Rescue efforts continue in Afghanistan after earthquake kills hundreds

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

I'm Janat Jalil, and in the early hours of Tuesday, the 2nd of September, these are our main stories.

Rescue efforts are continuing in Afghanistan's mountainous eastern region after an earthquake killed hundreds of people.

The EU blames Russia for sabotaging the navigation system of a plane carrying the head of the European Commission.

Israel is again accused of genocide, this time by a group of the world's leading experts on the subject.

Also in this podcast, the video shows the tennis player offering his cap to the child

before Piotr Shacherik appears to take it.

A man filmed snatching a tennis player's cap from a boy at the US Open apologises after a a huge online backlash.

Rescuers are struggling to reach villages in the remote mountains of eastern Afghanistan, where an earthquake has killed more than 800 people.

A Taliban official described the scale of the destruction as unimaginable.

The earthquake, which had a magnitude of six, struck on Sunday night, shaking buildings as far away as Pakistan's capital, Islamabad.

Kunar and Nangaha provinces were the worst affected.

We heard from this eyewitness in Kunar.

This is Sayyid Rahim from Afghanistan province, Kunar.

I saw some injuries and dead body.

A lot of horses are destroyed.

I prepared my emergency teams for responding, for the treatment, for the helping of the people.

They are very afraid and they are destroyed.

And they lose the parents, the children, the wives.

Dr.

Rafi Ulla works for a hospital in Assadabad in Kuna.

Our area isn't badly damaged, and my family is safe, but our little hospital has been receiving injured people from nearby towns and villages.

We treated over 200 people today, among them pregnant women, children, and the elderly.

We only have 150 beds, and we already had a lot of patients.

The Red Cross is helping, but we need more help.

We need tents, we need medicine.

It's a national tragedy.

Said Nizami is a senior journalist with the BBC's Afghan service and is from Kunar himself.

Kunar is a mountain region with limited farmland.

Not all villages are connected by route.

Women mostly work in the field, growing crops, caring for livestock, and feeding, drinking, water.

Healthcare facilities facilities are not available in every village or district.

The worst damage was in the mountain areas in Nurgal district in Kuner province.

Entire village were destroyed.

Rescue teams couldn't reach them until morning because the roads were blocked and helicopter couldn't land in the mountain at night.

Many people have died because they were trapped under the rubble and couldn't be rescued in time.

I saw the post in Facebook.

They're saying in one village, every ten minutes there is a funeral.

Sayed Nizami.

Well, we're unlikely to know the true number of dead for days, as many roads to the remote areas hit are still blocked.

Our South Asia correspondent, Yugita Limaye, spoke to us from the eastern city of Jalalabad and told us what she'd managed to see so far.

We started from Jalalabad towards the epicenter of the earthquake, but even this afternoon, we were not able to get anywhere close to the area.

The road blocked initially because of landslides.

They did work to clear that, but then this was a really kind of narrow mud track, I would say, in a village.

And it was completely backed up with vehicles, traffic running for hours, people trying to go in, ambulances just stuck for hours and hours.

But we did go to the airbase in this province, in this city, where the Taliban government have been running helicopter services.

They told us that they did about a hundred flights every day.

In fact, we were at the base for about half an hour, 45 minutes, and we already saw two or three helicopters come in and go out and we saw the injured being brought in and that really was a crucial lifeline because it was impossible to reach the worst affected areas.

Kuna provinces our colleague was pointing out earlier, mountainous terrain, really rugged landscape, but also these places are really tiny hamlets which are scattered all over the place.

So sometimes you know a little hamlet would perhaps just be four or five homes.

And if you see the aerial footage that has been shared by the government, which they've taken from helicopters, you can see that these are small, small hamlets that have been completely flattened.

At the best of times, they would have been really difficult to access and nearly impossible to reach right now.

So that process is going to be extremely slow.

Culturally, as well,

the dead are not necessarily all brought back to the hospital to hear the big city, Jalalabad.

They will all just be buried in their area.

So we will perhaps never know the true scale of the disaster.

And of course, they're coming into the biggest public hospital in the area, which is in the city Jalalabad.

Now, I've been there even a year ago, I was actually there,

and without a disaster, it was still overwhelmed, it was still overstretched.

And today, you know, we were inside it for quite a while, and it was really struggling to cope with the people coming in.

Because Afghanistan is suffering so many problems, it's got drought, hunger, severe aid cuts because of the Taliban's position on women.

