This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
I'm Ankur Desai and at 16 hours on Thursday, the 6th of November, these are our main stories.
World leaders gather in Brazil ahead of UN climate talks, but Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi will not attend.
South Africa says it's received distress calls from 17 citizens lured into fighting for Russia in the war in Ukraine.
And could the Trump administration be charged with crimes against humanity for striking ships near Venezuela?
Also in this podcast, the young lawyer challenging Pakistan's tax on period products.
I was getting congratulations for bringing this petition forward, as if I'm a soldier returning from war, you know.
But there should be nothing brave about it.
It's a biological function.
It's a natural phenomenon that all women go through.
The Brazilian city of Belem is known as the gateway to the Amazon, a focal point of the global climate crisis.
And on Wednesday and Thursday, President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva is hosting dozens of world leaders there in advance of the COP United Nations Climate Summit, which begins officially next week.
Notably absent are the leaders of the three greatest producers of carbon emissions China's Xi Jinping, India's Narendra Modi and Donald Trump, who says he won't even send a senior representative from the US.
The proceedings began on a dire note.
The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said the world had already failed to keep global temperatures from increasing by more than 15 degrees Celsius, a key climate goal.
President Lula, you have called this the cup of truth.
I could not agree more.
And the hard truth is that we have failed to ensure... we remain below 1.5 degrees.
Science now tells us that the temporary overshoot between the 15 limit, starting at the latest in the early 2030s, is inevitable.
We need a paradigm shift to limit this overshoot's magnitude and duration and quickly drive it down.
Our environment correspondent Matt McGrath is in Belem.
There's only about 50 or so world leaders coming to this particular meeting and the notable absentees, as you've mentioned, represent the bigger hitters in terms of emissions.
But there's still a number of countries here.
The European Union is here.
The UK is here with Sir Keir Starmer and Prince William.
So there is still significant heft, I think, in the people that are here, and I think President Dula is hoping that he'll be able to garner enough support support from those leaders that are here to be able to make some significant announcements on issues related to forests, at the very least.
And, as you mentioned, with some of those leaders in attendance.
Well, what can be achieved then, at this COP?
I think for President Lula there's a number of things.
He wants to set the tone for the COP meeting next week.
This is the leaders summit, and they're doing this right now to highlight the leadership, but also, I suppose, in terms of it's, a response to the logistics, which essentially is This is a smallish town that has struggled to be able to accommodate the massive nature of the COP, and so I think they're bringing the leadership meeting forward so that they get around that particular problem.
They'll be hoping to get the launch of a new forest fund, the Tropical Forest Forever Fund.
That will pay people around the world, particularly in Africa and in South America, to preserve their forests.
And they want this to be a long-term, large-scale fund.
And that's, I think, the apple of the eye for President Lula.
But I think he really wants to ensure that people, ordinary people all over the world, who are struggling with the cost of living and with energy bills, really feel the connection to the climate crisis, that the prices of food have gone up because of the climate crisis, that we're seeing devastation in the Caribbean and in the Philippines because of the climate crisis.
He wants to make that connection and make it clear to people that this isn't just some airy-fairy talking shop, that it's actually about real things that will have a real impact on people's lives all over the world.
We always see a lot of chat about climate change in the build-up to every COP conference, but are there other initiatives or other ways of pushing climate change policy forward outside of these events?
Yeah, there obviously have been, and I think one of the big questions here is what is this COP really for?
Because, you know, it's ten years on since the Paris Agreement was put into place.
All the arguments about that how do we save the planet, if you like have been put down in that particular set of rules and set of agreements.
The problem is getting people to live up to what they've committed to doing, and we've seen, essentially in the last couple of weeks, a bit of a fall-off from countries in what they're prepared to do, and I think addressing that shortfall will be the big question as to what this carpet really is for.
Matt McGrath reporting.
Next, the South African government says it has received distress calls from 17 of its citizens who've got themselves caught up in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
President Cyril Ramaphosa says he's ordered an investigation in order to get to the bottom of how the men were apparently sucked into the fighting in Ukraine's war-torn Donbass region.
Our correspondent Pumza Filani is in Johannesburg.
One of the main things that we can speak to around who these men are is where they come from.
