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Global News Podcast
France in fresh political crisis after MPs oust PM
00:31:50
Political uncertainty in France with the collapse of Bayrou government
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This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Celia Hatton and in the early hours of Tuesday 9th September, these are our main stories. The French Prime Minister Francois Bairou has lost a confidence vote in Parliament, will now be forced to resign. Benjamin Netanyahu has told residents of Gaza City to leave immediately as the Israeli military intensifies its assault. Democrats in the US Congress have published an image of a sexually suggestive letter purportedly sent by Donald Trump to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Mr. Trump denies being the author. Also in this podcast, a mural by the street artist Banksy surfaces in London before it's quickly covered up. It depicts a judge in a wig and black robe hitting a protester who is lying on the ground holding a blood splattered placard. We begin in the French capital, Paris. The French government had lost a vote of confidence in Parliament and the Prime Minister, Francois Byrou, will resign on Tuesday. He'd wanted to cut public spending to shrink the budget deficit, but failed to garner enough support. On Monday, French MPs voted against him.
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The National assembly has not approved 194 for 264 against. The Prime Minister must now tender his resignation to the President.
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The result in the French Parliament was expected, but but the extent of the government's defeat, perhaps not. The national assembly voted by a margin of almost 2 to 1 to eject Francois Byrou from office, bringing down his minority government. You might think you've heard this before. In the last three years, France has had four prime ministers. It must now find another person to fill that role. French money problems are at the heart of much of this, Francois Bayrou addressed Parliament on Monday. Before the vote, he had this warning for MPs on the country's ballooning deficit.
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3,415 billion euros of debt at the time that I am speaking to you right now. But this debt has a price. What we need to pay to the brokers, what we need to pay to pay back. And we must do it, because otherwise it's a shutdown. Otherwise it's a shutdown and we cannot leave in this country without keeping on borrowing to pay our civil servants to pay the people who keep our state running.
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I spoke to our correspondent in Paris, Hugh Schofield, and I began by asking him to summarize what happened in the French assembly, with Mr. Bairu calling the vote himself.
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It was an act of suicide, according to some, because it was quite clear that he was going to lose it. Let's not forget the background of all of this is a parliament in which no government can have a majority. It's split three ways. Whoever's in power is hated by the other two blocks and they can unite against him. And it was quite clear from the start of all this that Bairu, by staking his government's future on this issue of debt and on a stringent budget to come, would run into the opposition of the left, the left wing alliance, and of the populist right on the other side. And once again, though they hate each other, they came together to vote him out. And that's what happened. They said that his budgetary warnings and his dire cassandra like prognostications about the debt were exaggerated and that his policies were those of President Macron, who they all hate, and therefore he should be defeated. And he was.
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So can you put this into perspective for us then? How big is this crisis politically?
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There's a massive crisis. Obviously we still don't have a government. That means after the snap elections called by Macron in July last year, we're now onto another third Prime Minister in just a bit over, over a year, with no prospect of whoever takes over being able to command a majority in Parliament either. It's all happening at a time when public dissatisfaction, disillusionment with politics is at an all time high, when people just simply turning away from it. And that obviously poses questions about the of France. And it's at the time of debt, of growing worries about whether the level of debt is sustainable. All of this is a kind of concentration of worries, which means that many people regard this as potentially a worse crisis, as bad a crisis there's been since the Second World War.
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And so what are we expecting now? Is this really a threat to Emmanuel Macron's presidency himself?
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Not really. I mean, certainly there are people calling for him to resign, mainly on the. Clearly, it means that the rest of his presidency, there's another two, less than two years to run, probably going to be as marked as they have been up to now by this kind of drift and inability to do anything. Domestic politics will no longer be, Will remain out of his grasp as he concentrates on, on, on international affairs. But what will happen immediately is that he'll have to name a new prime minister, Hugh Scofield.
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The UN has demanded a swift and transparent investigation into the killing of at least 19 people in Nepal during protests against CoR and the decision to block several social media platforms. Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets on demonstrators in Kathmandu who carried placards saying, shut down corruption, not social media. Rebecca Kesbi spoke to our global affairs reporter, Ambarasan Etarajan. She began asking why the Nepalese government shut down the social media sites.
