This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
I'm Alex Ritson and at 17 hours GMT on Wednesday 29th October, these are our main stories.
Officially, the truce is still holding in Gaza, despite Israeli airstrikes which have killed more than 100 people.
Cuba now faces the terrifying might of Hurricane Melissa after widespread destruction in Jamaica.
President Trump agrees a tariff-lowering trade deal with South Korea after being presented with a golden crown.
Also in this podcast... The Syrian hospital which solved repair problems with a 3D printer.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says more than 100 people are now known to have been killed after a wave of Israeli airstrikes on Tuesday night.
Homes, schools and residential blocks were hit and a number of children were among the dead.
The Israeli military says it launched the attacks after accusing Hamas of killing a soldier, in violation of the US-brokered ceasefire.
Hamas has denied involvement.
Israel says it's now resuming the truce, which President Trump has warned must not be broken.
The leading Palestinian politician, Mustafa Barkuti, says the Israeli attacks were a clear provocation.
It represents the violation number 126 of the Israeli army.
They violated the ceasefire agreement not only by bombarding the people of Gaza, but also by preventing the opening of Rafah Crossing for people, by preventing humanitarian aid to Gaza, as it should be and, most importantly, by preventing heavy machinery to get into Gaza to deal with the rebels.
There are 10000 Palestinians who are still under the rubble, including some Israeli captives who were killed by Israeli airstrikes before and ended up under the rubble.
I got an update on the situation in Gaza from our correspondent in Jerusalem, Sebastian Asher.
It is clear that a large number of Palestinians have been killed.
Now we just had a statement from the IDF saying that they hit 30 terrorists, saying that they held command positions there within the terrorist organisations operating in Gaza.
Now the breakdown of figures that we've had so far from the authorities in Gaza, from local hospitals, I think, belie that, because they are speaking of a number of children, a number of women, some elderly people who've been killed, strikes that hit apartments, that hit a car, families and people within those areas killed.
Donald Trump insists nothing will jeopardise the truce.
But, I mean, looking at the pictures, it feels like it's over.
I think that is not quite where we are at the moment.
It's absolutely true that those pictures are the same pictures that we have been seeing day in, day out during the two years of the war.
We haven't seen them with that intensity since the ceasefire came in on October the 10th.
So these are by far, as the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered them to be, the most powerful strikes since then.
Again, the Israeli military says that it's over for now.
They say that the ceasefire, as far as they're concerned, is resuming after this.
You've quoted the US administration, President Trump, who have said, with these attacks but also previous ones, that the ceasefire is holding.
And I mean, that is very, very much the line that Mr. Trump wants to keep to.
And I think that Israel, the government doesn't want to go too far away from that.
You know, it's a cliche to call ceasefires fragile, but it is.
But I don't think it's going to break imminently, although from the perspective of people in Gaza it may feel that way.
Sebastian Usher in Jerusalem.
So where does this leave the ceasefire in Gaza?
International editor Jeremy Bowen has this assessment of the truce.
What this whole process is lacking right now is the kind of superstructure, scaffolding, if you like, of diplomatic political agreements that driver ceasefire on and means that when cracks appear, they don't widen until to such a degree that the whole thing crumbles.
I'll give you an example.
There's meant to be an international stabilization force which will have some kind of ill-defined peacekeeping role.
There is no specific... promises of troops right now.
It would require for it to be legal, a United Nations Security Council resolution.
The Americans have mentioned they might do something like that, but they've had three weeks to get on with it.
They haven't done it.
So all the kind of detail you need, the diplomatic thrust that you need to try to make a ceasefire work, is absent right now.
I think there is lots about the ceasefire that Hamas like insofar as they are able to continue.
Their men are back on the streets in the area that 45 or so of Gaza where Israelis are not in terms of military deployments.
And one thing that is a real potential deal breaker is the fact that Hamas says they're not going to disarm.
Now, This ceasefire process is meant to include the disarmament of Hamas, but there isn't much detail about how exactly that is going to happen.
There's other stuff that needs to be done as well.
The various committees need to be formed, some including Palestinians some, you know, which have been accused of being a kind of revival of colonialism, which would be led by Donald Trump, Tony Blair, that sort of thing, I mean.
None of this stuff is coming to pass at the moment, And without it, the ceasefire will, I think, increasingly become ragged, in coming to the point when it will crumble more and more.
Jeremy Bowen.
As we record this podcast, Hurricane Melissa is bringing storm surges and landslides to eastern Cuba after making landfall on the south side of the island.
Hundreds of thousands of Cubans have been evacuated to temporary shelters, and the country's president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, predicted there would be a lot of damage.
