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Episode: Life in Damascus returning to normal despite Israeli bombing

Author: BBC World Service
Duration: 00:33:06

Episode Shownotes

Life in Dasmascus is returning to normal despite Israeli bombing. Also: Netanyahu appears in court on corruption charges and a judge throws a spanner in the works for the Murdoch succession plans.

Full Transcript

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00:01:38 Speaker_10
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Miles and at 14 hours GMT on Tuesday the 10th of December, these are our main stories. Syria's new government is taking shape.

00:01:50 Speaker_10
A Prime Minister has been named and public sector staff are returning to work. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on trial for corruption. He told the court in Tel Aviv the charges against him were ridiculous.

00:02:04 Speaker_10
Also in the podcast, we hear from the lawyer of the French woman whose husband arranged for her to be raped by hundreds of men. And a spanner in the works for Rupert Murdoch's succession plans.

00:02:20 Speaker_10
It is still only 48 hours since the Assad regime came to an end in Syria, but the rebel groups that have taken over in Damascus know the country needs more than just a wave of euphoria to move forwards.

00:02:33 Speaker_10
They have started to address the basics of governing, like making sure key services, water, electricity, transport and the oil industry continue to function properly.

00:02:43 Speaker_10
An interim prime minister and a small cabinet have been announced to make that happen. But there's also a recognition that past crimes will have to be addressed. A list has been drawn up of Assad regime officials who oversaw torture.

00:02:58 Speaker_10
There have also been more than 100 Israeli airstrikes across Damascus. Israel says it's trying to prevent weapons getting into the hands of extremists. Our correspondent Lina Sinjab is in the Syrian capital.

00:03:13 Speaker_02
So basically the leader of the rebels came out yesterday after a meeting with the former prime minister appointing a new interim prime minister with a small cabinet basically to get all the public institutions and services resumed for people.

00:03:32 Speaker_02
And we've heard that some of the public employees have been contacted to come back to their work today, but it's not confirmed if they've resumed work today.

00:03:43 Speaker_02
But it seems that they have a plan to have a soft handover of power so that they continue with the running activities for people and so that life goes back to normal as soon as possible here in the capital.

00:03:56 Speaker_10
It does seem extraordinarily peaceful at the moment, from what I can gather in Damascus, particularly even in the Alawite areas, that's the sect from which Bashar al-Assad came. There must be a degree of concern about retribution in those areas.

00:04:11 Speaker_02
Well, certainly, especially among those Alawites who supported President Assad.

00:04:17 Speaker_02
Now, the leader of the rebel also issued like an amnesty for everyone who worked in the army before or was part of the Assad regime before, but of course, focusing on those who

00:04:31 Speaker_02
you know, had torture, prove that they've been involved in torturing Syrians. They issued a list of names that they're calling for them to be arrested, to be brought to justice and prosecuted.

00:04:46 Speaker_02
Even they said that the ones who fled the country should be brought to justice. So the assurances that they're giving to minorities are giving people some sort of calm, but also, of course,

00:04:58 Speaker_02
It's all to be proven how they're going to act on the ground in the days and weeks to come.

00:05:03 Speaker_10
The United Nations Special Envoy for Syria has said that the transitional arrangements need to be as inclusive as possible. Speaking at a news conference in Geneva, Geir Pedersen said that it was crucial all groups in Syria work together.

00:05:17 Speaker_04
Much of what some call rebel-controlled Syria is under the control of what I would call a patchwork of groups who are coordinating well for now, but they are not fully or formally united.

00:05:30 Speaker_04
It's important that we don't see conflict between these groups. Let me also say that, by and large, we have seen reassuring statements from the HDS and the different armed groups, but there are still some issues of law and order.

00:05:48 Speaker_10
Our international editor, Jeremy Bowen, is on the Lebanese-Syrian border making his way into Syria. He told us more about the potential issues in how power is being and may be distributed.

00:05:59 Speaker_31
It's really early days at the moment, and we don't even know the degree to which they have control outside the capital. They've clearly taken the main towns. Clearly the regime has collapsed.

00:06:10 Speaker_31
But Syria has dozens of armed groups, some of which are jihadists. They haven't converted and changed in the way that HDS says. that it has. So it has a massive job.

