The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Latest On The Hostages And A Ceasefire.

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

The debate around "pause" versus "ceasefire" continues but meanwhile, people are still dying in the Israel-Hamas war. Janice Stein is with us for what has become her regular Monday briefing on where the conflict stands. Plus her thoughts on a new a study into Canada's role in the Afghan war and why very few people can get their hands on the report.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Monday. That means Dr. Janice Stein, the discussion around Israel and Hamas, ceasefire or pause, and the hostages. That's all coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here once again. Mondays have been really important on the bridge in the last month, ever since October 7th. Dr. Janice Stein has been with us and we've talked about all the different aspects of this whole Israel-Hamas situation. It's a very difficult story to tell. It's one fraught with concerns about misinformation, about bias, you name it. But we've managed, I think, pretty well to walk our way through this story because of the expertise of Middle East expert, conflict

management expert, the Munk School, one of the founders of the Munk School at the University of Toronto, Dr. Janice Stein. And Janice will be with us in a sec. Just want to give you the, I don't know, I guess, what could we call it, the headlines for what is in fact day 39 of the Israel-Hamas war. Here are the headlines. And, you know, they're not encouraging. None of them are. The World Health Organization says the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza is not functioning as a hospital anymore.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society announced Sunday that the Al-Quds Hospital in the Gaza Strip was out of service and no longer operational. Hamas on Sunday said it was suspending hostage negotiations because of Israel's handling of the Al-Shifa Hospital. Now, Israel says the negotiations are still going on. There's some confusion around that. We'll talk about that with Janice. 36 babies are at risk of dying at the Al-Shifa hospital after fuel ran out on Saturday. Israel says they're working at trying to fix that and evacuate the babies from the Al-Shifa hospital. Plans for that are still being developed.

18 Israelis have been injured, one critically after the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia fired anti-tank missiles from southern Lebanon. The head of Lebanon's Hezbollah party said its armed wing had used new types of weapons and struck new targets in Israel. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galan warned Hezbollah not to escalate fighting along the boundary. Hezbollah is dragging Lebanon into a war that might happen, Galan told troops. And the U.S. military conducted airstrikes on two locations in eastern Syria it said were linked to Iranian-backed groups.

So, as I said, nothing encouraging coming out of the headlines on day 39 of this situation. So, having said that, let's bring in Janice Stein and try and figure out just where we are on this story. As I've said before, it's a very difficult one to talk about. So here she is, Dr. Janice Stein. So Janice, the talk, a lot of it at least in the last couple of days has once again been this issue about pause versus ceasefire. I know you've walked through this with us before, the differences on these, but it seems a lot of people are still getting caught up on the difference between those two words, and some of them are in a position that one would assume they knew better. Where are we on this question? What is the likely outcome of the whole discussion around pauses?

A relentless pressure, Peter, growing, no question about it, over the last week to 10 days for a ceasefire, which really means we stop this war. We stop this war. Coming huge demonstration in London, a big demonstration in the United States too which, frankly, we are in an election year in the United States. This matters. And an Arab meeting in which a call for a ceasefire was couched, but a big one was couched among a lot of other issues. So no question, changed atmosphere

from the last time we talked about this. Really interesting, just before you and I talked, a long interview with Jake Sullivan, who is running the issue, who's running this file in Washington. A noticeably harder tone from him than from Blinken. And there has always been differences in tone between the two of them. There's not the usual rivalry that you get,

the killing ones, between the National Security Council advisor and the Secretary of State, but it was a real difference. So where are we? If I had to guess, I think we're still weeks away from a ceasefire. It is not tomorrow. Let me just talk some military strategy with you for two minutes about what is going to get in the way here. If you think about a ceasefire, you have to have a line. Because otherwise, you're just opening yourselves up. They're hard enough to enforce even when you have a line. Every ceasefire, after they get created, you get allegations by one side or the other. They're violating it and you get resumption of fighting for a day, a few days.

