Charlie Kirk murder suspect arrested

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

I'm Julia McFarlane, and in the early hours of Saturday, the 13th of September, these are our main stories.

US officials say they've arrested a 22-year-old man suspected of shooting dead the prominent right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

Nepal has a new interim leader after her predecessor was ousted by violent youth-led protests.

Also in this podcast, Daily Life in a War Zone.

This must be the most dangerous bread delivery in the world.

If it weren't for the fact that we have an armored car, no one would be bringing bread there anymore.

We'll bring you a special report from frontline communities in eastern Ukraine.

We got him.

That's how the governor of the U.S.

state of Utah put it, as he announced the arrest of a man in connection with the murder of the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk on Wednesday.

The 22-year-old Tyler Robinson from Utah was taken into custody after a tip-off by a family member.

Mr.

Kirk was shot in the neck whilst addressing a large crowd at Utah Valley University.

Officers are examining evidence, including bullet casings, apparently carved with phrases such as hey fascist catch.

Our North America correspondent, Nedito Fik, sent this report from Utah.

Congratulations, you have been selected to receive the Resident Presidential Scholarship.

This was Tyler Robinson years ago, celebrating his scholarship to university.

Today, his unsmiling face is on a mugshot.

The 22-year-old was taken into custody late last night from his home in southern Utah, hundreds of miles from where he is accused of fatally shooting Charlie Kirk.

Tyler Robinson's father persuaded his son to turn himself in after he confessed to him that he was the one who shot Mr.

Kirk.

News of his arrest was broken by President Donald Trump, who was appearing on a Fox News breakfast show to talk about a baseball game he attended the night before.

With a high degree of certainty, we have him.

We're in custody, okay?

In custody,

everyone did a great job.

We worked with the local police, the governor.

Everybody did a great job.

After a manhunt that lasted 33 hours with the FBI appealing to the public for help, the authorities confirmed the suspect's identity and explained what had happened overnight.

They interviewed a family member who told them Robinson had become more political in recent years.

Utah's governor, Spencer Cox, said the family had discussed the conservative activists' upcoming event at Utah Valley University.

In the conversation with another family member, Robinson mentioned Charlie Kirk was coming to UVU.

They talked about why they didn't like him and the viewpoints that he had.

The family member also stated Kirk was full of hate and spreading hate.

Police then tracked down his roommate, who showed them several social media messages he said Tyler Robinson had been sending.

Here's Governor Cox again.

The content of these messages included messages affiliated with the contact Tyler, stating a need to retrieve a rifle from a drop point, leaving the rifle in a bush, messages related to

visually watching the area where a rifle was left, and a message referring to having left the rifle wrapped in a towel.

The messages also refer to engraving bullets and a mention of a scope and the rifle being unique.

The authorities have a significant amount of evidence in this case, including recovering bullet casings engraved with anti-fascist messages.

The governor said he had hoped the gunman wasn't one of their own from Utah.

That he was added another layer of shock to the community here in Orem.

That report by Neda Tofiq.

The latest attack comes at a time when the U.S.

is highly polarized.

The Utah governor has even described it as a watershed moment.

Robert Pape is director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threat, which researches terrorism and conflict.

My colleague Anita McVeigh put it to him that, following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a lot of public figures in the U.S.

will be feeling nervous.

That's absolutely correct.

So Charlie Kirk was an extremely prominent figure in the MAGA movement, but he's not a unique figure in the MAGA movement.

And this is true on the left as well, or for Democrats as well.

You have elected officials and then you have media influencers who are extremely prominent.

So on the Republican side, you have a number of podcasts with millions of views, or certainly near, you know, near that.

and they this is exactly one of the reasons that Charlie Kirk has been targeting he's extremely prominent

and then you also have leaders in Congress you have leaders who are going right now to plan town halls

you have leaders who are planning town halls trying to figure out should they have metal detectors should they even go

this is going to be the new world we've moved into.

And it's not a world that's going to be over in just a day or two.

I'm sorry sorry to say, we've reached a watershed moment of political violence in the United States.

In June, I published a large New York Times op-ed titled, We Are on the Brink of Major Political Violence.

Your listeners can go see that.

This is now happening, and this is going to be with us for months.

So how would you advise high-profile individuals to deal with this in the days and weeks ahead, given that an essential part of of what they do is being seen by the public, is communicating directly to the public, not only speaking from a podcast studio or

via a TV camera.

Yeah, there is no magic solution to this.

This is a problem where they are effectively what we call soft targets.

They do not have the money to have the security that a president or a prime minister

is going to have.

You're not going to have hundreds of people able to surveil an event in advance.

You're not going to be able to.

So, this is going to be a major challenge.

And this is one of the reasons why, for years, I've been saying we have to do more to tamp down political violence in the United States.

