Global News Podcast: Von der Leyen: Lampedusa migrant crisis is a European challenge

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In late 2007, the remains of a young woman from the Casca Nation were discovered in the

Yukon Woods.

I always think about, I want to know what really happened.

So I travel north to try to understand what happened and who was involved.

It's a pretty big risk to come forward with the information that I have.

I'm David Ritten and this is Someone Knows Something Season 8, The Angel Carlic Case,

available now.

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

I'm Alex Ritten and in the early hours of Monday, the 18th of September, these are our

main stories, a storm brewing over immigration in the European Union as thousands cross from

North Africa to the Italian island of Lampedusa.

The US National Security Advisor and China's Foreign Minister conclude two days of talks

in Malta and

It was multiple hits. They were going definitely for the rudder.

Did you get the impression they were hunting you?

100%. Definitely, there is one thing I have zero doubt about is that they were hunting.

Our killer whale is developing a taste for humans.

Also in this podcast, not a single woman is left among Japan's 54 junior government ministers

in the latest reshuffle.

And one of the individuals has one of the deepest voices, one of the greatest instruments

in terms of that resonance that I've ever heard.

The Grammy Award-winning producer who made a gospel album with prisoners in a notorious

US jail.

We start on the Italian island of Lampedusa, where thousands of people have arrived in

small boats from North Africa.

In the last week, a situation Italy's right-wing prime minister has described as unsustainable.

Giorgia Malone has called on the European Union to step up to help her country deal with

the search of migrant arrivals.

On Sunday, while on a visit to Lampedusa, the president of the European Commission,

Ursula von der Leyen, promised a 10-point plan of action.

Here's our Europe editor, Katja Adler.

In the EU, there are few topics more divisive than migration. Specifically, the arrival of

asylum seekers and others from Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, aided by people

smugglers.

Over the last week alone, 8,000 migrants have landed on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa,

crossing over from Tunisia, a relatively short boat ride away, outnumbering and overwhelming

local residents.

Italy's prime minister is on the defensive. She made stopping people smugglers' boats

a key pledge to voters.

Standing next to the European Commission president on Lampedusa today, Giorgia Malone

was eager to paint this as a European, not an Italian problem.

These are the borders of Italy for sure, but they are equally the borders of Europe.

At stake, there is the future that Europe wants to set for itself, because the future

of Europe depends on its ability to tackle challenges of our time, and the challenge

of illegal immigration is for sure one of them.

The number of irregular arrivals to Italy has almost doubled this year compared to last,

with 126,000 crossing so far.

Most migrants say they prefer to move on to other countries, like Germany, Sweden and

the UK.

Today, the EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said the EU accepted joint

responsibility.

A regular migration is a European challenge, and it needs a European answer. So we are

in this together.

Minister Malone and I are here today to offer a coordinated response by the Italian and

European authorities.

Miss von der Leyen presented a 10-point plan, including a possible new EU naval mission

in the Mediterranean, faster repatriation of people whose asylum claims have been rejected,

and humanitarian corridors for legal arrivals.

But Italy and other frontline Mediterranean countries like Greece have heard promises

before.

Fellow EU members, such as Poland and Hungary, have then repeatedly rejected the idea of

sharing out the number of refugees and other irregular arrivals across the bloc.

We will decide who arrives in Europe, not the traffickers Miss von der Leyen insisted

today, but as long as global inequality persists along with war and persecution, Europe's migration

conundrum is not one that will easily be solved.

Katja Adler

Desperately needed international aid is slowly reaching the city of Derna in eastern Libya,

which was devastated by flooding just over a week ago. Thousands of people died, and

many more have been left homeless with no electricity or clean water.

Here's the health minister for the eastern Libyan government, Othman Abdul Jalil.

Water supply in the city here, they were dependent on wells on the ground, and now most of these

either have been covered with mud or been damaged or maybe contaminated with sewage.

So we try to educate especially children and elder list the most vulnerable only bottled

water that we know it is clean and sterilized.

With the international aid effort gathering pace, the focus now is on helping survivors

and recovering the dead. More than 10,000 people are still missing. Anna Foster spent

the day at a centre in Derna being used to identify bodies.

It's one of the most vital jobs in Derna, and one of the most distressing. Doctors and

detectives gather each day in this hospital car park to process the dead.

A black body bag is carefully unzipped. Expert hands gently probe, taking measurements or

finding identifying marks. Many victims are now beyond recognition, but their DNA is taken

and logged in case there are still families alive to find them.

Many thousands are officially missing, like Mohammed's sister and her husband. When he

went to find them after the floods, their house had been washed away. He's heard nothing

from them since.

