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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
I'm Janet Jalil, and in the early hours of Friday the 21st of February, these are our main stories.
The White House National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, tells Ukraine to tone down its criticism of the US and sign a minerals deal being pushed by President Trump.
A planned news conference between President Zelensky and a visiting US envoy is abruptly cancelled as the rift between the two countries deepens.
The Mexican army arrests a senior leader of the notorious Sinaloa drugs cartel.
Also in this podcast, Amazon takes over creative control of the James Bond franchise after agreeing a deal with the broccoli family.
They have had their hands on that wheel for a long time but we are here still talking about Bonds 64 years later and I think they will still be looking over the back seat at who's driving.
We look at what this means for the future of the world's most famous fictional spy and how a wrong turn saw a cycling race descend into chaos.
A day after Donald Trump called the Ukrainian leader a dictator for daring to say that the US president lived in a Russian disinformation space.
An aide to Mr Trump has said that Vladimir Zelensky needs to tone down his criticism of the US and sign a deal for mineral rights to pay for American support in Ukraine's war against Russia.
Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, told Mr Zelensky to get over his reluctance to sign the deal, which he thought could be worth as much as half a trillion dollars to the U .S.
President Trump is obviously very frustrated right now with President Zelensky.
The fact that he hasn't come to the table, that he hasn't been willing to take this opportunity that we have offered, I think he eventually will get to that point, and I hope so very quickly.
Meanwhile, a U .S. envoy, retired General Keith Kellogg, has been holding talks with Mr Zelenskyy in Kyiv.
He said he'd come to listen.
But a planned joint news conference on Thursday afternoon was cancelled at the last minute, the Ukrainians say at the request of the American side.
However, afterwards, the Ukrainian president described his meeting with the US envoy as productive and called for stronger ties with Washington.
In just over a week, President Trump has dramatically upended US foreign policy, speaking to Vladimir Putin on the phone, allowing high -level face -to -face talks between Russia and the US that excluded Ukraine and Europe, and suggesting that it was Ukraine that started the war.
Our international editor, Jeremy Bowen, is in Kiev, and he told me US -Ukrainian relations have plummeted to a new low.
I think the fact that the news conference was cancelled, guesswork on my part, but the indications, I'd say, are that they had nothing good to say about each other, so best not to say in public.
And also General Kellogg, the U .S.
envoy, would have been asked all sorts of awkward questions about does he agree that Zelensky, who presumably would have been standing next to him, is a dictator, as President Trump has said, as for Waltz, the national security advisor.
And one of the criticisms of the American approach has been is that they are treating Ukraine potentially like a colony where they can extract its mineral wealth, its natural wealth, and just walk off with it in a very, very one -sided deal.
And Waltz was saying, you've got to get that contract signed and tone down the nasty comments about our leadership, even though the Americans, of course, have license to say, President Trump particularly, about what he wants about the Ukrainians.
So I think they are saying, look, it is an unequal relationship.
We are stronger than you.
And you know what? Bad luck.
We're going to do what we want and you better go along with us.
President Zelensky clearly feels he's got nothing to gain by biting his tongue.
What do Ukrainians make of the Trump administration lashing out at their president in this way and the way that Vladimir Zelensky is responding to that?
The one thing Ukrainians are not sure of after three years of war is nationalism.
And one thing that Zelensky is good at is defiance.
He showed that from the outset three years ago.
I mean, you remember he did a video late at night with his chief advisers around him saying, we are all here, we're not leaving.
And I think that that will quite likely be the approach he takes to order this.
And meanwhile, the Kremlin is saying that it would be unacceptable for NATO countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to Ukraine.
But many would say, how can you have a peace deal without them?
Well, answer, you can't.
I think that it wouldn't work otherwise.
There are various formulations being discussed.
But the thing about it is, if there is going to be some kind of a peace agreement, and it's a misnomer to talk about what's going on really between the Americans and the Russians as peace talks, because while the Americans had been backing Ukraine, they're not direct belligerents in the war.
And you can't really do a deal just by talking to one side.
And there now seems to be very little daylight between the things that Trump and his people are saying about the war and the things that Putin and his people have been saying about the war for many years now, since before the full -scale invasion.
