Global News Podcast - Zelensky unveils victory plan at White House

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Volodymyr Zelensky has outlined his Ukrainian victory plan at the White House; Kamala Harris warned other aggressors would become emboldened if Putin won. Also: a new map of the Milky Way, and the world's oldest cheese.

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service, with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Thank you. Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. You're listening to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. This edition is published in the early hours of Friday, the 27th of September.

The US Vice President, Kamala Harris, has told Vladimir Zelensky she will support him in his battle with Russia and criticised those calling on Ukraine to give up land for peace. In an apparent change of heart, Donald Trump has said he will now meet the Ukrainian president. And in a busy day of diplomacy in Washington, the White House says talks on a ceasefire deal for Lebanon are continuing, even as Israel keeps up its bombardment. Also in the podcast... My day-to-day will not change.

And I look forward to defending myself and defending the people of this city. Staying defiant, but the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, has been charged with taking bribes and illegal campaign contributions. With the US election fast approaching, Vladimir Zelensky is keen to ensure that whoever wins, Ukraine will have continued American support in the battle against the Russian invaders. To that end, the Ukrainian leader has met the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris at the White House

after holding talks with her current boss Joe Biden. Today we have a new support package, 7.9 billion dollars. This will be a great help and I raised with President Biden the plan of victory. Today we are preparing to discuss the details to strengthen the plan, coordinate our positions, views and approaches. Our teams will work together to ensure the implementation of our future steps. For her part, the US Vice President said she stood fully behind Mr Zelensky and Ukraine. As I have made clear on our six previous meetings and throughout Putin's brutal aggression and war against Ukraine, my support for the people of Ukraine is unwavering. I've been proud to stand with Ukraine.

I will continue to stand with Ukraine. And I will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war. And in a veiled criticism of her Republican opponent Donald Trump, she said those calling on Ukraine to surrender territory in order to end the war were essentially supporting proposals of surrender. A short while later, former President Trump said he would meet Vladimir Zelensky on Friday

after it looked like he would snub the Ukrainian leader. Well, for more on Mr Zelensky's meeting at the White House, I spoke to our correspondent there, Jenny Kumar. Kamala Harris, as you heard there, spoke of her continuing unwavering support. And I guess there were two things that President Zelensky was focused on during these meetings with the Vice President and the President, and that was continued political support and continued military support. So what we heard from Vice President Harris was that things would continue the same if she were elected. But in a swipe to her Republican rival,

she said there were some in the U.S. who wanted Ukraine to surrender. And she said it was imperative for the U.S. and the world to fight for Ukraine's sovereignty and democracy. Now, the Harris campaign has said, basically, a Trump-Bantz administration would sell out Ukraine and cosy up to President Putin. Yeah, we'll look at the Republican position in a moment. But President Biden still has, what, four months left in office. What more can he do in that time to help Ukraine? Well, he has announced today a £8 billion aged package and further weapons support. But the top ask for a long time has been permission to use Western missiles on targets deep

inside Russia. Now, there's been no public granting of that permission. Even if there was, we would be unlikely to hear of it before any strikes actually happen. Now, in the past couple of days, Donald Trump has been very critical of Vladimir Zelensky, and now Republicans are angry with the Ukrainian leader. I mean, has he permanently blotted his copybook if the Republicans win the presidential election? So this whole meeting here at the White House has been somewhat overshadowed by this growing row with the Republicans. And yes, there's been increasingly critical comments of President Zelensky from Donald Trump.

