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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Andrew Peach and at 13 hours GMT on Tuesday the 30th of July, these are our main stories. A series of devastating landslides in southern India has killed more than 90 people as officials warn many more victims remain trapped. Protests continue across Venezuela against the re-election of President Nicolas Maduro, which the opposition says was rigged.
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Away from the Olympics, we'll look at some of the bizarre races that make up a list of alternative sports and the slow demise of the landline. What impact is the transition to mobile technology having on our brains? MUSIC
The government in the Indian state of Kerala has declared two days of mourning after more than 90 people were killed in a series of landslides. Heavy rain turned rivers into muddy torrents, sweeping away trees and vehicles and submerging buildings. Soldiers have been deployed to help with the rescue effort. It's thought the number of casualties will rise further, as our Delhi correspondent Samira Hussain told Lucy Hockings.
People expect that that number is actually going to go up. They're saying about 250 people have been injured so far and they have the Indian Navy in the rescue attempts. You also have members of the Indian Army that are also involved in the rescue operations.
What's really making it all really difficult is, of course, that it continues to rain there. And it was those rains that triggered the three consecutive landslides very early in the morning Tuesday here in India.
And now they're trying to reach those communities that are basically cut off from other parts of the region. There is a critical bridge that connected one area that suffered a landslide and that has been destroyed. And so the army is actually building a rope bridge to try and reach some of those that are stranded.
Officials there believe that many people may have been swept into those rivers that have become really swollen and muddy and just become trapped under that water. So really now the race is on to try and get to some of those people that are stranded behind those mudslides. And Samira, this is an area of Kerala that is prone to heavy rain and flooding. So they are familiar in some ways with what needs to happen.
now. Right. So the state of Kerala is in the southern part of India and parts of it are, of course, coastal. But if you go more inwards into the state, you get to this sort of lush, green, hilly area. There's lots of tea estates and cardamom estates in this area. So
It does see these kinds of landslides or flooding rather, especially in the monsoon season, which we're in right now. And so they have seen that. Back in 2018, more than 400 people died. You know, that was considered some of the worst flooding that the area has seen in a century. So it is an area that sees this. But if you compare it to the last few years, they haven't seen something quite as deadly as this one. Samir Hussain.
The weather is continuing to cause problems for the Paris Olympics. The men's triathlon was due to be underway by now, but it's been postponed. Too much rain has caused pollution in the River Seine. This is an ongoing problem, with training sessions already cancelled for the past two days. Dan Angelescu is the founder and chief executive of Fluidian, which has been working with the authorities in Paris on the water quality in the Seine. He says the sewage infrastructure has been overwhelmed by the amount of rain.
The water quality still depends a lot on the rainfall in the sense that there has been all this infrastructure that cost a lot of money that was built, but it has a certain capacity. And what we noticed, and this is really groundbreaking because we are noticing it live, is that we had two rain events since the opening of this capture basin that's supposed to capture all the overflow. There have been two rain events that occurred
overcame the capacity of the structure, so the river was polluted, and it was polluted in Paris and most likely also upstream. Some athletes in the triathlon and other river-based events have expressed their unhappiness about the continued uncertainty as they try to prepare to compete. These spectators in the French capital say they're disappointed. It's
The idea is pretty good, and I think the whole thing is pretty good to do a lot for the water quality for the city. When you look further on and say, OK, people can swim in the Seine, that is one of the ideas that I read. It's a good idea, but for today, it's a little bit disappointed. We were very excited to see the triathlon, but we've just found out that it's been cancelled, sadly. Disappointed, but hopefully, you say it's going to be on tomorrow, so maybe we'll come back tomorrow.
So what happens if the water quality doesn't improve? Will the men's and women's triathlon events be cancelled? Here's our Paris correspondent, Andy.
Andrew Harding. If nothing happens positively in terms of the tests that they will do and will announce early tomorrow morning, then there is one last chance, which is Friday, for both the men's and the women's triathlon. But there is a distinct possibility by then that there will have been more rain and therefore there is the danger of more pollution having been washed in. And the real problem and the reason why I think athletes have expressed concern
some frustration, even anger, according to one French report about the situation, is there is no plan B. There is no backup venue. So if it doesn't happen here, it will not be a triathlon. It will be a duathlon, which simply doesn't count.
for Olympic goals and so on in the same way. So a huge amount at stake for the athletes, men and women, who should have been in the Seine here this morning. And we know that the water quality of the river has been too poor for people to swim in for a long time. So perhaps it was just too big an arse to clean it up.