What resources do the Taliban have to help those people that they're able to reach?

Well, so hospital, I mean, medical facilities, we've seen it, and particularly in this year, because we've seen the US cut all aid to Afghanistan.

We are seeing medical facilities really bearing the brunt of it.

And this is a country that is reeling under severe drought.

It's experiencing what is called an unprecedented crisis of hunger by the UN.

And of course, the Taliban's policy, specifically its restrictions on women, mean that many donors might not want to send funds to this country.

Yogita Limaye in Afghanistan.

Russia has been accused of sabotage after the navigation system of a plane carrying the President of the European Commission failed.

The GPS stopped functioning just as Ursula von der Leyen's plane was coming into land in Bulgaria.

The Financial Times reported that the pilots, after circling for a while, ended up using paper maps to ensure that they landed safely.

An EU spokesperson, Ariana Podesta, said they'd received information from Bulgaria that blatant interference by Russia was behind the incident.

We are, of course, aware and used to the threats and intimidations that are a regular component of Russia's hostile behaviour.

And of course, the EU will continue to invest into defence spending and in Europe's readiness even more after this incident.

Ms.

von der Leyen was visiting Bulgaria as part of a tour of Eastern European Union states to discuss their defence readiness against Russia.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there has been a notable increase in GPS jamming, which EU governments have warned could cause an air disaster one day.

Moscow denies any involvement.

So, how dangerous was this?

David Leermant is an aviation expert.

Not particularly, especially if you're flying on official duty for the European Commission, because you've got an aircraft which has got equipment that rather expects jamming, especially if it's flying in the direction of Eastern Europe.

In fact, any airliner nowadays that flies in Eastern Europe should expect jamming for at least part of its journey.

That's jamming of the GPS.

It doesn't jam every navigation aid.

But the idea that you have to get out of

I assumed it was a paper map.

I think the copy refers to an analogue map.

An analogue map, yes.

Uh nowadays pilots don't usually carry paper maps.

Some might do.

I don't think they'd be at all phased by having to get them out, because what they actually use nowadays is uh maps which might as well be on paper, but they're on the face of an iPad.

GPS is a a luxury.

It it gives you huge accuracy.

And if you have to go back to analogue, you don't have quite the same degree of accuracy, but it's quite good enough.

There's a separate problem though, which is if you once you've come to rely on GPS, you lack the expertise from using analog systems?

You might.

Yes, I think I could see quite a lot of pilots, not me, because I'm old and I'm used to the old systems, but I can see quite a lot of people being a little bit phased.

I'm a little bit surprised by the report that the pilot decided to circle for an hour before deciding to use the analog that they have available to him.

Now, don't forget, there are all sorts of things you've got.

You've got ground radio navigation aids that you can tune into, and they're like lighthouses.

You just look towards them, and you know where you are relative to them.

You know how far away, you know which direction they are, therefore, you know where you are.

You know, you really can

call up air traffic control and say, you can see me on radar, give me a hand, please.

David Leomount speaking to Sarah Montague.

Officials in Ukraine say the man suspected of assassinating a pro-Western politician on Saturday was acting in coordination with Russia.

Andrew Paruby was shot dead in the western city of Lviv.

Paul Moss reports.

He was certainly the kind of politician the Kremlin would hate.

Andrei Paruby wanted Ukraine to have closer ties to Europe, and he supported the use of the Ukrainian language rather than Russian.

So, no great surprise that police believe his alleged killer had ties to Russia.

The 52-year-old they arrested was described as an odd job man.

Some reports suggest he'd initially made contact with Russia to to inquire about his son, a soldier missing in action.

Ukraine's interior minister said the murder had been carefully planned, the victim's movements studied, and his escape thought through.

Paul Moss.

A group of the world's leading experts on genocide say Israel's actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.

The resolution by the International Association of Genocide Scholars adds to the growing number of legal experts warning that Israel is is committing war crimes.

Israel is also facing mounting international criticism, even from traditional allies.

Israel has rejected this resolution, saying it's entirely based on a campaign of lies by Hamas.

Emma Nader reports from Jerusalem.

So, this is a declaration passed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, which is the world's leading and largest professional association of genocide scholars, including many Holocaust experts.

Among their 500 members, we understand 28% took part in the vote and around 86% voted in favour of passing this declaration.

