transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson, and in the early hours of Friday 24 April, these are our main stories. President Trump says the Lebanon ceasefire has been extended for three weeks after diplomatic talks in Washington. Representatives at a United Nations Security Council meeting say measurable, yet fragile progress has been made in Haiti's fight against gang violence. The tech giant Meta is cutting a tenth of its global workforce, roughly 8,000 employees, as it boosts spending on artificial intelligence. Also in this podcast…

Speaker 2:
[00:42] We are losing money every time there is a blockage of internet. We are losing, losing, losing, losing, and no one is caring about me.

Speaker 1:
[00:50] We hear about life under Russia's internet crackdown. If President Trump has a chance of turning a ceasefire with Iran into a peace deal, he needs Israel and the armed group Hezbollah, which is backed by the Islamic Republic, to hold their fire in Lebanon. Tehran has made this a condition of any lasting agreement with the United States, and there has been a significant reduction in attacks in Lebanon since a ceasefire there was agreed last week. But it's fragile. On Wednesday, Israeli strikes killed at least five people, one of them a journalist. And on Thursday, Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel. With a ceasefire in Lebanon due to expire on Sunday, a second round of direct talks between the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors in Washington was convened in the White House. There, Mr Trump announced some good news.

Speaker 3:
[01:45] They like each other. I found that out today and I've sort of heard about that. They actually like each other. They like Lebanon and Israel. And we had a great meeting with the very high officials of Lebanon and very high officials of Israel. And we think that the president of Lebanon and the prime minister of Israel over the next couple of weeks will be coming here. They've agreed to an additional three weeks of, I guess, no firing, ceasefire, no more firing. Let's see. We hope that happens. It's not going to happen between them, but they do have Hezbollah to think about. We had a great conversation, and I think it's the beginning of something very important. It would be a wonderful thing to get this worked out simultaneously with what we're doing in Iran.

Speaker 1:
[02:31] Hezbollah rejected any Lebanese negotiations with Israel as the Israeli army continues to occupy a large part of southern Lebanon. I asked our North America correspondent, David Willis, if Mr Trump was more eager to get involved in Lebanon for the sake of getting a deal with Iran.

Speaker 4:
[02:49] He does, Alex, saying that Lebanon is a beautiful country that got torn apart and adding that the United States is keen to get involved, to work with Lebanon in order to protect it from Hezbollah. And President Trump said that Lebanon and Israel have, as he put it, a common problem, namely Hezbollah. And following these high-level meetings, he is clearly hopeful, it would seem, that a ceasefire can be sustained, Alex.

Speaker 1:
[03:19] Lebanon has agreed to the ceasefire, but not Hezbollah, which Israel has been fighting. So given that, can this three-week extension actually achieve anything?

Speaker 4:
[03:29] Well, it's the million-dollar question. President Trump made clear that the United States' close ally, Israel, has the right to protect itself should it come under attack. Israel of course has established that self-declared buffer zone in southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah regards them as occupying forces in that area. Hezbollah has said it wants the ceasefire to continue on the basis of full compliance, as it puts it, by Israel, but there remains considerable mistrust. President Trump also wants the ceasefire to hold, not least because it was his decision to attack Iran that reignited hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel. Since when, of course, nearly two and a half thousand people have been killed in Lebanon according to the Lebanese authorities. Mr. Trump knows that a broader truce has to involve Lebanon, and Mr. Trump told reporters that he's hoping to host Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Lebanese president at the White House in the near future, in the hope of expanding talks beyond the ambassadorial level to a next phase in which Lebanon would presumably push for Israel to withdraw from the south of the country. Israel wants, of course, the dismantlement of Hezbollah. But what's happened today is significant despite the carve-outs, such as giving Israel the right to defend itself if it's struck by Hezbollah. Significant as well, Alex, in that the US is willing to get involved, as we mentioned, in Lebanon.