Well, this is a ten-year project, 1.2 or 3 billion euros of investment in terms of diverting sewage pipes, chemical pipes, and also building a giant, what they call an underwater cathedral, to store excess rainwater.
But the trouble, and this is what a lot of the organisers and experts are pointing at, is frankly climate change. The weather is becoming more intense, rainfall more unpredictable, and it means that despite the investment and despite all the planning...
It's simply very hard to predict when the rain is going to hit and in the sort of quantities that Paris has experienced in recent days. Which I guess is why normally these events take place in more controlled environments than the open river. The rain is now giving way to a heat wave, I understand.
It's sweltering. It's 34 degrees here right now. I think it's going to be the same or hotter all over France today, but then it will break and it'll be a bit cooler in the coming days. Andrew Harding with me from Paris.
The town of Southport in the north-west of England is in mourning. Three children are now confirmed dead and another five, as well as two adults, remain in a critical condition in hospital after a mass stabbing attack that turned a summer holiday dance event into a scene of carnage. A 17-year-old male arrested on suspicion of murder remains in custody. Stephanie Power has been to the area and talked to people there.
If somebody asked you to describe Southport in three words, you would say Victorian seaside resort.
There's lots and lots of Victorian houses from small terraces to semi-detached to huge detached buildings. The sun's shining and it kind of looked just like it might always do on a Monday night. People are sitting outside. You almost would think that nothing has really happened here.
I just can hear you're listening to BBC News on your phone there. Nothing like this has ever happened, so it's very strange and upsetting. That's why I think so many people are listening, probably. I was home alone and I could hear the helicopters and I was like, I don't want to be by myself, just in case, because we didn't know if there was anybody else around.
that was involved, so... So you're going to go to the gym and just try and carry on, be normal? So, yeah, because there's nothing we can do apart from just hope that everybody's OK. Aside from all the other journalists around, I noticed lots of vicars and chaplains here to offer support.
They're words. There are no words for this. I mean, it's just unbelievable what's happened here. All I can say was, as I said in Welsh, that Jesus is crying as well. You just cannot imagine that life will just go, be taken like that. And the effect on other children, it'll affect them for the whole of their lives. It's that sort of thing, isn't it, where it's an ordinary day until it's not an ordinary day. Exactly. Exactly.
And this day, well, this will remain. And it can upset generations of children that somebody could do this. But the community, I mean, it's lovely to see, you know, British men are supposed to be a bit tight-lipped. But the men, tall men, are coming here with bunches of flowers. And that's lovely. Emily Spurrell, I am the Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner.
You were talking quite a lot about people worrying about people making assumptions. I mean, is that actually quite a serious problem? Because I've noticed there's some people doing their own reporting on Facebook Live, making all sorts of announcements. How difficult is that?
It definitely poses a challenge. I think, you know, I would really just urge people to go through the official channels. This is a really complicated investigation. The police don't believe they're looking for anybody else at the minute, but obviously they're still doing the work trying to try and understand what the motivation was and how we got to this point. So, you know, when people start trying to throw out other ideas or start trying to stir up, you know, sentiment in an unhelpful way, all that does is divert resources away from the police, being able to actually invest in getting justice for the children and the families who have suffered.
So I would just really urge people to let the police do their job. The facts will come out when they come out. And then, you know, we can have a discussion about, you know, what that means and how we might prevent something like this from happening again. The children attacked were at a Taylor Swift themed dance class and the US singer has posted on Instagram saying the horror of the attack was washing over her continuously and she was completely in shock.
It took the supporters of the Venezuelan opposition just one day to take to the streets to protest against the official result of the presidential election. The incumbent, Nicolas Maduro, has been declared the winner, but the opposition and many foreign governments have denounced that as fraudulent. The protesters were met with tear gas and rubber bullets. Catherine Ellis is a former BBC journalist now working in Venezuela. She told us what she'd seen.
People started walking from the mountains, one of the very poor neighborhoods in the east of the city, and they started walking to the center of the city. Now, I came across them by chance. I started walking with them. A lot of motorcycles as well. People with flags.
The atmosphere was jubilant in some ways, but people were getting angry as well. At one point, I actually got caught with a group of people between two groups of the military. Now, some of the people were actually starting to pick up rocks from the ground and starting to throw them towards buildings and starting to throw them towards police as well. There was tear gas and the police did start shooting rubber bullets as well.
One girl in front of me was screaming, please don't shoot me, please don't shoot me. Now the police and the military were trying to disperse the crowds, but people didn't know what was happening. I found out the latest from Jorge Perez from BBC Mundo. A lot of expectation and a lot of tension in the country, not only in the capital, but throughout the countryside, because it is expected today that the government is calling its supporters to go to the street to celebrate, as they said, the march.
