White House to release Epstein files

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Speaker 1 This is the Global News Broadcast from the BBC World Service.

Speaker 1 I'm Nick Miles, and in the early hours of the 20th of November, these are our main stories.

Speaker 1 I have just signed the bill to release the Epstein files, President Trump's post marking a U-turn in the controversy that won't go away.

Speaker 1 A 62% year-on-year quarterly rise in profits for the US AI chipmaker Nvidia has wowed the tech world, and Colombia vows to press on with deadly airstrikes in its fight against rebel groups.

Speaker 1 Also, in this podcast.

Speaker 8 There might have been $6 million sitting there.

Speaker 1 Six million?

Speaker 8 Six million? Yeah, and I had no idea. So I said, it's now or never.
I might as well start spending this money. Just spend it.

Speaker 1 The anonymous international development donors stepping up where Washington has stepped down.

Speaker 1 And the hunt for Ryan Wedding, the former Olympic snowboarder now suspected of being a dangerous drug kingpin.

Speaker 1 President Trump has posted on social media, in all capitals, I have just signed the bill to release the Epstein files. The U.S.

Speaker 1 Justice Department now has 30 days to release all of its documents on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Here's our North America correspondent, David Wirs.

Speaker 9 The big question now is how many of the files will be released. The Attorney General Pam Bondi said today that the Justice Department would, as she put it, follow the law.

Speaker 9 But the bill that's been passed by Congress and approved and signed into law by President Trump this evening allows for the withholding of any information, any material that could jeopardize an active or ongoing investigation.

Speaker 9 And just last Friday, President Trump ordered a federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's links to his democratic political opponents.

Speaker 9 So that ongoing investigation could potentially hamper the release of new documents, or the Justice Department could decide to heavily redact the contents of some of the files.

Speaker 9 We will have to wait and see how much more light the release of these documents actually shines on the activities of the late Geoffrey Epstein.

Speaker 1 This is very much a political story as well as a judicial one, isn't it? In that post, Donald Trump had a real swipe at Democrats. He said none of the files were released under Joe Biden.

Speaker 1 A lot of Democrats were very friendly with Epstein. Nevertheless, to what extent has the President been damaged by seeming to drag his feet until now?

Speaker 9 Well, you're right. And this affair has been a thorn in Donald Trump's side for months now.
He was once a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. There's no question about that.

Speaker 9 He's been dogged by questions about the extent of his involvement in Jeffrey Epstein's activities. And the saga has affected his approval rating, which has now fallen to a new low.

Speaker 9 A Reuters Ipsos poll published this week revealed that just 20%

Speaker 9 of the American population approves of his handling of the Epstein files issue.

Speaker 9 Signing the bill into law, as he has done, will take some of the pressure off Mr Trump, depending, of course, on what's actually in those files.

Speaker 9 But it could heighten the pressure on some other public figures.

Speaker 9 And earlier this week, of course, the former US Treasury Secretary, the former Harvard President Larry Summers, announced that he was, as he put it, stepping back from all public commitments after documents were released which showed that he also had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 1 David Willis, now on to another issue that's rarely left the headlines over the last year. Artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence.

Speaker 10 Artificial intelligence.

Speaker 4 AI. The AI ecosystem.
AI.

Speaker 8 The AI boom.

Speaker 1 But as with any new big thing, the question for investors is whether AI is now a proven money spinner or whether it's a bubble that will burst.

Speaker 1 So there were lots of eyes on Nvidia as it posted its latest revenue and profit figures.

Speaker 1 One of the biggest companies in the world, it makes the chips that power some of the most complex artificial intelligence systems out there.

Speaker 1 Our North America business correspondent, Michelle Fleury, told me whether the numbers were good or bad.

Speaker 11 Nvidia reported much stronger earnings, the much stronger growth, I think, than people were necessarily sure would materialize.

Speaker 11 And the reason I say that is that the company said revenue was 57 billion. That was up 62% from a year ago.

Speaker 11 But not only did it see strong demand from big companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and the likes, it also said that it continues to see that demand going forward.

Speaker 11 So the next three months, it's expecting a 75% increase in revenue compared to a year ago. So that is really what initially is cheering people here on Wall Street.

Speaker 11 The question going forward is where that money continues to come from. And I think that is where certainly Wall Street analysts will be quizzing the boss, Jun Zin Huang, when he speaks to investors.

Speaker 1 Indeed, Michelle, what does this tell us about the overall state of the health of the AI sector?

