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Washington has imposed new sanctions on Palestinian Authority members
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US to deny visas to Palestinian officials
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Podcast Announcer
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Nick Miles
This is the global news podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Miles and in the early hours of Friday, the 1st of August, these are our main stories. Washington's special envoy, Steve Witkoff is to visit Gaza later today. On Thursday, the US Administration imposed sanctions on Palestinian Authority members in another blow to the Pakistan opposition leader, Imran Khan. Senior members of his party have been jailed for up to 10 years. The United States has insisted there must be a deal to end Russia's war in Ukraine by August 8th. Also in this podcast, beds of deep.
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Victoria Gill
Sea clams, what look like meadows of foot, long tube worms poking out of the seabed, and mats of bacteria that resemble rivers of ice.
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Nick Miles
Scientists exploring the Pacific Ocean say they've discovered entire ecosystems of marine life at depths of over eight kilometers. The United States has imposed travel restrictions on members of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization, accusing them of undermining peace efforts with Israel. Washington's special envoy, Steve Witkoff is in Israel trying to salvage Gaza. Ceasefire talks. The White House Press secretary, Caroline Levitt said Mr. Witkoff and the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, will will also visit Gaza on Friday.
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Victoria Gill
President Trump is a humanitarian with a big heart and that's why he sent.
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Nick Miles
Special envoy Witkoff to the region in.
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Victoria Gill
An effort to save lives and end this crisis.
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Nick Miles
Special envoy Witkoff and Ambassador Huckabee will be traveling into Gaza to inspect the current distribution sites and secure a plan.
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Victoria Gill
To deliver more food and meet with local Gazans to hear firsthand about this dire situation on the ground.
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Nick Miles
Well, earlier on Thursday, Mr. Wytkoff met Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. As international anger grows of the terrible humanitarian situation in Gaza, those who have been able to visit the aid sites in the territory and leave with supplies say what's on offer is not nearly enough to feed their families.
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Tom Bateman
From 4 in the morning, I've been under the bridge and this is what I got for eight people. One jar of tahini. This is not distribution. This is not distribution at all. This is a crime. Shooting and martyrs laid down beneath us.
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Nick Miles
Look at this.
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Tom Bateman
Half a jar of tahini. What should I feed my children?
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Frank Cessno
This is a death trap. I swear to God, it's a death trap. You come to death and you know you're coming to death and you don't take anything or find anything left.
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Nick Miles
For more details on the US envoy Steve Witkoff's visit to the Middle east and especially his trip on Friday to inspect an aid distribution site in Gaza. I spoke to our Washington correspondent Tom Bateman.
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Tom Bateman
The next steps are that Mr. Witkoff and Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, will visit a site of the so called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, US and Israeli backed, supplying food aid inside Gaza and has had a series of disastrous consequences with many aid seekers being shot dead. You sense that from the kinds of things Mr. Trump has been saying about it and the way he has talked about starvation, it seems to me he has told Mr. Witkoff to go and see it with his own eyes. And I think what he reports back will matter. This is a close relationship between these two men. I think he trusts him more than many of his own officials. And so what he sees there will matter. The Americans have been saying that they have put money into the food supply for Palestinians. President Trump has been talking about $60 million, although it appears that half of that has come from the Israelis. Mr. Trump seems to speak in pretty sort of disappointing terms about the effects of the way that money has been used. So I think he's putting pressure on this situation.
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Nick Miles
Tom, many people around the world, many governments will want sanctions put on Israel for what's happening in Gaza. And yet today we saw sanctions from the US against some members of the Palestinian Authority. What was the reason behind that?
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Tom Bateman
Well, the Palestinian Authority, along with the Palestine Liberation Organization, these are significant organizations that gave Palestinians for the first time national political representation and a voice on the world stage that was internationally backed. Now they have self governance, some limited self governance within the occupied west bank, the Palestinian Authority. But Israel and United States governments have long called for the PA to reform. They accuse it of inciting terrorism and of also not reforming itself in terms of corruption. What they have done today is using those accusations and arguments they've held for a very long time is to sanction some members of the PA and the plo. This looks like fairly limited actually about travel bans, not a full range of financial sanctions. But the timing is clearly around the fact that we have had this week United nations conference involving the Europeans and Gulf Arab states which have called for a rekindling of the two state solution that the US And Israel have largely abandoned now. And you've had also countries like the uk, France and Canada commit to recognizing a Palestinian state. And this is the punishment, although it denies that the timing is around that clearly this is a way of effectively weakening or using a punitive measure against the Palestinian Authority, which would be the future governing body of a Palestinian state, to show really to the Europeans that they're Very unhappy with what they've done this week.