Maduro's disputed victory. But there is also this question whether the anti-government protests that spontaneously happened yesterday are going to occur today as well. Right. So choreographed celebrations, continuing protests, real possibility of violent clashes.
There's a curious fact. The government is calling, for example, in the city of Caracas, the capital, the government is calling its supporters to start marching from Petare. Petare is one of the biggest slums, not only in Venezuela, but in Latin America, where we saw some of the images yesterday from protesters, anti-government protesters. And the government is also calling its supporters to depart from there to march towards a presidential palace. So it is an open question. Are there going to be clashes? We are going to see that in the
The opposition and other governments, for that matter, are asking the authorities in Caracas to show us you're working, show us the tally, show us the votes to prove that the outcome of this election is accurate. Are they going to do that?
Well, it is not only a request of the opposition leaders. It's also a request from many of the governments in the region. And we have seen a reaction from Maduro's government expelling some of diplomats of Latin America because they also, their governments also requested this. If we are going to see it or not,
It depends on the government of Nicolás Maduro. But for now, they seem they're taking their time to show them. And it's been not only a request of the opposition, of regional governments, but also of some international observers like the Carter Center, the American Carter Center, an institution that has been observing elections in Venezuela since Hugo Chávez times.
Jorge Perez from BBC Mundo. And if you'd like to hear more about Nicolas Maduro and Venezuela's disputed election, you'll find it on the latest episode of the BBC's Global Story podcast. Just search for The Global Story wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
Photos of North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un tend to portray him as powerful, inspecting military equipment or riding on horseback. Reports from South Korea suggest he may be more infirm than he likes to admit, though, and that North Korean officials are trying to obtain medicine to deal with his obesity-related health problems. Gene McKenzie is our correspondent in Seoul.
This has come from an intelligence briefing here in South Korea, and these happen quite regularly. So every month or so, people from the intelligence services brief this committee of MPs here about their sort of latest findings on North Korea, and then those MPs brief the media. So we always get this information a bit secondhand.
But what has come out of the latest briefing are these lines about Kim Jong-un's health. So primarily, the intel services and these MPs saying that they now think that Kim Jong-un weighs 140 kilograms. And so that puts him at risk, they are saying, of a whole load of health-related, obesity-related diseases, such as diabetes and high blood pressure and heart disease. This is a man who smokes heavily, who drinks heavily, who obviously eats a lot, which is
It's one of the things that I think has always been hard for people of North Korea to stomach because, of course, North Korea is a country where there are extreme food shortages. A large proportion of the country are malnourished without enough access to food. And then you have this leadership that clearly has a lot of access to food and the finer things in life. We did see him lose weight some time ago. He really slimmed down, but that weight all went back on.
pretty quickly. And so you have the intelligence services now, as I said, that for some time now, they have been warning about his health, because what they are always thinking ahead to is like, well, if he is to die prematurely, who then comes in to succeed him? How does the regime stabilise itself? And does that mean the regime is more likely to collapse? Because perhaps there isn't a kind of natural succession plan in place. Gene McKenzie in Seoul. Still to come on this podcast...
We heard a lot of firing. We were on the ground for maybe about a minute and still hear a lot of firing going. I thought, holy cow, this is really a hot zone. One of the most controversial people to have shaped American views of the Vietnam War has died. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax and think about...
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The World Health Organization says injured and critically ill Palestinians are on their way from Gaza to the United Arab Emirates for treatment. It's the largest single medical evacuation since the brutal Hamas attack on southern Israel on October the 7th, including some 150 patients. Israel's sweeping military operations against Hamas have decimated Gaza's health care system since then.
International journalists aren't allowed into Gaza, but Barbara Plet-Uscher's report uses footage sent in by a local cameraman. This bus station in central Gaza is crowded with people embarking on a rare journey. One boy is being carried to his seat on a stretcher. Officials are calling out the names of those on their list. It's a chance for the sick and injured to get the care they can't get here, they hope.
Nothing is ever certain. Shaza Abu Salim is pushing her daughter Lamis in a wheelchair. The young girl needs major surgery for scoliosis, delayed now by six months. She barely moves, her face stained with tears and exhaustion. I call on the whole world to look at us with compassion.
I could not believe it when they contacted me, that my daughter was amongst those on the list going outside Gaza for treatment. I do not know when the war will end. I do not know when my daughter can receive treatment. May God make it easy and heal everyone.
