US shelves plan for Trump-Putin talks
President Trump has said he doesn't want a "wasted meeting" after plans for a summit on Ukraine with Vladimir Putin in Bucharest were put on hold. Also: a court in Colombia overturns two convictions against the former president, Alvaro Uribe; the US vice-president JD Vance says he's optimistic that the Gaza peace plan will work, despite the killings of dozens of Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers on Sunday; the tech company OpenAI launches a new AI-powered web browser called ChatGPT Atlas; and a 33-year-old socialist is leading the race for mayor of New York City.
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Speaker 14 This is the global news podcast from the BBC World Service.
Speaker 14 I'm Charlotte Gallagher and in the early hours of Wednesday the 22nd of October, these are our main stories.
Speaker 14 Donald Trump puts on hold a plan for face-to-face talks with Vladimir Putin on Ukraine, saying he doesn't want a wasted meeting.
Speaker 14 In Colombia, a high court has overturned criminal convictions against the former president, Alvaro Aribe.
Speaker 14 Also, in this podcast, the young socialist who's leading the race to be New York City's new mayor.
Speaker 15 If New York truly is the city that never sleeps, we deserve a mayor who fights for those of us who labor at every single hour of the day.
Speaker 14 How a new AI-powered web browser says says it will use the internet for you. And the German man who stumbled across a life-changing family secret after watching a documentary about the Nazis.
Speaker 14 First, talks between President Trump and Vladimir Putin were penciled in for next month in Budapest, raising hopes the Russian president might be ready to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.
Speaker 14 But those talks have now been put on hold, with Mr. Trump saying he doesn't want a wasted meeting with the Russian leader.
Speaker 14 Mr Trump implied that a refusal to freeze the fighting in Ukraine along current battle lines was a sticking point.
Speaker 14 His comments came after a phone call between the US Secretary of State and Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who rejected the proposal outright.
Speaker 18 Now, when we hear from Washington that we must stop immediately and that we must not discuss anything further, stop and let history judge.
Speaker 18 If we simply stop, that will mean forgetting about the root causes of the conflict, which Donald Trump's administration has clearly understood and voiced.
Speaker 14 Our State Department correspondent Tom Bateman has more.
Speaker 19 After a two-and-a-half hour phone call between Presidents Trump and Putin last week, Mr.
Speaker 19 Trump announced there would be this summit between the two leaders in Hungary, planned, it was thought, for the next fortnight or so.
Speaker 19 Now, since then, there have been at least two phone calls between Marco Rubio, the the Secretary of State in this building, and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, in which these issues have been thrashed out.
Speaker 19 And notably, the Russians sent a diplomatic note to the Americans at the weekend, basically sticking to all their long-term positions on the war, saying that they demanded the whole of the Donbass in the east and even more territory than they currently occupy.
Speaker 19
This is in effect a rejection of Mr. Trump's position.
He said he want a ceasefire, a freezing of the current battle lines in Ukraine.
Speaker 19 Now, an administration official telling me that there are now no plans for a summit between Presidents Trump and Putin in Hungary in the immediate future, and Mr. Trump confirming that news.
Speaker 21 I don't want to have a waste of time, so I'll see what happens. But
Speaker 21 we did all of these
Speaker 21 great deals, great peace deals. They're all peace deals, agreements, solid agreements, every one of them.
Speaker 21 this one and I said go to the line go to the line of
Speaker 21 battle on the battlefield lines and you pull back and you go home and everybody takes some time off because you've got two countries that are killing each other.
Speaker 21 Two countries are losing five to seven thousand soldiers a week. So we'll see what happens.
Speaker 19 Well this would have been the second such summit between the leaders after that meeting in Alaska back in August that did little really to drive forward President Trump's hopes for an immediate end to this war.
Speaker 19 And it feels like we're returning to a familiar pattern where Mr.
Speaker 19 Trump has issued threats to Moscow, including toying with the idea of giving the Ukrainians tomahawk missiles, only to withdraw from that position.
Speaker 19
And the Kremlin have learnt that and, in the meantime, have arguably felt it more effective to play for time. And I think Mr.
Rubio is an element here, much more hawkish on Russia than Mr.
Speaker 19
Trump traditionally. His involvement in this seems to have been part of the reason why the Americans now apparently don't want to reward Mr.
Putin with a second summit.
Speaker 14 Tom Bateman. While President Trump has turned his attention to Ukraine, his vice president has travelled to Israel.
