Global News Podcast - US-Venezuela: Trump's largest warship arrives in Latin America region

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

One of the world's most advanced aircraft carriers has arrived in the waters off Latin America as President Donald Trump ramps up the US naval presence in the Caribbean Sea. He says the US military is firing on drug traffickers. So why does Venezuela say he's trying to bring down its government? Also: California Governor Gavin Newsom is at COP30, to present his own vision of US climate policy. The mayor of Istanbul faces 2,000 years in prison over charges that his supporters say are politically motivated. And we look at the Israeli bill which would impose the death penalty on people convicted of terrorism. 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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I'm Ankara to Sy and at six hours, GMT, on Wednesday, the 12th of November. These are our main stories. Donald Trump sends his most advanced aircraft carrier to the Latin America region, escalating tensions with Venezuela. California Governor Gavin Newsom tells COP 30 that President Trump will reduce. the U.S. to a footnote on climate policy. And the mayor of Istanbul faces 2,000 years in prison. His party say the charges are politically motivated.

Also in this podcast, China wants young people to spend more money. Some of my friends are unemployed, still living at home and looking for a job. The economy is a bit off right now. I hope it gets better so we can all have a better life. And we look at the Israeli bill that would impose the death penalty for terrorism. For months, Donald Trump has been massing U.S. Navy ships in the Latin America region near Venezuela, ordering strikes on boats that he says are running drugs to the U.S. Now one of his most advanced warships has arrived in the region.

The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. At least 76 people have been killed by the U.S. operas. described by some human rights observers as extrajudicial killings. On Tuesday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said he was suspending intelligence sharing with the US until the attack stopped, adding that the fight against drugs must be subordinate to the human rights of the Caribbean people. Our South America correspondent, Ione Wells, has been telling me why the arrival of this latest U.S. ship is so significant.

It's the world's largest warship and the world's largest aircraft. and it is the newest, most advanced aircraft carrier that the U.S. Navy has. It is essentially kind of like a floating airport. It's a ship which fighter jets can land on and take off from. And I think its arrival in the region is certainly being seen as the latest escalation by the U.S. when it comes to its military buildup in the Caribbean, which many observers believe is not just about targeting alleged drug trafficking vessels, but it's also about putting military pressure on Nicolas Maduro,

the president of Venezuela. So I only, a lot of speculation about Donald Trump trying to force Mr. Maduro out of power. How did the relationship between the two presidents reach this point? Well, there has been a lot of international combination of Nicolas Maduro over the last couple of years, not just because of the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela that has triggered large amounts of migration to the United States, millions of Venezuelans who have fled Venezuela in recent years, but also because of the fact that the last election in Venezuela last year was widely recognised internationally as neither free nor fair

and that has led to the US, for example, not recognising Nicolas Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela. Now, another factor that has played into this is that the US has for some time accused Nicolas Maduro of being the head of a drug trafficking ring in Venezuela. Maduro has repeatedly denied these allegations and for his part, he has always accused the US of imperialism and of worsening the country's economic crisis

through imposing sanctions on Venezuela. So there has been this long-standing tension between the two nations. Now, why many people think that this isn't just about drugs, but also about trying to put military pressure on Nicolas Maduro, is that Venezuela itself doesn't produce large amounts of cocaine. That mainly comes from Colombia, Peru, Bolivia. there is some cocaine that is trafficked through Venezuela, but certainly it isn't the biggest drug trafficking route in the region,

and that is why many feel like given the US defines Nicolas Maduro himself as the head of a drug trafficking organisation, this might be part of a wider plan to essentially try to put military pressure on him and his inner circle. Ione Wells reporting. Well, Venezuela's southern neighbour Brazil is hosting the COP 30 climate talks this week, and the U.S., one of the world's largest producers of carbon emissions, has not sent a delegation. The White House said in a statement that President Trump would not jeopardize U.S. economic and national security goals

to pursue what it called vague climate goals that are killing other countries. But dozens of state and local officials from across the U.S. have traveled to the meetings in Bel-M to present their own message on climate, including California Governor Gavin Newsom. He's a leading figure in the Democrat Party. and a possible presidential candidate for 2028. Our environment correspondent, Magma Gra, is there. To warm applause in a hot and humid pavilion, California's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom came to the cop

to reassure participants that the U.S. was still committed on climate at state level. However, it didn't take him long to renew his war of words with U.S. President Donald Trump, who has described climate change as a con. Governor Newsom told supporters, at the cop that Mr. Trump was a bully and an invasive species who would reduce the U.S. to what he termed a footnote on climate change policy. And reacting to newspaper reports that said the president

