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With leaders from NATO countries gathered in Washington to mark 75 years of the alliance, Vladimir Putin also seems to be seizing the moment to grab some attention. Putin likes to mark significant events with violent demonstrations, your demonstrations of his importance. I'm Carolyn Bueller. And I'm Marco Wormand. We're also taking a look back today at recent history in U.S.-China relations. When Xi Jinping first rose to power, officials in Washington thought of him as a reformer.
They couldn't have been more wrong. They were far removed from reality. And we'll meet some athletes getting ready for this summer's Paralympic Games in Paris. Cessi foot players compete in one of the toughest events. Blind soccer. This experience is very important for life. All that and more today, here on the world. This is the world. I'm Marco Wormand. And I'm Carolyn Bueller. Thanks for being with us this Tuesday.
Washington is hosting a NATO summit this week marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Western military alliance. The challenge from NATO in 2024 is to assert its credibility for the future by showing that it's up to its central task of deterring military aggression against each of its 32 member states. There's also a lot of attention on one country that is not a member state. I would say the key issue there is what the alliance does and does not do in support of Ukraine.
Ian Brzynski, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council speaking there to the Associated Press. During an appearance on Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also talked about NATO's top priorities in Europe. Today we're facing a massive global security challenge after Putin's unprovoked, all-out invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago. Together with our allies, we move to strengthen our defenses, upgrade our posture, and deter further Russian aggression.
We've taken steps toward building a credible bridge to Ukraine's eventual membership in NATO. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky touched down in Washington last night. That was just after Russia had launched a daytime salvo of missiles on cities across Ukraine. Leaders of the summit in Washington were expected to finalize a joint declaration to make Ukraine's pathway to NATO membership, quote, irreversible, that something the government and Kiev had been hoping for.
As the NATO summit got underway in Washington, Russia's Vladimir Putin was hosting India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Moscow. Photos of the two of them hugging circulated as NATO leaders sat down to talk. We reached out to NATO historian Mary Sarati and asked what she thought about the timing of the Putin Modi meeting. I suspect Putin is trying to show that he is welcome in foreign capitals, even if he is obviously not welcome in NATO capitals.
Putin has in the past attended NATO summits, and obviously that's not happening now. So I think this is a certain amount of counter-programming. There's also truly stomach-turning counter-programming in the form of the bombing of the children's hospital in Kiev for the start of the summit. And so what message would you think that Putin is trying to send with this especially deadly wave of missiles aimed at Ukraine yesterday?
Putin likes to mark significant events with violent demonstrations or demonstrations of his importance. He likes to show his significance on key dates by generally violent displays, and that includes both cyber violence as well as real-world violence. And I think this is part of that pattern. As a historian, for example, when I looked back into the past, I noticed a disturbing trend of Putin receiving violent tributes on his birthday.
So for example, your fellow journalist, Anna Polakova-Skaya, a brave woman, who was one of the few who was willing to report from Chechnya during the war there. She was walking home carrying groceries one day, shot to death from close range. The day was October 7, 2006. That's Putin's birthday. Fast forward ten years, the drop of emails hacked from the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign by Russian military intelligence.
October 7, 2016, Putin's birthday and so forth. I could just keep going through a list. So we're talking about Putin and antagonism of NATO. We can trace that back to the 90s as the Soviet Union and the West were negotiating over the reunification of Germany. And there was talk about the limits to expansion of NATO eastward. There is some debate on my story about what exactly was promised. What has your research found about what the final agreements contain?
As part of the Unification of Germany, basically the West had to convince the then Soviet Union, which was occupying East Germany to withdraw its troops. And the question was what would Moscow want in exchange? And at an early phase in the negotiation, there was speculation, not a promise, but speculation that NATO could offer a non-expansion pledge.
But what happened in the end was actually the opposite. It turned out there was a strategy that Bob Gates, the former defense secretary at that point, who was a young policymaker called bribing the Soviets out. And that was what happened. So in the end, the treaty and German Unification explicitly allows NATO to expand Eastward. And Moscow signed this treaty, ratified it, and cash the associated check.
Putin ignores all that. He's cherry picking history and basically going back to an early round of the negotiation to try to justify what he's doing in Ukraine, which I do not believe is justified. I believe what he is doing is a series of war crimes. And what Putin says is that the West promised us not one inch of Eastward NATO expansion, correct?