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Nick Miles
That was Tom Bateman in Washington. My colleague Katrina Perry spoke to Frank Cessnow, a former CNN Washington correspondent and presenter, and asked him about the visit of the US Envoy Steve Witkoff to that aid distribution site in Gaza and about the US Administration's understanding of how the process working.
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Frank Cessno
Well, I think they've been standing by the efficacy of that system, despite all indications to the contrary. The terrible pictures and the terrible stories that have come out of Gaza itself, that the Gaza Humanitarian foundation, this means of distributing aid, has been a disaster. People have died trying to get to it. It's distributing far too little aid. Israel, and by definition, or by extension the United States, are becoming more isolated as a result of all of this. But Witkoff is there to see what can be done, to look at the humanitarian sites and to bring that back to the administration, to see what, if anything, can be resurrected out of the ceasefire talks that have essentially broken down and getting the Israeli hostages out and some next steps in a ceasefire, and then finally looking to whether there can be any political movement whatsoever. On the larger question of the Israeli.
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Victoria Gill
Gaza standoff and on that and the kind of broader political point, the isolation point you're mentioning there, the US Is becoming further apart from its allies. We've seen now three G7 member countries say they will recognize Palestine as a state subject to certain conditions, but the US still holding very firmly to its line of no 2 state solution.
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Frank Cessno
It's very interesting because what we're seeing now, and this is going to accelerate, I think, because of the kinds of stories, images, reality and suffering that's being brought on a daily basis across traditional media and social media in this country. Around the world, is a further isolation of the US And Israel as a result of all this. This is one of the reasons Wyckoff is there. So you have the United Kingdom, France and Canada saying under certain circumstances they'll recognize a Palestinian state not far down the line. The president was dismissive, sort of, this doesn't really much matter, or we didn't talk about it with respect to the United Kingdom and France's declaration with Canada. He actually initially said he was going to slap higher tariffs on Canada because of this position that they took. And he had hardly complimentary things to say about the initiative. But here's the other thing that's very interesting. A new Gallup poll in the United States just out in the last week or so, shows a dramatically declining base of support for Israel's military activity in Gaza. Just 32% now in the United States say they are backing Israel's military action in Gaza. And while the Trump administration says and often acts like it, doesn't much care about public opinion, they're keeping a sharp eye on this one because this can shift quickly and they know it.
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Nick Miles
Frank Cessno A court in Pakistan has sentenced more than 100 members of the party of the former prime Minister Imran Khan for their role in anti government protest. Two years ago, the chairman of the PTI party said the sentences would be challenged in the courts. From Islamabad, here's Azadeh Mashiri.
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Victoria Gill
This is yet another blow to Imran Khan's party and a serious one. The party's opposition leader, six members of parliament and a senator are among those sentenced. It's a direct hit to their presence in parliament. The protests in May 2023 were at times violent. Protesters targeted buildings belonging to the powerful military. Since then, the challenges keep multiplying and the party's influence is waning. They are operating with a leader behind bars, multiple legal cases and even infighting within the party.
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Nick Miles
Azada Mashiri In Pakistan, a Swedish jihadist has been sentenced to life in jail for killing a Jordanian pilot who was burned to death in a cage in Syria a decade ago. The Islamic State group posted a video of the murder prompting widespread revulsion. A court in Stockholm handed down the verdict on Osama Kriem. Our Europe correspondent Nick Beek reports the.
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Podcast Announcer
Highly produced video that is released back in 2015 gave the world a graphic illustration of the crimes the group was committing in Syria. The Jordanian pilot Maz Al Kusasba was killed after crashing near the city of Raqqa. A decade on 32 year old Swedish national Osama Crayam has been convicted for his role. Cryom is already serving 30 years in prison for helping plan the November 2015 Paris attacks and a life sentence for involvement in the bombings at Brussels Main Air and a metro station a year later.