Speaker 14 JD Vance says he's optimistic the Gaza peace plan will work, despite the killing of dozens of Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers on Sunday.
Speaker 14 He also said the return of dead Israeli hostages by Hamas would not happen overnight, as some bodies were still under the rubble of buildings bombed by Israel.
Speaker 14 The World Food Programme says it's been unable to deliver substantial supplies to northern Gaza because the border crossings into the area remain closed.
Speaker 14 Our correspondent Lucy Williamson filed this report from Jerusalem.
Speaker 22 Speaking to media in a cavernous concrete hangar laid with Astroturf, the US Vice President delivered an upbeat message at a critical time for Donald Trump's peace deal.
Speaker 22 The choice of Venue, a new US-led coordination center for the foreign forces meant to secure Gaza in the next stage of the deal, was meant as a sign that the deal was moving forward. J.D.
Speaker 22 Vance said he had real optimism the ceasefire would hold, despite it briefly fracturing two days ago, but that it would take constant effort, monitoring, and supervision.
Speaker 20
Every time that there's an act of violence, there's this inclination to say, oh, this is the end of the ceasefire. This is the end of the peace plan.
It's not the end.
Speaker 20 It is, in fact, exactly how this is going to have to happen when you have people who hate each other, who have been fighting against each other for a very long time. We are doing very well.
Speaker 20 We are in a very good place. We're going to have to keep working on it.
Speaker 22
Both Israel and Hamas have reaped rewards from phase one of the deal. Phase two requires them to make tough concessions, including giving up their respective control in Gaza.
Mr.
Speaker 22 Vance said the US did not have an explicit deadline for Hamas to disarm, but that if the group did not comply, very bad things would happen.
Speaker 22 Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that any violation by Hamas, including a failure to disarm, would allow Israel to return to the war. The U.S.
Speaker 22 has so far shown more tolerance for hiccups and delays, and several Israeli commentators have pointed out that the real decisions over Israel's military action in Gaza are now being made in Washington.
Speaker 14 That was Lucy Williamson in Jerusalem. New York City is two weeks away from choosing a new mayor, and a 33-year-old socialist is leading the race.
Speaker 14 If elected, Soran Mandani would make history and possibly shake the very foundations of America's financial capital.
Speaker 14 Our North America business correspondent, Michelle Fleury, reports from Wall Street.
Speaker 15 If New York truly is the city that never sleeps, we deserve a mayor who fights for those of us who labor at every single hour of the day.
Speaker 6 He's young, he's bold.
Speaker 13 I will be that mayor.
Speaker 6 And he wants to tax the rich. Zoran Mandani, a democratic socialist and son of immigrants, shocked New York's political establishment earlier this year with a surprise primary win.
Speaker 6 Now he's leading the race to run America's biggest city.
Speaker 19 I think he'll be a good change for the city. I think this is what we honestly needed.
Speaker 23 You know, I think a lot of people have felt very invisible for a long time, and like especially by politicians and government.
Speaker 6 Mamdani wants to freeze rents, make public transport free, and open subsidized grocery stores. He says the wealthy can pay for it.
Speaker 15 New York City deserves better than yet another mayor bought by billionaires.
Speaker 6 Delivering on that agenda, though, won't be easy. I'm in Lower Manhattan, staring at the elegant steps of City Hall, the building that houses the mayor's office.
Speaker 6
Now, most of the city's tax powers don't actually lie here. They lie with the state government in Albany.
New York State Governor Cathy Hochle has said she won't support any new taxes.
Speaker 6 although she has endorsed Mamdani.
Speaker 24 I've made it very clear that we have differences, but I also believe that he brings a sense of optimism and the can-do spirit.
Speaker 6 Still, Mamdani's rise is unsettling the city's corporate class.
Speaker 6 Economist Steve Moore at the Heritage Foundation, who served as an economic advisor to the Trump administration, warns of economic fallout.
Speaker 17 It's the home of Wall Street. It is the financial capital of the world.
Speaker 17 And I do believe that if Mamdani wins this race with his kind of socialist soak the rich agenda, that Wall Street will no longer be located in Manhattan.
Speaker 17 The problem is the rich keep leaving, and that means, you know, if a billionaire moves out of New York, you don't get any money out of them because now they're paying taxes in some other state.
Speaker 6 And the timing couldn't be worse. Texas now has more finance and banking workers than New York, a first.