00:06:23 Speaker_31
I mean, power anyway has been fractured in Syria for years because of the way that the war left the place in pieces, controlled by different authorities, different groups. But I think now, with the regime gone, there is

00:06:39 Speaker_31
It's a moment full of opportunities for Syrian people. If they can find a way of working together, they've got some hope, a hope that they haven't had. That's why people have been celebrating in the way that they have.

00:06:50 Speaker_31
But, you know, it's the Middle East. We have to be realistic. There are dangers ahead and the precedent

00:06:56 Speaker_31
from Iraq and from Libya in the last, well, 20 odd years, is the fact that when a dictatorship goes, when there is a vacuum of power in both those circumstances, the result has been a chaotic situation with people grabbing for power, settling scores, taking territory, and Iraq, you know, for many years there was a catastrophic murderous situation and it's still a very fragile state.

00:07:24 Speaker_10
As we heard there from Jeremy Bowen, there are many lessons to remember from the fall of Saddam Hussein. That was regime change led by the US and the UK and their allies. Emma Skye saw that period.

00:07:38 Speaker_10
She was there between 2003 and 2010, advising the commanding general of US forces through a key period from 2007 to 2010. And she's the director of the International Leadership Centre at Yale University. She spoke to my colleague, Michelle Hussein.

00:07:56 Speaker_30
When you look at these images coming out of Syria and the joy and euphoria on people's faces at the fall of the Assad regime, you know, it brings back memories of Iraq from 2003, when there was such hope and optimism that the fall of Saddam would bring about a better future.

00:08:15 Speaker_30
So I feel those similarities and every Syrian I know is just ecstatic at the moment. And just when you see people reunited with their loved ones, going back to their homes, it's very moving.

00:08:27 Speaker_18
There was a key mistake by the coalition, wasn't there, to remove everyone connected with Saddam or his party, the Ba'ath Party, and there's a link between that party and the Assad's party in Syria, to remove them entirely from the equation.

00:08:43 Speaker_18
Can you tell us the thinking at the time?

00:08:46 Speaker_30
So when the coalition overthrew the Saddam regime, they didn't have enough troops there at the beginning. And you could see there was a lot of lawlessness, a lot of chaos and looting.

00:08:57 Speaker_30
But a couple of months after that, they then decided in order to put the new Iraq on new foundations to create a democratic country, They couldn't build from the Ba'ath party.

00:09:09 Speaker_30
So, they went through this process of de-Ba'athification, of removing members of the Ba'ath party from their jobs and dissolving all the security institutions. The problem was there wasn't a difference really between the state and the party.

00:09:26 Speaker_30
And what this did was unintentionally collapse the state. So that led to a lot of violence and Iraq's descent into civil war.

00:09:36 Speaker_18
So today, what would you advise the UK and the US governments to do? Wait and see or take some immediate action because you'd want to be in a position of some influence or at least some communication with Syria?

00:09:49 Speaker_30
I think it's important to really think about what's in Western interests. You know, this is a Syrian revolution that's been brought about by Syrians themselves. Now, in Western interests, what's important is that Syria doesn't become a sanctuary

00:10:05 Speaker_30
for ISIS. There are already pockets of ISIS there. And it's really important that the ISIS guys in prison don't get out, that ISIS doesn't reconstitute, that ISIS doesn't move from the countryside into the towns.

00:10:19 Speaker_30
Because then you'll have Syria having these transnational jihadis who could pose a threat to us all around the world. So I think that is a core interest.

00:10:30 Speaker_30
It's also a core interest to see that Syria is stable, so that refugees who are now in Turkey, in Lebanon, in Jordan, can return back to their homes. And there's things that the West can do in terms of providing humanitarian aid.

00:10:47 Speaker_30
I think it's important to have links. with this new regime. I mean, it's a bit difficult at the beginning because Hayat al-Hasham is a prescribed terrorist organization.

00:11:00 Speaker_30
It was once affiliated with al-Qaeda and there were also sanctions on Syria, but those sanctions were on the Assad regime.

00:11:06 Speaker_30
But you can already see there's outreach indirectly to these new groups to say, I suppose, at one level, we wish them well and people wish to see Syria a much better country than it was under Assad.