Yes, that's what he said. And to be exact, I mean, historian, right? So I work with the documents that was those words were spoken in an early negotiation round. But that was I repeat, a speculative offer in the course of months of negotiation. What actually is in the treaty at the end is the opposite. NATO is allowed to expand its Article 5 territory Eastward. Article 5 is the heart of the NATO treaty. It's the clause of the treaty that says an attack on one will be treated as an attack on all.
And the treaty on German unification explicitly allows that to move Eastward. This is what Putin ignores. He is cherry picking history and going back to the earlier speculative comments made by US Secretary of State James Baker. Still with the agreement itself being quite clear as you're saying there has been this history of antagonism between Russia and NATO.
Are there alternative paths that the West and East might have taken to balance the interests of NATO members and Russia's security concerns that might have landed us in a different place today? I think what really mattered was actions inside Russia because Russia became a democracy and then it rapidly de-democratized.
In particular, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin decided to use violence again as a tool of domestic politics. In October 1993 he ordered tanks to shoot at his own parliament killing 100 people and sending 800 to the hospital. And that's what made countries in the West think, oh wait, maybe we can't actually be partners with Russia. And it became worse when he then invaded Chechnya in December 1994.
So I personally think there was a window in the early 90s where better cooperation could have been possible. That it was happening in the terms of strategic nuclear disarmament, but then the domestic developments, the de-democratization and of course the rise of Putin to power basically put paid to that. Mary Saratih is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of Not One Inge, America, Russia and the making of post-Cold war stalemate.
The president-elect of Iran has a reformist reputation and that helped him at the ballot box last week. My suit possessed Kean overwhelmingly defeated an ultra conservative opponent in the election there. But what does it mean exactly to be a reformist in Iran? We have seen a to see to describe Pigeon's political backstory to see his with the Center for International Policy in Washington. Ever since he's been engaged in politics, he's been on the reformist end of the spectrum in Iran.
He has always tried to strike a more non-partisan position within Iran's political landscape, saying that he's not with either conservative establishment parties or reformist establishment parties, but his politics has been very much on the reformist end of the spectrum.
And his reputation within Iran is pro reform. He's consistently criticized crackdowns by the government, whether in the 2009 Green Movement protests that we saw, and also during the 2022 Women Life Freedom protests where he went on state television publicly criticized the killing of Massa Amini. Yes, so given all that history, what does it mean exactly to be a reformist in Iran today?
So the reformist movement as represented by the reformist establishment in Iran has been very battered and has lost a lot of public legitimacy in recent years, especially with what large parts of the electorate and many Iranians who are disillusioned with the political status quo.
They had unmet expectations, both of the administration of Khatami and Rohani and many people reached a conclusion that given the entrenched hardline power centers and the unelected institutions that the presidency doesn't have enough power to bring about the change that they would like to see. And then he won over hardline rival in an election where turnout in the first round of this election reached a historic low of 40%, which reflected widespread disillusionments in the political process.
So when it was ham against a very radical conservative turnout increased to 50%, and I think both of these factors, both the low turnout and both the percentage of the electorate that did turn out in order for a position, it's a clear message of a desire for change from the Iranian people. You also mentioned the death of Masa Amini and the mass protests that followed, will people who have protested against the regime in Iran find relief or protection with Pzezhekian?
Yes, so Iran civil society and human rights activists and political prisoners have been split on Pzezhekian have been split on participating in this election. So we saw that there were many pro-democracy activists who in the past had participated in elections and voted for reformists candidates and they said that they opposed participating in this elections.
But at the same time, we saw prominent pro-democracy activists and political prisoners like Kavon Samimi who wrote a big kind of article that gained a lot of traction in Iran arguing for the need to vote for Pzezhekian and that in their fight against authoritarianism that the reformist government would be someone they could negotiate. And bring about more positive changes, especially when the alternative was a much more hard line candidate.
Right, and of course, looming all over this is the ultimate political authority in Iran, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Hamani. How would you describe the relationship between him and Iranian reformists? And is that where Pzezhekian, you think, will find his reformist ambitions really called into check?
Pzezhekian has differentiated himself from the approach of Rohani or Khatami by explicitly saying that he does not want to take a confrontational approach to hominay and his policy frameworks and that he wants to act within the policy frameworks of the Supreme Leader.