But there's a line. Here's the problem. There's no line, right? Secondly, if you say sitting ducks, literally, to ambushes. And there's no army in the world that's going to agree to that. And if they do, the ceasefire is going to get violated, literally, within hours. So that's why I say we're not there yet. Much more likely, the thing that could break this open is if there's a hostage deal. If there's a deal for, it has to be a large number of hostages, given the ones that are held, and the government in Israel, in order to get those hostages back, which is they had a big demonstration inside Israel by people

who say, give priority to the hostages. If that deal were to come, were to finally be concluded, there would be a multiple day pause, and then there would be an opening to agree on some sort of line, likely outside Gaza City, in which it might be possible to talk about a ceasefire. Wow. Okay. You've set the table for this discussion in many ways here, and there are a number of things I want to pick up on. I want to talk about the hostages. But before I get there, any discussion about whether it's a ceasefire

or whether it's a more organized pause on a daily basis obviously has to include affirmative action on either one of those by the Israeli government, by Netanyahu. And if anything, he seems, certainly on ceasefire, he's not interested in even discussing it. And he's being pretty aggressive in that position, even up against Biden. He's opened the door a bit on the pause,

talking about three, four hours a day, that he's willing to do that. Is that a significant, who does that satisfy? Does that satisfy anybody? i think you would expect him he's going he's got his back to the wall um that's anyone and let's also um talk about the elephant in the room here peter he's conflicted personally conflicted the longer this war keeps going the you, the more he kicks down the road, the commission of inquiry that is going to remove him from office. And so that is, you know, the incentives that he

has. And I've said to other people it would be like leaving Neville Chamberlain in office after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. They had a mechanism to change prime ministers. There's no such mechanism, unfortunately, in Israel right now. So I take his belligerence on this issue with a big grain of salt, because he's not going to be the only decision maker here. They have opened the door to a longer pause, and they don't define longer, but to a longer pause if there's a deal on the hostages. Because the pressure inside Israel to get those hostages back is overwhelming. So I think that's the way we get a multiple-day pause.

And there's a momentum here, right? Because once you get a three-, four-, five-day pause, and you could argue, well, you need that, because Hamas has to collect the hostages. Islamic Jihad has some. One other small group has some. They have to be brought out of the tunnels. They have to be staged.

There has to be a helicopter. Or they have to be moved by road. You can easily see how this could consume five or six days. Then it's tougher to restart. I think that's what the U.S. strategy, frankly, is, to work really hard on getting a deal on the hostages now. The major pressure on Netanyahu, obviously part of it's coming from Biden, but one would assume the major pressure has to come from the people of Israel.

And do we have any sense at this moment where the people of Israel stand on the issue of ceasefire? So it's really conflicted. They're conflicted. So if you look at the public opinion polls, Peter, they're holding two contradictory opinions at the same time. An overwhelming majority want this prime minister gone. And they don't even want to wait until the end of the war. They want him gone now, which is astonishing, frankly. There is a mixture of fury and fear that has not been felt inside Israel for a long time. You know, there are 150,000 displaced persons inside the country, the country of 9 million.

So what would that be in Canada? That would be 600,000 or more internally displaced people, both from the north and from the south, who can't go back to their homes. They're in hotels or with friends because those borders are not secure and missiles are being fired at these communities. So if you think about this,

the population is squeezed to the center. That's not a good geostrategic position to be in because you make the center of the country then an almost irresistible target for those who use missiles to inflict large numbers of civilian casualties. So there's a level of fear that probably hasn't been present for 75 years, honestly, which was the last time, maybe since 67 would be fair, but the last time civilians were at the forefront of a war was not long ago. So there's not a lot of interest in a ceasefire. There's widespread

agreement that they cannot live next door to Hamas, the Hamas that is saying to them over and over, we're going to do this again. We want permanent war until you're exhausted and worn out. So I think, and those are the two contradictory impulses, really. People who talk about, well, this war is going to open up a peace front. That's not on the agenda inside the country right now, but nothing trumps the hostages. Nothing trumps the hostages. So you need really skilled people in Washington that can leverage that opening right now. Okay. And we're going to get, I promise, to the hostages, but I've got one more question on this. You talked about the difference in tone, at least tone, if not language between