So, for example, yesterday at a campaign rally in North Carolina, he said that the Ukrainian people were dead and the country was destroyed. So raising further questions about any future support. And there's also been another almost diplomatic row where a senior Republican has accused President Zelensky of election interference, and that's because he visited a weapons factory, and they say this was in a key battleground state of Pennsylvania. It was with top Democrats and there weren't any

Republicans involved. And the House Speaker, Republican Mike Johnson, has called for the resignation of the Ukrainian ambassador. Jenny Kumar at the White House. And just a reminder that we are doing a special Q&A podcast on the US presidential election in a couple of weeks. So if you have a question you'd like to put to our AmeriCast colleagues in Washington, then please send us an email to globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk or tweet us at Global News Pod. Perhaps you'd like to know what the outcome of the election would mean for the war in Ukraine, or indeed something on our next item,

the widening conflict in the Middle East. And thanks to those who have already sent in voice notes. After ignoring demands to halt the fighting in Gaza, the Israeli Prime Minister has now rejected a proposal for a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon. Benjamin Netanyahu promised to keep fighting Hezbollah with full force until victory is achieved on the northern border. David Mentzer is a spokesman for the Israeli government. By hitting Hezbollah the way we are, in the very calibrated way, but also in a way that causes Hezbollah, the terrorist organisation devoted to our destruction,

by hitting them in the way that really hurts. It's actually Israel which is making the possibility for a political diplomatic resolution much more realistic. Hezbollah has continued to fire rockets into Israel, something it's been doing for the best part of a year, forcing thousands to leave their homes. Those residents who've stayed say the Israeli military shouldn't agree to the US-led plan to halt the offensive. 21 days, they will arrange again, they will bring new missiles. I don't believe them.

We must finish with this. To kill them, to stop them, to do something. But not stop the war. No. But behind the scenes at the United Nations, where world leaders are gathered for the General Assembly, efforts are continuing to try to secure a ceasefire. Our correspondent in Jerusalem, Daniel Disimoni, gave me this update on Israel's position. Prime Minister Netanyahu arrived in New York, where he's going to be speaking at the UN General Assembly, and stepping off the plane. He made plain that this is the policy. He said we're going to keep striking Hezbollah until we've met our goals and that goal which was set last week by his government is to return home 60,000 Israelis who've been displaced in the north of the country by Hezbollah rocket fire and since then

we've seen all of these strikes against Hezbollah and these very, very extensive airstrikes this week. And the rhetoric from the Israeli leadership is that the only way to achieve this goal is through military means. Previously, there was more openness, at least verbally, to a diplomatic way forward, but that seems to have closed. And certainly it's a coalition government here in Israel. And when there was talk about this possible ceasefire some of his coalition partners including the security minister and the finance minister both came out and said they would simply not accept it so certainly his government's been talking down any prospect of a diplomatic solution to this. Yeah well in the US the White House says discussions are still continuing for this possible 21-day ceasefire. But in the past few hours,

Israel says it has secured nearly $9 billion worth of US military aid. So it doesn't look like Washington wants to use any possible leverage it may have. Well, I think Washington has verbally been saying for a long time that they want a diplomatic way out of this. They say they're working very hard on a solution. They've said that there could be devastating consequences if this conflict with Hezbollah escalates, for example, if there's a ground invasion by Israel. But it does obviously still have leverage over Israel. Some people are very critical and says it doesn't use all the leverage it has. I think it remains to be seen

what other kind of pressure might be placed on Israel. But certainly, I think the diplomatic efforts are going to go on. And with Prime Minister Netanyahu speaking at the UN, I think he's going to kind of answer those who are calling on him to do a ceasefire. Daniel Samoni in Jerusalem. On Thursday, Lebanon's health ministry said

40 people had been killed in the latest Israeli airstrikes, bringing the total to almost 700 since Monday. Israel's air force said it had struck more than 200 targets, including Hezbollah infrastructure sites and weapons storage facilities. But many ordinary Lebanese are suffering. This man spoke in front of the rubble of a destroyed house in the Bekaa Valley. The Israeli enemy has committed massacres and genocide in Gaza and is now repeating it here in Lebanon. This house is peaceful and consists of three children and an elderly mother. What do these civilians have to do with this? Thousands of people have fled their homes and taken shelter at displacement centres. Others have left Lebanon altogether, with reports of more than 30,000 crossing into Syria.

