European leaders meet a day after Trump's win
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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Alex Ritson, and at 14 Hours GMT on Thursday 7th November, these are our main stories. Donald Trump's victory will have serious consequences for European security. The ominous words of one prime minister as European leaders gather in Budapest.

2024 looks set to be the hottest year on record and there's more chastening news on the environment. And some of the biggest stars in women's tennis are heading to a mega money tournament in Saudi Arabia, but not everyone's on board. Also in this podcast... ..violence and singing on the streets of Mozambique as voters question election results.

The meeting was set to happen anyway, a gathering of the European political community which brings European countries together to discuss issues of common interest.

But there's one subject that's clearly of more interest than any other right now, and that's Donald Trump's victory in the US election. This is a man who has never hidden his disdain for NATO and has threatened to impose tariffs on European manufactured goods imported into America. Not surprisingly, it's Mr Trump's name which has been on the lips of the politicians as they arrived in Budapest. Our Europe regional editor, Paul Moss, gave me the latest.

I think what's distinctive is they've all had a bit of a change of tone. You know, Tuesday was Election Day. That was all about diplomacy. When leaders phone up, Donald Trump say offer their congratulations.

perhaps jostle for favour a bit and say, do you remember when you visited our country? What a wonderful time you had and we all had tea together. It hasn't taken long for all that bonhomie to vanish and for politicians to start saying what they're really thinking. First out of the trap on Wednesday morning was Poland's Prime Minister, Donald Tusk. He said that Donald Trump's election presented a serious challenge for European security. He described Donald Trump as unpredictable.

Most of the leaders haven't been criticising Donald Trump explicitly, but more just focusing on what they're going to do now. I mean, you had the French president, Emmanuel Macron, saying now was the decisive moment when Europe had to seize its own destiny. In other words, we can't rely on America to come to our rescue anymore. We also heard from the European Union's counsel and its president, Charles Michel. In some ways, he was interesting because he too emphasised the need for Europe to take charge of its own affairs.

But he also seemed to be pleading with Donald Trump not to abandon his old partners. We want to deepen our ties with the United States, it's very clear, because there is a lot in common. But we also want to be more master of our destiny. We want to strengthen our economic base and we want to act in a way where we are respectful and respected partners. This is the basic principle.

And Paul, the location of the meeting in Budapest is rather pointed. Just extraordinary, isn't it? I mean, this really is a coincidence. But yes, Budapest, the capital of Hungary. Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban is perhaps Europe's biggest fan of Donald Trump. He was one of the first to congratulate him on winning. He called it a victory for the world.

But, you know, during the American election campaign, journalists kept saying how divided the U.S. was. Well, Europe is divided, too, and on similar lines between people who are broadly sympathetic to Donald Trump's agenda, his views on immigration, his views on the so-called culture war. You know, these attacks which sort of like to portray things as the burger eaters versus the tofu munchers.

And that division in Europe is among ordinary people, but also among politicians. So you have European governments very happy about Donald Trump's victory. Hungary, as I've mentioned, but also Slovakia's. The Austrian Freedom Party, which just came top in an election. Members of the governing coalition in Italy and the Netherlands. They're very sympathetic to Donald Trump. So you're not going to find it easy to have a united opposition, a united front position on what to do about Donald Trump's election. Our Europe regional editor, Paul Moss.

Officials in Lebanon say 55 people were killed on Wednesday during Israeli raids in the eastern Baalbek region. The Lebanese Minister of Culture says the strikes also caused significant damage to a historic building, calling it an irredeemable loss for Lebanon and for world heritage. The Israeli military said it killed 60 Hezbollah fighters in targeted attacks in the Baalbek area. Lebanon has been criticised in the past for its treatment of migrant workers.

But amid the chaos of war, many domestic workers from abroad have been left on the streets by their sponsor families and in many cases without their passports. Emir Nader reports from Beirut. We've just arrived at a huge warehouse in the centre of Beirut next to one of the main motorways that cuts through the city. And inside there's one great room with around 200 women inside.