00:11:22 Speaker_18
This question of how you bring about stability and humanitarian aid, I mean, funding anything in Syria would require sanctions to be lifted, wouldn't it? Yes, it would.

00:11:35 Speaker_30
But those sanctions were on Assad. And with the overthrow of Assad, there's a whole new, you know, whole different process to be put in place of how we engage with the new regime there. Syria, under Assad, was allied with Russia and Iran.

00:11:52 Speaker_30
And the new Syria, there is a hope that it won't have those alliances, because Iran has been able to transport all its support to Hezbollah in Lebanon through Syria. So, it's in Western interests

00:12:05 Speaker_30
to make sure that the new Syria has a chance to not be part of Iran's axis of resistance and to have a new relationship with Western countries.

00:12:17 Speaker_10
That was Emma Sky. Well, the ongoing uncertainty in Syria has caused worry in neighbouring Israel, so much so that Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes on Syria since the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

00:12:31 Speaker_10
It says it's trying to stop weapons falling into the hands of those it calls extremists. But the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has other pressing political concerns at home.

00:12:42 Speaker_10
He's just become the first sitting Israeli prime minister to take the witness stand in a criminal trial for corruption, which he calls a witch hunt. Here he is speaking before the trial.

00:12:55 Speaker_09
Regarding the trial, I heard in the media that they say that I want to avoid the trial. Have you heard that? Do I want to dodge? What a sad thing. For eight years I have been waiting to finally blow up the deluded and absurd charges against me.

00:13:12 Speaker_29
The charges relate to three cases and all of them he's accused of fraud and breach of trust and one he faces the more serious charge of bribery as well and in two of the cases he's basically accused of exchanging sort of regulatory favors for the owners of big media organizations in Israel for more positive press coverage and then there's also a case which has been widely publicized where he's accused of accepting lavish gifts

00:13:41 Speaker_29
really to advance the personal interests of powerful businessmen, particularly a Hollywood producer, those gifts to the tune of $200,000. And, you know, he denies any wrongdoing, has been saying that this is a brutal witch hunt.

00:13:55 Speaker_29
Those were the words he used in a news conference last night. That point has really been very much picked up. With the opening of the defense case, his lawyer has been speaking for most of the time in the courtroom.

00:14:07 Speaker_29
But outside the courts, you know, not just very far away from me, you can see this definitive split in Israel. We have on one side of me supporters of the Prime Minister, very angry that this veteran leader is on trial under these circumstances.

00:14:23 Speaker_29
And you have the anti-Netanyahu protesters who have been calling for the Prime Minister to step down for the past few years while he faces criminal allegations against him.

00:14:34 Speaker_29
And, you know, this is a sort of damaging division that has really been evident in Israeli politics for the past few years.

00:14:41 Speaker_10
And Yolande, remind us what could happen to Mr Netanyahu if he's found guilty.

00:14:46 Speaker_29
I mean, this trial, first of all, is expected to go on at least for another year before it reaches a verdict. He could then appeal to the Supreme Court. But yes, there are possible prison sentences here.

00:14:57 Speaker_29
Bribery is punishable by 10 years of prison sentence in Israel if he was found guilty.

00:15:05 Speaker_10
That was Yoland Nel. A 26-year-old man has been charged with murder over last week's fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York outside a hotel.

00:15:17 Speaker_10
Luigi Mangione was picked up while eating some food in McDonald's in Pennsylvania after a customer recognised him and alerted the authorities. Our correspondent Nida Torfik is following events from New York.

00:15:30 Speaker_23
Luigi Mangione, by all accounts, to those who knew him, he's the last person they would have suspected. He is an Ivy League university graduate, worked as a data engineer, and from a prominent Maryland family.

00:15:43 Speaker_23
Now, people who knew him say he was well-rounded, social, smart, athletic.

00:15:48 Speaker_23
But it does seem like the last few months is what investigators and really the world will be looking at, because he reportedly suffered from a painful back injury, which impacted his life.

00:15:59 Speaker_23
A picture on one of his social media accounts actually shows X-ray images of what many assume is his spine with surgical implants. And he was in court.

00:16:10 Speaker_23
He was asked by the judge, as he was charged in Pennsylvania with an unlicensed gun charge—he said that he had been in touch with his family until recently. Now, we do expect him to be extradited to New York after that process plays out.

