Global News Podcast: Pakistani court suspends Imran Khan's jail sentence

Hello, this is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service with reports and analysis

from across the world, the latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by

advertising. Ever wondered what the world's wealthiest people did to get so ridiculously rich?

Our podcast, Good Bad Billionaire, takes one billionaire at a time and explains exactly how

they made their money. And then we decide if they are actually good, bad or just plain wealthy.

So if you want to know if Rihanna is as much of a bad gal as she claims, or what Jeff Bezos really

did to become the first person in history to pocket a hundred billion dollars, listen to Good Bad

Billionaire with me, Simon Jack and me, Zing Zing, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Nigel Adderley and at 13 hours GMT on Tuesday the 29th of August these are our main stories.

The former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has a jail sentence suspended but he may not be freed.

The head of the Sudanese military is in Egypt on his first trip abroad since fighting erupted

in Khartoum in April. Japan urged China to ensure the safety of Japanese residents

after a wave of harassment linked to the release of wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant.

Also in this podcast, a new study shows that living in an area with poor air quality

can take an average of more than two years off life expectancy. And we hear from the medical team

in Australia that removed a live worm from a woman's brain. One of our neurosurgeons

took a biopsy of it wondering if the cancer is an abscess. She and everyone that operating

theatre were shocked when she pulled out a wriggling eight-centimeter worm.

A Pakistani court has suspended Imran Khan's three-year sentence for corruption.

The former Prime Minister was found guilty earlier this month of concealing information

about state gifts he'd received and selling them for as much as $600,000. Although the Islamabad

High Court granted him bail until the result of his appeal is heard, it's unlikely that Mr Khan

will be released from jail immediately. His lawyers are trying to stop other arrests against him in

separate cases. Speaking outside the court, Mr Khan's lawyer Gauha Khan said he hoped the

court would roll in his favor as soon as possible.

We are very hopeful he would be released so far. We have not been informed that he is under arrest

in any other case. If they are going to arrest him in other cases or strategies already online,

we have filed cases in the High Court, in Supreme Court, and we are seeking the court to restrain

the prosecution while I'm arresting him in any other case. And soon, Insha Allah, Imran Khan

would be out of jail in this case. I asked our correspondent in Islamabad, Caroline Davis,

what difference this ruling will make. In the reality of whether he's coming out of jail or not,

it might not mean any difference at all. His lawyers appeared in front of court today. They

were told that his jail sentence has now been suspended. That is until the appeal is heard and

then decided about this particular case, which as you mentioned is the Tosha Khan case. So this was

the case that he was found guilty of at the beginning of this month, that he was found guilty of not

having declared the money that he gained from selling state gifts. He is no longer imprisoned

because of that particular reason and that particular case. However, there are multiple

other cases against Imran Khan and many of those also have warrants out for his arrest too. So when

we initially spoke to his lawyers after this result, they said that they were planning to go and try

and get bail on all of these other cases to stop him from being arrested again immediately and

staying within jail. Then within the matter of sort of 20 minutes or so, it became clear that

there was already an arrest warrant that had been in place while he's been in prison on another case

altogether, which technically runs out tomorrow when we are expected to hear another case with

Imran Khan. But I think it became increasingly clear that Imran Khan is probably very unlikely

to be coming out of jail. Even his own lawyers started saying that the chances of getting out was

about 30% chance. And I think with this sort of discovery and realization that this other case

already meant that he was going to have to stay in jail, they really thought actually it's going to

be quite difficult to try to get this form of bail to get him released. So the reality is, despite

this sentence being temporarily suspended until his appeal is heard, it looks very unlikely that

Imran Khan is coming out of jail anytime soon. And his long term aim of course is to try and

stand in elections again. Does today make any difference for that aim? No, not at all. At the

moment the sentence still stands that appeal has not been heard. Imran Khan is still disqualified.

And at the moment we still don't have a date set for the general elections in Pakistan, even though

we currently have a caretaker government which takes over in the months preceding an election,

but still no election date. And Imran Khan is still very much disqualified.

