Global News Podcast: Israel strikes targets in Gaza after rocket attacks

Hallo, das ist der Global News Podcast aus der BBC World Service

mit Rapporten und Analysen von across the world.

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Der Mann, der für Filme, wie Star Wars und Räder der LVM-Versicherung geplant hat, Norman Reynolds, die 89 Jahre alt ist.

Der Israeli-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warnt am Sonntagmorgen, nach einer Sicherheitskabinett-Meeting,

dass Israelse Enemies einen Preis für Aggression bezahlen würden, nach einem großen Rocket-Attack von Süden Lebanon.

Ich habe es sehr klar gemacht, dass unser Enemies uns nicht testen sollte.

Wir brauchen zu restrieren, und wir werden gegen die Extremisten verabschieden, der Resort zur Verwaltung.

Und als wir uns gegen die Aggression von einer anderen Front verabschieden,

werden wir unser Enemies verabschieden, und sie werden einen Preis für jeden Akt der Aggression bezahlen.

Und eine kurze Zeit, nachdem Benjamin Netanyahu das Televisions-Adress gegeben hat,

hat er die mehr als 30 Rocket-Attack, die von Lebanon gefeiert hat. In einem Stichwort eröffnet late on Thursday night.

Der Israeli-Army hat gesagt, dass es currently striking in the Gaza Strip war.

Reports from the ground, as we record this podcast, spoke of three explosions.

A Palestinian security source said, the strikes hit several Hamas training sites.

Israel had earlier blamed the Palestinian militant group Hamas for the rockets fired from Lebanon,

but it had denied having anything to do with the attacks.

Before the latest operation by the Israeli army, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres

had urged all sides to avoid escalation. Stefan Dujarek is his spokesman.

We condemned the multiple rockets being fired from Lebanon into northern Israel today.

We urge all actors to exercise maximum restraint.

The UN Interim Force in Lebanon remains in contact with authorities on both sides of the blue line,

and we urge the parties to liaise with our peacekeepers and avoid any unilateral action

that could further escalate the situation.

Tensions were already high after Israeli police stormed Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque this week.

Our Middle East correspondent in Jerusalem, Yolande Nel, closely followed the events

as they happened during the day and gave this assessment of Mr Netanyahu's televised speech

just before Israel launched its strikes on Gaza.

Benjamin Netanyahu said that his government would hit its enemies,

that they would pay a price for all acts of aggression, as he put it.

And he talked to about how there were internal divisions in the country,

but that would not stop.

In what he called a strong security response, the country would be united in the time of Christ, as he said.

And we do know that leading opposition figures in Israel have backed the government's security response,

whatever it might be.

He also talked about the situation in Jerusalem.

Mr Netanyahu said there was no interest in Israel in changing the decades-old status quo rules

that operate at the contested holy site at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound known to Jews as Temple Mount.

Mr Netanyahu said we will act aggressively against extremists who resort to violence there.

When it comes to what's happened, Israel has to show a strong response.

If you look at this in perspective, there are some reports that this was the largest barrage of rockets fired at Israel

from Lebanon since 2006, since the Second Lebanon War.

This is something that is unusual, but at the same time a response from Israel has to be carefully calibrated.

In other words, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, backed by Iran for this rocket fire from Lebanon,

has also said it assumes that Hezbollah knew what was going on,

and that means that there is a real risk of a provocation with Hezbollah,

and that is an entity which has a huge arsenal of weapons.

Joland Nell in Jerusalem.

Iran and Saudi Arabia have been bitter rivals in the Gulf for many years,

almost going to war on a few occasions,

but remarkably they appear to have come to something of a diplomatic truce,

brokered by China no less.

Now these two Middle Eastern countries have agreed to restore ties

and even reopen diplomatic missions after their respective Foreign Ministers met in Beijing,

their first such meeting in seven years.

I spoke to Frank Gardner, our security correspondent,

and began by asking him how he would describe the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Absolutely awful would be to put it mildly.