I saw cars coming down. I came out running. I thought that was it, that I'm going to

die. Our neighbours, we could see them waving flashlights. In just a few moments, the light

went out and they disappeared. That was the hardest thing.

The hospital aid is now arriving in Derna in earnest. Flights are carrying vital medical

supplies from around the world, and although Earth and debris have enveloped these streets,

there are still points of light.

This is such a stark contrast to the mud and dirt that covers so much of this city. Piles

of colourful clothes brought here to be donated to people who really need them. This is Libyan's

helping Libyans in one of their worst moments of crisis.

Praise be to God. Everything is good. They've sent lots of aid.

A week on from this disaster, survivors are finding comfort where they can, in a place

that has lost so much.

Ana Foster in Derna. Paramilitary forces in Sudan have again attacked the army headquarters

in the capital Khartoum. Several government buildings were set on fire as well as a landmark

tower. Our Africa editor is Richard Hamilton.

Residents woke up to the sound of explosions and it seems the army has resorted to indiscriminate

bombing. Last week, more than 50 civilians were killed when the army bombed a market

in the south of the city. And then for its part, the paramilitary, the RSF, seemed to

be setting fire to buildings and taking key points in the city as both sides are struggling

to control the city. We're looking at Khartoum being turned into rubble, really, and as you

say, the Great Annihil Petroleum Oil Company Tower. It was a modern skyscraper. It was

only finished in 2010 and the architect said that seeing pictures of it being gutted by

fire was truly painful and it was senseless destruction. And the RSF have set fire to

other buildings like the Justice Ministry, the Ministry of Metrology. So the city is

sort of being turned into a zone of urban warfare and the authorities say the main hospitals

in Khartoum and Darfur are now out of service. It's just a tragedy. 7,500 people have died

and more than 4 million have been internally displaced and that's now the highest such number

in the world.

Sounds like the outlook for this conflict is pretty bleak.

It is. On Wednesday, the UN envoy to Sudan, Falka Pertes, stepped down in frustration

and he warned that Sudan was heading towards a full blown civil war with two parallel governments,

a bit like what we've seen in Libya. The RSF leader, General Hemeti, has close ties with

the warlord in Libya, Khalifa Haftar. And it seems like neither side wants to surrender

because they can't land a knockout blower and they each think they can win. So it's

going to be a sort of duel to the death. And diplomacy hasn't worked because recently

the United States put sanctions on the RSF leader, Hemeti and his brother, but that's

had no impact. And if we look at what happened in neighbouring south Sudan, eventually both

rival leaders came to an agreement to share power, but not before 400,000 people died.

Richard Hamilton. Killer whales are being blamed for sinking three yachts amid an increase

in apparent attacks on sailing boats. In this recording, we can hear the animals repeatedly

hitting a boat.

Scientists first reported this new orca behaviour around the Straits of Gibraltar and the Iberian

Peninsula in 2020, since when collisions have increased, views differ on why snapping the

rudder at speed could be either playing or hunting. Kate Bramkart spoke to Paddy O'Connell

about an incident she had earlier this month on her yacht off the coast of Spain with her

partner, Thomas.

The first encounter was very loud. It came from nowhere. It was in the middle of the

night. Thomas was on the watch. I had been sleeping for an hour or two and the orcas

went straight for the rudder and hit it very strongly, which made my body slam the wall.

It was multiple hits. They were swimming close to the boat, pushing with the body and then

going definitely for the rudder.

And did you get the impression they were hunting you?

100%. Some people are saying they're playing, they're training, but definitely there is

one thing I have zero doubt about is that they were hunting because it was the middle

of the night. The moon was extremely shiny and the sea was like oil. It was flat. We did

not hear or see anything until they hit the boat. They came from below and as soon as

that first hit was done, they had a very intimidating behavior. It felt like we were

prey, I would say.

What would you do differently?

First of all, we wouldn't sail by night because the level of dramatic feeling is bigger by

night because it just takes you to another level of fear, I think. We were only two,

three miles from the coast, but people say that you have to get even closer, which by

night wouldn't have been possible for us, but by day maybe you can make it a little bit

closer.

Do you have humility as a human faced with being in the environment of the orca? There

will be listeners who say the orca lives in the sea and Kate doesn't.

Yeah, we have no means on the boat to be offensive to the orcas. We refuse to have fireworks.

We refuse to have any kind of violent tools. The fact that we are in the sea and that it's

orcas territory, that's a bit more complicated for me to accept because sailing boats are

pretty nature friendly compared to other kind of boats that are much bigger or destroying

the seabed. I don't feel like the sailboat would be the first to be the problem.

