single hour of the day. He's young, he's bold. I will be that mayor. And he wants to tax the rich. Zoran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and son of immigrants, shocked New York's political establishment earlier this year, with a surprise primary win.

Now he's leading the race to run America's biggest city. I think he'll be a good change for the city. I think this is what we honestly needed. You know, I think a lot of people have felt very invisible for a long time and like especially by politicians and government. Mamdani wants to freeze rents, make public transport free, and open subsidized grocery stores. He says the wealthy can pay for it.

New York City deserves better than yet another mayor bought by Bill. Billionaires. Delivering on that agenda, though, won't be easy. I'm in Lower Manhattan, staring at the elegant steps of City Hall, the building that houses the mayor's office. Now, most of the city's tax powers don't actually lie here. They lie with the state government in Albany. New York State Governor Kathy Hochel has said she won't support any new taxes, although she has endorsed Mamdani. I've made it very clear that we have differences, but I also believe that he brings a sense of optimism in the can-do spirit. Still, Mamdani's rise is unsettling the city's corporate class.

Economist Steve Moore at the Heritage Foundation, who served as an economic advisor to the Trump administration, warns of economic fallout. It's the home of Wall Street. It is the financial capital of the world. And I do believe that if Mandani wins this race with his kind of socialist soak the rich agenda, that Wall Street will no longer be located in Manhattan.

The problem is the rich keep leaving, and that means if a billionaire moves out of New York, you don't get any money out of them because now they're paying taxes in some other state. And the timing couldn't be worse. Texas now has more finance and banking workers than New York, a first. The city that once defined global finance is losing ground. That's why Mamdani is racist.

seem to win over big business. With less than a month to go, he met behind closed doors with top CEOs. In general, I think it was positive. Catherine Wilde was there. She runs the partnership for New York, a group representing New York's corporate elite. He did a good job of convincing the business leaders that he wants to listen to them, get their ideas, have their help. He is not going to make ideological, narrow political appointments. So I think that was very reassuring. I absolutely think there's total agreement on affordability, financial insecurity being the issue that is really dividing America, whether it's on the right or the left. I don't think that the business community is aligned with some of the ways that

Mamdani wants to address that issue. But I think they totally agree it's the issue that must be addressed. For now, Mamdani is well ahead of rivals Republican Curtis Sliwa and independent Andrew Cuomo, the former governor. If elected, Mamdani would be New York's first Muslim mayor, its youngest in decades, and the first major left-wing figure to rise during Trump's second term. Whether he's the future of the Democratic Party

or just a flash in the political pan remains to be seen. Michelle Fleury. The tech company OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Atlas, a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser that promises to use the internet for you. The company said Atlas will look and feel like an existing browser but is built around a chatbot. So how will it work?

Earlier, I spoke to our technology correspondent, Lily Jamali. Well, for one thing, Atlas does a way with the way most of us use browsers and search bars. It does a way with a traditional bar that you see, that address bar. So when you open up a new tab in this browser that they're releasing, it takes you straight to chat GPT, and you can start engaging with the chatbot there. You also would type web addresses that you're looking to visit in this chat, you know, this ongoing chat with the chatbot. The agent feature, this thing called agent mode, actually does the searching for you on its own, basing what it does on context that it's gathered about what you might want or need from various services. And Open AI has already been trying to insinuate itself into our everyday lives, into our shopping habits I've noticed especially.

These last few weeks, we saw announcement about this at its developer day earlier this month. They are trying not just to make revenue, but to turn a profit, which they never have. So presumably they're hoping Atlas will kill not just the browser, but the search engine as we know it. I was going to say because a lot of people will be wedded to Google Chrome. That's the most popular browser. And ChatGPT are going to be wanting to compete with that. Yeah. And I asked analyst Patrick Morehead about this.