This is not just a new thing.

My research at the University of Chicago has been going on for five years on the growth of American political violence.

And now we've reached a watershed moment.

This is, there isn't going to be a quick, cheap solution to this.

What is the solution, Robert?

The best near-term solution is for political leaders on different sides of the aisle.

In America, that means Democrat and Republican to make joint video statements to condemn violence from their own side.

So we've got to get out of this idea where Democrats complain about the Republican side of the House and Republicans complain about the Democratic side of the House.

Our research shows that only makes it worse.

If the leaders will condemn violence from their own constituents, this is how you can actually lower the temperature.

We have research that shows this.

And now the politicians have real reason because their lives are on the line.

So they've got to make a real choice here.

And the key thing they can do is they can make joint video statements, having senators from both sides, Republican, Democrat, governors from both sides, Republican, Democrat, former presidents from both sides, Republican Democrat, joint video statements, and not just a one-off, multiple of this, because we've reached a fever point.

Robert Pape.

To Nepal now, and a new interim leader has just been sworn in, following a wave of protests earlier this week, which forced the Prime Minister to step down.

Sushila Kharki will be the country's first female leader.

The protests were sparked on social media and driven by students and young activists, and things only got worse when the previous government blocked all access to social media platforms.

But the process to select the new interim prime minister took place not by way of political convention or any normal parliamentary method, but through chat rooms on Discord, a platform popular with video gamers.

This was the view of one young protester.

We were wanting her for a long time.

Generally, this revolution was not just for a day or two.

It was like for years and years people were longing for something like this, and we are so happy and so proud, like literally proud of this moment.

So, what do we know about the new interim Prime Minister, Sushila Kharki?

Here's our global affairs reporter and Bharasana Etarajan.

She was the former Chief Justice of Nepal's Supreme Court, well known for some of her judgments targeting corruption even at the highest political level, that even earned the wrath of the then government in 2016-17 when there was a motion to impeach her.

And she is highly respected within the country.

The fact that the youth or Gen Z who were protesting against the previous government chose her as the leader so that she can clean up and she can hold a free and fair election shows what kind of respect she has.

And there has been widespread welcome and people saying, and she's the right person to lead this country at a time of difficulty.

And Baristan, these protests protests were driven by social media at the start.

That's not anything too unusual.

But what's so extraordinary about what's happening in Nepal right now is it seems that the process for political change has been happening on Discord, this app for gamers.

It's quite unprecedented.

Probably this is the first time we are seeing in the region where a video gaming chat room was instrumental in choosing the country's interim leader.

Now, these Gen Z or young people, they were organizing these polls, even on this Discord channel, which is very popular with video gamers.

It suddenly grew up from 40,000 to 140,000 members, and the chat rooms were full of discussions about where the country can go, what they can do.

This momentum built up, and in fact, there was a poll within this Discord channel how to choose the leader, and Sushila Kharki got the maximum number of votes.

Of course, there are critics who would say that this is not the best way.

There are flaws because there can be trolls who can join this discussion on the chat room.

But even though events in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, where social media was used to mobilize people for protest, here is a process where instead of sitting in a big convention center or in a government hall where you have 100,000 people joining in a chat room, of course, it's going to be chaotic, but they did come out with something which can be acceptable to everyone.

And that is where this protest is quite different from other events in the region.

But at the same time, what's going to happen next?

Whether the youth-led movement can sustain the structure after what they call as a huge revolution for a country like Nepal?

And Barasan Etarajan.

The regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has long been accused of human rights abuses against its own people, subjecting them to religious persecution, starvation, forced labor, and now a major new report by the UN has accused Pyongyang of increasingly implementing the death penalty for people watching and sharing foreign films and TV shows.

The UN is now calling for the situation to be referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Our Seoul correspondent, Gene McKenzie, has the details.

It's long been known that North Koreans endure some of the worst human rights abuses in the world, but according to this report, their suffering is getting worse.

The UN has interviewed more than 300 people who've escaped the country in the past decade and found that the government has tightened its control on all aspects of people's lives.

The death penalty is being handed out more often, including to people caught watching and sharing foreign films and TV shows, as Kim Jong-un tries to limit his citizens' access to information.

Witnesses have told the UN that the executions are carried out by firing squads in public to instill fear in people.

We spoke to a young woman who escaped the country two years ago, and she said three of her friends were executed after being caught with South Korean content.

I went to one of my friends' trials where he was sentenced to death.

He was tried alongside drug criminals.

These crimes are treated the same now.

It made me very afraid.

The UN wants the situation to be referred to the ICC, but that referral would need to come from the UN Security Council, and two of its members, Russia and China, are currently supporting North Korea.

Just last week, all three leaders came together for a military parade in Beijing.

