Roof collapse at Dominican Republic nightclub kills scores of people

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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Janet Jalil, and in the early hours of Wednesday, the 9th of April, these are our main stories.
Rescuers are searching for survivors after a roof collapse at a music venue in the Dominican Republic kills scores of people. The Trump administration escalates its trade war with China, with tariffs of more than 100% coming into effect today.
The UN Secretary

General accuses Israel of violating the Geneva Conventions in Gaza by blocking aid supplies.

Also in this podcast, we talk to the renowned British artist David Hockney about his biggest

ever exhibition. I mean, I've always said I want my work to be seen, but I don't have to be

Thank you. about his biggest ever exhibition.
I mean, I've always said I want my work to be seen, but I don't have to be seen. We start this podcast in the Dominican Republic, where throughout the day, the number of people killed by the sudden collapse of a nightclub roof has been steadily rising.
As we record this podcast, at least 66 people are confirmed to have died, and more than 150 have been injured. It's thought that many more may be buried alive by the huge mounds of rubble.
Rescue workers are continuing to search for survivors at the music venue in the capital, Santo Domingo. The president, Luis Abinader, said they weren't giving up hope.
The main objective is still to save lives, which is what we're doing. We've been following this tragedy minute by minute so that all the resources and emergency rescue workers can be available.

But we still have a way to go.

We have trust in God that we will still rescue more people alive from these ruins.

I heard more from our Americas editor, Leonardo Rosh, about what could have caused this disaster.

It's very strange that the whole roof collapsed in one go. That's why people are saying that there is something wrong because you might have bits off the roof for collapsing, people running the other direction.
The building was a 1970s building that began as a disco, as a nightclub, and then became a music event, you know, a venue later where they had concerts. So there are many people online, people I saw on local TV, neighbours saying what happened is that there was a fire there a few years ago.
I don't know if there was structural damage. There were reports of water leaks.
And also because it was closed during the COVID pandemic, that when it reopened, it reopened with new infrastructure on the roof, air conditioning generators, and that might have put a strain on the roof. It's been investigated.
And what witnesses said, survivors, is that they thought it was an earthquake. It felt like an earthquake trembling and the whole thing came down on them.
There's dozens of people who are outside. They're praying.
They're sharing pictures, asking for people to inform, is my husband, is my daughter, is my brother here, or in some hospital. So the rescue efforts are going on.
And we have to say that the Dominican Republic has a history of hurricanes and earthquakes. And they have a very developed team, very well trained and very well equipped, and they're doing all they can to find survivors.
Leonardo Roshan. As we record this podcast, the US President Donald Trump is poised to further escalate his trade war with China in a move that will reverberate around a world still stunned by the past few days of steep stock market falls.
The White House says the US is imposing another 50% tariff on Chinese imports from today to punish Beijing for imposing its own reciprocal tariffs on US goods. This means that Chinese products entering the US will face duties of more than 100%.
The White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt, said this could all change if China decided to reach out to Mr. Trump.
He believes that China wants to make a deal with the United States. He believes China has to make a deal with the United States.
It was a mistake for China to retaliate. The president, when America is punched, he punches back harder.
That's why there will be 104% tariffs going into effect on China tonight at midnight. But the president believes that Xi and China want to make a deal.
They just don't know how to get that started. And the president also wanted me to tell all of you that if China reaches out to make a deal, he'll be incredibly gracious, but he's going to do what's best for the American people.
But while the White House says around 70 countries have contacted it wanting to negotiate deals deals before tariffs on them also come into effect, so far the world's second biggest economy has remained defiant, with China vowing to fight to the end in its trade war with the United States. Our Washington correspondent Anthony Zerka reports on a likely fallout.
China is one of America's largest trading partners. And so you can strike deals with Bangladesh, you can strike deals with South Korea, even the EU, Japan.
But if there's a trade war with China, that is going to put at risk the global economy and also have a very real domestic impact here in the United States. So while it does seem like Donald Trump is making progress in some areas, there seems to be room for accommodation.
If China doesn't play ball and China doesn't seem to want to play ball, at least for now, that is going to be really difficult to overcome. I think there is tremendous unease and you're starting to see it publicly voiced.
Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, was openly critical of Donald Trump's trade policies, warned that it could lead to economic harm. You saw other Republicans join together to sponsor legislation in the Senate that would curtail Donald Trump's trade powers, give Congress an ability to have to sign off on any tariffs that extend longer than a set period of time.
So there's nervousness. You know, China is thinking that they may be able to tolerate economic pain longer than the United States just because there are politicians in the United States that are open to or going to have to answer to the voters in a matter of days or months or years.
Anthony Zirka. So what's it like for stock brokers in the trading floor who are having to grapple with these head-spinning financial twists and turns? Mark Lowen has been speaking to three of them.
Jack Stickley, a stockbroker at Morgan's Financial in Brisbane in Australia. Luca della Rocca, head of trading at Intermonte in Milan in Italy.
And to Steve Burns, a stockbroker in the US state of Florida. First, Jack Stickley.
Yeah, it's certainly been a busy couple of days. First and foremost, we really try our best to get on the front foot and talk to clients.
That's really the best way to communicate how you're seeing things and making sure that each client is comfortable with what they've got in their portfolio. If we're deploying a client's portfolio, we're making sure that we're keeping updated with how we're going with that.
But yeah, communication is the utmost, most important factor in days like we've seen the last couple of days. I mean, without asking you to break your confidence of your clients, I'm guessing that some of them may have been losing a pretty significant amount of money in the last few days.
Yeah, no doubt. If we get a phone call from a client and given the last couple of days saying, sell the portfolio, I'm really struggling to handle this volatility, we haven't really done our job in that initial onboarding phase.
We do spend a fair bit of time running through with each client what their appetite for risk is and really trying to build out a portfolio that is tailored towards their needs. But obviously, that's a perfect world.
I mean, are we talking about some clients losing millions just in a matter of minutes? Oh, look, I don't want to dive too far into the numbers. But yeah, look, most of my clients, it's not the first time that they've seen these type of market drawdowns.
I mean, it wasn't too long ago that we had COVID. Luca, what's it been like for you over the last few days watching all of this? Yes, I think it has been pretty much similar to what Jack has described.