All from Sierra Leone, some children. They were domestic workers who came to work in Lebanese families' homes and since the war started they've been either abandoned or they've had to flee.

I came in Lebanon in 2022. Surrounded by children playing and women chatting and reading their phones, we meet Aisha Koroma, 23 years old and still shaken by her close experience of the war. In front of our house, they leave me and run away because these people, they do not care about me. So they left you alone in the house? Yes. And they left Lebanon? Yes. And just take their things and go.

When Israel began expanding its airstrike campaign on Lebanon at the end of September, many Lebanese families started fleeing the targeted neighborhoods, often leaving behind their domestic workers, like in Aisha's case, forcing them to sleep outdoors.

Zainab Bangura worked for a family in the south of Lebanon. Most of the women at this shelter are stuck here.

Under Lebanon's kafala system, families sponsor the residency of a migrant worker, but they regularly hold on to the workers' documents as a method of control. In many cases, when they fled the war, employers didn't return the passports, so women here are now trying to get new documents from their consulate.

We're arriving to meet the representative of the syndicate of companies that brings migrant workers to work as domestic workers. Should the syndicate, should the government be doing more to take care of women who say they've been abandoned in the street? Suddenly, one day, people, Lebanese and foreigners, were in the street. Here's Joseph Saliba. So it was not well planned from us to be ready for such a huge situation.

something going on. The families that have kicked their domestic workers out since the war started, that's a huge abandonment of their responsibility to the women who've been in their homes, no? I can tell you the disaster that came from Israel is not only on the domestic helpers.

Some families, they abandoned their brothers and sisters and mothers. The shock that came to the Lebanese people, in a two minutes time, leave your house with nothing. You know, some of the houses they have left without their own documents. The gold of the money, they just run away.

Do you think the fact that there has to be these charities like the shelter that's been set up for these hundreds of women who don't have anywhere to go suggests that politicians or the sector here in Lebanon needs to do more to care for guests who are here in this country? Financially, we are broken. We appreciate what our government is trying to do. We are asking it to do more. But at the end, this is Lebanon and this is what's going on.

It's not only some of Lebanon's 170,000 domestic workers who've been made homeless. Over a million people have been displaced by the conflict here. But it's domestic migrant workers in a foreign country at war who are among the most vulnerable.

It is now virtually certain that 2024, a year punctuated by intense heatwaves and deadly storms, will be the warmest on record, according to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service. It says that global average temperatures are likely to end up more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the figure that the UN has long suggested was the limit to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

How countries adjust to the changing climate is also coming under scrutiny. The United Nations Adaptation Report has just been published. Navin Singh Khadkar is the World Service Environment Correspondent. He told me more about it. When there are climate-related impacts, disasters, extreme weather events, or even sometimes slow things, for example drought, it takes time.

What they have found is, although many countries have made plans, half of those projects, particularly those under the UN Climate Convention, either have not worked satisfactorily or are not sustainable. Basically, they're not working. For example, not being able to assess what is it, what they really want.

And then sometimes getting the wrong prescription, wrong solution. It's called maladaptation. For example, you know, what kind of species of trees that should have been there? They got the wrong ones. And as a result, that forest or those trees, instead of becoming protector, they

They are susceptible to wildfires and then they aggravate the situation. Compared to mitigation, which is about how do you make the transition to clean energy, so installing solar panels or windmills or turbines and all that, securing money for adaptation is very difficult.

because the rate of return is not easy. And finances tell me securing fund or getting investors, let's say, for adaptation project is not easy.

And then, of course, there's this issue of experts coming from somewhere else, trying to help them out, but they don't know the ground situation. And the ground people, they have some idea what's going on, but they have not been able to thrash out the solution themselves. So for the sake of the planet, are they going to be able to get out of this rut? Can they get out of this rut?

