National Guard member dies after shooting in Washington DC

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

0:47I'm Janet Jalil, and in the early hours of Friday, the 28th of November, these are our main stories. President Trump says one of the two US National Guard soldiers shot in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday has died from her injuries. Video has emerged showing Israeli security forces shooting dead two Palestinians who appear to have surrendered in the occupied West Bank. More than 90 people are now known to have died in Hong Kong's worst fire in decades. Also in this podcast... What we love about cats is that they look amazing and they act amazing. And in this case, we just had to murder them first in order to sort of celebrate that loveliness about them.

1:29Surprising and rather gruesome new evidence has been found about how cats became domesticated.

1:42Thanksgiving in the US has turned to tragedy for the family of a member of the National Guard who was shot just yards from the White House on Wednesday. President Trump announced that the soldier, who was just 20 years old, had died from her injuries. Right now, I heard that Sarah Beckstrom of West Virginia, one of the guardsmen that we're talking about, highly respected, young, magnificent person, started service in June of 2023, outstanding in every way. She's just passed away. She's no longer with us. She's looking down at us right now. Her colleague, 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, is still fighting for his life after being left in a critical condition.

2:29A suspect has been named as Ramanullah Lakamwal, an Afghan national who was shot by other National Guard members at the scene and detained. It's since emerged that he worked with the CIA in Afghanistan before being granted asylum this year in the US. The authorities say he drove thousands of kilometres from the west coast to launch an ambush-style attack on the two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C. Our North America correspondent is Sean Dilley. It's the worst news the president could have delivered today at Thanksgiving when the nation is celebrating a very American and Canadian, it has to be said, tradition, marking this very sad news of an incredibly young soldier, National Guard, standing in the capital.

3:11and we obviously heard that she'd served with the National Guard since June of 2023. We were also aware of an interview her father Gary had given to the New York Times earlier in the day and during his interview he said that he was holding Sarah's hand. He was with her in the hospital that he felt that her injuries were mortal and it wasn't something that he felt she could survive from. So indeed she hasn't. She's succumbed to her injuries and it's an incredibly bitter pill to swallow on Thanksgiving of all days for Americans to be told that the suspected killer once stood shoulder to shoulder with US forces in Afghanistan.

3:50Sarah was a specialist. She'd been serving since June of 2023 and Sergeant Andrew Wolfe had been serving since 2019. They've both been with a mission here in Washington DC since August. Now the Trump administration says it's going to review the permanent residency status of every person from 19 countries, including Afghanistan, in the wake of this shooting? There's something called a green card. It's a certain category of immigrant visa that lets people permanently live and work. Now, what they haven't done is given any detail or even actually specific list. We do have a bit of an idea of countries that would be included.

4:25That would be Iran. That would be Afghanistan itself, the Republic of Congo, Chad, quite a few countries that previously been mentioned in proclamations by the White House. But how they would be further vetted we don't know but it wasn't just today that the White House and the US government under Donald Trump have spoken about national security risks they spoke about it in June in the proclamation and there was a separate executive order in January of 2025 so it's been an ongoing situation and now the US government has linked their announcement which is fairly sweeping to review the green card status of people from these 19 countries but what they haven't done has gone into any detail as to what that review process might look like.

5:04Sean Dilley. Video has emerged that shows Israeli security forces shooting dead two Palestinians after they'd surrendered in Jenin in the occupied West Bank. This comes as the Israeli military has been stepping up its operations in the north of the territory. Our Middle East analyst Sebastian Usher described the video. It shows an operation by the Israeli border force in Jenin. This is been a hotbed of violence for months and months. And you see two Palestinian men emerge crouching from a building. They then kneel down. At least one of them raises his shirt to show his bare chest, one would assume to show that he doesn't have weapons, he's not armed.

5:48There seems to be some communication between them and the border officers. And then after a short time, one of the And then starts to go back inside. This is a very small opening. So he's crouching down again. And then the other follows. And then shortly after that, they open fire, the border police, shooting at them point blank. Now, it looks when you see the video as if they're being directed to go back inside. But Army Radio in Israel has published what it says is the border police involved giving their version of events. And they seem to be, at least for now, taking a very different defence, saying that the men, the two men, had gone against their instructions, but they'd gone back into the building despite what the border police wanted.

6:39And that's why they opened fire. So a huge discrepancy there. But as I say, what you see on the video doesn't seem to back that version up. And the Palestinian Authority is calling this a summary execution, a war crime. What are the Israelis saying? Well, they said that it's under review. The Israeli military and the Israeli police saying that this was an operation that went on for hours, that it was an effort to get these two wanted men, as they described them, to surrender and that it was at the end of that process that this happened. The National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Kavir, who emerged from a settler movement very much on the far right, he has said that he fully backs the officers and that terrorists must die.