In particular, we do focus on institutional clients.

So yes, indeed, they're very much used to the situation. They might be, as you mentioned, losing significant chunks of money, but it is part of their business.
So they're definitely used to it, which means probably on our side, we need to be able to offer also a bit of, let's say, moral support to the PMs and traders. Steve, has it been stressful for you? I mean, $6 trillion were wiped off the US stock market since the tariff announcement last Wednesday.
In my world, and personally, I leaned so much in the active trading world towards my own risk management, stop losses since I'm active. So I took two drawdowns and two of the drops, but I had such a low cost basis when I bought the first dip that I didn't get hit as hard as many other people did.
It was a good lick on one day, but it was one day. While other trend followers and swing traders that I've seen held for multiple days and took much bigger hits on this.
I've seen a lot of trauma in the active trading world, especially for the long bias traders that were buying stocks and holding stocks for multiple days or buying the initial dip because this was so traumatizing because it was like we had the deep seek and we had the AI crash initially where so many of the AI stocks 50% down from their peaks before the tariff event and the tariff event escalated everything. That was the view of stockbrokers on the current market turmoil.
It's been known for some time now that Moscow has been using thousands of North Korean soldiers to try to oust Ukrainian forces who've seized territory in the Russian region of Kursk and in Ukraine itself using attack drones from Iran. But now the Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, has made the dramatic claim that two Chinese soldiers fighting alongside Russian troops have been captured in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region.
He said they had Chinese documents and bank cards, and he's demanded an answer from Beijing. In a social media post that included a video of one of the men speaking Mandarin, Mr Zelensky appealed to the United States to intervene.
I believe this is an important moment that we need to discuss with our partners urgently. I understand that we are a strong country, but we cannot fight multiple countries at the same time, all of whom want something on our land.
We really hope that after this situation, the Americans will talk more with the Ukrainians and then with the Russians. We truly hope the Chinese side will also respond.
I asked our correspondent in Kyiv, James Waterhouse, about the significance of this announcement and if it was the first time Ukraine had accused China of supplying troops to Russia. It is the first kind of claim.
I mean, for President Zelensky, he is certainly looking to frame this as significant. Why? Well, he wants to reiterate what he sees as the widening geopolitical footprint of Russia's invasion.
He wants to say to America, and he did so in a press conference, he wants to say to America, you need to pay attention to what is happening. You need to consider your response if Beijing is now helping Moscow in its invasion.
But there is no evidence, according to Western officials, that Beijing is directly helping Russian troops. And we don't know what those Chinese soldiers may have been doing.
They might have been in Ukraine in a mercenary role, or they could have simply been mobilised from inside Russia. So there are a lot of unanswered questions but Zelensky did post a video showing an Asian soldier in a Russian uniform handcuffed talking to his captors.
So it's a sizable significant accusation but at the moment you know we wait to hear to see what Beijing and Washington say in response but there's no further evidence despite Kiev there is, and that there may well be more Chinese soldiers fighting on Ukrainian soil. And just remind us what Beijing's position is on the war in Ukraine.
Well, they have always stopped short of condemning the invasion, but nor have they spoken publicly in support. Now, before the full-scale invasion, Beijing and Moscow,

