Trump and Putin to hold Ukraine talks in Alaska

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

I'm Jackie Leonard, and in the early hours of Friday, the 15th of August, these are our main stories.

Donald Trump says he believes Vladimir Putin is ready to make a peace deal as the two leaders prepare for talks in Alaska later today.

U.S.

scientists have used artificial intelligence to create new potential antibiotics that can kill drug-resistant superbugs.

And there's been fierce international criticism of the Israeli finance minister's decision to approve long-delayed plans to build thousands of homes in the occupied West Bank.

Also in this podcast.

Bratfurst is a staple of German and Austrian cuisine and is readily available at sausage stands.

The row about the origins of the Bratfurst Sausage.

President Trump says he believes Russia and Ukraine could make peace as a result of his talks with Vladimir Putin later today in Alaska.

But Mr.

Trump acknowledged that the risk of the talks failing could be as high as 25%.

Speaking at the White House on the eve of the summit, the US leader said that if there was a breakthrough, the summit in Alaska could be followed by discussions also involving the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.

Mr.

Trump hoped that these could start shortly, possibly even in Alaska.

The Trump-Putin meeting is being held at the Elmendorf Air Force Base, a major US military installation that has been crucial in monitoring Russia.

Ukraine and Russia are said to be far apart on many issues, and President Putin recently said that the conditions for him meeting Mr.

Zelensky haven't been met.

President Trump also had this to say about the war in Ukraine.

I think if I weren't president, he would take over all of Ukraine.

It's a war that should have never happened.

So how are Ukrainians feeling about the one-on-one talks in Alaska without them after more than three years of a full-scale and painful war, as our defence correspondent Jonathan Beale has been finding out, soldiers and civilians are worried about what may happen at the summit on Friday.

They call it drone aside.

Training to deal with what is now the greatest threat to a Ukrainian soldier's life:

Russian drones.

Their defence isn't that sophisticated.

A shotgun.

They say it's still the best way to take down a drone.

If Donald Trump can't get a ceasefire, then this training in the East may help save their lives.

And among these troops, there seems to be little confidence the US President can do a deal without giving up more of their land, for which they're still fighting and dying.

Well, it's a very

hard question for me because I lost on this war my father, a lot of my friends, and for what?

It must be stopped and we must win.

But if you give away territory, or if President Trump makes Ukraine give away territory, will that be a win?

It will be not my solution, but I don't like this idea.

The views from the front are reflected in Ukraine's towns and cities.

The capital, too, has been subjected to more intense Russian drone and missile attacks.

Though as those Alaska talks get closer, the strikes have slowed down.

On the streets of Kyiv there are signs of resignation that some sacrifices will have to be made.

Probably we will not be able to take what was captured back.

Moreover, if they gave the weapon in the very beginning, then it might have helped.

And now we don't have the resources.

All our boys are in the heaven or in the hospital.

Talk, sure,

but look.

If we don't stop, we'll lose even more territories and more people.

It's like gambling in a casino.

The more you play, the more you lose.

President Trump has said that in the end, President Zelensky will have to sign something.

But one of his MPs, the chairman of Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Committee, Oleksandr Merezhko, says that's not true.

Absolutely not, because one thing to sign something, but absolutely another thing is to impose this on Ukraine, on our society, on our armed forces.

Ukraine has proved many times that you cannot impose anything on our people.

That's why, first of all, I'm sure that Zelensky will never sign a document which goes against the interests of Ukrainian people.

And second, we're a democratic society.

We have proved it many times.

Gennady says he's not expecting much from the talks.

He says it's all too vague.

The 78-year-old's home in Luhansk is now occupied by Russians.

His eyes well with tears when he tells me he'll never go back again.

He says, I still miss it.

I liked fishing there.

I had a small plot of land.

I grew grapes and walnuts.

And now it doesn't exist.

Kannady is just one of three and a half million Ukrainians who've been displaced by the war.

He's now living with hundreds of others in mobile homes just outside the capital.

Eighteen-year-old Valeria is another resident of this new makeshift town, now waiting for news from Alaska.

I really hope there will be something good after those talks, but I don't have much hope.

I don't want our country to lose any territory.

