Blinken calls for longer pauses in fighting to let aid into Gaza
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Valerie Sanderson, and at 14 Hours GMT on Wednesday, the 13th of November, these are our main stories. The outgoing US Secretary of State calls for more aid to be allowed into Gaza. Antony Blinken says Israel has achieved its aims there and the war should end. President-elect Donald Trump puts the world's richest man, Elon Musk, in charge of rooting out government inefficiency.

India's Supreme Court rules against the controversial practice of bulldozing the homes of those accused of crimes, which rights groups say tend to target Muslims. Also in this podcast, Iranian human rights activists say a man has been hanged for a second time after his previous execution was halted after 30 seconds when the victim's family said they forgave him.

the top priorities of Haiti's new prime minister and... ..the tiny songbird blown thousands of kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean by a hurricane in America.

The US says Israel has not breached American laws on relief supplies following the lapsing of a 30-day deadline from Washington aimed at boosting humanitarian aid access in Gaza. The threat involved the possibility of some US military assistance being cut off. But the UN and several aid agencies say conditions have deteriorated since the warning letter was sent. They say aid for Palestinians in the Strip is at its lowest level in a year.

Scott Paul is the Director of Peace and Security at Oxfam America. To characterize anything that's happened over the past 30 days as progress is a grotesque distortion of the situation on the ground.

30 days ago, the Biden administration laid out a series of commitments, of demands it wanted to see the government of Israel implement to improve the situation. And what we've seen is halting progress on a couple of those and dramatic backsliding in the form of bombardment, starvation, displacement, dispossession, and depopulation of

across North Gaza. It has been impossible to provide humanitarian assistance in a way that we feel is acceptable for every day out of the past 13 months. All across the Gaza Strip, people are fighting for their lives. The US is obligated to suspend military assistance, including arms sales, to foreign governments that block humanitarian assistance. That has been our call, and the US government is refusing to implement its own law as we speak.

Speaking in Brussels, the United States' top diplomat, Antony Blinken, said that while Israel has implemented most of the steps the US laid out, it needs to allow longer pauses in fighting. We need to see real and extended pauses in large areas of Gaza, pauses in any fighting, in any combat, so that the assistance can effectively get to people who need it. There are huge challenges in that regard, but we've also seen real solutions.

The polio vaccination campaign was the one thing that's been very successful in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of children got polio vaccines. But critical to success in doing that was having extended pauses for days, not simply hours, as is the case right now, to make sure that everyone bringing assistance in has the ability to bring it in and to distribute it and to have space to do that.

Mr Blinken added that Israel had accomplished the goals it set itself and that the war should now end. Well, let's get more on reaction to the US view that Israel has met its demands on increasing aid, which has outraged the aid agencies. Our correspondent Joe Inwood is in Jerusalem. Not just them, the United Nations as well. We've been hearing from the body over...

days, weeks, months that the situation, especially in the north of the Gaza Strip, is apocalyptic, is the exact phrase they used. It's worth pointing out the numbers that we kind of understand about the amount of aid trucks getting in. Before

Before the conflict started, there were about 500 to 600 trucks of supplies going into Gaza every day on average. The US said that they need that number to get to 350 a day over the last 30 days. And the United Nations say the figure is actually closer to 40. So the data that we've got from the UN quite clearly says that the situation is nowhere close to what the United States say they need.

But despite that, the US have said that Israel is making progress. And so the letter that we've been referring to that was sent 30 days ago, they say the conditions have been met and therefore arms supplies can continue. It's worth pointing out that throughout all of this, the Israeli government have denied that there is a famine in Gaza or anything approaching it. They say it's simply not true. But the United Nations is pretty clear. They say that starvation is a daily reality for the people of Gaza.

Is it your sense that the incoming Trump administration, and I'm thinking of the plan nomination of Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel in that, do you think that's already having an impact on the war? I think it's too early to say it's having an impact on the war, but what it does do, it really gives us a clear direction of travel for the incoming administration. Just to tell our listeners, Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas, and he is avowedly pro-Israel.