Did you think you would sink and be eaten?

100%. One of the orcas was eight meters long, which is enormous. I was on the radio with

people telling me, do you have life jackets? Do you have a dinghy? I knew that orcas can

sink a boat in 30 minutes and that was in my mind.

Could I ask you what you think of the orca? Do you admire it or have you come to in any

way fear it?

It took me a few days to say that, but I think they're beautiful animals and we got lucky

to see them from very close, but also I fear it because I felt I was a prey of the orcas.

I wish we could find a way for boats to be in the same area as orcas. Maybe the authorities

need to take this way more seriously because the problem is a lot of people will become

aggressive to the orcas or some people will stop sailing and none of those options are

good.

Kate Bramkart speaking to Paddy O'Connell. As international travel has become more affordable,

excessive tourism has become a problem for many countries. In Italy, Venice is struggling

to manage the huge number of people wanting to visit its famous canals every day. A reporter,

Giovanna Girardi, has been looking at the authorities' latest measure to try to curb the crowds.

I'm here in Venice, it's not high season and still crossing the bridge of sight is very

difficult. There are plenty of people stopping by taking pictures, big groups of tourists.

To tackle overcrowding from tourism, the city of Venice has approved a measure for day-trip

visitors who will have to pay a five euros fee and book their visiting advance.

Hello Simone, nice to meet you.

Simone Venturini is the city counsellor for tourism.

Next year we will run the measure in a trial phase. We will choose only 30 to 40 days where

it applies. These will be the days where Venice usually sees the highest numbers of tourists.

Over tourism is widely recognized as an urgent issue for Venice. The historic island city

is just 7.6 square kilometers in size, but according to the Italian National Statistics

Institute, it hosted almost 13 million tourists in 2019 and the number of visitors are expected

to overtake pre-pandemic levels in the coming years.

The idea is to discourage day-trip tourists from visiting the city at particularly busy

times of year and to invite them to choose another day for a trip.

But will the introduction of a daily charge deter tourists?

I think it's not too much, five euros, so I think lots of people will do this.

I think I suppose I get, I understand it, like it is so busy.

Yeah and all the streets very crowded and I imagine if you work and trying to get to work

and stuff is like very hard, so it's very understandable.

I suppose as a tourist I fiver quite a lot for just to walk around for a day.

The measure is completely useless, onerous and absurd and I think that's another step towards

Venice becoming a known city. I don't think that you should have to pay a ticket to visit the city.

Throughout history Venice has been a multicultural and multilingual city, but what was once due

to commerce and fine craftsmanship has today become a result of tourism.

The measure comes just weeks after serious warnings by UNESCO.

The UN Agency for Culture said that Venice should be added to a list of world heritage sites

in danger as the impact of climate change and mass tourism threaten to cause irreversible damage to it.

Giovanna Giordi reporting from Venice.

Still to come in the Global News Podcast.

The historian Simon Sharma's new book on pandemics and how we deal with them.

We have this two extraordinary aspects to our human nature in our modern times.

Miraculous ingenuity that came up with the vaccine in unbelievably short time

and cartload of paranoia and conspiracies.

The US National Security Advisor and China's Foreign Minister have concluded

two days of talks in Malta that Beijing described as frank, substantive and constructive.

Jake Sullivan and Wang Yi reportedly discussed a potential summit between Mr Biden and Xi Jinping.

Our North America correspondent David Willis told me more about the talks.

Well the US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reportedly held several meetings

over the course of the weekend, Alex with China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi

in an attempt to maintain, as they say, channels of communication between the two superpowers.

A readout from the White House says that the two men discussed issues such as Russia's war in Ukraine.

China is now a close ally of Russia, of course, but it has yet to voice public support

for Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the future of Taiwan, which China claims as its own

even though it continues to receive strong support from Taiwan from the United States.

But above all else, this was from the United States point of view at least,

all about reassuring the Chinese that the United States does not seek conflict or confrontation

and that America's support for Taiwan does not extend to backing the island's independence

from China.

Meanwhile, China's Foreign Minister will be going to Moscow.

Yes, he's due to travel on Monday for talks with his counterpart Sergey Lavrov.

His second trip actually to Russia this year, he met with Vladimir Putin back in February

and those talks, according to Russia's Foreign Ministry, will focus on what it called

communication at the highest levels and so called stronger cooperation across mechanisms

such as the United Nations and the G20.

It's the latest in a series of exchanges between the two nations.

Mr. Wang met with the Secretary of Russia's Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, in July

and it's thought those interactions could pave the way for Vladimir Putin to visit Beijing

in October at a similarly high level visit followed Mr. Wang's last trip there to Moscow

with Xi Jinping visiting Moscow in March.