We're approaching 1.5. You know, that's the threshold, the tipping point, which everything collapses. Or let's say, you know, it'll be a runaway climate change case, catastrophic. Because we are reaching there. Well, actually, the other report from Copernicus has shown that the whole year, this year, past 15 or 16 months, the UN report says it's

if we are approaching 1.5 for good, then what happens is we'll have to be able to adapt more. We'll have to be more resilient, you know, build that resilience. And that is where adaptation becomes so important. But the problem is, A, there's a huge funding gap.

Because, you know, the figure here is we need between around $190 billion to around $360 billion a year. Whereas what we are getting, the figure they have is for 2022 was $28 billion. So the gap is massive.

That gap needs to be addressed. And B, more importantly, how do we do it? The maladaptation chapter. That is the question. Will we be able to identify our problems and then also bring in the right solution? Navin Singh Khadkar, the World Service Environment Correspondent.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, has appointed a new director to lead its mission to discover the essence of the universe. The 70-year-old project, based near Geneva in Switzerland, is home to the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. Professor Mark Thompson is a British scientist, will be leading the project today.

and he's been speaking to the BBC and my colleague Amol Rajan. The Large Hadron Collider is the world's pre-eminent infrastructure for unravelling the mysteries of the universe...

And at the moment, we're going through the stage of actually upgrading it, making it more powerful. So in many ways, we're right at the beginning of the journey of discovery for the Large Hadron Collider. And my first priority will be completing that and actually bringing that into operation as soon as possible, because it's such an exciting machine. It will deliver more data.

But actually, the other thing that's exciting is our scientists are becoming more imaginative, adopting advanced technologies like artificial intelligence. So the data we take in the future is going to be even more powerful than the data we have now. So huge discovery opportunities.

The second priority is all of these very large infrastructures, the Large Hadron Collider is 27 kilometres in circumference, take a long time to plan, to construct. And we're now looking at what happens after the Large Hadron Collider.

So in the next five years during my mandate, one of the highest priorities is really to converge on what comes after the Large Hadron Collider. And that really is a question of what are the big scientific questions we want to address and what is the right machine to do that.

The prime candidate is something we currently call the future circular collider, which is about three times as large as the Large Hadron Collider. What would success look like from your mandate, from your five years, in terms of getting us to a better understanding of what's inside the atom?

No, I think you're absolutely right. The essence of what we do at CERN, put crudely, is smash particles together as hard as we can to create conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang. And in that way, we explore the building blocks of the universe. As I say, I think the thing that really excites me in terms of the science that we'll be delivering in the next five years is the opportunity not only to measure the properties of the Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider,

but also to explore the unknown. As I say, we are going to have a more powerful machine, more data, better techniques. There really are exciting discovery opportunities here.

Now, of course, with discoveries, you don't actually know what you're going to discover. Otherwise, there wouldn't really be discoveries. So I think the real excitement for me is that opportunity. We're taking a leap into the unknown. We don't know what we will find, but I'm really excited about the chance of actually finding something completely unexpected. So that would really be my biggest hope in the next five years. Professor Mark Thompson, clashes between protesters and police have broken out in the capital of Mozambique.

Police fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators in Maputo. Post-election protests involving thousands of people have engulfed the country since last month's disputed presidential election. At least 18 people have been killed in the violence. Our Africa regional editor, Will Ross, has been following this.

This is all about last month's election and there's a particular opposition leader, Venacio Montlan, who has really rallied the protest movement. He's got a pretty big following, especially among young people, and he's called for a week of protests. And this is now kind of the climax of that whole week of anger against the government.

And it's a very, very tense kind of worrying situation really right now because the defence ministry has threatened to bring out the army. There are already some army trucks on the streets, but we've seen a lot of tear gas from the police already.

But they're facing a vast number of people who are simply not accepting the result of the election. And in fact, election observers did point to a lot of discrepancies. It's possible that there might be a recount of some sort if the courts push that through.

