Reuters World News - Freed grandma on Hamas' tunnels, Texas' biggest abortion travel ban and Venezuela's opposition

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

An 85-year-old grandmother talks about being taken into Hamas' tunnels in Gaza. She's one of two hostages freed by Hamas as Israel's military intensifies its assault on militants in Gaza. An abortion transport ban implemented in Texas' biggest jurisdiction so far. And Venezuela has chosen an opposition candidate – but will she be able to run? Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, a grandma speaks for the first time about her experience in Hamas' tunnels in Gaza, as the U.S. and Qatar ramp up diplomacy to get more hostages free, and urge Israel to show some restraint. Venezuela has a winning opposition candidate. But will she get to run in the general election? And Lubbock County is the latest and largest Texas jurisdiction to ban those seeking an abortion from traveling on their roads. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes, every weekday. I'm Carmel Crimmons in Dublin.

And I'm Christopher Walgesper in Chicago. Dressed in black, 85-year-old Yakovi Lifshitz was wheeled out of a medical center in Tel Aviv early this morning. The grandmother, one of two elderly Israelis now free, telling reporters about the moment she was taken by Hamas. A frail-looking Lifshitz, also describing her journey into a spiderweb of tunnels in Gaza. A video, released by Hamas earlier, shows Lifshitz shaking the hand of a masked gunman and saying, Shalom, before being handed over to the Red Cross under cover of night. You go with the swamp? The latest hostage release, a sign of the diplomatic tightrope as Israel pushes to eradicate Hamas in Gaza.

In public, the US has said Israel has the right to defend itself. But sources tell Reuters that they've stepped up private appeals for caution. The priority is to gain time for negotiations to free other hostages. The ruling Emir of Qatar, the nation key to negotiations with Hamas, has also urged Israel to show restraint. The Gaza death toll has topped 5,000 from Israel's continued bombardment in response to Hamas's surprise attack on southern Israel. And the fate of more than 200 more hostages hangs in the balance.

Lipschitz grandson, Daniel, echoing fears of families around the world. Those people have no much time. We have to help those hostages very fast. In Venezuela, an industrial engineer won the vote to run as the opposition candidate in an expected election next year. Turnout was huge, in some places more than twice as many people showed up than was expected. And they did so in an election run without state help. Julia Sims Cobb is working with the Caracas team.

So Julia, Machado seems to be the clear frontrunner in the primary. But that support doesn't necessarily mean she's a shoe in to beat Maduro, right? Absolutely not. She also has a bureaucratic hurdle that she has to get over, which is that she, like some other opposition politicians, is banned from holding public office. She specifically was banned by a controller because she supported U.S. sanctions on the Maduro government. we think that that ban might be rescinded, but we're not sure when.

Tell me about Machado. So Maria Karina Machado is an industrial engineer and former lawmaker who has been bearing the flag for the Venezuelan opposition for about a year now ahead of this campaign for the primary and then now ahead of the campaign for the 2024 elections. She has been called center right or right wing by some observers. She says that she's a liberal who's interested in, you know, you know, social fairness and those kind of policies. But she does propose some privatizations of state-run companies, including Venezuela's state-run

oil company, Peveza. So any Machado presidency would be a big 180 from what Venezuela has had over the last two decades. Can you explain how U.S. involvement plays a role in this primary as well as the general election next year? So the opposition and the government, Maduro's government, last week signed a deal in Barbados that had some parameters for the elections, including that they would allow international observers. But it didn't include anything that would rescind these bans on some opposition figures. But the U.S., in response to this election deal, did roll back some of its sanctions on the Maduro government. And they've said that Maduro has until the end of November not only to rescind the bans on the opposition politicians, but also to release three Americans who they class as wrongfully detained and also Venezuelan political prisoners that they say are being held by the government.

In northwest Texas, Lubbock County is a sprawling 900 square miles with a population of about 310,000 people. And it's now the largest Texas jurisdiction to outlaw transporting a person over the roads. to receive an abortion. Laws like this are key to the conservative aim of further restricting abortions after overturning Roe v. Wade. Justice reporter Julia Hart is covering the fight over these new local laws.

What the supporters of these measures expect is that by outline the transportation of a person along their roads for an abortion and doing that in enough places around Texas, they'll be able to just sort of choke off the channels that people are using to reach states where abortion is still accessible. But there's no sign that in the 10 months since the first of these anti-transport ordinances passed that there's been any kind of reduction or slowdown in that.

How would Lubbock County even begin to enforce a law like this? Well, they really can't. I mean, the kinds of enforcement mechanisms you might think of like roadside patrols are just not constitutional when it comes to the right to travel. The laws, the ordinances, in fact, rely on private citizen enforcement for this very reason. They need to be used by a private citizen who accuses someone of transporting a person on the roads of these jurisdictions to get an abortion. And that makes that part of it actually makes it more difficult to legally challenge, but also makes them much more difficult to actually enforce. The greater sort of impact of them seems

to be that they're used by both sides to galvanize voters and political action on bigger goals, bigger issues. Bitcoin has hit $35,000 for the first time since 2022, on speculation that regulators will soon approve an exchange-traded Bitcoin fund. That type of fund would allow investors to gain exposure to Bitcoin without actually owning it directly, so boosting demand for the digital currency. An off-duty Alaskan Airlines pilot accused of trying to disable the engines of an airplane has been charged with 83 counts of attempted murder. The San Francisco-bound flight had to be diverted to Portland, Oregon, after the suspect, 44-year-old Joseph David Emerson tried to disable it from inside the flight deck. Tens of thousands of women and non-binary people in Iceland

are going on strike to protest gender inequality at work. Prime Ministerial, Catherine Jacobs' daughter is joining them and will not go to work today. Oil giant Chevron has agreed to buy Hess for $53 billion in stock. The deal gives Chevron a bigger U.S. oil footprint and a stake in rival ExxonMobil's massive Guyana discoveries. That's it for today's episode. We'll be back on Wednesday with our daily news show. To make sure you know what's going on in the world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast player or download the Reuters app.