was going to allow drilling for oil in the waters of California, Mr. Newsom said it was never going to happen. As it relates to offshore oil drilling, it's overwhelmingly opposed by members of all political parties in the state of California. It's dead on arrival. And I also think it, remarkable, that he didn't promote it in his backyard in Marlago. It didn't promote it off the coast of Florida. That says everything. Governor Newsom wasn't alone. Around 100 state and city officials from different parts of the United States came to show their commitment to tackling rising temperatures. Among them was the governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham. We're doing the work. We're making a difference. We're going to stay focused. We're going to do

more. We're going to work to add states. And oh, by golly, looks like. like we might add Virginia, and we'll stay the course with New Jersey. So that's our commitment. We're here. While the American politicians were welcomed, some delegates were a little bit wary, having seen the United States enter and leave various climate agreements over the past two decades. Long-time climate talks participant, Mohamed Adao, from Kenya, said that while he understood that many people in the US were still committed on climate, the rest of the world wasn't going to sit around and wait for them to come back.

The rest of us are not going to wait for the US. At the end of the day, it requires the rest of the world to get on with a job at hand to tackle climate change. Ultimately, this isn't going to just hurt the most vulnerable nations. It's also going to force the US to miss out on the energy of the future. And so this is an act of self-supportage, and we can't let one man wreck the planet that we share. Kenyan Mohammed Adao ending that report by Matt McGraw. Prosecutors in Turkey have announced 140 new charges against the opposition mayor of Istanbul, Ekram Imamoglu, who is the main rival to the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Mr. Ememoglu, who strongly denies allegations of corruption, has been in jail since March, when his arrest sparked the largest protests in Turkey in over a decade. His party says the fraud charges are politically motivated. Istanbul, our senior international correspondent, Ola Geryn, reports. Istanbul's jailed mayor now faces yet another legal case, and this one is on an epic scale. The indictment runs to 4,000 pages and names 400 suspects. It alleges that Ekrem Imamolu is the boss of a crime group

involved in embezzlement, extortion and money laundering. Prosecutors have demanded a sentencing, of more than 2,000 years if the mayor is convicted. They have also asked the courts to close his Republican People's Party, which is Turkey's main political opposition. Mr. Imamolu has already been accused of everything from espionage to forging his university degree. His party says his only crime is running for the presidency of the country.

As the cases against him multiply, it seems safe to assume he will remain behind bars, unable to stand in the next election, due by 2028. The authorities here insist the courts are independent. Human rights groups say they have been weaponised. Olegeren reporting, China's once surging economy is struggling with exports falling, ongoing trade tensions with the U.S. and record high youth unemployment, the government is under growing pressure to turn things around. One idea is to encourage younger consumers to increase their spending in order to give the economy a shot in the arm. But as China correspondent Stephen

McDonnell reports from Beijing, rather than buying more, many young people seem to be embracing frugality with great enthusiasm. It's lunchtime in Beijing and workers at this shopping and office district just east of the foreign ministry have poured into the street and are in search of some food along Chawai Nanjee. It's an area with lots of small service sector businesses, as well as retail, wholesale clothing and some big chain outlets. I'm here to try and get an idea of the attitudes of younger people

when it comes to their purchasing patterns in the China of 2025. Ask one young woman if it's more important for her to say, or spend money at the moment. Right now, making money is more important to me. I actually need to expand my income sources and cut my costs. She works in insurance and says she's now earning less than she used to. I changed jobs and it doesn't pay well. Also, I don't know for how long this new job can sustain me in the future.

A bad economic environment like this makes people feel down because we are not earning very much. This woman's comments encapsulate three of the big reasons why the Chinese government is finding it hard to get younger people to consume more. They're worried about job security, their wages are stagnant or going down, they don't feel good about their future prospects. A young man who works in the food and beverage industry

says there are low-level jobs available, but that it's hard to find decent work related to his specialty area. Some of my friends are unemployed, still living at home and looking for a job. They had all kinds of majors at university, from financial services to product sales. The economy is a bit off right now. I hope it gets better so we can all have a better life. The United States has a problem with consumers binge buying on their credit cards using money that don't have.

In China, it's the opposite challenge. People are already inclined to save rather than spend, and this only increases when there are perceptions of tough times ahead. Helena Lofgren has been studying China's consumption patterns for the Swedish Institute of International Affairs and believes this economy is relying too heavily on selling products overseas in a time of geopolitical uncertainty. People save more than they consume,

and you need the consumption to make up a bigger share of the economy than it's doing today in China. So you have a very export-oriented, an investment-driven economy. And what we see now is that these parts are too big for the economy to stay healthy. Vloggers have exploded across China's social media platforms, filming themselves, showing young people

where they can buy cheap clothes, cheap food, cheap everything. It's feeding into a kind of minimalist consumption subculture for an age with so much uncertainty. and with would-be customers waiting for the price of goods to keep falling, desperate companies keep slashing their prices. This is driving deflation, which is also dragging down growth. The government might have to expand the social safety net, get graduate wages back up,