Etienne Labande from the World Food Programme is currently in the Cuban capital, Havana.
What we know is that the most affected provinces have been Santiago de Cuba and Guantanamo.
Heavy rains there, strong winds, as it was predicted plan.
The important thing is, thanks to the very strong civil defense mechanism that we have here, more than 600 000 people have been evacuated before the landfall to protection centers and, thanks to our preparation measures, We were able to send assistance before the event so these people can be assisted there.
On Tuesday, the hurricane hit Jamaica as a Category 5, the most powerful storm there in modern history.
It's been declared a disaster area, with much of the island still without power and some areas left underwater.
Three quarters of a million people were moved from their homes.
Our reporter Nick Davis is in the Jamaican capital.
Well, we've been seeing video from all over Jamaica over that part of the day, after the storm sort of passed and people who had connection were able to upload.
But it's really going to be the daylight hours which is going to really reveal the extent of the damage of communities.
It's just unbelievable when you are able to get in contact with people and they talk about their stories of survival, what it was like going through that storm.
You know it's funny.
My parents are from this island and i would hear my dad talking about hurricane charlie.
This is one of those points.
You know he was talking about a storm in the 1950s.
This is one of those same almost seminal moments i'm not sure if that's the right term for it in the island's history.
People are going to talk about this for generations.
What stories are you hearing from the people that you know?
When we saw the storm was tracking more westwards and heading towards Montego Bay, I literally saw it going down my friend's road.
And so we were on with them saying, listen, stay safe.
And they said they were going to update us.
And when they did, It was video which almost brought tears to my eyes because, you know, a home I relaxed in enjoyed, was in pieces.
A good friend who is a hotelier on the other side of the island.
You know, I saw video people literally just wandering onto his property because Part of the hotel had been destroyed.
Farmers, I know lots of farmers in St.
Elizabeth and you know their peanuts literally ready to come out of the ground and all gone, all gone.
All of that work. destroyed in an instant.
They're literally on floodland.
I mean, it's like a paddy field where they are.
It's going to be so difficult for people to be able to bounce back from this.
And I'm also very concerned about the psychological impact as well, because you know a lot of kids who have been hearing that the storm is coming for days now.
You know almost sheltering in place.
They're off school because of the storm and then having to live through it.
It's going to be very hard.
And even now, the second stage comes in, which is, as you said, the cleanup, the relief stage of it.
You know, the airport in Montego Bay is unusable at the moment.
It suffered quite badly. a lot of damage.
We don't know when that will reopen.
We're expecting the airport over in Kingston to have its assessments done later in the day and for hopefully, some of the first relief flights to come in later this afternoon.
But we don't know.
The government will be holding press conferences to update the nation throughout the day.
The prime minister has been very vocal.
He's obviously made the island a disaster zone.
That's going to unlock some of the facilities of the Caribbean insurance facility which a number of Caribbean nations can dip into for this sort of thing.
But as I said, it's the average person.
Jamaicans don't insure their properties.
How do you come back from something like this?
It's going to be very difficult.
But they will do because Jamaicans are very resilient.
I just wanted to add that one last bit.
Nick Davis in Kingston.
President Trump says a trade deal with South Korea is pretty much finalised after talks with his counterpart Lee Jae-myung.
South Korea is the last stop on Mr Trump's tour of Asian nations.
He's due to meet China's leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday on the sidelines of the APEC forum in Zhongzhou.
Our China correspondent Laura Bicker is there and sent us this report.
The show and the summitry has begun.
Donald Trump has arrived in the ancient South Korean capital of Gyeongju.
His motorcade is just coming past me now.
There are the flags of both the U.S. and South Korea on his car.
But the US president has made it clear his priority on this visit is trade talks with China when President Xi arrives.
We're going to be, I hope, making a deal.
I think we're going to have a deal.
I think it'll be a good deal for both.
And that's really a great result.
You know, that's better than fighting and going through all sorts of problems.
No reason for it.
I think it's going to be a great deal for both.
Donald Trump's trade policies and tariffs have made some foes among key U.S. friends.
The No Trump protests in South Korea have been small but significant.
Hundreds rallied outside the U.S. embassy in the center of Seoul at the weekend.
22-year-old college student, Kim Sol-yi, was helping to carry a banner depicting a cartoon Donald Trump vomiting money.
When Donald Trump called Korea a money machine, that really angered me.
It seems like the US is seeing and treating Korea as its cash cow.
Just up the street is a rival demonstration.
This time the target is the other superpower.
China.
Anti-Chinese sentiment here has grown in the last decade and more recently since the president granted Chinese tourists visas.
This 27-year-old didn't want to give her name.