The two have been implacable Middle East rivals,

and people I think tend to oversimplify this,

saying well Saudi Arabia is ruled by Sunnis,

and Iran is ruled by Shias.

It's much more complicated than the religious split,

the two different big divisions in Islam.

It's really about geography,

and Iran under the Shah was the most powerful country in the Gulf region,

and then of course it suffered years of isolation.

Saudi Arabia enlarged its strategic pact with the United States,

and has tried to keep in check Iran's recent growth across the region.

And Saudi Arabia has been hugely worried by things like the war in Yemen,

where Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized power over eight years ago.

But that war has failed to result in any kind of a victory for anybody.

And Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has looked over its shoulder and seen that in its view,

the United States is disengaging from the region.

President Obama talked about a pivot to the Pacific.

There was President Obama reaching out to Iran,

and the Saudis have basically concluded that they are going to have to live with Iran,

and they're better off making a deal with them,

because they don't feel they can rely on the United States anymore.

It's quite amazing that they are reopening their embassies and diplomatic ties

within weeks of brokering a kind of deal that China had a huge hand in.

Yeah, it's a diplomatic triumph for China. There's no question about it.

I mean, it's not a natural ally for Saudi, but it is now,

because it's a customer for Saudi oil energy.

And when it comes to personal relationships,

there's really not much good blood between Washington and Riyadh.

And Riyadh is reaching out not only to China, but to other nations, including Russia.

So it's loosening its strategic alliance to the United States.

It's not broken, but it's loosening.

Yeah, and it does help, of course, that China will never bully or pressurise Saudi or Iran,

or Russia for that matter, about human rights.

Yeah, you're right there.

I mean, all the Gulf nations say that they are fed up with being lectured over this,

and there's a lot of talk of hypocrisy.

One of the things that I find extraordinary,

as somebody who's watched and lived in the Middle East for so long,

is that the Gulf Arab states, and indeed ISIS and al-Qaeda,

are largely silent on China's treatment of the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.

There's documentary evidence that points to around a million of them being incarcerated

in these compulsory reeducation camps.

And yet there's not a squeak about that, or very little.

So yes, I think there's an element of realpolitik here.

China is a massively important trading partner for every Gulf nation,

but particularly the Saudis.

And that I think kind of trumps a lot of other things.

Frank Gardner.

When the U.S. withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in 2021,

there were scenes of chaos in Kabul Airport,

as huge numbers of Afghans tried to flee the incoming Taliban government.

Since then, the Taliban have imposed our hardline policies on the country,

notably banning girls and women from secondary schools and universities.

But now the Biden administration has released a provisional report,

reviewing the U.S. withdrawal,

and its conclusion is that little more could have been done

to prevent the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.

Speaking at a White House briefing,

the National Security spokesman John Kirby

defended the decision to leave and blame the chaos on Donald Trump.

Decisions made and the lack of planning done by the previous administration

significantly limited options available.

President Biden inherited a forced presence in Afghanistan

of some 2,500 troops.

He inherited a special immigrant visa program

that had been starved of resources.

And he inherited a deal struck between the previous administration

and the Taliban that called for the complete removal

of all U.S. troops by May of 2021,

or else the Taliban would go back to war against the United States.

I spoke to our correspondent in Washington, Jessica Parker,

and began by asking her for more detail

about this partially released document by the Biden administration.

Reading it and then listening as well to John Kirby earlier,

there is, I'd say, a point that they want to make,

which is, I think, a political one,

that they think it was the right thing still to do to withdraw from Afghanistan.

They say the conflict had drifted into nation building,

which had never meant to be.

One goes on to actually blame Donald Trump,

the previous administration, for some of the things

that he had done in the lead-up to all this,

and the situation that J. Biden's team

are essentially saying that they inherited.