But at the moment, there's this kind of very worrying standoff. And the fear, having seen at least 18 people killed already, the fear is that if the police and possibly the army decide to simply use force to try and crush this, we could see a lot worse in terms of the number of casualties on the streets. Yeah, as you say, they threatened to bring in the troops. Would they really do that?

Well, quite possibly. You've got a party here, the Frelimo party, that's been in power for 49 years. It's clearly determined to stay there. And this is not the first time this party's been accused of using rigging tactics to get through an election.

And there are people with a lot to lose. So if they do rely on the police and the army, there is a fear that there could be a lot more violence. But it's interesting that this man, this opposition man, Mr. Montland, he's talking in kind of revolutionary language and he's

clearly does have a following and it's not just the capital Maputo. We've seen right across the country in the provincial capitals and smaller cities a lot of anger. There have also been reports of sort of revenge killings, they're calling them, against the police because the protesters feel that the police have simply killed people for protesting peacefully. Africa regional editor Will Ross.

Still to come in this podcast. I went out there and I had fun. I did take it very seriously. I worked my butt off. It's all over for Reagan, the Aussie Olympic breakdancer who made waves this summer.

An adventure of a lifetime. Sailing around the world. Delivering a renovated yacht thousands of miles around the globe, from Brazil to Europe. It was an opportunity to gain a lot of experience. My path to my dream was beginning. But for the sailors selected, this dream job quickly turned into a nightmare. Rodrigo, the police are here. There's something on this boat. Whoa. A tin of cocaine. And a key suspect...

was miles away. Fox got the shots. He was in charge. But we've found him. Brazilian police say that you are an international drug trafficker. Well, I'm not. From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, Season 5, Finding Mr Fox. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

This weekend in Saudi Arabia, one of the top stars of women's tennis will lift the WTA finals trophy and pocket $5 million. It's the first time that a major professional women's sport event has been held there. But women's rights are restricted in the kingdom and the decision to stage the event there has unsurprisingly proved highly controversial. Our sports news correspondent Laura Scott reports from Riyadh.

As the stars of women's tennis serve up a show in Riyadh, a lot's resting on the promise of sport driving positive change. With a record £12 million in prize money for players who've been put up in a luxury hotel and have a beauty salon on site, no expense has been spared.

But for some, the kingdom's reputation has prompted some soul-searching. I would be lying to you if I said I had no reservations. This was world number three Coco Goff speaking ahead of the tournament. Obviously, I'm a woman and I was very concerned and my dad honestly was very concerned with me coming here, but...

You know, it's one of those things where it's like I want to see it for myself and see, you know, if the change is happening. And then if I felt, you know, uncomfortable or felt like, you know, nothing's happening, then maybe, you know, I probably wouldn't come back. Ticket, please.

This country is no stranger to hosting top-level sport, but what makes this significant is it's the first major women's sports event to be held here. Whilst there have been recent reforms, human rights issues remain, and critics claim the WTA has sold its soul by allowing Saudi Arabia to host the crown jewel of women's tennis.

The promotion of this event has angered Fauzia al-Hateibi, whose sister Manahel is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence in Saudi Arabia over social media posts supporting women's rights and photos showing her head uncovered.

For me, yes, it is sports washing. And as for the people promoting it, I see them as partners in crime. I don't only see them as getting paid money to promote sport for Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, I see them as influencing girls to believe this publicity and fall as victims like my sister Manahil.

The WTA said it was sensitive to concerns about bringing the final somewhere where women's rights are restricted and homosexuality is illegal. But it said its three-year deal was justified by players receiving equal prize money to the men and their plans to leave a legacy.

Their aim is to get a million Saudis engaged in tennis by 2030. Yet with Sunday's action watched by only a few hundred fans, there are already questions about the appetite for tennis in the country. Who's from Saudi? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Ahead of the finals starting, we met young budding tennis players taking part in the future stars camp. Welcome.

15-year-old Zaina told us what it was like to train on the same courts as her idols. We never really had these kind of tournaments and events in Saudi, so for them to finally come is life-changing.