00:16:26 Speaker_23
Here in New York, prosecutors have already charged him with murder, besides casings on the crime scene that had the words, defend, deny, depose, kind of a

00:16:36 Speaker_23
reference, perhaps, to the 3-Ds of insurance, tactics used by insurance to deny coverage to people.

00:16:42 Speaker_23
Also, he was found in possession of a three-page handwritten manifesto that officials say showed ill will toward corporate America and reportedly referred to insurance companies as parasites.

00:16:54 Speaker_23
It's really also interesting to underline just how much he has become a folk hero out of this, because of many people's anger toward the insurance industry, but the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro,

00:17:05 Speaker_23
said the real hero here was the person who alerted authorities.

00:17:08 Speaker_10
But what does the shooting death of a person on the streets of a highly surveilled city like New York tell us about America, security and some of the worrying subsequent reaction?

00:17:18 Speaker_10
Juliette Kayyem is the former Assistant Secretary for Policy at the United States Department of Homeland Security. She spoke to my colleague Emma Barnett about some of the burning questions surrounding the attack.

00:17:30 Speaker_32
How did someone survey Mr. Thompson, the CEO of the health care company, and move around the most surveyed city in the United States with cameras everywhere, with people everywhere with iPhones, and managed to escape the city for almost a week?

00:17:51 Speaker_32
And to me, that suggested that this was someone who was studying how law enforcement and how these cities sort of try to protect themselves, which is essentially they have lots of cameras around, and he was able to evade them quite successfully.

00:18:07 Speaker_32
Now that we know a little bit about him, that he's a smart person, he went to great schools, he studied engineering technology, he was into electronic gizmos, some of it is beginning to make sense. He was

00:18:21 Speaker_32
hunting for a person who reflected an industry that he had come to despise. When I saw the pictures of Thompson, the head of the health care agencies, walking alone, not only did he not have security, he didn't even have staff.

00:18:37 Speaker_32
I think a lot of that is going to change for an industry that will now view itself as a potential target.

00:18:44 Speaker_32
From the New York Police Department and New York perspective, in the end, it was really going quite public, as NYPD did, with pictures and every picture that they could find, including a later one that they disclosed where he was in a taxi cab.

00:19:02 Speaker_32
that was the trigger for the McDonald's employee to know who was sitting in that restaurant. So in some ways, it's old-fashioned policing, which ultimately got him, which was get out to the public and ask if anyone sees this person.

00:19:16 Speaker_28
I suppose there's also just a much bigger point here around what didn't happen after the killing.

00:19:23 Speaker_32
The gun now appears to be what we call a ghost gun, and most people know that Americans are a very armed society.

00:19:30 Speaker_32
Ghost guns are sort of a new factor in a very complicated and violent country because, of course, they are basically at-home kits made with 3D printers.

00:19:40 Speaker_32
There are regulations in this country to try to stop them, and it's before our Supreme Court right now. And so that is a huge factor in terms of will we come out of this thinking about this kind of weaponry differently? And the likelihood is no.

00:19:57 Speaker_32
We are just a country that finds it very hard to put gun restrictions on this. But I think what happened and how he by him evading the NYPD, as well as shooting the CEO of a company that is the leading health care company, I think it just

00:20:14 Speaker_32
the way that he became sort of like this Robin Hood is just a horrible part of this story. And so when you ask like what didn't happen is there just wasn't sufficient outrage.

00:20:26 Speaker_32
And I think I think we have a lot to learn from that society that begins to think it's going to solve its public policy problems about health care by by shooting the CEOs of health care companies is a country that has lost its way.

00:20:41 Speaker_10
Juliette Kayyem. Still to come in this podcast, in the islands of the South Pacific, deep sea mining for rare metals.

00:20:51 Speaker_08
They present a huge potential for our country. Countries like us, at the forefront of impacts of climate change, are struggling to find ways to build resilience.

00:21:04 Speaker_10
There is little sign of an end to the political chaos in South Korea. President Yoon Suk-kyo has refused to step down after trying to declare martial law last week. Now, his own office say even it is unable to say who's in charge of the country.

