Reuters World News - Bodyguards in GOP politics and the Dutch pot paradox

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

The civil war inside the Republican Party. Debunking the 15-minute-cities myth. Formula One’s season opener in Bahrain. In the weeds of the Netherlands' pot legality headache. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy Friday podcast fans. It has been a long week, so let's go full throttle into the weekend. We kick it off at Bahrain for the season opener of the Formula One Grand Prix. Then a quick swerve to inside the civil war within the Republican Party. We'll be infighting hurt their race to the White House. And we end in mellow fashion in the Netherlands, where they're trying to stub out the legal lacuna where cannabis is legal to smoke, but not to support.

I'm confused. Don't worry, you won't be. Stick with us here on Reuters World News as we bring you everything you need to know from the front lines for the weekend. I'm Kim Vennel in London. We usually kick off our episodes with the headlines, but we're going behind the headlines for this special weekend episode. Roytas has a team dedicated to debunking misinformation, from miscaptioned viral videos to outright falsers. One of those resident fact checkers, Nick Harding, joins us for this new segment today. Hi, Nick. Hi, Kim. So today we're talking about 15-minute cities. Once upon a time, 15-minute cities was a concept in town planning, aka the dream of, say, being able to visit all the amenities you need within a 15-minute walk. But after the pandemic,

the phrase 15-minute cities has taken on a life of its own. Nick, what is going on here? Misinformation about 15-minute cities mainly focuses on the belief that residents of of these areas will be permanently locked in their homes or neighbourhoods and will be fined or punished for leaving. Social media users claim they'll be enforced, using surveillance cameras, fences or gates to stop people leaving, leading some to refer to them as open-air geo-prisons. So is it true? Now I debunked this by reading through planning notes and 15-minute city proposals at both national and regional levels and finding no evidence of plans to introduce such a resource.

restrictive totalitarian measures. I also spoke with numerous experts, for example Professor Carlos Moreno, who's widely credited with creating the model and has since received death threats over it, told me the claims were insane, lies and tremendous fake news. Thanks a lot for clearing that up. Nick Hardings in London on fact-checking 15-minute cities. Now, moving around cities quickly is a theme that fits well with Formula One. As the season gets underway in Bahrain this weekend, some fans in the US are already looking ahead to a new race on the streets of Nevada.

Our very global sports team has this look ahead. I'm Amy Tennery. I'm a sports reporter with Reuters. I'm speaking to motor racing correspondent Alan Baldwin. Now, I'm on my couch. Alan is somewhere a lot more exciting. He's in Bahrain for the kickoff of the F1 season. He is on the grid. He's in the paddock.

He is talking to drivers and Alan. What's good? I'm in Dacchio, which is where the circuit is. It's got a kind of a showbiz atmosphere here. It's a night race. It's quite a spectacular to watch. Testing was here at the same circuit last week on the basis of that. There's some people who are perhaps strutting around a little bit confidently.

And one or two others who might have been hoping to be strutting around who are looking a little bit frustrated, perhaps. Well, this is going to be an unusual or maybe a unique. season with the addition of the penultimate race in Las Vegas. I wonder if you talk a little bit about that. That's been pretty majorly, majorly hyped. Yeah, it's been majorly hyped. It's going to be the big showbiz extravaganza of the season. It's going to be bright lights, Saturday night, the strip in Las Vegas.

It's going to be a long way from Formula One's last appearance in Las Vegas back in the 80s when they were basically racing in the car park of Caesar's Palace. This is a full-on, let's hit America. let's give it all we've got race. The only slide problem, as you alluded to earlier, it's the penultimate race. By the time Formula One gets there, the championship could be all over. One dark horse, long shot, of course, but I got to ask about it as an American as Logan Sargent. Now, this could maybe help F1's bid to get some American fans that Americans for once will actually have another American to root for.