I have my friends from the territories, and they don't want to lose their home.

It's our home.

It should not be part of the Russian Federation.

Valeria, ending that report by Jonathan Beale in Ukraine.

WhatsApp says Russia is trying to block its services because it offers users secure communications, and it's vowed to do its utmost to continue to make encrypted services available.

Since Moscow introduced draconian laws after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, criticism of the war can land people in jail, so WhatsApp has become a crucial communications tool.

Earlier this week, the Russian authorities announced curbs on voice calls via WhatsApp and Telegram.

Dr.

Stephen Hall, lecturer in Russian and post-Soviet politics at the University of Bath in England, told Rebecca Kesby more about what Russia's doing.

The Kremlin's thinking on this is to be able to control the message and the narrative.

The Kremlin has created a new social media network similar to WhatsApp and Telegram, based to an extent at least on the Chinese platform WeChat called Max.

And this comes from VCONTACTE, which is the Russian version of Facebook, which is now controlled by the regime.

So this is a safe space, as it were, that is controlled by the Kremlin.

I suppose you could say it doesn't show that they're very confident, though, that that the Russian government is popular.

What does it tell us they're worried about?

Well, it highlights that they're worried.

I mean, a lot of the talk is that they can't control the internal situation.

It's links back to the Croaker City Hall terrorist attacks, which, according to the Kremlin, were instigated by the Ukrainians somehow.

And that this has been the case in other places where pensioners and Russian teenagers have been blackmailed or convinced to to go and burn military registration officers and relay stations linked to transport.

And the FSB, the Federal Security Bureau, the internal domestic security services have always blamed this on Ukraine.

So the idea is to control the communication, control the narrative and to be able to send Russians regime approved narratives.

Okay, but I mean it it would be something that Ukrainian

actors might be interested in doing, in actual fact.

So perhaps they have been quite successful in using WhatsApp and Telegram for, let's say, subversive activities.

I don't know, don't know exactly whether they have been successful or not.

The SBU, especially, and the GRU, the military intelligence, have been very effective in the past.

And so you would assume that they do know what they're doing.

And this has been very helpful in getting Russians to attack their own infrastructure to deal with the war effort in Russia.

So, yes.

Dr.

Stephen Hall from the University of Bath.

For some time, there's been concern about the emergence of superbugs, the infections that can't be cured by current antibiotics.

So, there's cautious optimism about the news that scientists have created a new type of antibiotic using artificial intelligence.

In laboratory and animal tests, researchers found that the drugs, which were designed atom by atom, could kill off two hard-to-treat bacterial infections, including MRSA.

Professor James Collins from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the drugs need further refinement before trials can begin, but the power of AI is already clear.

We're excited for this story because we show that generative AI can be used to design completely new antibiotics.

ones that can be used against multi-drug resistant pathogens.

And this gives me great excitement for how how AI can be used to address the antimicrobial resistance crisis.

Here, AI can enable us to come up with molecules cheaply, quickly, and in this way expand our arsenal and really give us a leg up in the battle of our wits against the genes of superbugs.

Our health and science correspondent James Gallagher told us about the discovery.

We know that we need new antibiotics and this is a way of trying to find new ones.

So artificial intelligence has already been used to scour existing drugs.

Chemicals have already been made to see if any of those have antibiotic potential.

This has gone that step further of going, can you use AI to actually design a drug and does what it come up with work?

And the answer is yes.

So what they've done is they've set loose the artificial intelligence, they've trained it, they've asked it to develop an antibiotic from scratch, they've narrowed it down, they've manufactured the most promising looking candidates that have been invented, tested them in the laboratory, and they have two, ones that work against gonorrhea and ones that work against MRSA.

And why is this so important?

It's so important because we have a desperate need for new antibiotics.

So, what's happened pretty much since the 1980s is science has pretty much pulled out of inventing new antibiotics.

And in that time, superbugs have taken off, partly because we're overusing the antibiotics that we have and using them inappropriately.

And what's happened is bacteria have become progressively more and more and more resistant to the drugs that we have.

It's what's known actually as the the silent pandemic now, because more than a million people a year are being killed by these infections that are now resistant to the drugs that we have.