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Nick Miles
Nick Beak Scientists exploring some of the deepest ocean trenches on Earth have discovered whole ecosystems of marine life living at depths of more than 8km. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, suggests that deep ocean trenches around the world could be home to a diverse array of creatures adapted to live in the dark and under extreme pressure. Here's our science correspondent Victoria Gill.
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Victoria Gill
Beds of deep sea clams, what look like meadows of foot, long tube worms poking out of the seabed and mats of bacteria that resemble rivers of ice. These are some of the communities of marine creatures that Chinese researchers captured on camera on a mission to some of the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean. Traveling in a submersible vehicle, the team explored ocean trenches around the Northwest Pacific of depths of up to 9,500 meters, nearly six miles down. This is known as the Hadal Zone, after Hades, the Greek God of the underworld. But rather than a desolate environment, scientists were amazed to see the abundance of life. Previously. People always think the Hadal Trench is not a ideal place for life to survive. That's Dr. Meghran Du from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Under this extreme high pressure, under the super high depths, they must have their trick to adapt to the super high pressure. That's the question we need to answer. In the following research, the team hopes to work out what those tricks and adaptations are exactly what enables marine creatures to thrive in such a harsh environment. With no sunlight, they feed on carbon rich chemicals that seep out of the seafloor. And these new observations challenge long held assumptions about the potential for life in some of the darkest, most extreme places on Earth.
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Nick Miles
Victoria Gill still to come, a mega.
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Randy Saveni
Flash is basically lightning on steroids. It's a lightning flash, lightning discharge that can travel hundreds of kilometers.
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Nick Miles
Scientists have revealed the longest single lightning flash ever recorded. The US President Donald Trump is insisting that there must be a deal to end Russia's war in Ukraine by his deadline of August 8th. That's according to a senior American diplomat. John Kelly reaffirmed Mr. Trump's demand during a meeting of the UN Security Council.
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Will Chalk
Both Russia and Ukraine must negotiate a.
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Podcast Announcer
Ceasefire and durable peace. It is time to make a deal.
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Nick Miles
President Trump has made clear this must be done by August 8th. The United States is prepared to implement.
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Podcast Announcer
Additional measures to secure peace.
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Nick Miles
Well, Mr. Kelly also criticized China for providing crucial components to Russia's war machine. The ambassador was speaking after Moscow's massive drone attacks and missile attacks on Wednesday night on Ukraine's capital Kyiv, which has killed at least 15 people. On that issue of President Trump insisting there must be a deal to end Russia's war in Ukraine by August 8, I heard more from Vitaly Shevchenko, Russia editor for BBC Monitoring.
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Vitaly Shevchenko
Well, it's been more than six months since Donald Trump returned to the White House. There's been a succession of deadlines, a succession of threats, a lot of talk and chatter, but very little action that would meaningfully and seriously harm Russia. Ukraine has borne the brunt of Donald Trump's annoyance, irritation and anger. That seems to have changed. Hence the latest shorter deadline of 10 days, the threats of secondary sanctions. But looking at what experts are saying, both in Russia and Ukraine, they're not really expecting much. In fact, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said earlier that Russia has learned to live with those sanctions. And when it comes to deadlines, we've been here before. That's what the Russian foreign minister said.
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Nick Miles
And the Kremlin doesn't appear to be taking the deadline seriously. There was a barrage of attacks across.
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Vitaly Shevchenko
Ukraine, and once again, it's civilians who suffered the most. It appears the search and rescue operation in the Ukrainian capital continues. One apartment block, nine story apartment block collapsed, 54 flats destroyed. That's just one sign of how deadly these Russian attacks are and how the Kremlin doesn't really care about Donald Trump saying that he doesn't like Vladimir Putin attacking civilians in Ukraine.
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Nick Miles
Vitaly Shevchenko from BBC Monitoring Just like in many other countries, as an adult, if you go into a restaurant or supermarket in Kenya after a, a hard day's work, you'd be able to buy a nice cool beer. The question is for how much longer? That is because the Kenyan government is proposing a package of measures to restrict the sale of alcohol in all sorts of places, including hotels. Just why then are the authorities considering taking what is pretty drastic action? Will Ross is our Africa regional editor.
