European leaders meet ahead of Trump's summit with Putin

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You're listening to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

Hello, I'm Oliver Conway.

We're recording this at 13 hours GMT on Wednesday, the 13th of August.

European leaders meet to voice support for Ukraine ahead of the Trump-Putin summit.

Intense Israeli strikes hit Gaza before a new planned offensive to take over the territory.

And the US puts a $5 million bounty on a notorious gang leader in Haiti.

Also in the podcast.

People expressing their irritation, some saying that people using one seat for hours after only buying a very cheap drink, freeloading on the electricity, commenting about people's bad manners, certainly generating a lot of online debate.

How Starbucks in South Korea is dealing with laptop squatters.

When Donald Trump met Vladimir Putin in 2018, he sided with the former KGB agent instead of his own intelligence agencies on the question of Russian election interference.

Ukraine and its allies fear a similar outcome at the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska on Friday.

So, European nations have spent the past few days trying to persuade the US President to take Ukraine's views into account in any discussion of the war on its territory.

There are a series of virtual meetings today hosted by Germany with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in attendance.

But the British defence analyst Paul Moorcraft is not optimistic European leaders will be able to influence President Trump's thinking.

President Trump is very keen to get out and concentrate on the Far East.

So really what the Europeans are saying carries very little weight.

There won't be a coalition of the willing peacekeepers.

The Russians won't allow that.

So there's very little role for the Europeans.

I asked our diplomatic correspondent, Paul Adams, what the Europeans can realistically hope to achieve.

They know that they have got a difficult job here.

They've heard the language coming out of the White House ahead of the Alaska summit.

They've been alarmed, as have the Ukrainians, by talk of territorial swaps, clearly an idea that Steve Witkoff, the Trump's envoy and Vladimir Putin, talked about when they met in Moscow last week.

The White House has kind of slightly lowered expectations in the last 24 hours or so, saying this is a listening exercise.

But still, I think there is a sense among Ukraine's European allies that this is a moment of great danger, that President Trump might be persuaded, out of his desire to maintain a relationship with Vladimir Putin, to give things away that are not his to give away.

And so I think they are capitalizing on their improved status with Washington, you know, all the efforts at European defence spending, the kind of flattery that leaders like Sakir Starma

of the UK and Mark Rutter of NATO have been able to wield or to manage over the last few months, has given them some credit, some diplomatic credit in the White House, and they are going to try and use that credit.

And if you look at what's happened this week, you know, already we had a meeting convened at very short notice here in the UK, down in Kent, involving national security officials from a number of countries, including top Ukrainian officials, at which J.D.

Vance, the US Vice President, was present.

And now, this meeting today involving on the phone Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky.

Now, no one perhaps would have thought that that was likely to happen just a couple of days ago.

So, the Europeans are working at pace in an attempt to get in Donald Trump's ear to make sure that their message about the necessity of a ceasefire first

and the unacceptability of the notion of territorial swaps at this very early stage in the process, that those messages are ringing in Donald Trump's ear when he arrives in Alaska on Friday.

Yeah, a ceasefire looking increasingly important for Ukraine.

There have been numerous reports over the past 24 hours that it's suffering on that eastern front.

The latest one says Ukraine has ordered evacuations from an area where Russia has made some advances.

So, Russia is on the front foot here.

Yes, I think it is worth being a little cautious about what's going on around the town of Dobropilya, which is in the Donbass, in that area that the Russians allegedly allegedly want Ukraine to agree to pull out of altogether.

It's an extremely contested area.

The Russians have moved small units forward.

We don't quite know whether these are just probing units or whether this is a precursor to something significant, it could be, or whether it's just a way for Vladimir Putin to be able to say to Donald Trump when they meet in Alaska, hey, look, the front line is collapsing, we're on the front foot, we're winning.

Just as he did a few months ago in describing the situation in Kursk.

So we don't know exactly what is going on, but the Ukrainians clearly are fighting hard and trying to maintain a very unstable front line there.

Our diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams.

Israel's military chief, El Zamir, has approved the planned offensive to retake Gaza City, despite reports of his previous opposition to widening the conflict.

Israel captured the area back in 2023 before pulling out, but the military has now confirmed that it's begun new operations there.

Witnesses say there have been intense strikes in the past 24 hours, with 123 people killed, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, while another eight, including three children, have died of starvation or malnutrition.

Ayad is a local humanitarian coordinator.