Blinken, the secretary of state and the national security advisor. I found Blinken this weekend. I mean, of all the statements that were made by both those two men, the one that seemed most overwhelming to me was Blinken saying, too many Palestinians are dying in Gaza. Absolutely. Which seemed to be as harsh as he could possibly put it, to be heard in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that you've got to back off. Yeah. And Peter, you know, and even because I watched that interview,

even the visual expression, you know, his eyes narrowed, he squared his chin. So there was a real hardening of resolve on Blinken's part. And just think where we are now. We're at a point where the IDF is surrounding the biggest hospital. And the allegations are that people who were captured in the October 7th, because there were large numbers of Hamas fighters who were captured inside Israel that day. And they have provided information, or so the allegation is, that there was a very large command center underneath that hospital.

So that's where the intelligence claims are coming from. But can you just imagine, you know, the pictures that we've seen have been horrific for civilians in Gaza, just horrific. But if fighting erupts around underneath in a hospital that still has the patients who are frankly unable to move. You know, the civilians who are sheltering there have moved, sometimes even against the wishes of Hamas people who are stationed in these courtyards, but it would be carnage, frankly.

We're in a tactical forward against the hospital. So that's where we are. And Blinken was really saying, this cannot happen. This cannot happen. And I absolutely know from past experience that if that's what he's saying in public, that's a pale imitation of what he's saying, frankly, in private. So they are looking for a way now to get a long pause.

And there's some urgency to get that done. And do you think... No, just one thing for our listeners to pay attention to. You know, the Jordanians flew in and filled the hospital. There have always been, as there's flew in a field hospital right next door, and so that the operation against the El Shifa Hospital, it would functionally be just a shell. That's the only way that we would not have carnage for civilians, because this has to be a ground operation. If you believe that there is an elaborate set of tunnels and bunkers, which stores ammunition and command and control under the hospital, you have to go in, right?

You can't bomb it from the air. That's not going to work. And I do say to myself, Hamas must know this is coming. There's a tunnel network here, 250 kilometers that goes all the way to the south. How much can be left by now under there anyway? The Jordanian field hospital story is a good one. And, you know, it in a way opens the door for other countries who would be allowed in to be doing the same thing. Absolutely. I.e., Canada. Yeah.

Trusted countries. And you see, here's the point, because if you fly in a field hospital, but you're trusted, that means you're not flying in ammunition. You're not going to fly in fuel that Hamas is going to be able to siphon off. You have at least some trust in officials on the ground, whether the UN officials who are there and Palestine Red Cross, who are going to monitor that the hospitals used for the purpose for which it's being flown in.

So there are opportunities for other countries to do something very concrete, very practical. And we're good at that. We're good. Yeah. I mean, we practical, and we're good at that. We're good at that. I mean, we have, you know it. Yeah, I mean, we do that in situations where there are natural disasters, you know, rapid response teams of different degrees that move in, including, I think, field hospitals.

Okay, let me move to the hostages, and give me a minute here to sort of explain myself. There were two U.S. congressmen who were visiting Israel this weekend, had meetings with Netanyahu and the top Israeli commanders, one Democrat, one Republican. And I don't know whether you saw, but I was watching an interview with them on Sunday. And there were some interesting things they said that related to the issue of the hostages. One was they're not all in tunnels. Clearly, the Israelis have told them they know where they are.

