Hamas agrees to parts of US peace plan for Gaza

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

I'm Nick Miles and at 5 hours GMT on Saturday the 4th of October, these are our main stories.

President Trump has urged Israel to immediately stop bombing Gaza, saying he believes Hamas is ready for a lasting peace.

The American rapper Sean Diddy Combs has been sentenced to just over four years in jail following his conviction on prostitution-related charges.

Also in this podcast, scientists race to make living computers powered by lab-grown mini-brains.

We shouldn't be scared of them.

You know, they're just computers made out of a different substrate, of a different material.

It happens to be biological tissue.

And after another deadly shark attack in Australia, we look at solutions.

I personally as a surfer feel safer with a drone to look at someone watching from the water's edge and maybe spotting a fin.

It is to be able to cover a kilometre of beach and 500 metres out to shore.

There have been many false dawns when it comes to finding a solution to the Gaza conflict.

Two ceasefires came and went, but now it seems that President Trump feels confident it can be resolved and he praised those who'd assisted in the process.

I want to thank the countries that helped me put this together.

Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and so many others.

So many people fought so hard.

We were given a tremendous amount of help.

Everybody was unified in wanting this war to end and seeing peace in the Middle East.

And we're very close to achieving that.

Thank you all, and everybody will be treated fairly.

Well, the President has told Israel that it must stop bombing Gaza immediately.

That's after Hamas indicated that it could be ready to release all remaining hostages, living and dead, as part of its response to Washington's 20-point proposed peace plan.

An official speaking on behalf of Hamas said the group had accepted in principle, but sought to make some changes.

So, which parts of President Trump's plan is Hamas agreeing to, and which parts is it seeking to amend?

Our correspondent in Jerusalem is John Sudworth.

On face value, it appears to accept some of the broad principles: an end to the war, a prisoner exchange, it says, and then in another part of this statement, it appears in word at least to agree to the release of hostages, although it does say that's going to be subject to the correct field conditions being met and possibly further negotiations.

And it also, in one part of the statement, appears to accept the idea, a key part of this peace proposal, that the governance of Gaza would be handed over to a committee of sort of technocratic Palestinians.

All of that, of course, will be read by some as Hamas having embraced at least parts of the plan.

On the other hand, what has it rejected?

Well, nothing explicitly, but there are huge parts of this plan that simply aren't mentioned.

The disarmament of Hamas, of course.

I mean, that's a key part of the plan, absolutely insisted upon by the Israelis.

There's no mention of that.

And further to that, Nick, right at the end, it mentions that in terms of the future of the Gaza Strip and what it calls the inherent rights of the Palestinian people, it talks about further discussion within a national framework, and it talks about a unified Palestinian movement of which Hamas will be a member and which it will contribute responsibly.

But the question is, is this a genuine engagement with the broad principle of the plan as well as some of the key elements?

Or is this an exercise in buying time?

John, I'm just reading on the Reuters News Agency that a Hamas official saying that we're not going to disarm until, in his words, the Israeli occupation ends.

Which parts of the things that Hamas are rejecting will be most difficult for Israel to swallow?

Israel has always said that this war is about the complete defeat of Hamas.

The idea that Israel would agree to a peace plan, and in particular, this current Israeli government would agree to a peace plan that sees Hamas remaining as an armed force, is impossible.

And the idea, therefore, that Hamas is linking that prospect to other conditions, I think, will at least suggest to sceptics in this Israeli administration that this is an attempt to sort of go back to first principles, long-drawn-out negotiations, which this peace plan was meant to avoid.

I mean, everybody admitted that some of the detail was lacking, but the broad principles were laid out in those 20 points, and it was a kind of take it or leave it.

And I think on that point in particular, the idea of equivocating over the idea of disarmament will be very likely to be seen by the Israeli government as playing for time and a sign that this is not an acceptance in anything like good faith.

John Sudworth.

Well, as John was saying, there is likely to be opposition from some in Israel to ending the military campaign in Gaza now.

So let's take a closer look at why President Trump is sounding so positive about the peace plan.

Our U.S.

State Department correspondent is Tom Bateman.

