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Welcome to The W, where elite athletes are redefining the game of basketball from buzzer beating shots, jaw dropping defense and logo threes.
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They elevate it. The New York Liberty are the reigning champions and the Golden State Valkyries are the newest team to join the league since 2008.
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Watch the WNBA this season on ABC, CBS, ESPN, This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
I'm Chris Bowro and in the early hours of Friday the 16th of May these are our main stories.
The United States has played down the chances of progress in peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul after the two sides failed to meet as scheduled on Thursday.
More than 100 Palestinians have been reportedly killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, and there have been widespread power cuts in Sudan's capital Khartoum after drone strikes on power stations.
Also in this podcast. They suspected that this gene was driving the production of lighter pigments instead of the darker pigment you'd get, say a black cat, they thought it was driving lighter pigment but they couldn't understand why.
Why some cats have orange fur, and why those cats are usually male Last week Vladimir Putin proposed the time and place for peace talks with Ukraine, May 15 in Turkey.
Russia and Ukraine had been expected to meet on Thursday in Istanbul for their first direct peace talks for more than three years, but so far, no meeting has taken place.
The Russian president kept everyone guessing as to whether he'd attend.
and late on Wednesday it became clear that he wouldn't.
A junior Russian delegation has been sent to Istanbul instead.
The Russian Foreign Ministry says it's ready for serious work, but the Ukrainian president disagreed.
Volodymyr Zelensky, who's been meeting the Turkish president in Ankara, says a ceasefire is his main objective.
As for the agenda, they will have a mandate, and a ceasefire is the priority.
Although I still believe that Russia continues not to treat these meetings seriously, and does not want to end the war, let us hope that they will demonstrate at least something during the meetings.
The US President Donald Trump said that progress wouldn't be made until he and President Putin got together for a meeting, and that was echoed by the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who's in Turkey.
We came because we were told that there might be a direct engagement between the Russians and the Ukrainians.
That was originally the plan.
You all heard the same thing.
that was not to be the case or if it is it's not at the levels we had hoped it would be at.
I hope I'm wrong I hope they have tremendous breakthrough tomorrow they talk but I frankly do not believe that we're going to have a breakthrough here until president Trump sits face to face with President Putin and determines what his intentions are moving forward. I heard more from our reporter in Istanbul Emily Wither.
Oh my, it has been a day of mixed messages but it does look like there will be some talks taking place I think the fact that we still don't know for sure when they're starting just really shows what a confusing 24 hours it has been.
But Zelensky is sending a delegation headed by the Ukrainian defense minister to meet this lower level Russian delegation.
They're currently meeting the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fedan.
And then we also think that they'll be joined by U .S. officials, including the U .S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
And look, while this might not be the big meeting that was speculated at first here with Trump, Zelensky and Putin, even if these two sides sit down in a room together, it still will be very significant.
These will be the first direct talks between the Ukrainians and the Russians since 2022.
Who knows? Trump in the last hour said that he will probably return to Washington on Friday after his tour three Gulf countries though he also said his destination is unknown as of yet okay and we had followed him is Alinsky saying that that his defense team has a mandate for a ceasefire and to negotiate for that what do we know about what Russians are hoping for and what perhaps their their demands might be going into this I mean we're not so sure the Russians have said that they're ready to discuss possible compromises we don't know what those are and also we heard the head of the Russian delegation,
Vladimir Modinsky, earlier, he said that they are quote, in a working mood.
And I think one of the strategies will clearly be to show the Americans that the Russians are still serious about talks.
The Ukrainians say by sending this lower level delegation, the Russians are simply stalling for time, it doesn't appear that either side is ready for any major concessions.
Rubio has described the current state of the talks as a logjam that only Trump can break.
I think the US though will still be pushing for at least a 30 -day ceasefire.
Ukraine has already agreed to such a deal.
And I guess they may be hoping to get the Russians on side too.
I know you just mentioned it there, but how much should we really be making of the sort of junior nurse of the Russian delegation, because it seems like they might still have some authority to make some decisions anyway.
Yes, absolutely. And we know that the delegation when they held a press conference here in Istanbul earlier, they very much defended themselves.
The head of that delegation said that we do have the credentials and that we are prepared to sit down and have serious talks, so it may be that this lower level delegation was sent as a kind of snub to the Ukrainians.
I guess we're just going to have to wait and see when these talks actually start and what can be achieved.
Emily Wither. The Hamas -run health ministry in Gaza says at least 114 Palestinians, including many children have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in the last 24 hours.