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Now, what happened today in the Kathmandu and other parts of Nepal was quite extraordinary because thousands of youngsters, they were mostly demanding accountability and against political corruption. Of course, the ban on social media provided the trigger for this protest. Now, it all went on very peacefully, people raising slogans and holding placards saying, shut down corruption, not social media. So they were singing. But then when the protesters tried to breach some of the barriers, trying to enter into high security areas like Parliament building, and that's where many eyewitness accounts say that the clashes started. Now, if thousands of people are going into key government buildings, people saw what happened in Sri Lanka. We were covering it quite extensively. And also in Bangladesh, how they toppled the governments at that time. So this is a trend being watched close because the social media has also given power to these youngsters who think that now they have a say in how the country is being governed. They're mobilizing. So their governments are afraid about any mass uprisings. And that is one of the reasons why the critics would point out restrictions being brought in for social media or a way to contain dissent.
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So what is the government going to do now? Because I notice, well, the interior minister has resigned, I guess. Would he have been under pressure to do that?
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This has taken everybody by surprise. And I've been speaking to people in Kathmandu. They said they couldn't believe that the number of casualties, hundreds injured with bullet injuries, according to the doctors. And the government says that, you know, it regrets now, the first casualty we are seeing, the Home Minister has stepped down following this violence. But the government has come under a lot of criticism. And even though Nepal has seen various protests, pro democracy protests in the 90s and later on and during the Maoist time, nowhere in the history that so many people were killed in a very short span of time during a public protest. This is the first time. So people are trying to grapple with this enormity and severity of the situation. The concern is whether this is going to trigger more anger because Home Minister resigning can be one part of it. People would want answers, accountability from the whole government, because already there are demands for Prime Minister KP Oli to step down as well.
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And Berishn Etaraja in the Middle east, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has told residents of Gaza City to leave now. He said Israeli forces were organizing and assembling to enter Gaza City for what he called ground maneuvers. Last week, Israel said it had established control over 40% of the city. Mr. Netanyahu's warning came after gunmen in Jerusalem killed at least six people in an attack on Monday, which Israel blamed on Palestinians from the occupied West Bank. From Jerusalem, our Middle east correspondent, Lucy Williamson, sent this report on the attack.
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From the dashboard camera of a nearby car, the sound of Israel's fragile security shattered. Then chaos as crowds surge in panic. Down the road. A taxi driver, dazed in the confusion, helps his passenger out as a bullet whizzes past inches from his head, hitting the vehicle behind him. Emergency teams found the dead and wounded scattered on the ground, along with the bodies of the two gunmen shot dead by armed bystanders. Daniel Katzenstein is a first responder with the United Hatzala Volunteers.
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One of the first people that I treated was one of the bus drivers.
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His name was Mohammed. He also ran to help. This is not a battle of Islam versus Judaism.
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This is a battle between the people.
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Who wish to do harm and the people who want to live life. Visiting the site, Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu said the country was in a war against terrorism on several fronts. I would like to state as clearly as possible these murders and attacks in all sectors will not weaken us. They will only increase our determination to complete the mission we have taken upon ourselves in Gaza, Judea and Samaria and everywhere. Hamas voiced its support for today's attack, describing it as a natural response to the crimes of the occupation and the genocide Israel was waging. The Palestinian Authority quickly condemned the shooting of civilians on the hill above the attack site. 18 year old Pini from Tottenham in London was watching the scene with his yeshiva teacher, Pinchas. In a couple of hours, the world is going to forget about this and be shouting on us why we are doing stuff to keep us safe in Gaza or in Lebanon, on all different places. Mr. Netanyahu has made Israel's security the central justification for expanding the war in Gaza and Israel's military occupation of the West Bank. His supporters will see today's attack as proof that he needs to go further. His critics will see it as evidence that his actions aren't keeping Israelis safe at all.
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Lucy Williamson the shooting in Jerusalem came as both Israel and Hamas consider President Trump's latest proposal to end the fighting in Gaza. Here's our diplomatic correspondent James Landell.
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The latest US Peace plan would, according to reports, involve the immediate release of all 48 remaining Israeli hostages, both alive and dead. At the same time, a ceasefire would begin and thousands of Palestinian prisoners would be freed. Only then would talks begin to end the war. Donald Trump urged Hamas to accept his terms or face the consequences. In what he called his last warning, Gideon Sa, Israel's foreign minister, said his country accepted the US Deal. Hamas said it was discussing some ideas from the American side. The group has previously insisted on an Israeli commitment to end the war and withdraw its forces as part of a ceasefire deal, but there's little trust on both sides. Israel's Defense minister, Israel Katz, threatened Hamas with what he called a mighty hurricane, telling it to release the hostages and lay down its weapons or Gaza would be destroyed, and the group annihilated. All the while, international diplomacy continues.