The region that they're believed to have come from, which is KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, I can tell you, is some of the poorest parts of the country, where unemployment is increasingly high.
So, while their names or identities are not known yet, we do know about the circumstances that they are likely to have come from.
But we know, of course, from the presidency spokesperson, Vincent Maguena, who I spoke to earlier today, that a part of their investigation will look at exactly the circumstances that led them there.
Initial reports suggest that they were lured to that country under the prospect of earning high salaries, working either in Russia or within that region.
And it's believed that they've then instead found themselves working as mercenaries in the conflict.
So if these men do manage to make it home, what sort of reception might they get?
How will they be received?
Part of that will depend on what the investigation uncovers.
And the reason I say that is that South Africans largely are not people that have appetite for war.
In fact, they will often be found on the side of wanting to find a peaceful resolution to a conflict.
And if it's clear who the underdog is, will likely be wanting to side with that underdog.
Over the last few years here a number of civil society organizations have expressed their unhappiness that South Africa initially wasn't coming out stronger in condemning Russia when it became clearer or there were clearer suggestions on who the aggressor in the conflict is.
And that's a sentiment that prevails here.
So while they may find empathy or sympathy amongst people who understand the difficult economic challenges conditions that millions of South Africans face, it will be difficult for people to empathize if it's found then, that they actively participated in the war, knowing what they were going into.
And just briefly, because this isn't the first time that South Africa or other African nations have got caught up in the conflict.
Certainly.
In fact, it's part of a growing concern across Africa.
My own colleague, Mayeni Jones, recently did a report from speaking to South Sudanese nationals who shared their own report of how they were promised jobs working in various parts of Russia and instead found themselves working building drones.
So it seems to be part of a growing concern here.
And it's something that President Ramaphosa has spoken very harshly against, saying that Vulnerable people and communities should not be targeted by companies that have vested interests in the ongoing conflict.
Pumza Falani reporting from Johannesburg.
The Trump administration is facing mounting questions over the legality of its airstrikes against alleged drug boats of South and Central America.
More than 60 people have been killed in the last two months.
But many Democrats say the strikes are illegal, while some Republicans also want answers, causing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to brief key lawmakers in Congress on Wednesday night.
Meanwhile, a former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, has told the BBC the strikes would be treated under international law as crimes against humanity.
The White House has rejected the claim.
Here's our State Department correspondent, Tom Bateman.
The roar of the fighter jets on the Gerald Ford, the world's biggest aircraft carrier, will soon sound off Latin America.
President Trump's military build-up in the waters of Venezuela continues after more than a dozen deadly airstrikes on small boats he says are carrying drugs.
In the high seas, punishment is being delivered publicly. at the pull of a trigger.
But the missile strikes are rattling the halls of Congress.
They are illegal, say most Democrats, and even some Republicans are asking difficult questions.
So Mr Trump dispatched his top diplomat, Marco Rubio, to give a classified briefing to lawmakers last night.
The White House has designated several cartels as terrorist groups, arguing trafficking lethal drugs constitutes an armed attack on the United States.
And it says that makes the airstrikes legal.
I've been aware of this for some time.
James Reich, a Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was in the briefing.
The president really ought to be congratulated for saving the lives of young American people.
They're doing good work.
They're doing it lawfully. and I encourage them to keep it up.
Senator, how do you satisfy people about the legal basis for these strikes?
He didn't answer that, while the leading Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, left the briefing unconvinced.
What we heard isn't enough.
We need a lot more answers, and I am now asking for an all-Senators briefing on this issue.
After another classified meeting, this one by Pentagon officials.
Last week I caught up with one of those in the room, Sarah Jacobs, a Democrat congresswoman on the House Armed Services Committee.
The level of transparency was not OK.
And there's nothing that we heard in there that changes my assessment that this is completely illegal, that it is unlawful.
And even if Congress authorized it, it would still be illegal because there are extrajudicial killings where we have no evidence.
For Luis Moreno Campo, the strikes amount to an unprecedented expansion of presidential power.
He was, for a decade, the first chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court.
They are not soldiers.
They are not combatants.
They are smugglers.
They are drug dealers.
These are criminals, not soldiers.
So that's why I see it difficult to defend itself.
I believe the obvious case for me is crimes against humanity.
What court can do is a different matter.