Just to give you a quote from him in 2018, he said, There is no such thing as a West Bank. It's Judea and Samaria. There's no such thing as a settlement. They're communities, they're neighbourhoods, they're cities. There is no such thing as an occupation. That's a direct quote from the man who will be the ambassador to Israel. Now, those words were very popular with the right here in Israeli society, but just to explain what he's saying there...

is that the occupied West Bank, which will be the centre of any future Palestinian state, part of a two-state solution, which is talked about so often but not really being moved towards in years...

If he says that there is no such thing as a West Bank and that it's not occupied, well, that tells you what the American administration could be thinking. Just to give some context, he has spoken this morning and has been much more cautious speaking to Israeli radio. Mike Huckabee said that the direction of future policy will be for Donald Trump.

Delegates at the COP29 Global Climate Change Summit in Azerbaijan have heard more dire warnings about the speed at which the world is warming and what this will mean for everyone who lives here on planet Earth. In particular, they've discussed ways to prevent planet-warming jet condensation trails.

Amid all the talk, though, there's an enormous Donald Trump-shaped elephant in the room. That's because Mr Trump, who'll be inaugurated for his second term as president on January 20th, has made clear his contempt for international forums like COP29.

It's clear, of course, that regardless of who's in the White House, any progress towards preventing the worst effects of climate change will depend on leadership from the world's largest economies and largest contributors to climate change, including the US. So you might think it must be a sobering time for the current US representative to the COP talks, President Biden's National Climate Advisor, Ali Zaidi. He took time out from his busy schedule in Baku to talk to James Copnell.

I think regardless of where countries start out, the direction of travel for everybody has to be towards a clean energy future and a clean energy economy. And the substance of the conversations here at the COP reflect the consensus we reached at the last COP in Dubai that we need to transition away from fossil fuels,

to rapidly ramp up sources of clean power, including nuclear technology. We can do that together as a global community if we put our mind to it. We need to come out of this COP redoubled on that objective. Do you get any sense that's happening? Because COPs in the past have been criticized for lots of fine words and then quite a few empty promises.

You know, going into the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, as the world gathered at that top, the world was on a trajectory for five, six, seven, maybe degrees more of warming. And today, while we are far short of where we need to be one and a half degrees aligned, we are on track for two, three, maybe three and a half degrees. So we've

proven that this system can deliver a bending of the curve, but we have to prove that we can go all the way. And that will be the test, the measure of the success of this COP and any ones in the future. How do we collect greater ambition on that trajectory? And I'm hopeful that at this convening and the next one, that the world will continue to come together around that increased action and ambition.

What role do you see for the US in this? Looked for, perhaps, for global leadership on this issue, as with many others. And yet, at the same time, Donald Trump is about to come back to the White House, a man who has, in the past, expressed extreme scepticism about climate change.

The major economies of the world, the major emitters of the world need to be responsible for the major emissions reductions. The way we lead is by leading through our example. And the U.S. over the last four years has doubled its pace of decarbonization in this decade. And we've got to do more to double it again and go all the way. What we know is that

Over the course of the last decade and more, the United States has, through its development of clean energy in the United States and around the world, been a force for moving this global dialogue forward. I would be sugarcoating it if I said it did not matter what happens.

the priority and the policy preference of the federal government was. In fact, it is very important. But the U.S. is a set of cities and states and businesses. And I will tell you, the momentum across the country, across the states, across the cities, across the businesses is in the direction of clean energy. And I think that will continue to cascade through the world as leadership.

President Biden's National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi talking to James Copnell.

Russia is launching unprecedented drone attacks on Ukraine. Last month, a record 2,000 were reportedly fired, with 145 on Sunday alone, the most in a single day since the start of Moscow's full-scale invasion of the country. With Russian forces pressing along the front and North Korea joining the war, Ukraine's forces are struggling to cope with the renewed air offensive. From Kiev, our Ukraine correspondent James Waterhouse sent us this report.