Speaker 6
The city that once defined global finance is losing ground. That's why Mamdani is racing to win over big business.
With less than a month to go, he met behind closed doors with top CEOs.
Speaker 25 In general, I think it was positive.
Speaker 6 Catherine Wilde was there. She runs the Partnership for New York, a group representing New York's corporate elite.
Speaker 25 He did a good job of convincing the business leaders that he wants to listen to them, get their ideas, have their help.
Speaker 25 He is not going to make ideological, narrow political appointments. So I think that was very reassuring.
Speaker 25 I absolutely think there's total agreement on affordability, financial insecurity being the issue that is really dividing America,
Speaker 25 whether it's on the right or the left.
Speaker 25 I don't think that the business community is aligned with some of the ways that Mamdani wants to address that issue, but I think they totally agree it's the issue that must be addressed.
Speaker 6 For now, Mamdani is well ahead of rivals Republican Curtis Sleewer and Independent Andrew Cuomo, the former governor.
Speaker 6 If elected, Mamdani would be New York's first Muslim mayor, its youngest in decades, and the first major left-wing figure to rise during Trump's second term.
Speaker 6 Whether he's the future of the Democratic Party or just a flash in the political pan remains to be seen.
Speaker 14 Michelle Flairy. The tech company OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Atlas, a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser that promises to use the internet for you.
Speaker 14 The company said Atlas will look and feel like an existing browser, but is built around a chatbot. So how will it work? Earlier, I spoke to our technology correspondent, Lily Jamali.
Speaker 26 Well, for one thing, Atlas does away with the way most of us use browsers and search bars. It does away with the traditional bar that you see, that address bar.
Speaker 26 So when you open up a new tab in this browser that they're releasing, it takes you straight to ChatGPT and you can start engaging with the chatbot there.
Speaker 26 You also would type web addresses that you're looking to visit in this chat, you know, this ongoing chat with the chatbot.
Speaker 26 The agent feature, this thing called agent mode, actually does the searching for you on its own basing what it does on context that it's gathered about what you might want or need from various services.
Speaker 26 And OpenAI has already been trying to insinuate itself into our everyday lives, into our shopping habits.
Speaker 26 I've noticed especially these last few weeks, we saw an announcement about this at its developer day earlier this month.
Speaker 26 They are trying not just to make revenue, but to turn a profit, which they never have. So presumably they're hoping Atlas will kill not just the browser, but the search engine as we know it.
Speaker 14
I was going to say, because a lot of people will be wedded to Google Chrome. That's the most popular browser.
And ChatGPT are going to be wanting to compete with that.
Speaker 26 Yeah. And I asked analyst Patrick Moorhead about this.
Speaker 26 He said he thinks that users are actually going to be pretty interested in playing with Atlas and trying it out, but he's not so sure that users will stick with it.
Speaker 26 And I think that's an important distinction. Old habits die hard, as you just sort of alluded to there.
Speaker 26 For people who came up Googling everything, or maybe they're using Microsoft Edge or Apple Safari now, they might still prefer those more traditional methods of searching the internet.
Speaker 26 And he says there are some functionalities that ChatGPT is offering here that you can kind of get on some of those competitors already.
Speaker 14 And I guess it's a trust thing as well about AI, and it can get things wrong, can't it?
Speaker 26 It can get things wrong.
Speaker 26 And I have to say, just stepping back for a moment, one of the criticisms of OpenAI and some of these other AI developers is that they just throw these tools out at all of us and then say, use them and tell us how it goes.
Speaker 26 What are you interested in? And that can be very innovative and fun and create new maybe use cases that they hadn't thought of internally.
Speaker 26 But on the other hand, we saw what happened with social media, right?
Speaker 26 And already chatbots have found themselves at the center of this conversation about mental health, about how children should and shouldn't use them.
Speaker 26 And I'm not saying that will be a huge issue with this particular product, but more because there's just this known unknown out there.
Speaker 26 OpenAI is very comfortable throwing these things out to us and seeing what they do. Sometimes it goes goes well, others not so much.
Speaker 14 Lily Jamali. Iceland's frozen, inhospitable winters have long protected it from mosquitoes, but that may be changing.
Speaker 14 This week, scientists announced the discovery of three mosquitoes, making the country's first confirmed finding of these insects in the wild.
Speaker 14 Mosquitoes are found almost everywhere in the world, with the exception of Antarctica and until recently, Iceland, Rory Gallimore reports.