David Willis.

In Japan, the Prime Minister Fumio Koshida faced a wave of criticism for filling all the

government's junior ministerial posts with men following a reshuffle.

There's a photograph of them on a Japanese news website.

It's the first time not a single woman has been appointed to one of these posts since

they were introduced in 2001.

Asia Pacific editor Will Leonardo told me more about this controversial reshuffle.

This comes off the back of the Prime Minister Fumio Koshida announcing that he'd appointed

five women to cabinet positions.

That's a joint record of women including a first female Foreign Minister in two decades,

a woman called Yoko Kamikawa and all of this was hailed by the Japanese Prime Minister at the time

saying this is my government trying to advance women in politics.

But a closer look at the reshuffle showed that in the process he'd also eliminated all women

from these junior posts.

That's 54 posts, the vice ministerial posts and all parliamentary secretary posts before

there were 11, so now there's not one among 54.

It's quite a stunning photograph.

Indeed, yes.

And this photo of Mr. Kishida surrounded by these men all looking relatively similar in

the morning suits on the stairs.

It's kind of a symbolic of Japanese politics really which has one of the lowest representations

of women in the world.

And it also points to structural issues within the Governmenting Liberal Democratic Party

which, despite its name, is actually fairly conservative.

There's about 12% women MPs the party has, you know, their concerns about the next generation.

Some reports said that they couldn't find the women to fill some of these posts.

They've approached them but they said some of the women wanted to focus on the upcoming

elections and not, for example, be put in the foreign ministry where they'd be needed to

go on foreign trips and that sort of thing.

So they literally couldn't find the people to fill the jobs.

They might say that but there'll be other people listening to go, the only possible

reason could be misogyny, can't it?

That might be the case.

But if you look at these posts, they're a stepping stone for a lot of younger generational

Japanese politicians and MPs to get a taste of what it's like being in Government.

And it seems that they searched around or they couldn't find, according to some reports,

the younger generational people willing to do some of these posts.

I mean, it was very much clear that they approached the women to do this but some said

they weren't willing to take up the post at this time.

And we left with a situation where there's 54 people in junior ministerial posts of whom

none are women.

Will Leonardo.

For decades, Jan Wenner has been the doyen of music journalism in America.

He was one of the founders of Rolling Stone magazine and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

But an interview about his latest book featuring white male singers has caused controversy

after he defended his decision not to include women or black artists,

although he later apologised for his remarks.

Daniel Mann has this report.

He's got Mick Jagger.

He's also got John Lennon, Jerry Garcia from The Grateful Dead, The Who's Pete Townsend

and Bob Dylan.

So five of the biggest names from the 60s.

From the 70s when he started releasing albums, Bruce Springsteen and the 80s.

Bono.

And that's where the music stops.

With seven men, all white and all of them featured in Jan Wenner's The Masters.

The book is a series of interviews with the singers by Mr. Wenner.

He describes them as the philosophers of rock, the ones that could really articulate it.

But rock has its roots firmly in black music, the blues, rhythm and blues.

And in Rolling Stone's 500 greatest albums of all time, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On

is at number one.

And Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life is at number four.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Wenner said,

of black artists, you know, Stevie Wonder, Genius, question mark.

Mr. Wenner added,

Masters, maybe Marvin Gaye or Curtis Mayfield.

I mean, they just didn't articulate at that level.

And number three in the top 500 is Blue by Joni Mitchell.

For many critics, as influential a singer-songwriter as Bob Dylan.

So why no women?

Just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.

You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock and roll, claimed Mr. Wenner.

He said he could have included one black and one female artist to avoid any criticism.

But the backlash has been fierce.

US media has reported that Mr. Wenner's remarks have been labelled racist and sexist.

And the comments have cost him his place at the pinnacle of America's rock establishment.

The rock and roll hall of fame has removed him from its board of directors.

Daniel Mann.

One of Britain's leading historians has been researching how we humans

have responded to plagues and pandemics throughout history.

In his new book, Foreign Bodies,

Simon Sharma surveys the history of inoculation or vaccination from China to Europe.

The author highlights how a Greek public servant inoculated more than 4,000 patients

without harming a single one of them.

But as his book shows, inoculation has also been met with distrust and suspicion.

Simon Sharma spoke to Audrey Brown about the starting point of mass inoculation.

I'm thinking now instantly of Smallpox, which I start the book with.

It comes as an extraordinary and deadly surprise.

People in the end of the 1600s were gradually getting rid of the black death of the iconic plague,

which would have been the terror.

It struck quite suddenly in the late 1600s by Smallpox, which killed one in six people.