Speaker 11 NVIDIA is seen as a bellwether, and there are good reasons for that. I mean, it is so important, it's hard to underestimate.
You know, it now accounts for 7%

Speaker 11 of a major US stock index. So what NVIDIA does, the rest of the market follows.

Speaker 11 It's seen as a bellwether for the artificial intelligence stocks, in part because it is the backbone of the infrastructure.

Speaker 11 So as companies kind of want to build out and develop more and more and use AI more and more in their products, they turn to companies like NVIDIA. So it tells you where we're going.

Speaker 11 But the question mark comes in, and the reason people are talking about is there a bubble or not, is that you're starting to see a lot more borrowing to try and fund those investments.

Speaker 11 And so while NVIDIA is seeing strong demand for its products and strong growth, investors are beginning to question how all of these purchases are being funded.

Speaker 11 That means that you're seeing NVIDIA's share price still performing very well, but other companies, it could be a Meta, it could be an Oracle, are beginning to sort of face tougher questions from Wall Street.

Speaker 1 And just this week we heard Michelle, the head of Google, admitting that there was a degree of irrationality behind the AI boom.

Speaker 11 But what's fascinating is that in that same interview, the boss also talked about the importance of AI as he saw it to humanity as a whole.

Speaker 11 And it makes me think back to the dot-com bubble, where the power or the transformative nature of the internet is undeniable, but not all of the companies who were there at the beginning survived or did well.

Speaker 11 And I think that's what people are looking at now with AI: there isn't a doubt so much that AI is here to stay, but it's which companies will turn out to to have been the winners with proven profits down the road.

Speaker 1 Michelle Fleury. It's almost a decade since a peace deal was signed in Colombia that many hoped would bring an end to the armed conflict there.
But still, the killings continue.

Speaker 1 In recent weeks, at least a dozen children forcibly recruited to fight for rebel groups have died in government airstrikes.

Speaker 1 Well, despite calls from the opposition to halt the aerial bombardments, Colombia's defense minister Pedro Sanchez, while apologising to the mothers of the children who were killed, said they will continue.

Speaker 1 Mr. Sanchez went on to say that the army was following the law and blamed the guerrillas for the deaths of child recruits.

Speaker 1 He called the strikes the last option in the fight against armed insurrection. Our Latin America expert, Luis Fajardo, told me this marks a shift in the left-wing government strategy.

Speaker 12 When the government of Gustavo Petro came into office in 2022, Petro had promised a very different strategy.

Speaker 12 He had said that Colombia had been relying for too long on military solutions, and he had promised that the last remaining rebel groups in Colombia would quickly disarm under his administration because of the political talks he had been promising.

Speaker 12 These have not turned out to be successful till now, three years into his administration. In fact, the widespread perception is that security is decreasing very substantially.

Speaker 12 These groups, many of which obtain substantial funding from drug trafficking, have become more powerful. They have become more brazen in their attacks.

Speaker 12 And one of the reflections of this is the change in policy.

Speaker 12 Petro, when he was an opposition leader, he had been very strongly against airstrikes against rebel targets because precisely he had mentioned other cases in which other children had also been killed.

Speaker 12 during these attacks and he had promised that under his government it would be very different. A few months ago he changed his mind.

Speaker 12 He started authorizing it and now he is facing a lot of political criticisms.

Speaker 1 And what about the main rebel movement, the FARC dissident group? How they responded to all this?

Speaker 12 The FARC dissident groups, there are multiple FARC dissident groups actually.

Speaker 12 There are several factions from the mostly the mobilized FARC that have continued operating and reacting militarily across the country.

Speaker 12 One of the main groups is one led by a guerrilla who calls himself or has been called Ivan Mordisco.

Speaker 12 He went recently on a video appearance that has been distributed widely in Colombia, challenging the state, not only the state, but also sending threats against journalists and against many other members of the civil society, which he accuses of being allied in what he describes as an authoritarian state.

Speaker 12 And he has been threatening even actions against the presidential elections, which will be held next year.

Speaker 12 So he remains very defiant, as do many other rebel groups right now in Colombia, despite all the hopes that had been maintained for a final peace process after so many years of internal strife in Colombia.

Speaker 1 Colombians must be very confused. A hard-line approach doesn't seem to work.
A softer approach isn't working. What alternative is there?

Speaker 12 There is, as in many other countries, an extreme degree of polarization.