So I think that Trump does not like defiance and he pushes back when he gets it.
I don't think these bullying tactics are going to work in international relations and particularly not dealing with a country that believes it's fighting for its life.
the way that they might work if you run the negotiating table talking about a hotel project in New Jersey.
Jeremy Bowen in Ukraine.
The Mexican army says it has arrested a key player in the Sinaloa drugs cartel, one of Mexico's most powerful criminal groups.
Jose Angel Canobio is accused of organizing the smuggling of fentanyl into the US, an issue Donald Trump has addressed by threatening to impose hefty tariffs on Mexico if it doesn't stop the drugs coming across the border.
For more on the arrest, I spoke to our Mexico correspondent, Will Grant.
He is a significant capture for the Mexican security forces, there's no doubt about it.
This is José Ángel Canovio, commonly known as El Cuerrito, meaning the blonde one.
He is ostensibly the head of security for one of the sons of the jail drug lord El Chapo Guzmán, his son Iván Achivaldo Guzmán.
And just that alone tells you that he's a significant figure in the Sinaloa cartel.
Drug war experts in Mexico say he was also influential in the organisation's recent push to make fentanyl trafficking such a large part of its criminal empire.
So this comes just hours after the US added the Sinaloa cartel to its list of foreign terror organisations along with several other Latin American crime groups.
This is all part of the efforts to combat fentanyl.
So a big blow for this particular cartel.
It is. I think it's always important to take any single arrest in its context.
Of course, all of these figures from El Chapo Guzman himself down are important when they are detained.
But the criminal organization is much bigger and much stronger than any single individual.
I think what is significant is that this shows there's a sort of more concerted effort by the Mexican government to try and focus on the issue of fentanyl trafficking, something that clearly Donald Trump has been pushing for to secure, as he saw it, a greater commitment by the government of Claudia Sheinbaum,
the Mexican president, towards strengthening the U .S.
border and having troops focus on fentanyl trafficking and undocumented immigration.
So she'll be hoping that those threatened tariffs won't be imposed.
But at the same time, she's also saying that she'll press ahead with legal action against US gun manufacturers because, she says, a large proportion of the weapons used by criminal groups in Mexico actually come from north of the border, from the US.
On the US side, there's the belief that there is no way that US gun manufacturers can be held responsible for the ultimate destination of those guns.
But I think what Claudia Sheinbaum is doing is pushing the elements that matter to her in this relationship with Donald Trump in its early days.
She's saying, look, this is a two -way street.
You're obviously worried about fentanyl trafficking, so are we.
But in return, you have to acknowledge two things.
One is that the demand for fentanyl on illegal drugs is in the US.
And two, as you mentioned, the guns are coming illegally smuggled from the United States.
Will Grant in Mexico.
The authorities in Azerbaijan have ordered the suspension of the BBC's Azeri service, a source of impartial news and information in the country since 1994.
It comes a week after the country's oldest independent news agency, Tehran, was also shut down.
Rehan Dimitri has the details.
The BBC's Azeri service and Tehran news agency were the last two independent news sources in the oil -rich country of 10 million people.
The BBC Azeri website had up to one million readers per week providing impartial news in a country where information is tightly controlled.
More than 20 independent Azerbaijani journalists have been jailed since the government intensified its crackdown on independent media in 2023.
Journalists are often accused of currency smuggling, a charge that human rights groups have described as dubious.
Last year, the Committee to Protect Journalists, which promotes press freedom around the globe, named Azerbaijan among the world's top ten countries for jailing journalists.
Rehan Dimitri, now to one of the most recognisable theme tunes in the history of cinema.
The much -loved James Bond films have graced our screens for more than six decades.
But Bond fans may have been shaken and possibly even stirred by the news that the Broccoli family, which has tightly guarded creative control of the franchise, is handing it over to the streaming giant Amazon.
This comes four years after Daniel Craig last played the role of the world -famous spy.
James Bond superfan Mark O 'Connell says the success of the franchise is largely down to the Broccoli dynasty.
They understood that there is a market for this and you can add cool casting, cool music, cool cars, cool tailoring.
They have had their hands on that wheel for a long time.