It's a whole litany of policies and

actions taken by Israel in the war that this resolution presents, saying that it constitutes not only genocide but war crimes and crimes against humanity, pointing to the widespread decimation of Gaza's healthcare sector, aid, educational sector.

It points to the reported 50,000 Palestinian children in Gaza who've either been killed or injured, saying that that would severely impact the ability of Palestinians as a group to survive.

It also points to the language used by Israeli political leaders, how some of them have fully supported plans to forcibly expel all of Gaza's 2 million Palestinians, as well as the total, near total decimation of housing in the Gaza Strip.

Now, Israel has vehemently denied and rejected this declaration, calling it based on Hamas lies, saying it's poorly researched.

And indeed, Israel has long rejected accusations that it is guilty of genocide in this war.

Now, most Western governments and indeed the United Nations have said that it is a court that should rule on whether Israel is committing genocide.

There is a case in front of the International Court of Justice at the minute, but that might take years to come.

Israel has been granted an extension to present its defense until January 2026.

And so, until then, while many other organizations, rights organizations have said that they find Israel guilty of genocide, until that ruling by the International Court of Justice, many governments won't find these kinds of declarations as authoritative.

Emir Nada in Jerusalem.

Russia's Vladimir Putin and India's Narendra Modi were among 20 or so world leaders who attended a summit in China hosted by Xi Jinping, intended to challenge US dominance.

And this week also sees the Chinese president overseeing a military parade in the capital Beijing to mark the end of the Second World War, which is expected to showcase the country's growing arsenal.

China now has the largest maritime force in the world.

Our China correspondent Laura Bicker sent this report.

I'm in a very windy Dalian on the east coast of China, just about four hours train ride from Beijing.

This is the cradle of China's shipbuilding industry, and it's here that they've built the most ships for the Chinese Navy.

Do you see the ships every day?

50-year-old Mr.

Liu is live streaming from the park in a bright floral shirt, a distinctive pattern in this region of China.

Shipbuilding companies bring job opportunities and lots of welfare benefits to Darian residents.

I'm very proud of Darian.

President Xi vowed that his country would never be humiliated by foreign powers.

China has been invaded more than 470 times by sea.

And it's that never again mentality that has propelled this country not just to be the biggest shipbuilding force in the world, but to now have the largest maritime force in the world.

Well, the scale is extraordinary, and it is across a broad spectrum.

So it's not just naval capabilities, but it's Coast Guard capabilities, it's its maritime militia.

Nick Childs is a maritime expert with the International Institute of Strategic Studies and says China's shipbuilding capacity is currently 200 times that of the US.

So it is on a scale that is in many ways eye-watering and it certainly suddenly caught the attention, I think, of the United States because the United States Navy, while it still has significant advantages, is seeing the gap because its shipbuilding capacity has dwindled significantly over the past decades.

China is fostering national pride in its navy.

Tour guides lead busloads of visitors into a theme park built to honor its maritime power.

The whole theme park is built like an aircraft carrier and what would be the runway to land jets.

You've got people wandering around eating their ice creams,

buying souvenirs,

including military uniforms.

China only two operational aircraft carriers with a third in sea trials.

It also has far fewer submarines than the US.

This limits its capacity to sail far from its own shores.

But there are signs this is changing and fast.

Rehearsals for a huge military parade to be held in Beijing this week have already previewed some of the country's emerging technology, including hypersonic weapons and at least two new types of underwater drone.

That report by Laura Bicker in China.

Still to come.

An overnight concert in London that is intended to make the audience nod off.

Max Richter's landmark eight-hour work sleep.

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Your perfect outfit is just a click away.

To Guyana now, the small South American nation which has in recent years experienced a massive oil boom, turning it into one of the world's fastest-growing economies.

But how can it escape the resource curse?

That's a question the Guyanese were pondering as they cast their votes to decide who will manage the country's billions.

In terms of oil,

we have innumerable sources of wealth, gold, minerals, and so on, oxide,

forestry, and all of that, but they're not using it wisely.

Most of it is being taken out of the country without people paying the due taxes and revenue that they ought to.

We need a change for better.

We need a better leader.

We need a leader that's concerned about the people of Guyana.

Not just a leader who just concerns about friends and family, getting friends and family richer and richer, and the people of Guyana just be living poor and poorer all the time.

Polls closed shortly before we recorded this podcast, but results are not yet in.

President Irvan Ali, who's seeking re-election, is facing two main challenges.