But you're saying that you would treat this as crimes against humanity.
I mean, that's one of the very most serious charges under international law.
What justifies that?
Because crimes against humanity is a systematic attack against civilian population.
Criminals are civilians.
They're criminals.
We should do better investigating them, prosecuting them and controlling them, but not killing people.
The White House said in response to that that the president had acted in line with the laws of armed conflict.
They said to protect the US from cartels trying to bring poison to American shores.
It called the international court a biased, unserious entity with no jurisdiction over the US.
Mr Trump hasn't veered from his position that he will keep killing alleged smugglers.
I don't think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war.
I think we're just going to Kill people that are bringing drugs into our country.
OK, we're going to kill them.
You know, they're going to be like dead.
The seas off Venezuela now brim with American military might.
A region is poised and a president is pushing the bounds of the law.
Tom Bateman reporting.
Still to come.
In this podcast, a view on Russia from a founding member of the punk protest group Pussy Riot.
To overcome Putin's regime is a goal for people inside the country and outside.
It's not possible to win him with flowers.
It's people with weapons needed.
A young lawyer is taking the Pakistani government to to challenge a tax on women's period products which increases their cost by 40.
The country classifies items like sanitary pads as luxury goods, but Mahnoor Omer argues that they should be considered essential and made tax-free.
She spoke to my colleague, Anita Rani, and began by telling us why she believes period products are taxed so steeply.
Personally, my opinion on this is because they're seen as a product used by upper class women, not a need of women all over Pakistan.
Similar to like a makeup item or perfume, which is to me, quite frankly, very unreasonable.
So it's an omission on part.
I would like to think it's not an intentional act.
It's an omission where while making this law, they didn't really think of much of it.
Well, I have to also point out that sanitary products have only not been taxed here in the UK for nearly five years, since January the 1st 2021.
OK, so, you know, we were only just behind you.
What's the attitude to menstruation and periods in Pakistan?
I would say the attitude back home is still quite conservative.
I was getting congratulations for bringing this petition forward, as if I'm a soldier returning from war.
You know, it was quite intense where they said, you're so brave for speaking about this.
But there should be nothing brave about it.
It's a biological function.
It's a natural phenomenon that all women go through.
So people still being so hush hush about it.
Women don't speak to their daughters about it.
When I was little, in my class I would say like sixth, seventh grade a girl got her period during computer class.
She got up, her white kameez from the back was red stained entirely.
She looked so confused.
She had no idea what was happening.
The boy started laughing at her.
The teacher, you know, quickly whisked her away to the bathroom.
But I said, did your mom never tell you?
And she didn't.
So that just goes to show even mothers don't speak to their daughters about it.
And what are the consequences for women?
You mentioned the difference that they're seen as something that upper class women use.
So what are the consequences for women in the poorer regions?
The consequences are extremely dire because firstly, lack of affordability because of this tax leads to lack of access.
And lack of access then translates them to using alternatives, alternatives such as pieces of cloth that they wash and reuse again and again.
In some areas, there have been reports of women using leaves.
And especially right now after the floods that happened, women's health was at the back burner once again.
So this leads to infections.
It leads to reproductive health issues.
Reproductive health issues then lead to a rise in domestic violence because families are now upset.
Why isn't she giving us more children?
So it's a cycle of, I would say, poverty.
It's a cycle of abuse.
It's a cycle of illiteracy.
It just goes on and on.
It's interconnected.
And a serious educational consequence as well.
The UNICEF report also said that one in five girls in Pakistan miss school because of their period.
Your case against the Pakistani government has now had its first hearing.
What made you bring a case?
Where did your personal activism come from?
I've been pretty... passionate about women's rights from a young age.
I started organizing with the Women's March, also known as Orit March, back in 2019 as a volunteer and now as an organizer.
And when I got my license to practice law, my colleagues and I were speaking to each other and a colleague and dear friend, Esen Jangir, who is the lawyer on this case with me and a great feminist ally.
He said, why don't we use our license to start challenging these laws?
So this is just the start.
We're going to do an analysis of all the gender blind legislation, legislation against minorities, and challenge them one by one.
Mahanul Omer speaking to Anita Rani.
Now, have you ever tried vibe coding?
What about Caucasians or have you heard of aura farming?