So many need to be healed. But Israel's war against Hamas has closed hospitals, killed doctors, blocked medicines, inflicted traumatic injuries. We were struck. My eldest son was killed. My father was killed. My
My youngest son, Aser, lost his sight. Nasima al-Ajil is holding little Aser. His eyelid closed over an empty socket. Her leg wrapped in bandages. His left eye was blown out with a skull fracture. My middle son suffers from a leg injury and leg deformities. And I suffer a skull fracture, blindness in my left eye and a broken shoulder and ribs.
There's no safe place in Gaza. The front line keeps closing in. Again this week, scenes of people forced to flee an Israeli military operation. Many have had to do so time and time again. They have nowhere left to go. The buses are pretty much the only way out. It's not the first medical evacuation, but it is the biggest.
facilitated by the World Health Organization in coordination with the Israelis. WHO says there are still 10,000 more patients that need to leave Gaza. My name is Sara Marzouk. I am 12 years old and a resident of Gaza. I was injured in Gaza. They bombed our neighbor's house and my leg was cut off.
She's standing with crutches, wiping away tears. But her eyes light up when she talks about walking again. I am very happy because I will travel. They will give me an artificial limb and I will be able to walk again. I wish that the war would end and that all children like me will be able to come with me and have artificial limbs fitted and receive treatment abroad. I also hope that I will return to see my father in peace.
It is a bittersweet goodbye in the middle of a war. Salma Abid needs care for a tumor in her ovaries. She prepares to wrench herself away from the young daughter clinging to her neck. How can I leave this little girl behind, she asks. Since the first day of the war, she has been afraid. She cannot sleep at all. It's a collective trauma that Salma, like many others, will carry with her.
The doors of the bus are closing. This is only the first leg of a long journey. Little children stand waving in the windows. Those on board are hoping for a cure, hoping even more they will see their families again. That one day they'll be able to return.
Our Middle East correspondent, Barbara Platt-Usher. One of the most controversial individuals to have left his mark on American views of the Vietnam War has died. Lieutenant William Calley commanded a US Army platoon that carried out one of the worst war crimes in American military history. Eventually, in 2009, 41 years after the events, he said he was sorry. Mark Duff looks back at the man and the massacre that won him notoriety.
And so the helicopters put down and we jumped out and still hear a lot of firing going. I thought, holy cow, this is really a hot zone. But, you know, a couple of minutes later, we realized we were not being fired at. Ron Heberle was a battle-hardened frontline war photographer when he landed with American troops outside the hamlet of My Lai in March 1968.
Even he was shocked by what he saw that day. It was just pretty carnage in the village. Just unreal scenes happening. I mean, the hoochas were burning. There was people, dead people laying in some of the hoochas. There was people, you know, on the trail. I think the weirdest thing was some of the soldiers were jumping on some of the animals, the water buffaloes, with their bayonets, trying to stab them.
Just a complete, you know, freak-out scene. But still, to this day, I still can't really figure it out. Soldiers under the command of Lieutenant William Calley killed 504 people as they conducted a search-and-destroy operation against Viet Cong communist guerrillas. Nearly all of the victims were civilians. The killings shocked a United States already divided by the war and galvanised the growing anti-war movement.
Callie was charged with killing 102 men, women and children. He was eventually convicted of 22 deaths. At his court-martial, he made this defence of his actions. I have committed a crime. The only crime that I have committed is in judgement of my values. Apparently, I valued my troops' lives more than I did that of the enemy.
When my troops were getting massacred and mauled by an enemy I couldn't see, I couldn't feel, and I couldn't touch. That nobody in the military system ever described as anything other than communism. They didn't give it a race. They didn't give it a sex. They didn't give it an age. They never let me believe it was just a philosophy in a man's mind. That was my enemy out there.
For his crimes, he spent just three days behind bars before he was released under house arrest by President Richard Nixon. Calley always protested that he'd been made a scapegoat. For all that, he became a living symbol of the moral corruption that the war in Vietnam wrought on America's self-image.
Mark Duff reporting. Do you still have a landline at home? It's estimated only around 25% of households in the US still do. In Britain for the first time, more than half of households now have only mobile phones. This reflects the picture around the world where mobiles are rapidly replacing the old copper wire technology. But what's the impact of this on people, on our behaviour, on our brains?
Sophie Scott is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. She spoke to my colleague Justin Webb. It's big in a couple of ways. So it's moved from a place to a person. So you've got your phone in your pocket and they're calling you no matter where you are. You might be in bed asleep in America and the phone will ring. And also, of course, it isn't just a phone.
