US government shutdown forces food aid cuts

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Speaker 8 This is the global news podcast from the BBC World Service.

Speaker 8 I'm Janet Jalil and in the early hours of Tuesday the 4th of November, these are our main stories. The Trump administration has equaled the record for the longest government shutdown in U.S.
history.

Speaker 8 The Israeli military's former top lawyer is arrested over the leak of a video allegedly showing Palestinian detainee abuse and what's causing an Antarctic glacier to rapidly retreat.

Speaker 8 Also in this podcast.

Speaker 9 There are on that island locals who think it is ugly and don't want it to proceed.

Speaker 8 Construction of a glass elevator on Bali's T-Rex cliff is put on hold.

Speaker 8 We begin in the the U.S., where Donald Trump is set to break the record for the longest government shutdown in the country's history.

Speaker 8 The standoff between Democrats and Republicans has left Congress unable to pass a new budget, and with a shutdown now in its 35th day, there's still no sign of a deal.

Speaker 8 This has left more than 40 million Americans who rely on food aid because of their low incomes facing great uncertainty about whether that aid, known as food stamps, will continue.

Speaker 8 Initially, the Trump administration had said funding would stop from the beginning of this month, but now, under pressure from judges, it has said it will give Americans who receive food assistance about half their normal monthly amount, a measure that will still leave many people struggling to feed their families.

Speaker 8 These women at a food bank in Detroit describe the impact this is having on them.

Speaker 10 It's hard when you don't know if your next meal is

Speaker 11 going to be, you know,

Speaker 3 not there.

Speaker 11 Some of us don't have savings.

Speaker 12 Some of us don't even have bank accounts.

Speaker 12 Some of us don't have money put up in a cookie jar anywhere. You know, it's just we live check by check and then you get the food stamps.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 13 anxiety kicked in. It was like, okay, what I'm going to do, how I'm going to feed my kids.
That benefits was a huge help.

Speaker 13 It was a weight off our shoulders, you know, but for them to just cut it like that, it's devastating.

Speaker 8 A correspondent in Washington, Peter Bowes, told me the shutdown is hurting millions of lower-income Americans.

Speaker 14 We're now talking about large groups of people potentially going hungry, as we just heard, from the impasse in Congress. People are turning to food banks to survive.

Speaker 14 And this has been going on since Saturday when the money ran out. Now, there has, as you reported, been some positive news on that in the last few hours.

Speaker 14 The Department of Agriculture telling a court that it will tap into a contingency fund to allow states to partially fund these benefits through the rest of this month.

Speaker 14 So, eligible households will receive 50% of their SNAP benefits, their food stamp benefits.

Speaker 14 But some states, we understand, might experience some delays in getting that money out of the door to really fund those food stamps to actually really get the food on the table for those millions of people.

Speaker 8 But those people are still going to suffer because they're not getting the full money they're entitled to.

Speaker 8 And with this shutdown looking set to become the longest ever, is there any sign of a compromise between Republicans and Democrats?

Speaker 14 No end in sight, although, interestingly, the Senate Republican leader, John Thune, has said that he is optimistic about ending the shutdown this week.

Speaker 14 He said in the last few hours that the Senate would take what will be its 14th vote on the funding bill, which they've so far failed to pass.

Speaker 14 He didn't give a concrete reason for his optimism other than to say that it was based on his gut feeling of how these things operate.

Speaker 14 He said, I think we're getting close to an off-ramp, but in practice, what needs to happen is that more Democrats need to vote with the Republicans to pass the bill, and there is no indication right now that that is going to happen.

Speaker 8 Peter Bose, let's turn to Israel now, which has been rocked by a scandal that has seen the Army's top lawyer arrested and has exposed deep divisions in Israeli society.

Speaker 8 The arrest of Yefat Tome Yeroshalmi came after she went missing for several hours on Sunday, sparking a large search operation.

Speaker 8 She'd already resigned a few days ago after admitting that she'd approved the leak of a video which allegedly shows the severe sexual abuse of a Palestinian detainee by Israeli soldiers.