I mean, do you even understand any of this?
Well, these are all words being added to the Collins English Dictionary thanks to their popular use.
Now, let me help.
Caucasian is going on holiday somewhere cold and aura farming is people doing things for the.
But let's take a closer look at vibe coding.
That's using AI to make an app or websites without having to write the programming code.
In other words, you just give AI an idea or vibe and it will do the work for you.
No expertise needed.
My colleague Rebecca Kesby spoke to Erika Boyton.
He's professor of cybersecurity at De Montfort University in Leicester.
So is vibe coding actually happening?
It's probably happening for very small examples, but there it's not very useful.
It may well be happening in some situations where companies are cheerful about their code going out with lots of errors in, but I hope it's not happening at great scale.
For a safety-critical software, let's say.
So how would it work then, using AI to code?
Well, like all generative AI, it's seen lots of examples of things and then it's able to give an output that looks plausible on the basis of the examples seen.
So when you ask it a question for a small standard programming exercise, it will probably give a very good or 100 correct answer.
Now wanting to be able to describe a computer program, an app, by a little bit of natural language, saying what it would do.
That's sort of the holy grail of the whole research area that I've been in since 30 years ago.
And wouldn't it be great?
You're skeptical.
Yeah, I mean, getting programs right is difficult enough when you're talking to specialists, when your descriptions of what the programs need to do are in relatively precise description languages or mathematics.
But natural language, which is what you feed to something like JetGPT, is by definition vague.
So even if these systems have knowledge of programming which they actually don't, they just have knowledge of what they've seen before they wouldn't have enough information to produce the correct program on the basis of natural language input alone.
The question is is it really saving work to have someone without any expertise using a computer produce something that's broken and then have someone who needs to understand in great detail how things can be broken to fix it, when there's every chance that that second person would have been able to do it with less effort correctly from the start?
So your words are probably music to the ears of all the coders because, I mean, there is this fear, isn't there, that AI is going to take over and tech jobs could end up going.
But it sounds as if we still do need human coders to do the business.
That's what I firmly believe.
But I think companies will be using the availability of AI as an excuse for cutting jobs wherever they can.
But it will have consequences.
The software out there will be more broken and we will have less software engineers around if the people who can actually do the job get sacked.
Right.
So maybe more money for the broligarchy then.
And I'm using that word because that's another new one that's going into the dictionary.
It's to label the small clique of very wealthy tech billionaires that wield outsized political influence.
Are you familiar with that word?
Absolutely.
And they are very close to this story because they have great influence in politics and governments across the world are driving AI hype narratives online, desperately looking for productivity gains and taking the Kool-Aid from the Brolicarchy as their input.
They think the Clankers will take over, but yeah, we believe they won't.
And remind me, the Clankers, this is something to do with Star Wars, I think.
This is also in the dictionary.
Yes, it's a derogatory term for robots, but these days more generally applied to AI systems.
So, particularly when the bros are talking about, we should make sure that AIs don't get disrespected.
Then people like me will happily talk about Clankers in response.
Do you have any advice for ordinary non-AI specialists of how to navigate this new world with all these new words and flashwords going around?
I think scepticism is healthy, but my line on this world of generative AI and chat GPT is that if the work can really reliably be done by one of these systems, then probably the work wasn't very interesting to start with.
Professor Erika Boyten.
Now as a founding member of the Russian feminist protest group Pussy Riot.
Masha Alyokhina became known around the world after her arrest in 2012.
The group had just performed a punk rock prayer in the Moscow Cathedral, sporting brightly knitted balaclavas and fluorescent dresses.
She spent two years in a penal colony because she criticised Vladimir Putin and the Orthodox Church's political alignment and, after her release, continued her activism.
In May 2022, faced with a new prison sentence and under house arrest, she decided she had no choice but to escape Russia.
Masha Alyokhina has now written a memoir Political Girl Life and Fate in Russia and spoke to Emma Barnett about why she's now living in exile.
I'm in federal wanted list.
I have the third criminal case and sentence which been opened last year and a month ago.
I was sentenced to 13 years and 15 days of penal colony.
So that means that if I'll appear on the border, I'll go straight there.
You were jailed in absentia earlier this year and you've been in prison many times.