Our correspondent Rami Rouhaim is in Tyre on the southern coast of Lebanon. I asked him whether Hezbollah wants a ceasefire. I think they are keen for a ceasefire, but crucially for a ceasefire that includes Gaza. That has been the position of Hezbollah since they started attacking Israeli positions, first in the occupied Sheba farms and then across the border. They said this is a support front for Gaza and they said that it will not stop until the Israelis stop their onslaught in Gaza. So in Hezbollah's view, a ceasefire is one that includes Gaza and one that does not break that link that they insist on, the link between the Lebanese front and the Gaza front. Of course, the Israelis are adamant

that they want to break exactly that link, So it's not exactly clear how the two positions can be in any way brought closer together. But while the fighting goes on, it seems Hezbollah is taking much worse punishment than Israel. Israel says a Hezbollah drone commander was killed. How damaging are these attacks on its military infrastructure? Well, we can't really know. They're certainly damaging, no doubt.

And, you know, the Pager attacks were also very, very damaging. The assassination in Dahye on Friday was probably more damaging. But yes, absolutely, they have taken very, very big and very, very painful blows. But they have also expanded the geographic scope of their attacks and they've also increased the firepower. They have also brought in new weapons, new kinds of missiles into play. So they certainly were not paralysed by all of these very painful blows. And it appears that the way things look, there's only

one way it can go and that's more escalation. There doesn't seem to be any way out of this at the moment. Rami Rouhaim in Tyre in southern Lebanon. The mayor of New York is arguably the most powerful city official in the world. But the man who currently has the job, Eric Adams, is facing five criminal charges. Once a rising star of the Democratic Party, he's accused of bribery, soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals and conspiring to commit wire fraud. The US District Attorney, Damien Williams, said that Mr Adams had crossed bright red lines for years. The conduct alleging the indictment, the foreign money, the corporate money, the bribery,

the years of concealment is a grave breach of the public's trust. Year after year after year, he told the public he received no gifts, even though he was secretly being showered with them. The corruption alleged in the indictment is, as I said, long running. The benefits, the free upgrades or free tickets altogether, the hotel stays, and the value. And if you just sum up all the dollar amounts here, you get to more than $100,000. Mayor Adams denies all the charges. He told a news conference he'd been demonized. This is not surprising to us at all. The leaks, the commentary, the demonizing. And I ask New Yorkers to wait to hear our defense before

making any judgments. I will continue to do the job for 8.3 million New Yorkers that I was elected to do. Our correspondent, Neda Tawfiq, in New York, told me more about the charges unsealed on Thursday. The U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, actually held up a cardboard layout of the different travel benefits that he alleges Eric Adams received, luxury flights, different tickets to events. And they say it amounted to $100,000 in bribes, essentially. And what they're alleging is that this was a decade-long scheme that really ramped up when Eric Adams ran for mayor, and that not only did he accept these illegal foreign donations, but that he applied for a New York program that matched those donations,

which amounted to him essentially stealing $10 million in public funds. And they say that the Turkish officials and one official, I should say, and the businessman did get Eric Adams to do them favors. In one instance, a Turkish consulate high-rise building that had safety concerns. Well, Eric Adams pressured fire department officials, allegedly, to get that approved. So officials laid this all out in a press conference. And the background to this is essentially that Eric Adams, he knows that he's been under this cloud of federal investigation for nearly a year, but he has fought against it. He has kind of claimed that he's being targeted by prosecutors for trying to bring up issues during his administration, including that of

the migration issue. So Eric Adams remaining defiant, saying he will stay in office, that he will not resign and claiming that this is all essentially a witch hunt against him. Neda Taufik in New York. In our previous podcast, we reported on a new global study that's found that children's eyesight is getting worse, with one in three now nearsighted. In China, the communist authorities have unveiled a plan to address that issue, and at the same time tackle the problem of obesity that affects one in five Chinese children, as well as improve children's mental health. The Chinese government says school children should spend at least two hours a day doing