Two years of life expectancy and that increases significantly if you live in China, Nigeria

and South Asia. Our South Asian correspondent Samira Hussain told us more about the findings of

the report. Basically, if you are breathing poor air, it can wipe out anywhere from one to six years

off your life expectancy. And in some areas, that's actually more than the adverse effects of

smoking, of HIV, AIDS and of even malnutrition. It's really quite significant and it's pretty

startling to see that in, you know, just documented in this report. And how does air pollution

affect daily life for say an average person in India? In India, you have different seasons. You

have the monsoon season and then you also have pollution season. And having seen, you know,

the air pollution happen in other parts of the world, you look here in India and there are

days and weeks that schools can be closed, that people just don't go into their offices, that

even transportation becomes difficult because visibility is poor and also just the smog has

such an impact on how much you're coughing and your eyes. And that's just sort of an immediate

impact. That's not even taking into account the life expectancy impact or the long-term health

implications. And China has made big inroads into reducing air pollution, but what's happening

elsewhere? Right. So China has been able, in 2013, China really made a concerted effort to reduce its

air pollution. And so they moved away from coal burning to natural gas and really got rid of a

lot of these old vehicles on their roads. You know, some say that, look, it's a bit easier for China

to implement some of these rules because of their more authoritative regime. If you look at a country

like India, it is a large, wielding democracy. And it can sometimes be difficult to enact these

kinds of new sort of legislations and rules and get a lot of buy-in when you have so many

other pressing issues that are at play in the country. But if you look that since 2013, which is

incidentally when China had enacted its Clean Air Act, we saw that about 59% of the global

increase in pollution came from India alone. Samira Hussain in Delhi. Meanwhile, London has

expanded the area in which drivers of the most polluting cars must pay a fee to drive. The zone

known as Yulez now covers the entire city. And while the planet is intended to improve air quality,

it has been controversial. Many residents with older cars say they can't afford to pay the $15

charge. And they've criticised the scheme to reimburse them for scrapping their vehicles

as insufficient. The Mayor of London, Sadik Khan, defended today's expansion.

It was a difficult decision for me to take, but it's a vital one and the right one. And let me

explain why. The evidence in relation to the consequences of air pollution are quite clear.

In London, we see around 4,000 premature deaths a year directly linked with air pollution.

We've children who've got stunted lungs forever, adults with a whole host of health issues from

cancer to dementia, heart disease to asthma. But also we know there's a policy that's

effective at reducing air pollution. We know this because we started the Yulez in Central London

and saw a reduction of toxicity made the main pollutants by almost 50%. A third fewer children

admitted to hospital with air pollution related illnesses. We expanded it to in London and saw

a reduction of 21% of the main pollutants nitrogen dioxide. Children going to 1,400 schools

breathing clean air. But it's in outer London where there's the biggest problems. We've not

seen significant improvements. Sadik Khan. Japan has urged China to ensure the safety of Japanese

residents and diplomatic missions after a wave of harassment linked to the release of wastewater

from the Fukushima nuclear plant. The Japanese foreign minister said Beijing

should calm its citizens. The Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Japan must

address the reason for the people's anger. Ignoring the strong doubts and opposition of the

international community, the Japanese government unilaterally and forcibly started the discharge

of contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear accident, which prompted strong indignation

from people of all countries. This is the root cause of the current situation. If Japan's push

to release contaminated water into the sea was based on science, why is the opposition in Japan

still so difficult to quell? I asked our correspondent in the region,

Jean McKenzie, about the Japanese concerns. Well look, ever since Japan said it was going to release

this water, China has been the loudest critic. So almost as soon as it started releasing this

water last Thursday, China announced that it was going to ban all seafood from Japan. But the

interesting thing is that this government opposition in the last few days seemed to now kind of trickle

down to the public. So Japan says that since the water was released, its businesses and schools in

Fukushima have started receiving hundreds of abusive phone calls coming from Chinese callers.

But then it said today that actually its embassy in Beijing had been attacked. So people had turned

up at the embassy and started throwing pieces of bricks at it. So Japan has said that it's now so

worried about its citizens in China as well as its businesses over in Fukushima. But it is worried

that citizens in China might be the target of abuse or kind of revenge attack, that it's now

telling people in China to keep a low profile. And what does it want from the Chinese authorities?

So Japan has called this reaction worrying and regrettable. So it's urging China to tell its

people to act calmly, begging them really to not inflame this situation. But we had a press

briefing from the Chinese Foreign Minister yesterday, and the Chinese were just kind of

absolute that they always ensure the safety of foreigners, they say. But again, it issued this

warning to Japan that it wanted it to stop the release of this water. So China is really going

for Japan over this issue. And at the moment, we've heard what they've said on what they want,

and this could be an impasse because the Japanese clearly believe they have to do this.