00:21:19 Speaker_10
I asked our Asia-Pacific editor, Mickey Bristow, to describe what's happening.

00:21:23 Speaker_00
Disarray is the least word you could perhaps use. Chaos, complete chaos, really, at the top of South Korean politics at the moment. What you have had over the last few days is this deepening crisis.

00:21:40 Speaker_00
Had Yoon Sung-yool, the president, stepped down, resigned, or had he been impeached at the weekend for ordering martial law last week, there could have been an orderly transfer of power to the prime minister.

00:21:53 Speaker_00
Constitutionally, everybody would be clear where everyone stood, but that didn't happen. He's decided to hold on to power as long as he can. supported by his party, who refused to vote with the opposition for the president's impeachment.

00:22:09 Speaker_00
So he's still in power, but of course, authority is drained away from him. And over the last couple of days, it's been unclear exactly, you know, what power he does exercise. The Ministry of Defense said he was still in charge of the armed forces.

00:22:25 Speaker_00
He was commander in chief. The Foreign Affairs Department suggested he's still in charge of diplomacy. South Korea's foreign affairs.

00:22:33 Speaker_00
But if the president's own office is today saying it is unclear who is in charge of the country, then that really is something. Remember, we're talking about South Korea. For the last few decades, it's been a stable and reliable democracy.

00:22:47 Speaker_00
If the president's office doesn't know who's in charge, then who does?

00:22:52 Speaker_10
And, Nicky, some details have been coming out about that very brief period of martial law last week and how it all happened.

00:22:58 Speaker_00
There have been lots of other things happening inside and outside Parliament today, a flurry of activity.

00:23:04 Speaker_00
Perhaps the most eye-catching is the Chief of the Special Warfare Command, essentially the person in charge of sending troops into Parliament last week to effect martial law.

00:23:17 Speaker_00
Previously, we believe that the order for martial law came and the order for the troops to move came from the Ministry of Defence,

00:23:25 Speaker_00
now appears from this testimony from this army commander that it was Mr Yoon himself who on several occasions called the commander, demanded he send troops to parliament and also whilst legislators were gathering inside parliament to vote down martial law, the president called the commander and said get those people out, break down the doors, drag the legislators out, stop them from voting before there's a quorum, before there's enough of them to vote for martial law.

00:23:55 Speaker_00
The commander said he refused to do that. The politicians gathered. They voted down martial law. The president accepted that. So real details about the cut and thrust and the difficulty that

00:24:10 Speaker_00
that existed in South Korean politics and really how it could have gone either way had this commander not decided to refuse the order from President Yoo.

00:24:19 Speaker_10
Mickey Bristow. A powerful media patriarch, a chosen son and his squabbling siblings. It is a succession battle worthy of Hollywood fiction and it is being played out in a US court.

00:24:32 Speaker_10
The 93-year-old media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has failed in a legal bid to change his family trust so that his son, Lachlan, gets editorial control over his media empire.

00:24:44 Speaker_10
The trust currently splits power to control News Corp and Fox News, among Mr Murdoch's four eldest children when he dies. A court in the US state of Nevada said Rupert Murdoch had acted in bad faith.

00:24:57 Speaker_10
Our North America business correspondent Michelle Fleury reports.

00:25:01 Speaker_06
Rupert Murdoch tried to amend a 1999 family trust to give his son Lachlan more control over the family media empire, bypassing siblings Prudence, Elizabeth and James, who don't necessarily share his conservative views.

00:25:16 Speaker_06
This ruling, guaranteeing a say for all of the children, could change the editorial stance of the Murdoch family's many media assets,

00:25:24 Speaker_06
These include controlling stakes in the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK, and perhaps most significantly, Fox News in America, the powerhouse conservative network that's had a huge influence on Republican politics and right-wing audiences.

00:25:39 Speaker_06
James, Elizabeth and Prudence welcomed the decision, saying in a statement obtained by the BBC that they hoped to move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members.

00:25:53 Speaker_10
Michel Fleury, to France now and a disturbing legal case that's made headlines around the world. Just a warning, you may find the following details distressing, involving a woman called Giselle Pellicot.

00:26:05 Speaker_10
Her husband of 50 years is accused of drugging her into unconsciousness and allowing strangers to rape her. Ms Pellicot waived her right to anonymity.