They're a constant presence. But at the moment, the sirens of Kyiv and cities across Ukraine, they're not stopping. They go off at any point every day. Sometimes they are followed by the booms of the city's air defences and explosions, and sometimes they're not. And somewhere, someone feels their full impact. In Kyiv, Victoria and Volodymyr show us what's left of their high-rise flat.

We heard the sirens, and almost immediately after, there was an explosion. Their 14-year-old daughter, Maria, had come home early and was lying in her bed. A Shahed drone flew in through the window, right into her room. She had no chance to survive. She died immediately.

My goodness. Their flat is completely gutted and we are looking through a huge hole in the wall at the skyline of Kiev and this really connects it. You see these drones, you hear the sirens, but this is what they caused. Everything burned down. There's nothing even left in the memory of my child.

Maria didn't want to leave the country. She had faith in victory. So we're all here. But sadly, she's not anymore.

As Ukraine waits to see how Donald Trump will approach this war when he re-enters office, North Korea has joined Moscow's invasion. And Maria's father, Vladimir, is just baffled as to how it all started. What's the point of it? There are no benefits. People just get killed. Unfortunately, the end of this doesn't depend too much on Ukraine, I think. It depends on other countries that help us.

Mikhailo Shamanov is from Kyiv's military administration. Every night it's a lottery. Where it hits, where it's shot down, where it falls and what happens. We understand that people are exhausted, but we cannot give up because Kyiv or other cities are being bombarded.

And it's mobile air defence units like this one which keep those drones out, or try to. We are south of Kiev, in the expansive countryside next to the forest, where we meet Vitaly. The more missile danger there is, and the more targets we have, the more our guys' spirits are lifted. They're ready to stand to the last hour. The Russians will never break us by the amount of drones they send.

And sure enough, our conversation is interrupted by the echo of the air raid siren across the tree lines there. These guys are clearly defiant, despite all of the political tides surrounding Ukraine at the moment. And that's not easy with the pressure this country is under. That report from James Waterhouse in Kiev.

In India, the Supreme Court has ruled that the demolition without due process of houses and businesses of people accused or convicted of crimes must stop. Human rights groups accuse states governed by the Hindu nationalist BJP of using the demolitions to target Muslims, something the authorities deny. A South Asia regional editor and Barisan Ethirajan told me about the practice.

Now, demolition of illegal houses or buildings are common in many parts of the world because they did not have the proper authority or the paperwork and they were built on a government land. But what happened in India in the last few years, it has taken a different dimension with the human rights groups accusing people

Some of the states governed by the Hindu nationalist BJP are targeting those accused of crime or convicted of crime, particularly the minority Muslim community, destroying their houses and businesses. This is in clear violation of law.

And what the Amnesty International calls such punitive demolition of family homes of suspects could also amount to collective punishment in violation of international human rights law. So this has triggered a lot of debate and controversy in India. So there were a lot of petitions filed against

In the Supreme Court, and the hearings went on for months, now the court has come out very categorically saying that demolition of such houses and properties of individuals accused of any crime or even convicted of crime is unconstitutional and the authorities must follow a due process to remove any illegal encroachment. And do you think this ruling from the Supreme Court will have an immediate effect?

That's what the court would expect the state governments to follow. But again, it is not simply about demolishing about the whole law and order situation, because, you know, rights groups would say during Hindu processions, they go and provocative comments were made in front of masks that triggering tensions.

And only Muslims are being targeted in this fashion that after every communal riot or any violence, those who are accused of attacking security forces, their homes were being demolished overnight without being shown any proper work or any court orders.

And now the human rights groups hope the state governments will take the cue from the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court has also clearly stated any authorities who are violating its orders will be held accountable. So that has come as a clear reminder to the authorities. However, the governments in various states, they argue that they do follow the process and they deny specifically targeting the minority Muslims. And Barisan Ethirajan.

A lot of the discussion ahead of the US election was about migration, and a recent American migrant to the UK has been causing quite a storm in recent days.