So the deal that the U.S. had reached with the Taliban,

the Doha agreement, and then the lack of planning they claim

that had been done subsequent to that by the Trump administration,

the low number of troops that had been left in Afghanistan,

a failure as well to properly resource a visa program

for Afghans who had worked with U.S. forces and U.S. personnel.

So there is quite an effort in this report and by Mr. Kirby

to say that J. Biden had inherited a difficult situation

from the previous administration.

So I think it has to be taken as a kind of political piece of work

as much as something that's looking at maybe what went wrong

on that chaotic withdrawal,

maybe people remember seeing those desperate scenes from Kabul Airport.

Absolutely, and human beings clinging to giant transport planes

as it took off from the airport.

There was an admission of intelligence failures, though, Jess.

Yeah, I mean, certainly watching the briefing,

a sort of tacit admission of intelligence failings,

and we've known that what happened and the speed with which

the Taliban took over the country shocked the Western world.

So, to some extent, I don't think it's news

that there were some intelligence failings,

but within this report it says

the intelligence community's assessment in early 21

was that Taliban advances would accelerate

across large portions of Afghanistan

after a complete U.S. military withdrawal

and potentially lead to the Taliban capturing Kabul

within a year or two.

Of course, it happened far faster than that.

So Mr. Kirby, John Kirby was kind of pressed on these points

and also pressed by journalists who were quite combative

in some of the questions they were asking him

about whether there were any regrets

about the way that the whole thing had been handled.

And Mr. Kirby simply replied that the President had been proud

of everyone who had been involved in the operation

and that no operation ever goes perfectly to plan.

And he also argued that ending a war is never easy or low risk.

But I think certainly an effort in this report

and the presentation of the report to defend what had happened

whilst insisting that this was all about

trying to learn lessons for the future.

Jessica Parker.

As we heard in the earlier podcast,

China has been hosting the President of France Emmanuel Macron

and the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen.

Mr. Macron, who is in Beijing for a state visit,

told President Xi that he's counting on him

to bring Russia to its senses over Ukraine.

The red carpet was out when Emmanuel Macron

arrived at Beijing's Great Hall,

the start of an important complex mission

overshadowed by a war half a world away in Europe.

Mr. Macron made it clear he wanted President Xi

to do something about it.

Russian aggression in Ukraine has dealt a blow

to this international stability.

It has put an end to decades of peace in Ukraine.

And I know I can count on you under the two principles

I've just mentioned, to bring Russia to its senses

and everyone back to the negotiating table.

For now, that remains a distant prospect.

Beijing has presented its own 12-point peace plan,

but it's thin on detail

and viewed with suspicion in the West.

President Xi said China wanted to see a settlement,

but beyond repeating Beijing's insistence

that nuclear weapons should not be used,

he gave no sign of any willingness to put pressure

on Vladimir Putin.

No such sign was expected,

but the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen,

did say that President Xi had told her

that he was willing to meet Ukraine's Leader Volodymyr Zelensky

when the conditions and time were right.

For all the tensions surrounding China's relations with the West,

over Ukraine, human rights and the future of Taiwan,

Emmanuel Macron says Europe must resist the urge

to reduce trade and diplomatic ties.

He's being accompanied by a large business delegation

and today deals were struck on green and nuclear energy,

as well as a new airbus assembly line in China.

Paul Adams, and as President Macron takes part

in diplomatic talks in Beijing,

the disruptions in France continue.

Once again, there have been mass protests against his plans

to change the pension age from 62 to 64,

which was pushed through Parliament last month without a vote.

Francis' Constitutional Council will decide on its validity next week.

Hugh Schofield spent Thursday on the noisy streets of Paris.

Another big demonstration on this 11th day of action,

the first one was back in mid-January.

It's pretty much the same scene, a big, big crowd.

I can't tell you whether it's more than the last one or not.

We're in with these outbreaks of violence,

which we saw right here behind us.

There's a restaurant just over there called La Jotonde,

which is famous for the protesters,

because President Macron went there on the night of his first election

and it's become a bit of a target for them.