00:26:16 Speaker_10
In Paris, her lawyer, Stéphane Babourneau, speaking with his client's permission, has been telling my colleague Victoria Derbyshire about the impact the case has had, not just on her own well-being, but on how French society has reacted to the case.

00:26:31 Speaker_05
By listening to the victim herself, we were immediately convinced that this woman was telling the truth, that she was genuinely unaware of what was happening to her.

00:26:45 Speaker_05
She explained to us how for 10 years she's been trying to understand what was happening to her by consulting with doctors, by talking with her family, with her environment, and no one was able to find any explanation.

00:27:01 Speaker_19
What were your fears, your concerns, before telling Gisele Pellico exactly who this involved, what it involved, and the scale of it over almost a decade?

00:27:15 Speaker_05
Well, that she could have a nervous breakdown, of course, because we were all very worried that a human being who has been exposed to hundreds of extreme sexual abuse without knowing that, after being told what had happened to her,

00:27:35 Speaker_05
She couldn't accept to watch the videos or even to continue the discussion about the extent of the rapes, how many, how long. She wasn't ready for that.

00:27:49 Speaker_05
It took her almost three years to be able to accept to have this very straightforward conversation about

00:27:58 Speaker_05
what was in the case and she accepted that because at that time she was already thinking to allow the public into the courtroom so she felt that she needed to be fully aware and fully informed of the case even if as many others she would have preferred to leave without knowing if it was possible, but it wasn't.

00:28:20 Speaker_19
And she, as you say, it took her four years to watch the footage, the videos that her husband had filmed. How did she respond? How did she deal with what she was viewing?

00:28:34 Speaker_05
She felt extremely humiliated by what she was seeing, extremely humiliated. And she was extremely shocked of seeing herself becoming an object.

00:28:46 Speaker_05
And I think that this achieved to help her deciding that she wanted a public trial because she felt that it was important that people understood what happened to her.

00:28:58 Speaker_19
Let's talk about Madame Pellicot's decision that she didn't want to be anonymous, that she wanted to waive her right to anonymity and open up the case to journalists and to members of the public. Why was that important to her?

00:29:14 Speaker_05
She realised it wouldn't be possible to understand the extent of what happened, and that this story could be useful to others, and that in order to ensure that this would not happen again to anyone, it was important for the public to know how this could happen.

00:29:36 Speaker_19
What kind of men are on trial here?

00:29:39 Speaker_05
We heard many times that they are ordinary men. They are ordinary men because they are well-integrated men for most of them. They have jobs, families, friends, but they are not ordinary in the choices they made.

00:29:55 Speaker_05
So what this trial is trying to achieve is to understand what has led to this horrendous story.

00:30:05 Speaker_10
Stéphane Babonneau. Pacific islands are often small in landmass, but vast in terms of the ocean waters and the seabed they control. So deep-sea mining is a huge opportunity for many of them.

00:30:19 Speaker_10
It's the process of removing rock-like nodules packed full of metals from the ocean floor. The tiny Pacific island nation of the Cook Islands is looking at how feasible it is for them, but at what environmental cost?

00:30:33 Speaker_10
Our Pacific correspondent Katie Watson now reports from the island of Rarotonga.

00:30:41 Speaker_03
Hi Orana, my name is Alana Matamaru-Smith. I am the current director of Te Epokaire Society, a local non-government environmental organisation based here in the Cook Islands.

00:30:55 Speaker_03
We want to show the world that there is actually opposition to deep sea mining here in the Cook Islands and not everyone is in support or would prefer a significant amount of time being put into this space before any big decisions are made.

00:31:08 Speaker_16
Low-lying Pacific islands are among the nation's most vulnerable to climate change. With rising sea levels, the ocean remains their greatest threat. But it's also their greatest provider. They fish in it.

00:31:19 Speaker_16
They live off tourists drawn to their turquoise waters. Now the Cook Islands wants to dig deeper, to the ocean floor, where there are millions of rocks or nodules packed full of some of the most in-demand resources in the world.

00:31:33 Speaker_16
Cobalt, manganese and nickel, crucial elements in things like electric car batteries and mobile phones. The Prime Minister Mark Brown is leading the Cook Islands push to mine the ocean. Such is life on a small island, he wears more than one hat.