Speaker 12 There are left-wing candidates who still suggest that there are some ways to attempt some political dialogue with these groups, while many right-wing, many conservative opposition groups say that it is useless to try to dialogue with these groups, which they describe as little more than criminal gangs that claim to have a political purpose but are really more interested in drug trafficking and illegal mining and this kind of activities.

Speaker 12 What is certain is that security has become once again a very big electoral topic in Colombia.

Speaker 1 Luis Fajardo in Miami.

Speaker 1 Since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas came into force some some six weeks ago, numerous attacks by both sides have consistently threatened the fragile truce.

Speaker 1 But none has worried observers as much as the most recent wave of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza. Hamas claims the attacks left at least 25 people dead.

Speaker 1 Three of the victims were killed when a United Nations sports club in the south of the territory was hit. Israel insists it was targeting a terrorist in Gaza.

Speaker 1 Our correspondent in Jerusalem, John Donison, gave my colleague Sean Lay his analysis of events.

Speaker 5 Probably the most serious airstrikes on Gaza since the ceasefire came into place, what, six weeks ago now. 25 people killed.

Speaker 5 The largest strike appears to be in the Zaytoun area of Gaza City, where the civil defense agency says 10 people were killed.

Speaker 5 There were additional strikes in Gaza City and also in the south of the Gaza Strip around Khan Yunis.

Speaker 5 And, you know, as well as the dead many people it seems to have been injured so it's another dangerous moment in the Middle East I think what explanation has Israel given for launching these attacks well Israel says it was targeting terrorists and also terrorist infrastructure there have been strikes all throughout the six weeks since the ceasefire on a daily basis and Israel sometimes says that it was Palestinians who were entering into areas

Speaker 5 where they are not meant to go, into zones that Israel has designated as under their control.

Speaker 5 But this appears to be on a greater scale than that.

Speaker 13 How fragile is the ceasefire? Because the rhetoric, at least from American politicians, for example, the US Vice President J.D.

Speaker 13 Vance, when he visited Israel, was that this ceasefire will hold and we shouldn't be distracted by occasional exchanges of fire between the two sites.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, I think this is more than an occasional exchange of fire. I mean, the ceasefire is fragile at best.
It came into force six weeks ago, and I think it's fair to say that every day

Speaker 5 or almost every day, there have been Palestinians who have been killed in Israeli strikes, and it should be said that there have been Hamas activity as well with them targeting Israeli forces inside Gaza.

Speaker 5 Now President Trump when that ceasefire was declared said the war was over.

Speaker 5 If it is over

Speaker 5 it could be back at any time and many would dispute that it is actually over at all and all the while you know we have a pretty desperate humanitarian situation in Gaza.

Speaker 5 More aid is getting in but the weather has turned here. We had torrential rain over the weekend.
Many people flooded in Gaza, people up to their shins in water.

Speaker 5 And of course, you've got hundreds of thousands of people living in tents there. So Gaza might have dropped out of the news a little bit, but it is still an ongoing situation.

Speaker 1 John Donison.

Speaker 1 Still to come.

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Speaker 1 The story next of Ryan James Wedding.

Speaker 19 Wedding is the former Olympian from Canada who is now the leader of a transnational criminal enterprise.

Speaker 1 He is so important that the State Department has put up a $15 million reward.

Speaker 20 Make no mistake about it. Ryan Wedding is a modern-day iteration of Pablo Escobar.

Speaker 1 That's just some of what was said at a Department of Justice press conference in the US.

Speaker 1 It was an opportunity for the authorities to emphasize how much progress they were making in the investigation and to up the reward for finding Ryan Wedding to $15 million.

Speaker 1 The newsroom's Will Chalk told me more.

Speaker 14 Well, strangely, for a story about an alleged drug lord, Nick, a good place to start with this is is probably the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Speaker 14 That's when Ryan Wedding competed in the giant slalom snowboarding event representing his country, Canada.

Speaker 14 Now, being an Olympian is something that millions of people aspire to and, you know, usually seen as a hugely respected thing. But in the years since, the FBI think Ryan Wedding's life took...

Speaker 14 a very different turn and he became one of the world's most dangerous fugitives running his own drug cartel and ordering dozens of murders around the world.

Speaker 14 Let's hear a bit more from Cash Patel, director of the FBI.

Speaker 20 This Justice Department and this FBI will work with our Canadian counterparts and the government officials across the world to bring him to justice.

Speaker 20 He is responsible for engineering a narco-trafficking and narco-terrorism program that we have not seen in a long time. He will not evade justice.