Yeah, I don't think there's any indication that the Japanese are going to stop the release of

this water. This is something they've been planning for many years, and really something

they felt they were left with no choice. I mean, this plant at Fukushima has been storing this

water now for, you know, a decade, more than a decade, and they'd filled a thousand of these

massive tanks, they had to find a way to release it. And that this plan has been signed off by the

UN Nuclear Watchdog as safe. And all the testing that's been done so far in the days following

the first release has shown that the radioactive levels in this water are within the safe range.

But, you know, the issue for Japan is how it's going to be able to support its fishermen now

if this Chinese boycott continues. Of course, you know, fishermen in Japan rely a lot on selling

seafood. There's even some indication today from the Japanese that they might actually complain to

the World Trade Organization now about this boycott from China.

Gene McKenzie. In recent months, there have been so many twists and turns in the story of

Yevgeniy Progoshin and his Wagner mercenary group that when Mr. Progoshin's private jet crashed

last week, reportedly killing all on board, there were some who suspected that wasn't the end of

the story, that the incident had somehow been staged to allow the Wagner boss to disappear

quietly into the sunset. But the Russian authorities insist that Mr. Progoshin's body

and the bodies of the other nine passengers and crew have been identified. And on Monday,

the White House said it was increasingly confident the Yevgeniy Progoshin died in that plane crash.

So, what did the Russian public make of all of this? A Russian editor, Steve Rosenberg, is in Moscow.

You know, it never fails to astonish me. There could be such drama

unfolding in Russia. And yet, come onto the streets of Moscow and you really couldn't tell that.

I'm in a park close to the Kremlin where people are strolling in the late summer sunshine and there

are kids whizzing by on scooters and lots of Russians taking selfies with St Basil's Cathedral

in the background. It all looks very calm and very relaxed. And yet, this is a country that is

currently fighting a war, having attacked and invaded its neighbour, Ukraine. And this is also

a country where things happen in the most suspicious of circumstances. And just a few days ago,

a private jet crashed 60 miles from here, killing 10 people, including the Russian mercenary chief

Yevgeniy Progoshin, the man behind the Wagner Mutiny. That made headlines around the world.

But I wonder what people in Moscow are making of it.

I'm not happy or sad about it, says Nina, but I do think that Yevgeniy Progoshin only has himself

to blame. Then I speak to Ari. Does he believe that the Kremlin was behind the crash?

If the Russian government did it, so it's very bad for them, because he was very

helpful for the Russian government. Was he popular in Russia? He and his Wagner PMC were

like heroes in Russia. He is very, very popular. He said very popular things. He criticised the

Russian government and he said what people wanted to hear from him.

Well, I'm outside a church now, right opposite Red Square. And here on the pavement, there is a

makeshift shrine dedicated to the memory of Yevgeniy Progoshin and to his Wagner colleagues.

There is a sea of red carnations and red roses. People are stopping to light candles here and

crossing themselves in Russian Orthodox style. Some people are putting sweets and even cigarettes

by the flowers. I can see there are portraits here of Mr. Progoshin and of his right-hand man,

Dmitry Utkin. Let me read you some of the posters that have been put up. One declares,

a warrior lives forever. Another to the fallen fighters of Wagner. And there is one here that

says simply, thank you, Uncle Yevgeniy. It's clear that to many of the people coming here,

stopping here, Yevgeniy Progoshin, is a hero. I served in the regular army and I've served with

Wagner and a tolly tells me, Progoshin would spend whatever it took to kit out his fighters.

Well, that's what the Russian public is saying. But what about the Russian media? Mr. Progoshin's

death has been a huge story internationally. But on Russian TV's flagship weekend news show,

the plane crash was very low down the running order. Some of the coverage here aims to make the

West look bad. I've got some audio here on my phone. It's from a Russian TV talk show. Take a listen.

So the presenter is mocking a whole bunch of foreign newspapers for running the same front

page headline. It's Putin's revenge. They're using the same playbook, she says.

Now, many here do suspect that the Russian authorities were behind this crash.

So the Kremlin is using the media to try to move attention away from itself to ensure that the

death of a mercenary chief does not weaken the position of the president.

Steve Rosenberg in Moscow. Still to come.

It makes me really angry. Of course it does. They call themselves environmentalists,

but uprooting trees is against nature. We have a special report on the conflict in the

French countryside between farmers and environmental activists.

Ever wondered what the world's wealthiest people did to get so ridiculously rich?