Gene McKenzie

In 2022, scientists studying images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope noticed previously unseen little red dots.

Ever since, they've been trying to work out what they are.

Early on, some thought they might be very distant and therefore very old galaxies.

But now, researchers think they might be something entirely different, a new class of of object called black hole stars.

Rebecca Kesby has been speaking to the lead author of a new study, Dr.

Anna de Craaff at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg.

She began by describing what these little red dots look like.

They have these very, very red colours, and that's also why we didn't see them before, right?

So with the other telescopes, like the Hubble Space Telescope, we couldn't see them.

And so we recently took what we call spectra of these little red dots.

You essentially split the light kind of like a rainbow.

And in doing that, you get a fingerprint.

And then you can compare that fingerprint to all sorts of different models.

So what we did is we took basically every model we could think of.

So stars, like in our own Milky Way, different galaxy types, different black hole models, and nothing could fit the data.

And so that led us to conclude that we need something totally new.

Wow, this is really interesting.

So this could be a totally new kind of form then.

I mean, so they're not really really stars, we don't think.

Exactly.

So they have some properties that are a little bit like stars.

So we think they are essentially glowing balls of gas, but very different from stars.

They're not fueled by nuclear fusion in the center, so like our own sun would be.

But instead, there is a black hole in the center that is powering this whole star-like object.

That's why we call them black hole stars, but it's a very new phenomenon.

It sounds very exciting, but it sounds like it's going to be quite difficult to prove or really find out.

How are you going to study this if it is a totally new area of astrophysics?

Well, first of all, we've ruled out that it cannot be anything that we're familiar with.

And so we have to kind of go back to the drawing board and come up with something new.

And what we're doing now is taking more and more detailed observations, still with James Webb, to try and tease out what is the actual physics here.

So I think we are convinced that there is a lot of gas there, kind of like a star.

We are also, for the most part, convinced that there has to be a black hole in the center, but the details of this require more work.

Like, how do you form such a system?

Where does it end up?

And so we're now getting the right data to figure out all these important details.

Dr.

Anna de Craft.

Still to come.

That was one of the photos that led Michelle, the bride, to turn detective.

Who was this tall man in her wedding pictures?

A hunt for a mystery wedding guest.

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to eastern Ukraine now, where an estimated 218,000 people need evacuation from Donetsk region, including more than 16,000 children.

The area, which is crucial to the country's defense, is bearing the brunt of Russia's summer offensive, including daily attacks from drones and missiles.

Some are unable to leave, others unwilling.

And despite the growing threat from Russian drones, there are those who would rather take their chances than leave their homes behind.

From the frontline communities in Donetsk, our international correspondent Quentin Somerville sent this report.

So they're just loading up the bread dough here.

This bread will be given for free to frontline communities, to people really who are in

a desperate situation.

Two different armoured vehicles arrived at our place from Svanyevka and Siversk at 8 a.m.

They load up and leave.

We bake around two and a half, three thousand loaves of bread a shift and give them away the next day.

This must be the most dangerous bread delivery in the world.

We've moved three times already.

If it weren't for the fact that we have an armored car, no one would be bringing bread there anymore.

We're heading into Bilazerska.

It's been getting hammered by the Russians.

The biggest threat here is drones.

Most of the vehicles have drone jamming equipment.

Just listen

to how quiet it is here in Bilazerska.

We've hardly seen a soul and there's good reason for that

because

Russia has been increasing, not lessening its attacks since that summit in Alaska.

The old, the sick, the infirm, those that couldn't already make it out, are stuck here.

The only person I meet on the streets that day is a man pushing a bicycle.

He's been to the bond out house of his sister-in-law to collect a couple of metal pots.

Vlodimir has his own reasons for staying.

What will be will be at 73 years old.

I'm not afraid anymore.

I've already lived my life, so to speak.

I stayed here because of my wife.

You know, my wife has had five surgeries.

Life's challenges don't vanish in war, and 53-year-old Ochla is facing more than most.

Through acquaintances, we were given this little room for a couple of months.

And after that, we don't know what to do.

How is life here now?

Life is hard.

We have no money for food.

All our savings went to the hospital.

I have terrible depression.

I cry at night.

The closer they come, the heavier the shelling is here.

We will have to move farther away somewhere, but we don't know how because we have no money.

In Slovyansk, another city under pressure, I listened night after night as the hum of Russian drones changed just before they dive.

But despite the nightly raids, the 51-year-old Nadia says she's staying.

She said, Mom, everything will be fine.

Our son, our son.

There are no more tears left to cry.

We miss you.

You were our hope for everything.

On a hilltop above the town, her 29-year-old son Sergei is buried.

He died fighting the Russians two years ago.