President Xi and Vladimir Putin announced a relationship without boundaries against what they described as external threats, i.e. America.
They are united ideologically, and in the three years since, their economic ties have only deepened. You know, China now makes up the bulk of Russian imports and Western officials are worried

about Chinese technology flowing to the front lines in the form of missiles or other weapon systems. It is a relationship that has changed, but has become all the more significant for both.
So for this relationship to spill into direct military involvement, like we've seen with North Korea, I don't think there is enough evidence to say that at this stage. And in the case of North Korea, you know, yes, a few thousand troops were deployed, but it was the provision of ammunition which proved to be significant in some areas of the battlefield.
So, of course, it would be significant if this was more. And I think what's interesting is how President Zelensky is framing this.

He is trying to generate that urgency to keep the pressure on America to care about Ukraine. James Waterhouse in Kiev.
The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has strongly condemned Israel's ongoing blockade of Gaza, saying it violates the Geneva Conventions. Mr Guterres said the floodgates of horror have reopened,

leaving civilians in what he called an endless death loop. He rejected a new Israeli proposal to control aid deliveries in Gaza.
Let me be clear, we will not participate in any arrangement that does not fully respect the humanitarian principles. Humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality.
With more, here's Imogen folks in Geneva where several UN bodies are based. No supplies humanitarian or commercial have been allowed into Gaza for more than a month.
The fourth Geneva Convention requires Israel as the occupying power to ensure the population has food and medicine. Hospitals and health workers must be protected.
Essential services like water and sanitation must be maintained. None of this, Antonio Guterres said, is happening in Gaza.
He urged a renewal of the ceasefire, pointing out that previous pauses in fighting had allowed Israeli hostages to be released. And he paid tribute to aid workers in Gaza, describing them as heroes who were doing all they could to help people.
He demanded an independent investigation into the deaths of 15 aid workers who were killed by Israeli forces last month. Imogen folks.
Now to the country with the world's lowest birth rate, South Korea. With declining fertility rates, businesses there are facing a serious shortage of workers.
So the government is now looking at increasing immigration, a move that's not exactly popular with some South Koreans. David Kan visited the country to find out more.
Osan in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, is a city with amongst the highest percentage of foreign workers in the country, mainly from other parts of Asia. And it's here where I meet Jones Galang, a Filipino missionary who is also the head of the Osan Migrant Workers Center.
Compared to other countries, Korea is very popular. Why? It is very near to Asian people, and the salary is more compared to other countries, like Saudi, Hong Kong, UAE, like that, especially the non-skilled workers.
The second, of course, it is a foos from their own countries because no job and poverty. So, for example, the Filipinos, nobody will come here if we can find work in our country.
It is a shame. And then, of course, the third one is Korea needs workers.
Korea needs workers to maintain his image in the international market and then to maintain the economic upload. So they need workers.
And then for the workers, Korea is like a heaven. Korea does really need its workers, especially young workers.
Jae-yeon Yoo is a professor of social welfare studies at Gachon University in South Korea. He also sits on the advisory board for the Presidential Committee on Aging Society and Population Policy.
South Korea now has more job seekers in their 60s than those in their 20s. With the ongoing low birth rate, fewer teenagers are transitioning into adulthood.
It's inevitable that the working age population will drop significantly. That is, unless we have immigration.
It'll take time for the birth rate to increase, and even if more babies are born, it will take 20, 30 years for them to enter the workforce. On the other hand, immigrants can make an immediate visible impact, quickly contributing to the economy.
And the South Korean government is keenly aware of this. In August last year, Hemi-Yoo, senior secretary of low birth rate, spoke about immigration in an interview with the national radio station KBS.
One potential solution to address the rapid decline in working age population is to utilise foreign labour. I believe we need to develop a medium to long-term plan for this.
Foreign workers have already been contributing significantly by filling the short-term labour shortages. However, we need to look beyond this.
While concerns remain, those wanting to move to South Korea have been steadily increasing, with the immigration application numbers almost tripling between 2022 and 2024. A welcome increase for a country that's facing depopulation unprecedented anywhere else in the world.
That report by David Kan in South Korea. Still to come...
Direwolves went extinct more than 10,000 years ago. It's thought they died out because of the decline of large herbivores, such as mammoths, as well as climatic change.
Now it's being claimed that they have been brought back into existence. Is that true? You're listening to the Global News Podcast.
The social media giant Meta has been facing increased scrutiny from various governments, including Britain and the US, for not doing enough to protect young people online. In response, it's now expanding parental controls already available on Instagram to Facebook and Messenger.
The restricted teen accounts, which have been on Instagram since last September, will now be available on Facebook and Messenger in the UK, the US, Australia and Canada. Our North America technology correspondent, Lily Jamali, told me more.
What we're seeing is the expansion of recent changes that were made by Meta to Instagram for teen accounts now going to Facebook and Messenger. So it won't just be Instagram where users will see the types of changes that were introduced last year.
So what are those changes going forward? We'll see built in restrictions on who can get in touch with teens, what they see on the platform, as well as limits being placed on how much time they can spend on these platforms. There are also expected to be changes to Instagram itself coming in the next few months.
So teens under 16 will be blocked from going live unless their parents allow it. Parents will also need to turn off a feature for that to happen.
So that's another thing that's coming through. And teens under the age of 16 will also be required to have parental permission to turn off a feature that automatically blurs images that contain potential nudity in their DMs or direct messages.
So taken together, what the company is really doing here is making teen accounts more restricted by default. I suppose the big question is,