So, we need new ones and we need new ideas for finding new ones.

AI is appearing to be a potential driving force for these new drugs.

And how big a difference to medical developments, medical research, is AI making?

Well, AI is all over the place, everywhere.

So, kind of like drug discoveries we're just discussing here, but also interpreting and analysing scans, so like breast cancer scans or mammograms, or analysing a lump growing on your skin to work out whether it's a mole or is it actually a dangerous skin cancer.

So AI is being used in all of these fields as well as just being used in hospitals to make doctors and nurses work easier.

So I think we are going to see AI have like a transformative effect on medicine.

It's still quite to be figured out exactly what that is going to be to be, but there's no doubt that it's already starting to make those changes.

Are you excited about this development?

The problem is that we don't know if these antibiotics are going to work.

So, like, they're great in mice, are they going to be great in people?

It's still a question that needs to be answered.

But the fact that you can train a piece of software and it can invent something that is actually able to treat and kill bacteria, that's pretty incredible.

So, I think I'm more excited about the technology than the drugs that it has found.

But in 10 years' time, if these have proven to actually really do work and make a difference, then I should have said I'm excited about all of it.

That was James Gallagher.

There has been fierce international criticism of Israeli plans to build more than 3,000 homes in a controversial settlement in the occupied West Bank.

The country's far-right finance minister, Betzel El Smotrich, said the move, which will split the territory, will bury the idea of a Palestinian state.

The UK and EU have condemned the plan, describing it as a flagrant breach of international law.

From Jerusalem, our correspondent John Donison reports: The E1 project has been controversial for decades.

The plan to expand Jewish settlements illegal under international law in an area of land between Jerusalem and the existing settlement of Mali Adamim.

Palestinians have long argued it would, in effect, cut the occupied West Bank in two, making their vision of a future Palestinian state impossible.

The difference now is that the Israeli government is proudly saying that very thing.

At a news conference in 40-degree heat on the rocky hilltops east of Jerusalem, the far-right finance minister Bezel El Smotrich said the land had been given to the Jews by God and he put it to me that the plan would kill the idea of a Palestinian state forever.

What message does that send to the likes of Britain and France who've just announced their intention to recognize one?

It will not happen.

I say to the leaders of France and Britain and Norway and Australia and Canada, you have no chance.

You have no chance.

A Palestinian state will not be established.

You will not determine from overseas what will be the future of the Jewish people who finally, after 2,000 years, are taking their fate into their own hands and caring for their future, existence, and security.

If you recognize the Palestinian state in September, our answer will be to impose full Israeli sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria so that simply you will have nothing to recognize.

Mr.

Smotrich thanked President Trump for his support and it was suggested the E1 project could be renamed T1 in his honour.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry called the new settlement plan an extension of crimes of genocide, displacement and annexation.

The scheme is expected to be given final approval next week.

That was John Donerson.

Still to come.

We started very early in the morning on smooth flat roads where we can get the greatest amounts of efficiency on reasonably low speed roads and just try and be as efficient as we can.

Smashing the world distance record for an electric vehicle on a single charge.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

Now through September 2nd, get up to 50% off store-wide on carpet, hardwood, laminate, waterproof flooring, and much more.

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The current head of the Economic Community of West African States, known as ECOWAS, has urged military-led Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger to rejoin the organization.

The three countries broke away from ECOWAS after refusing its demands to restore democratic rule.

Will Ross reports.

The Sierra Leonean president, Julius Madabio, says he's held talks with the three military rulers to learn about their grievances and find solutions.

Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger officially broke away from ECOWAS in January after forming their own alliance of Sahel states.

They've grown close links with Russia and have cut ties with France.

The big worry for the whole region is that this split is undermining efforts to work together to tackle the growing threat from Islamist militants.

The coastal countries Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Ivory Coast are all worried about the violence spreading south from the Sahel region.

That was Will Ross.

The U.S.

State Department has approved a possible sale of $346 million worth of weapons to Nigeria.

Washington says the package, which still needs to be approved by Congress, includes rockets and bombs and will bolster Nigeria's security as well as support U.S.

foreign policy objectives.

