Reuters World News - DeSantis’ foreign policy problem and a kiss made in China

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants to be a winner but does his lack of foreign policy expertise hold him back in 2024? India's parliament disqualifies opposition party leader Rahul Gandhi as a lawmaker after a court sentences him to two years in prison. We talk about a new product that’s helping long-distance couples bridge the kissing gap, and the dangers of AI-generated images in photojournalism. And the latest rulings from the World Athletics Council on trans athletes and testosterone in sports. *The episode was corrected to say that a Manhattan grand jury did not meet Thursday (rather than didn’t yet take up the case). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ron DeSantis wants to be a winner, but can his stance on foreign policy, abortion and guns taken beyond his Florida base? The World Athletic Council gives a landmark ruling on transgender athletes. And we leave you with a kiss from a robot in China. Stay with us. It's Friday, March 24th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. I'm Kim Vinal in London. First, the headlines from around the world. City Hall up in flames as French protests show no sign of abating. Demonstrators are furious at President Emmanuel Macron pushing through wildly unpopular pension reforms. Manhattan prosecutors have hit out at House Republicans who object to a criminal investigation of Donald Trump. In a letter

sent to the Hill, DA Alvin Bragg's office said Trump created a false expectation that he'd be arrested the next day. Trump told his followers he was going to be arrested on Tuesday. after a grand jury indictment of allegations he paid hush money to Pornstar Stormy Daniels. The grand jury didn't take up the case on Thursday and are not expected to meet again until next week at the earliest. Trump plans to hold a large rally in Waco, Texas, this weekend. India's parliament have disqualified opposition leader Rahul Gandhi as a lawmaker. It's after a lower court sentenced him to two years in jail on charges of defamation.

The charges stem from a 2019. speech where he referred to thieves as having the surname Modi. Gandhi supporters say they'll take to the streets Friday to protest his conviction. And the Chinese Communist Party is able to use this as a tool to manipulate America as a whole. Lawmakers across the aisle have grilled the CEO of TikTok. At issue is whether the Chinese government can access the personal data of the 150 million Americans using TikTok. CEO, Xiao Ju Chu, vowed the app would take the safety and privacy of its users seriously. We were firewall-protected U.S. data from unwanted foreign access.

The hearing comes as more politicians are taking up the possibility of banning the app in the U.S. or forcing a sale of the Chinese-owned company. After thousands of Israelis took to the streets again shouting shame over proposed judicial reforms, the country's Attorney General has said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu violated the law by saying he would personally get involved in the court changes. A wave of Israelis have pledged to reject call-ups for military reserve duty if the reforms proceed. Like this Army Reserve Officer asked only to be identified as Major E. We decided that we cannot serve and support an army that actually functions as an army of a dictatorship.

The US and Canada have reached a deal aimed at stopping asylum seekers entering the shared land border. Canada will take in an extra 15,000 migrants over the next year from the Western Hemisphere on a humanitarian basis, according to a US government source on the deal. It expands the existing safe third country agreement, so it applies to the entire length of the land border, and asylum seekers using unofficial crossings will be turned back. The revised pact will be discussed face-to-face between U.S. US President Joe Biden and Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa on Friday. Now to a momentous and divisive announcement in world sports.

The Council has agreed to exclude male to female transgender athletes who have been through male puberty from female world ranking competitions from March the 31st this year. Mitch Phillips, our European sports editor, listened in to World Athletics President Sebastian Coe. Whatever they do, they are going to leave either trans athletes feeling excluded or they're going to leave women athletes feeling they're not on a level playing field. World Athletics also tightened restrictions on the amount of testosterone allowed in competitors

who were assigned female at birth. It's what the organisation calls difference in sex development athletes, or DSD for short. It'll impact athletes like South African track star Casta Semenya. The track and field governing body also lifted a ban on Russian athletes for doping. But Russians won't be at events anytime soon as they're still banned due to the war in Ukraine. Which is your favorite nickname that Trump's given you so far? Is it Ron de Sanctimonious or Meatball Ron? I don't know how to spell De Sanctimonious.