physical activity, some of it outdoors. I heard more about the plan and reaction to it from our China media analyst Kerry Allen. So real problems with young Chinese students sitting for long periods of time eating junk food and developing eye problems. The idea is that this new rule will ensure that students can get outside, get some sunshine, talk with one another more and it's also good for their mental well-being. Do they not get enough outside activity at the moment then? They don't, not really. So normally there are breaks in between classes that are very, very short. When I lived in China, I worked at a school for a period of time and a lot of students find that it's very, very difficult to find somewhere

to have a little space to play before having to rush back in. Yeah, so it sounds like they'll have to make some considerable changes then. Yes, and that's one of the concerns on Chinese social media platforms today. So a lot of people on the platform Weibo, which is China's equivalent of a platform like Facebook or X, they're saying that unless there are regulations that ensure schools have to do this, they think that it won't happen.

But there are some who think these have been big problems, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, when students were remote studying for a long period of time. They were in their homes, not moving, in front of computer screens for eight hours a day. They can see the benefits in this, and they're hoping that it could provide benefits to young Chinese children. Yeah, I mean, the benefits of physical activity are well known. Why didn't they think about something like this before? Well, there's a lot to get in in Chinese schools. So in primary schools in particular, students learn Mandarin, they learn literature, maths, English.

The Communist Party rhetoric is also integrated into classes. So students have, for example, classes in moral education. And PE is also included. But PE is not something that has been given a high priority for a long period of time. There are concerns that students who spend a lot of time in PE, it might not amount to much career-wise. But in light of these growing health problems amongst young Chinese children, it's now something that the government seems keen to prioritise. Kerry Allen.

And still to come on the Global News Podcast... These people are used to seeing death, but not on that scale and not like that. And whatever the figures show you, the experience for them was indescribable. Emotional testimony at the UK COVID inquiry. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads?

Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. It's been ten years since the shocking disappearance of 43 students in Mexico. The trainee teachers were abducted and killed, apparently by local police officers in collusion with organised crime gangs.

The suspected massacre in Guerrero State has been called one of Mexico's most infamous human rights cases. The investigation was marred by allegations of corruption and a cover-up. Only three of the victims have ever been identified. On Thursday to mark the anniversary, families and supporters gathered in Mexico City to demand justice. Paul Henley heard more about the crime from our correspondent in Mexico City, Will Grant. Well, in essence, Paul, you touched on it there. It is one of the most emblematic human rights violations in Mexican history, certainly in modern Mexico, arguably in modern Latin America. The name Ayotzinapa, where this tiny student teacher college is based, will forever be synonymous in Mexico with the disappearance

and supposed murder of the 43. And the fact that a state forces are believed in independent investigations to have been involved alongside organized crime, and be that it's never been solved that they simply do not know where the vast majority of those bodies lie. Tell us about the demonstrations. Well, as you can imagine, they're gathering in what is essentially the center of Mexico City. They're hoping to walk to the presidential palace itself, the National Palace, make their point very, very clearly that they feel let down by President López Obrador, a man who said as a campaign promise he would leave no stone unturned in this investigation, who has called it a state crime. But during his administration, the independent investigators had to abruptly leave Mexico,

saying they were hitting a number of official obstacles when it came to looking at the involvement of the military. And something that he says is simply not the case, that the military were involved. He agrees that local forces may have been involved but doesn't believe that it goes any further than that. The thing is, for the families, they may get no further than a certain point on their route because the barricades are firmly up and there is a big, big police presence. The new president-elect says she is seeking accountability. How hard a task is that? It's huge, I think, because what has been lost in this decade

is any sense of shared ground, common ground between the López Obrador administration, indeed the party, the governing party, Morena, and the victims and their supporters. I think all goodwill has been lost over these years by the fact that the victims' families who've kept up their fight for justice simply feel they've been pushed back, they've been taken in one direction, pulled back in the other, lied to to their faces, and they feel let down by successive administrations, the Peña Nieto administration, under whose watch this horrific situation took place, and the López Obrador administration, who promised to solve it.