is this enough? I think we ought to frame this for what it is, which is a preemptive approach

by Meta to basically put in guardrails on its own before governments do it for them.

The announcement about those Instagram teen accounts was made notably right around the time

when kids online safety legislation was looking like it was making traction last summer here in

Thank you. teen accounts was made notably right around the time when kids online safety legislation was looking like it was making traction last summer here in the United States.
That actually didn't end up going anywhere. But Meta had made this announcement and they rolled it out with these Instagram teen accounts with slick advertisements that were plastered on billboards and they took out full page ads in major newspapers across the U.S.
The Molly Rose Foundation, which was set up after the death of a young girl back in 2017, has taken an advocacy role in this space. They've been saying that there's been relative silence from CEO Mark Zuckerberg on what the changes have been so far.
How have the changes that the company has instituted done? Have they actually worked? And what kind of sensitive content is actually being tackled here? Parents still don't know if, you know, for example, settings stop their kids from being algorithmically recommended certain kinds of content, content deemed inappropriate or harmful by a lot of parents. Others say this is a step in the right direction.
This is an area that a lot of these social media companies have been remiss to tackle on their own. And I think there have been some expressions of appreciation that Meta has done something instead of just sitting on its hands.
Lily Jamali. Prince Harry, the younger son of Britain's King Charles, who's made a new life in California over the past few years, made a rare public appearance in the UK on Tuesday in a British court.
He's fighting the government's decision to downgrade his security during his visits to Britain in the wake of his dramatic split from the British royal family and his subsequent move with his wife Meghan to North America in 2020. Prince Harry says his fears about security are the reason he rarely returns to the UK now.
But the government says he is still getting protection, albeit not that of a working royal. Speaking to us from outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, our reporter Charlotte Gallagher told us why the prince was pursuing this case.
He thinks the security isn't quite tough enough as he would like because he still says that he faces threats not just from being the son of the king but also the fact that he served in the British Army in Afghanistan and actually fairly recently there was a death threat made against him by a terror group. So he look with these threats against me it's just not right that I don't have the same security as other members of the royal family.
And this comes as Prince Harry is embroiled in yet another dispute over the charity Sintabale that he founded in honour of his late mother Princess Diana. It does I mean I think this is quite a difficult time for Prince Harry.
This charity was really close to his heart and it appears to be crumbling. There was this row between the chairwoman of the charity and also the trustees.
They resigned, she stayed and they wanted her to resign and them to stay. Prince Harry stepped back from his role as well and the charity commission are going to be looking into it.
There's going to be an investigation into this charity. I mean, this was a charity that was set up in order to help children, particularly that had been affected by HIV in Southern Africa.
And at the moment, it doesn't appear that there seems to be any resolution to this row about this charity. I mean, there's accusations that have been made by the chairwoman of racism, misogyny, not particularly involving Prince Harry but other members of this charity.
So it's been a very bitter row indeed and at the heart of it is a charity that was set up that was supposed to help people. And Prince Harry's father, King Charles, is currently on a state visit to Italy.
Do we know if the prince is going to be visiting any other members of the royal family during his trip to Britain? We have no idea and it would be very rare for us to find out about any other visits if it wasn't his father or perhaps his brother. Now a couple of people did shout, some journalists did shout at Prince Harry when he was going into the court saying, have you seen your father? Because there a chance that there could have been like a little bit of a crossover before king charles left and when prince harry was in the country when he comes here it tends to be an in and out trip he doesn't really stay here for any longer than he needs to but yes it's very interesting timing isn't it that the king isn't in the country and prince harry is here i mean we believe the last time they met in person was February last year when they had a 45-minute meeting after the king was diagnosed with cancer.
I mean, they have, I think, a very different relationship to the one they had, you know, even a decade ago when Prince Harry was very much at the centre of the royal family and very much at the centre of public life in this country. Charlotte Gallagher.
They've been extinct for more than 10,000 years, but now it's being claimed that dire wolves have been brought back into existence. The species, made famous by the TV series Game of Thrones, were much bigger than their closest living relative, the grey wolf.
Scientists in the United States at the Texas-based company, Colossal Biosciences, say they have used gene editing to create three healthy pups. But as Theo White explains, experts say these beasts aren't quite what they're claimed to be.
Direwolves went extinct more than 10,000 years ago. It's thought they died out because of the decline of large