That's the sound of a tiny little bird, a scarlet tanager, that normally migrates no further than from the eastern United States and lowland South American woods. But that found itself blown off course and across the Atlantic Ocean, ending up in Yorkshire in the north of England. John Carter is with the British Trust for Ornithology and he's been talking to Rebecca Kesby. We

We do get quite a few American vagrant birds in the UK and this is often connected to weather. So if we get these big kind of storms that rage across the Atlantic from the US or from Canada or from further south, across the Atlantic they can bring these birds that are migrating south and they get caught in this weather and they get

drift across East and then they hit remote islands very often, such as the Scilly Isles or Western Scotland or Shetland. And then maybe they kind of reorientate and they kind of start moving and migrating in a normal way to them. They kind of think, okay, I'm still, I still need to go South. So they start moving again, but, but,

These things are vagrants. They're lost. They're kind of in the wrong place. So they do turn up in odd places. And when they do arrive, they often stand out. At the moment, we think that there is only one. But I mean, can it survive in Yorkshire, which does get quite frosty? Fairly soon, it's going to start getting cold there.

Yeah, I mean, these are principally insect eaters during the summer, and then they kind of start eating bits of fruit in the winter as well. So in their native range, they would now be, you know, heading down into Central and South America. So they would be leaving North America. So the likelihood of it surviving in Yorkshire is pretty slim. But if it kind of gets itself down to Spain or North Africa or somewhere like that, it may survive the winter fine.

John Carter of the British Trust for Ornithology. Still to come on the Global News Podcast. It was very obvious that this particular whale had been conditioned to be putting his nose on anything that looked like a target. The mystery of the friendly beluga whale solved at last. When we left, there was this wonderful feeling.

But it was only the beginning of a nightmare. This is a story that started with a job advert.

A yacht owner looking for a crew to sail his recently renovated boat from Brazil to Europe. For me, it was going to be a great adventure and an opportunity to gain a lot of experience. But when police raided the vessel and discovered drugs... Cocaine. Hidden under one of the beds. It can't be. A key suspect was miles away. Everything revolved around him. Who's the boss? A British guy. Fox. Fox.

This is World of Secrets from the BBC World Service. Season 5, Finding Mr Fox. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Elon Musk, the man confirmed by Donald Trump to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, has already set to work. Promising total transparency, he says he'll rank government spending according to how dumb he thinks it is. Here's Donald Trump breaking the news of Elon Musk's appointment. Elon, because he's not very busy...

has agreed to head that task force. It would be interesting. If he has the time, it would be a good one to do it, but he's agreed to do it. Mr Trump has also picked the Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be Defence Secretary and the South Dakota Governor, Kristi Noem, to lead the Department of Homeland Security.

The former Democratic senator for Alabama, Doug Jones, is concerned about some of the appointments. I think he is appointing people to positions in exactly the manner he said he was going to do. He is carrying out exactly the things that he said on the campaign trail, particularly with homeland security and immigration. He is looking to do them...

what I believe to be some of the most draconian immigration enforcement measures that we have seen in this country. Mass deportations, rounding up people, separating families. I think there's a lot of things at play here. And, you know, others that just don't seem to have the experience necessary. His defense secretary pick,

coming from Fox News. It's more almost like the reality TV shows that he's had in the past. So I am concerned about the picks that I'm seeing. On the other hand, Senator Rubio, I think, is a pick for secretary of state that will carry out the president's wishes, but certainly qualified for that position.

But Mr Trump's base seem to love what he's doing. James Cocknell has been speaking to Randy Reid, a former Republican congressional candidate in Nevada. What does she make of Elon Musk's appointment? Love it because the United States is 248 years old and we have, I think, over 490 government agencies, which is two a year since our inception.

And I feel that he's going to go in there and trim the fat, as we like to say, and put more money in the American people's pockets, as it should be. There's too much government overreach. And I think if anyone can learn to minimize that usage of our dollars, our tax dollars, it's going to be Elon Musk. Is it clear exactly the contours of that role, how it will operate? No, not yet.