Former legends Martina Navratilova and Chris Everett wrote to the WTA earlier this year, urging them not to bring the event to Saudi Arabia. It's just amazing what Saudi Arabia has achieved in the past eight years since it started this transformation. I put their comments to the head of the Saudi Tennis Federation, Areej Mutabagani. We're on a transformation journey and we invite anyone and everyone. I really would love them to come and see for themselves. Seeing is believing.

The promise of the WTA is that their top athletes haven't just gone to Riyadh to play and pocket millions in the process, but that they can be a force for good in Saudi Arabia. The critics will take some convincing that prize money hasn't come at the expense of principals. Laura Scott in Riyadh.

The entire island of Cuba and its 10 million strong population has been plunged into darkness. Hurricane Rafael, with winds of 185 kilometres per hour, caused the country's electricity grid to collapse. Rafael is the latest and worst blackout to have plagued the Caribbean island in recent weeks.

Weather forecasts predict more rains and flash flooding to hit Cuba, which is also struggling with old and decaying infrastructure, as well as fuel shortages. So what's it like to be there right now? Freelance journalist Ruri Nicol was able to send us this message from his home in Cuba. Just before its arrival, the lights went out and the electricity union, the state electricity suppliers,

said that the whole grid had gone down again, which is something that happened two weeks ago, plunging the island into darkness for nearly four days as they struggled to get it going again. The hurricane itself seems to have done quite a lot of damage. You could hear masonry falling. There's rumors of

buildings, certainly one building fell, which is something, Havan is in a very dilapidated state. So it's something that happens quite regularly if there's a lot of rain that entire buildings fall down. Things were falling from roofs, trees were falling everywhere. The city right now is completely black, completely dark because of course there are no lights. But the winds have reduced a little and now we're getting hit by a lot of rain.

There's a lot of disquiet about the grid collapsing again because of the hurricane. It's something that traditionally hasn't happened. They do turn off the electricity during hurricanes, but for the grid to collapse, it's a big deal, which is adding to a great deal of uncertainty here. The country was quite traumatised after the last power cuts, and this is not helping at all. In fact, one comedian has appeared online saying...

the hurricane saying to Rafael, please don't come. They'll blame you for everything. Journalist Ruri Nicol in Cuba. Deepfake images generated by AI, artificial intelligence, are being used to influence the outcome of elections around the world. But there are new ways of detecting the images and warning people about them. Here's our North America technology correspondent, Lily Jamali.

Maybe you've seen images floating around social media. Fake hurricane victims, fabricated celebrity endorsement of Kamala Harris was even shared by Elon Musk on X back in September. It's quite a high quality image, but it's definitely fake.

That's Oren Etzioni, founder of truemedia.org, one of at least a dozen deepfake detection tools that aim to help users identify AI-generated content on social media. Media processed by the site gets color-coded tags to, in theory, alert users to potentially false information. Red, fake, red.

likely to be manipulated, yellow, inconclusive, uncertain, or green. It's likely to be real. On social media, often images are compressed. You're looking at them at your phone screen. The bottom line is people often cannot tell.

To test the tool out, we made some short deep fakes of our own. Today we're going to talk about some things I've been seeing. We have three models saying fake, fake, fake. We even have 100% confidence. With this deep fake video, however, the tool wasn't as certain.

And it looks like the models came back and were uncertain about the face. One detected with middling confidence, and one said there was little evidence. Ezioni is open about how these models don't catch fake images 100% of the time. But he argues true media is still a valuable tool to the average voter trying to tell truth from fiction.

Others say deep fake detec what is actually a very c analysis is hard. It's no and on a good day, individ

You can't operate at that scale at the internet. There are billions of uploads every day. Digital forensics expert Hani Fareed of UC Berkeley says these tools have the potential to do more harm than good. The nightmare situation is a real video gets out there, one of these techniques misfires, which has happened, and now you've empowered the lie.

or a fake piece of content, it misfires, says it's real. Now you've empowered the lie because now you have, hey, this technique said it's real or this technique said it's fake and that now you've made things worse. We got mixed results as well. Take this Instagram photo of the actress Jennifer Aniston.