herbivores such as mammoths, as well as climatic change and competition from other species.

Now, Texas-based Colossal Biosciences claims to have brought them back.

That is the howling of the six-month-old pups Romulus and Remus and a three-month-old girl

called Khaleesi. To create them, scientists took DNA from a 13,000-year-old dire wolf tooth

I don't know. old pups, Romulus and Remus, and a three-month-old girl called Khaleesi.
To create them, scientists took DNA from a 13,000-year-old direwolf tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull. They identified genes they believed accounted for the species' distinctive characteristics, such as its powerful build and white coat, and inserted these into the genetic information of a grey wolf.
The researchers then made embryos, which were put in the wombs of domestic dogs and brought to term. Pontus Scoglund is the group leader of the Francis Crick Institute's Ancient Genomics Laboratory.
He says these hybrid beasts can't be called direwolves. They made 20 changes seen in the direwolf DNA or inspired by how dire wolf looked.
But really, there would have been millions of differences between the grey wolf, you know, the normal wolf people think about, and the dire wolf. And there's another problem.
Even if they were dire wolves, some scientists argue they wouldn't know how to act like them without parents or a pack to learn from. Theo White.
A blockbuster exhibition of the work of the British artist David Hockney opens today in the French capital Paris. The 87-year-old has long been renowned for his vivid use of colour, joyful celebrations of springtime and iconic images of Californian swimming pools.
The artist, who still smokes despite his health problems, told the BBC's culture editor, Katie Razzle, that when he was first approached two years ago to do the show, he hadn't expected he would still be alive to see and enjoy the opening of his largest ever exhibition. Well, I'm just laughing.
We made it, yes. April in Paris It's fantastic sitting in this room, it is.
It's your biggest show ever. Do you think it's your best ever? Yes.
I am nearly 88 years old, so it should be. And the last painting in it was made just this year.
There were moments as he struggled with health problems that David Hockney didn't think he'd live to see his new show. But Britain's best loved artist tells me he still paints every day and remains defiant about his smoking habit.
I'm still a smoker, a happy smoker, fed up of bossy people telling you what to do. How many people are you expecting? I don't care how many come.
I mean, I'm very, very pleased with it. This is about 70 years' work in here.
I'm looking at the very first picture in the show. It's a portrait from 1955 of David Hockney's father, who is sitting in a bare room.
He's wearing a dark frock coat, and it's very sombre colouring. And you can see just over his shoulder the edge of a picto-frame.
One of the first times, perhaps the first time, where Hockney was playing with this idea of a picture in a picture. In amongst the show's celebration of Yorkshire landscapes, Hockney's many joyful representations of spring in Normandy, the vast LA vistas and those swimming pools, are around 60 portraits, mainly of family and friends.
David has got a piercing look. You don't really know where he's looking.
It's kind of like he's looking through you. His great-nephew Richard has sat for Hockney ever since he was four.
He always gets your personality out and that's why he chooses to paint people that he loves, his family, his friends and

he always likes my cheeky grin. What's it been like for you all to arrive en masse, all the family

with him? I mean the night before we were just sat there we played five different variations of

April in Paris, the Ella Fitzgerald version and we got him in the mood, we did the same in the morning. And I think the painting keeps him alive, to be honest.
So as long as he paints, he's fine. Downstairs, there's these beautiful paintings.
The one you did early on at the Royal College of Art, we two boys together clinging, at a time when being gay was illegal. And then you to LA there's this incredible sense of liberation did it feel like you were at the vanguard of something new I just moved to LA because I wanted to go there somewhere I'm not known and that was fine with me I mean, I've always said I want my work to be seen but I don't have to be seen.
That was the artist David Hockney talking about his new exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.

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, you can send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

This edition was mixed by Martin Baker.

The producer was Lynne McChefrey.

The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Janat Jalil.

Until next time, goodbye.