He said he thinks that users are actually going to be pretty interested in playing with Atlas and trying it out. But he's not so sure that users will stick with it. And I think that's an important distinction. Old habits die hard, as you just sort of alluded to there, for people who came up Googling everything, or maybe they're using Microsoft Edge or Apple Safari now, they might still prefer those more traditional methods of searching the internet. And he says there are some functionalities that chat GPT is offering here that you can kind of get on some of those competitors already. And I guess it's a trust thing as well about AI, and it can get things wrong, can't it? It can get things wrong. And I have to say just stepping back for a moment, one of the criticisms of Open AI and some of these other AI developers is that they just throw these tools out at all of us and then say, use them and tell us how it goes.

What are you interested in? And that can be very innovative and fun and create new maybe use cases that they hadn't thought of internally. But on the other hand, we saw what happened with social media, right? And already chatbots have found themselves at the center of this conversation about mental health. about how children should and shouldn't use them. And I'm not saying that will be a huge issue with this particular product, but more because there's just this known unknown out there. Open AI is very comfortable throwing these things out to us and seeing what they do.

Sometimes it goes well, others not so much. Lily Jamali, Iceland's frozen inhospitable winters have long protected it from mosquitoes, but that may be changing. This week, scientists announced the discovery of three mosquitoes, making the country's first confirmed finding of these insects in the wild. Mosquitoes are found almost everywhere in the world, with the exception of Antarctica and until recently Iceland. Rory Gallimore reports. Iceland has no shortage of natural dangers, volcanic eruptions, glacial floods,

scaldingly hot springs and bitterly cold winters. But it is at least one of the few places on earth where humans don't have to worry about mosquitoes. Until now, two females and a male have been caught on a sticky trap used to attract moths. There are species that's resistant to the cold. It isn't clear how many other mosquitoes are in Iceland or exactly how they got there.

One scientist said he did not believe their arrival was linked to climate change and suggested they could have been stowaways on a ship. That was Rory Gallamore. Still to come. We will pay a reward to somebody who's not connected to the theft, but there are people out there in the art recovery. every world who consistently pay thieves, and we refuse to do that. I'm a lawyer.

How the stolen jewels from the Louvre might be recovered. A court in Colombia has overturned two convictions against the former president Alvaro Oribi, which could have resulted in him spending 12 years under house arrest. While he was an office between 2002 and 2010, he led a military campaign against drug cartel. and left-wing guerrilla groups. But he was also accused of having links with right-wing paramilitaries. In August, he was found guilty of fraud and bribing those groups, something he'd always denied.

Now, the High Court in Bogota found the original ruling contained errors and wasn't proven beyond all reasonable doubt. Our global affairs reporter Mimi Swaby told me more about the case. This is a case that has shaken Columbia with its twists and turns for 11 years now, but it's been resolved in record time on an appeal. But this first sentencing was the first time a former Colombian president has been convicted in a criminal trial. And the case really revolved around allegations that Mr. Rubé was ordering or had ordered a lawyer to bribe jailed paramilitaries to discredit claims that he was organized with these groups. And these are right-wing groups who are responsible for massacres, for thousands of displacements and disappearances, as well as really awful atrocities during.

Colombia's armed conflicts. And these paramilitaries, according to truth commissions, are responsible for nearly half of the more than 450,000 people who were killed from 1985 to 2018. So a huge amount of people who were affected by this conflict. And the court had claimed that Mr. Rubé had played a major part in that. And so why was his conviction overturned then? Bolta's High Court overturned both convictions today against Mr. Mr. Urube basically because they said that they couldn't find proper evidence showing that there was bribery involved and that fraud had occurred. There had been a mic tapping which highlighted that Mr. Uribe had basically told the lawyer to go and bribe these paramilitary

individuals who'd been jailed. But that was deemed a invasion of privacy. So these weren't used in the court. These were thrown out. But the main point was the evidence wasn't concrete enough. two sentence Aroube for 12 years of house arrest. And I imagine there's been quite a bit of reaction to this inside Colombia. It has many Colombians are incredibly confused. This case has been going on for many, many years now, and they're confused how the same court essentially has gone back on itself and undone all the kind of really groundbreaking sentences and rulings

that had already put in place. However, Mr. Urubay has said this is a win. has called it a political persecution. This is alongside the US's top diplomat Marco Rubio, who's said that that Uruguay was a victim of the weaponization of Colombian judges. On the flip side, you have the left-wing president, the current president, Gustavo Petro, who said that history is repeating itself

and has really said this ruling covers up the country's paramilitary governance, its history of paramilitary governance. He's also added that now Mr. Trump, alongside his right-wing ally, Mr. Aroube, is going to seek sanctions on him. So he's come out and really denounce this ruling, saying that it goes against the Supreme Court and he is not in favour of it, like many Colombians he believes, around the country. Mimi Swayby.