Israel says it's targeting Hamas fighters and that it will continue with plans to expand its offensive in the coming days.
Funerals have been held in Khan Younis for some of the dead.
Our Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson reports.
At Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, families were splintered again today into the living and the dead.
The tiniest shrouds wrapped around the bodies of six week old Moaz and his big brother, Motaz, just over a year old.
Two young brothers, killed in air strikes that Israel says were targeting Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Three more of their siblings were injured.
Their mother, Safa, unhurt but broken, wailed for her boys.
I gave them dinner and they went to sleep," she said.
It was a normal day.
The little one had just woken up and I breastfed him.
Then the world turned upside down.
Gaza is bracing for a fresh military offensive by Israel's army.
Ceasefire talks in Qatar this week have not changed those plans.
But Israel is also being urged to end its 10 -week blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
It's counting on a new distribution system being built with private contractors that Israel says will stop Hamas stealing aid.
But the future distribution plan has been criticized by aid agencies as a way of reinforcing military control.
And with warnings of approaching famine in Gaza, the BBC understands that a bridging solution involving international agencies is being discussed.
David Mensah is a spokesman for the Israeli government.
The UN needs to cooperate.
Right now they are refusing to cooperate.
And the long and the short of it is they're effectively helping Hamas stay in business.
There's no famine in Gaza.
There's a famine of truth.
When Israel opened their gates for aid Hamas stole it.
Israel blames Hamas for Gaza's dead.
But each day the dead are mounting.
Medics say airstrikes killed at least 66 children over the past few days.
Children are burying siblings and adults are carrying the weight of being unable to protect.
Lucy Williamson. My colleague Andrew Peach has been speaking to two doctors in Gaza dealing with incredibly stressful situations.
Dr. Rami is an emergency doctor at Ulaoda Hospital in the north of Gaza.
That's the hospital which took in some casualties from the latest strikes.
He was joined by Dr. Guarda who's doing her medical training in some of Gaza's other hospitals.
And just a warning, there's some graphic detail in this conversation.
Let's hear from Dr. Guarda first. The medical staff, nurses, all of them are exhausted.
It's very hard and difficult to see people and patients die slowly in front of your eyes.
There are a lot of children.
Actually cancer patients have to leave Gaza to take their treatment abroad but actually they didn't do that because the crossings are closed.
And the most important thing we face is hunger.
A lot of people didn't find food.
It's very hard to say and speak.
I'm sure. And just give me a visual description of what what it looks like inside the hospital because I'm imagining a lot of people.
Yes, I previously volunteered in Alexa hospital in the emergency room.
A lot of things are terrible I see.
The pumping's everywhere, and the people are overcrowded, and actually the staff and nurses and the medical treatments weren't enough to give them the care.
So it's very hard as a doctor to see someone who needs your help, but you didn't do that for him because the equipment not available.
When we spoke to medics earlier in the conflict a few months ago it really stuck with me that we heard that doctors were working shifts of three or four days without much in the way of sleep because of course, if you take a break, if you take a rest, then the queue of people needing your help gets longer.
Yes, I see that in my eye, a lot of doctors didn't sleep, works 24 hours every day, and They are far from their families.
So, actually, the situation's very terrible.
I'd like to bring in Dr. Rami now to our conversation.
Dr. Rami is an emergency doctor in northern Gaza.
Give me a sense, Dr. Rami, of the hospital that you're working in where you've just finished your shift. Today is actually was a horrible day.
There is a high number of attacks happen today, especially out north of Gaza.
The hospital received a high number of people who was injured and some people died.
Today for the team it was a hard day.
And Dr Garda has been telling us about her hospital and the overwhelming number of patients with a lack of staff, equipment, supplies, is that the same kind of story?
Today our emergency department at Alaud hospital north of Gaza we received 27 patients injured from the attacks happen today until 2pm.
Most of these injured people today was from the pediatric, children and women.
There is not that much equipment and supplies.
All Gaza Strip suffer from this problem.
Our hospital at North Gaza have, maybe we have a special case because it's not that huge hospital so we have a lot of supplies which will be zero in the next days.
And I mentioned that you've just finished your shift, you sound exhausted but I imagine that's really hard to do, really hard to leave, because there are still people who need your help.
Yes, yes, but when we left we there was maybe the ambulances went out to bring another injured people and there was a new attack.
Even when I left the hospital, I am not sure that I would arrive to my home or to my family.