And Khatami, after this period of really the failure of this conservative government in kind of bringing about positive development for the Iranian people, may decide to give some concessions towards the reformist camp and visit Shion in the wake of these protests to bring about some changes. But that remains to be seen.
And wondering how much influence Pzezhekian will have over Iran's foreign policy? I mean, could you imagine Iran's role in several regional conflicts changing when he becomes president? Yes, so the overall strategic direction of Iran's foreign policy, the president can't change. That is said, you know, by the Supreme Leader, the revolutionary guards basically run the regional policy, you know, with respect to Israel, Iran's support for Hezbollah, for Hamas.
And Pzezhekian is not going to be able to decisively change Iranian foreign policy, but he will be able to do things like prioritize a serious diplomatic process with the United States to try to restore some kind of nuclear deal and negotiate perhaps on more effectively on these regional theaters. Sina, 35,000 foot headline, what is the single biggest challenge facing Masud Pzezhekian as he begins his term as president?
The effect of sanctions has really been the main cause of economic malaise and stagnation in Iran for many years now. And these difficult economic conditions that has contributed to a lot of people not voting or a lot of people hoping that Pzezhekian can change the situation. So whether he can get the lifting of some of these sanctions or not is going to be decisive for his legacy. Sina Tussi is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. He joined us from Washington.
At Wimbledon last night, the crowd got a little feisty. It was nothing new for Novak, Jokovic. The 24-time grand slam champion thought spectators were booing him in his match against Holger Roon. I think Novak doesn't know. I think it's the Roon. It's Roon. So he's like, what do they do? They think they're booing. As ESPN's announcers pointed out, Jokovic didn't seem to get that fans were actually cheering his opponent's name Roon.
Or maybe fans knew exactly what they were doing. Either way, Jokovic won the match in straight sets and had this to say after. And to all those people that have chosen to disrespect the player, in this case me, have a good night. Advantage, humor. You're listening to the world. Hey there. I've got a quick favor to ask you. We are doing a listener survey to learn more about how you listen, what you like about our show, and maybe what we could improve on.
It takes about two minutes to fill out, and we would be grateful if you did. You can find that survey at survey.prx.org slash world. Thank you. This is the world. I'm Carolyn Beeler. Now that France's whirlwind elections have wrapped up, the country is turning its attention back to hosting the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Paralympic start in late August. One of the most challenging team events is Blind Football. That is soccer played by athletes who are visually impaired or blind.
A few nights a week, players have been getting together for training on the outskirts of Paris in Sensandanie. The world's Europe correspondent Orla Berry went to check it out. The first thing you notice about a game of blind football is that I can get really noisy on the pitch. Footballers shout boy, boy constantly to let the other players know where they are. Boy is actually a Spanish term, which means I'm going. The sport originated in Spain in the 1920s.
But while it might be noisy on the pitch, it stands their silence. How do you feel about the game? It's like in tennis, coach Samir Kasama says, the referee will stop the match and demand silence from the crowd he says. The players need to be able to concentrate. Kasama, who's also the co-founder of the Bondi Blind Football Club, is on the pitch throughout the game, calling out instructions to his team.
The pitch is around five or six times smaller than your average soccer field. Trainer Priscilla Karola Costa tells me. And each team has four players and goalkeeper. The goalies are sighted, but all the players are blind, are visually impaired. And they must wear a blacked-out mask over their eyes, she says, to ensure total equality. Their barrier is running the length of the pitch to stop the ball from going wide. And that ball makes a really distinctive sound.
It's sort of like a constant rattling sound. So the players can keep track of where it is throughout a match. Blind football was first included as an official sport in the Paralympics in 2004. One of the players, Martin Barron, who's been blind since birth, tells me it was around then that he picked it up too. For me, it was the competitiveity with a team. This experience is very important for life simply.
Whether his team wins or loses, Barron says it's competing. That's the most important part. Barron already has a silver medal. He played with a French team during the London Olympics in 2012. Although he doesn't know just yet, if you'll be picked for the squad in August. We're training a lot for that. Just now I can't just help. We'll find out sometime this month he says. Barron and his teammates practice taking shots at the goal.
Trainer Priscilla Corolla cast her, stands at one side of the goal. She taps the goal post. This is the right post, she says. Then she does the same on the other side. Before the player takes a shot. Mamadouthi Am, who's been blind since birth, tells me he started playing the sport as a teenager in Malin. He always dreamed of playing professional soccer, he says. The goal is to make sure that he's playing the sport, allows me to fulfill that dream.
Coach Samir Gassama says he doesn't think about the player's disabilities. He expects them to train like top athletes. In August, eight teams from around the world will compete during the Paralympics. It's not going to be easy, Gassama says. France is the rainy European champion, he says. But these are the top teams in the world. We're hoping for a medal, he says. But honestly, it's going to be hard. For the world, I'm all about Paris.
For a long time, migrants leaving West Africa have made their way to Europe seeking a better future. Now many of them say it's become tougher to get by in European countries, so more West Africans are risking the dangerous and longer circuitous route to the United States. Once they get to the southern border, however, new difficulties begin. KQED's Catherine Monahan reports from California's Bay Area.
At the Home Depot in Emeryville, a young man from Senegal is sliding boards onto the top of a pickup truck. It's a way to make a few bucks from customers who want help loading their purchases. In the corner of the parking lot, about 10 other recently arrived migrants are chatting in Wolof while they wait their turn. One of them is 25-year-old POP, who is using his nickname because of his undocumented status.
He tells me in French, they didn't want to leave Senegal, but the conditions pushed them out. Political violence has shaken Senegal in recent years and unemployment is high, so POP became one of nearly 30,000 Senegalese to cross the US-Mexico border just in the last two years, up from almost none before them. First he flew to Nicaragua, where analysts say the government is facilitating migration to the US, partly in retaliation against US sanctions.
A chain of smugglers then brought POP through Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico demanding more and more money along the way. He says they were like mafia, high-level criminals, threatening him and his fellow migrants with machetes and guns. If he died there, he wondered how would his family even know. After about a month, POP arrived in Tijuana and surrendered himself to US Border Patrol. To his shock, agents chained him by the wrists and ankles and put him in detention.
A Dubu-Trowray directs the African Advocacy Network in San Francisco, which helps the growing number of African migrants in the Bay Area. Advocacy groups report that black migrants in immigration detention centers are more likely to be put into solitary confinement or denied medical treatment or assaulted. And then after release, Trowray says they remain at a disadvantage, even those like POP who have a university education. Black migrants, but you are on the west coast, we're kind of invisible.
We are heavily, heavily under employed and this is such a waste, I mean, how can you leave all these bright young people on the sidewalk? To apply for asylum, migrants must complete a 12-page form in English. That was hard enough for POP, who speaks French, but many West Africans need translation into their unique tribal languages. Maria Ryan is an immigration attorney with the African Advocacy Network.
Immigration law is really complex and really like what we find is they don't even understand what they're supposed to be doing. The current surge in migration means that many pro bono translation and legal services were stretched thin. Back at the Emryville Home Depot, POP is finishing up a day of work. He wants to apologize to Americans for crossing the border legally, but he asks that we understand his humanity.
His dream is to continue his education and get a master's in business administration, but for now, he says he just has to work. For the world, I'm Catherine Monahan, Emryville, California. You're listening to the world. City officials in Barcelona say that pigeons are out of control. Our reporter goes on the scene. I'm guessing they're about 300 birds now around my feet. And now a bunch of tourists are taking photos of me.
Then he meets the folks who can't stop feeding the pigeons, survival of the fattest ahead on the world. This is the world. I'm Marco Wurman. And I'm Carolyn Beeler. With NATO leaders gathering in Washington this week, there's a lot of attention on the ties between the United States and its closest allies. Relatively speaking, the alliances between those Western nations are pretty clear and solid. Much less clear is the relationship between the US and China.
Chinese leaders Xi Jinping has been a senior figure in Beijing for more than 15 years. In other words, he's been part of some fraught interactions with three different American presidents. The summer, we're examining these tensions with Jane Perles, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and former Beijing bureau chief for the New York Times. She hosts the podcast Face Off, the US versus China. Jane, welcome back.
Good to be here, Marco. So Xi Jinping has been empowering China through the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. And we've seen pretty dramatic changes over those years. Let's go back though to 2012 as the page is about to turn. Barack Obama is the US president. Xi Jinping is vice president of China. And China, Watchers in Washington are looking at Xi with hope. Explain how that is.
Well, I think one of the best examples of that, Marco, is an amazing lunch I attended at the State Department where Xi Jinping was guest of honor. It was lunch on Valentine's Day 2012. Xi Jinping was just about to become president of China. He was vice president at the time. Then vice president Biden was the host, all the important American businessmen, diplomats, officials involved in China were there.
Everyone was weathed in smiles. They couldn't have looked happier. Not because it was Valentine's Day, but because they thought Xi was going to be a reformer that US and China would get along as they had. That continued trade and business between the US and China would change China into a more open society. They couldn't have been more wrong. They were far removed from reality.
Not everyone got it wrong, though. You spoke with Minching Pay, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College, who says the reformer label was purely which we're thinking by the West. And of 2012, after it became the party chief, we went to Guangdong and delivered probably of the cuff remarks in which he said, what happened to the Soviet Union? We need to be aware of. The party became too soft to deny, protect its ideology overnight, a party of tens of millions of people just disintegrated.
So, Jane, does Xi Jinping see the collapse of the Soviet Union as kind of a warning for China? Absolutely. He saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a big warning. It didn't want that to happen to China. Xi, of course, grew up as a loyal member of the Communist Party. But more than most Chinese leaders with the exception of Mao Zedong, he really is an ideology freak.
He really seems to believe the Communist Party is China's salvation, particularly his brand of Chinese communism, which requires total loyalty to the state. And the ideology these days is framed around Xi's own thoughts. He believes more in a state-run economy than an economy with capitalist strands. He believes, for example, that women should play a subservient role and stay in the home.
Right, so this is the backdrop when President Obama and President Xi meet in person in California in 2013. It was supposed to be an informal meeting. That meeting didn't go well. That's a mentioning pay again, who describes it as a swing and a miss. I think that meeting was suggested by the US. There's a get to know you. A lot of things were off. I think Xi Jinping proposed the idea of new type of great power relations, which the US did not embrace. So that was a downer for him.
And I think by the time probably Xi already was convinced that the US was declining power. He did not, to be as solicitous as his predecessors. Jane, you point out that around the same time the relationship that is taking off is the one between Xi and Russia's Vladimir Putin, right? For sure. Xi and Putin have met more than 40 times. It's incredible. They really seem to like each other's company. It just doesn't seem to be just formalities.
But more important, Xi Jinping sees Putin as a useful tool to keep threatening the US. Xi is supporting Putin to war in Ukraine. This is an important strand for China to complicate life for the US. There's actually not a lot of respect by the Chinese people for Russia. Historically, but Xi Jinping is trying to make Russia more of a friend of China's than it's been in a long, long time.
Interesting. All right. So in 2017, Donald Trump enters the White House. How does that change Xi's posture toward the US? Well, as mentioned, Pays says she attempted to play to Trump's personality. He got one thing about Trump, right? And he got many things about Trump wrong. Once he got Trump, right? Trump is a very vain, narcissistic man. So he would treat him like an emperor. But what did not know about Trump is that Trump never returns favors.
So it says that Trump takes everything for granted. So that extraordinary show of respect did not register with Trump that China expects things in return. Yeah, it's absolutely right. Because after Trump was treated to all those grand gestures, he went back to DC and basically told China get lost. He started the trade war. He raised tariffs about 25% on a whole array of goods from solar panels to steel, sneakers to washing machines right across the board.
So, going back to 2021 when Joe Biden becomes president, Biden and Xi already knew each other. They met 10 years earlier when they were both vice presidents of their countries at the same time, right? That's right. Yes, they first met in 2011 in China. They met actually on a basketball court. Biden invited Xi to play, but Xi cleverly demurred. They took a stroll. They seemed to be superficially quite friendly, underneath it all, not quite so clear.
To see him Biden met again in Beijing in 2013, Biden had this to say. I know the man. I know his motor, Saperana. He's been, we have disagreements. He has a different view than I have in a lot of things, but he's been straight. I don't mean that it's good, bad or indifferent. It's just been straight. When you spoke with Minching Pay, though, Jane, he had a different read on then vice president Biden's time with Xi Jinping.
Chinese leaders are pretty good at wasting these hours without showing what they really think. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party has very strict rules about talking to foreigners, even if you are very senior leader. Biden probably overestimated the amount of information he was able to extract from those hours spent with Xi Jinping. So Jane, after Obama and Trump, the US-China relationship is pretty badly fractured.
Biden, as you explained, comes into office having some personal history with Xi himself. Where has the US-China relationship gone since then? Not Shell, not well. Biden is called Xi Jinping, harsh names, a dictator, a thug. Though he also brags about knowing Xi better than any other world leader and knowing he better than any past US presidents. But the bottom line is that Biden has pretty much continued the hard line of Trump on China.
There are tough export controls on American high-end technology. And I think what the terms of Chinese a great deal is how Biden has convinced Japan and South Korea, America's closest Asian allies, to turn against China. China feels this is designed to keep China down, to stop China from becoming a world power, and they're not wrong in thinking that, of course. Biden and Xi met in person again in 2023 on US soil. Did that change anything? Not really. They met in San Francisco last November.
They had not seen each other since COVID. In part, there was hope that things might go better because the Chinese economy was already faltering and there was some hope that Xi may need the United States. But that again was kind of naive. In San Francisco it was really just a papering over of the deep differences and the pretty profound antagonism. Whoever enters the White House next Xi Jinping will still be in control of China through that person's for your term. Xi knows both Trump and Biden.
Can you venture to guess Jane how Xi is sizing up the current US election? Well all I can say is I think the Chinese are sitting back and enjoying the spectacle. They don't like Biden because as I mentioned he is reinforcing US allies in Asia and the Chinese see that as containment. They don't like Trump because he's unpredictable and many of Trump's aides are virulently anti-China. But my bet is that they like Trump more than Biden.
That's Jane Pearl as the former Beijing bureau chief of the New York Times and host of face-off the US versus China. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. The corridor in 2008 became the first country in the world to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution. Now a court there says the Machangara River that flows through the capital of Kido has not been adequately protected. The legal ruling is being seen as a historic victory for the rights of rivers in particular.
Natalia Green is an environmental activist who played a role in getting the rights of nature into Ecuador's constitution. We reached her in her office this afternoon and I asked her what the Machangara River's court case is all about. This is a river that is very polluted. It's a very polluted river that unfortunately only 2% of the water of the river as the municipality says is treated.
So the Machangara River is a river that is born in the Atacaso here in the Montenegro of Kido crosses the city. There is a capital city of Kido and then goes down to the to meet the Wajaramba and then as Meral doesn't then to the Pacific Ocean. Because it's born in the Atacaso River as soon as it crosses the city it's completely polluted and it's becoming a threat to the health not only of the people from Kido but of the whole country.
Take a consideration that Ecuador is a country that recognizes the rights of nature. All of this nature has rights but there is a need to intervene with legal justice in cases like this one where you have an ecosystem that is completely dead. It's polluted with what sewage and industrial runoff things like that. The river is a sewage. You know, it's like an open sewage. There's industrial waste as well. Companies that are like washing their cars and so on.
Today the press conference that we had in the environmental engineer mentioned that there are only very year 11 sanctions given to people that are polluting the river 11. The municipality has done very little to preserve the river and to control what comes into the river and is pretty much a sewage. So what exactly did the court rule here in terms of upholding the river's rights? So we have been working for more than a year with this case.
Putting together the evidence there have been many universities studying the health of the river and the state of the river and how it used to be before and we decided to place this action the protection. The ruling that the judges heard these in two hearings, the last one was last Friday and the judge reaffirmed the Rio Machangara has rights which is very important. And then the judge said that there is the need for integral restoration of the river. Very important parts of the ruling.
It allows us to push these municipalities and the municipalities that will come to have a plan that is like a long term plan to clean the river. If right now you cannot get into the river, you cannot drink the water. If you have the risk of getting all these millions of diseases as soon as you touch the water of the river, then the river is dead and then something needs to be done about it. And so this is definitely a huge victory and it completely feels my heart.
So what is your hope for what this river will look like once it gets cleaned up and how it might be able to be used by people in Kido and both upstream and downstream? A couple of months ago there was an older guy with Alzheimer who was caught in the river. And when the police tried to get him out, he said that he was going to bathe in the river because he remembered bathe in the river when he was younger and he couldn't remember and now that he was so polluted.
And that made us realize that it wasn't so long ago where people were bathe in his river. And that we want that. We want our children to bathe in that river. We want to go and walk through the river. And there's a beautiful poem that says that this river used to smell like mint. Smell like mint, like experiment. Mint. Our lawyers have actually finished their petition by saying, please, Mrs. Judge, allow this river to smell like mint again.