Now to a story of a German man who stumbled across a life-changing family secret after watching a documentary about Nazis. Despite what he'd been told by relatives, he was closely related to one of the Third Reich's most feared leaders. one of the main architects of the Holocaust. Stephanie Prentice explains. Henrik Lankite lives in Spain with his wife, working as a pastor and part-time couples counselor.

And one quiet evening, he ended up researching one of the most famous Nazis in history. I saw Heinrich Himmler had his wife, and then I saw he had an affair. In this affair, I've seen the picture of this lady, and this is my grandmother, and I saw her name, Hedwig, but she had a difference. different surname. So first I went to my wife and I said to her, is that my grandmother? And she said,

yeah, that's her. And we compared with an album we had. And then later on, I saw they had two children and I see the name of my uncle and I see the name of my mother. And then I go to my wife again, I said, am I the grandson of this guy? Himmler's mistress bore a resemblance to his grandmother and shared the same date of birth and death. She'd be married after the end of the second. World War covering the tracks of his heritage. He later found a birth certificate formally linking the former SS leader who orchestrated Nazi Germany's concentration camps to his mother and says that was the death of his former identity. It was like a morning because I lost my identity. I completely lost it. In my family, because of that, ancestor, you have to be low. You can't shine.

You can't, we don't deserve it. With our past, Yeah, you could believe or could come to thinking we don't deserve anything. Henrik Leinkechite says his late mother was aware of who her father was and the secret cast a shadow across the whole family. Now he wants to change that. I was the last to know, everybody knew about it. And I also tried to imagine how was it for them. They always had to live with that burden, which I understand.

But I also understand, like, what could it have been if after the war, They would have said publicly, yeah, that happened. But we don't have that ideology, you know. We don't want to be like them. My mission is to tell people, you're not judged by your genetics, by whatever. You have to find your identity. That report by Stephanie Prentice. A growing number of international students who want to study medicine are heading for Bulgaria

because it's cheaper and easier to get a place there than in the UK. Jill Domigan reports. Just before I go back, we normally, shop around probably the more traditional cuisine stores. Mohamed Adnan Patel stocking up in Bolton, a town in the northwest of England, before heading back to Plovdiv in southern Bulgaria. A lot of stuff that we make here and we take over just so we can get a taste at home. Mohammed's about to start his fifth year of a six-year degree at Plovdiv Medical University.

It was a big shot to my family that I was not only studying medicine, but I was also studying it abroad. applied to medical schools in England, but he didn't get the grades to get in. Like many countries, Britain restricts the number of domestic students who can begin a medical degree each year because they're so expensive to fund. So I applied for universities here, and I didn't get any offers. Freya Mandapali lives in Preston, half an hour from Mohammed. She's about to start her second year at the same Bulgarian university. So I just decided I'd look at options abroad.

Freya and Mohammed have joined an increasing number of students going to Eastern Europe and particularly Bulgaria to study medicine. Plovdiv is one of Europe's oldest cities. It's famous for its Roman ruins and it's quite a big tourist draw. Lots of pavement cafes and street performers. And about a 20-minute walk from all of that is the medical school. So I'm sitting in the middle of the campus. It's really pleasant, very green, lots of trees.

Of course, lots of students, many of them talking in English, but also other languages, because this place attracts people from around the world. I'm from Canada. I'm from Germany, from Kalswur. I am originally from India, and I live in Dublin. There are more than 7.5,000 foreign medical students studying in Bulgaria and more than 1,700 of them here in Plovdiv. This faculty takes on around 470 international students a year.