The situation here is worsen more and more.

Nothing tangible changed, even though the slightly number of trucks that the Israeli occupation

let it enter,

some of it.

The last 48 hours from the south, we heard very well

the high explosion and bombardment and attacks from the tank shelters, arteries, and bombings.

At the same time, there's a new push for a ceasefire agreement after talks broke down last month.

The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli efforts were now focused on a comprehensive deal to release all the remaining hostages in one go.

I heard more from the BBC's Yoland Nell in Jerusalem.

We know now that a Hamas delegation is back in Cairo for meetings with Egyptian intelligence.

It still does look like a kind of long shot, but there is an assessment that there is a window of opportunity in these coming weeks because as Israel is preparing for this military offensive, which has been condemned internationally, oh, it says it's going to go into parts of Gaza where it doesn't have full control, where most of the two million Palestinians are now living.

Israeli media don't expect that to begin in earnest until October.

That's the window, and interestingly, there is now more talk of a comprehensive deal instead of a partial one.

And in the past, it's really been Israel that's been pushing for a phased deal to release the hostages.

Washington has said it's no longer pushing for that.

And now it seems Benjamin Netanyahu has changed his position.

He said, I want all of them, the release of all the hostages, both alive and dead.

That's the stage we're at when he was was talking to an Israeli TV channel, and we heard from Arab officials, they were being quoted last week, saying that Egypt and Qatar were preparing a new framework for a deal to release all the hostages in one go.

That's picked up by an Israeli newspaper today, saying that this could be a deal that would also end the war, and there'd be explicit clauses in there for the demilitarisation of Gaza, the symbolic exile of some Hamas members from the Strip.

And what are we to make of those comments from Benjamin Netanyahu that people should be able to leave Gaza, particularly in light of that report about possible talks with South Sudan?

Yes, I mean, it has been the Israeli government policy to promote this despite all the international condemnation.

They were encouraged by that vision that President Trump laid out earlier this year.

They basically want Gaza's 2 million people to leave for other countries.

Now, in the same TV interview, Benjamin Netanyahu said, I think that's the right thing to do, even according to the laws of war as I know them, is to allow the the people to leave, and then you go in with all your might against the enemy who remains there.

So he's quite vague on all of this.

But, you know, as much as Israel insists any plan would be voluntary, Palestinians and human rights groups, you know, others in the international community are warning that, you know, it's not voluntary if the conditions in Gaza basically become unlivable.

And, you know, this could amount to ethnic cleansing, to forced displacement, violations of international law.

And yeah, with all of that sort of being discussed, you have that AP Associated Press report on South Sudan.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry has declined to comment on whether there are talks going on about sending Palestinians there.

But this is not the first country we've heard about.

There have been other East African countries that have been mentioned in the past, Libya as well.

And Palestinians fear that if they left even temporarily from Gaza, then Israel would never let them go back.

This would undermine all hopes of a Palestinian state which should be in the West Bank Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital, according to the long-standing international formula for peace.

You know, Palestinians fear that Gaza could ultimately be annexed by Israel to build new Jewish settlements there.

Your land now.

Next to Taiwan.

A typhoon has been pounding the island, bringing heavy rain and strong winds.

I got the latest from our Asia-Pacific regional editor, Jae Sung-Li.

Well, officials there are saying that one person is missing after he went fishing and was swept away, and that many more are injured now.

More than 7,000 people have been evacuated from their homes, tens of thousands of households are without power, and flights have also been cancelled.

Schools and offices have been shot in nine cities and counties in the south, including metropolises like Kaohsiung and Tainan.

Now, the typhoon's impacts have been mainly in the southern areas.

In the capital Taipei, which is up all the way in the north, there have been some strong gusts, but no significant damage has been reported.

And the storm is now heading out into the Taiwan Strait and is moving towards China's Fujian province, which is in its southeastern coast.

But even as the storm starts to move away from Taiwan, the weather agency there says as much as 60 centimeters of rain is forecast in the southern areas in the next few days.

And as the island has a rugged terrain, you know, about 70% of it is covered by mountains, you know, the authorities are on high alert.

so they have mobilized more than 30,000 troops to help with relief and rescue efforts.

Now, of course, Taiwan has been hit by plenty of typhoons in recent months and years, and the storms impacting an area that's already been affected.

That's right, Ollie.

So, Taiwan, this island of 23 million people regularly sees typhoons during its summer season.