We're against the socialist system embodied by the Communist Party.
We value democratic freedom and the free market economy.
That's why we stand here.
Lee Jae-myung is a seasoned politician, but he has his work cut out for him.
He must play the gracious host to both superpowers, while also trying to get what his own country needs.
The country is doing what it can to flatter its guest and awarding him its highest honour, the Order of Mugunghwa, and gifting him a replica of a 1500-year-old golden crown.
This moment, right now that Lee faces himself, is trying to manoeuvre these superpowers on which the country relies so heavily.
Darcy Drought-Vajaris is from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Korea is finding itself between the rock and the hard place of its both economic and security relationships with both China and the United States.
And right now it's a particularly fraught moment because of the looming Trump-Xi visit.
She and Trump are bringing drama to a summit the world often overlooks.
Now there's some hope the two superpowers will come to a kind of a trade deal, but Mr Trump wants it to be bigger and better than ever before.
Even if the two sides do agree, this superpower rivalry looks likely to continue.
Thank you.
Laura Bicker.
Polls have closed in Tanzania in the presidential election, but the main opposition leader, Tundu Lisu, was nowhere to be seen on the ballot.
Instead, he's on trial for treason and his party, Chadema, was banned from standing.
The incumbent, Samia Sulahu Hassan, is expected to win.
She came to power after the death of her predecessor, John Magufuli, who died in 2021.
Her path to this polling day has been described by rights groups such as Amnesty International as a wave of terror.
Our correspondent Sami Awami is on the island of Zanzibar, where he visited a polling station.
He told Priya Rai about the situation there.
The atmosphere here Priya, is very calm, so far you know, especially because the Zanzibar Islands are known for having this very bit of a tamarisk elections here.
So far, everything has been going on all right.
I've just arrived at a polling station.
The polls here opened at 7pm.
And in Zanzibar elections start a day before, and that's because they have a system here of early voting.
Now, yesterday, there were a few complaints from the opposition that the process...
In some cases, in some polling stations, we're not smooth.
But so far, we haven't had any complaints from the opposition.
And they hope that the situation will continue to be as smooth as they are so far.
Yes.
Well, on that point of them hoping to go smoothly, what is the perception of the election in Zanzibar compared to the rest of Tanzania?
This election has been very interesting because, like I said, usually the attention is in Zanzibar.
But this election the attention has been more in the mainland and because of the crackdown on the opposition.
Here in Zanzibar, there's been nothing extraordinary or unusual in the islands.
The current president has been carrying out a lot of infrastructure projects.
He has built a lot of roads networks across Zanzibar, hospitals and schools markets.
So there's been quite a lot of praises from Zanzibaris whom I've spoken to.
But of course, the opposition have been raising a lot of issues.
They talk about rampant corruption.
They say, yes, the government has been implementing all these infrastructure projects.
But while the government's been doing that, there's been a lot of corruption going on.
But they've also been talking about how Zanzibar remains to be not fully autonomous.
They depend a lot of instructions from their mainland.
And so the opposition says They want to take power so that they can restore Zanzibari's autonomy, so that they can decide a lot of their decisions here regarding developments etc.
So the usual political campaigns and promises from both sides, but nothing extraordinary like the suppression of the opposition, like we've seen in the mainland.
Over the last couple of weeks, Sammy we've been discussing in various African nations elections, but also delays to the announcement of results.
It's something many listeners have been getting in touch with us about, and the potential consequences and tensions that that can sometimes cause lead to.
In Zanzibar.
The Electoral Commission has pledged to announce the preliminary results at least within 24 hours.
What can you say about that?
That's correct.
I spoke to the director of the Zanzibar Electoral Commission here and he said that Technology has improved quite significantly and they've learned a lot of lessons from past elections.
So they will try to announce the results as soon as possible.
In fact, I asked him whether by the 1st of November the results will be out, and he said he believed so, especially if the process will go as smoothly as they envision.
So the plan is to announce at least within 24, 48 hours for the results of the election to be known.
So they expect to announce as soon as they can.
Sami Awami in Zanzibar.
He said the situation there was calm.
That's not been the case elsewhere in Tanzania.
As we record this podcast, the authorities have declared a curfew in the commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, due to take effect from 6 pm local time.
That's after several people were injured when police fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators who blocked roads and lit bonfires.
Still to come in this podcast, the messages found a century after they were sent.
They were picking up rubbish and Felicity saw a bottle and she picked it up and said oh, this bottle's pretty cool.
It's very thick glass and it's got messages in it.
We better take it home.
Sudan's foreign ministry has ordered two senior officials from the UN's World Food Programme to leave the country within 72 hours.
No reason was given for the expulsions, but in the past...