You know, some of them are above ground, some of them are below ground. That's one. Two, and this goes back to what you told us this, I think, three weeks ago on this program. And I kept looking around for other people talking about it, and they weren't. At least I didn't hear them talking about it or writing about it. But you told us that don't assume

that all the hostages are held by Hamas. Some are held by Hamas, some are held by Islamic Jihad, and some are held by basically street gangs working to make a buck. Yeah. So guess what? That's what these two congressmen said. And they said it because they said you've got you you got to be careful assuming that this is an easy operation because we're not dealing

with one group holding the hostages there are multiple groups holding the hostages and in some cases for different reasons street gangs are looking for money yeah um and I thought that was interesting because that's been kind of underground, to pardon the pun. Buried. Buried on that story. But it is an important part of trying to answer this hostage story, this hostage question right now. So those congressmen, that's the first confirmation that we have.

I think what you and I have known all along, that there's got to be reasonably good tactical intelligence now, right, of where these hostages are. And that's part of the reason why you send in ground forces, because they're capturing people, right? And those people are talking, and that's how you get good tactical intelligence, frankly. You know, U.S. has gone out of its way to say, we're not going to discuss intelligence details. They don't say, Jake Sondra did not say,

we don't know where they are. He just said, we're not going into intelligence details. Tells me, of course, they know where they are. The second interesting point was Hamas said this week, and you can understand why they would say this, right? We're not holding any civilians. We're only holding the soldiers that were captured that morning. Now, that's not a believable claim, frankly, Peter, but I understand entirely why they would say it, because then it's a military-to-military issue, and it absolves them

of any responsibility for having attacked civilians and taken civilians prisoner. But I think it's undeniably true that we have two groups, jihad, Islamic jihad, more radical than Hamas, more difficult to negotiate with, always has been. And that's what's, and let's add a third thing, that the

communications are now harder. The senior political leadership is in Qatar. The cell phones, the people are way down in the tunnels, the leadership. Harder to get through on the lines. It's taking much longer for messages to go back and forth. They've come close once or twice. And here's the dilemma.

It's not going to be enough to do a deal with Hamas. You have to do it with Islamic Jihad and Hamas both. You need both of those in the deal. And that's why this is so torturously slow, frankly. Last question on Israel-Hamas, plus Islamic Jihad. Has Joe Biden boxed himself into a corner? Well, look, yes and no, okay? We're talking about the Middle east everything is nothing straightforward here

uh the yes part is he's really infuriated arab american voters and they're critical uh because uh they're they're you know they're in detroit they're in Michigan, they're in Ohio, they're in Pennsylvania, to take only the three most obvious states. And all battleground states. They're all battleground states. And they're not huge numbers, Peter, but even if they stay home, because some of those people, frankly, are not likely to vote for Donald Trump. That would be almost inconceivable. But if they stay home, if they're just so angry and disheartened and they feel they have no voice whatsoever, they stay home. Well, 1%, as we saw four years ago really mattered. And this time, Biden's behind in the polls. So he's going to have to,

he's certainly in a much tougher spot as a result of this. And he's going to have to find those voters somewhere else. Secondly, as you talked about last time, Peter, younger people, there's a real split in the Democratic Party. The younger people, 35 and a real split in the Democratic Party. The younger people, 35 and under, are much less inclined to support a war by Israel in which civilians are the primary casualties. So that's a big problem for him too. So the electoral math, that's where he's boxed himself in, I think. He hasn't boxed himself in because now's the time to collect on the political capital that he

invested. So ironically, Macron can call for a ceasefire. You can get calls literally from anywhere in the world, even the UK. It doesn't matter. They have no leverage. There's one government right now that has leverage and can actually deliver, and it's the United States. So after a whole decade of people writing about the U.S. in decline, you know, that's an industry, is the U.S. in decline. You know, that's an industry. Is the U.S. in decline?

We've been doing it for 50 years. Well, is the U.S. in decline? Here we are at probably the most dangerous moment. And there's one government that actually has leverage where it matters. And that's the United States, because Biden put that political capital in. Okay. We're going to leave this topic. We're going to move over a couple of countries. We're going to talk about Afghanistan,

which is certainly something that you know a lot about, having been involved in more than a few studies about the situation in Afghanistan, especially when the Canadian troops were there. So we'll pick that up right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Monday episode, right here on SiriusXM, channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Our guest, she has been on a number of Mondays now since October 7th,

Dr. Janice Stein from the Munk School, University of Toronto, Middle East analyst, conflict management expert, you name it. Janice is there. So we're going to move over from Israel and Hamas to Afghanistan. And the reason I bring this up is because Murray Brewster is a great reporter at the CBC at a piece, I think, on Friday, talking about something that I think most people weren't aware of, but there was an official history being written right during the war on Canada's role in Afghanistan.