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Podcast Announcer
The government has for quite a long time said that there's a huge problem when it comes to alcohol, especially with the youth. And so this national authority for the campaign against alcohol and drug abuse, known as Nakada, was put in place. It's come up with these recommendations as a way, it says, of helping society, especially protecting young people from the abuses of alcohol. And some of the measures are certainly being criticized pretty openly. In Kenya, people are looking at things like banning the sale of alcohol in supermarkets, restaurants. This is a country that has a massive tourism sector, so the thought of banning alcohol sales in restaurants seems a little bizarre. But there are other ones, including influencers on social media won't be allowed to promote alcohol. And that's actually received some criticism from within government, with an official saying these influencers and content creators are very important. We need to think these things through very carefully. But there are, of course, other people who look at the problem of alcohol abuse and how widespread it is and say there do need to be measures put in place. But I ought to stress that these are recommendations at the moment. And following a lot of criticism online, this organization Nakada put out a statement saying these are not the final word, as it were. There's going to be more consultation.
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Nick Miles
And will the other aspect of this is that these recommendations wouldn't address another big problem, which is local alcohol known as changa.
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Podcast Announcer
Yeah, Chang' a is brewed right across the country. So from the kind of densely populated areas of Nairobi to every village in many regions of the country, certainly. And it's had a massive impact on society. I mean, people will say, look, it's affordable, it's cheap, so that's a good thing. There's another way for people to get alcohol if they want it, but because it's unregulated, from time to time there are problems where the wrong ingredients are put in and suddenly this turns into a large barrel of poison. And there have been cases where multiple people have died. But maybe the bigger problem in especially in the villages that I've seen is just the impact on society of people who have access to this pretty cheap brew becoming alcoholics pretty young and it tearing their families apart and stopping them from being able to work properly.
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Nick Miles
That was Will Ross. Now, often when we report on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it is to do with the conflicts that have dogged that country for more than 30 years. But the government there doesn't want the nation to be defined by that. It's spending a big amount of money on a controversial sponsorship deal with one of the biggest football teams in the world. Will Chalk has the story.
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Will Chalk
A Barcelona FC training session with cameras snapping pictures of the players for sports websites and the next day's newspapers. Pictures that will likely be seen by millions around the world. In other words, a great advertising opportunity. And from next season, the team's training tops will have Dr. Heart of Africa written on them. It's part of a four year sponsorship deal and the Congolese government says it will raise the profile of the country. But it's not come cheap at around $50 million. And the DRC has already splashed out on similar deals with Italian side AC Milan and French team AS Monaco. Money well spent. We asked people in the country's capital, Kinshasa, it's a good idea to bring tourists in drc.
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Frank Cessno
When you talk about tourism, there should.
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Nick Miles
Be things to see.
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Frank Cessno
When those people come here for tourism, they should use that money to build the country. Country.
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Nick Miles
So that when they call those people.
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Frank Cessno
They have something to see. So yes, tourism, but there is nothing to see.
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Will Chalk
So far it's not just shirt sponsorship. It's claimed the deal will also involve Barcelona's stadium hosting an immersive exhibition to showcase the cultural diversity and sporting tradition of the drc. But for some, it shows the government has the wrong priorities. Especially because the country's Own football league has been plagued by massive underfunding for years. Maurice Carney runs U. S based advocacy group Friends of the Congo.
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Nick Miles
The country has 7 million internally displaced people. You have outbreak of cholera and you have 70 million people living less than $2.15 a day. And the Congolese government is entering into a marketing and promotion agreement, a sponsorship agreement, $50 million with European football teams. It just doesn't add up.
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Will Chalk
What makes things murkier is that in signing this deal, the DRC is following in the footsteps of its eastern neighbour Rwanda, who sponsored Premier League side Arsenal shirts since Rwanda has been accused of backing the rebel group involved in much of the violence in the east of the drc, something it denies. But the Congolese government has previously written to Arsenal questioning the morality of the arrangement. Timothy Longman is an international relations professor at Boston University. He's been following the conflict for 30 years.