Speaker 8 The video was broadcast on an Israeli news channel in August last year, but some believe the alleged abuse never took place. Amir Avivi is a retired brigadier general in the IDF.

Speaker 15 This video was checked and was a fake. It was a combination of different videos from different dates.

Speaker 15 The IDF excels at investigating every single case.

Speaker 15 And here, the problem is on the other side. It's like over-investigating or being so motivated to investigate that it ends up with allegations that you know are false and not true.

Speaker 8 That, however, is not a view shared by the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Guy Shalev.

Speaker 8 He told the BBC that the footage is just one example of widespread abuse that his organization has documented Israel's Stet Taman prison.

Speaker 16 The only reason why this specific case was we even know about it is because the victim was assaulted so badly that they had to hospitalize him in a civilian hospital.

Speaker 16 That is how his condition leaks and we know of many, many cases of torture, 29 cases of death in Stet Ayman alone.

Speaker 8 Tal Schneider is political correspondent at the Times of Israel. She spoke to my colleague James Kumrasami about the case.

Speaker 17 She was heading the military prosecution and she put five, I think, reservists or soldiers on trial with the video attached to their trial.

Speaker 17 The trial is undergoing, I mean it's not done yet, but it's a severe case of course.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so tell us about her. She admitted that she leaked the video.
It's even more serious than that though, isn't it? It's what she said to the High Court.

Speaker 17 So she was under a severe criticism for putting them on trial. Then in order to defend her reputation and her unit reputation, she leaked the video to a prominent channel in Israel.

Speaker 17 There was an investigation about who leaked the video in which she tried to mesmerize the way it was conducted, the investigation, and then lied on an formal affidavit to the high court, to the Supreme High Court, which is a very severe way to conduct things in Israel.

Speaker 17 It's actually a criminal offense to lie in a half affidavit.

Speaker 17 So for that, she is now being investigated and then she kind of ditched her own iPhone, which is supposed to serve as evidence for her leakage and so on and so forth. It's very complicated.

Speaker 1 Yeah, clearly, broadly, if we take a step back, I mean, how divisive, not just this case, but in general, have these allegations of abuse by Israeli soldiers been?

Speaker 17 Again, the military is putting people on trial if they misbehave during battle or during detention of terrorists.

Speaker 17 And of course, many people have criticism on that, but you know, the authorities have to go forward.

Speaker 17 So it's very, very divisive in a society that went, you know, severe massacre and people, they want to see Israeli prosecuting the terrorists and not prosecuting its own soldiers, of course.

Speaker 17 But if they did something, they have to go through a trial. You know, emotions run very, very high in Israel at the moment over this case, and they want to see her behind bars and so on.

Speaker 19 Tal Schneider.

Speaker 8 Scientists analyzing satellite images of Antarctica say they've documented dramatic changes in a glacier, which could have a significant impact on the rate at which sea levels are rising.

Speaker 8 They've been studying the Hectoria Glacier on the Antarctic Peninsula, as our climate reporter Mark Poynting explains.

Speaker 18 Back in late 2022, Hectoria Glacier underwent astonishing change, retreating by five miles in just two months.

Speaker 18 What drove such rapid loss of ice was something of a mystery, but a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience claims to have found the answer.

Speaker 18 These scientists believe it could be the first modern example of a process where a glacier lightly resting on the seabed rapidly destabilises.

Speaker 18 The lead author Naomi Ochwat from the University of Colorado says this could be an ominous sign.

Speaker 20 Hectora is a small glacier, but if something like that were to happen in other areas of Antarctica, it could play a much larger role in the rate of sea level rise, that we may have small pulses instead of a subtle linear or exponential curve.

Speaker 18 But other scientists aren't convinced. They point to other evidence that this part of the glacier could have been floating in the ocean rather than resting on the seabed.

Speaker 18 Floating tongues of ice break up much more easily as they can be eaten away by warm ocean waters. That would make the loss of ice impressive, but not unprecedented.

Speaker 18 But whatever the disagreement, scientists are united on one thing. The fragile white continent, once considered largely immune to the impacts of global warming, is changing before our eyes.