Will Grant in Mexico City. It's been a while since Covid dominated the headlines, but it hasn't gone away. The Chinese authorities have, for example, warned that the coronavirus is still evolving in potentially dangerous ways. In London on Thursday, we got a reminder of the darkest days of the pandemic at the official inquiry into Britain's handling of Covid. Professor Kevin Fong saw the impact firsthand in hospitals in his role as the National Health Service's advisor for emergency preparedness.

We had nurses talking about patients raining from the sky. One of the nurses told me that they just got tired of putting people in body bags. Now, at the hospital, they said that sometimes they were so overwhelmed that they were putting patients in body bags, lifting them from the bed, putting them on the floor, putting another patient in that bed straightaway because there wasn't time.

We went to another unit where things got so bad, they were so short of resource, they ran out of body bags and they were instead issued with nine-foot clear plastic sacks and cable ties. And those nurses talk about being really traumatized by that because they had recurring nightmares about feeling like they were just throwing bodies away. These people are used to seeing death, but not on that scale and not like that. Professor Kevin Fong with part of his evidence, the inquiry into Britain's response to Covid. Something rather different now and scientists in China say they have discovered the world's oldest known cheese

from three and a half thousand years ago. They analysed dairy samples found with Bronze Age bodies buried in the Xinjiang region of western China and discovered goat cheese and fermenting microbes from kefir. Fuchsia Dunlop is a writer on Chinese cuisine which doesn't usually feature cheese so was she surprised by the discovery? Well, not really. I mean, I think what this highlights is that Chinese cuisine has always been very multicultural and shaped not only by ancient indigenous traditions, but also by contact with people from, you know, in this period of time and the early dynasties, and with people from the Northwest. So across North China, you still

see the legacy of contact with all these nomadic peoples to the north and the west. And yeah, very interesting. I mean, still within Chinese borders, you have Uyghurs, Tibetans, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and they're all people who have dairying traditions and who eat various kinds of dairy food. But not the prevalent culture. So what happened then? Well, so for a long, many parts of Chinese history, there were eras and there were areas where people did have a dairying tradition. So there's a very famous sixth century agricultural manual, which has a whole section on keeping cows and sheep and making things like yogurt. During the Tang dynasty, more than a thousand years ago, the upper class is at something like ghee, clarified butter and various kinds of yogurt

and cheesy foods. But in the later dynasties, yes, it sort of became a very minority thing and largely died out by the end of the Qing Dynasty. So in China today, there are pockets of very fascinating cheesemaking. So for example, in Yunnan province in the today, there are pockets of very fascinating cheese making. So for example, in Yunnan province in the southwest, the Yi people, that's one of the minority groups in this very diverse region, they make a goat's milk cheese, which is very like Indian paneer, a sort of simple fresh cheese. And another group in Dali in Yunnan province make something a bit like mozzarella, where they're stretching the curds and then sun drying the cheese. So you have these little pockets of cheese making, but it never really caught on.

I think what's really fascinating is that the Chinese didn't really need cheese because quite early on they started using the soybean, which is very protein rich and offers a similar sort of series of amino acids to those essential for human nutrition. And can be fermented and also to give that sort of richer flavour too, right? They fermented soybeans to make things like the ancestors of soy sauce, fermented beans with these rich umami flavours. And then from at least a thousand years ago, more than a thousand years ago, they were making tofu. But the thing that's so interesting is that the technology of making tofu is terribly like the technology for making simple cheeses. You know, you have a milk,

in this case, a bean milk, and you coagulate it. You know, cheese in Europe is mostly coagulated with rennet, an animal enzyme, but in China they use gypsum mineral salts and things to coagulate the soybean. But you end up with something that looks quite cheese-like. So the Chinese perhaps didn't really need cheese in the same way. Fuchsia Dunlop talking to James Menendez. Astronomers have just published a new map of the Milky Way, the galaxy that includes our own solar system. It is a big thing to map, 950,000 trillion kilometres wide. It takes light about 100,000 years to get across. Professor Catherine Haymans is the