Speaker 1:
[05:12] David Willis. President Trump remains in a bullish mood with Iran, denying that he's keen to end the war with Tehran. He claimed that the US Navy had sealed up tight the critical oil waterway, the Strait of Hormuz, and that it will remain that way until Iran makes a peace deal. But the Islamic Republic is showing no sign of backing down on its demands that the US end its blockade of Iranian ports. Here's our security correspondent, Frank Gardner.

Speaker 5:
[05:40] So the situation in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz is once again a kind of stalemate, bit of a logjam, really. The good news is that, of course, the ceasefire is more or less holding. The full scale war has not resumed. The president, Donald Trump, has not carried out his threat to target power plants and bridges across Iran, although Iran doesn't trust him and thinks that that could still happen at any minute. But the bad news is that there are not one but two blockades going on on this vital waterway. Iran, which whether the US likes it or not, does have some control over the Strait of Hormuz. It has the major coastline there, all the way from the shuttle Arab waterway up in the north, next to Iraq, all the way down to the border with Pakistan in the southeast. And it's still got the ability to target ships. It's attacked three ships in the last day also. It's reportedly seized two of them. So it's still a threat to shipping. And at the same time, the US has imposed a naval blockade on all Iran's Gulf ports, not on the Strait of Hormuz per se, but on Iran's ability to export its oil and to import produce. And as long as that naval blockade is there, as long as the US is blockading those ports, Iran says the Strait of Hormuz is not gonna be open and they're not gonna come to peace talks. So it's really a case of who blinks first. Now Iran can take a lot of pain, but this is really tough for them. They need their Gulf ports to be able to export their oil, to generate income, to pay people's salaries. So not only are they gonna be running out of money, but the oil is gonna be stacking up in their reservoirs and soon gonna fill them up, which means that they're gonna have to start shutting down wells. For the US., there is pressure because this blockade on the Strait of Hormuz is driving up the price of the pump. And much as Donald Trump says he doesn't really care about that, he's not in a big hurry internationally, there's more and more people turning to look at the White House saying, you need to solve this. And Iran's position hasn't really changed. So the ball is pretty much in the US court on this one right now.

Speaker 1:
[07:49] Frank Gardner. While Russia wages war on Ukraine, the Kremlin is fighting for control of cyberspace at home. Access to popular messaging apps is restricted. There are curbs on mobile internet and on VPNs, virtual private networks, used to circumvent censorship. Officials claim it's for national security reasons. But as our Russia editor Steve Rosenberg reports, there is growing criticism of Russia's internet crackdown.

Speaker 6:
[08:20] Outside the presidential administration offices in Moscow, people are waiting to submit a petition. They're calling on Vladimir Putin to end internet censorship, to lift restrictions on popular messaging apps and on mobile internet. They have the right to petition their president. But in authoritarian Russia, this is very much put in your head above the parapet. It's a very small group of people that's come out today. And the suspicion is that people are frightened to publicly demand that constitutional rights are restored. When we turned up here a few minutes ago, we were filmed, we're still being filmed quite closely by security officers on this street. Those who have turned up, pretty brave I think.

Speaker 2:
[09:07] My business is entirely on the Internet.

Speaker 6:
[09:11] Julia has signed the appeal. She runs a catering company.

Speaker 2:
[09:15] We are losing money every time there is a blockage of the Internet. We are losing, losing, losing, losing. And no one is scared about me.

Speaker 6:
[09:24] Aren't you frightened? Aren't you scared?

Speaker 2:
[09:25] I'm very. I'm shaking.

Speaker 6:
[09:28] Do you think that coming here today will make a difference?

Speaker 2:
[09:32] I don't know. Probably not. But it's what I can do. Here, mum, this is messenger Max.