Speaker 8 Mark pointing. Well, climate change is certainly on the mind of Britain's Prince William, who's on on a five-day visit to Brazil.

Speaker 8 It was all sightseeing and symbolic gestures on the first day as he was handed a key to the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Speaker 8 Today the Prince of Wales will visit the island of Paqueta and meet the teams who manage the nearby mangroves area to learn about restoration work being done there.

Speaker 8 The trip comes at a difficult time for the British monarchy as Ione Wells reports from Rio.

Speaker 22 It has been of course a difficult couple of weeks and months for the royal family with headlines recently being dominated by Andrew, Prince William's uncle, and his connections and affiliations with the late Geoffrey Epstein, something that the Royal Family has been very keen to shift the narrative on, hence why King Charles stripped Andrew of his titles, removed him from the Royal Lodge as well.

Speaker 22 Now the Royal Family is keen to shift people's attention back to other issues that they want to talk about, namely solutions for tackling climate change, which is the core reason why Prince William is visiting Brazil for the first time.

Speaker 22 He is firstly here in Rio de Janeiro primarily for his annual Earthshop Prize ceremony which is going to take place on Wednesday.

Speaker 22 Five different climate solutions from around the world will receive a million British pounds in prize money towards their initiatives.

Speaker 22 There's also going to be performances from lots of different celebrities and artists from the around the world including Kylie Minogue giving a performance there.

Speaker 22 That's before he goes on to the COP30 climate summit which is taking place in the Amazon city of Belém.

Speaker 22 He's going to give a speech there which he has written along with his father King Charles as part of those first few days of the climate summit where different world leaders will be getting together to try and discuss how the world will work together to try and tackle both carbon emissions but also issues like deforestation.

Speaker 8 Ioni Wells, the Indonesian authorities have temporarily halted construction of a nearly 200-metre glass lift on one of Bali's most photographed cliffs, which, as well as being an area of great natural beauty, also forms the shape of a dinosaur.

Speaker 8 Pictures of the elevator on Ke Ling King Beach cutting through the T-Rex cliff have gone viral, with many saying it will accelerate erosion and ruin the spectacular landscape.

Speaker 8 Our reporter in the region, Bill Bertels, told us more about the controversial project.

Speaker 9 They're hoping, if they complete this, to build, jutting out from the cliff, a glass elevator that also has viewing platforms dotted along the structure and it would take tourists from the cliff top down onto the white sand below.

Speaker 9 This was first launched in 2023.

Speaker 9 I was there last year when construction was underway but it was very early stages so Now it's so far along that the scaffolding is all up and people can visually see with their own eyes at the beach.

Speaker 9 Wow, this is what's going to be there. Photos have gone around, and in recent days on social media, those photos have really caused a stir.
People are outraged, just saying this is such an eyesore.

Speaker 9 The beach below is actually quite a dangerous beach to surf at or to swim at. It's pretty rough.

Speaker 9 And so there's an argument: the more tourists you help get to the bottom, the more drownings there will be. But I really think it's the aesthetics that's causing the concern.

Speaker 9 And there are locals who think it is ugly and don't want it to proceed, but the economy there is just so heavily reliant on the tourist dollar.

Speaker 9 And so local governments in sort of villages and districts across Bali seem in the post-COVID era to be very enthusiastic in approving new developments and new projects.

Speaker 9 And it is causing some friction, perhaps not as much as you might think.

Speaker 9 But I think it's a slow burn sort of issue where there are definitely some politicians in Bali and activists activists in Bali who are very publicly raising alarm about Bali's natural beauty being eaten up either by villas, hotels or other projects.

Speaker 9 But you get the impression that even if people are a bit worried about over-tourism, they are very reliant on the money it brings.

Speaker 8 Bill Burtels.

Speaker 8 Still to come.

Speaker 21 The juices of fiction began to flow again, and I started writing these novellas and I wanted them to have a kind of lightness to them. I wanted them to be playful.

Speaker 8 A conversation with the acclaimed author Salman Rushdie.

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Speaker 8 Thousands of people in the north of Afghanistan have spent a difficult night out in the open in freezing temperatures after a 6.3 magnitude earthquake.