or find another way to spread optimism amongst China's youth. If it does nothing, the stresses will continue to grow on an economy already under considerable pressure. Stephen MacDonald reporting from Beijing. Still to come on this program. Nobody wanted to go over the parapet, so my great-grandfather struck up his pipes, and it was only when he started to play blue bonnets over the border

that the men actually started to follow. We marked the life of the first World War backpiper who won Britain's highest military honour. If you eat too many ultra-processed foods, you could be starving your gut microbes, and they'll get hangary. That's one of many things I learned after working on a new audio course about the gut microbiome. You can learn how to keep your gut happy by listening to Try This from the Washington Post. I'm Christina Quinn. I host Try This. Dig in with me on practical advice for life's common challenges. Follow Try This Right Now, wherever you're listening.

Try it. President Trump has reiterated his intention to sue the BBC over a documentary about the events leading up to the storming of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. in 2021, saying he had an obligation to do so. At the weekend, the BBC's Director General and Head of News resigned after it was revealed that a BBC documentary had edited two parts of a speech by the U.S. President. making it appear that he had explicitly encouraged the January the 6th riots. The BBC chairman Samir Shah has also apologised. But Mr Trump's lawyers are threatening to launch a $1 billion lawsuit against the corporation unless it makes a full and fair retraction of the documentary by this Friday and appropriately compensates him for the harm caused.

In an interview with Fox News, Mr. Trump was asked if he planned to carry out that threat and this was his reply. I guess I have to, you know, why not? Because they defrauded the public, and they've admitted it, and their top echelon. Director General and the CEO both resigned. This is within one of our great allies, you know. This is our supposedly great ally. BBC, the government has a chunk of that one, I guess.

But that's a pretty sad event. They actually changed my January 6th speech, which was a beautiful speech, which was a very calming speech, and they made it sound radical. I asked our North America correspondent, David Willis, what he made of the president's latest interview. Well, I think it suggests that he believes he has to sue Anker in order to protect his reputation and that he is determined to treat the BBC no differently than the American media, despite the fact that it is a foreign broadcaster. He says he believes that he has an obligation in his words to sue because the Panorama program had butchered, I use his words again there, his speech,

leaving the BBC, in his view, guilty of dishonesty. And in their letter to the BBC on Sunday, Mr. Trump's legal team claimed that the Panorama program had caused the president overwhelming financial and reputational harm and asserted that his client's intention to sue the corporation for no less than a billion dollars was real if he didn't receive a retraction, an apology and compensation by this Friday. Now, the BBC has said that it will reply to this in due course,

but this interview is a further reminder of the fact that the clock is ticking in that regard. So how possible is it for him to launch a lawsuit against the BBC from the United States? Well, the letter from Mr Trump's lawyer made mention of his. his intention to sue the BBC in Florida, in the courts there. And because the Panorama program was broadcast on the 28th of October last year, Mr Trump and his team have missed the one-year deadline for suing in the British courts, but in Florida, the statute of limitation is two years, although one key thing that his lawyers would have to prove if the case came to court

was that the documentary had been available to watch here in the United States. And they would also have to show that the president suffered significant financial harm as a result of the panorama broadcast. And, of course, in order to get the sort of payout that Mr. Trump's legal team is seeking, they would have to prove that he suffered a billion dollars in losses. That said, there have been some very large defamation awards here, the highest to date being the $1.4 billion that the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay to the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, which he, Mr. Jones, had claimed, was a hoax.

And Mr. Trump, of course, has a reputation for making legal claims for eye-watering amounts of money, including the $10 and $20 billion. He talked from CBS news over the editing of an interview with Carmelah Harris only to settle out of court for significantly less. In that particular case, Anka, CBS settled with him for $16 million. David Willis speaking to me from Los Angeles. The Israeli parliament has passed the first reading of a bill that would impose the death penalty on people convicted of terrorism against the state. The national security minister is, Itemar Ben-Gavir, whose far-right Jewish power party proposed the bill, has said it's aimed at deterring Arab terrorism and that terrorists will be released only to hell. That last remark appears to be a reference to the recent deals with Hamas, which saw Israel release Palestinian prisoners in exchange for hostages.

Dr. Amir Fuchs is a lawyer and senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank. He told my colleague James Kumarasami about the bill. It's very vague, but at least on the surface, this is a discriminatory bill that's supposed to catch non-Jews terrorists who attacked Jews with terrorist intentions. And what is the intention behind the bill, do you think? The intention is, first of all, to start executions in Israel, which we didn't have for more than 60 years. The only time the criminal system sent anyone to death in Israel is Adolf Eichmann in 1962. So Israel has no tradition of executions of terrorists, although we had many terrorists in our history.