Speaker 27 Iceland has no shortage of natural dangers, volcanic eruptions, glacial floods, scaldingly hot springs, and bitterly cold winters.
Speaker 27 But it is, at least, one of the few places on Earth where humans don't have to worry about mosquitoes, until now. Two females and a male have been caught on a sticky trap used to attract moths.
Speaker 27 They're a species that's resistant to the cold. It isn't clear how many other mosquitoes are in Iceland or exactly how they got there.
Speaker 27 One scientist said he did not believe their arrival was linked to climate change and suggested they could have been stowaways on a ship.
Speaker 14 That was Rory Gallimore.
Speaker 14 Still to come.
Speaker 16 We will pay a reward to somebody who's not connected to the theft, but there are people out there in the art recovery world who consistently pay thieves, and we refuse to do that. I'm a lawyer.
Speaker 14 How the stolen jewels from the Louvre might be recovered.
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Speaker 14 A court in Colombia has overturned two convictions against the former president Alvaro Uribe, which could have resulted in him spending 12 years under house arrest.
Speaker 14 While he was in office between 2002 and 2010, he led a military campaign against drug cartels and left-wing guerrilla groups, but he was also accused of having links with right-wing paramilitaries.
Speaker 14 In August, he was found guilty of fraud and bribing those groups, something he'd always denied.
Speaker 14 Now, the High Court in Bogota found the original ruling contained errors and wasn't proven beyond all reasonable doubt. Our global affairs reporter, Mimi Swaby, told me more about the case.
Speaker 5 This is a case that has shaken Colombia with its twists and turns for more than 13 years now, but it's been resolved in record time on an appeal.
Speaker 5 But this first sentencing was the first time a former Colombian president has been convicted in a criminal trial. And the case really revolved around allegations that Mr.
Speaker 5 Urube was ordering or had ordered a lawyer to bribe jailed paramilitaries to discredit claims that he was organized with these groups.
Speaker 5 And these are right-wing groups who were responsible for massacres, for thousands of displacements and disappearances, as well as really awful atrocities during Colombia's armed conflicts.
Speaker 5 And these paramilitaries, according to Truth Commissions, are responsible for nearly half of the more than 450,000 people who were killed from 1985 to 2018.
Speaker 5 So a huge amount of people who were affected by this conflict, and the court had claimed that Mr. Urube had played a major part in that.
Speaker 14 And so, why was his conviction overturned then?
Speaker 5 Both of these high court overturned both convictions today against Mr.
Speaker 5 Urube basically because they said that they couldn't find proper evidence showing that there was bribery involved and that fraud had occurred. There had been a mic tapping which highlighted that Mr.
Speaker 5
Orube had basically told the lawyer to go and bribe these paramilitary individuals who'd been jailed. But that was deemed an invasion of privacy.
And so these weren't used in the court.
Speaker 5 These were kind of thrown out. But the main point was that the evidence wasn't concrete enough to sentence Urube for 12 years of house arrest.
Speaker 14 And I imagine there's been quite a bit of reaction to this inside Colombia.
Speaker 5 It has. Many Colombians are incredibly confused.
Speaker 5 This case has been going on for many, many years now, and they're confused how the same court essentially has gone back on itself and undone all the kind of really groundbreaking sentences and rulings it had already put in place however mr urubé has said this is a win he has called it a political persecution this is alongside the us's top diplomat marco rubio who's said that that urubé was a victim of the weaponization of colombian judges on the flip side you have the left-wing president the current president gustavo petro who said that history is is repeating itself and has really said this ruling covers up the country's paramilitary governance, its history of paramilitary governance.
Speaker 5
He's also added that now, Mr. Trump, alongside his right-wing ally, Mr.
Arube, is going to seek sanctions on him.
Speaker 5 So he's come out and really denounced this ruling, saying that it goes against the Supreme Court and he is not in favour of it, like many Colombians, he believes, around the country.
Speaker 14 Mimi Swaby. Now to a story of a German man who stumbled across a life-changing family secret after watching a documentary about Nazis.
Speaker 14 Despite what he'd been told by relatives, he was closely related to one of the Third Reich's most feared leaders, one of the main architects of the Holocaust. Stephanie Prentiss explains.
Speaker 30 Henrik Lenkeit lives in Spain with his wife, working as a pastor and part-time couple's counsellor. And one quiet evening, he ended up researching one of the most famous Nazis in history.
Speaker 31 I saw Heinrich Himmler had his wife, and then I saw he had an affair. And this affair, I've seen the picture of this lady, and this is my grandmother.
Speaker 31 And I saw her name, Heydrich, but she had a different surname. So first I went to my wife and I said to her, Is that my grandmother? And she said, Yeah, that's her.
Speaker 31
And we compared with an album we had. And then later on, I saw they had two children.
And I see the name of my uncle, and I see the name of my mother. And then I go to my wife again.
Speaker 31 I said, Am I the grandson of this guy?
Speaker 30 Himmler's mistress bore a resemblance to his grandmother and shared the same date of birth and death. She'd remarried after the end of the Second World War, covering the tracks of his heritage.
Speaker 30 He later found a birth certificate formally linking the former SS leader who orchestrated Nazi Germany's concentration camps to his mother, and says that was the death of his former identity.
Speaker 31
It was like a morning because I lost my identity. I completely lost it.
In my family, because of that ancestor, you have to be low. You have to you can't shine.
You can't we we don't deserve it.
Speaker 31 With our past, yeah, you could believe or could come to think we don't deserve anything.
Speaker 30 Henrik Leinkite says his late mother was aware of who her father was, and the secret cast a shadow across the whole family. Now he wants to change that.
Speaker 31 I was the last to know. Everybody knew about it, and I try also tried to imagine how was it for them.
Speaker 31 They always had to live with that burden which I understand but I also understand like what could it have been if after the war they would have said publicly yeah that's that happened but we don't have that ideology you know we don't want to be like them my mission is to tell people you're not judged by your genetics by whatever you have to find your identity That report by Stephanie Prentice.
Speaker 14 A growing number of international students who want to study medicine are heading for Bulgaria because it's cheaper and easier to get a place there than in the UK. Jill Dummigan reports.
Speaker 32 Just before I go back, we normally shop around probably the more traditional cuisine stores.
Speaker 33 Mohamed Adnan Patel stocking up in Bolton, a town in the northwest of England, before heading back to Plovdiv in southern Bulgaria.
Speaker 32 A lot of stuff that we make here and we take over just so we can get a taste at home.
Speaker 33 Mohamed's about to start his fifth year of a six-year degree at Plovdiv Medical University.
Speaker 32 It was a big shock to my family that I was not only studying medicine but I was also studying it abroad.
Speaker 33 Mohamed originally applied to medical schools in England, but he didn't get the grades to get in.
Speaker 33 Like many countries, Britain restricts the number of domestic students who can begin a medical degree each year because they're so expensive to fund.
Speaker 34 So I applied for universities here
Speaker 34 and I didn't get any offers.
Speaker 33 Freya Manda Parliam lives in Preston, half an hour from Mohammed. She's about to start her second year at the same Bulgarian university.
Speaker 34 So I just decided I'd look at options abroad.
Speaker 33 Freya and Mohamed have joined an increasing number of students going to Eastern Europe and particularly Bulgaria to study medicine. Plovdiv is one of Europe's oldest cities.
Speaker 33 It's famous for its Roman ruins and it's quite a big tourist draw, lots of pavement cafes and street performers. And about a 20-minute walk from all of that, there's the medical school.
Speaker 33 So I'm sitting in the middle of the campus. It's It's really pleasant, very green, lots of trees.
Speaker 33 Of course, lots of students, many of them talking in English, but also other languages because this place attracts people from around the world.
Speaker 14 I'm from Canada.
Speaker 32 I'm from Germany, from Khalsa.
Speaker 32 I'm originally from India and I live in Dublin.
Speaker 33 There are more than 7,500 foreign medical students studying in Bulgaria and more than 1,700 of them here in Plovdiv. This faculty takes on around 470 international students a year.
Speaker 33
Three years ago there were 700 applications. This year it was 1200.
The fees are around 10,000 euros a year, just over 11,500 US dollars.
Speaker 33 It's a relatively small amount compared to costs for foreign students in many countries but far more than Bulgarians pay.
Speaker 33 The Bulgarian government's keen to attract lucrative international students like these.
Speaker 33 But while that's a success story and boosting the economy, the average monthly pay for a nurse at a state-run hospital is around 1,500 levre, about 900 US dollars.
Speaker 33 For a junior doctor, it's just under $1,200.
Speaker 33 That's far less than they can earn in neighbouring European countries, and so inevitably, many are voting with their feet.
Speaker 14 Jill Dummigan.