He has absolutely embraced the statement from Hamas and said that he believes that they are ready for a lasting peace, as he puts it.

And then goes on to say, and this is an extraordinary statement, given this is the President of the United States talking about his absolutely key ally in the region.

Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza so that we can get the hostages out safely and quickly.

For the Israelis, they are going to realize the sort of urgency and pressure that Donald Trump is putting on this.

He wants his deal done yesterday.

The only nod in Donald Trump's statement is the fact that there is still really quite a complex road to go down.

He says we are already in discussions on the details to be worked out.

So I think the point is we're still in the situation that neither Israel nor Hamas is prepared to say no to Donald Trump.

But to get the whole of his 20-point plan done, there still needs to be mediated negotiations between the two.

So that remains critical.

But he is, I mean, there is extraordinary momentum now, I think, to this process.

I mean, it will take an extraordinary amount of pressure from Donald Trump on Israel to accept these things, which for many in the Israeli cabinet are unacceptable.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think what we've seen in the Hamas statement, the very final paragraph, which is written in quite sort of esoteric language, is basically about the demand for their disarmament as part of Donald Trump's proposal.

And what they are saying there is that that is a matter for the Palestinians and for it to be decided between the Palestinian factions as part of an ongoing process.

So they are rejecting the parts of Mr.

Trump's plan that say they should be demilitarized and disarmed and that they should be exiled or agree to an amnesty where they agree to no longer pose any kind of military threat.

Now, that is not going to be acceptable to the Israelis.

They're going to point that out very strongly to the Americans when they start responding to this both privately and publicly publicly after Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, is over.

I'm sort of reminded a bit of what's happened with the process between Russia and Ukraine when it comes to Donald Trump, in that he has repeatedly sort of put these frameworks out there.

And what you've seen is the Ukrainians accept, but the Russians sort of play for time and run rings around him.

And it shows you that despite the demands and the urgency, there is still the ability for one or either side to use the process to try to stall and therefore to sabotage if they are not in a position to do so.

So, you know, you've got both sides still really unhappy, very, very unhappy with parts of this package, but Donald Trump basically wanting to be able to stand up and say, I've got the hostages out, I've ended the war.

Have we now potentially reached the moment finally when Washington may say to Netanyahu, look, make a deal or we're going to reduce or cut off weapons completely?

I don't know if Donald Trump will ever get there, but it's clear that he has become increasingly irritated with the Israeli leadership in the the last few weeks.

And I think he's doing two things here.

He has listened very carefully actually to the Arab and Muslim countries, particularly in that meeting they had at the United Nations in New York last week.

The proposal that he put out to end the war, they were pretty happy with.

They feel, some of them, that it then got rewritten under pressure from the Israelis or key parts of it over the weekend.

And so it ended up more favourable to Israel than what they had understood it would be.

But he has listened.

And that, I think, for Qatar and for other Arab and Muslim countries has been a very very important moment they feel that he has been drawn far more towards their position but the other point it goes back to what happens next because in terms of leverage and pressure to get Netanyahu to sign up to it

you know no other American president has managed to do that so far now I think Mr.

Trump feels he's got enough credit in the bank in terms of what he's done for Netanyahu to be able to just pull him along but in the end if a deal costs Netanyahu his coalition and his job, because the far-right reject it and bring down the government, that becomes a very, very strong motivation for him not to do the deal and to find ways out of it.

So Donald Trump's sort of going to have to push against that if that becomes the block in this process.

Tom Bateman in Washington.

The American rapper Sean Diddy Combs has been sentenced to just over four years in prison for his conviction on charges related to prostitution.

He flew people across the U.S.

for drug-fueled orgies he called freak-offs.

At a court in New York, the federal district judge said a substantial sentence must be given to send a message that abuse against women was met with real accountability.

Gloria Ulred is a lawyer for some of the alleged victims of Sean Combs.

She had this to say outside the court.

Mr.

Combs will be in prison for a while.

The judge basically had a lot of good things to say about Mr.

Combs and his contribution to the community over many years and to racial justice.

But on the other hand, he has to pay the price for what he did.

Claire Richardson has been speaking to Anushka Mutanda Dochherty, host of the Fame Under Fire podcast, which takes a look at celebrity legal battles.