Yes. in Russia, you've been locked up for what you have done, but you also managed to escape.
Can you tell us about how you managed to do that?
I've heard the speech of Vladimir Putin with the declaration of full scale war.
Against Ukraine?
Against Ukraine.
I desperately didn't want to leave the country for freedom of what I'm fighting.
At the same time, I do understand that this is the war.
If you take a side inside the country, that means that you imprisoned in my case forever.
I was thinking when I got the sentence in absentia.
I was thinking what it is to be in the country actually.
Because politically, I'm in the country.
They opened this case and they gave me a sentence.
Physically, I'm not there.
And millions and millions of people are there, but they politically are not there.
Yes.
Because they cannot speak because they physically will go to prison.
So is permanent, very brutal and dangerous self-censorship which affects personality, affects society and basically rotten the country.
The state taught Soviet Union people that they are small, they are comparing to the state nobody.
The protest of one person or of the group people will not lead to the change of the power.
So it's something which is in the blood.
At least five generations have been taught this thing.
I'm just trying to get a sense from you if you've got any hope that the people will protest.
More will rise up.
The thing is that to overcome Putin's regime is, for my opinion, this is a goal for people inside the country and outside.
It's not possible to win him with flowers.
It's people with weapons needed.
What do you think about the West's response to Putin at the moment?
Ukraine should be safe and Europe needs Ukraine, not a part of Putin's gulag.
Because if it is something wrong with Ukraine, as Putin says, next will be something wrong with you.
They will find Nazis, so-called Nazis, in your country and they will invade.
Putin needs war.
This is like the general thing which Western people do not understand.
Putin needs war. because he needs to keep people in survival mode.
Pussy Riot's Masha Alyokhina.
China's space program has released a video of its astronauts holding what it calls the first ever barbecue in space.
Come on.
One per person, not too many.
Sounds like they really enjoyed it.
Well, our reporter Will Vernon told me more.
Space stations are a pretty delicate place.
You can't have smoke or fire or dodgy toasters or anything like that in there.
This was done in a specially designed oven.
Now, there are a few science words here, Anca, so prepare yourselves.
Chinese space scientists used temperature catalysts and multi-layer filtration techniques to create an oven with built-in purification, smoke-free, and the heating elements aren't hot to touch.
So they managed to cook chicken wings and reportedly steak too.
And, unlike previous feats of galactic gastronomy, this is actual cooking with chemical reactions which made the food golden and crispy.
Sounds appetising.
I wonder what it looks like, actually.
Asteroid food, I guess, then coming a long way from the days of freeze-dried powders and pastes and tubes.
Yeah, it's come a long way, hasn't it?
Cooking in space, perhaps the next hit BBC TV show.
Yuri Gagarin, who was the Soviet cosmonaut, the first man in space, was also the first person to eat in space.
He had two servings of pureed beef and liver and one of chocolate sauce which he squeezed into his mouth from a tube.
He was only in space for 108 minutes, which isn't really long enough to get very hungry, is it?
But Soviet scientists wanted to see whether it was possible.
Sounds like my diet when I was a student.
Absolutely.
We've all been in one of those.
American astronauts' rations have evolved over the years from freeze-dried cubes to gels.
And now on the International Space Station, they actually fly in fresh fruit and vegetables.
Six years ago...
NASA astronauts baked the first ever cookies in space, but that was used in kind of warming of a container.
And it took 120 minutes to bake those cookies properly, whereas the Chinese chicken wings took 28 minutes, which is a little bit longer than on earth.
So nasa was the first.
Nasa astronauts were the first to actually cook something in space.
But the chinese have gone something you know one better and actually managed to to grill meat to really create a kind of almost barbecue.
I mean, if we can send people like katie perry into space, surely we can start sending michelin star chefs into space as well and start working on that reality tv format you've just come up with, Absolutely.
I can see perhaps someone like Gordon Ramsay really going to town on those astronauts for their you know rubbish cooking.
And that's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast a little later.
If you want to comment on this episode or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.
The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk and you can also find us on X at BBC World Service.
You can use the hashtag Global News Pod.
This edition was mixed by Craig Kingham and the producers were Peter Goffin and Stephen Yensen.
The editor is Karen Martin and I'm Ankur Desai.
Until next time, goodbye.