So there was a lot of argy-bargy, shall we say,

with stones and bottles being thrown at the police

who were protecting the restaurant.

Briefly, the canopy of the restaurant was set on fire,

but it was put out.

But they keep on going.

It's a big display of force from those who oppose the pension reform.

But the fact is, the pension reform has now gone through Parliament.

It's only got one more hurdle, really, constitutionally,

and that's this constitutional council,

which has to rule on whether it's in conformity with the constitution.

And if it passes that, then it will be law.

I think it's pretty unlikely that they will decide

that the whole thing is against the constitution,

but one can't rule it out.

Don't forget that this is not a court.

These are wise men and women, all of them, mainly, ex-Politicians.

So they may give a political slant to their interpretation of the constitution.

And it may be they give some kind of negative spin to the law,

which allows both sides to climb down without a loss of face.

But I have to say, I think that's quite unlikely.

I think Macron now is determined to see this through.

He thinks he's taken all the damages he's going to get.

So what's there to lose from continuing?

Hugh Schofield in a noisy Paris.

Still to come.

Some of the paragraphs were accurate,

and then there were other paragraphs that described things

that were completely incorrect.

A politician in Australia may sue the makers of the AI Chatbot,

ChatGPT, after it implied that he was guilty of bribery.

I will be back, right?

Gehe jetzt auf LVM.de slash junge Leute

und erfahre mir über die LVM-Versicherung.

Wir lieben.

Willkommen wieder.

Der Herr von Grenada's Reparation Committee

spoke of the action he wanted the royal family to take.

The king and the prince of will speaking of being profoundly sorrowful

for the involvement with regards to slavery.

We would want and demand that that profound sorrow

be converted into an apology of acceptance

that what they have done is a crime against humanity.

And they should make some repair with regards to the harm that was caused.

Trevor Bernard, Director of the Wilberforce Institute

for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation in Hull,

said the move by the royal family was welcome, but overdue.

It's hard to think of any family in this country

that is more directly involved in slavery than the royal family.

Charles II set up the Royal African Company.

The Royal African Company transported more enslaved Africans

to the Americas and any other institution in history.

Our Royal Correspondent Sarah Campbell gave me the details of the research project.

The Historic Royal Palaces, that's a charity that looks after royal buildings,

has now become a partner in a research project

being carried out by a researcher at the University of Manchester.

And she is looking at, among other things,

the links between British monarchy and the transatlantic slave trade

during the 17th and 18th century.

And the Royal household is supporting that research

by allowing access to the Royal Collection and the Royal Archives.

The project started in October 2022,

so that's just a month after King Charles exited the throne.

A lot of people will be asking why come it now,

but I think you've kind of alluded to it.

Maybe he wants to get something in train before his coronation.

I think across the globe this issue of slavery and reparations

and should something be done about it has become

much more of a significant issue

than perhaps it was even sort of two or three years ago.

And it's something that the King and Prince William

on a tour last year to the Caribbean

were sort of directly criticised

and came face to face with.

And I think both want to have a more

greater understanding of their family's role in this.

So, to give you some of the statements

that we've heard about King Charles talking about it before,

this was last year when he was Prince Charles,

told Commonwealth leaders

that to unlock the power of our common future

and just also acknowledge the wrongs

that have shaped our past.

He's talked of his profound sorrow

at the suffering of so many.

And those two words are ones that his son Prince William used

when he was in the Caribbean

talking of his profound sorrow

and the appalling atrocity of slavery.

Of course, what you haven't heard there is a sorry.

You've heard sorrow, not sorry.

And I think it is quite an important distinction.

Campaigners are calling for a direct apology.

I don't think on that far yet.

I have to say that the statement that came from Buckingham Palace

was in direct response to an article in the Guardian newspaper.

And they have broken down links

between the monarchy and the slave trade.