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James Landale In a separate development, Spain has withdrawn its ambassador to Israel in an escalating dispute between the two countries. Earlier, Madrid announced new measures against the Israeli military and more aid funding for Gaza. Israel has accused Spain of being anti Semitic. The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, said the move was aimed at stopping Israel from exterminating a defenseless people Next to the United States. Monday was not a good day for Donald Trump. Two matters haven't gone his way. First, the US President lost his legal appeal against an earlier court judgment that ordered him to pay more than $83 million to the advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. He'd been found guilty of defamation for his repeated social media attacks and public statements denouncing Ms. Carol after she accused him of sexual assault. And also on Monday, a screenshot of a sexually suggestive drawing allegedly sent by President Trump to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to wish him happy birthday has been released by Democrats. President Trump denied the note from 2003 ever existed. Our New York correspondent Neda Taufik first told us more about the drawing. So originally, remember, the Wall Street Journal put out a report about this note that Donald Trump allegedly for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday. It was a book put together by the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein. And at the time, Donald Trump said he was suing the Wall street journal for $10 billion, saying it didn't sound anything like him. It's not something he would write. You even had Vice President JD Vance saying the same thing, his children saying his dad doesn't doodle. This note allegedly was an outline of a naked woman with a kind of imagined conversation between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epst. Well, now we have the oversight Democrats in Congress of this Oversight committee. They put out a subpoena to Epstein's estate to get this birthday book. And on X now they've actually released the image of this alleged note. And in it, the note alludes to a wonderful secret that the two of them share. It calls Epstein a pal. But even now, Celia, you have some in the White House still suggesting that the this was not a note that Donald Trump made, that this is a fake. So it's going to be very interesting to see how his base reacts because remember, the Epstein crisis really is what it has become. Now in the MAGA base is such a sensitive issue. Donald Trump is desperate to move past it. But you have those in his base who are very confused by his turnaround because remember, he campaigned on exposing Epstein and all of his clients. Now he's saying it's a Democratic hoax. So they want to what's the story there? And also today, earlier a court upheld an award made to E. Jean Carroll over the civil action she launched against the president. Can you tell us what happened there? Yeah, look, Donald Trump has certainly been having some court victories, but when it comes to E. Jean Carroll, the former writer, he has really lost all of his appeals. This one was for a civil judgment of $83.3 million that he had to pay to E. Jean Carroll for defam blaming her. And what we saw from this three judge panel court of appeals was that they felt that that judgment was fair because they called Donald Trump's behavior reprehensible. They say he acted with malice and for over several years he repeatedly defamed her and that that award was just because the jury felt it needed to be that large of an amount to deter him from defaming her in the future. Our New York correspondent Nedda Taufik. And here in London, a new work by the elusive street artist Banksy has appeared on the side of the Royal Courts of Justice in the center of the city. It shows a judge hitting a protester who's lying on the ground. Banksy's art is often critical of government policy, war and capitalism. This latest piece comes after almost 900 people were arrested at a demonstration in London against the banning of the campaign Palestine Action. Helena Wilkinson reports. The latest work by Banksy appeared on an external wall of the Queen's Building, which is a listed building at the back of the Royal Courts of Justice complex. It depicts a judge in a wig and black robe hitting a protester who is lying on the ground holding a blood splattered placard. Not long after it was unveiled, the artwork by the world famous graffiti artist was covered up, but it's also been guarded by security officials. An HM Courts and Tribunals spokesperson said that the Royal Courts of Justice was a listed building and they're obliged to maintain its original character. Court officials say the work will be removed. The Metropolitan Police said it received a report of criminal damage to the side of the Royal Courts of Justice today and that inquiries continue. Helena Wilkinson still to come, the writer Ian McEwan imagines a man 100 years in the future and how he might view our world now.
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And he looks back on our time and of its immense energy and the risks it took and the craziness. At the BBC we go further so you see clearer. With a subscription to BBC.com you get unlimited articles and videos, hundreds of ad, free podcasts and the BBC News Channel streaming live 24. 7 from less than a dollar a week for your first year. Read, watch and listen to trusted independent journalism and storytelling. It all starts with a subscription to BBC.com find out more@BBC.com unlimited.
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Next to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Health Ministry in the country has intensified efforts to stop the spread of Ebola after confirming a new outbreak near the Angolan border. Officials say cases of the highly infectious Zaire strain have risen to 43 with 15 deaths. Emergency response teams are already on the ground in the affected areas. The BBC's global affairs reporter and Africa specialist Richard Kagoe gave us this update on what the DRC authorities are doing to stop the spread of the Ebola virus.