Our podcast, Good Bad Billionaire, takes one billionaire at a time and explains exactly how

they made their money. And then we decide if they are actually good, bad or just plain wealthy.

So if you want to know if Rihanna is as much of a bad gal as she claims, or what Jeff Bezos really

did to become the first person in history to pocket a hundred billion dollars. Listen to

Good Bad Billionaire with me, Simon Jack. And me, Zingsing, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

The head of the Sudanese Armed Forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan,

is in Egypt to be President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. It's the first time Sudan's military ruler has

left the country since internal conflict broke out in April between the army and the paramilitary

rapid support forces. More details from Will Ross. Up until just a few days ago, the Sudanese

military leader was holed up inside the army headquarters in Khartoum. The fact that General

Al-Burhan has now been able to leave the country for talks with his ally in Egypt is for some a

sign that the army is under less pressure. The rival rapid support forces may have been weakened

in the capital, but in Darfur, the RSF is still strong and has been behind ethnically motivated

attacks. On Monday, General Al-Burhan dismissed the idea of peace talks and spoke about defeating

the rebellion. Many Sudanese seeing their country being steadily destroyed will be hoping that behind

the scenes regional leaders are pushing for another attempt at negotiating an end to the war.

Will Ross. President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have strongly condemned the influence

of white supremacy in the US. That follows confirmation from authorities in Florida

that the fatal shooting over the weekend of three black people in the city of Jacksonville

was racially motivated. The pair made the comments while speaking at the gathering of

civil rights leaders to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington led

by the trailblazing African American minister Martin Luther King, Jr. So how pervasive is white

supremacy in American society? Rob Young asked the Reverend Dr. Jackie Lewis, a senior minister at

Middle Collegiate Church in New York for her views. White supremacist ideologies have become

an epidemic in the United States. It is not the first time we've been here. I'm an African American

person. So I understand that our economy, our society was built on enslaving Africans and

oppressing other racial ethnic minorities. And then we've had decades of progressive

accomplishments that have brought us to a place where in America, we sort of feel like our Constitution

speaks truth. We can all have liberty and justice. We can all be free. But there has been,

since 2016 or so, a kind of backlash where there's so much anger, resentment, a feeling of being

displaced by many white Americans that this dream that was their dream has been taken away from them

because of the accomplishments, the opportunities of others. And what we see in this shooting where

someone is hunting black people is the accumulation of anti-black rhetoric. So you're saying that

we're not just seeing individual racist attacks, but this is part of a broader structural

racist system within the United States? I would say that, sir. And I'm a pastor and I'm a psychologist

and I study movements. And I would say this is a movement. I would say this is a curated,

cultivated movement against blackness that frankly starts with Thomas Jefferson

and his notes on the state of Virginia, where he has a suspicion that black people are inferior

to whites. And it is built into laws. It's built into an economy, like the economy of America

is built on the backs of African people. I would say the anomaly are the seasons of black flourishing,

right? The seasons of black power, the seasons of black equality, the election of President Obama.

I think white people in America, some of them lost their minds when we elected a black man

as president. And now Trumpism, DeSantisism has given license to this kind of violence

that would stop black flourishing. The White House has said that the U.S. needs to tackle

white supremacy. How do you practically tackle this issue? I'm a pastor of the most incredible,

multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-gendered, queer-affirming community called Middle Church.

And how I tackle this is every day creating opportunities for people to find what I would

call a boon to. I am who I am because you are who you are. To disrupt the racism

and white supremacist ideology in America is to create laboratories of community.

That's a mindset change, Anne. But I wonder practically, politically, what do you want to

hear or perhaps not hear from some of the current crop of political leaders in America?

Thank you for that beautiful question. I want the mindset change. Many of the people who

are speaking these white supremacist ideologies say they're Christians. The mindset change

starts with our core beliefs. Let's enact love as a public ethic.

The Reverend Dr. Jackie Lewis speaking to Rob Young. The French countryside has become the

setting for increasingly violent attacks by environmental activists against farms and

agriculture. In the South, activists recently destroyed several thousand young apple trees

after their owner, who had gone organic, switched back to conventional farming.

This report from John Lawrence, not far from the town of Levoire.

Farm manager Michel Vieira snaps off an apple tree shoot.

That's what they did, he says, 18,000 times. Outside this three hectare plot, apples are

ripening in the summer heat. But here, where six farm workers spent a good part of spring

grafting young trees onto rootstock, their work was destroyed in one night by a group of what

the French government now calls eco-terrorists. It makes me really angry, of course it does.