What do we need to know about him? I would say to American fans of Lopin Sargent, Great, it's great to have an American on the grid. Don't expect them to be on the podium anytime soon unless something astonishing happens. I think a lot of fans will be going to races in America because they want to be part of the show, because they want to see the big names that they've seen

in Drive to Sive. They want to see some of the characters. They want to see Gunda Steiner, the boss of Hass. They want to see some of these personalities. Well, Alan, thanks so much for all your insight. and I hope you have a great rest of your assignment. Best of luck this weekend. Well, thank you so much and enjoy sitting on that sofa. And from sporting rivalries to political rebellions, is the Republican Party heading for its own car crash?

While Republicans are at the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend, fighting at the local level threatens the very foundations of the party. Tim Reed in Los Angeles is one of our reporters who's been spending a lot of time at the local level of American politics. So Tim, you and your party fanned out across the US to see what's going on at a grassroots level of the Republican Party. What did you find? We found a Republican Party driven by internal fights, power struggles, battles over bank accounts and which actual parties in charge of things. This is at a mostly at a county and a state level. It's a party in many parts of the country that's basically at civil war with itself.

And much of this is a legacy of the Donald Trump era. I came across a situation where a former member of the Clark County Republican Party turned up at a party meeting and she was so scared for her own safety because she'd been told that if she turned up at this party meeting, she'd be thrown out. She took two bodyguards with her, one of whom was a former Las Vegas policeman who was armed. and there was a big confrontation with some party members. She was ordered to leave. One of these party members challenged this former policeman

to a fight outside the meeting, so things are getting pretty nasty. It's sort of hard to understand how these really local-level fights could impact the party as a whole. What sort of repercussions could this have at a national level? Well, if you add up all these fights, and there are many of them across the country, it's a real worry for a lot of strategists because it dampens enthusiasm among grassroots voters

and it's day that are so important to any party's political prospects. If they're not turning out to vote or they feel they're not sure who's actually running their party locally, they may just not turn out and that's a gift for Democrats. The party is just embarking on a new search for a presidential candidate for 2024 and if that eventual nominee for the White House cannot unify the party, it's going to really hamper their chances of winning back the White House in 2024. They also fear that it will affect donations. Donors might be wary of giving money to a party that's so riven with internal strife.

All right, Tim, I'm sure we'll be talking much more as we get to November 2024. Tim Reed. Thank you. On to a thing which divides Republicans and countries around the world. The legalization of pot, especially for recreational purposes. In Europe, legalization hasn't really kept pace with the U.S. except in the Netherlands with its famous Amsterdam coffee shops. But if you get in the weeds, legally speaking, it's a mess.

Selling pot has long been legal under certain conditions. But supplying wasn't, leaving a gaping loophole and a profitable opportunity if you look at the growth of the big U.S. market. Now, the country is set to trial licensing cannabis growers. Reuters Clement Rossignor went to a coffee shop to file this report for us. Tough gig, right? I'm in the barren coffee shop in the touchdown of Broder, a city about to allow limited number of companies to grow cannabis,

an activity that is currently out loud, but tolerated. This is part of an experiment that coffee shop owner Rick Brand says is really looking forward. because it would open the way to a country-wide legalization of the production of cannabis. It's very difficult for me to explain how cannabis is produced at the moment because it's illegal. I don't even know. I don't know. People they offer me a sample. I don't know where it's coming from. So it's time, it's about time that cannabis became 100% legal in the Netherlands as well. He says it would allow him to stop dealing with what he calls shady producers and offer a more qualitative, consistent products to his clientele.

There are different kinds to test it, not only with a microscope or with machines like this, but we can smoke it. We can smell it and that's the only way. That's the only ways we have at the moment. That's why it's very important that we have legal production in the future in the next future so that we are 100% sure that the legal producers don't use pesticides or any other stuff on the cannabis. I am Clement Rossignoll in Broder, Netherlands. And that is it for this edition of Reuters World News. We'll be back on Monday.

In the meantime, you can find more trusted news at Reuters.com.