Astronomer Royal for Scotland. She's been telling us what the new map brings to our understanding of the Milky Way. Any listeners out there who are lucky enough to live in a dark sky location will have seen that faint band of stars that arches all the way across the night sky that marks out the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. And it's that starry arch that has been observed for 13 years now using the Vista telescope that's based down now in Chile in the Atacama Desert. And what they've done is they've mapped out all of the objects in that arch of the Milky Way, but in the southern hemisphere, so looking into the centre of our

Milky Way galaxy. And what's really fantastic about this telescope, what's really niche about it is it looks in the infrared. I like to think of this telescope as it's kind of like our commando telescope. When you watch the movies, you see the commandos go out at night and they can't see anything. So they put on their night vision goggles. That's exactly what we're doing with VISTA, because when you look into our Milky Way galaxy, it's full of dust, which obscures the light that we can see with our own eyes. So we have to look in the infrared light to peer through the dust to see baby stars forming and the montage of images that have been released

that you can go and look at show some of the prettiest points in our Milky Way galaxy where you see these nurseries stellar nurseries where these brand new stars are forming. Gorgeous, colourful, gassy regions of our galaxy where new stars are being formed and new planets are being created. Professor Catherine Haymans. Let's return now to the fighting in Lebanon. Thousands of people have fled their homes in the wake of Israel's continued strikes against Hezbollah. One of those people is Sarah.

She was forced to leave her home to try to find safety further north and she's now living together with 12 other family members in temporary accommodation. We can hear from her now and just a warning there are some first-hand descriptions of recent attacks that some listeners might find distressing. It was literally one deadly week. Three different events happened. The first event was the pagers explosion and then the second day the walkie-talkie explosion. And then two days after that, we had another explosion in the southern suburb of Beirut. All of these things happened very close to where I live and where other family members live as well. Things escalated really quickly when the first incident related to the pagers explosion happened. I look at my phone and I find lots of missed calls on my phone. And then I call my husband and he tells me to rush and try to get my kids. I have two kids who were in the daycare. So he was just telling me that people are exploding.

And I was in shock. I didn't understand. What do you mean by people exploding? I mean, is this real life or is this some movie you're narrating for me? I just had to rush to my car. I started driving and things weren't clear at all. I started getting other calls from friends, from family members, telling me people

are jumping from the balconies, people are exploding, and people didn't really understand what was happening until my aunt told me. She called and told me it was a pager problem. Pagers are exploding, so people are dying on the streets. It took me almost an hour to get to the daycare where my children are. I was like terrified. I wasn't sure if I would find them. And it was this one hour that I was driving that made me feel that this is unexplicable. I haven't even seen this in horror movies, you know. What's the process you then went through of thinking, okay, what do we do then? I feel very lucky because unlike a lot of the Lebanese people, thankfully, we have a relative

that has a flat in an area outside Beirut. And this relative is outside the country. What have you said to your children? I know they're young, but how have you explained to them why their lives are suddenly turned upside down? My eldest is three, and then my second child is almost two years old. My eldest was preparing to go to school. I had to tell her some positive things, of course, that we get to spend some time with family, you get to play a lot. So they're happy so far. Is it cramped with 12 of you or is there enough space? It's really cramped. I mean, every family gets one room, literally.

It's not nice. But at the same time, I mean, we're all very close to each other. So it's nice living with them. It's not that we don't like living together. It's just you don't have enough space to live with your family, you know. Do you think you'll ever be able to go home? Of course, I will go back home. I have full faith. But it just may take a long time.

No matter how long it takes, we will go home. And that was Sarah talking to Andrew Peach. And that is all from us for now. But the Global News Podcast will be back very soon. This edition was mixed by Peter Wise and produced by Alison Davis. Our editors, Karen Martin. I'm Oliver Conway. Until next time, goodbye. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Global News,

AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts.