Hundreds dead in Venezuela earthquakes

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Hello, welcome to the programme. This is News Hour from the BBC World Service. I'm Paul Henley. We're coming to you live from London. Offers of international help are mounting for Venezuela a day after two powerful earthquakes were killed at least five hundred and eighty nine people and injured probably thousands more. Venezuela's interim president Delcy Rodriguez announced on television that United Nations certified rescuers would help search for survivors.

का अगरे दूरी

When the earthquake started I clung as tightly as I could to the door frame, so tightly that I broke my finger. I held on tight really tight to the door frame until all the floors collapsed.

Jesus Armas is a resident of the capital Caracas. This is what he told the BBC late last night.

People are trying to do their best, but the thing is that many, many buildings that had collapsed. There are no enough tools to find survivors that are not enough

The government has promised that aid will reach affected areas, but already criticism of their response is growing. Argenes has been searching for survivors in Caracas.

Coño, no es posible llamarlos militares.

Isn't it possible to call the military to say come here, help us with this? The military officers that are right here get on a tank and come help the people. That's what we want.

Foreign help is still en route, Venezuelan expats are organizing their own campaigns in Doral in Florida. More than thirty percent of the population is Venezuelan originally, and donation drop off points have been set up to gather supplies.

I wanted to come to donate drinking water because that's what's needed most right now. I know people, close friends and family members who are missing, and well, I want to help as much as possible and do whatever little we can from here.

Yeah.

En este momento estamos empacando alcohol isopropílico, agua oxigenada.

Now I am packing disinfectants. I'm here volunteering because I'm Venezuelan. I know the need my country is facing. I know my country isn't prepared for a situation like this. We are not a country that typically experiences earthquakes.

vinimos a traer suministros para los bebés en Venezuela

We came to bring supplies for babies in Venezuela. I can't be in my country helping in the way I'd like to right now, and I felt this was the least I could do at this moment.

Some Venezuelans there in Florida we can hear live now from Venezuela and speak to Andres Ortiz, who is a gastroenterologist in Caracas. He works with the charity Healing Venezuela. He joins us from one of the main hospitals in the city where he's volunteering today. Doctor Ortiz, welcome. What is happening around you? What are the big medical challenges that people are facing?

Yes. Uh right now in the hospital. Uh the hospital is pretty much full. Uh the emergency room is As the doctors say, there's a tense calm. Uh they're expecting uh rescue. em emergency uh rescuers to bring more patients in today. They say when when they come in, it's uh really, really moving. But right now in this moment it's pretty much calm.

Is the hospital where you're working undamaged and have you got enough supplies, etcetera? What what are power and supply lines like?

Yeah, yeah. This this hospital was not affected. It's uh perfectly the structure is perfectly fine, they have uh electricity and everything. But yesterday the government Um uh they they they issued some information and they're saying that they had to close down eight hospitals near Caracas and La Guaira and that they're they're moving all those patients from those eight hospitals towards the other hospitals in Caracas. So that's overflowing the um the capacity of all the hospitals in Caracas.

A lot of people uh will know those who've died in what's happened. Uh your son i is one is one of them. He's a medical student, he's lost friends I hear.

Yes. Uh he has uh there were four students, medical students that were living in La Guaira. They uh their their building where they're living collapsed. three of them died. One of his friends survived. He waited for around ten, twelve hours until they finally rescued him. And when they rescued him, they were waiting for him at the hospital where he works, in this hospital, hospital bad.

Sorry to hear that. Tell us about the scenes in Caracas itself, the wider city. A lot of people sleeping rough because of fear of aftershocks or because their homes have been been destroyed. What what can you see?

Yes, on my way to this hospital I did see a lot of people sleeping on the streets and a lot of people sleeping in tents. uh near the hospital and like in parks and uh green areas around the city you can see a lot of people uh sleeping in tents and uh not only tents but um Provisional uh tents that the government has set up, I guess.

I guess you as a medical volunteer will be hoping that you are very busy in the very near future. It's a small window, isn't it, left for finding survivors?

Yeah, yeah. Every every minute is counting. Today I saw in the news that a plane with um medical supplies and a lot of um workers who are specialized in rescue people. uh came in to Venezuela. That was uh a plane from Germany came in this morning and a plane from Spain. That's what I uh I could see in the news today.

All right, thank you very much for coming on the programme. Doctor Andres Ortiz, uh working in one of the big hospitals in Caracas. As he mentioned, thousands of Venezuelans have spent a second night on the streets as the race continues to find survivors trapped beneath the rubble

Thanks for having me. Um well, the first thing we were able to do in the in the immediate hours after the the earthquake struck was was to confirm that all of our staff in Venezuela are indeed safe and accounted for and we were very relieved um that that was the case.

You'll have dealt with similar things before. What are the humanitarian priorities now?

In the immediate days when something like this happens, it is obviously search and rescue, as you've just been talking about, um, uh delivery of of basic relief items, food, water, shelter. um and access to medical services. That those are the most critical things in in these the these hours and days ahead. Um, very quickly though, um and we're we're preparing for this already, um, the the aftermath uh the humanitarian impact of of earthquakes like this, this is gonna take months.

Yeah, your team will discover the impact of years of economic crisis on the ground there. What are you hearing about how equipped the authorities are to respond?

There is there is mobilisation happening as you as you spoke to, internationally as well as nationally, and certainly a a great outpouring of support from Venezuelans overseas and within the country. Um, I think in the the the days ahead there were still um fairly significant barriers to accessing the most impacted areas. Um you referenced the airport as damage.

Could the recently dramatically improved relationship between the US and Venezuela help here?

was certainly encouraged to hear the the the reaction from the US and the the commitment to mobilise uh you know significant funding to support the response. Um, especially because, you know, over the last uh year or so, Venezuela, among many, many other countries, has been impacted by quite significant reductions in humanitarian aid funding from the US and elsewhere.

Many thanks, Eleanor Brakes, Head of Programme Delivery at the International Rescue Committee. You're with the BBC World Service, this is NewsHour, we're live from London.

Coming up an intriguing discovery deep below the surface of the red planet.

On Mars, we can fairly confidently say that there will 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 and perhaps even long term human settlement.

The headlines this hour. Venezuela's interim president Delcy Rodriguez says nearly six hundred people are now known to have died when two huge earthquakes struck on Wednesday. Iran has again insisted on its right to control shipping in the Strait of Hormuz a day after a vessel was struck as it took a route near the coast of Oman, and a court in Germany sentenced a Saudi man to life in prison for an attack on a Christmas market. Killed six people in twenty twenty four. More on that soon.

I'm Paul Henley and this is Newshour, live from the BBC in London.

There is plenty of excitement here at one of Seattle's fanzones. Supporters in different shirts gather in front of a giant screen cheering as yet another team edges closer to the knockout stages at the World Cup. And that is exactly what Egypt and Iran are hoping to do. Both teams face each other in a crucial manner. It also marks the start of Seattle's Pride Weekend, a celebration of LGBTQ communities.

I I don't see it being uh you know the main the main part of the game. Right now it's about two teams trying to get to the next round. So Pride match or no pride match, it's that's not that's not what matters.

Welcome to Seattle.

This.

This is how we pride.

Seattle organizers insist the timing was not designed to provoke. Pride weekend had been planned long before the World Cup draw paired Egypt and Iran in the city, and they say the answer to discomfort is curiosity rather than retreat.

We're excited to have you in Seattle. You are welcome in Seattle. While you're here, learn about who we are, learn about our culture.

Hedda McClendon is a senior official on Seattle's World Cup twenty six local organizing committee.

curious about our culture. Ask questions. It might not be how you want to live or how things are in your country, but this is something that makes us unique and we want you to experience it and be curious.

Thank you.

دادم که ما اینجای مره فوتبال

No we are here to play football, not for other things. We think about football. Our concentration is on the match and on being successful. As for things that are forbidden in our religion and do not exist, we do not want to talk about them. We only talk about the match, football and the beauty of the game.

So it's got rice, lentils, garbanzo beans, um elbow macaroni, garlic, tomato.

Not far from the fanzone, an Egyptian restaurant pop-up is getting ready for the match, and for fans craving a taste of home. Owners Amani and Ayman Aboamo say the discomfort around the game is real. But they see it less as a confrontation, and more as awkwardness rooted in cultural misunderstanding.

Mm-hmm.

It's the culture but it's I mean, you know, it's it's kind of like acceptable to the people here. Everyone is used to that. Back home people are not used to that and it's a cultural thing that they cannot get it. So it's just like this piece of confusion that each party cannot understand the other party.

I don't think it's gonna have any effect. Um people going to the match are gonna be at the match. people at uh Pride Fest are gonna be there. Soccer fans are here for soccer. They really are into the game.

As Egypt and Iran try to edge closer to the knockout stages, This match here in Seattle is a glimpse into what happens when a World Cup lands in a city celebrating one set of values, while two of the teams taking part arrive carrying very different ones of their own.