But whoever wins the presidency will also have to contend with Venezuela, which is trying to claim the region where most of Guyana's oil wealth is produced.

Our Central America correspondent, Will Grant, told us more about what's at stake in the elections.

Guyana is only 800,000 people, but there has been this economic boom that you've mentioned because of these recent offshore oil discoveries.

Now Guyana is essentially one of the world's fastest growing economies.

It's had double-digit growth for the past five years.

The

International Monetary Fund says the country's GDP has increased fivefold since 2020.

So obviously that's given the ruling party a lot of money to play with.

They're in a strong position.

The President, Irfan Ali, is in a strong position.

But there are people who say that they haven't spent that money wisely, essentially that it's been squandered.

I was going to ask you about that.

How has this huge oil wealth been managed?

Well, in part, the ruling party has used it for new infrastructure in the capital, Georgetown.

There have been unconditional social payments made to every resident, every citizen, I should say, over the age of eighteen, of around three hundred and fifty dollars.

All of that has strengthened President Ali's position with the electorate.

But opposition candidates and the opposition coalition believe that things are getting worse in terms of the disparity between the wealthy and the poorest, in terms of the cost of living, and the continuing issues of sort of nepotism and corruption in the country haven't improved either, they say.

And another issue is the tensions with Venezuela, which is casting a shadow over these elections.

Yes, even today on election day itself, security forces in the country say a boat which was carrying election officials and ballot boxes was shot at by the Venezuelan shore in that contested region of Esquibo.

Obviously, that is

a real concern for the Guyanese Defence Force and the police in that country.

The Venezuelan Defence Minister have said that they had nothing to do with it, denies any involvement, and accuses the country of inciting a conflict.

But yes, it is the background mood music to the entire election, in a sense.

Will Grant, wherever you're listening to us in the world, the web address in your country will end with a two-letter code.

Here in the UK, it's.uk, in the US, it's.us.

You get the idea.

It is perhaps unsurprising then that the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla, which was assigned.ai, has in recent years found a great way to make money out of it.

Nick Miles heard more from Jacob Evans.

Since the boom of artificial intelligence, really, the number of people buying these websites has almost gone up tenfold in the last five years alone and doubled in the last year as well.

And for last year, for Anguilla, they said that this brought in basically about 40 million US dollars, which is almost a quarter of its entire GDP.

And they expect that to go up again to about 50 million dollars this year.

And every time they've sort of reviewed and looked at what this domain revenue is bringing in, they've actually undersold it and they're actually getting way more than they actually thought.

And this is huge for an island like Anguilla because it's a tiny island, about 16,000 people, almost entirely reliant on tourism and importing things because it hasn't got much arable land and and things like that.

So, having a diversifying economy and something which isn't prone to challenges either because it's in the North Atlantic hurricane belt, and you know, relying on tourism, you get a pandemic, you get a hurricane that can decimate the entirety of your income stream.

This is a different income stream which they're hoping they can make sustainable and for long-term investment.

And guaranteeing that income stream for years and decades in the future is important because a lot of these islands have brain drains, people leave, don't they?

Absolutely, yeah.

And I think that's one of the biggest things for Anguilla.

As much as this is a positive and in the moment, it's really good, these things can plateau.

There's only so much

that these number of addresses can go up.

And whilst it's on the way up now, that will begin to level out.

And it's about what do we do in the immediate future.

So, for the new Premier of the island, Cora Richardson Hodge, she's made a pledge to sort of offset some of those costs which the Anguillans are facing right now.

The sort of a global cost of living crisis.

They want to offset import taxes.

Like I said, lots of things are imported and try and save Anguillan's money now.

But what is really important, and speaking to economists and to the IMF as well, is securing long-term investment, whether that's in schools, whether that's in infrastructure, whether that's sort of in tertiary education, to make sure that they can use this money to build up and diversify their economy even further.

Jacob Evans.

The former British European and Commonwealth heavyweight boxing champion Joe Bugner has died at the age of 75.

He had been living with dementia.

In a career spanning four decades, he fought everyone from Muhammad Ali to Joe Frazier to Henry Cooper.

Ade Edadoyne looks back at his life.

His nickname was Aussie Joe.

He was born in Hungary, but made his name here in England.

And Joe Budner has won the European title.

He shot to prominence at the age of 21 with one of the most controversial victories in British boxing history.

