This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
I'm Pete Ross and in the early hours of Saturday the 27th of June, these are our main stories.
The search for earthquake survivors in Venezuela continues.
As the UN confirms, more than 50000 people are still missing.
The US says it's launched what it describes as retaliatory strikes on Iran.
President Trump's former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, pleads guilty to mishandling classified information.
Also in this podcast.
We thought that this kind of complex system was associated and could only form through plate tectonics, but our results suggest that Mars found another way.
Scientists find huge magma systems on Mars that point to the potential to sustain life.
We start this podcast in Venezuela, where the number of dead after Wednesday's devastating twin earthquakes is rising dramatically as more bodies are recovered from collapsed buildings.
The latest official figures say over 900 people have been killed.
The United Nations says more than 50000 people are still unaccounted for.
Those figures alone give us a sense of the scale of this disaster.
The northern state of La Guaida was one of the worst hit areas.
Our reporter Vanessa Silva is there.
The level of devastation has no words to explain what we have seen.
In this area of this coastal town of Venezuela, the one that was hit with more force with the earthquakes that shake the country on Wednesday.
You can see there's so many destruction.
Wherever you see is a building collapsed.
This building at my back is just completely lining to one side, is about to collapse and there is so many places and you can see people struggling with their own hands trying to remove the rubble, the concrete, everything in the searching of the loved ones.
But it's a lot of work that is needed.
The international rescue teams are arriving to Venezuela, but still it's not enough.
It still is not deployed in all the places that we are seeing today.
I mean, we literally see the floor open, the earth breaks in this area of La Guaira.
Vanessa Silva in La Guaira.
Just to the south of there in the capital, Caracas.
Our Latin America correspondent, Will Grant, has been back to the neighbourhood where he used to live.
I'm standing on the very corner of my street, and only a matter of metres away is a completely flattened building.
I used to walk past it every day.
I lived three doors down.
A very, very strange feeling to be looking at that building so devastated, knowing that as the earth moving equipment moves in now to pull out rubble and make a situation safe for rescue crews to try and go back in again.
That sort of game of stopping earth moving to listen again and see if there's any signs of life.
It's just harrowing to see, with all the neighbours sitting out on their porches waiting for information, crossing their fingers, praying and so on.
And I'm looking, right as we speak, at homes that have had the complete front of them sheared off, apartment blocks that will never be possible to be inhabited again.
I've seen groups of architects and surveyors, presumably from the city and some private firms, trying to work out what is safe, what can be salvaged and what eventually will need to be demolished.
But for right now, I think the majority of the focus of most Venezuelans is on this shocking, this awful figure of 50000 missing.
Yeah, that's quite an overwhelming figure.
Do we have any updates on what more we can expect from that?
And can you describe the sort of response?
I understand that it's quite chaotic.
The earthquake perhaps is exposed.
You know, the fragility of the medical system there due to economic reasons, etc.
What exactly is going on with that as well?
Well, let's start with the numbers.
I mean, we've seen the number of dead creep up, from you know around about 100 to then over 200 and now closer to a thousand.
And the fears are that those numbers, that shocking number of 50000 missing, will start to be converted into unfortunately, numbers of dead in due course.
As for the second question about whether or not the state can cope, basically whether or not there's sufficient equipment, earth moving equipment and so on what the response has been.
Well, I think it's fair to say it's been patchy, as you might expect.
Venezuela has been through some extremely tough economic times in recent years.
There's been deep seated problems with corruption and so on.
So at a time like this, you're right, those things are exposed.
There's the fact that in the economic turmoil of recent years, somewhere between 20 to 25 of the population There's been this massive outward exodus of young people and expertise.
Plus, of course, the political situation that only a matter of months ago, six months ago, there were airstrikes in this city.
This nation had its president removed at gunpoint by US troops.
All of these things create instability, of course.
So look, I think the truth of the matter is that Venezuelans are coping the very best they can.
The response among ordinary people is really impressive, really laudable.
Everybody is turning out as best as possible.
I'm seeing so many people volunteering health workers walking past me right now, no doubt doing extra shifts and shifts on top of shifts and, of course, ordinary people turning out with water and food and donations at every turn.