I don't really know what it means, but I kind of like it's long. It's got a lot of vowels. I mean, so we'd go with that. That's fine. You can call me whatever you want. I mean, just as long as you can call me whatever you want. you, you know, also call me a winner? Governor Ron DeSantis there, telling Pierce Morgan on Fox that he wants to be a winner.

His policy stances may help him win Florida, but they could cost him the big prize in 2024, says a new Reuters Ipsos poll. The governor's positions on abortion and guns are popular enough that he could win the Republican nomination over Donald Trump. But his foreign policy stances already earning him critics in his own party. Graham Slattery in Washington, D.C. has been following the governor. So, Graham, DeSantis had to walk back his line this week that the war in Ukraine is a territory dispute. Could foreign policy hurt him on the way to 2024?

It could hurt him, both in the primary and in the long run. It's one of the few issues where the Republican electorate and the Republican base really is divided. And the part that supports continuing U.S. involvement in Ukraine, they tend to be somewhat higher income. they tend to be more urban or suburban versus rural. They tend to be the voters, in other words, that are willing to move beyond Trump. So it's a risk embracing the isolationist wing of the Republican Party, particularly when many of the voters who are most willing to move beyond Trump

are more often than not Ukraine supporters. If we look more locally at DeSantis' so-called anti-woke policies in Florida, is there a sense that they are too extreme for a national campaign? It really depends on the issue. In some respects, that might be true. With transgender rights, what our recent polling has shown is that the restrictions he's put on on transgender youth are broadly popular at the national level. That said, most pollsters don't see that as an animating issue for most voters in a general election. You know, economic issues, foreign policy, health care, etc. generally are issues that independents go out and vote for.

Graham, thank you. An image of Vladimir Putin on his knees in front of Chinese President Xi Jinping went viral this week. So did a handful of images showing Donald Trump's supposed arrest. They weren't real. They were AI generated. Reuters' global photo editor, Ricky Rogers, joins us for Fact Check Friday. So Ricky, can you tell that these images aren't real? What do you look out for?

We have people posted where Donald Trump is and where he might appear in New York City. and we can tell, still tell pretty much that those images are fake, that they're not photographs. The quality, the digital quality of the images, they're not taken on traditional cameras, digital cameras. They are too smooth, there's no pixelation, but it is becoming more and more difficult, and very soon it will be nearly impossible without some sort of technology actually to identify those. The image of Xi and Putin is another challenge because it would have been an event probably where we wouldn't have had access and only official photographers would have. You can only trust

pictures as much as you can trust the source. What challenges then does AI present to photojournalism? The danger with AI generated images is becoming greater just because the images are so good and they are so indistinguishable from photographs. They are not photographs because photography has a definition, right? But it becomes so much easier now to manipulate the truth through the manipulation of images. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Now, I can't believe I'm saying this, but those are the kissing sounds of a new Chinese robot. It's designed to help couples in long-distance relationships smooch virtually by connecting to their phones. The silicon mouths sink with your chosen partner and even warm up to resemble human touch. Reuters Shanghai Bureau Chief Brenda Goh spoke to the inventor. Brenda, why did he invent this? So he was a student at the Beijing Film Academy. He would say that he was in the relationship ship at the time,

but he couldn't meet his girlfriend due to lockdowns. And there were phone calls, but there wasn't the physical intimacy that you would get from just the phone call. And he decided to invent this to try and bridge that physical intimacy gap. And he says it's been pretty popular in the two weeks since it's been released, 3,000 units sold. Is there anything we can take away from that in terms of the state of personal relationships in China?

Well, I think it speaks to how Chinese consumers are curious, if they're willing to try new things. And yeah, I guess, you know, a lot of people in China do live apart. Couples, you know, you have a lot of migrant workers. They might be separated from their loved ones for long periods of time. I think it's really hard to say whether it's a novelty thing or whether people really want to use it the way it was intended. There have also been some concerns about the device being used for erotic content, right?

The Chinese regulators really do look quite closely at erotic content. They frown on any sort of pornography or anything that's a bit erotic in nature. So we asked him, we asked Zhao about this and he said, you know, he will follow regulations like the company will comply, but at the other day, that's very little that he can really do about how people use the device. Moa, Brenda, thanks. Well, that's it for Reuters World News. We'll be back on Monday.

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