Speaker 14 Around 8 million people in the UK take antidepressants, but doctors say new league tables have shown for the first time that the side effects associated with the drugs are very different.
Speaker 14 The teams at King's College London and Oxford University are calling for the drugs to be more closely matched to the needs of each patient.
Speaker 14 Here's our health and science correspondent, James Gallagher.
Speaker 35 It's always been known that antidepressants can have physical side effects. This is the first time they've been ranked, so the drugs can be easily compared.
Speaker 35 The findings published in the Lancet Medical Journal reveal how different medicines can raise or lower body weight with a range of up to 4 kilograms, and heart rate changes could vary by 21 beats every minute.
Speaker 35 The researchers said no two antidepressants were built the same, and prescriptions should be tailored to the needs of the patient.
Speaker 35 For example, they suggest people with high blood pressure could avoid medicines that make it even higher. The study looked at the first eight weeks of a course of antidepressants.
Speaker 35 They suspect these effects last throughout treatment, but that is still being tested.
Speaker 14 That was James Gallagher. Next, jewellery stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris on Sunday has been valued at more than $100 million by a French prosecutor.
Speaker 14 So far, the police have failed to track down the thieves, so where might this jewelry be now? And how can these historic artifacts be recovered?
Speaker 14 Ed Butler has been speaking to Christopher Maranello, a lawyer and founder of the firm Art Recovery International.
Speaker 16
The thieves don't want to keep them intact. There's no incentive for them to do that.
You could say that they're more valuable as historical pieces, but the thieves don't care about history.
Speaker 16
They don't care about the cultural heritage of France. They don't care about anything.
They're just common thugs. These guys are just looking to cash out.
And to do that, they need to break them up.
Speaker 16
They need to take them out of the settings. They need to look at the raw diamonds and they need to move them on in order to sell them.
And the largest stones, they need to recut.
Speaker 16 And to do that, you need to go to a place where they cut diamonds. That's Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Delhi, India, and find a dodgy dealer that's willing to cut the stones with no questions asked.
Speaker 1 So what is the job of someone like you in a situation like this? Not that you're directly dealing with it.
Speaker 16 With a painting, it's a lot easier to try to recover because they may try to sell it at an auction somewhere, or they may sell it to a dealer, or may approach a dealer who will contact us and say, I'm being offered this.
Speaker 16 Can you tell me if it's stolen? But with high-profile jewelry, it's very difficult.
Speaker 16 So, my role would usually be that, you know, if somebody would contact, if there was a reward offered, which I had been calling for for some time over the last 24, 48 hours, Criminals would call me, or someone connected to the criminals, or someone who knows who the criminals are, and say, Look, I want to collect the reward.
Speaker 16 I know who these guys are. I know where the jewels are.
Speaker 16 Or they may say, Look, I don't have any connection to the theft, but I was wondering if there was an insurance company out there that was willing to pay an amount of money to recover them, a finder's fee.
Speaker 1 Is there any risk there that you'd be literally paying off the thieves themselves?
Speaker 16 Never. We don't do that.
Speaker 1 But do you think that there would be be even a percentage in doing that for the sake, as you say, of keeping intact a priceless piece of historical artifact that would otherwise be broken up?
Speaker 16 Well, that has been done in the past, but it's usually done by governments and with the authorization of the police, like such as the Turners that were recovered. Payments were made.
Speaker 1 It was kind of a ransom, effectively.
Speaker 16 Yeah, we don't pay ransoms. You know, we will pay a reward to somebody who's not connected to the theft, but ransoms are a whole different story.
Speaker 16 They're illegal, they're unethical, but there are people out there in the art recovery world who hold themselves out as recovery experts who consistently pay thieves. And we refuse to do that.
Speaker 16 I'm a lawyer. I'm not going to lose my license over a case.
Speaker 1 What chances do you think do the Louvre have of getting their stuff back here?
Speaker 16 Very slim, unfortunately, because they have a huge head start on the police who can only find these items by locating all the criminals and and sitting them down and demanding that they tell them where they are?
Speaker 16 So there's been a race with a massive head start for the criminals.
Speaker 14 That was Ed Butler speaking to Christopher Marinello from Art Recovery International.
Speaker 14 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.
Speaker 14
The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service.
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Speaker 14
This edition was mixed by Jonathan Greer, and the producers are Marion Strawn and Stephen Jensen. The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Charlotte Gallagher. Until next time, goodbye.
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