Podel, the latest one, is just the latest in a series of typhoons to either hit or impact Taiwan this year.

But after Typhoon Danas, which hit the island last month, what followed was that more than a year's rainfall was dumped in a single week in some southern areas, unleashing widespread landslides and flooding that left at least four people dead and scores more injured.

And as the Pacific typhoon season is expected to continue until around October, we could see more storms impact or batter the island in the next coming days or weeks.

And when some areas, as you've mentioned, are still recovering from the damage left behind by those previous typhoons.

Jae-sung-li.

The U.S.

has imposed a bounty of $5 million on a notorious gang leader in Haiti.

Jimmy Charizier, known as Barbecue, runs a violent group that controls most of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince.

The U.S.

alleges that Mr.

Charizier, along with an American citizen, violated sanctions by soliciting funds from Haitians in the U.S.

to help pay gang members and buy guns.

William O'Neill is the UN independent expert on on Haiti.

Charizier has had a horrendous impact on Haiti over the last five years or so, even longer, going back to 2017-18,

when he was still in the Haitian National Police and was implicated in several massacres 2017, 2018, 2019, where many, many people were killed, women were raped.

He then left the police and became a gang leader.

And after the president Moise was killed a little over four years ago now, he became more prominent and head of a coalition of gangs that morphed into a larger coalition last year, which has now taken over roughly 90% of the capital of Port-au-Prince and has been responsible for, again, deaths, rapes, and extortion of the population and many other human rights violations and grave crimes.

There's a growing pressure being put on Haiti by the U.S.

administration in several ways.

There have been other sanctions announced recently before this one.

This is a big one, though, $5 million.

There have been several arrests in the United States, including in this case, there's an indictment of a Haitian American who is alleged to have been funneling money and weapons to Chehrizier and other gangs.

It's more than symbolic, I would say, but it's hard to say it was going to lead to really quick, immediate change in the security situation in Haiti.

William O'Neill, the UN independent expert on Haiti.

Egyptian novelist Sonala Ibrahim has died at the age of 88 after a short illness.

He was famed for his critiques of political repression and jailed as a young man for being a member of a communist organization.

Sonala Ibrahim won a host of awards throughout his career, but in 2003 he declined a prize in Egypt, accusing the government of having no legitimacy.

I heard more about him from Mohammed Taha of BBC Arabic.

Sonala Ibrahim has been known as the Franz Kafka of Egypt.

He is that writer that is doing an experimental political writings, and sometimes it was critical to the Egyptian authorities that put him in prison in the rule of Gamal Abdel Nasser, but he tried to rectify that by other novels later by criticizing the authorities and the openness and the Sadat era.

Then

he tried to be on the edge, so he's criticizing the authorities, but at the same time backing up.

He's a very interesting writer.

So, mainstream success in terms of Egypt.

Was he popular in the rest of the Arab world?

Indeed.

Egypt is well known as the cultural hub of the Middle East.

So, if a novel will be read in Egypt and will be known in Egypt, it will be well known in the Arab world.

Indeed, he was known in the Arab world and he moved to live outside Egypt in the year of 2000.

He went to Oman and he wrote some writings there and that's why he has this also gulf element.

Mohamed Taha on Sanala Ibrahim who's died at the age of 88.

Still to come on the Global News podcast.

What's really fascinating that keratin actually attracts calcium and phosphate from your own saliva to rebuild your tooth enamel.

So it's the first regenerative technology in dentistry that would allow to use a sustainable and naturally abundant protein.

A potential breakthrough in treating tooth decay.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

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A cholera outbreak in the Darfur region of Sudan is getting worse, and the UN fears that more than half a million children are at risk.

The area has seen sustained conflict between the rapid support forces and the Sudanese army since the war broke out in April 2023.

One of the worst affected places is the town of Tawila, where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter after being displaced by the fighting.

Silva Penico is a coordinator for the charity Doctors Without Borders or MSF in Tawila.

From the beginning of June we started to get cholera cases notified from the villages around Tawila.

So we opened a cholera treatment center and started to work at community level in order to raise awareness but unfortunately things started to accelerate from July onwards on certain days 200 new cases referred to the facilities and as of today we have treated a little bit more than 6,000 cholera patients in total describe to us then if you can a little bit the conditions people are living in because presumably with so many people coming into what is a fairly small town in a short space of time the conditions are right, I suppose, for uh an outbreak like this.

Exactly.