Budner claiming the British, European and Commonwealth titles by the narrowest of margins from a national treasure in Henry Cooper.

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I think personally it was one of the most hurtful, painful results a father could have had because they chased me out of my beautiful country of England because I beat a legend.

In a remarkable 32-year professional career, he fought the biggest names in the sport.

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He spent the final years of his life in Australia, where he got the nickname Aussie Joe, but he'll be forever remembered as one of the greatest heavyweights to emerge from England.

Add a adadoin on the life of the former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Bugner, who has died at the age of 75.

Later this week, a concert with a difference is happening at Alexandra Palace here in London, with an audience staying there overnight to experience the composer Max Richter's landmark eight-hour work sleep.

The album is 10 years old this month.

It's been played at locations as diverse as the Sydney Opera House and the Great Wall of China.

And it's been described as the lullaby for a frenetic world.

It sounds like this.

Max Richter explained what had inspired him to write the work.

I mean, the starting point of the piece actually was

an experience which Julia, my partner, had of listening in to concerts which I was giving in some other part of the world.

So she was listening sort of at crazy hours of the night.

And when I get back, we talk about this and she was saying that this is an amazingly sort of profound way to experience music in this sort of borderland, sort of liminal space between waking and sleeping, and how emotional that was.

And she was saying, we really need to make a piece about this and investigate this space.

So, you know, I went away and did some thinking and also consulted with David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, a friend of mine who I've worked with previously, and started to assemble a kind of vocabulary for a piece of music that could kind of accompany the sleeping mind through the night.

Yeah, I wonder as an artist, because the way that this is performed, people, they'll have their own beds.

Some of them will sleep for part of it, even though some will stay awake for the whole time.

As an artist, the idea that somebody might not be fully present for all of your work, how do you reconcile yourself with that, that they might miss great chunks of it?

I'm really fine with that.

You know, if people are sleeping, then the piece is working on some level.

I mean, it's a piece without any rules.

And when we play it live, as you said, you know, some people stay awake, they treat it as a concert.

Other people,

they turn up and they basically go to bed and we see them in the morning.

So, you know, there are a lot of different ways to experience this piece.

But I think for us as musicians, when we're playing, we see ourselves really as accompanists to something that's happening in that room, you know, which is hundreds of people, many of them strangers, coming together in an unfamiliar place and deciding to trust one another to go to sleep.

It's very much about a kind of a community forming during that performance.

What do you do, if anything, about one of the greatest scourges when it comes to sleep, people's mobile phones?

Well, I mean, I do suggest that people, you know, put their phones away, but like I said, you know, it's really not a performance where I want to try and prescribe too much.

Really, it's like, you know, every artwork is in some sense, you know, 50% the work and 50%, you know, the listener's biography, their feeling, their enthusiasms for the music.

So there's a kind of a dialogue that's set up, and I think that is, you know, it's best experienced without too many distractions, that's for sure.

The composer, Max Richter, talking to Anna Foster about his eight-hour work sleep.

A man who was caught on camera at the US Open last week snatching a cap that a tennis star had proffered to a young boy in the crowd has apologised after the video went viral, sparking a huge online backlash.

Piota Szecherek, a Polish businessman, said he'd made a grave mistake.

The tennis star, Camil Maishak, who hadn't realised what was happening at the time, managed to track his young fan down to give him another cap, as Harry Bly reports.

The 50-year-old chief executive of a Polish paving company took to social media on Monday, where he unequivocally apologised to the boy, his family, the fans, and the player himself.

It all started last Thursday when the tennis player Camille Maikshak, who had just won his match at the US Open, was meeting fans in the stands and signing autographs.

The video shows the tennis player offering his cap to the child

before Piotr Shacherik appears to take it.

And after the video went viral, the reaction was ferocious, with comments like, that's despicable, that's like taking candy from a baby, and and this is absolutely disgusting to watch.

Mr.

Shachetik was quickly identified, with many people leaving poor reviews on his business.

In his apology, Mr.

Shachetik said he was convinced the tennis player had been passing the hat in his direction.

The boy who had the hat snatched away was tracked down too, at the request of Camille Maikshak.

The pair reunited over the weekend, with the player sharing a video of him giving the young fan his very own cap.

Harry Bly reporting.

And 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 Williams, the producers William McSheffery and Arian Kochi.

The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Janat Jalil.

Until next time, goodbye.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best store.

We the man to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We the man to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.