Speaker 14 So, what do we know about Ryan Wedding? Well, he's thought to have started his rise through the underworld after being released from prison in 2011 on drug dealing charges.

Speaker 14 His aliases include El Jefe, Giant, and Public Enemy, and he's believed to be living in Mexico under the protection of the Sinaloa cartel.

Speaker 1 And well, today we heard details of new charges against him.

Speaker 14 Yeah, the big one being that he orchestrated the killing of a witness just last year using a fake news website.

Speaker 14 So the accusation is that Ryan Wedding wanted to track down a witness who was due to testify against him and put a bounty on his head.

Speaker 14 So he paid a website thousands of dollars to post pictures of the witness online in a bid to track him down. Here is the U.S.
Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Speaker 19 The witness was gunned down in a restaurant in Medellin

Speaker 19 before he could testify against wedding. Today we're unsealing a new indictment charging wedding with two additional counts of witness tampering and intimidation.

Speaker 19 murder, money laundering, and drug trafficking.

Speaker 14 Now, although the authorities are still very much searching for Ryan Wedding, they said as part of this press conference they've already made 10 other arrests, including, incidentally, the man who ran that Canadian website.

Speaker 14 But like Wedding himself, the person who actually committed the murder still hasn't been found. So this is very much an ongoing thing, Nick.

Speaker 1 Will Chalk.

Speaker 1 The closure of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, earlier this year left thousands of health and nutrition programs around the world on the brink of collapse.

Speaker 1 Many projects had been almost entirely dependent on the funding from America and did in fact shut down.

Speaker 1 But then a group of former USAID employees decided to act and found some extraordinary saviours willing to help. Sam Fennec has the details.

Speaker 4 In southern Nepal, a mother watches anxiously as a health worker measures her toddler's arm.

Speaker 4 This is a malnutrition clinic supported by Helen Keller International, one of the hundreds of projects thrown into uncertainty when the US government cancelled USAID programmes earlier this year.

Speaker 4 Helen Keller's country director for Nepal is Pooja Pandre.

Speaker 21 When we received the stopwork order, it was really truly heartbreaking, you know, because it came as a shock.

Speaker 4 USAID had been one of Helen Keller's primary funders. When the department closed, thousands of community health volunteers were stood down.

Speaker 4 And it left the charity wondering how they keep funding services across Nepal's most vulnerable districts.

Speaker 21 So the PWS8 funded project, because it was designed at scale, we covered almost 60% of the country.

Speaker 21 One of our primary jobs was to really identify where are the most vulnerable areas that have high risk of malnutrition. And there, our job was to really truly implement a community-focused program.

Speaker 21 And so what I mean by that, we would sort of employ local women that would go to communities after community screen children if they're malnourished.

Speaker 21 If they find a malnourished child, they would then refer them to the closest treatment center.

Speaker 4 So how did the clinic keep going? In the weeks after the cuts, a small group of former USAID staff formed a volunteer initiative called Project Resource Optimization or PRO.

Speaker 4 They sifted through more than 20,000 cancelled USAID projects, narrowing them down to 79 that were the most cost-effective cost-effective and life-saving. Rob Rosenbaum explains how they did it.

Speaker 22 We started with an algorithmic approach. So once we had that initial list, that brought it down to about 600 projects.

Speaker 4 And how long did it take you then to get that list of 600 down to a list that you could actually do something with, that you could find donors and philanthropists who would be able to help them?

Speaker 22 Within a month, we got the first set of projects up. I think there was about 10 projects at that point.

Speaker 4 They published the list online and hoped donors would come and they did. First individuals stepped forward.

Speaker 4 One retired lawyer found that she had millions sitting in an old charitable account that she'd forgotten about.

Speaker 8 There might have been six million dollars sitting there.

Speaker 4 Six million?

Speaker 8 Six million, yeah. And I had no idea.
So I said, okay, I'm looking at this list and there are things I can do on this list. I said, it's now or never.
I might as well start spending this money.

Speaker 8 Just spend it.

Speaker 4 Her donation funded two projects, one in Ethiopia and one treating malnutrition in Nigeria. But then came the message no one expected.
Sasha Galant from PRO picked it up.

Speaker 10 This actually started with an email in our inbox from an interested donor.

Speaker 10 The next time we heard back from that donor, they said they wanted to do more than anticipated and they decided to fund all of the remaining projects on our vetted list at that point to ensure that they would all receive enough funding to keep them operational for the next 12 months.

Speaker 10 In total, that covered about $65 million of of projects.