You've got something in your pocket that is also going to tell you the news and going to tell you who's thinking about you on social media and all this other kind of stuff that can distract your attention. So half the reason why we're picking up our mobile phones every couple of minutes isn't just to communicate with other people, it's to see other things that might be interesting to us because...
Companies make money that way. People want you to keep going back to their social media because that's where they can put adverts and that's how they can sell space. They want to keep you looking. The place thing is interesting. How does that then change us and our interactions? Because you're not you're no longer in one place talking to someone you know is in another place because it could be anywhere.
I think it's still the personal aspect that matters most. So the thing that's very interesting about humans is we are born communicators. So from the minute you're born, you will pay attention to other human beings and they will behave as if you're in a conversation with you. And that's how you learn to speak is in conversations. And conversations remain important throughout your whole life. Some of the worst things that can happen to a human is you take them out of conversational social spaces. So that's loneliness and it's very bad for our health.
And if you look at the development of technology, almost as soon as a piece of technology appears, we will find a way of using it for communication. So humans discover writing, we start writing letters. If I go back a couple of generations, like my grandparents, before they had phones, they would write postcards to each other back and forth in a day because there were several posts in a day. You could have, you know, in the moment correspondence, a bit like we might use email now. And that
immediately shifted as soon as phones come along. We're just not using it to tell people, you know, to order things. We're using it to call our friends. Which does what to our brains? Well, probably none of that changes the brains fundamentally in that what the important thing is that you're communicating and our brains are so flexible and plastic that we will find new ways of using that communication. So when mobile phones came along...
Everyone thought we'll be using it like a home phone and we'll be talking to everybody. But almost immediately, text messaging became, if anything, more important. And you see that kind of explode in the world of different ways you can communicate digitally. Really interestingly, if you look at young people who are much more fluent users of this kind of digital text communication than an old person like me, they still, if you compare them having a conversation with a friend, having a conversation on a phone with that friend or texting that friend,
they still feel better and more connected when they've had the face-to-face conversation with their friends. So they're still at the heart of it. What you really want is that sort of in-person communication. And phones will give you that almost as good as face-to-face, but not quite. Professor Sophie Scott of University College London.
Wife carrying in Finland, haggis hurling in Scotland, a mud Olympics in Germany. Just some of the bizarre contests that have made a shortlist for fans' favourite alternative sports after 2,000 people were questioned by the airline EasyJet. David Lewis has been looking through what made the cut.
Every four years, the eyes of the world are turned to the greatest sporting event on Earth. But as top athletes descend on Paris for the Olympics, other eye-catching events around the continent are getting a look in. A handful have now been named as Europe's most interesting alternative sports.
Hundreds of fans were asked and they found their favourite in Finland, the wife-carrying championship in Sonkojärvi. For the uninitiated, the clue is very much in the name. Male competitors aim to carry their female partner through an obstacle course in the quickest time possible, ideally without hurting themselves or their marriage.
Strategies differ, either a piggyback, a fireman's lift, or why not go rogue doing it Estonian style, with the lady perched upside down with legs clinging like a crab around her spouse's neck. A pair from Australia won this year's sprint. They were smiling in their winner's photo, though she was still wearing her helmet.
If that's not quite physically destabilising enough, there's always a French wine marathon. The Marathon du Médoc is a full 42km race, and one for the Bonvivers. With 23 wine stops thrown in, the course runs through vineyards and countryside.
Oh, and participants are encouraged to snack en route on oysters, foie gras, cheese steak and ice cream. Yes, that's oysters, foie gras, cheese steak and ice cream. Over the border in Germany, why not try your hand at the Mud Olympics? The sporting events held on the mud flats along the banks of the Elbe River near Hamburg include wrestling and handball, all in the muck. Plus, participants can try their luck at the Mud Olympics.
eel race, slithering like a fish in the brown stuff to glory. But for athletes who seek to stand still, there's always haggis hurling. Held in the birthplace of poet Robbie Burns, the traditional Scottish supper, sheep's stomach stuffed with the animal's heart, liver and lungs, is thrown as far as possible. The world record is an impressive 66 metres, and there's an option to keep the missile as a souvenir.
David Lewis reporting. And that's all from us for now. There'll be a new edition of Global News to download later. If you'd like to comment on this edition and the stories we included, drop us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk or on X, we are at globalnewspod. This edition was produced by Alice Adderley. It was mixed by Callum McLean. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Andrew Peach. Thanks for listening. And until next time, goodbye.
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This is the story of a man who killed so many people. He lost count. But despite his shocking death toll, he only served 12 years in jail. And the families of his victims...
That justice system ultimately ignored all of those bodies and all of the families. From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, Season 3, The Apartheid Killer. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