The BBC's Schima Khalil reporting from Seattle Now scientists here in the UK have drawn close comparisons between the way human beings and apes lab. In fact, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom are the only creatures capable of laughing audibly other than ourselves, and the new research opens a window on the way laughter and therefore speech evolved. Italian national Chiara de Gregorio is a primatologist at the University of Warwick, and she is lead author of this study.

When we talk about laugh and lather, we could say that we and great apes have it because it's really the same type of signal organized in the same way and also used in the same, you know, social context. But something similar is still present in other human animals.

But it's the great apes laughter that can be compared to ours and I think we've got a clip here of of a chimpanzee making a laughing sound. So the sound that the chimp makes isn't that similar, but it's about the rhythm, isn't it?

Uh yeah, so we actually found that we and other nongra tapes, so the chimp we just listened to, but also bonobos, orangutans, uh gorillas We all share the same rhythm while laughing. That is a regular rhythm that we can call isochrony, and it is like the ticking of a clock or the ticking of a metronome. So a very regular type of signal and we all, you know, laugh in the same way apparently.

And that gives us an insight into the way communication, speech evolved, does it?

Yeah, because the thing is speech is something that only humans have, so it's difficult to understand how it evolved because it's difficult to make comparison. But actually laughter it is. A very important point in the evolution of human language and and speech Has something to do with the ability to control our mouth and our lips and our tongue because actually the vocal tract of other non human primates.

But rhythmic laughter we can now say dates back about fifteen million years. Are we saying that the first meaningful vocalization was laughter, which is quite a nice discovery?

Yeah, I would say the maybe the first that we actually really share because of course uh the new one primates can communicate with some very mm also complex vocal behaviour the more we study them. the more we actually found that they do crazy things. But of course it's different. We use they use that

Chiara DiGregorio, who is a primatologist at the University of Warwick in England. This is the BBC World Service. NewsHour.

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Welcome back to NewsHour. Hundreds of thousands of people in Japan have been ordered to evacuate their homes. because of a risk of flooding and landslides as two tropical storms approach the country. And the way those storms interact could end up making matters worse, let's speak live From Tokyo to our correspondent Kurumi Mori. Kurumi welcome. What's the latest? Is it obvious the storms are near?

Hi Paul, absolutely. I just got caught in a flash rain myself just going from the train station to the studio here. in Tokyo. That number about the evacuations is now one million residents across Japan. They've been ordered to move away to a safer place as river levels just continue to rise and increasing that risk of flooding and landslides. So the government

How well prepared are the authorities then?

Yeah, I would say, you know, by lar by and large, I would say they are pretty prepared. I think uh Japan uh is very used to unfortunately natural disasters and big weather events. Um so I would say we're as prepared as one could hope. Over the years government officials have stepped up efforts when it comes to public awareness and alert systems to make sure that residents know just how bad some things could get.

And this consequence I mentioned of two storms interacting with each other, it's got a name, the Fujiwara effect. What could it mean?

Yeah, Fujiwana effect. Um so when it crosses, when there are two storm systems that cross and interact. Uh forecasters are saying that it makes it harder for them to predict the path of these storms. Now predicting the path is important because then we can see what areas are most uh affected or will be most affected. It helps us prepare, it helps us evacuate if we need. The other complication though this time, earthquakes. We just felt an earthquake in Tokyo just shortly before this hit.

Yeah.

Very briefly, when could the storm strike?

Yeah, we're looking at now three AM and three PM. So there's two, right? So back to back within twelve hours. Tokyo is set to get two rounds of heavy, heavy rain. So uh we're bracing for them.

You're listening to NewsHour from the BBC, I'm Paul Henley. A court in Germany has sentenced a man to life imprisonment for an attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg. In December 2024, the fifty-one year old man, who's a psychiatrist from Saudi Arabia, was found guilty of murder after he drove a car into the market, killing six people and injuring more than three hundred. Jenny Graham, who's a correspondent for Deutsche Vela TV in Berlin, covered the incident at the time and she told me more.

Well this was a Friday night. It was the Friday before Christmas. So this Christmas market was was packed with people. Christmas markets across Germany, as pretty much everyone knows, attract thousands of people every year and the Magdeburg Christmas market was no exception. And around 7 pm that night, a man drove a rented vehicle through the market. killing four women and a nine-year-old boy during that incident. And then a woman later died of her injuries in hospital a few weeks later.

Immediately after the attack, the far right in Germany were very vocal about it, weren't they?

They were. They actually organized some rallies in Magdeburg in the days immediately after the attack. Many people may not remember that Germany was actually in the middle of an election campaign. Snap elections had been called after the then Chancellor Olaf Schultz had lost a confidence vote.

And indeed the suspect's story complicates things. Tell us more about him.