Diddy, if we remember, was charged with sex trafficking, transportation for prostitution, and racketeering with conspiracy.

The big ones there being RICO and sex trafficking.

He was acquitted of those two, but he was convicted on two counts of transportation for prostitution.

Now, we've been building up to sentencing for a while.

We wanted to see how long he was actually going to get behind bars.

The defense were asking for 14 months, that's pretty much time served, and the prosecution 11 years.

The judge made the decision for 50 months, that's just over four years.

Taking off the time he's already already served inside the MDC, the Metropolitan Detention Center, he'll be in there for just over three years and then a five-year probation period.

So how will victims and their families feel about this?

It's quite short of the 11 years that prosecutors wanted to see him put away for.

You know what the reaction has been from the lawyers of victims?

That they felt that Judge Arun Subramaniam had a very victim-centric response to what the defense presented, that he very much came down on the side of saying, you have done irreparable harm to two women, Jane and Cassie, Jane using a pseudonym there, and that we do not feel that you have shown enough remorse to warrant you being released from jail right now.

He thinks that he still needs to serve more time and be more repentant.

And I think what we're seeing reflected from Cassie's attorney, what we're seeing reflected from some of the other attorneys who have other people in civil litigation against Diddy is that they feel that the judge definitely took into consideration what they got up and testified to on the stand.

And what about from Diddy himself?

What have we heard from him in this sentencing?

You know, Diddy spoke.

He made the decision to speak.

He did make a point of saying, you know, it's been hard to stay quiet this entire time.

I will point out that he could have taken the stand during the trial.

So he chose not to do that and speak at this point.

He really begged for mercy from the judge to return him to his family.

I mean, he did have all of his six adult children there.

And he was speaking about the fact that, you know, some of them have lost their mother.

Kim Porter passed away, and for them, and then their father has been incarcerated.

That being him, he wants to return, look after his family.

He's a changed man.

His experience inside the MDC has made him, you know, grow in ways he never has before.

When the sentence was revealed, he was sighing, tipping his head back, looking at his family.

I mean, we didn't get a massive reaction like we did at the verdict, but he was looking towards his children, some of whom were crying, but who were generally quite quiet and calm.

But other members of his, like, more distant distant family and friends and supporters in the overflow room were in tears and visibly upset.

A firm in Switzerland is trying to create a computer powered by clusters of lab-grown brain cells, which it says could one day be a replacement for silicon.

Final Spark says its synthetic brain organoids can now survive for four months before they die, and they respond to very basic keyboard commands with a burst of energy.

Here's our technology editor, Zoe Kleinman.

Biocomputing is a fascinating and weird branch of science which involves trying to make machines out of living cells.

The idea is that they'd be more environmentally friendly and use a lot less power than traditional hardware.

Final Spark is replicating human cells from an anonymous donor bought via a clinic, which it then cultures into neurons, brain cells, that cluster into groups called organoids, essentially lab-grown mini-brains.

They're nowhere near as complex as human brains, but when these organoids are attached to an electrode, they can respond in a very basic way to some commands.

Fred Jordan is the co-founder of Final Spark.

I mean in science fiction, people have been living with these ideas, okay,

for quite a long time.

And when you start to say I'm going to use a neuron like a little machine, like a transistor, it's a different view on our own brain.

A rival firm, Cortical Labs in Australia, has so far succeeded in training its cell clusters to play the early video game Pong.

Zoe Kleinman.

Still to come in this edition of the Global News Podcast.

I'm gonna kick the habit.

This is the end of all my faults.

If I ever saw one.

Peanuts, the comic strip featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy the Dog turns 75.

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Next, imagine paying $10,000 for a cruise but never setting sail.

More than 100 people who booked cabins on a cruise being advertised on Facebook and Instagram say they were scammed after it emerged the company didn't even have a ship.

VCL has refunded some customers but refused refunds to dozens of others.

The company has threatened those who complain online with legal action.

Our business correspondent, Suranjana Tiwari, has been investigating.

It's thought this company, which is called Victoria Cruises Line, or VCL, may have taken almost $1 million in deposits, possibly more, and they were advertising a fully-fledged cruise, but they don't seem to have a lease or a charter for a ship.