How can you lose the place where you were born, where you grew up, where your child grew up, where he found his final rest?

And then to live your whole life with the feeling that you will never again visit this place.

I cannot even imagine that right now.

The longer she stays here, the greater the risk to her own life.

But for now, to leave is unthinkable.

There are no easy goodbyes here in Donetsk.

A report by Quentin Somerville.

The southern European nation of Albania has the dubious honour of being rated as one of the continent's most corrupt.

In our earlier podcast, we reported on what the government of Albania is claiming is a solution.

It has appointed a new government minister to help fight corruption.

Her name is Diella, and she's a virtual minister, powered by artificial intelligence.

Diella will oversee government procurement.

Albania's Prime Minister, Eddie Rama, has now given an interview to the BBC.

My colleague Andrew Peach put it to him that the new minister will just respond to what the humans who program her tell her and will, therefore, have minimal impact on corruption in the country.

Diella is already helping as a virtual assistant in our very advanced platform of where we offer online for all our citizens 95%

of our services and Diella has helped more than a million applications and that has issued herself 36,000 documents with a digital seal.

On the other hand, Diella is working for something very fundamental for us, which is the transfer of the acquis communitaire, the European Union body of law, to our legislation.

Countries before used

armies of translators, armies of pre-drafters and drafters,

and it took a lot of years.

But what you've described is a couple of functions that people will be familiar with.

An AI bot fronting any large organization or government is pretty common, really, really useful.

And of course you can use AI for a bureaucratic process of the one you went on to describe.

But how does it make your government operations 100% free of corruption, which is what you've claimed?

This is what we are working on.

And that's why I explained that this is what we expect from Diela.

We are working together with a very, very brilliant team, which is not only Albanian, but also international, to practically come out with the first

full AI model in public procurement.

Not only will wipe out every kind of potential influence on the process of public biddings, but

will also make these processes much more fast, much more efficient, and totally accountable because they will be transparent.

In the end, this is just a big publicity stunt, isn't it?

I don't think it hurts.

It has also another impact.

It forces and it exercises a great hell of pressure on the other members of the cabinet, on the other agencies within the country, to run and think differently.

And this is, in fact, the biggest advantage I'm expecting from this minister that will be there to collect from the others the things that the others should deliver.

So it's quite an exercise when it comes to the the psychological effect it has.

Prime Minister Eddie Rama speaking to Andrew Peach.

And finally, how many people were at your wedding?

Did you ever find yourself stumped for a name or not recognizing a long-lost cousin or distant relative?

Well, bride Michelle Wiley was perplexed when she got her wedding photos back in 2021 and had no idea who one of the wedding guests was.

And after asking the venue, the other guests, the photographer, and of course her husband, she was still in the dark.

It sparked a four-year manhunt.

Now, finally, she has an answer, as Stephanie Prentice reports.

It's your friend's big day.

Your partner has gone ahead early, and you're running late.

My partner was actually, he was a bridesman at his friend Michaela's wedding.

He went off first thing in the morning.

I'm rushing to the venue, I get there.

I'd never met Michaela's husband, so I see this groom standing there, nervously waiting.

So I'm thinking, cool, right, no worries.

Look about and there's one seat left.

I'm thinking, that's obviously my seat, I'll take that.

It was not in fact his seat.

Andrew Hill House was meant to be at a different wedding two miles away.

Something that soon became clear.

The music starts, everyone stands up, everyone turns round in unison,

and out comes Michelle.

I've just got a roll with it at that point, because you can't exactly just get up and walk out of a wedding.

So eventually the ceremony ends.

Right as I lift myself out of the seat, I hear somebody, can we get everybody together for some group photos, please?

And I'm just like,

That was one of the photos that led Michelle, the bride, to turn detective.

Who was this tall man in her wedding pictures?

Walking down the aisle, didn't even notice them.

It was just when I got the pictures back for the photographer.

I was like, John, who's this guy here?

Right behind my mum and dad?

And he's like, I have not got a clue.

After the service, the mystery guest was gone.

Michelle said the photos would pop into her head over the years, and she even wondered if she had a stalker until she decided to ask an influencer to post them.

Within two hours of it, we managed to find him.

We commented on the post, which is just brilliant.

I see all these pictures of me circled and who is this man?

And initially, I was afraid, I thought I was in trouble.

It's such a relief finding out now that I don't have a stalker, my husband doesn't have a stalker.

Michelle and Andrew have now met, formally, and say they plan to stay in touch, perhaps attending each other's major life events in future, though next time, on purpose.

Stephanie Prentiss.

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 or any of the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

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

Use the hashtag Global Newspod.

This edition was mixed by Holly Smith, and the producers were Alison Davis and Stephen Jensen.

The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Julia McFarlane.

Until next time, goodbye.

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