True Media clears the original post as real, but this screenshot of it shared on X is marked as uncertain. True Media says being transparent about that kind of uncertainty helps. They also have humans step in as needed. But the internet isn't known for nuance. So in the meantime, Fareed says the best way to limit exposure to deepfakes is... Get the hell off of social media. And seek out reliable sources. Lily Jamali.

This year's Olympics in Paris offered up many viral moments, including the Turkish shooter celebrated for his casual style while winning a silver medal, Team USA's Rubik's Cube-solving pommel horse competitor and the French pole vaulter who knocked off the bar with his crotch.

None of these, however, surpassed the Australian breakdancer Regan, who became world famous overnight after that routine in her green and yellow tracksuit. Now, though, she's announced her retirement from the sport. Stephanie Prentice told me more.

Well, Alex, Rachel Gunn, also known as Beagle Reagan, she didn't have the best time at the Olympics. She represented Australia in the breakdancing or breaking, as they call it, competitions. But her moves, which included things like the sprinkler and the kangaroo hop. I've been practising.

Rebobbled on the kangaroo hop. They weren't quite well received by judges, but really that was the least of her problems because the internet seized on the routines and suddenly she was world famous. She was subject to thousands of memes, people screen grabbing bits of it, adding their own commentary, mocking her, mocking the sport and actually questioning how she qualified in the first place. So she did defend that back in August.

I went out there and I had fun. I did take it very seriously. I worked my butt off preparing for the Olympics and I gave my all, truly. I'd really like to ask the press to please stop harassing my family, my friends and the broader street dance community.

Yeah, people can be so cruel. The dance actually reignited a debate on whether breakdancing, breaking as it's known, is really suitable for Olympic competition.

Well, actually, yes. What actually happened, Reagan has now said the level of scrutiny has been so upsetting that she no longer wants to compete. She said the idea of people filming her in future, then posting it online, has really taken the joy out of it for her. And she said she will still dance. She loves to dance, but she'll do it in smaller community competitions and from the comfort of her living room. And as you just said, that performance did result

reignite this debate about whether breakdancing or breaking is particularly appropriate when it comes to the Olympics. Now, we did see it in the 2018 Youth Olympics and it went down a real storm there, but Paris was its big debut as a proper Olympic sport.

because of the way that it's so creative and it is quite hard to score. I mean, there are categories like originality, like execution, but it is more fluid and it's harder to judge. So it did make a big splash this year as a sport, got a lot of attention, but it's not on the agenda for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. Reagan gave me hope that I might one day be a breakdancer. Stephanie Prentice with that report. MUSIC

And that's all from us for now. If you want to hear more about how the impact of a second Trump presidency could be felt internationally, why not check out another podcast from the BBC World Service, The Global Story, in their latest episode.

What Trump's victory means for the world. They discuss how US policy might change on Ukraine, the Middle East, China, Europe and beyond. Just search for The Global Story wherever you listen to us. If you want to comment on our podcast or the topics we covered, send us an email. The address globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X.com.

at Global News Pod. This edition was mixed by Sid Dundon and the producer was David Lewis. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritz and until next time, goodbye.

An adventure of a lifetime. Sailing around the world. Delivering a renovated yacht thousands of miles around the globe, from Brazil to Europe. It was an opportunity to gain a lot of experience. My path to my dream was beginning. But for the sailors selected, this dream job quickly turned into a nightmare. Rodrigo, the police are here. There's something on this boat. Whoa. A tonne of cocaine. And a key suspect...

was miles away. Fox got the shots. He was in charge. But we've found him. Brazilian police say that you are an international drug trafficker. Well, I'm not. From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, Season 5, Finding Mr Fox. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.