Now, this cruise was a retirement cruise where passengers would live on the ship for a minimum of three years and they'd have the choice to extend.

And what happened was the departure date just kept on getting postponed.

Some people sold their homes, they stored their belongings, one even put down an elderly pet, and they thought they were going to live out their retirement on a cruise.

And it's really turned into something of a nightmare.

Now, I traveled to Perth in Australia to meet one couple, Dennis and Tarunia Won.

They told me about their experience.

Victoria, who is the owner of the company, her son claimed that we've never said we had a ship, we've never promised we had a ship, and yet when you go to their website, you're able to book the exact cabin that you want.

So stay well away from them and hopefully Facebook will shut them down.

I've been looking into VCL for some time now and what I found was a tangled web of registrations and business uses for the company.

There's little evidence that I saw that it was ever registered or had the documentation in order to operate a cruise.

Now, this website of VCL is very sophisticated.

It's still operational, it's still advertising the cruise at discount.

Although I did reverse image search a lot of the pictures on there, and they are stock shots which are widely available on the internet.

Meta told me that it hasn't taken the ads down because it did not find any evidence that the page violates its policies.

I asked VCL its response to accusations that it's running a scam and VCL denied it, saying there are no victims because they had stipulated that they needed to reach a roughly 80% occupancy to be able to charter a ship.

VCL says it hasn't yet reached this target and that's why it hasn't chartered a vessel yet.

Suranjana Tiwari

Australia is the deadliest country in the world when it comes to fatal shark attacks.

There aren't all that many of them, but when they come, they make the headlines.

With the summer approaching there, the beaches are filling up.

And after a recent attack in Sydney that killed a surfer, sharks are on the minds of many people.

It's also reignited the debate in New South Wales over how to keep people safe, as our correspondent Katie Watson has been finding out.

It's a stunning afternoon here in DY, a popular surfers beach in the north of Sydney.

There are a couple of surfers out on the water, lots of families who've come down here with young children to enjoy the beach after school.

The buzz of drones on the beach is reassuring to people here.

There's a growing number of drone operators employed by the New South Wales Government to monitor the coastline during school holidays when the beaches are packed.

I personally as a surfer feel safer with a drone fly over than with no drone.

Isaac Hales is one of them the eyes in the sky it's not just someone watching from the the water's edge and maybe spotting a fin it is being able to cover a kilometre of beach and 500 meters out to shore

we wanted to see though what other measures are being used in new south wales to ward off sharks so we got on a boat and travelled down sydney's coastline

We've travelled about an hour and arrived off the coast of Bondi Beach, probably Sydney's most iconic beach and there are some surfers on the water.

But what I hadn't noticed before was the infrastructure around shark protection.

So, for example, just beside me are four small white boys.

That marks out where the shark net is in the bay.

Bondi is one of 51 beaches that has a shark net.

Often, dolphins, turtles, and other fish can get trapped in these nets too and end up dead.

But that's not the only criticism of the shark nets.

There's a net here, but it's not a fail-safe barrier that doesn't let sharks in at all.

In fact, the net sits a few meters below the surface and it doesn't reach the bottom either.

And it's about 150 meters long, but compare that to the size of the bay.

That means sharks can swim over, under, and around it.

The state government had planned to remove some nets, as there's public support to get rid of them.

But that's been halted since the recent attack.

All along the coast of populated areas of New South Wales, there are also what's known as smart drum lines, a set of buoys that have bait attached to them.

When a shark bites a line, it triggers an alert.

Authorities come and tag the shark within 30 minutes, and then it gets released.

These tagged sharks can then be tracked on an app, available to the public on their phones or smartwatches.

We're back on dry land, and right in the distance, you can see the shark monitoring equipment, but it's really, really far in the distance.

Very hard for people to think about it, really.

I've been asking people how they feel about getting in the water.

You're definitely going to feel more safer with a net, absolutely, yeah.

Like,

just having that conscience that they have a net up that they can't come in as far as here, then, yeah.

If you ask all my friends, they know that I'm a right chicken going into the sea.

Animals and seaweed are like my two phobias.