7:25And Sebastian, in a separate development, a 16-year-old Palestinian-American who's been in Israeli detention for nine months without charge has been freed after intense pressure from US lawmakers. Yes, that's Mohammed Ibrahim. He was arrested back in February when he was 15 years old. He's a US Palestinian national. He was visiting his family in the West Bank when there was a raid in the middle of the night. He was taken away. He was accused essentially of throwing objects, throwing stones at settlers, vehicles. There's some discrepancy about whether he was actually charged or not. The Guardian newspaper, which broke the story, says that actually he was charged and that in order to get released, he gave a guilty plea amidst a suspended sentence.

8:12But I think that's unclear. He's saying he never threw stones. He was just forced to confess. He denied it throughout. And what his family has found particularly shocking, besides obviously his detention for nine months, is his condition, his physical condition when he was released. They say that he's lost a quarter of his body weight. He has had various sicknesses and he was taken straight into hospital after being released where he's being treated. I mean, Palestinians will point to it as emblematic of the plight of many young Palestinians there. It comes to light essentially because he is American and that pressure, as you say, from the Americans made it that it was a case where he was going to get released.

8:58Obviously, there are many other cases where that doesn't happen. Sebastian Usher, as we record this podcast, it's nearly 48 hours since flames began spreading through multiple high-rise apartment buildings in Hong Kong in what has now become the deadliest fire in the territory for decades. The inferno, which tore through seven of eight tower blocks, has killed more than 90 people. But it's feared that number could rise even higher as hundreds are still missing. The fires have now largely been put out and firefighters are moving from floor to floor of the scorched, smouldering tower blocks as they search for residents who may not have been able to escape in time.

9:41The Hong Kong Deputy Director of Fire Services, Wong Ka-wing, says it's still a very dangerous situation for the emergency services. Our major challenge is the temperature is very high in the fire ground and the inside layout is very compact because the scaffolding is collapsed. And our firefighters need to conference the high temperature to proceed to the fire ground layer by layer. It is very difficult for us. The tower blocks had been undergoing extensive renovations and police say construction materials on the outside of the buildings may have been why the fire spread so far and so rapidly.

10:20A criminal investigation is being launched following the arrest of three executives who were in charge of the renovation works. Our correspondent in Hong Kong, Danny Vincent, told me more. We know that the firefighters said they hope to finish checking off the apartment this morning, we know that hundreds of people are still considered missing. On the ground, when I visited the scene, there are fears that the missing people, the people unaccounted for, sadly, possibly may not have been able to survive or escape. So there's fears now that that death toll will continue to rise. And 48 hours on, it now seems that the fires are mostly under control.

11:04That's right. The authorities say that the firefighters have most of the fires under control now. I was at the scene for most of the day and late until the night yesterday. And even at that stage, more than 24 hours after the flames originally engulfed the building, there were still many apartments that were still on fire. And you could see firefighters spraying large streams of water literally non-stop at windows to try to get the flames out. So it was an absolutely huge fire. It's been a huge tragedy for people in Hong Kong. But the fear now is that this situation hasn't ended. People expect the death toll to rise.

11:45And there's also now many questions being asked about why this fire escalated so quickly. The authorities said it escalated in an unusual way. And there are now people, at least on the ground and especially online, asking for people to be accountable. There's many questions that still need to be answered. People are now getting increasingly angry. There's been several arrests. There's now an incorruption inquiry going on. People are saying, how could this have happened? Why weren't there at least alarms going off when the fire started? That's right. On the ground, there are still a large number of people just looking on at the scene of the fire.

12:27I've spoken to many of them, and that the feeling on the ground is still one of mourn and of sorrow. But online, there are huge calls about the questions revolving around why this started. There have been three arrests of construction company executives. The authorities say those arrests are connected to suspicion of manslaughter. They've connected that to possible flammable material. Hong Kongers are definitely becoming increasingly angry, essentially, about this incident. and they want to know what has happened. Much of the speculation has been around two pieces of building material. The first is bamboo scaffolding.

13:08Some people claim that that is flammable and that might have been the reason why the flames spread so quickly. There's also a lot of speculation about some of the meshing that's used across all of the buildings during this renovation period. One person I spoke to yesterday, the day, they said they think this is a real big test for the government. People on the ground seem to have a level of patience about getting the answers to those questions. But online, you can definitely feel that anger is growing. And at some point, the authorities are going to need to have clear answers and quite quickly for the Hong Kong public.