Speaker 6:
[09:41] An advert for Max, Russia's new state-backed messaging app. The authorities are heavily promoting it. It's excellent, says the voiceover. But many Russians doubt it's at all secure. Meanwhile, WhatsApp has been blocked, access to the popular Telegram messenger restricted, and in many parts of Russia, curbs on mobile Internet mean that only state-approved sites open. The authorities talk about a sovereign Internet for a sovereign Russia. It feels like a digital iron curtain is being built. I travel 120 miles from Moscow to Vladimir. In the town center, the taxi booking app on my phone opens okay, and I can access state media. But Google searches aren't working, and independent news sites aren't loading. Across town, Yulia Grekova shares her story. She had applied to the local authorities to hold a rally against Internet restrictions. She had listed 11 options for a venue. City Hall replied, Sorry, not possible. On that day, we'll be cleaning the streets at all 11 locations. Then the police came to her work and warned her, don't protest. Back in Moscow, I asked Vladimir Putin's spokesman, is Russia on a road to the past? No, it's not, replies Dmitry Peskov. Security considerations dictate certain measures. Most of our citizens understand that. Once the need for such measures disappears, services will be fully restored and return to normal. It also looks like trust in the president is falling. Vladimir Putin's approval rating has dropped to its lowest level since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As well as frustration with the Internet restrictions, there is concern about the economy and growing fatigue with the war on Ukraine. Remember Yulia, who I'd met outside the presidential administration office? She handed in her petition. Now she's back at work, in the kitchen at her catering company.

Speaker 2:
[12:08] All the conversation is about survival. Future is not even mentioned in day-to-day conversations with friends, with relatives. It's like what we are doing every day in a week, in a month. Nothing more than a month.

Speaker 6:
[12:24] Just like the bread I can see expanding in the oven, rising across Russia right now is a deep sense of uncertainty.

Speaker 1:
[12:35] And you can see the full version of Putin's Russia. We're cut off from the outside world on the BBC News YouTube channel. Delegates attending talks on how to tackle gang violence in Haiti say some progress has been made. Around one and a half million people have been displaced since gang warfare erupted five years ago. UN Security Council representatives said a new multinational gang suppression force will replace the Kenyan-led security forces in the coming months. Here's our Global Affairs reporter Mimi Swaby.

Speaker 7:
[13:09] It is estimated that half of gang members are children, compounding Haiti's status as one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a child. Representatives at the UN Security Council meeting emphasised the need to protect young people amid Haiti's humanitarian, economic and security crisis. The emergency meeting also spotlighted a multinational gang suppression force which will be deployed in the coming months to replace the Kenyan led multinational security force. Although representatives stressed that fragile progress had been made, the new force is heavily anticipated to help Haitian authorities regain control and create conditions for longer term stability in elections this year. Haiti's acting Prime Minister, Alix de Lille, Fils Amé, addressed the meeting, saying it was time to come together for the state to retake its rightful place and that Haiti would not perish. Since gang warfare erupted in 2021, nearly 1.5 million people have been displaced by the violence, half of them children. Thousands have been killed alongside widespread reports of sexual assault, kidnapping and extortion.

Speaker 1:
[14:17] Mimi Swaby, the tech giant Meta has told its staff that it plans to cut 10% of its global workforce impacting almost 8,000 employees. This comes as the parent company of Facebook and Instagram plans to spend more than ever on artificial intelligence. I heard more from our reporter Alfie Haberschen.

Speaker 8:
[14:38] An internal memo to Meta's staff about these latest cuts didn't mention AI explicitly, but it said this would allow the company to make room for other investments. But if you look at Meta's spending, it's easy to see where that money might be going. The numbers are staggering $40 billion on AI in 2024, $70 billion in 2025, and now this year set to be $135 billion. It's hard to process figures like that, but it's about the yearly cost of running a country like Portugal or Greece. Meta is not the outlier here. It's worth noting Microsoft, Google, Amazon, all spending similar amounts or trying to win this race. There's been so much talk about how AI will turn the world of work upside down. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg says 2026 is the year it will happen.

Speaker 1:
[15:24] And it is the latest in a series of cuts from Meta. How is it able to function with such a reduced number of staff?

Speaker 8:
[15:32] Yes, well, Meta has been rapidly automating a lot of routine admin tasks, content moderation, ad creation, customer support. Even this week, the company told its staff it's going to begin tracking them on their computers and logging their interactions to train and improve its AI models. Given all the layoffs, one employee told the BBC that this situation just feels dystopian. We also heard recently it's even developing an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg himself to give employees feedback. So all this makes for a lower staff count and one that's predicted to drop further.