The conditions are extremely diverse on the camp.

The colour hotspots, most of them, I mean, originate from the internal displaced person camp.

So as you said, we estimate the number of displaced persons within El Fashier between four hundred and uh five hundred thousand persons.

Most of them women and children are fleeing the fight from Al Fashir, Fascia, which is approximately 50 kilometers away, and one of the centers of the conflict in Sudan now.

They lack almost all of the basic necessities you can imagine: food, healthcare, safe water, and shelter.

So, all of the organizations here are working to scale up, but the conditions are really difficult for this.

Is it just the sheer numbers?

Why is it, for example, that people don't have safe water?

Because the situation situation has quite changed over the past months with the acceleration of influx of displaced population within the camp, there is a constant influx of displaced persons from Al-Fashir with an extreme level of vulnerability, so which put uh pressure on resources in Tawila and also forces to respond fast as those persons are really need for uh emergency aid.

For example, there was an attack on Monday in Al-Fashir and two hundred families were reported arriving in Taula yesterday evening, so we are going there this morning in order to see how we can support.

Silva Pennicott talking to James Copnell.

Rare earths have been a major sticking point in trade negotiations between China and the US.

These critical minerals power everything from electric vehicles to fighter jets to data centers, and China has such a stranglehold on them that when it cut supplies earlier this year, production around the world was disrupted.

But a project in Australia is hoping to provide an alternative source, as our Asia business correspondent Suranjana Tiwari now reports.

Drive three hours south of Perth, and you end up in very barren terrain.

There's hardly anything here except highways running through acres and acres of red sand.

This is Western Australia's mining territory, and I've been given exclusive access to a stockpile of rare earths belonging to a company called Iluca Resources.

I'm standing in the middle of a massive pit, and there are mountains of what looks like worthless dirt everywhere.

But in reality, this is the source of those rare earths, the critical minerals that are so important for things like electric vehicles and defense systems.

Iluca Resources says here there are 1 million tons of the stockpile and that's already worth more than 650 million US dollars.

In one corner of the pit, trucks are dumping the minerals onto a separator.

Australia has some of the largest reserves of rare earths in the world.

They're lightweight, super strong, and resistant to heat, making them useful in small electric motors and other applications.

But the process of extracting those minerals from the earth is expensive and complicated.

One country produces almost all the world's supply.

Dan McGrath is head of rare earths for Iluca Resources.

Back in the 90s, where rare earths were produced in France and other places, those operations relocated to China.

So China has since then very deliberately sought to control the rare earth market for the purposes of supporting their downstream manufacturing and defence industries.

The Australian government is loaning Iluca $1 billion to build a refinery.

It wants to reduce China's control of pricing and supply.

The refinery won't be online for two more years, but Beijing's recent restrictions on exports upended operations for major automakers and defence manufacturers globally, with some having to pause production altogether.

We know there are other governments around the world that want to participate.

Government intervention is a strategic decision, says Australia's Resource Minister Madeleine King, to help the world rely less on China and in turn reduce Beijing's control over pricing and supply.

The open international market in critical minerals and rare earths, it doesn't exist because there is one supplier of these materials.

We can either sit back and do nothing about that, or we take on the responsibility to develop a rare earths industry here that competes with that market.

In China, environmental damage from years of processing rare earths has led to chemicals and radioactive waste seeping into waterways.

That's something Australia will have to contend with too.

I spoke to critical mineral expert Professor Jacques Eckstein from Curtin University.

There is no metal industry that is completely clean.

In Australia, we've got mechanisms to handle that.

We've got a legal environment and a framework to at least deal with it responsibly.

Australia seems to have a lot going for it in the rare earths race as it tries to be a more reliable and cleaner source and one that crucially is independent of China.

Serenjana Tiwari.

It's not unusual for cafes to introduce policies to deter so-called so-called table hoggers, people who spend long periods nursing a coffee while working on laptops.

Some establishments have even banned laptops completely.

Well in South Korea, a Starbucks franchise has now asked people to stop bringing in bulky items, including desktop computers, printers and even partitions used to keep other customers out of the way.

Katie Silver has the story.

This trend of studying and working in cafes known in South Korea as Ka Gong Jo, it's been intensely debated.

The term seems to have been coined back in around 2020, picked up in prevalence in the last few years.

Nowadays, when it's used on social media, not always used in a very friendly manner.