So the idea here is to start it. And the people suggest this bill. They know that there's a big majority in the people that support it. So it's also a populist suggestion. And the aim is deterrence, though, isn't it, I guess? Of course, what they say, that it will deterrent. the terrorists, but when I read research from the United States, which is the only Western democracy that has the capital punishment for murders, we see that it's very hard to show

that there's any deterrence at all for the capital punishment. And of course, at least for my point of view, that when someone is committing a terrorist attack, it's taking such a big chance for his life anyway. So the chances that the capital punishment will be something that deters him are very, very low. And also the position of the officials, of the heads of security services for years in Israel, was that it will not deter, and even it would probably be counter-effective with fighting terrorism. It's still got a couple more parliamentary votes before it becomes law. What is your sense of whether it will eventually find its way on the statute books? There is a big chance that it will be ratified because there is a big public support for it.

And we even saw, in the first reading, that most of the opposition were reluctant to come and to vote against, and some of them even voted for. So there is a big chance. Still, there will be deliberations and the legal officers will try to persuade them that this is unconstitutional. And if it will be ratified, it is probable that the Supreme Court will say that it is unconstitutional. It still has a lot of obstacles until we will see someone who is convicted and sentenced to death. Dr. Amir Fuchs, a senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute. You might remember the story of two NASA astronauts who became stranded on the International Space Station after the capsule that was supposed to take them back to Earth experienced a series of technical problems. They came home in March after nine months on the ISS.

Now three Chinese astronauts were stuck in space after their craft was hit by debris. They had been due to return to Earth last week after a second. six-month mission on the Tiengong Space Station. The space journalist Leo Enright told us more about this delay. There's three tachianauts, as they call them, who are stuck aboard the space station with three other cosmonauts, so many different names for them, who will be living and working on the station as a replacement crew

for the next six months or so. The station isn't built for six people, so it's all a bit cramped, but hopefully they'll be able to return home soon. This is not the first time that this has happened where a crew have been stuck in orbit because their spacecraft was hit by debris. It happened to the Russians several years ago, and they had to send up a replacement spaceship to bring that crew home. I think, I mean, reading the tea leaves that on this occasion,

Chinese officials are reasonably satisfied they can get the crew back using the vehicle that was damaged. But I'm watching Chinese state television as I'm speaking to you in case they break in to programming with a launch out of Inner Mongolia because they do have a replacement spaceship in Mongolia standing by ready to launch if needed. Space journalist Leo Enright. Tuesday was Remembrance Day here in Britain. That's Veterans Day in the US, an armistice day in France and Belgium. It's the anniversary of the end of the First World War,

a day to look back at the sacrifices of past generations and consider the horrific cost of armed conflict. For Kevin Laidlaw of Scotland, it's also a day to think about family. His great-grandfather, Daniel Laidlaw, was a bagpiper in the First World War and won the Victoria Cruel. for rallying the troops at the Battle of Luce.

He was one of only three pipers to win Britain's highest military honour. Now Kevin is campaigning to have a statue of him built in his hometown. He told us about Daniel's act of bravery. This was in 25th of September in 1915 at the Battle of Luz in France. And it was the first time the British were going to use poison gas. The Germans had actually used it in Yipra in April, 1915. The gas was just released from cylinders. So it was basically relying on the weather, the wind to carry the gas out over the trenches. They released the gas about 6.30 in the morning,

but it was actually falling into the allied trenches and gassing our own men. And of course, nobody wanted to go over the parapet. So my great-grandfather, Piper Laidlaw, struck up his pipes, played over the parapet. And it was only when he started to play blue bonnets over the border, which is the regimental march of the King's Own Scottish Borders that the men actually started to follow. You have to remember this is playing a musical instrument.

That's what he was armed with. And trench warfare was just horrific. And the Germans would be raking machine gun inches off the ground. So to get up in that sort of environment, which must have been held, to play a musical instrument. instrument to rally the men is

unthinkable. I have vivid memories seen the medals. We're actually displayed in my grandparents' house. But my overall memory was there was this big picture off him at the top of the stairs and I always stopped to look at this funny man with this big sort of handle bar

moustache on it. And now that picture hangs on my wall. Kevin Leidlaw. 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 episode, all the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is Global Podcast at BBC.com.com. And you can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag Global NewsPod. This edition was produced by Peter Goffin and Stephen Jensen. And it was mixed by Martin Williams and the editor is Karen

Martin. I'm Uncle Dessai. Until next time, goodbye. If you eat too many ultra-processed foods, you could be starving your gut microbes, and they'll get hungry. That's one of many things I learned after working on a new audio course about the gut microbiome. You can learn how to keep your gut happy by listening to Try This from The Washington Post. I'm Christina Quinn. I host Try This. Dig in with me on practical advice for life's common challenges. Follow, try this right now, wherever you're listening. Seriously, try it.