So they reporting today that back to 1564,

Elizabeth I, according to the paper,

first gave a large oil ship

to the slave trader John Hawking

in exchange for a share in profits.

And something else that's recently come to light,

a previously unseen document showing that in 1689

there was a transfer of £1,000 worth of shares

in the slave trading company,

the Royal African Company,

infamous in the transatlantic slave trade.

And these shares were given to King William III.

So evidence, you would say,

they're potentially of direct profiteering

by the monarchy from the slave trade.

And does that open the royal family then

or even the British state

to some sort of restorative justice

or even reparations to,

especially to Caribbean nations?

Well, that's the question.

I think Caribbean nations are calling for.

And I think we'll have to wait and see.

Sarah Campbell.

President Biden will visit Northern Ireland next week

as part of the events marking

the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

That was the political deal

which largely ended three decades of conflict

known as the Troubles.

One key component was the decision to bring Sinn Fein,

the party with close ties

to the Irish Republican paramilitaries of the IRA,

into a power sharing regional government.

The BBC's Ireland correspondent Chris Page

was in his last year at school at the time,

and he's been back to the classroom

to hear some personal reflections on the agreement

and its impact.

Do you remember this room here?

Oh, yeah, Ramay.

I see it's Raminoi, but yeah.

This is where it all happened.

Well, I'm back in our history and politics classroom

with our teacher, David Armstrong,

and a few old friends,

Victoria Nuve, School Magazine, report there.

You wrote it, Mr Armstrong's kindly looked it out for us.

Do you want to read a bit from it?

The year of 1997-98

was a year of expectancy and tension

in Northern Ireland politics,

with parties working round the clock

to try and reach an agreement by the May deadline.

The current affairs team consisted of chairpersons

Simon McAvoy,

committee members Gail McConnell

and Secretary Victoria De Nune.

What do you remember most about that time?

There was still this amazing optimism of everyone here

that, yes, this can happen,

and we're not going to give up hope.

I feel the hand of history upon our shoulder.

Today is about the promise of a bright future.

A line can be drawn under the bloody past.

Mr Armstrong, what were your thoughts

sitting at the front of this classroom and others

and looking out at us?

In terms of teaching it, I sort of felt

there's something happening here.

It's not just history, this is now.

At that stage, it was actually

whether we're going to buy in for hope

that change would come

or we're just going to see more of the same.

Gail, what do you think back and remember?

It felt like such an exciting time

because what we were studying in the classroom

wasn't in the textbooks

and we were all about to turn 18.

We were also being schooled by you

that voting is just the bare minimum

of what political involvement and activism looks like.

It really felt like an experience of kind of coming of age.

Simon, you've lived in England for, I think,

nearly a whole 25 years.

What really comes to me is how alive

politics felt at that period.

You know, I'd always been interested in politics,

but really, it had always felt like

kind of a distant thing that other people do.

And suddenly, we were kind of in the middle

of this really momentous political moment.

It felt like we were kind of sorting it out for ourselves.

Gail, you have written a couple of volumes of poetry,

one of which focuses on very personal experiences

in your life that you did speak about.

My own kind of personal history was that my father

was a prison governor in the Mayas prison

and he was shot and killed by the IRA

outside our home in 1984 when I was three and a half.

I really wanted to try to understand the very long history

that had kind of created the context for my father's murder

and for everything that followed.

I remember you when Sinn Fein came,

you were sitting right up the front

and listening to them very intently.

And people still tend to sit at the front

at those meetings, which is why you in a way stood out,

but I also was aware of your story in that sense.

I'll read something from this that kind of speaks to

the moment of my father's murder, I suppose,

but also that tries to reckon with an aftermath.

And it's sort of an aftermath that's endless, really.

My father rejoices.

That's what it means.

My name, I mean, but did he?

What, if anything, was the source of his joy?