Thank you very much.
And the country has suffered from a long-running civil war.
So what's behind the latest order?
Our global affairs reporter Richard Kegoy told us more.
It's unclear, because there's no explanation that was issued by Sudan's foreign ministry about how they arrived at this decision.
What they said is that they had summoned the director of WFP in Sudan and stated the reason as to why they decided to expel him and the president emergency coordinator, the office in charge of that.
So we really don't know exactly, because in the statement, what followed is that they indicated that Sudan's sovereignty needs to be respected.
So that's actually the puzzle in this whole issue.
And presumably the impact on the WFP's much-needed operations in Sudan could be big.
Absolutely, because what the WFP says is that, at this time, there are close to about 24 million people who are in dire need of food.
A lot of them are suffering from acute food insecurity, and even some of them.
So what they're saying is that this now forces them to really rethink leadership changes at a time when all efforts need to be directed to reach a lot of these vulnerable populations.
That's really their concern, that this is going to disrupt the provision of life-saving assistance.
Richard, while we have you, I also wanted to ask you about El Fascia, the western city taken by the paramilitary rapid support forces.
Any update on the events and humanitarian situation there?
Yes, it's difficult, especially for aid agencies right now to access El Fasha.
This has been the situation before the fall of the city.
What we've heard is that lots of people have fled the city to North Kordofan State, and we're talking about thousands of people.
What we're hearing from researchers from Yale University who did a study through satellite images and through their field operatives there is that there have been reports of people who have been killed.
And the RSF has been accused by the army that they targeted over a thousand people from ethnic communities that were accused of collaborating with the army.
Army officers who have been captured and have been transferred to South Darfur State.
So literally, the situation is very dire from a humanitarian perspective because it's really difficult to access the area because of the prevailing security situation.
Richard Kagoy.
A new breath test for pancreatic cancer could revolutionise treatment.
In its trial stages.
Still, it's potentially a way of pinpointing a disease which is notoriously hard to spot and notoriously deadly.
Professor George Hanna is head of the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London.
He's been leading the project and told Paul Henley about it.
The early symptoms of pancreatic cancer are shared with benign conditions.
And that's why if the general practitioner refers everybody with those symptoms.
We're overwhelming the symptoms, the system with patients who do not have the disease and do a lot of unnecessary investigations.
Symptoms like what?
Like vague abdominal pain, back pain, dyspepsia.
Those are symptoms which could be cancer and it could be benign condition.
Actually, very early cancer might not have any symptoms.
So if those symptoms vague symptoms, vague abdominal symptoms referred for investigation then it will be too many unnecessarily.
If we wait, then we will miss cancer.
Give an example, 90 of patients with pancreatic cancer.
They have symptoms prior to diagnosis and visit their general practitioner maybe an average three times before the diagnosis is made.
This is a breath test.
Can you explain how it works?
How do you do the test?
The patient breathes in a bag and there is a device which transfers compounds from the breath into a tube.
And this tube has been sent to the lab and then the lab will analyse the compound to detect cancer.
And what compounds are you looking for?
How did you know what to search for?
We did some discovery studies and some lab work and came up with a list of compounds which will be volatile in the room temperature and normal pressure.
And those compounds were the basis for the test.
And these are early indicators of pancreatic cancer.
The first wave of tests was on about 700 people.
Tell me how they were selected and tell me some of the results.
So those patients have been selected as the cancer patient from known to have cancer on biopsies.
And the control group are patients who have benign condition like inflamed pancreas or recent onset diabetes.
And there is another group of patients who have normal pancreas.
So all patients have pancreas. the reference test, which is the CT scan or biopsies.
So those are the three groups which they underwent the test.
And the results?
Because it's about to go to a much wider testing sample.
Yeah, so the results are very promising.
And this is why the Pancreatic Cancer UK are funding the next stage, which will go for a wider test.
How early can you detect this disease, which proves fatal in very many patients?
Very quickly, doesn't it?
Yeah, so there are cases where selected from all stages, including early stage, which is stage one and two, and three and four, of course with more advances.
So the test has been done across the four stages of cancer.
The breath test has the promise to diagnose early cancer because it does not only detect molecules from cancer, but it detects molecules from the response to cancer.
And the response to cancer happens at an early stage and this gives an opportunity to pick up cancer at an early stage.
How significant is this breakthrough?
Very promising because it will allow patients to be picked up at a curable stage.
And when we pick up the patient at a curable stage, this will allow more chance for cure.
Just to give you an example 80 of patients with pancreatic cancer are detected at a stage which we cannot offer them any curable treatment.
So this is really potentially transfer a group of patients from an incurable disease to a group of patients who potentially can offer them a potential curable option.