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They've got considerable experience and this is quite evident in terms of how they handled the last outbreak. That must have been around 2022. We only reported key cases of six people who died, but before that between 2018 and 2020, we lost almost close to about 2,300 people in the equator province. But you can see that there's a lot of capacity building and I guess also support that has really come through. And also in terms of public education and awareness on how to deal with this disease, they've got sufficient stockpiles, about 2,000 of the available vaccine and they've requested. So you would say maybe because of the partnerships that they've been having with various organizations that would be in a better positions. But the DRC is a very expansive country because from the capital Kinshasa to the site where the outbreak was confirmed is slightly over a thousand kilometers. So it's quite really a task for the Ministry of Health officials in the.
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Drc, Richard Kagoe and one other note on what's happening in that region. Neighboring countries including Uganda and South Sudan as well as Nigeria have increased health checks at airports and border posts to prevent cross border transmission of Ebola. We'll keep an eye on this developing story. In Argentina, the markets tumbled on Monday in response to a major upset for the president's party after it lost an important provincial election. Javier Milei acknowledged what he described as his party's clear defeat after the opposition Peronist movement triumphed in Sunday's ballot. In Buenos Aires Province, Argentina's stock and bond markets dropped sharply and the national currency, the peso, also fell by about 5%. Since becoming president in December 2023, Mr. Milei has slashed public spending and dismissed tens of thousands of public employees. The provincial result comes just six weeks before midterm elections across Argentina. So what area did this election cover and why was it so important? That's a question I put to our Latin America analyst from BBC Monitoring in Miami, Luis Fajardo.
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This election was in Buenos Aires Province, which is by far the largest province in Argentina. It contains nearly 40% of the population of the country. It does not include the capital itself, Buenos Aires, which is a federal district, but it does include a large part of the metropolitan area. Nearly 10 million people living in the metropolitan area, which are part of this province and are normal, considered a stronghold of the Peronists. This time, President Javier Milei, as you mentioned, had put a lot into this election. He had made it almost a referendum on his administration and the results are clearly very negative for him. It is seen as a bellwether for the rest of the country for how the rest of the country might vote in the elections next month. And certainly it's not a very good situation right now for President Milei, indeed.
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I mean, tell us more about what President Milei has said. He mentioned mistakes.
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Ned well, yes, he said that it was due mainly to tactical mistakes from the political operatives of the province, of his party in the province. He has clearly said that he does not want to change course in his very controversial, very tough economic measures. However, the economic reality is, according to many critics, moving against him even in the last few hours because most people now think that the Miles party is going to have have a difficult time in the legislative national elections and he's going to have a very difficult time in having a parliamentary majority that could continue passing his reforms. There has been what some people are already calling a Black Monday of intense financial speculation and problems with the country's currency, a big fall in the country's stock exchange and a strong devaluation of the national currency against the US Dollar. All of this seen as a reflection of people not really trusting that he might be able to continue with his very harsh economic policies which he has been trying to pass in the last couple of years.
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Luis Fajardo earlier this year, the US President Donald Trump unveiled plans for selling a five million dollar gold card visa that will offer wealthy buyers permanent residency in the United States and a path to citizenship globally. These schemes have often been considered controversial. Do the super rich use them as a tax plan, an insurance plan or something else? And should jet setters with deep pockets be able to skip the queue? More from the BBC's Josh Martin Migration.