Speaker 8 At least 20 people have been killed and more than 300 injured. Thousands of buildings have been destroyed or damaged, including the famous Blue Mosque in Mazari Sharif, close to where this man lives.

Speaker 8 The man who lives near the epicentre said it was one in the morning when all the houses were struck and people were hurt.

Speaker 8 My request to the Taliban government, he said, is to help people rebuild their homes. A reporter in Kabul, Payenda Sargand, told Nick Miles the latest.

Speaker 24 According to preliminary information from the National Disaster Management Authority under the government of Taliban in Afghanistan, the number of dead are in dozens and the number of injured in hundreds.

Speaker 24 But still the investigations are still going on. The concern is that this number will rise because the rescue effort is underway.

Speaker 25 Tell us if you would a little bit about the area where this earthquake took place and the types of buildings that are there.

Speaker 24 It happened in northern Afghanistan. and the center was in Balkh province and the surrounding provinces were badly hit.
There most houses are mud houses, I mean they're not concrete.

Speaker 24 And at the moment it's winter, kind of the weather is very cold.

Speaker 24 And the roads, of course,

Speaker 24 mostly the roads are not asphalted, not proper roads. So that's that's one of the issues that will really

Speaker 24 cause problem in terms of helping people and getting aid to those areas where people are affected.

Speaker 25 Indeed, and there will be many people who have either been left homeless or who are perhaps trapped under the rubble.

Speaker 25 What kind of machinery is available in some of these towns and how will the authorities get it to the people who need it?

Speaker 24 Well, at the moment, several humanitarian organizations have sent emergency aid and ambulances if they can.

Speaker 24 The Taliban's government, they have some machinery to help, but mostly looking at the past, because Afghanistan experienced these earthquakes before as well.

Speaker 24 It's mostly done by local people, just with shovels and things, until they get help.

Speaker 24 But even if they do get help, all the people, all the affected areas will not be able to receive a full support, of course, considering that Afghanistan is at the moment

Speaker 24 dealing with different other issues. The rescue efforts will take a very long time, especially if they want to get anywhere where people are affected, because it's not one province.

Speaker 24 There are many provinces. There are new reports from Badakhshan province, which is very mountainous and it will be very difficult to get help there.

Speaker 8 Payender Sargand in Afghanistan.

Speaker 8 India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has dominated his country's politics for more than a decade. But last year proved to be something of a shock for him.

Speaker 8 While he was re-elected, his BJP party fell short of the majority it had been expecting. A big blow to Mr.
Modi personally.

Speaker 8 So, the forthcoming election this month in one of India's poorest and most populous states, Bihar, has become a matter of prestige for him.

Speaker 8 And unusually for India, it's female voters who could decide the result. Devina Gupta reports from the state capital, Budna.

Speaker 19 For For the past one month, 40-year-old Kushpu Devi has been starting her day early.

Speaker 19 Going door to door in Masori village to campaign for her party's candidate.

Speaker 19 Her target group is women.

Speaker 8 I speak to everyone, but I'm more focused on the women, because here there is a higher percentage of women voting.

Speaker 27 As Kushpu speaks to women, it's almost evening here.

Speaker 27 This village, with its small brick homes, open courtyards, street dogs, and children drinking water from a hand pump reflects life in one of India's poorest states.

Speaker 27 There are 74 million voters here, and nearly half of them are women. And when it's polling day, they turn out in large numbers, which makes all the difference.

Speaker 28 women?

Speaker 19 Santor Singh is a political analyst in Bihar.

Speaker 28 They vote on bloc. In the last few elections, we have observed that they are putting in big numbers.

Speaker 28 And never forget, in a caste-hidden structure of Bihar, they have become a caste-neutral constituency of women, cutting across caste and religion.

Speaker 19 He is referring to India's complex caste system, where people often vote for candidates from their own social group. But women are breaking that pattern.

Speaker 19 And many of them have long-backed Nitish Kumar, Bihar's chief minister, for the past two decades. He's in alliance with the BJP, the party of India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

Speaker 19 In the opposition is a united front of regional parties led by the Congress and both sides are competing hard for the female vote.