And since Canada's involvement ended, that history kept on being written through the various stages that we did on our exit from that country. Now, the reason this is interesting, and what Murray points out, is it's awfully hard to get a copy of this official history, which leaves a lot of people wondering what exactly is in it, what does it talk about?

I think Murray's had a glimpse of some of it and he seems to be pointing in the direction that among other things, there was a degree of, there's certainly a degree of tension between Canada and its major allies, Britain and the United States, about how things were conducted in Afghanistan, and that Canada got little credit and a lot of the opposite from those two countries. Now, let me start by saying, have you seen the official history no i you know and i'm

frustrated uh so let me just just clarify a little bit this is a history of the canadian army not the air force not any you know is so it was actually commissioned by Andy Leslie, who was commander of the Canadian Army at that time, who really thought that we would, and he's right, that we would all benefit from a history. And, you know, we don't have official histories of the Army, actually, Peter. We have official histories of the Canadian Armed Forces, and they take forever. So Andy jumped the gun here and said,

let's write a history of the army, because it was after all the army that was the principal Canadian force that was on the ground. And the person who wrote it, tough-minded enough to say, look, I'm not doing this. If it's going to go through censorship and you folks have any editorial control, I'm just not doing it. So it got done quite quickly. And then it got stuck in the army bureaucracy. Andy Leslie had moved on, new commander. And finally it published, and it got published by the King's

Publishers, we now call it, not the Queens any longer, the King's Publishers, 1,600 copies. I knew this was coming, and I really wanted one. They were gone in five seconds. And I'll tell you a funny story, which when our book, I wrote it with funny story which when our book I wrote with Eugene Lang when our book was published and it was a much more open process right we didn't have to clear with anybody there was you know the big indigo at the corner of Spark Street in Ottawa well they ordered 500

copies the department of defense came downstairs and bought 499 so nobody could get a copy in ottawa so it was a local bestseller at that one indigo for good reasons and that people were coming up to you people were coming i think a similar process must have gone on here that those coffees flew off the shelf and i desperately looking for one have not seen it so we don't know exactly what's in it, how startling it may be, how revealing it may be about what was going on behind the scenes within the command of the Canadian army during that conflict. But this one little snippet about the relationship that Canada had, at least after the fact, with the UK and the us yeah i mean you you studied this war obviously for your book but um yeah and more so what what what can you tell us about that

uh so i'm gonna guess now and speculate because i haven't seen the book but as you know uh we went to Kandahar, which was, at the time we made the decision to go, was not yet the most violent part of the country, but by the time we got there, it already was. And our forces at that time, I think that's what people are talking about. Our forces at that time literally fought an all-out battle with the Taliban. And Canadian commanders feel to this day that they held off the assault, that if we had not been there, the government of Afghanistan might have fallen right at that point. U.S. forces were way north. the government of Afghanistan might have fallen right at that point.

U.S. forces were way north. We took the brunt of it. That's when we suffered a large number of our casualties. And I think what we're going to hear is we feel underappreciated by our American and British colleagues for being there at the time and for stopping by far the largest wave of Taliban fighters. Wouldn't be the first time we'd feel underappreciated by those two. I mean, it took them forever to kind of concede that, yeah, okay, so you had your own beach at Normandy, right? Yeah.

But, you know, are there, this is an unfortunate term here, but are there smoking guns in terms of Canada's performance in Afghanistan? Yes, of course there are. Of course there are. And I'd love to have this conversation with you again when we both get the book. But sure, there are, right? And there were divisions, differences inside our military about what we should be doing and how we should be doing it. And there were tensions with the cabinets of both prime ministers, frankly, at different times.