Natalia Green is an activist with a global alliance for the rights of nature in Ecuador. Like many cities, Barcelona has a pigeon problem. Several reasons for that, there are tons of places for pigeons to nest there, as well as tourists happy to feed them. But the real culprits officials say are the so-called super feeders. They are locals who everyday dole out kilos of crumbs and seeds, keeping tens of thousands of pigeons plump and vital, primed for reproduction.
From Barcelona, the world's Jerry Haddon reports. In the center of Barcelona, on the wide iconic Plaza Cataluña, Pepe Lopez snaps photos of her nine-year-old grandson, Gabrielle. Gabrielle's covered in pigeons. They're roosting on his arms and shoulders. They're all eyeing the same thing. The fistful of sunflower seeds in Gabrielle's right hand. No, no, no. No. Aren't you scared, I ask him? Not at all, he says. It's amusing. They're little claws tickle, he says. They give me goose bumps.
Little Gabrielle may not know it, but his sweet-looking grandmother sitting there on a park bench is wanted by local authorities. She's one of hundreds of pigeons' super-featers, people who spend a lot of time tossing a lot of food to the birds. I usually buy my bread crumbs in the supermarket, Lopez says. I brought this big bag, see? I've been in Barcelona for 60 years and we always come to this plaza, she says, to feed the pigeons. Multiply granny Lopez by 350.
That's the estimated number of super-featers in town, and well, that makes for a lot of happy pigeons. 40,000 pigeons says Carmen Mate, she heads the city's animal welfare service. We estimate that we have around 1,100 pigeons per square kilometer in Barcelona, she says, when a healthy number would be a quarter of that.
So the city is trying to rein in the feeding, using mainly persuasion, convincing the super-featers to keep their crumbs to themselves, but it isn't easy, says Mate, because most of the super-featers are elderly and alone. There are people who feel ostracized socially, she says. Often they're only connection to another living creature comes through feeding pigeons.
So social workers are treading lightly, trying to build relationships with them, hoping to gain their trust before even talking pigeons. To find the super-featers, they depend largely on complaints from residents. The cafe on another pigeon-filled plaza, barista Diana San Mudio, says she holds down two jobs because of the birds, serving her customers and cleaning up pigeon droppings. There's this woman who sits just outside, she says, and tosses them breadcrumbs.
We have to chase her off to keep our tables clean. She's just left San Mudio, tells me, you could have interviewed her. But officials asked me to leave the super-featers alone. They worry that attention from media could undermine their efforts to win the feeders over. Besides the super-feater campaign, officials are now using specially treated seeds that leave pigeons sterile, and its banned bird seed sales in the touristy parts of town.
But back at Placecatelina, I ask for bird-feeds straight up at a souvenir stand. Sure, the woman says, three euros. I sit down on the same bench where the grandmother Pepe Lopez usually sits. I open my little pouch and sprinkle a few seeds at my feet. Oh my god, here they come. I'm guessing they're about 300 birds now around my feet. Woo! And now a bunch of tourists are taking photos of me.
Out on the plaza, a young couple sets their baby on the ground, sprinkle seeds on her lap, and films the frenzy. Meanwhile, other kids chase after pigeons, as kids do, and tourists do the selfie thing. They hide overhead several much larger bird-circle. Seagulls. Turns out they're moving inland, attracted in part by the easy meal they find in pigeons. The city says they've got an eye on the gold population now too. But when they're eating, they're eating one. It's transformed.
And animal welfare is common. Mate says seagulls in large enough numbers transform. They become very aggressive, she says, and they're considerably bigger than pigeons. But unlike pigeons, she says, seagulls bite. For the world, I'm Jerry Haddon, Barcelona. This is the world I'm Carolyn Beeler. Every once in a while there's a food or ingredient so integral to a culture that it holds an almost magical status. For Jews with family roots in Yemen, that would be Hilbe.
It's a greenish yellow sauce made from fenugreek seeds and a staple for Yemenite Jews. It's not often found outside the Middle East. Reporter Sarah Venturi recently developed a taste for the sauce in her neighborhood in Jerusalem. There's a full-offel shop across the street from my apartment in Jerusalem. It's a classic in the neighborhood. It's been there since before Israel was even a state. Every time I order, the guy behind the counter asks me a very important question. Do I want Hilbe?