13:44Danny Vincent in Hong Kong. Now, cat lovers the world over may be surprised to hear how and when their feline friends first became domesticated. Gregor Larson, who is a professor of evolutionary genomics at the University of Oxford, busted a few myths while compiling his new study. It found that cats didn't become domesticated at the dawn of agriculture, as previously thought in the Levant, but in Egypt and other parts of North Africa a few thousand years later, and for rather gruesome reasons. Professor Larson was talking to Paul Henry. Over the last couple of decades, a new narrative has taken hold, which starts in the Levant at the time when people are settling down and practicing agriculture.

14:29They're creating large grain storage pits and those grain stores are attracting rodents and then the rodents are attracting the cats and the cats get attracted to the people and then people start moving those cats around. And that sort of narrative has been pretty much the dominant one for at least the last decade or so. It describes how maybe cats, unlike dogs, are not really attracted to us. It's only because we are providing the grain that provides for the mice that brings the cats in. And so it kind of makes sense. And the narratives that make the most sense are often the least likely to be true.

14:55What's really curious in this case is that through a study led primarily by Claudio Ottoni, where he was looking at the ancient genetics of cat remains across North Africa, the Levant and Europe, is it turns out that what we were all learning multiple decades ago about it really being the fault of the Egyptians is much more likely to be true. I suppose it's not true either that the Egyptians worshipped cats. They worshipped a goddess named Bestet or Best, and she embodied catness, as it were. When you first see her depicted, she has a human body and a lion head for a good thousand years or so.

15:29And then there's a transition period where she's depicted and sculpted as a human body and a head that looks a lot like a cat. And people would make pilgrimages to pay homage to her and were required to make votive offerings of mummified cats. You would usually buy one on site and then present it as an homage to best and that would be part of your pilgrimage. It's not a very cute story and not one that cat lovers will celebrate. What we love about cats is that they look amazing and they act amazing and in this case we just had to murder them first in order to sort of celebrate that loveliness about them.

16:00But ancient Egyptians got hold of them to sacrifice them. They weren't exactly pets. No, they weren't. But in order to kill that many on such a large scale, you have to kind of industrialize that process of murder, as it were, which means you need a whole lot in close proximity. And what's really intriguing is that wildcats do not like mating in close proximity to other wildcats. So you have to overcome that behavior and select for the behavior in cats, which allows them to mate and reproduce not just in close proximity to other cats, but also in what is relative captivity. And those are the traits that then allow cats to start to thrive in much closer proximity to people, which is that first stepping stone, which then gets them incorporated into cities and towns and then eventually into our houses.

16:43Those relationships have basically allowed the human population to balloon from maybe a couple of 10 million, 20 ,000 years ago or so, to more than 8 billion now. And it's all because we have these ridiculously close relationships with animals. Professor Gregor Larson. Still to come. Don't worry about it. He's just a snake. We hear about a church in the US where worshippers are encouraged to hold venomous snakes.

17:19If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed. Hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

17:58In what's been described as a David versus Goliath story, 14 Kenyan farmers have won a legal battle to overturn a law which punished them for using their own seeds. The law made it illegal for farmers to follow the traditional practice of saving seeds from their crops to use again. The idea was that commercial seeds would be better regulated and therefore safer. If caught breaking the law, farmers faced the prospect of being fined thousands of dollars or even going to jail. The legislation was seen as favouring big seed distribution companies, including multinationals, and punishing small farmers like Francis Ngiri.

18:36We have to fight for our food sovereignty. Seed is one of the sources of food sovereignty. It is a pity that we have to make it a war so that we can be given what is right for us. And now that parts of that law have been overturned, there have been celebrations in the street. Our correspondent in Nairobi, Richard Kagoy, told us more. Caught in Kenya ruled in favour of 14 farmers who had moved to Caught sometime in 2022. And this is about criminalising or restricting sharing of seeds. So it's an age-old tradition where farmers amongst themselves would be sharing seeds just in readiness for the next planting season.

19:19So they would be storing their seeds in a pot or just beneath the earth, covering it with ash just to prepare themselves. So then they have enough to plant for the next season. So now this was a restriction in the law because if anyone was founded to do this, then they would face maybe a jail time of two years or have to pay up a fine of about$8 ,000. US dollars. Now, there's a majority of poor peasant farmers in rural Kenya. So their major concern was that when they decided to formalize the seed distribution process, it would be very costly for them because they'd be forced to pay up in advance for them to get seeds.