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Frank Cessno
I think Congo feels like, well, if they can do it, we should as well. Congo, the problems are more closely related to corruption. And so I do imagine there will be some concern about where this money is actually going to go. Yeah, Rwanda has a very different set of issues. It's a much stricter government that allows a lot less dissent. With Congo, the problem is more just where does the money go?
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Will Chalk
From a Barcelona perspective, rightly or wrongly, it's $50 million. And as football clubs have proved time and time again, it's a sport where money talks.
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Nick Miles
Will chalk there now to something that you might call a lightning change of subject. The certification this week of the longest single lightning flash ever recorded according to a study published by the World Meteorological Organization. It happened back in 2017 in the United States and it measured 829km in length. That is roughly the distance between Paris and Venice. Randy Saveni, a professor of geographical sciences at Arizona State University and one of the study's authors, told James Menendez about such mega flashes.
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Randy Saveni
A mega flash is basically lightning on steroids. It's a lightning flash, lightning discharge that can travel hundreds of kilometers. It's not limited to just in the nearby area. It can travel, as we have in this particular case, an enormous distance.
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Nick Miles
How do you actually measure it then?
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Randy Saveni
Well, in the early days we actually used ground based radio technology. As you all know from radio, there's a static discharge when lightning occurs and we can triangulate it based on the ground, but that's only limited to where we have the detectors. So nowadays what we use is what we call a lightning mapper. It's a instrument that we put on board Weather satellites that can very precisely detect the start and the end of the individual lightning flashes.
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Nick Miles
Why has it taken so long to measure and well, I guess certify most importantly this one.
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Randy Saveni
Well, this one was overlooked. Basically there were back in 2017, there was a study of this particular event and there were three other mega flashes that occurred with it, but somehow this one was overlooked. And one of our researchers actually went back and was examining this historical storm and he's, wait a minute, I think there's an even longer one here. And as we looked into the data and we carefully analyzed it, we realized that yes, it is not only was overlooked, but it is the longest one that we have on record.
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Nick Miles
And I guess here comes the key question. Why does it matter? Why is it so important to measure these mega flashes?
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Randy Saveni
Well, it helps us with our understanding of lightning, but it also, on a day to day basis, helps to emphasize the very major safety idea that lightning can travel a very long distance away from its parent thunderstorm. So what we say is if there is a thunderstorm over your area that's producing lightning, wait at least 30 minutes after it's passed before you go outside and start to resume normal activities.
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Nick Miles
Are these things getting bigger? Is that possible? I mean, we hear about lots of impacts of climate change. Presumably that has an impact on storms. Do those storms, as they get more powerful, have an impact on the length of light?
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Randy Saveni
Well, we don't know. Frankly, this record doesn't really relate to climate change because we simply don't have a long enough record of these megaflashes yet. We've only been studying them for the last 10 years. We just don't have a long enough record to be able to say, are they changing? Are they becoming more frequent? Are they becoming longer? As we get more data, we should be able to start to answer those kind of questions.
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Nick Miles
That was Randy Saveni from the Arizona State University and that is all from us for now. But there will be an a new edition of the Global News podcast later on. 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 globalnewspot. This edition was mixed by Ricardo McCarthy. The producers were Lear McSheffrey and Oliver Burlau. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Nick Martin, Mars. And until next time, goodbye. Three, two, one.
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Podcast Announcer
And a dream to revolutionize space flight.
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Frank Cessno
Don't launch like a rocket and land like an airplane.
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Randy Saveni
It was the first time anybody had.
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Tom Bateman
Ever seen any of that told by.
- [26:05]
Podcast Announcer
The men and women who made it happen.
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Frank Cessno
California, countless hours developing the procedures we.
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Victoria Gill
Had trained together for so long.
- [26:12]
Podcast Announcer
From the BBC World Service, 13 Minutes presents the Space Shuttle.
- [26:16]
Nick Miles
It was like something being born. This vehicle was saying, I'm alive.
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Vitaly Shevchenko
Let me go search.
- [26:23]
Podcast Announcer
For 13 minutes presents the Space Shuttle. Wherever you get your BBC podcasts, what a view.
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Frank Cessno
What a view.