So there's a lot, Peter, that I think has yet to come out. And I'm absolutely fascinated to see how much he was able to break out because he did the research. Apparently, you can't get access to the documents yet. They're not declassified. So he did it the same way we did it with interviews. But it's later. It's, you know, 10 years have gone by.

People may be more willing to talk. And it was really interesting. I'll say this which I haven't said in public before when we wrote our book the war was still going on there were what I call military mothers in the country

the loss of their sons was very very fresh so even then there's a degree of self-censorship when you hear some things that you think, oh my God. And then you make the decision, well, it's not necessary to put that in the book.

So I think that's not a coincidence. These books flew off the shelf and we can't get them. And of course, they're not going to publish anymore, they say, right? Right. Because a King's publisher can only afford to do 15 or 16. But we'll find a way to get it. Somebody will have it.

I'm sure we will. It'll come out at some point. Because it's an important story to tell. It is. It is. We lost 157, 158 lives in Afghanistan, but many others, hundreds of others, were impacted by the war wounds of Afghanistan. And there were, as you say, political issues

surrounding not only how we ended up going into Afghanistan, but also where we ended up going, the whole move from Kabul to Kandahar. And then the decisions to pull the plug and get out after having said that we'd never cut and run. Yeah. So there's a lot. You know, let's put one other quick one on the table.

Peter, there's almost a wrap to the story at the end. Nobody's written the story of why we had so much trouble getting our people out when the United States pulled out, right? Because you know there are fixers for journalists who put themselves at risk. There are people who work with our forces. We had a large number of people and the withdrawal was chaotic, but we have many people, especially who fled to Pakistan and have been waiting for Canadian documents all this time. Well, just this weekend, the Pakistanis deported Afghan refugees refugees wholesale deportation back to afghanistan

and among them were people who have been waiting for canadian documents and did not get them oh my god that's terrible i mean it's not just frustrating. It's just terrible. It's terrible. Yeah, it's just terrible. Who knows what will happen to them when they go back. Yeah. And they're known, obviously. These people are known.

Yeah. All right. Listen, Janice, on that note, we wrap it up for this day, and we'll see where we are seven days from now. And you've got your big conference coming up. We do. The security conference this weekend. I hope to bring you back some good stories,

Peter. I'm sure you will. You always do. All right, Janice, thanks very much. We'll talk again. You're welcome.

Janice Stein, Dr. Janice Stein from the University of Toronto, the Munk School. And as I've said, a internationally recognized expert on security matters, on conflict management, and on the Middle East. And we are very grateful that Janice spends time with us each week

as we go through this situation. A number of you have written asking about Brian. Brian is writing his memoirs at the moment, so we've given him some time off to do that. But eventually, you know, he will be back with us, and one of the ideas that some of you have put forward, and both of them are interested in doing, is having a weekly show that's the two of them,

Janice Stein and Brian Stewart, talking about international issues, maybe Ukraine, maybe the Middle East, maybe, who knows? There's lots of things to talk about. And they're both very well versed on all issues. So we look forward to having them with us if we end up being able to do that probably at some point in the new year um okay that's uh that's it on that uh topic i i just want to mention one thing before we wrap it up for today um a lot of uh letters and a lot of

comments and private emails to me and conversations I've had with friends about last Thursday's program, which was the, um, your turn, your thoughts, your letters, and your personal anecdotes and family stories about Remembrance Day. Um, it was, it was a nice little show. And, um, among the letters I got, I got one letter. It was actually a comment on our YouTube channel from a woman who was very upset, accused me of wearing a knockoff poppy. Now, let me explain. If you watched it on the YouTube channel,

you saw that I was wearing a paper poppy. Now, first of all, we've been wearing knockoff poppies, all of us, for decades and decades. Nobody's wearing a real poppy, so I assume anything you put on as a poppy is a knockoff poppy. However, I understand what this writer was getting to. It wasn't what she was used to seeing. And she assumed that I just went to a coloring book and cut something out of the paper.