Nigeria faces several major security challenges, including attacks by Islamist militants, kidnapping gangs, and separatist insurgents in the southeast.

Our correspondent in Abuja, Chris Awokor, told us more.

This deal is coming from a request by the Nigerian government asking for over 1,000 general-purpose bombs and

more than 5,000 precision-guided rockets, including other military hardwares.

And this has now been approved by the U.S.

government and expected to be given the green light by the US parliament before being shipped over to Nigeria.

It's quite a contrast, isn't it, to the Obama administration in 2014 when it refused to sell lethal weapons to Nigeria?

Yes, indeed.

In 2014, the Obama administration actually declined selling lethal weapons to Nigeria, and they say it's due to the military's human rights record.

And at the time, it actually made the Nigerian government to complain bitterly and insisting that halting such sale was affecting its effort in defeating the Islamist group Boko Haram.

Again, in 2021, US lawmakers also held down another proposed sale of attack helicopters amid also mounting concerns about Nigeria government's human rights record.

But this was shortly after Nigeria took delivery of six Tukano Tukano aircraft valued at $500 million from the US.

So why does the Nigerian government want these new weapons now?

As it is, Nigeria is battling a complex web of insurgency and criminal violence across the country.

And this weapon is expected to help bolster the government's effort in the fight against these security challenges.

Today, Nigeria is grappling grappling with two jihadist group attacks, especially in the northeast, kidnapping gangs also in the west of the country, and separatist agitation in the southwest.

In central Nigeria, we've also seen criminal gangs operating, as well as clashes between headers and farmers that require intense efforts by the military to put down.

So, but basically, I think the focus is mainly to defeat Boko Haram and IISWAP group in the northeast, as well as deal a decisive blow to bandits and criminal gangs that engage in kidnapping for ransom in the northwest of the country.

That was Chris Ewoko.

Now, some good news for those thinking of making the switch to an electric vehicle, but who suffer from what's known as range anxiety, that fear that you'll run out of battery power and be stranded in the middle of nowhere.

A team from Polestar, the Swedish EV company, has just smashed the world record for distance on a single charge using a standard, publicly available, unmodified vehicle, achieving just under a thousand kilometres on a single charge.

Three efficiency drivers were at the wheel and Sam Clark was one of them.

Rebecca Kesby first asked him, what exactly is a professional efficiency driver?

I have been driving electric vehicles now for 20 plus years and therefore have got fairly well experienced now in knowing how to to get the most out of them.

And in the most recent years, there's been a huge amount of attention, particularly from automotive OEMs like Polestar, to see how far we can really push their vehicles.

And therefore, someone like me that's been doing it a little while is well versed and well-placed to be able to try and get as much efficiency out of these vehicles as we possibly can.

Right, so how did you do it then?

Because you drove just shy of a thousand kilometers on one charge of the battery.

There were three of you in the car working as a team.

Talk us through how it worked.

Yes, it takes a lot of planning and there were three of us as drivers, but only two of us were ever in the vehicle at one time.

So we made sure that we did shift patterns for safety to make sure that everyone had an opportunity to have a rest.

Yeah, we started very early in the morning on nice smooth flat roads in the Norfolk area of the UK where...

where we can get the greatest amount of efficiency on reasonably low speed roads and just try and be as efficient as we can.

I should point out that Norfolk in the UK is known for being quite a flat flat terrain.

It's not full of hills that you might get elsewhere in the country.

Talk us through that then because obviously every time that you break in an EV and you then have to accelerate like traffic in cities or something or going over the Scottish hills and mountains all of that uses more energy.

That's right, yeah.

And the important thing about these records is they're journey records.

So they're done on real world conditions on normal roads.

We're not allowed to go over the same roads twice.

However, we also, you know, it's a record, right?

So we want to make sure that we're pushing the limits wherever we can so flat terrain warm climates which is why we do it in the summer are all things which play to our favor the vehicle isn't modified in any way but we do try and use the variables as best we can so we're hoping that there's no rain that we drive as efficiently and as smoothly as possible that's the key thing to driving evs is trying to be smooth they can be very torquey very very high accelerating type vehicles which is good fun but also energy sapping so what we're trying to demonstrate with these things is that no one's going to be able to travel the distances that we achieved and we're not suggesting that anyone can.