Speaker 19 offering welfare schemes like direct cash transfers to their bank accounts. But does that really have an impact on how women vote?

Speaker 30 Simply in going and vote and national election means other issues.

Speaker 19 I meet a group of them in the capital city of Patna.

Speaker 29 Why don't these schemes come earlier? Why are they only announced during elections?

Speaker 30 We hear about these policies, but most women do not know how to avail them. They do not know if it is for them and

Speaker 30 where to go, what to do to be able to take benefit of these policies.

Speaker 27 What are your expectations from this election?

Speaker 30 What do you want from your leader, Birozgari?

Speaker 31 Leaders should focus on unemployment and education.

Speaker 31 Even the rich avoid government schools because they are in such poor shape.

Speaker 32 It's an uncomfortable reality that Bihar is one of the poorest states and there is so much migration out of Bihar.

Speaker 32 It's not possible for one person to have a like a magic wand and have a solution to all problems. But a leader should be doing is understand what are the issues.

Speaker 8 That report by Devina Gupta in the Indian state of Bihar.

Speaker 8 The Chinese fast fashion giant Shein is known for its cheap, on-trend clothing, but it emerged this weekend that it's also been selling childlike sex dolls in France.

Speaker 8 Now, in response to the outrage this has caused, with French authorities threatening to outlaw the retailer, the company has banned the sale of any sex doll on its online platform.

Speaker 8 Our reporter, Carla Conte, told me more.

Speaker 6 This began with an anonymous tip received by France's Consumer Fraud Agency about some deeply disturbing listings found on Sheehan's French site. And what the authorities found was shocking.

Speaker 6 It was dolls with the features and proportions of young girls measuring around 80 centimeters tall, wearing frilly dresses and even holding teddy bears, described in explicit sexual terms and sold for just under 190 euros, which is around 218 dollars.

Speaker 6 Now, these weren't just tucked away in some remote part of the internet or found on the dark web.

Speaker 6 They were right there on Xi'an's French language website, among the same tabs where you would normally find the cheap clothes that the Chinese retailer is known for selling.

Speaker 6 And investigators said that the listings left little doubt about their child pornographic nature.

Speaker 8 And the French authorities reacted with great anger, didn't they?

Speaker 6 They did, yeah.

Speaker 6 The French economy minister, Roland Rescure, has said that he was appalled by the listings and said that Xi'an had crossed the line, warning that he would block the site in France if anything like this happened again.

Speaker 6 And Xi'an, for its part, has apologised and taken down the dolls. It says that it's opened an internal inquiry as well and that it was imposing a total ban on sex doll-type products.

Speaker 6 A spokesperson for the company also told the AFP news agency that the ban applied globally, not just in France.

Speaker 8 And this is really bad timing for Xi'an because it's due to open its first physical outlet this week in Paris, but it's not the first time it's been caught up in a controversy in France either.

Speaker 6 Yes, far from it. Xienne already has a long record of ethical and legal issues.

Speaker 6 It's been accused of, for example, copying small designers' work, of violating labor laws, and turning a blind eye to what critics call exploitative factory conditions in China.

Speaker 6 Environmental campaigners have also criticized the brand for churning out thousands of new garments every day and effectively flooding the market with cheap disposable clothing.

Speaker 6 And in France specifically, it's already been fined 14 million euros this year for misleading promotions and another 150 million euros for illegally collecting user data through cookies.

Speaker 6 So, this latest scandal lands at a particularly awkward time for the company, as you were saying, just as Shein prepares to open its first permanent shop in Paris this week.

Speaker 8 Carla Conti, staying with China and business, Starbucks is selling a majority stake in its business in China as part of a deal worth $4 billion.

Speaker 8 It comes less than a week after the US and China struck a trade deal amid growing rivalry between the two countries. Suranjana Tiwari reports.

Speaker 10 China is Starbucks' second largest market after the US, but it's been looking for a local partner since earlier this year as part of restructuring efforts by CEO Brian Nicol.

Speaker 10 The coffee giant will sell a controlling share of its retail operations in China to a private equity firm and will retain 40% while continuing to own and license the brand in the country.