Will Grant in Caracas.
The US military has conducted strikes on Iranian targets.
The move comes after President Trump accused Tehran of a foolish violation of its truce following an attack on a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz.
No casualties were reported when the ship was struck by a drone on Thursday.
I heard more from our correspondent in Washington, Hal Griffith.
We've had a statement from the US Central Command saying that it's carried out a powerful response in its words to yesterday's attack.
It says that a US aircraft has struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations and a coastal radar site.
It says it's justified in doing this because of that attack on the Singaporean vessel, which it describes as an Iranian act of unwanted aggression.
And it says that US military forces are going to remain in the area to ensure that the memoranding of understanding between the two countries, signed only just over a week ago, remains in full force.
More recently, in the wake of the attack, we've heard from the vice president, J.D.
Vance, who posted on social media that Iran had violated the ceasefire, that the US was honoring it.
And if Iran had a disagreement about how the Memorandum of Understanding is being applied, it just needs to pick up the phone.
However, the message ends with violence will be met with violence.
And have we had any reaction from Tehran yet?
It's a dynamic situation.
As I speak to you, reports have been coming in that Tehran has retaliated.
The Revolutionary Guard has carried out an attack in areas where there are US forces deployed.
We don't have any details or confirmation of that, but it may follow a pattern that we saw in the early part of the war earlier this year, where some of the Gulf states were targeted by Iran.
We also know that Iran has justified that attack on the cargo ship saying that it was using an unauthorized route to transit through the Gulf, and it accuses the US of provoking parties to bypass Tehran's control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is one of the points in that memorandum of understanding.
Clearly, this all raises concern that situation could escalate.
Neither side wanted to back down or seem weak, while in reality probably neither side wants this to blow up, given that there's very little domestic appetite for the war in Iran to continue here in the US at the moment.
You mentioned the Memorandum of Understanding there.
One of the other key aspects was Israel's presence in Lebanon.
We're learning that Israel and Lebanon have now signed a US-brokered framework aimed at restoring Lebanon's sovereignty.
Can you tell us more about that?
Yeah, that was signed here in Washington between the two nations.
However, vitally, Hezbollah is not party to the agreement.
So the agreement states that both countries should be able to live in peace as neighbors and calls for a cessation of hostility between them.
It also discusses the release of detainees and the returns of remains between the two countries.
However, nothing in the agreement stops either country from defending itself against attack.
And we know from what we've seen in years now that is sometimes used as justification for military action, particularly by Israel.
We've heard from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who's reiterated that his forces remain in southern Lebanon and will do so until Hezbollah disarms, while allowing the Lebanese army, in some cases, to eventually take over control of territories in pilot areas.
But I think on the ground little has changed, even though this understanding is a positive and suggests cooperation and peace between the two countries, potentially further down the line.
Harold Griffith in Washington.
Is there life on Mars?
So the song goes anyway, and now new evidence has emerged that the red planet once had enormous Earth-like magma systems deep beneath its surface that contained some of the ingredients vital for life.
Previously, it was thought Mars lacked the geology necessary for such activity.
The findings published in the journal Nature Astronomy could help us better determine how planets become habitable.
The study's lead author is Tobermory Mackay-Champion from Oxford University.
He told Paul Henley more about the research.
Earth has something called plate tectonics, which constantly recycles its surface.
But Mars doesn't have this.
Instead, Mars' surface has been preserved for billions of years.
And so, by understanding how Mars formed and evolved, we can learn more about Earth, what makes it unique and whether we might find planets like Earth throughout the universe.
And what was it about Mars that surprised you?
So NASA collected data from the surface of Mars back in 2018 to 2022.
They looked at seismic waves from Mars quakes and meteorite impacts.
And these seismic waves travel through the planet and they're a bit like how an X-ray allows a doctor to see inside the human body.
One thing stood out to us, and that was that the seismic waves were traveling much faster than expected through rocks that are about 25 to 40 kilometers beneath the Martian surface.
So we examined the data using computer models to test how that might have come about.
So what did you actually find underneath Mars' surface?