We were very vulnerable when COVID struck as a respiratory disease,

a disease which was transmitted in droplets.

And, you know, it was a terrible moment when everything seemed to disintegrate extremely quickly.

We are used to getting on a plane, lightning communications and transport.

We're talking a book a bit about how that was realized in the 1800s with cholera.

The means of transport are places where viruses and bacteria and pathogens sort of hit or lift.

So the thing that makes us feel confidently modern is also the thing that can kill us.

The play on words, foreign bodies in the title of the book, which refers to how vaccines are made,

but also that the thing that we do as human beings is that we blame the other.

We blame those that are not like most immediately and most like us.

That's exactly right.

Donald Trump famously still calls it the China virus.

And this also goes back, you know, some way in the 19th century cholera was called Asian cholera.

So there is this odd thing to think that someone out there is doing this deliberately.

If it was a lab leak, then at the very least it was carelessness.

At worst, it might have been intentional.

So we have these two extraordinary aspects to our human nature in our modern times.

On the one hand, miraculous ingenuity that came out with the vaccine in unbelievably short time.

And our less evolved character, which is just a cartload of paranoia and fears and conspiracies.

What did COVID repeat about the past?

Because this was not our first rodeo.

You know, it's Mark Twain who is alleged to have said history never repeats itself, but sometimes it rhymes.

I think at the beginning stage, it was rather different.

For example, again, being a history professor and going back to the 1700s.

That was the first time without any knowledge of the immune system.

People were prepared to accept taking a little bit of the toxin, the pathogen that would kill you

and giving yourself a dose of smallpox.

Mild enough to, as we now know, immunize you against lethal severity.

And understandably, a lot of people bridled or refused to believe.

And those who promoted it, women and mothers were doing it.

Famously, the wonderful Lady Mary Wiley Montague and the Princess of Wales at the time.

They were called unnatural mothers.

Now, in our time with COVID, we know about the immune system.

We know how that works.

What was very dispiriting, particularly if you live in the United States, as I do,

is to see how quickly suspicion of medicine and science was weaponized politically.

How the kind of mad theories kicked in that Bill Gates and George Soros were trying to implant 5G chips in the vaccines.

Resisting what we were told about vaccines became literally an article of faith.

We had the right out of our own uninformed common sense to decide what was best for our own body.

Simon Sharma talking about his book, Foreign Bodies, which has just been published in the United States.

Parchman Prison is a maximum security facility in the US state of Mississippi,

housing several thousand inmates in tough conditions.

Some of the prisoners seek solace and redemption by attending church services and singing gospel songs.

The Grammy award-winning producer Ian Brennan spoke to the BBC's Martin Venard

about the access he gained to one of the services to record an album called Parchman Prison Prayer.

We recorded in the chapel on Sunday morning at one of the many services.

There are multiple services. There are over 2,500 residents not knowing who I would meet,

not knowing what the voices would be.

Virtually every one of them was incredibly strong.

I mean, these are world-class singers and this recording happened on the day of this year's Grammys

and I told them at the end that there will be no better performance tonight

than there were today by many of the men and I meant that.

They had reached that transcendent place where there was such vulnerability and directness and honesty in their voices

that that is a rare place for anybody to be able to achieve.

One of the individuals has one of the deepest voices, one of the greatest instruments

in terms of that resonance that I've ever heard.

Did you get to speak to any of the prisoners and know anything about them?

I did speak with the prisoners but our time was very limited.

Parchman is a maximum security prison.

The majority of people there are there for very serious crimes like homicide and assault.

It houses the death row. Many of them have been there for decades.

All of them that were involved in this except for three are from rural Mississippi.

The through line there is gospel music and that's what is fascinating.

It's so direct that it could be somebody singing decades ago in the 20th century

but it sounds very up-to-date and it could even be somebody singing in the future

and I think it's timeless in that way.

The climactic song is a traditional lay my burden down

and at the beginning of the recording session

people were sitting largely apart from one another

little clusters in different groups and some people all by themselves

and it ended with all 14 men up on their feet involved in making this one song.

I was literally surrounded by people.

Some playing instruments, some standing and clapping.

There was freedom in that moment for all of us and an experience that I will never forget

and to see the same individuals who had been quite shut down to a large degree

and maybe skeptical to see them on their feet laughing, clapping, hugging each other, high-fiving

was an exhibition of the beauty of music.

This is Global Podcast at bbc.co.uk.

You can also find us on X, formerly known as Twitter, at Global NewsPod.

This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll and the producer was Emma Joseph.

The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Alex Ritzen. Until next time, goodbye.

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