The first time this happened, I didn't know what Hilbe was. So I just said, again, yes, I'll try some Hilbe. When I got home, my Yemenite roommate was hanging out with his cousin, Itema Kahvani. I told them I didn't know what Hilbe was and Itema said, When you eat Hilbe, it's like when Popeye eats spinach. It makes your muscle grow and you can lift anything you want. Yeah, it's a powerful stuff. I feel sorry for you that he spent so much time on this planet and you hadn't tasted Hilbe.
This is my Yemenite roommate, Eli Wyman. All your previous memories won't have any color for them anymore. This will be different. When you think about your life before Hilbe and I are different. It turns out that by many standards, Hilbe and Itema weren't exaggerating by all that much. Hilbe really is the stuff of legend. There's a claim that Yemenite babies will come out of their mother's womb smelling of Hilbe. This is Susan Wiengarten.
She's a food historian specializing in late antique Jewish sources. Then your Greek seeds have an extremely strong and specific taste. You either love it or you hate it. Technically, the fenugreek seeds are what is actually called Hilbe. But usually when people talk about Hilbe, they're referring to the sauce, which is marked by the taste and scent of those seeds. It's slightly sulfurous, I think you probably have to say.
It comes out in the sweat, so if you're reading it, other people will know about it. The first evidence I've found comes from the first century. The legend of Hilbe includes a laundry list of supposed health benefits. I've heard that Hilbe lowers your cholesterol, helps ward off diabetes, assists in milk production and nursing women, can be used as a pre-workout drink, kind of like a protein shake. Manage's blood pressure helps prevent hair loss.
The full list, which has not been evaluated by a doctor, goes on and on. Now if you go into any Yemenite community in Israel, especially on a Friday afternoon, it's almost certain you'll find someone eating Hilbe, floated on top of chicken soup as a pre-sabuth meal. And it's always made for his right. I met the Kahalani's home in Amina Dav, a small, mostly Yemenite community southwest of Jerusalem, and the whole family is here. Eli's uncle Alon Kahalani has agreed to show me how to make Hilbe.
For making Hilbe, we need several things, okay? This is Eli again, Alon's nephew. Grinder? Yes. Srog. Srog is a spicy Yemenite sauce that can be used by itself or added to Hilbe. Garlic, lemon. And cilantro. This is the thing that we need for Hilbe and the soul. Alon picks up a clear glass bowl of fennel Greek seeds that have been soaking overnight. You can see them at the bottom. They've absorbed some of the water and puffed up a bit.
And the rest of the water in the bowl resting on top has turned yellow. Usually, I drink this water before I use the Hilbe because it's very healthy. So if you want to test it, you can test it. I do want to test it, yeah. Hi. Yeah. Right, fine. The Hilbe water is sharp, bitter, almost a little metallic. Okay, so we will start. I love this cookie like a bubble soap. It's hard to hear, but Alon says he wants it to be the consistency of bubble soap. And now Alon goes for a quick taste test.
He grabs a spoonful of the foamy, frothy, light green sauce with flecks of herbs dotted across it. That's it. Alon is laughing because after all this build up and with very little fanfare, Alon declares that he's produced the perfect bowl of Hilbe. My mother was a good teacher. How old are you when she thought you had to make it? When I was ten years. If you're not already sold on Hilbe, there's one final poetic metaphor embedded in it. It doesn't keep for very long.
You really have to eat it within 24 hours of making it. Otherwise it sort of loses its lustre. Although in the Kalani household, there's never any leftover. For the world, I'm Sarah Venturi, Jerusalem. If you like me just send to yourself, I've got to try that. You are in luck. We've got a recipe for Hilbe along with photos on our website, theworld.org. And we have got a bit of music for you to close out our show for the day. This is Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto, the Pipers of San Jacinto.
The group was created in the 1950s as a way to elevate Colombian culture and boost pride through a very early iteration of the Cumbia style. The band is carried that torch ever since across several generations of musicians. Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto are actually touring the US starting later this week. Through the end of September, check your local listings as they say. That is our show on this Tuesday.
The world comes to you every weekday from the man and bill, Harris Studio and the Department of Communication at UC San Diego. We are online at theworld.org and you can always catch up on shows you missed by listening to the world wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Carolyn Bealer. And I'm Marco Wormen, as always, thank you for being with us.