They call themselves environmentalists, but uprooting trees is against nature.

2023 has seen a sharp increase in what French environmentalists themselves call

operation coup de poing, punch operations.

The biggest was at a place called Saint-Solene in the west of France,

where thousands of activists trying to stop farmers building a reservoir

fought a pitch battle with thousands of gendarmes. 250 people were injured,

50 seriously, five critically. The government banned a group called Earth Uprising after

Saint-Solene, though that ban has now been suspended by the Constitutional Council.

Among other recent incidents, militants entered greenhouses and destroyed lily of the valley,

accused of using too much water and sand, and lettuces said to be experimental and chemical

fertilizer dependent. Back in Lavor, Mayor Bernard Carrillon says a mysterious group calling itself

the thistle that has claimed responsibility for the apple farm attack is typical of a new very

left-wing eco-extremism. In its communique, this group aligns itself with the radical

environmentalism that is on the rise in France. It treats its adversaries as enemies because

they're in favour of economic growth and believe that it's thanks to research and industry that

we are going to meet the challenge of climate change. A donkey snorts in a field belonging to

a smallholder, Jean-Luc Hervé, a member of the Peasants Confederation, an environmentally

radical farmers union founded by the sheep breeder Josée Beauvais, who made a name for himself by

dismantling, as he put it, a McDonald's and destroying fields of genetically modified maize.

Monsieur Hervé says he understands the attack on the Lavor farm.

This industrial structure has been committing environmental irregularities for years,

pesticide spraying in windy weather, or when they lit fires to protect their trees from the frost,

and sent 20 people to hospital with smoke intoxication. So this sort of reaction,

though it might be regrettable, is to be expected.

A recent poll shows 85% of French people oppose the sort of direct action increasingly

adopted by environmentalists in France, but the eco-radical minority is an active one.

Following the ill-fated banning of the Earth Uprising Collective, 180 groups were formed around

the country in support of the organisation. This war in the French countryside has perhaps only just

begun. John Lawrence, reporting. Now, those of you with a squeamish disposition may want to cover

your ears. Surgeons in Australia have pulled an eight-centimetre-long parasitic roundworm,

alive and wriggling from the brain of a patient. Sanjay Sanyanayake, Associate Professor of Medicine

at the Australian National University, based at Canberra Hospital, told Michelle Hussain

first about the patient. It started off many months before the brain surgery, when she

presented with these sort of non-specific symptoms, diarrhea, tummy pain, a cough, and she had

abnormalities on a CAT scan in her liver and her lungs. And at that time, there were lots of

diagnostic possibilities. Then Clever Person decided to do an MRI of the brain and found an

abnormality in the front part of her brain. So she came back to our hospital and one of our

neurosurgeons took a biopsy of it, wondering if it's cancer, is it an abscess, is it something else.

And she and everyone that operating theatre were shocked when, with some forceps, she pulled out a

wriggling eight-centimetre worm. It was very much alive. Then we sent it to a parasitologist

up the road in Canberra who specialized in animal parasites and it was alive when he got it too,

but then he killed it. Had you ever seen anything like that or heard of cases like that? Had this

essentially moved all the way through her body and grown in her body? Look, this is an unusual case

because it's the first time that this particular parasite has been found to infect a human. So

it's another new infection in the world. In terms of do we ever see worms appear in brains that

has happened before, but certainly the way in which this happened and discovered was a very

dramatic scenario indeed. How would she have become infected with it? So to understand that,

we need to understand the life cycle of the parasite. Now normally, it lives in carpet

pythons, so snakes. And it's excreted in the poo or the feces of the snake, which has got the

parasite eggs in it. What we hypothesize here is that this lady, our patient, collected local

grasses, native grasses, which she used for cooking. And we think those grasses would have been

contaminated by python feces and the parasite eggs. So through those contaminated grasses,

she would have become infected herself. How did she react when she came around and was told

what you'd found? We're all horrified and we're many degrees separated from her. So it was that

poor lady's brain that was involved. So obviously she was horrified. But at the same time, we finally

had a diagnosis for her. We finally had an opportunity to give directed treatment for her. So I think

there was relief as well as horror. What an astonishing story.

And that's all for 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.bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X, formerly known as Twitter,

at Global News Pod. This edition was produced by Alice Adderley and mixed by Daphne Evans.

The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Nigel Adderley. Until next time, goodbye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.