I may be attacked or injured when just crossing the road at this moment may have been another attack, so me and my friends and colleagues or also if the hospital may be injured, so every one of us don't know when he will be the next.
Dr Rami and Dr Ghada speaking to Andrew Peach. In February President Trump signed an executive order saying that Afrikaners, white South Africans who are the descendants of mostly Dutch settlers were being persecuted and granted a group of them refugee status but the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa has accused those who've already left for the USA have been cowardly.
It's our country and we must not run away from our problems. We must stay here and solve our problems. When you run away you are a coward. And that's a real cowardly act.
And I expect every South African to stay here.
And we work together and we solve our problems. We've got the most beautiful country in the world and I can bet you they will be back soon because there is no country like South Africa.
The BBC's North America correspondent Nomya Iqbal has been speaking to one of those who has been resettled.
Charles Kleinhaus arrived in Washington on Monday along with 58 other white South Africans.
He has also come under scrutiny over anti -Semitic comments on social media that have since been deleted.
If you are white, you are wrong in South Africa.
You are a land thief, you are a racist. The plenty of them.
You say you're not a racist white person.
Not at all. I've got many black friends.
I think I've got more African black men as friends, as white friends.
I'm tired of being told just because I'm white, I'm a thief, just because I'm white, I'm wrong in this.
I had nothing to do with apartheid.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Is there anything specific that's happened, Charles, that made you think I've got to get out of here?
I've still often reporting everything to the police not getting any protection or anything like that.
The only thing that's left of my farm is a sign that says mining area, all the fences has been taken off, boom gate has been broken off.
There are voices out there including the South African president who has called you cowards.
You've got other Afrikaners who are saying that you're not refugees, you're opportunists, think that you have abandoned the country, what would you say to those people?
I had to leave five beats to the mouth, which I will lose now because I'm not going to pay for it, behind, my car behind, my dogs behind, my mother behind, it is not, I didn't come here for fun, but my children are safe.
What was it like when you got off the shuttlebus and came into the hangar and were greeted by the Trump administration?
It was overwhelming.
I didn't expect that because I thought we were going to be on a shuttle bus, taken somewhere and start working.
All of us that are there, we know we're going to start from the bottom because we are the new people here.
We're going to start from the bottom, bottom, bottom, bottom.
Do you ever worry that you might be caught up in some big political game here, that you're a pawn somehow?
You know, it's a scary, scary thing but people mustn't think we're just taking advantage of this.
This is, we're coming here to make a contribution to the county.
Old tweets of yours have been dug up in which you appear to have made anti -Semitic comments and so people are questioning should you be here.
What would you say to that?
I would like to… What would you have to clarify?
I've deleted a comment but I was actually thinking I should have not deleted it.
If you go look where I commented on, it was pass over to Orthodox Jews and I am Christian.
We're spitting and screaming and bumping Christians walking with the cross.' For me as a Christian that is not acceptable.
And in Israel. And I went and I said something on Twitter which I copy and pasted from somebody else's page because if you go read my post you'll see it's not the way I write.
So you had quoted someone else.
I mean the quotes...
I copied and pasted it.
No, the quotes were anti -Semitic.
They said Jews are dangerous people, they're untrustworthy, they're not God -shasting people.
I was super angry. So you did it out of anger?
Yeah. And I was in hospital at that point in time.
I was on morphine. But that's not an excuse.
I'm not trying to make an excuse.
Even now, if I would see any person going against my religion, I will speak up against it.
You have high hopes being here in America.
Is there a past of you that that is anxious that it might not work out?
No to be honest with you because of my belief I believe this is God's plan for me Charles Klein house speaking to the BBC's Nomia Iqbal Still to come on this podcast I always try and rehearse worst -case scenario maximum drag the maximum everything that the beating that he took on the wing of the plane not just the air speed and the particles in the air.
It's it was it's like a resistance workout on steroids.
It's really hard. The impossible mission how Tom Cruise walks on the wing of a plane in midair.
As America's most trusted movers Mayflower has seen it all from big dreams and new beginnings.
All right, here we are.
Oh, it's perfect. To first steps and fixer uppers.
From starter homes.
So guess what? We're having another.
Another? We definitely need more space.
To more practical homes.
Yes, Mayflower has been there for it all and will always have your back.
Every moment, every move, every step of the way, schedule your move now by going to mayflower .com.
Welcome to the W where elite athletes are redefining the game of basketball.
From buzzer beating shots, jaw -dropping defense and logo threes, the WNBA delivers non -stop action and world -class talent every game.