20:01And the seeds that they will be getting, which are certified, it will be very difficult for them to regenerate or to propagate them for future use. So it was really quite a moment for them. I just saw them, you know, bursting in celebration. They were jumping, they were hugging each other. They were, you know, celebrating, they were shouting, they were singing. And some of them, I could see them on their knees, you know, just praying. I mean, because it had even a spiritual dimension to this because it was quite emotional. A lot of them were saying that their rights, you know, to seeds have been reinstated.

20:37And so they were very, you know, in a very joyful mode, I would say. So it was quite a relief for them because it's been quite a long journey, close to about three years in and out of the courts. Richard Kagoy. As U.S. envoys prepare to head to Russia next week to try to persuade it to back the latest version of a plan to end the war in Ukraine, President Putin has once again struck an uncompromising note. In his first public response to the latest U.S. peace proposal, he said Ukraine had to surrender territory for any deal to be possible. When the US draft plan was revealed last week, it was viewed by Ukraine and its European allies as being a Russian wish list.

21:18They pushed back to get a revised version. But it seems that Mr Putin is now simply doubling down on his core demands for ending the war. Here's our Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg. Vladimir Putin claims that Russia is happy to talk about peace. But will he sign a peace deal to end Russia's war in Ukraine?

21:42President Putin said there was no final version of Donald Trump's peace plan. Referring to draft proposals, he said Russia could see that on some issues, America was taking Moscow's position into account. But certain specific points, he added, would require serious discussion. Each word was of importance. And there would be discussions next week in Moscow with President Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff. The Kremlin leader repeated his belief that Russia has the initiative on the battlefield and his demand that Kiev hand over territory in the Donbass that Moscow has failed to seize in four years of war.

22:24Ukrainian troops will withdraw from the territories they occupy. That's when the fighting will end. If they don't withdraw, we will achieve this by force. Vladimir Putin also said it was pointless signing any agreements with Ukraine's leadership, claiming those in power in Kiev had lost their legitimacy. Another indication that Moscow is in no hurry to agree a peace deal with Ukraine's current leadership. Steve Rosenberg. The former left-wing president of Peru, Pedro Castillo, has been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for attempting to disband parliament amid a political crisis in late 2022.

23:04His sentence comes a day after another Peruvian ex-president, Martín Vizcarra, was sentenced to 14 years behind bars for bribe-taking. Here's our Latin America correspondent, Will Grant. Peruvians have had the unprecedented experience of seeing two of their ex-presidents sentenced to prison in as many days. The most recent, Pedro Castillo, came into politics as a rural schoolteacher with no prior experience of elected office and was heralded as Peru's so-called President of the Poor. In December 2022, the left-wing leader attempted to dissolve Congress amid repeated conflicts with the legislative branch.

23:43His gamble failed spectacularly, with even members of his own government supporting steps to see Mr Castillo impeached and arrested. His sentence of more than 11 years in prison comes a day after another left-wing ex-president, Martín Vizcarra, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for corruption and receiving bribes while serving as a regional governor. Peru has been beset with political crises for years, with two other former presidents already behind bars. Following Mr Castillo's impeachment and arrest, there were widespread protests by his supporters, which were brutally repressed by the security forces.

24:21at least 50 people were killed in the clashes. Will Grant. Campaigners in Scotland are trying to raise£12 million, or$16 million, to save the farmhouse where the country's most famous poet, Robert Burns, wrote much of his work, including Auld Lang Syne. Ellisland Farm, which was built by Burns himself back in 1788, is suffering from damp, decay and structural deterioration. Graham Satchel reports. Burns wrote many of his most noted poems at Ellisland Farm, including Tamashanta, My Hearts in the Highlands and Auld Lang Syne. He took inspiration from the rugged landscape and the nearby river. The banks of the Nith, he said, are as sweet poetic ground as any I ever saw.

25:07Campaigners want to fully restore the farm's buildings and plan to use the site to house the extensive Burns collection, which includes original drafts of his poems and letters, a restored flute and even some of his shopping lists. There are plans to create spaces where modern-day artists and musicians can come to work. The restoration will cost an estimated£12 million. Worth it, campaigners say, so Byrne's work can never be forgot. Graham Satchel. There was a time when in hundreds of churches in the US, pastors and some members of the congregation held venomous snakes during services, believing that their faith would protect them.

25:45The practice in the Appalachia region has now been banned in many areas. One of the last churches to still do this is the House of the Lord Jesus in West Virginia. The Grammy award-winning producer Ian Brennan has been there to record one of its services with its live music, and he's turned it into an album, They Shall Take Up Serpents. He's been telling the BBC's Martin Venard all about it.