It's not at all. But I think we're in such a new era with this election and what the American people are.

Right. They made a very loud impact in this election that they're not happy with the direction that the country has been under the current administration and they need real change. And Donald Trump has proven to the American people with his past record, nonetheless, let alone what he's now going to be able to do, having that experience under his belt of where to cut that red tape, where those issues

where those holdups are. And I think he's going to be able to clear the way to have business people, smart people, not these political hacks, these, these political hacks that are just as bad as Hollywood movie stars. They're just in a different role, but they're all paid to be actors. So we bring people in that have actually have resumes of accomplishments. That's what we need. That's what we need to be attracting.

Randy Reid talking to James Copnell. So what should we make of Donald Trump's appointments so far? I asked our North America correspondent, Gary O'Donoghue. People are not surprised. They're a little bit surprised about the Secretary of Defence. That really did seem to come out of the blue. Pete Hexeth has been very vocal about wanting to fire generals and get the sort of whole kind of woke people.

atmosphere out of the military, as he puts it. He wrote a book about all that. And Donald Trump loves that sort of stuff. So I suppose there's some logic to that pick. Elon Musk has been a very prominent campaigner for Donald Trump since July, since Donald Trump got grazed by a bullet.

assassination attempt and has spent a lot of money on his behalf. And he's going to head up this Department of Government Efficiency, as you said, threatening to take $2 trillion out of the federal budget, about 30%. And then we also got people like Kristi Noem, you mentioned, who's, again, pretty hardline on things like immigration, which Donald Trump will want.

given that he's promising a mass deportation, the biggest mass deportation of migrants in US history. The Democrats, or some of them, are already saying they're concerned about some of these appointments. I mean, will there be any effective opposition to any of them or are they a done deal? Some of the appointments have to be confirmed by the Senate.

particularly cabinet appointments and key administration appointments, not all, but quite a lot of them. So people like Marco Rubio for Secretary of State will have to get voted through. Kristi Noem would have to get voted through by senators. Elon Musk will not because this department, so-called, is going to be outside government. Effectively, it's an advisory role.

And there could be some opposition. I think probably not to Rubio. Kristi Noem may face some problems. It depends who he picks for attorney general. That's going to be an incredibly sensitive and controversial pick, given what Donald Trump has said about Robles.

rolling back the convictions on the January the 6th rioters, about going after his opponents, about switching the focus of the Department of Justice away from things like prosecuting police who kill people to defending religious freedoms and things like that. So that could be incredibly controversial. Bear in mind, there has to be a simple majority to get people approved in the Senate. But the Republicans are going to have a sort of 52, 53 to 47 majority there

That means they can afford to lose a couple of wobbly Republicans and still get their nominees through. So I think they'll be feeling reasonably comfortable with that.

Iranian human rights activists say that a man has been hanged for the second time after his previous execution was halted after 30 seconds when the victim's family said they forgave him. The incident comes as the Norway-based group Iran Human Rights says there's been a new surge in executions this year, with at least 166 executions in October alone.

Our Middle East regional editor, Sebastian Usher, reports. One word saved the life of Ahmed Alizadeh the first time he was being executed in April this year. Forgiveness, shouted the victim's family as he was being hanged. The 26-year-old was brought down from the gallows and resuscitated.

but it was to prove a short respite. It seems that Alizadeh, who denied the charge of murder, was unable to pay the blood money, which under traditional Islamic law, the victim's family could demand instead of his life. And so his execution went ahead for a second time, and this time there was to be no last-minute reprieve.

Haiti's new Prime Minister Alex Didier Fils-Aimé was barely in his post when a passenger plane from the US was hit by gunfire as it tried to land in the capital Port-au-Prince on Monday. The UN says more than 3,600 people have been killed in Haiti since January and more than 500,000 have had to leave their homes. Mathias Pierre works for the communications office of the new Prime Minister and he says Mr Aimee's priorities are crystal clear.