Was there joy between us before he left

or after he walked through the hall,

the squeaky door saddle across the tiles,

walking outside into the morning,

into those bullets sailing through the blue air,

into perforation, into a heap, into gravel,

an almost human shape, into death,

into silence or whatever comes after?

What are your thoughts on the Good Friday Agreement,

sort of Ben and Nye?

I would have voted in favour of it.

One of my father's murderers did get out of prison

under the Good Friday Agreement.

One of the things I'm conscious the Good Friday Agreement didn't do

was give us a way collectively to reckon with the past.

Gail McConnell, ending that report by Chris Page in Northern Ireland.

A mayor in Australia says he may sue the company

behind the artificial intelligence writing tool,

ChatGPT, after it falsely claimed that he had served time

in prison for bribery.

The web app incorrectly identified Brian Hood

as the guilty party in a corruption scandal,

which he had in fact exposed from Sydney Filmerser Reports.

Brian Hood was the whistleblower in a corruption scandal,

involving a company owned by the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Several people were charged.

Mr Hood was very much not one of them,

but that fact didn't stop an article generated by ChatGPT,

an automated writing service powered by artificial intelligence.

Instead it cast him as the villain,

who was jailed for his part in a conspiracy

to bribe foreign officials to win currency printing contracts.

He only found out after friends told him about it.

He explained to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

that he then saw the story for himself.

After making the inquiry,

it generated five or six paragraphs of information.

The really disturbing thing was that some of the paragraphs were accurate.

They contained accurate information about names, dates, times, places.

And then there were other paragraphs

that described things that were completely incorrect.

It told me that I'd been charged with very serious criminal offences,

that I'd been convicted of them, and that I'd spent 30 months in jail.

Mr Hood says that if open AI, which owns the ChatBots,

doesn't correct the false claims, he'll sue.

It would be the first defamation lawsuit against the automated service.

However, a new version of ChatGPT

apparently avoids the mistakes of its predecessor.

It correctly explains that Mr Hood was a whistleblower,

who was praised for his actions.

But his lawyers say that defamatory material

that damages the mayor's reputation still exists.

And their efforts to have the mistakes rectified will continue.

It is one of the most recognizable scenes in movie history.

Indiana Jones fleeing a huge boulder bearing down on him

inside an ancient temple at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The man responsible for that set was Norman Reynolds.

In 2016, 35 years after Raiders came out, I interviewed him,

along with the film producer Robert Watts.

They explained showing the set to Steven Spielberg, the film's director.

I said to Steven, I'll just show you how this boulder works,

because I wasn't sure whether he'd like it or not.

So you rolled the ball down, and we all stood by what the ball rolled down,

and there was a small figure at the end of the track, who was Robert Watts.

Steven asked me to run in front of it.

And Steven says, OK, I said to you after that, I said,

you could have stopped it, couldn't you, Norman?

You said no.

Where do you think you're going?

Well, I'm not going that way.

Norman won an Oscar for his work on Raiders.

Before that, he'd also grab one for his role as art director

on the original Star Wars film A New Hope.

Norman went on to design the Star Wars sequels,

as well as a string of other films such as Superman,

Empire of the Sun, Alien 3,

and the first of the Mission Impossible films starring Tom Cruise.

Kathy Kennedy, the Lucasfilm President, said today

that Norman set the standard with the look of Star Wars

in Indiana Jones, inspiring Generations of film designers.

Steven Spielberg told the BBC

there was nothing that Norman couldn't make work,

that he was a joyful, friendly and massive talent.

Steve Nibbs, on the life of the British production designer

and art director Norman Reynolds, who has died at the age of 89.

And that's all from us for now,

but there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later.

And if you want a comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it,

then send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk

and you can find us on Twitter at Global News Pod.

This edition was mixed by Ethan Connelly Forster,

the producer was Aleem McChefrey,

the editor is Karen Martin.

We'll find them and until next time, goodbye.

The Lazarus Heist, Season 2 from the BBC World Service.

Search for The Lazarus Heist,

wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.