Our computer models showed that the only way to explain the seismic data was if there was a thick layer of dense, iron and magnesium rich rock.
And what's exciting about that is that these rocks they only form under very specific geological conditions.
And they basically reveal that Mars once hosted much larger and more complex underground magma systems than we'd previously imagined.
And that's surprising because we thought that this kind of complex system was associated and could only form through plate tectonics.
But our results suggest that Mars found another way.
And why are these magmatic systems, as they're called, so important?
We think that they could be really important for developing habitable planets.
Nobody knows exactly how life began, but we do know that life requires persistent energy sources, liquid water, a continuous supply of bioessential elements and a climate stable enough to sustain it.
And the large magmatic systems that we identified in this study.
They recycle heat and fluids and these life essential elements through the crust.
They drive long-term hydrothermal activity.
And they also influence the planet's atmosphere and climate.
And so together, these processes that we've identified can create and maintain habitable environments that should support the emergence and the persistence and the evolution of life.
There's also a practical angle.
So we also found these magma systems are exceptionally good at concentrating valuable metals.
And so it actually means that on Mars we can fairly confidently say that there'll be far more near-surface metal deposits than we once thought.
And that's quite exciting because it suggests that these deposits could one day support mining.
They could support manned missions to Mars and perhaps even long-term human settlements.
Next time you go to the movies you might be in for a treat, because it's becoming really common for symphony orchestras to play the score live while you're watching the film, especially in the US and Europe.
Harry Potter by John Williams and Lord of the Rings by Howard Shore are two of the favourites.
But Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra conductor Jacob Joyce told the BBC that playing movie music isn't as easy as it sounds.
I actually find it from a conductor's perspective to be a fascinating challenge.
They're very different from what I was trained to do. standard classical conducting.
You don't usually conduct a Brahms symphony or a Mahler symphony with a click track in your ear and certainly a movie going on on the screen.
So I had to train myself a lot because they're very demanding.
They take all of your attention and command of every possible transition you can imagine in music, because these movie scores, especially the scores of a great composer like John Williams, are very complex.
I'm a firm believer that nothing can replace the works of Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms, and I would be the strongest advocate for keeping those in the concert halls for centuries to come.
But movie music is also some of the greatest music written, especially in the 20th century.
A composer like John Williams I would consider up there in terms of his orchestrational ability, his ability to write memorable themes with the greatest composers.
It's really phenomenal music.
I think orchestras really like playing the music because it is quite demanding and it also can be quite expressive.
There's a bigger difference between watching it in a movie theater and seeing it live just physically.
You can feel the music shake your body at the most powerful moments.
And so I think it's a really powerful phenomenon to get to experience great music in a concert hall.
That cannot be replicated by any technology in a theater or at home.
E.T. is one of the greatest scores ever composed.
The three original Star Wars are some of the most challenging, some of the most thrilling to conduct and also to play.
The soundtrack to Oppenheimer is one recent score that is played partially by Symphony Orchestra.
¶¶
But many of the most famous composers of today are doing a lot of what they do on a computer, through software, as opposed to live musicians.
And I think you feel through these soundtracks that something very real is lost in that process.
Jacob Joyce, who's a conductor with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
Still to come in this podcast.
The purpose was actually to show that we economists are absolutely useless at predicting stuff, particularly football.
And then the worst possible case happened and I got it right, not just in 2014, but three times in a row.
The German mathematician who's predicted the winner of every World Cup since 2014.
Stay with us to find out who he's backing this time.
This is the Global News Podcast.
John Bolton may once have been President Trump's national security advisor, but since being fired from his post in 2019, he's been one of his former boss's fiercest critics.
In his 2020 memoir, Mr Bolton portrayed the president as ill-informed about geopolitics.
Donald Trump called him a sleazebag and suggested he should go to jail.
Now the US president might get his way, after John Bolton pleaded guilty to mishandling classified security information.
Our deputy North America editor Gary O'Donoghue told Valerie Sanderson more about the case.
It really goes back to the time after John Bolton was fired in 2019, where he wrote a memoir.
The Trump administration tried to stop him publishing it, which they failed to do.