People would say they've been dogmatic or overprotective, but we are here still talking about Bond 64 years later and I think they will still be looking over the back seat at who's driving.
I asked our arts correspondent Vincent Dowd if this development had come as a surprise.
It's a massive surprise.
if you'd asked any well -informed arts journalist yesterday what's happening with 007 everyone would have said oh well it's mired in this terrible painful slow row between E .ON Productions based in London who owned the franchise and Amazon who are now the distributors as you say basic facts the most
recent Bond film was in No Time To Die in 2021 the next year the distributors then MGM were bought out by Amazon and that's the origin of the tension there's been since which has taken a very surprising turn today.
And why do we think this is happening now?
Partly age. Eon is basically Michael G.
Wilson and Barbara Broccoli who are half -siblings.
Michael is now 83. Barbara is rather younger in her mid -60s.
She's reported very recently as having been very unimpressed with execs at Amazon and what they might want to do with the franchise.
They sort of co -own it in a funny sort of way.
Well, what might have changed their minds?
I think basically they may have been made an offer they can't refuse financially.
As I say, Barbara Broccoli is in her 60s.
She said she wants to devote more of her life and her time to working with the arts and working with charities.
She's still very active.
So what does this mean now for the Bond films?
Well, it's not that No Time to Die was a financial flop.
It's made $775 million worldwide.
I suspect, however, that Amazon want to make more of that.
Think of what Disney did with the Star Wars franchise since they, in effect, took over from George Lucas, spin -offs films, all that kind of thing.
in the Amazon era already you would have been very possibly ignorant of the fact that there was one non -movie spin -off, a game show on Amazon Prime called 007 Road to a Million.
Nine pairs of contestants attempt to win a million pounds by competing in James Bond -inspired challenges around the globe.
It sounded pretty dire, it was pretty dire widely considered deeply forgettable.
And now the big question on many people's lips will be who will be the next James Bond and when will we see the next film?
I think it'll be another four years before we see the film.
In terms of who it might be, I don't think it any longer could be Aegis Elba or Tom Hardy, who used to be the front runners.
The years go by, and they're just a bit too old now.
So James Norton, Jonathan Bailey, Aaron Taylor -Johnson, Paul Meskell, Daniel Kaluuya, all kinds of people.
I would guess it's going to be at least a year before we find out.
Vincent Dought. Three months ago, the award -winning French -Algerian writer Boualem Sansal was detained in Algeria after arriving there to visit his family.
The 75 -year -old novelist is being held for breaching state security.
But details of the charges against him are not known.
Sansal, a major figure in francophone modern literature, has long been a critic of government repression and Islamic fundamentalism.
His French lawyer has still not been granted a visa to see him.
Hugh Schofield reports from Paris.
With his long grey ponytail, Boalem Sansal was a familiar face in the French media.
This was him on a popular chat show a few years ago when he'd released a new novel.
He was a kind of go -to guy on Algeria, not least because he was very critical of the government there.
So it was a shock when, in November, it was announced that on a visit to Algiers, Sansal had been arrested at the airport under state security laws.
I am the publisher of the last book of Boalem Sansal.
Paris publisher Jean -Francois Colossimo knows Boalem Sansal well.
He describes him as a humane and gentle person and a genuine free thinker.
Above all, he's a man who trusts in human brotherhood.
He's a man who trusts in a kind of love for the cosmos, love for the earth, love for history, love for the different people and their cultures.
He's three men of peace.
So what has angered the Algerian government so much about him?
Well, he's a writer of the size of the Solzhenitsyn.
If you want to compare, it's there that you have to go to Solzhenitsyn.
He says the truth about the official history.
He puts it down. For a kind of regime like the one that, unfortunately, the Algerian people have today on their back, truth is unbearable.
Sansal had been getting up the nose of the Algerian government for many years.
From semi -exile in France, he wrote about corruption, about what he saw as the carve -up of power between the Algerian military and Islamists, about the threat to France of Islamists.
And in this interview, on a website close to France's hard -right national rally party not long before his arrest, he may have overstepped the mark, calling into question aspects of Algeria's official account of its own history.
On the internet, the reaction from pro -Algerian influencers in France has been vitriolic, accusing Sansal of being a stooge for Marine Le Pen.