Speaker 1:
[16:05] Yeah, and you mentioned eye-watering spending on AI. Where's all this going?

Speaker 8:
[16:10] Yes, eye-watering indeed. The biggest chunk of it is going to Meta's aggressive expansion of data centres. These have come under a lot of criticism of late for their impact on the environment, the sheer amount of water and electricity being used. They can be equivalent to the size of an airport or a small city, holding millions of service to train the AI. Also, as Meta cuts these jobs, as we've mentioned, it's pooling its money together to try and poach some of the best AI engineers around. We're talking about superstar footballer type wages here. We saw reports last year of $100 million offers to persuade some of OpenAI's best talent. That's the maker of ChatGPT, of course. But the overall picture here is the race to so-called artificial general intelligence or AGI. That's the buzzword we hear all the time, all these top AI companies are going for, often defined as developing AI that can surpass human cognitive ability in every area. Of course, we're not quite there yet, but we know Meta is a little behind its rivals, like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. What we're seeing here is Mark Zuckerberg trying to close that gap.

Speaker 1:
[17:12] Alfie Haberschen. Still to come in this podcast.

Speaker 9:
[17:19] Eventually, Mr Rachmaninoff found out that his place is taken by a nine-year-old girl.

Speaker 1:
[17:28] The last surviving pupil of the composer Rachmaninoff has died at the age of 101. This is The Global News Podcast. When dinosaurs dominated the earth millions of years ago, giant octopuses roamed through the oceans. That's according to a new study which found that these gigantic invertebrates may have been among the top predators of the seas a hundred million years ago. The research published in the journal Science questions what is known about underwater life back then, as our science reporter Helen Briggs explains.

Speaker 10:
[18:09] For decades, scientists have believed the biggest ocean predators at the time of the dinosaurs were animals with backbones such as sharks and marine reptiles. Invertebrates, including octopuses and squid, were thought to play minor roles. But a set of remarkably well-preserved fossilised jawbones of octopuses living between 72 and 100 million years ago tells a different story. The evidence suggests some of the earliest octopuses grew to extraordinary sizes with powerful arms and crushing beak-like jaws for hunting large prey. Researchers at Hokkaido University in Japan say the animals may have reached total lengths of up to 19 metres, potentially making them the largest invertebrates ever known. The fossils offer a tantalising glimpse of a powerful, intelligent giant that may have trialled ancient seas. But Dr Nick Longridge, a paleontologist at the University of Bath, says many questions remain.

Speaker 11:
[19:09] So this would have been an absolutely voracious predator. What exactly it's eating, I think that's the big question there. Is it some sort of apex predator, kind of like a great white shark, or like the mosasaurs were, or like an orca? That's not impossible. Most other octopi don't hunt fish, they don't hunt vertebrates, they hunt shellfish. One possibility, big shellfish would be ammonites. That's kind of my hunch. It's kind of a bit of a mystery.

Speaker 10:
[19:34] Until more fossil evidence is found, scientists can only guess at the exact shape of the animal, how fast it could swim and what exactly it was dining on.

Speaker 1:
[19:45] Helen Briggs. The climbing season at the world's highest mountain is just getting underway, but the route to the top of Everest is blocked. A large chunk of glacier has lodged itself on the path just under Camp 1. The block of ice is 30 metres high and now the Nepali Department of Tourism is trying to find alternative ways for the climbers to reach the summit. Our environment correspondent Navin Singh Khadka told my colleague Oliver Conway more about the problem.

Speaker 12:
[20:16] The Sherpas who fix the ropes and ladders, they are known as ice fall doctors, they have been monitoring it and unfortunately nothing has happened. They were expecting this thing to move or melt or anything, but that hasn't happened and it's quite tall, this wall of ice. And they have not been able to cross it, circumvent it. And the fear is if they go near it and if they touch anything, there might be movement and it might fall. The fear is also because recently in 2023, a similar serac fell over a cliff and that triggered an avalanche and killed three shepherd rope fixtures. When I talk to them, they have a very, very fresh memory of that and they're quite scared.