People expressing their irritation, some saying that people using one seat for hours after only buying a very cheap drink, freeloading on the electricity, commenting about people's bad manners, certainly generating a lot of online debate.

Now, Starbucks, in a statement, has said that Starbucks Korea has updated its policy so all customers can have a pleasant and accessible store experience.

But they're far from the only cafe around the world looking to navigate how to balance this.

The BBC, for example, has reported about certain cafes in the likes of London and Newbury limiting laptops to just an hour on weekdays, banning them on the weekends.

We're also hearing as well about places where there are a lot of digital nomads, for example in Spain, in Barcelona and Valencia, actually charging hourly charges to try and deter what they've called laptop squatters.

And indeed, there was a cafe in Australia, for example, that put up signs that prohibited Zoom calls.

One study study even identified different types of cafe work-from-homers, and I'll give you an idea.

One of them was called device disconnectors who like to visit third places for a quick break away from technology.

And they also had such terms as caffeine creatives who go to cafes in order to try and get their creativity.

Katie Silver.

Well, your morning cup of coffee or tea and can of fizzy drink can be carrying hidden loads of microplastic.

According to a new report, it's hot drinks that could be giving you the bigger dose.

David Lewis has the details.

Well, there's a heat wave on in the UK right now, Ollie, that I'm sure you've noticed, and we've all been tucking into cold cans of drinks to cool down.

But according to this study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, they might well be loaded with microplastics.

And in more terrible news for British people, hot tea might carry even more, these experts say.

For those not in the know, microplastics are synthetic particles, generally not spotted with the naked eye.

They're found in waters, both fresh and marine, as well as terrestrially.

And they come from the breakdown of larger plastics, so things like carrier bags, bottles, and synthetic textiles, trash that's not biodegradable and can end up in the food chain, and that can impact our health.

And how did they find all this out?

Well, researchers analyzed dozens of drink samples of popular brands here in the UK from supermarkets.

and coffee shops.

Refreshments included hot and cold coffees and teas, fruit juices, energy and soft drinks, things like that.

Cold cups were filtered straight away, hot drinks given 30 minutes to cool down and then tested.

The team said they found microplastics in all the beverages people reported drinking and they warned the warm temperature and brews accelerated the release of microplastics from the packaging.

There are ways to limit ingestion for coffee in chai fans though.

According to this report, boiling hot tea in paper cups had one-third more microplastics microplastics present than drinks served in glass vessels.

So, opt for the latter if you want to sort of do your bit to stop yourself ingesting that much.

So, as more pollution clogs up the seas and land, this problem is not going anywhere soon.

In conclusion, the research team highlighted there was a need for more improved packaging materials and public awareness to try and limit all of our ingestion of these tiny particles.

David Lewis.

Tooth decay affects 3.5 billion people.

That's nearly half the world's population.

But But could toothpaste made from your own hair be the answer?

Scientists here in the UK have discovered that keratin, a protein found in hair, skin, nails and even sheep's wool, can repair damaged tooth enamel and stop decay in its tracks.

We heard more from Dr.

Sharif El-Shakawi from King's College, London.

What we found, which is really exciting, is that keratin protein, which is found in hair and found in sheep wool, it's very abundant natural protein that is present everywhere and sometimes is a waste material.

So we've used that and tuned the molecular structure of the keratin to be able to like kind of use it as a coat on the teeth and infiltrate this decay.

And then which what's really fascinating that keratin actually attracts calcium and phosphate from your own saliva to rebuild your tooth enamel.

So it's the first regenerative technology in dentistry that would allow to use a sustainable and naturally abundant protein.

The problem with enamel is once it's gone, it's gone forever.

You cannot get it back.

So all the solutions currently is just basically prevent further damage, but you cannot really regrow or self-heal.

So the concept that we're trying to develop is actually can we self-heal our own enamel without even noticing.

So if you have like a kind of micro small defect, your own body can actually heal itself and become like sustainable.

And that's something that we see as a longevity, anti-aging and a regenerative technology that we can start with teeth for that.

And it's something that has to be expensive.

And that's the whole point.

I mean, something that's relatively cheap with very deep tech signs that we can deliver to the people.

Dr.

Sharif El-Shakawi.

And that's all from us for now, but the Global News Podcast will be back very soon.

This edition was mixed by Alison Purcell Davis and produced by Richard Hamilton and Stephanie Zacherson.

Our editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Oliver Conway.

Until next time, goodbye.

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