Yes, so he was a fifty year old man at the time who had been living in Germany for eighteen years, originally from Saudi Arabia. He had claimed asylum back in two thousand and six. and worked as a psychiatrist here in Germany. Now, he was a vocal critic of the Saudi government. He has anti Islam views and also expressed support for the far right.

And the German authorities at the time faced accusations they could have prevented the attack. The Saudis had warned their German counterparts about him, hadn't they?

They had. And, you know, there were questions after the attack, you know, how much did the authorities know? Could they have prevented this? He was incredibly active in social media in the years leading up to the attack. And he'd said that he felt that

And there's been intense interest in this case and its outcome, hasn't there?

Yes, a special courtroom was built for this case because of the massive media interest and the sheer amount of people who were going to be in the courtroom witnessing this.

And what was the outcome, the verdict?

Yes, so the man who drove the vehicle into the Magdeburg Christmas market. Talib al Abdul Mosin. He was sentenced to life in prison and he faced the the equivalent of a first degree murder charge after the deaths of the five women and the nine year old boy in Magdeburg. This sentence is not unexpected given the severity and the sheer number of people who were casualties and fatalities in this attack.

That was Jenny Graham who reports for Deutsche Vela TV in Berlin.

Now in some particularly disturbing news from France during this week's heat wave, three very young children were reported dead in two separate incidents, having got trapped inside overheated cars. Cases where children are accidentally left in hot vehicles by their parents or get in themselves and are unable to get out because of child locks are distressingly common and are known to cause the deaths of around forty children every year in the US alone.

Well, this is an issue that truly is very misunderstood. Um, the overwhelming majority of these tragedies happen when an otherwise loving, responsible parent or caregiver loses awareness of that child in the vehicle and forgets that they're there. Most of the time it's a situation where, you know, it's a missed daycare drop-off.

Obviously a lot of America grapples with very high temperatures in the summer. How hot does it have to be to get dangerous to a child in a car?

Well, that's a great question. Um, so we have actually seen children die in hot cars on days when it was in the 60s outside, 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Um, and you know, that is pretty comfortable. Some might even say, um, you know, chilly.

Yeah.

That's like I think it's around twelve, thirteen degrees Celsius, something like that.

Yeah, yeah. So um what feels really nice outside for you and I um is a totally different story for a child who's inside an enclosed vehicle. So children, their little body temperatures rise three to five times faster than adults. And a vehicle that's closed up acts like a greenhouse. So it allows that heat to come in, but then there is nowhere for it to escape. And so that car heats up very quickly.

The lower temperature of danger that you mentioned i is actually m more closer to fifteen degrees Celsius, I'm just being told. You're calling for new car safety regulations to to stop these tragedies. What obstacles are you facing?

Well, right now we have um got a bill passed in the United States. And um the the bill calls for our federal department of transportation to issue a safety standard or a rule to the auto industry on technology that they have to include in all new vehicles.

Thank you, Amber Rollins. Executive Director of Kids and Car Safety in the US calling for those new regulations.

We wanted to understand why Mars evolved so differently from Earth. So Earth has something called platectonics, which constantly recycles its surface, but Mars doesn't have this. Instead, Mars's 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 twenty eighteen to twenty twenty two. 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. So one thing stood out to us and that was that the seismic waves were travelling much faster than expected through rocks that are about twenty five to forty kilometers beneath the Martian surface.

So what did you actually find underneath Mars's surface?

So 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

Because the Earth has tectonic plates and Mars doesn't, is that right?

Absolutely. So the surface of Earth is broken up into these big blocks and they move relative to one another. And where these plates meet are where you get lots of big earthquakes. It's where you get volcanoes. And it's a bit like a conveyor belt. It constantly overturns Earth's surface and makes volcanoes and that sort of stuff. But Mars doesn't have that. It's what we call a stagnant lid planet. So its surface is just static.

And why are these magmatic systems, as they're called, so important?

So one particular importance is that 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 crowd.

So where does all this put us when we're thinking about alien life elsewhere, not on Mars?

So ultimately we think planets may not require Earth like plate tectonic to develop the environments that are capable of supporting life. And so habitable planets could be far more common than we previously thought. 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.

That was Mars researcher Dr. Tobamori Mackay Champion, wrapping up this edition of NewsHour. Thank you very much for listening.

The Signal Awards recognize the podcasts that define culture, and being honored by the Signal Awards sets your production team apart with recognition. The industry's top experts and access proof that your work is a standard bearer for podcasting worldwide. By entering your work is heard by the Signal Awards Judging Academy, an invitation-only body of podcasting. Podcast professionals from acclaimed organizations to