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To the United States has been symbolized by the green card for more than a century. But US President Donald Trump's latest announcement on visas took a more optimistic tone and a more eye catching colour. The Gold Card Remember the words the Gold Card. While cracking down on undocumented migrants, the White House launched a plan to hand out residency visas to any foreign investors who passed background checks so long as they paid up. We're going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million and that's going to give you green card privileges. Plus it's going to be a route to citizenship and wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card. But a few months on after the Gold Card website has launched is still waiting further details. Despite what the president told reporters in the Oval Office, residency by investment and its relation, citizenship by investment have existed for decades. They even share a similar nickname as Trump's gold Card, commonly called golden Visas and golden passports, respectively. When Portugal launched its golden visa program in 2012, it hoped that foreign investors would Revive its property market after a crash. The program caught the eye of Hong Kong citizen Lily Chan. We traveled to Europe at least once a year for holidays and things. So I had been to Portugal before. It was peaceful, safe, good weather, good food, and it's cheap. 2017. I was thinking about retirement and tried to diversify my. My money. It's a EU passport, so I will be free to go to different countries. I don't have to live in Portugal there, and even I get a passport, and I only need to spend seven days out of a year there. The property is cheap. And although golden passports might grab the headlines due to alleged criminals exploiting them, golden visas can offer an insurance policy for citizens living in politically dicey circumstances. No wonder, then, that historically, they've been purchased mainly by citizens of mainland China and the Middle East. Hong Kong's political situation also influenced Lilly. The golden visa program that Lilly used for Portugal, which was based on residential property investment, helped channel 7.5 billion euros, or $8.7 billion, into the Portuguese economy. But it no longer exists, in part because of the overheating housing market in places like Lisbon, where Lily bought and renovated her apartment. The list of places that'll grant you a golden visa is actually growing, even as the EU pulls up the drawbridge on a back route into the block. But one country at the bottom of the world is drawing the type of wealthy people President Trump would like to invest in. The United States. And they're not from China or the Middle East. They're from the US Itself. Well, I had been traveling to New Zealand for quite an extensive time, more than 30 years. And I made the decision to. To move my business there and also to move there full time. So it was natural for me to enter the country as part of a program to bring investment into New Zealand. That's Mark Bergman, a US Tech investor and venture capitalist who moved from Silicon Valley to New Zealand under a previous iteration of the small country's golden visa program. I view it more as opportunity. I'm investing in New Zealand, and I'm expecting to see significant economic return. It's sort of up to me. If I do a bad job, obviously I won't see those returns. But my hope is that I will make significant return and create great value within New Zealand. Mark's level of commitment is somewhat of an anomaly of these programs. For the poor island nations of the Caribbean and Pacific who first started selling passports, it was a near perfect product. Selling official documents boosted government revenues, While the super rich would rarely relocate or put pressure on public services. New Zealand's investor visa was designed to be the opposite of that. The vast majority of the world's population will live, work and die in the same country they were born into. Golden visas offer a way around this for the wealthy few. But countries joining the multi billion dollar marketplace offering residency and then passports to the highest bidder may find that investors are not necessarily loyal shoppers.
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That report By Josh Martin with war in Ukraine and Gaza and President Trump upending many of the expected norms in international relations, world for many feels like an unsettling place at the moment. But will future generations look back and think the same? Well, the British prize winning author Ian McEwan has written a new book that imagines just that. It's called what We Can Know and it tells the story of a literary historian a hundred years from now. Looking back on the present day, the author explained what he was trying to do.
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The 21st century is already looking pretty ragged set of two and a half decades and I imagine it will continue that way. But my expectation, or rather hope is that we will kind of pull through somehow with a lot of damage along the route. So I imagine someone rather like me, passionate about literature and history, looking back on our time filled not only with dismay at the decisions we took or didn't take, but also with envy because there are many wonderful things about our civilization, especially in the first world that he no longer has. Britain is an archipelago due to a nuclear accident in the mid Atlantic. The world's supply chains, the industrial civilization has been much disrupted. Population has been halved to 4 billion. And he looks back on our time and of its immense energy and the risks it took and the craziness from, you know, flying several thousand miles for a week long holiday to cheese rolling competitions and 4 billion people watching a television for an Olympic event. The extraordinary output of its science and its own literature in biography and history and so on, its bookshops crammed with new books. I call it the derangement in the novel. In other words, we're all implicated in this, especially in the first world. Our lifestyles, you know, the plastics we throw out every day. The mode of living is wonderful to be a person, say, with a reasonable income, living in the first world. And a medieval king would envy many of the things that practically all of us have. Hot water spewing out of taps, oranges in winter, etc. Anesthetic. And he lives in a rather moribund world that's very oppressed by its past, very conventional. I suppose I'm wanting to reach through the idea of what we can know. What will the future know of us? How accurate will it be?
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The author Ian McEwen, talking about his novel what We Can Know. And hopefully we won't have to go a hundred years into the future to be able to judge how accurately he's been able to capture our current age. Not an easy task for sure. And that's all from us for now. But there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcastbc.co.uk you can also find us on X@BBC World Service. Use the hashtag global newspod. This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll. The producers were Liam McSheffrey and Michael Bristow. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Celia Hatton. Until next time. Goodbye.
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At the BBC we go further so you see clearer. Through frontline reporting, global stories and local insights, we bring you closer to the world's news as it happens. And it starts with a subscription to BBC.com giving you unlimited articles and videos, ad free podcasts and the BBC News channel, streaming live 24. 7. Subscribe to trusted independent journalism from the BBC. Find out more@BBC.com join.