These athletes don't just play the game, they elevate it.
The New York Liberty are the reigning champions and the Golden State Valkyries are the newest team to join the league since 2008.
Watch the WNBA this season on ABC, CBS, ESPN, ION and PRIM, starting May 16th.
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Terms apply. There have been widespread power cuts in the Sudanese capital Khartoum and the surrounding region, after drone strikes on three power stations.
The Sudanese authorities accused the paramilitary rapid support forces of systematically attacking power infrastructure in the country's two -year civil war.
Our correspondent, Barbara Pletasha, is following developments from the Kenyan capital Nairobi.
So this happened on Wednesday night.
There were three power transformer stations located in Omdurman which is the city across the Nile from Khartoum and it's part of the capital region.
Much of that capital region has been without electricity because of the strikes.
There are some images on social media which show massive fires and the Sudanese electrical company said that they had been trying to put out the fires.
They also said that the attacks or the drone strikes had affected other parts of Khartoum state as well.
disrupting services quite widely.
Do we know if the RSF have formally said that they're behind these attacks or is it's still sort of up in the air as to who actually carried them out?
Well the RSF hasn't commented on the strikes but it is something that they have been widely blamed for and it does seem to be a shift in strategy from really focusing on gaining territory and that is something they have been forced to do, experts say, because they have been pushed out of central Sudan in recent months, including Khartoum, so they've lost a lot of territory.
But then they have come back now with these drone strikes on civilian infrastructure.
I'm guessing this is being seen as an escalation.
The difference with this, I think, is that it's affecting things like power which affects hospital services.
It affects water supplies, treatment facilities.
They can extend to quite a wide area.
a, it was widely used as an escalation.
The strikes on Port Sudan in particular, the drone attacks have been increasing, but this was quite another order because the RSF carried out attacks daily for a week.
They hit all kinds of targets like a power station, fuel depots, a military airbase, an international airport, quite strategic targets.
And the fact that they were able to hit those strategic targets from a position that are hundreds of kilometers away really kind of shook people up.
And did sort of signal, according to some experts, a new phase in the conflict.
And this is largely because it appears to be closing the gap between the Army and the RSF when it comes to air power.
Are there any signs that one side is asserting its dominance and potentially moving towards victory or are we still very much in the central phase?
There had been some suggestion after the army recaptured the capital city of Khartoum in March that this might be a turning point, which would give it momentum.
But the actual fact is there's been momentum on both sides going back and forth for two years and neither party has shown the ability to retake the whole of the country.
So I think this latest phase, if we can call it that, doesn't necessarily signify that there will be a winner.
Neither party is in a position at this point anyway to actually outright win this war.
Barbara Pletasha, the head of the Ugandan Army has said that anyone who doesn't vote for his father, President Yoweri Museveni, in the next general election will be deported.
It comes amid a mounting crackdown on members of the opposition ahead of the poll in January 2026.
Our Africa regional editor Temizgine Debasai has the details.
General Muhozi Kairner -Rugaba, known for his controversial tweets, issued the warning on X, although he didn't specify where his father's opponents might be deported to.
In another post, the heir apparent to President Museveni, who's been in power for nearly four decades, said female soldiers should switch to wearing skirts, warning that anyone continuing to enforce trousers would have a very bad day.
Earlier this month the General claimed to have captured and tortured a bodyguard of opposition leader Bobby Wine.
The bodyguard later appeared in court showing signs of mistreatment.
A bustling Moscow metro station has unveiled a replica of a monument to Joseph Stalin, which had been removed decades ago.
It's being seen as part of the Soviet dictator's rehabilitation under President Putin, as Sasha Shlickter explains.
Stalin was known for his short stature but in this composition he's godlike, towering above adoring crowds.
Taganzke is a busy station so the removal of the original bar relief twelve years after Stalin's death to make way for a tunnel made sense.
The municipal authorities say the composition celebrates 90 years of the Moscow metro but as one architectural historian remarked, it's more of an ideological gesture than a genuine attempt to restore historical architectural appearance.
Researchers have finally solved a mystery that's been puzzling scientists for decades, why some cats have orange fur and why those cats are usually male.
Teams from Kyushu University in Japan and Stanford University in the US say it's all down to a genetic mutation that doesn't occur in any other species.
I spoke to our science correspondent Esme Stallard. what they found was that in the cells that are responsible for producing pigment, there was a gene called ARHGAP36, very catchy, that was particularly active and they suspected that this gene was driving the production of lighter pigments instead of the darker pigment you'd get with say, a black cat.