That's not what happened. I am currently in the UK, back in Canada in a couple of days. But so I was doing the local custom in terms of remembering. And the decision was made in Britain this year, in the United Kingdom, that to avoid plastic and other materials, they would go to paper poppies. And that's what sold across the UK this year. And that's what I purchased. And my family purchased paper poppies.

So it was a knockoff poppy, just like the ones you wear. However, it was an official knockoff poppy, if you wish. So I wanted to explain that because I didn't want people to have the wrong idea that I was in some manner disrespectful of the poppy because I'm not in any way. In fact, I saved my poppies. I've got poppies going back years and years. I used to, some of you will remember, I used to do the Remembrance Day service from the National War Memorial in Ottawa on the CBC. And I've got all the poppies I wore over those years.

All right. Here's an end bit on this whole issue of switching to paper. It's not about poppies. It's about straws. It's about plastic straws. I don't know whether you've been in a situation where you've been, where you wanted a straw and you were given a paper straw and you, they don't last very long.

They seem to sort of crumpled up into a mush fairly quickly. But the argument on plastic, I think we all know it. I don't need to explain it to you. But the number of plastic straws that are out there, the BBC did a piece just the other day where they quoted, admittedly, a not very scientific but a much repeated estimate, but the number of disposable drinking straws used every day in the United States at 500 million.

The validity of that statistic is being disputed, and the real figure could be less than half that amount. Certainly the amount being spent on disposable drinking straws has been rising year on year for the past two decades, says the BBC. And although the estimates for exactly how straws are used each year and how many end up in the environment are tricky to confirm, what's clear is that plastic straws get everywhere. They're found in huge numbers in beach cleanups around the world. They've been found perforating the stomachs of penguins and even jammed inside the nostril of an olive ridley sea turtle so that's the push on moving away from plastic straws it really started you know these straw free movements started in 2011 campaign eventually

inspired major companies like starbucks and mcdonald's to stop using plastic straws in entire states like California to ban them outright. So the reason this is in the news today, or these days, is that some of the studies being done suggest that it's not that much of a gain moving from plastic to paper, that paper straws are causing issues too. And that maybe we haven't found the right solution yet in moving away from plastic to other materials that can achieve the same kind of goals that plastic was used for, whether it was straws or something else. So we'll follow that one.

It's all part of our continuing process of keeping an eye on things. And NBITs are a great way to do it. Tomorrow, at the moment, I've got a pile of NBITs that I've collected over the last few weeks here in the UK, and I want to get them out. So we may do that tomorrow. NBIT programs are always popular with you, and there's some great ones,

more than a few of them to do with climate, and of course my favorite, airplane stories. So we'll tackle some of those tomorrow. That's it for this day. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening. As the week goes on, tomorrow, as I said,

Wednesday is Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce. Thursday, your turn again. And the Random Ranter comes back after taking the week off last week on Remembrance Day. And then Friday is Good Talk. Mention again, if you haven't had an opportunity yet to sign up for the newsletter that I do with nationalnewswatch.com, go for it.

It's kind of a fun little newsletter that comes out every Saturday morning. There's no charge. You get it free in your inbox. It'll be there by 7 a.m. Saturday mornings. Something to read over the weekend. The focus is kind of stories that may be on my mind one way or another, some personal anecdotes,

and stories that I think are interesting that you may have missed during the week. Context to the bigger stories, the news behind the news kind of stories. So it's a quick read. It shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes. But that's the idea. And every once in a while, I'll throw in a video there as well of something that may perk your interest. So that's nationalnewswatch.com slash newsletter.

And you can subscribe. You just have to give them your email basically so that's all there is to it no credit cards nothing like that it's all pretty straightforward and that's it for this day i'll be back tomorrow looking forward to talking to you thanks for listening today and we'll talk to you in 24 hours.