Professor George Hanna of Imperial College London.
Now to Syria.
In hospitals across the country.
Vital machines such as ventilators and baby incubators often lie unused because spare parts aren't available.
But the charity Field Ready is trying to change that using 3D printing.
Craig Langren reports.
My name is Imad Nashar al-Niam.
I'm from Aleppo, northwest Syria.
Aleppo University Hospital had six incubators for newborn babies, but none of them were working.
So Emad and his team had a lightbulb moment.
What if they could make the replacement parts themselves?
The doors of these baby incubators are loose so we cannot close them.
So it means that we cannot put a baby in.
We said so what if we design and bring new one for you?
They said that would be perfect, but we don't know if you can do that.
When Emad showed me pictures and videos of his workshop on a video call, it became clear just how they operate.
A workshop equipped with 3D printers, laser cutters and traditional tools that only gets electricity for around two hours a day, running entirely on solar panels.
The team start working on the drawing to make sure that the sizes are right.
Then we use the 3D printer to start printing.
When they finally delivered the repaired incubators back to the hospital, the reaction was immediate.
When we brought them after five days, so they were really shocked.
They told us that they really look better than before.
The original doors, they were very happy.
And they told us that unfortunately, many of these babies couldn't survive because of not having these incubators.
And crucially, EMAD solution is affordable.
It costs us about $150.
And this baby incubator itself is about from $8,000 and more.
Hospitals can report broken equipment through a mobile app and then Emad and his team assess each case, design the parts, print them and train the hospital staff to maintain them.
We are working currently with about 13 hospitals.
In the last months we have fixed 20 machines.
They've seemingly tackled everything from x-ray cooling systems that were wasting thousands of litres of water every day to ventilators, ultrasound machines, any sort of surgical equipment.
For Emad and his team of engineers, there's something deeply personal about this work.
Our role here was really different.
Like we could save lives through engineering interventions.
I just imagine how, when we are going to fix this incubator, and I just imagine how babies will benefit from these incubators and that we can save their lives.
The fall of the Assad regime back in 2024 has opened up new possibilities too.
Suddenly, Ahmad's team can access the whole country and they're training local engineers to carry this work forward.
And, in the meantime, his designs are available online, open source, for anyone who might want to have a go at fixing a broken bit of hospital equipment.
When he talks about his workshop the smells of iron and wood and melting plastic from the 3D printer he sees something that others simply might not.
For us, we smell the future.
We smell the hope.
This is the hope.
This is what we feel that we are doing what we can.
That report by Craig Langren.
Let's end this podcast with a message or two in a bottle, written more than 100 years ago by soldiers in World War I.
They've washed up on a remote Australian beach.
Rebecca Wood has the story.
Privates Malcolm Neville and William Harley left Australia on a troop ship in August 1916.
Their destination the other side of the world, to the battlefields of France during World War I.
A few days into their journey, and in what appears to be high spirits, they wrote two letters home, put them in a bottle and threw it overboard.
Fast forward a century and the bottle has been discovered by Deb Brown and her family when out on one of their regular litter picks on Wharton Beach near the town of Esperance in Western Australia.
They were picking up rubbish.
Peter was tying some rubbish on the front of the quad bike to take back to the bins and Felicity saw a bottle floating around in the shoreline and she picked it up and said, oh, Dad, this bottle's pretty cool.
It's very thick glass and it's got messages in it.
We'd better take it home.
When they got the bottle home, they took a few days to dry it out on their windowsill.
Then came the big moment.
I stuck a pair of surgical tweezers down inside and twisted, and twisted, and twisted until it was thin enough to pull up through the neck.
And when we opened it up we were just.
We could not believe that the writing was so clear.
Quite amazingly, the writing in pencil had survived and was still legible.
In his letter, Malcolm Neville wrote to his mother that the food on board was real good and that they were happy, despite the ship heaving and rolling.
Months later, he was killed in action on the battlefield at the age of 28, one of the 60000 Australians who died in the conflict.
The other writer, William Harley, survived the war and went on to get married and have children.
Deb Brown says it's a lot to take in.
It's very emotional, but we're also very excited that we found it, that a local family found it, because we've made it into something really special for the families.
After a bit of research, Deb sent the letters back to the soldiers' relatives.
And on receiving it, Private Harley's granddaughter Anne said they were stunned by the find.
It's as if their grandfather was reaching out to them from beyond the grave.
Rebecca Wood.
And that's all from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News podcast later.
This edition was mixed by Rosenwin Derell and the producers were Muzaffar Shakir and Oliver Burlel.
The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Alex Ritson.
Until next time.