More of us are venturing into the sea.

Millions of people enjoy Australia's beaches every year, and still the odds of being bitten by a shark are minute.

But risks of political fallout after an attack are much bigger.

Chris Pepin Neff is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Sydney.

If politicians in Australia could put a shark net around it, they would.

Sharknets are a political tool.

They've been here for 88 years.

It is time for more modern technology.

And that's happening.

But seasoned surfers are clear.

If you choose to go into the ocean, you choose to be in the shark's world.

Reducing the risk to zero is impossible.

Katie Watson reporting.

This week, the comic strip Peanuts is celebrating its 75th anniversary.

Drawn by the American cartoonist Charles Schultz, it tells the story of a young boy, Charlie Brown, his friends, and his dog, Snoopy.

It began on October the 2nd, 1950, and today marks the anniversary of Snoopy's first appearance.

Jonathan Fenton Fisher has been speaking to the widow of Charles Schultz, Jeannie Schultz, about 75 years of a pop culture phenomenon.

When Charles Schultz sat down to draw his first Peanuts comic strip, he could have no idea of what was to come.

In the beginning, it ran in just seven newspapers.

But by the end of his life, in the year 2000, there was barely a person on the planet who hadn't heard of Snoopy, the Beagle, and his owner, Charlie Brown.

Thousands of papers ran the comics.

Millions of people read them, not just on this planet, but beyond.

Charlie Brown, Houston, we're reading you 5-5 now, over.

Houston, this is Snoopy.

That's Apollo 10, the NASA mission that circled the moon in 1969.

Its lunar module was named Snoopy.

The command module, Charlie Brown.

That's how big Peanuts had become.

Schultz was known as Sparky to his friends and family, and 75 years after he drew that first four-panel daily comic strip, his wife Jeannie is looking back.

It is amazing.

I mean, 1975, it seems to me we just had the 25th and then the 50th.

And I think back to what Sparky said that art will be defined 100 years from now.

So I keep thinking, well, we are kind of creeping up on that 100 years.

What is it that you have?

That's blanketing.

Look at all of you!

The Peanuts TV specials began in the 1960s and also drew millions of viewers.

With their jazz soundtracks, they reflected Schultz's world, a world of children with children's problems and worries.

In this case, the need to cling on to a blue, scruffy, comfort blanket.

But it was also a world that adults could relate to.

Say, taking your problems to a psychiatrist.

May I help you?

I'm in sad shape.

Wait a minute.

Before you begin, I must ask that you pay in advance.

Five cents, please.

For someone whose work became so famous, Charles Schultz remained a shy, modest man throughout his life, not even convinced by his own artistic skills, as he told the BBC in 1977.

Unfortunately, I'm not highly educated.

I'm merely a high school graduate.

I studied art in a correspondence course because I was afraid to go to art school.

I couldn't see myself sitting in a room where everyone else in the room could draw much better than I.

And this way I was protected by drawing at home and simply mailing my drawings in and having them criticize.

He used to say, I'm not an artist, I'm a cartoonist.

I think if you look at the drawing and the expressions and the drawings, it is art.

It tells a story.

Speaking to me from his studio and museum in California, Jeannie told me more about her husband and how 75 years after it was first published, Peanuts still remains relevant.

These days of social media, the comic strip, which takes four seconds to read, is perfect for social media, for people's attention span these days.

And that is how Snoopy and Peanuts are living in this world.

Happily, in the world of Peanuts, some things never change.

Remember that psychiatrist?

That's Lucy, who frequently promises to make Charlie Brown's dream come true, to kick an American football for a scoring win.

Why or why do I let her do this to me?

Why?

Why?

She holds the ball and time and time again pulls it away at the last moment.

This time I'm really gonna kick it.

I'm gonna kick the habit.

This is the end of all my faults.

Oh sham, Charlie Brown.

A failure face if I ever saw one.

After 75 years of trying, Charlie Brown still hasn't succeeded.

But Peanuts certainly has.

It's Jonathan Fenter Fisher with that report on 75 years of Peanuts.

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 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 Zabihulla Karouch and the editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Nick Miles and until next time, goodbye.

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