Three years ago, there were 700 applications. This year, it was 1,200. The fees are around 10,000 euros a year, just over 11.5,000 US dollars. It's a relatively small amount compared to costs for foreign students in many countries, but far more than Bulgarians pay. The Bulgarian government's keen to attract lucrative international students like these. But while that's a success story and boosting the economy, the average monthly pay for a nurse at a state-run hospital is around 1,500 liver,

about 900 US dollars. For a junior doctor, it's just under 12.000. $1,200 US dollars. That's far less than they can earn in neighbouring European countries and so inevitably many are voting with their feet. Jill Domegan. Around 8 million people in the UK take antidepressants, but doctors say new league tables have shown for the first time that the side effects associated with the drugs are very different. The teams at King's College London and Oxford University are calling for the drugs to be more closely matched to the needs of each patient. Here's our health and science correspondence.

It's always been known antidepressants can have physical side effects. This is the first time they've been ranked, so the drugs can be easily compared. The findings published in the Lancet Medical Journal reveal how different medicines can raise or lower body weight, with a range of up to four kilograms, and heart rate changes could vary by 21 beats every minute. The researchers said no two antidepressants were built the same, and prescriptions should be tailored to the needs of the patient. For example, they suggest people with high blood pressure, could avoid medicines that make it even higher. The study looked at the first eight weeks of a course of antidepressants.

They suspect these effects last throughout treatment, but that is still being tested. That was James Gallagher. Next, jewellery stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris on Sunday has been valued at more than a hundred million dollars by a French prosecutor. So far, the police have failed to track down the thieves, so where might this jewellery be now? and how can these historic artefacts be recovered?

Ed Butler has been speaking to Christopher Marinello, a lawyer and founder of the firm Art Recovery International. The thieves don't want to keep them intact. There's no incentive for them to do that. You could say that they're more valuable as historical pieces, but the thieves don't care about history. They don't care about the cultural heritage of France. They don't care about anything.

They're just common thugs. These guys are just looking to cash out. And to do that, they need to break them off. They need to take them out of the settings. They need to look at the raw diamonds, and they need to move them on in order to sell them. And the larger stones, they need to recut. And to do that, you need to go to a place where they cut diamonds. That's Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Delhi, India, and find a dodgy dealer that's willing to cut the stones with no questions asked.

So what is the job of someone like you in a situation like this, not that you're directly dealing with it? With a painting, it's a lot easier to try to recover because they may try to sell it at auction somewhere or they may sell it to a dealer or may approach a dealer who will contact us and say, I'm being offered this. Can you tell me if it's stolen? But with high-profile jewelry, it's very difficult. So my role would usually be, you know, if somebody would contact, if there was a reward offered, which I had been calling for for some time over the last 24, 48 hours, criminals would call me or someone connected to criminals or someone who knows who the criminals are and say, look, I want to collect the reward, I know who these guys are, I know where the jewels are, or they may say, look,

I don't have any connection to the theft, but I was wondering if there was an insurance company out there that was willing to pay an amount of money to recover them, a finder's fee. Is there any risk there that you'd be literally paying off the thieves themselves? Never. We don't do that. But do you think that there would be even a percentage in doing that for the sake? you say, of keeping intact a priceless piece of historical artifact that would otherwise be

broken up? Well, that has been done in the past, but it's usually done by governments and with the authorization of the police, such as the turners that were recovered, payments were made. It was kind of a ransom, effectively. Yeah, we don't pay ransoms. You know, we will pay a reward to somebody who's not connected to the theft, but ransoms are a whole different story. They're illegal, they're unethical, but there are people out there in the art recovery world who hold themselves out as recovery experts who consistently pay thieves. And we refuse to do that. I'm a lawyer. I'm not going to lose my license over a case. What chances do you think do the Louvre have of getting their stuff back here?

Very slim, unfortunately, because they have a huge head start on the police who can only find these items by locating all the criminals and sitting them. them down and demanding that they tell them where they are. So there's been a race with a massive head start for the criminals. That was Ed Butler speaking to Christopher Marinello from Art Recovery International. And that's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast, all the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.

The address is Global Podcast at bbc.com.com. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag Global NewsPod. This edition was mixed by Jonathan Greer and the producers of Marion Strawn and Stephen Jensen. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Charlotte Gallagher. Until next time, goodbye.