Speaker 4 Their identity remains unknown, but their money means that a handful of programs can keep going.

Speaker 4 Back at the clinic in Nepal, health workers are busy checking children for malnutrition.

Speaker 4 Helen Keller's country director, Pooja Pandre, says the funding it received from PRO has kept their services running, but only for the time being.

Speaker 21 So it really helped restore our community-based nutrition activities, or you know, reinstate some of the key life-saving services.

Speaker 4 So, you've got a year's worth of funding. Yes.
Are you thinking about what happens after that?

Speaker 21 The funding climate is really difficult. The Nepali government's budget is not very high,

Speaker 21 and the government is now sort of just finding very difficult that with their own budget, they have to now procure these essential sort of drugs. There's a lot of like system-level collapse as well.

Speaker 21 And the government now is having a really tough time to prioritize.

Speaker 4 The Trump administration formally dissolved USAID on the 1st of July. Since then, PRO has raised more than $100 million and helped 79 projects around the world.

Speaker 4 It says it intends to continue its work matching donors with charity projects.

Speaker 1 Sam Fenwick reporting.

Speaker 1 Italy's top appeals court has ruled that a former Ukrainian military officer should be extradited to Germany to face charges of blowing up Russia's Nord Stream gas pipelines three years ago.

Speaker 1 Ukraine has denied any role in the blasts, but the case could have serious political implications, as Germany is Kyiv's biggest supplier of military aid in Europe. From Rome, Sarah Rainsford reports.

Speaker 23 Sergei Kuznetsov will be extradited to Germany under police escort in the next few days to face the charge of anti-constitutional sabotage.

Speaker 23 He's accused of coordinating the deep sea explosions in 2022 that destroyed three key gas pipelines from Russia to Germany. At the time, many suspected Russia, but this summer Mr.

Speaker 23 Kuznetsov was arrested on holiday here in Italy. Then another Ukrainian man was detained in Poland.
Kiev is saying nothing. It needs German support in its war with Russia.

Speaker 23 But Serhei Kuznetsov's lawyer has told the BBC his client was an officer in the Ukrainian military at the time of the blasts, so if he was involved in such a complex and significant operation, then he must have been following orders.

Speaker 23 His client, he said, felt abandoned.

Speaker 23 Last month, the court in Poland refused to extradite the suspect there because the judge said no Ukrainian could be prosecuted for what he called a legitimate act of self-defense against Russia.

Speaker 1 Sarah Rainsford.

Speaker 1 Now, the Austrian artist Gustav Klimp's portrait of Elizabeth Lederer has had a checkered history.

Speaker 1 The two-metre-tall painting from the early 20th century has made history by becoming the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction when it went for more than $236 million at Sotheby's in New York.

Speaker 1 Our correspondent David Sillito has the details.

Speaker 15 Now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to an unequivocal masterpiece of Vienna's golden age.

Speaker 1 It was one of those standing room only moments at Sotheby's. Paintings by Gustav Klimt have a habit of setting records.

Speaker 15 Bidding began at $130 million.

Speaker 1 At $130 million for almost six feet high, this portrait of a woman in a white dress, surrounded by a background of Chinese figures, looks you straight in the eye.

Speaker 1 Elizabeth Lederer, the daughter of the artist's most important patrons, was 20 years old when Gustav Klimt painted her portrait. In 1939, the Lederer's paintings were seized by the Nazis.

Speaker 1 Many were lost in a fire. But the portrait survived because it was separated from the rest of the works because the subject of the painting was Jewish.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, back in the auction room, bidding had reached $200 million.

Speaker 1 And after some intense conversations with the telephone bidders, the hammer finally came down at $205 million.

Speaker 15 Here it is, for the Elizabeth Ledere portrait, only at Sotheby's, here in the Breuer. The Climps, Julian, is yours.

Speaker 1 Congratulations. Adding the premium to the as-yet-unnamed buyer, and it's a total price of $236 million.

Speaker 1 The only painting to have gone for more at auction, Leonardo da Vinci's Salvatore Monday, which went for $450 million.

Speaker 1 But at a time when the art market has this year been heading downwards, a reminder that if the right painting comes along, the super-rich buyers are still there.

Speaker 15 Thank you both to all of our bidders. Thank you so much.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 And that is 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 or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.

Speaker 1 The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service.
Use the hashtag Global Newspod.

Speaker 1 This edition was mixed by Zabihula Karouch and produced by Wendy Urquhart and Guy Pitt. The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Nick Mars, and until next time, goodbye.

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