The president of Algeria, Abdelmadjid Taboun, gave an interview saying that the whole affair was a concoction intended to mobilize opinion against Algeria.
The truth is that Boalem Sansal is caught up in a bigger crisis, which is the recent breakdown in relations between France and Algeria, possibly the worst since Algerian independence 60 years ago.
Sansal is a victim and a kind of hostage.
He's never written a word that is seditious or inflammatory, merely described the world around him as he sees it.
His lawyer, still waiting for the chance to visit him in prison is Francois Zimaret.
He's a free thinker and as all free thinkers and free minds his thoughts and beliefs might have shocked or irritated.
This is incumbent to freedom of speech in fact but at the end of the day I still don't see how his words could have endangered a state of 45 million inhabitants.
François Zemuré ending that report by Hugh Schofield.
Still to come... It was super insane to see how fast they could learn to tell the difference between my colleague and me underwater.
Scientists discover that wild fish can tell humans apart.
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As the civil war continues to rage in Yemen, more than a decade after it erupted, tens of millions of people remain utterly reliant on aid there.
And yet the UN has paused operations this month in parts of the country after a wave of arrests of aid workers by Houthi fighters.
This comes on top of cuts in aid funding.
Our Cairo correspondent, Sally Nabil, has been investigating.
Over the past few months, we have more than 24 UN staff arrested, as well as others from local and international aid agencies.
They have been behind bars for months.
Their whereabouts are unknown.
One employee for the World Food Programme died in detention a few days ago.
It took us a while to be able to find someone, an aid worker, who agrees to talk to us.
Hannah, who works for a US -funded aid agency, and Hannah is not her real name.
She spoke to us on condition of anonymity.
And she told us how she had to flee the capital, Sana 'a, after the Houthis raided her office.
I didn't realize how shocking it was until I walked into the office and saw my manager sitting in the meeting room, his phone and laptop confiscated and surrounded by security personnel.
Outside, two armored vehicles were parked near our building and a group of massed men stood nearby.
What Hana told me during our conversation is that she believes this heavy crackdown on aid workers is meant to spread fear among the public.
They just want to make an example of these aid workers who are...
But Veronica's grave was recently vandalized and the metal cross was taken.
We don't know if it's the scrap dealers themselves sending these guys or it's other people stealing and taking them to the scrap metal dealers.
Pudensiana and her family have now repaired Veronica's grave.
Peter Mataba is one of the grave diggers working at the cemetery.
What we know is that once we leave, there are people who come and break into graves.
Many crosses have been taken or even broken.
It's a problem recognized by the local council.
Dr. Ndimile Kilatu is the health officer of Morogoro Municipal Council.
We are in the planning phase to strengthen security, but it cannot be today or tomorrow.
But we do need to have a fence and also hire guards.
The efforts we are making include educating scrap metal dealers on what type of metal they should buy and which they are not allowed to take.
For some scrap dealers, that education is hitting home.
Isire Ramadan is a local trader who has had his business for 20 years.
He regularly checks the metal brought to him to make sure it isn't stolen.
In the past they used to bring us crosses but now we took one of them to the police and later he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
After that the theft reduced but now it has returned.
I feel bad because they are destroying the memory of our beloved ones.
In the graveyard in Morogoro, Putensiana walks around the graves Like many family members who come to visit their loved ones at this resting place, she remains hopeful that this area can be protected.
Alfred Lastic reporting from Tanzania.
Now, fish have a reputation for poor memories, but are they being unfairly maligned?
Scientists have found that fish may be more intelligent than we think.
While carrying out research, they accidentally discovered that wild fish could tell two divers apart.
The co -author of the study, Katinka Soller, spoke to Evan Davis.
The sea breams, they did learn to tell the difference between me as a diver who would provide them with food reward.
I feel like the most surprising outcome of this research was the setup that we were fully in the wild, that the researchers, they themselves, went into the wild.
Like it was super insane to see how fast they could learn to tell the difference between my colleague and me underwater.
They were not the original study.
You were studying other fish and they were kind of getting in the way.
Yes, in the previous year, our lab and especially Alex Jordan, he observed that this was happening.