I think the priority for any government in Haiti is to first establish security,

return to democratic order by organizing elections. And I think the prime minister in his speech yesterday has the public engagement to define a national strategy for establishing security in the country, working with the international forces to see how we can create security

peaceful environment in the country and certainly we organize organized election in the country. Mathias Pierre from the office of Haiti's new prime minister.

And finally, the mystery of why a tame beluga whale bearing a harness swam up to fishermen in Norway may finally have been solved. Five years ago, when it took place, there was widespread speculation that the white whale, who became known as Valdemir, had been trained to spy for Russia. Now, a marine scientist who was working in Russia at the time has told the BBC that she's certain that the whale escaped from a military facility near Murmansk.

Satellite images from there suggest that whales may be being trained to protect nuclear submarines. Our environment correspondent Jonah Fisher has the story. It's April 2019 and a beluga whale has surfaced alongside Jor Heston's fishing boat in the far north of Norway. We saw a white shadow in the water. This white shadow was big and moving towards us.

it turned out to be a beluga whale. As it came closer, we saw that it was entangled with something. First we thought it was a rope or some fishing gear.

In fact, it was a harness, and once Jor had jumped in the water and freed the whale, attention was drawn to the words written on the harness buckle. No, there was no cameras on it or anything. It was just like this. Jørgen Rewig is from the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries. And it also says on the small letters on the clips... Equipment, St Petersburg. Equipment, St Petersburg.

Alan Clow was the first journalist on the scene. This was supposed to be a fun and warm story about a mammal being freed, but it really dawned on me that this is something far bigger than I've been doing before. Freed from the harness, the beluga, instead of swimming off, sought out more human contact and took up residence at the harbour of Hammerfest. The whale was given the name Valdemir, a blend of the Norwegian word for whale...

The first name of President Putin. It was very obvious that this particular whale had been conditioned to be putting his nose on anything that looked like a target. Yves Jourdain is a whale researcher at the Norwegian Orca Survey. But we have no idea what kind of facility he was in, so we don't know what he was trained for.

The marine mystery made headlines around the world. But it was widely thought at the time that the beluga was most likely a spy whale trained by Russia. But that's just been an assumption.

until now. I'm 99% sure that he escaped. This is Dr Olga Shpak. She's just told a new BBC documentary that she believes the whale fled Russian military training. I can't fully disclose the contacts where I got this information from, but I've heard what his nickname was. His nickname was Andryukha. This animal was kind of easy to train. It was...

inquisitive and active, but at the same time, it had the character that it often did what he wanted to do. It seemed like no one was surprised that it actually just escaped.

But what are the whales being trained to do? Satellite images suggest they're being kept in pens alongside a Russian submarine base near Murmansk. Here we can see Russian nuclear-powered submarines. Thomas Nielsen is the editor of Norwegian online newspaper The Barents Observer. The location of the beluga whales is very close to the submarines and the surface vessels.

might tell us that they were actually part of a guarding system. They could be considered a kind of underwater guard dogs. Sadly, there is no happy ending. Two months ago, the beluga's lifeless body was found floating off the coast of Norway. The Norwegian authorities say Faldemir, or should that be Andruha, died when a stick became lodged in his mouth.

And that report from the appropriately named Jonah Fisher. And that's it from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. This edition was mixed by Vladimir Muzichka. The producer was Mark Duff. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Valerie Sanderson. Until next time, bye-bye.

When we left, there was this wonderful feeling, but it was only the beginning of a nightmare. This is a story that started with a job advert.

A yacht owner looking for a crew to sail his recently renovated boat from Brazil to Europe. For me, it was going to be a great adventure and an opportunity to gain a lot of experience. But when police raided the vessel and discovered drugs... Cocaine, hidden under one of the beds. It can't be. A key suspect was miles away. Everything revolved around him. Who's the boss? A British guy. Fox. Fox.

This is World of Secrets from the BBC World Service. Season 5, Finding Mr Fox. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.