Speaker 13:
[21:00] And how did this block of ice get there? Did it fall down from above?

Speaker 12:
[21:04] No, what we need to understand here is the Khumbu Icefall. That's a massive stretch. As soon as you climb above Everest base camp, you reach this Khumbu Icefall, which is the most treacherous part in when you are climbing Everest from the Nepalese side. So what happens is, because it's a moving glacier, the Khumbu Glacier, then you'll get all sort of these things, you know, like things come up, appear, reappear, disappear, they're melt. So there are crevasses, there are seracs, there are blocks of ice appearing, reappearing. Now, unfortunately, this time around, this has appeared right above the route heading to camp one. And the fear is it might come down anytime and again, triggering avalanches or even rock falls or whatever.

Speaker 13:
[21:48] So how much of a delay is this causing and how disruptive is it to the climbing season on Everest?

Speaker 12:
[21:54] Going by past experiences, by now they should have fixed the ropes and ladders and climbers who have assembled at the base camp, they should have started acclimatizing up to camp one. Now, because of this delay, the fear is that there might be a traffic jam and that might cause other risks. That is the real concern now.

Speaker 13:
[22:16] And can they do anything other than wait for this chunk of ice to melt?

Speaker 12:
[22:20] This is where everybody is guessing. Officials are not coming out clearly. They say there is a Plan B and nobody knows what that is. But there are, when I speak to industry people, the shepherds or operators, what they're saying is there could be two things. One is they could use strong drones to transport the equipment and all those things to higher camps. And they might even use helicopters to ferry those climbers to those camps, camp one or so. Again, it might be controversial. It is controversial already, you know, using helicopters and all that. But given the situation like this, you know, it might be a possibility. But nothing official as of yet. These are options being discussed. We're yet to see if it really happens.

Speaker 1:
[23:04] Navin Singh Khadka. A pianist who was the last surviving pupil of the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff has died at the age of 101. Born in California to Polish parents, Ruth Slenchinska gave her first recital at the age of four and made her debut with a full orchestra in Paris aged seven. She was heralded as one of the greatest child prodigies since Mozart, but briefly turned her back on her music career in protest at her tyrannical father's rules. Our media and arts correspondent David Silito looks back at her career.

Speaker 14:
[23:47] The pianist, Ruth Slenchinsk, playing Rachmaninoff, a relationship that had begun in the 1930s. The great Russian composer had had to pull out of a concert, and the promoter went looking for someone to take his place.

Speaker 9:
[24:04] Sophie asked my father if I could replace him, and I did. And eventually, Mr. Rachmaninoff found out his place was taken by a nine-year-old girl. Next thing I knew, he invited my father to bring me to him to play for him.

Speaker 14:
[24:29] Yes, she was nine.

Speaker 6:
[24:31] Ruth, how are you today?

Speaker 9:
[24:33] All right.

Speaker 14:
[24:34] And Rachmaninoff's new student was already a veteran of the concert circuit.

Speaker 9:
[24:38] And what are you going to play for the audience?

Speaker 14:
[24:39] Here she is.

Speaker 9:
[24:40] I'm going to play a minuet in G major by Beethoven.

Speaker 14:
[24:43] Aged five. But the pressure from her father to practice nine hours a day led to her running away from home when she was 15. She was in her late 20s when she returned to performing. And it was only in later life that she said she truly came into her own.

Speaker 9:
[25:02] Nobody becomes a pianist until they're really at the age of 60 because you don't know what you want until then.

Speaker 14:
[25:12] Indeed, this recording of Chopin was from a recording deal that she signed when she was 97.

Speaker 1:
[25:22] David Silito. And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag globalnewspod. And don't forget our sister podcast, The Global Story, which goes in depth and beyond the headlines on One Big Story. This edition of the Global News Podcast was mixed by Lee Wilson and produced by Wendy Akut and Ira Khan. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritson. Until next time, goodbye.