Speaker 10 Starbucks said the total value of its China business is more than $13 billion under the New Deal.

Speaker 10 The company has more than 8,000 stores in China, but the COVID pandemic dealt a blow, hitting sales and directing consumers to cheaper options.

Speaker 10 Homegrown rivals, including the country's biggest coffee chain, Luck and Coffee, have grown rapidly in popularity.

Speaker 10 Starbucks is not the only brand to sell or partially sell operations in China as competition grows between the world's two largest economies, China and the US.

Speaker 10 Yum Brands, which runs KFC and Pizza Hut in China, spun off its local business in 2016, while Gap, Best Buy, and Uber exited the country after struggling to fend off homegrown rivals in a crowded market.

Speaker 10 Foreign companies have also complained that operating in China has become more of a challenge.

Speaker 8 Surinjana Tirari

Speaker 8 Salman Rushdie's latest book, The Eleventh Hour, is out today.

Speaker 8 The collection of short stories is the acclaimed author's first published work of fiction since he was stabbed on stage and blinded in one eye by an assailant in 2022. Mr.

Speaker 8 Rushdie, who'd already spent decades fearing for his safety after Iran issued a fatwa against him, wrote a book about that attack three years ago called Knife, but has now returned to fiction.

Speaker 8 He spoke to James Kumrasami about his creative process.

Speaker 21 After the attack, it was very difficult for me to think about fiction. I realized that the only way of getting past it was to go through it.
And that's why I ended up writing Knife.

Speaker 21 But more or less, immediately on finishing the memoir, you know, the juices of fiction began to flow again. And I started writing these novellas almost immediately.

Speaker 1 And you have turned to the past in these new novellas in different ways, haven't you? They muse on death, but on birth as well.

Speaker 21 Yeah, and I wanted them to have a kind of lightness to them. I wanted them to be playful.

Speaker 21 The Indian story, the musician of Kahani, every time I've gone back to India, I've always revisited that tiny little neighborhood where I grew up, and it means a lot to me.

Speaker 21 And I thought, I'm not sure that I have a lot of extra stories to tell set in that place, but maybe I've got one.

Speaker 21 And the story Oklahoma, in a way, revisits my younger days as a writer when I first came to America.

Speaker 1 As well as reflections on your earlier life.

Speaker 1 You have reflections on language and on freedom of speech, which has been very much something you have been associated with, perhaps for reasons you might not have wanted.

Speaker 1 That final short story, The Old Man in the Piazza, in which language becomes a character. Tell us about that.

Speaker 21 The story is a small town in which people assemble in the town square, essentially to argue with each other.

Speaker 21 And the point about language being a character is that what the story is suggesting is that maybe we're losing the ability to talk to each other.

Speaker 21 Maybe we don't understand each other when we talk to each other. Even though we're using a single language, we can't communicate.

Speaker 1 And there's also a period in the story when there is no disagreement, where everyone is on the same page. Everyone is a yes person.

Speaker 21 Everybody's ordered to be on the same page.

Speaker 7 Quite.

Speaker 1 Does that ring bells about what is happening now in parts of the world?

Speaker 21 Well, I do think that there is pressure on people to conform to various lines of attitude. And that's true across the political spectrum.
I mean, here in...

Speaker 21 in the United States, of course, there's a major censorship push. PEN America recently put out a paper saying that there are currently 23,000 active bookmans in the United States.

Speaker 21 That's an attempt to control the narrative of the country, if you like.

Speaker 21 And then coming from the liberal progressive side, there's also a desire to keep people in line, you know, to tell people how to speak and how not to speak. And I find them both worrying.

Speaker 1 What about the balance then between freedom of speech and disinformation?

Speaker 21 Well, you do it by doing it. You know, you tell the truth instead of telling lies.

Speaker 1 How do you control it, though?

Speaker 21 Well, you don't control it. That's the point about it being free.
You let a thousand voices speak.

Speaker 8 Salman Rushdie.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. This edition was mixed by Graham White.
The producers were Anna Aslam and Guy Pitt. The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Jeanette Jalil. Until next time, goodbye.

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