But it turned out in a subsequent investigation that he'd been sort of ferreting away various bits of national security information, including sending it to his wife and daughter, who were sort of acting as part editors of this book he was writing.
And an investigation was launched under the Biden administration.
The culmination of that is that today he's entered into a plea agreement with prosecutors and has pled guilty to one charge.
He originally was facing 18 and he will be sentenced later in the year.
He initially pleaded not guilty.
So why did he change his mind?
I think the evidence probably came along or his lawyers saw the evidence.
He also says interestingly, his lawyers said today that he didn't want it to go to trial because he was concerned about national security issues coming out during that trial.
That may be a gloss.
It may be more that he thought he would stand a better chance with a plea deal.
He is 77 years old, but even this plea deal, it hits him pretty hard.
I mean, what could happen to him?
OK, so sentencing in October, the maximum he could get is 60 months in prison.
So that's pretty substantial.
And also he's definitely going to face a fine of two and a quarter million dollars.
He's losing his pension and he's also got to do 100 hours of community service.
And these lawyers will argue the case particularly, I think, on the prison term, because you know, as I say at 77, he doesn't really want to do that.
But he's going to suffer pretty badly financially on this one.
And he's not the only high profile Trump critic facing indictment, is he?
No, he's not.
I mean, they've had two goes at James Comey.
He was the former FBI director.
One of those was thrown out, one's ongoing.
This is different because this was started under the Biden administration.
It's seen as a different kind of case.
Gary O'Donohue.
The German Weather Service has said the country has hit its highest ever temperature on record at 413 degrees Celsius.
As large parts of Europe swelter under similar conditions.
Our correspondent, Anna Holligan, sent this report from the Dutch seaside resort of Cakedown.
On golden sand stretching across the North Sea.
Toddlers splash in the waves and families seek relief in the sea breeze.
Elsewhere, escaping the heat is far more difficult.
The electronic music festival Defqon 1 in the Netherlands was ended prematurely.
At midnight, visitors were asked to leave as a code red weather warning took effect.
Fans were gutted.
I feel sorry for the people that have come really far.
Some people have travelled literally from the other side of the world for like a once in a lifetime experience.
So I feel gutted for them.
But I understand as well because it's so hot.
Organisers said they simply couldn't take the risk.
We were in the tent yesterday and you couldn't even dance.
Everyone's pouring sweat, everyone's exhausted.
You couldn't do it.
And that was 31 degrees, so 37 today.
Yeah, it's unbearable, unbearable.
Across the continent, the heat is having devastating consequences.
In France, a toddler died after being rescued from a car.
The pride march scheduled to take place in Paris this weekend has been postponed, while officials in Belgium cancelled a re-enactment of Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.
The World Weather Attribution Group of scientists said the record-breaking heat gripping Europe is unmistakably linked to climate change and such temperatures would have been virtually impossible 50 years ago.
Anna Holligan.
Now, it's been 30 years since this global pop phenomenon began.
When I was standing in a room full of execs most of them were male and they told me that I was standing by myself.
And they told me that Wannabe should not be single.
And I said, no, I like it.
I like it.
And I couldn't tell you why.
It was very sort of instinctive, childish answer.
But I like it.
And none of them, none of them wanted that record.
Jerry Halliwell or Ginger Spice, remembering how the Spice Girls had to fight to get their label to release Wannabe.
But their debut single shot to the top of the UK charts and reached the number one slot in 37 other countries.
Posh sporty, scary baby and ginger became synonymous with girl power, encouraging women and girls around the globe to take up space in society and, of course, on the music scene.
They sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making them the best-selling girl group of all time.
Lisa Verrico, music journalist at the Sunday Times, watched their route to global stardom.
So, how significant was their impact on the music industry?
Oh, massively.
I mean, we think about the 90s, we're always talking about, you know, Oasis and Britpop and that.
We'd already had the British invasion in the 60s and that was a rehash of it.
And the Spice Girls came along and they did something that literally hadn't been done before.
And it's Interesting to hear Gerry talk about male executives, because record companies did not like girl groups.
They didn't want girl groups at all.
They didn't think they would make money.