They thought it was driving lighter pigment, but they couldn't understand why.
What they found was there was a piece of DNA missing.
Without this piece of pigment production.
You've got, essentially, the discovery that male cats have less of the suppression, which means that they're more likely to be orangy ginger colour.
This gene is associated with the X chromosome, so maybe anyone remembers learning about DNA back at school, but effectively male has an X and a Y chromosome, so they're basic sections of DNA, and this particular gene only occurs on the X chromosome.
If you have that mutation, so you're missing that, it only needs to kind of occur once for you to be completely ginger whereas female cats like female humans have an XX chromosome so they almost needed to missing twice to be fully ginger so yeah it's also linked to sex which is very interesting.
So they have essentially a backup chance of overriding the mutation so that if one of the X's is faulty the second X might come in and sort of get I see and why do scientists think that this is an important discovery?
Well it this gene is not just associated with pigment production it's also found in the brain and it's also found in hormonal glands and so could tell us a lot about and not just temperament but also health conditions which Daniel Warren Cummings who was a clinical animal behaviorist with the charity Cats Protection I was speaking to and said he really welcomed the breakthrough because of this.
So our understanding of them is really limited compared to what we should really know about so we don't even know if we're necessarily getting inheritable diseases or issues being passed along.
So yeah, any research in this area is much appreciated.
The next stage of this research in cats is just to go beyond okay what causes it to be ginger, but also could it be affecting other things?
And that's really important in terms of healthcare for cats and preventative care as well.
We wondered if Hollywood was ahead of the game because we think most ginger cats in films are male.
Is that what you're seeing?
I did some very diligent research, as one should as a science correspondent, and that's what I found as well.
But I think it is quite, weirdly, it was very well -known that most ginger… I think it was an anecdotal observation maybe by society, that it seemed that most fully ginger cats were male.
So I guess it's reflecting the reality in all of these cartoons.
But I think that is why the scientists were looking at the X chromosome, because they suspected that's where it was laying because so many fully ginger cats are male.
So, it turns out Hollywood was on the ball all along.
And staying with Hollywood the eighth and possibly last instalment of the Mission Impossible movie series has had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and claims to include ground breaking stunt work instead of CGI – the sequences that have never been attempted before.
Director Christopher McQuarrie said the stress of shooting the stunt segments made him feel physically ill.
We spoke to Wade Eastwood, the stunt co -ordinator for the films. This time round he was responsible for Tom Cruise walking along the wing of a plane in mid air.
I have to go through all the mechanics of the aircraft itself with a body in different positions, for example.
Tom's going through all the mechanics of the aircraft as a pilot, as well, because he flies it all out and does everything on his own.
But I have to go through all the sort of limitations, the C of G, the center of gravity as you move out along the wing, etc., etc. So I do all those tests with weights and dummies before we put a body on it and really see what we can do and how far we can push the envelope and still remain control.
And then we start introducing Tom and obviously, a body moves differently.
It opens itself to the wind more.
So, I always try and rehearse worst case scenario.
Maximum drag, maximum everything.
But the beating that he took on the wing of the plane, not just the airspeed and the particles in the air.
It was, it's like a resistance workout on steroids.
It's really hard. There's always a risk.
You know, I do risk assessments and I have to weigh it up.
I try and make it as safe as possible.
I put the right training in place.
I put the right people in place.
But of course, there's a massive risk, you know, parachute doesn't open, my motorbike falls off the side of a ramp.
Anything happens and you're either badly broken or dead.
Stunt coordinator and man with very cool name, Wade Eastwood.
And that's all from us.
Now, there'll be a new edition of the global news podcast later on.
If you'd like to comment on the podcast and the topics we're covering, do send us an email.
Our address is globalpodcast .co .uk.
We're also on X at BBC World Service.
You can use that hashtag Global News Pod.
This edition was mixed by Holly Palmer.
The producers were Richard Hamilton and Stephen Jensen.
The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Chris Barrow. And until next time, goodbye.
of basketball. From buzzer beating shots, jaw -dropping defense and logo threes, the WNBA delivers non -stop action and world -class talent every game.
These athletes don't just play the game, they elevate it.
The New York Liberty are the reigning champions, and the Golden State Valkyries are the newest team to join the league since 2008.
Watch the WNBA this season on ABC, CBS, ESPN, ION and PRIME starting May 16th.
. .