00:31:48 Speaker_16
He's the tourism minister and the seabed minerals minister too.

00:31:51 Speaker_08
They present a huge potential for our country. Countries like us, at the forefront of impacts of climate change, are struggling to find ways to build resilience against the increasing impacts of climate change in our countries.

00:32:05 Speaker_17
You think you're finding a way forward that's different, but yet people are saying this is risky, you shouldn't do it.

00:32:12 Speaker_08
We know that for the last 20 years we haven't been able to get the financing from the larger emitting countries. So we've got to look to ways to how we can protect ourselves.

00:32:23 Speaker_08
And our seabed minerals provides an opportunity for us to be able to look at how we can potentially exploit this resource.

00:32:32 Speaker_15
It's a hot and sunny day here on Rarotonga, and we've come to the main port on the island. And we've boarded the Anuanua Moana, which is the research ship owned by Moana Minerals.

00:32:46 Speaker_16
South African Hans Smit is the CEO of Moana Minerals, which has an exploration license in the Cook Islands.

00:32:51 Speaker_27
We have a couple of ways of sampling nodules. The best way to explain it is a cookie cutter. You've got dough and you press a cookie cutter into it and you lift it out. And what's really important about that is it's undisturbed.

00:33:03 Speaker_27
So when we look at it at the surface, that's what it looks like on the seafloor.

00:33:07 Speaker_16
The worry, though, is that if they start mining, this untouched area of the ocean will be disturbed. To scoop up the nodules on a large scale, a robot will move along the sea floor, hoovering up the rocks.

00:33:19 Speaker_16
The sand that's brought up as a by-product will then be put back into the sea. And that's one of the sticking points, how best to discard that material without disturbing marine life.

00:33:29 Speaker_27
Nothing we do in life is risk-free. So if we want to have this lifestyle, we want our cell phones and we want our electric vehicles and the like, we need the metals.

00:33:47 Speaker_16
The Cook Island sees deep sea mining as giving this nation some security in an uncertain future. Future income that will give its people better health care, education and opportunity. The downside, though, isn't yet clear.

00:34:01 Speaker_16
Internationally, there's a growing call for a halt on deep sea mining while more research is done. And this island is split.

00:34:11 Speaker_10
Katie Watson. And that's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

00:34:27 Speaker_10
You can also find us on X at Global News Pod. This edition was mixed by Nora Hull. The producer was Rachel Wright. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Nick Miles. And until next time, goodbye.

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Buenos dias, world, from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. On season three of our show, Amazing Wildlife, we have spotlighted captivating animals from around the world, like the capybara.

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Capybaras are actually the world's largest rodent, and they have short little ears that they wiggle very much like hippos. It's one of the cutest things. They're one of the most adorable animals.

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All episodes of season three are available now. Listen to Amazing Wildlife on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by. And in 2017, Miranda, a university tutor from London, joins a yoga school that promises profound transformation.

00:37:05 Speaker_13
It felt a really safe and welcoming space. After the yoga classes, I felt amazing.

00:37:12 Speaker_14
But soon, that calm, welcoming atmosphere leads to something far darker, a journey that leads to allegations of grooming, trafficking and exploitation across international borders.

00:37:24 Speaker_13
I don't have my passport, I don't have my phone, I don't have my bank cards, I have nothing. The passport being taken, the being in a house and not feeling like they can leave.

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World of Secrets is where untold stories are unveiled and hidden realities are exposed. In this new series, we're confronting the dark side of the wellness industry, where the hope of a spiritual breakthrough gives way to disturbing accusations.

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You just get sucked in so gradually.

00:37:56 Speaker_13
and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise. And it's like this, this secret that's there. I wanted to believe that, you know, that

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whatever they were doing, even if it seemed gross to me, was for some spiritual reason that I couldn't yet understand. Revealing the hidden secrets of a global yoga network. I feel that I have no other choice.

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The only thing I can do is to speak about this and to put my reputation and everything else on the line. I want truth and justice. and for other people to not be hurt, for things to be different in the future.

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To bring it into the light and almost alchemise some of that evil stuff that went on and take back the power.

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World of Secrets, Season 6, The Bad Guru. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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