They thought that young women wanted young men to scream at There was a few weird banana rams.
They were very much a novelty and they weren't to be taken seriously.
In the wake of the Spice Girls.
I think there was something like 50 girl groups launched in Britain after that.
But the amazing thing about the Spice Girls was it didn't just go to number one here and people thought that maybe it would be a one-off hit.
They went to number one in the States, but having never toured.
And I spoke to them on the phone, unfortunately.
In the week that 1B went to number one, they had exactly the same fizzy energy as the song.
They kept grabbing the phone off each other.
They all had something to say.
No, no, no, let me say it again.
They're all talking on top of each other.
I think actually in the end there'll be one out with her hanging on the phone.
But you could just hear it.
And this is the thing about young women.
They could tell that it was genuine.
And so, yeah, it was masterminded by a man.
And the song was mostly written by two men.
But it was their personalities, their strength of personalities, and the fact that they were actually genuinely kind of strong women.
I think what's interesting if you look at, maybe the best legacy of the Spice Girls really is that we don't have a lot of girl groups now.
There's lots of them, the All Saints and The Sugar Babes, and then there was the TV show ones.
But actually, if you look at a lot of the women who were inspired by the Spice Girls so Billie Eilish Adele, Charli XCX women who thought well, actually I don't need a Svengali to be put into a group to make it in pop and to get my voice heard
So I think maybe the fact that we don't have this kind of churning industry like there's K-pop girl bands now and that's very much on that production line that we don't really seem to have in this country anymore
Lisa Venico on the legacy of the Spice Girls.
Now, you may remember Paul the octopus from Germany.
He hit the headlines for his near-perfect psychic abilities during the 2008 European Football Championships and the 2010 World Cup.
Sadly, Paul's no longer with us, but another German appears to have taken his place.
Mathematician Joachim Klement has correctly predicted the winner of every World Cup since 2014.
Adrian Childs asked him about the key to his success.
The purpose was actually to show that we economists are absolutely useless at predicting stuff, particularly football.
And so I built an economic model that tried to predict the 2014 World Cup.
And then the worst possible case happened and I got it right, not just in 2014, but three times in a row.
What data are you inputting?
It's free economic variables.
It's the population of a country, which gives you an idea of the size of the talent pool.
Then the wealth, basically as a proxy for is there a possibility to get enough infrastructure to develop talented young players into world-class players?
Then the climate.
Can you play football year round in a country, which obviously gives you a distinct advantage compared to countries where it's too cold in winter, too hot in summer.
And of course, the FIFA World Ranking, which gives me an idea.
Having said that, those four factors only explain about half the of the variation of the outcome of every single match.
The other half is luck, which gives you an idea why I think that, getting the World Cup winner right three times in a row, I should have played the lottery.
I would probably be sitting in Monte Carlo speaking to you now rather than on my desk in London.
So you've inputted all your data this year.
Mm-hmm.
And when did you do this?
This was before the tournament started?
Yeah.
In April, when the groups were cleared.
I usually do that about a month before the tournament starts.
And then I never change it, no matter what the tournament brings.
What is it?
You sit at a computer, then you finally press enter and it goes and then up comes the name.
Is that how it works?
That is literally how it works.
Yes.
I know.
And people wonder whether I then just get bored watching the World Cup because I know the outcome.
Not at all.
Quite the opposite.
As a German, I support Germany.
Since I do this, I also have become always a big, big supporter and very nervous for the team that I predict to win the World Cup.
And the key question is, who's your system come up with?
This time I think I have a death wish, because I predicted the Netherlands to win the World Cup this time for the first time, beating Spain, for example, in the semi-final, which in itself would be a major upset.
German World Cup predictor Joachim Clement.
And for more on the World Cup, listen to the BBC World Service sports podcast More Than The Score.
It's available wherever you get your podcasts.
And that's all from us for now.
If you want to get in touch, you can email us at.
You can also find us on And don't forget our sister podcast, The Global Story, which goes in-depth and beyond the headlines on one big story.
This edition of the Global News Podcast was mixed by Chris Lovelock and the producer was Rebecca Wood.
The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Pete Ross.
Until next time, goodbye.