It's just a demonstration of the art of the possible and just show that you can really make EVs do long distances now with reasonable ease, and we can all do that.

You talk about energy sapping.

Apparently, you were driving at around

20 miles an hour most of the time.

That can't have been easy for you as a driver.

It was a little bit faster than that because we were on the road for about 22, 23 hours, but we obviously stopped quite a lot.

So the vehicle was stationary for several

throughout that journey as well.

So our average was probably more like 30, 35 miles an hour.

But you're right, Rebecca, there's a lot of concentration required, and it gets obviously more challenging through the night or through the morning, through the day, and then back through the night again.

So that's one of the reasons why we wanted to make sure we change drivers regularly.

And the person in the passenger seat is helping with navigation at all times because

we come up against all sorts of challenges on these things when you travel such long distances in one go.

Particularly road closure.

Well, road closures was a big one.

There's an area called Melton Mowbray, which we're all familiar with from the pies,

that we were attempting to drive through seamlessly at about midnight, only to find that there was a cycle race happening the next day and all the roads were shut.

Oh, no.

So, trying to navigate around that and ensure that we didn't go on the same roads that we'd already been on, because that would have avoided the record, was a challenge.

So, even at sort of midnight, having driven for 18 hours, there's still a great deal of concentration required.

That was Sam Clark.

And speaking of cycling, the British cyclist Matthew Richardson has become the world's fastest rider after breaking the record for an event called the Flying 200m.

He covered the distance in 8.941 seconds.

Richardson said it was a pretty cool feeling to achieve a goal he had had for some time.

Here's our sports correspondent, Joe Linsky.

200 metres in under nine seconds.

Matt Richardson, who was born in Kent, switched from representing Australia to Great Britain last year.

He's now gone quicker than the previous mark set by the Dutch rider, Harry Lavrison.

He did it as part of a multiple world record attempt by British cycling at a Velodrome in Turkey.

The paracyclist Will Bjorfelt also made history, cycling more than 50 kilometres in the course of an hour.

That breaks a record that had stood for 11 years.

Björfelt said it was an achievement he'd been working for for a long, long time.

Jolinski.

A row has broken out between two German states over which can lay claim to having invented the Bratwurst sausage.

Regensburg in Bavaria has the world's oldest Bratwurst stand, but a chance discovery by historians suggests the grill may first have been fired in neighbouring Thuringia, as Bethany Bell has been finding out.

Bratwurst is a staple of German and Austrian cuisine and is readily available at sausage stands.

It's made from finely chopped meat, usually pork, although sometimes beef or veal, that's chunkier than a frankfurter.

Until now, the Wurstkuchel Tavern by the stone bridge in Regensburg has claimed to be the oldest Bratwurst stand in the world.

The first documented evidence of a cook or a food stall on that site dates back to 1378.

A little to the north in Turingia, the earliest written reference to Bratwurst dates to 1404.

However, historians in Erfurt, Turingia's state capital, have have now come across an even earlier document that mentions a meat roasting stand.

It's dated 1269, 109 years before the Wurstkuchl site.

They're now looking for the place in Erfurt where the sausage stand once stood.

Back in Regensburg, however, they're unimpressed.

Andreas Meyer from the Wurstkuchl says that, unlike in Erfurt, they have a living tradition, producing charcoal-grilled pork bratwurst with mustard.

They may have found a document in Erfurt, but the important thing is that we actually work here.

The historic Vurstkuchel is alive, and in Erfurt, there's a piece of paper.

It's not the first time there's been a row about Bratwursts.

Regensburg and Nuremberg, also in Bavaria, have both laid claim to the oldest sausage stand title.

Eventually, it was ruled in favour of Regensburg, which is not going to give up the honour without a fight.

That was Bethany Bell.

And that's it from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News podcast later.

If you would like to comment on this edition or the topics covered in it, do please send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

You can also find us on X at BBC World Service.

Just use the hashtag globalnewspod.

This edition was mixed by Jack Wilfan.

The producer was Liam McSheffery.

Our editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Jackie Leonard, and until next time, goodbye.

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