Tulsi Gabbard resigns as US national intelligence director

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1:14This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Celie Hatton, and in the early hours of Saturday, the 23rd of May, these are our main stories. Donald Trump's director of national intelligence resigns for personal reasons, but Tulsi Gabbard also struggled with the president's decision to enter into foreign wars. Our North America editor wraps up another tumultuous week for the U.S. president. And the Democratic Republic of Congo says Ebola cases have now been reported across several conflict-hit eastern provinces. Also in this podcast, we look at the legacy of Carlo Petrini, the founder of the global slow food movement.

1:58And the tennis legend Billie Jean King finally graduates the age of 82. It's just so great. I just wish my parents could have been there because I'm the first in our immediate family to finish college or university. So I'm happy I finally did it.

2:17We start in the U.S. with the announcement of the resignation of another Trump cabinet member. Tulsi Gabbard is stepping down, citing personal reasons. She'd been serving as the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, normally a position that wields great power and influence in the Oval Office. But long before she announced her departure, Tulsi Gabbard had largely taken a backseat in the administration. Once a Democrat, she'd switched her allegiance to the Republicans under Donald Trump and was a vocal supporter of his America First policy. The president's interventions in Venezuela and Iran put her out of step with his inner circle.

2:56With internal tensions growing, Ms. Gabbard will leave at the end of next month. Our North America editor, Sarah Smith, told me more about Tulsi Gabbard's political struggles in office. Tosi Gabba was a congresswoman from Hawaii. As a Democrat, she was a big rising star in the party. She even ran for president in 2020. But then she switched sides, became a big Donald Trump MAGA supporter. And when he returned to the White House, found herself actually being appointed to this job as director of national intelligence. But she has been a long-term critic of wars of choice of foreign intervention.

3:31Now, of course, Donald Trump was as well during the election campaign, and that tied them closely together. But she's maintained that position during her time in office. And the result is that she was cut out of key meetings, planning the military action in Venezuela, when the then President Nicolas Maduro was captured by US forces, and the war in Iran. She also gave some rather inconvenient testimony to Congress when she was being asked about the intelligence in Iran. And she said that they had no evidence that Iran was trying to rebuild its nuclear capabilities. And that was directly opposed to what Donald Trump and the White House was saying at the time.

4:05So there have clearly been tensions there for a while. And there were rumours circulating around Washington that it was possible she might be asked to leave her post. In the end, today, she announced her resignation. She said because her husband is unwell, that he's suffering from a rare and serious bone cancer and that she needs to leave her job to support him through that battle. And Donald Trump posted on social media that Ms. Gabbard has done an incredible job and we will miss her. It's been an interesting week for the Trump administration. conversation congressional Republicans called off a vote on the Iran war.

4:39Can you take us through this decision and what it tells us about the party's stance on the conflict? Yes. So there was a push in the House of Representatives for a vote on a war powers resolution. And if this passed, it would compel Donald Trump to end the military action in Iran. But it needs obviously a majority in Congress to pass it. It's been tried before and it has failed. This time, though, it looked as though there would be enough Republican rebels joining with the Democrats to actually win this vote. So they pulled the vote rather than lose it. But the Republican leadership in the House can't put this off forever.

5:15The same war powers resolution is also going through the Senate, and it's getting much closer as well to a victory for the Democrats or for those who oppose the war in Iran. And part of this is because Donald Trump has been challenging Republican lawmakers who he doesn't feel have been loyal enough. He's actually managed to back primary challengers against some other Republicans. And he's been successful in that. So come November, the pesky lawmakers who don't agree with him will no longer be in Congress. But they're there for now and might yet deal him a few difficult blows. There's a lot of political wrangling within the Republican Party.

5:52As you've said, Sarah, also this week, some pushback from Senate Republicans for funding for Donald Trump's ballroom and also a compensation fund that he's announced? Yeah, very, very controversial compensation fund that he announced this week as part of a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service. And he says that this will be$1.8 billion of public money that people can apply for if they felt that they were victims of weaponised justice under the Biden regime. Now, Donald Trump claims that he's a victim of that himself, but he says he won't be eligible to apply to the fund. But it could apply to all sorts of his friends and allies.

6:32And very controversially, it could also apply to people who took part in the January the 6th riots. Now, that has absolutely infuriated a number of people and Republicans in Congress who say they simply cannot vote for this. And also, at the same time, they're being asked to authorise billions of dollars of spending for the ballroom extension that Donald Trump is building on the side of the White House. What Republicans are saying is, look, we've got elections coming up in November and we are facing an electorate who are really worried about the cost of living, about the price of petrol and of groceries, all of which are being impacted by the war in Iran.

7:08So they blame Donald Trump for a lot of that. We cannot go to the electorate and tell them that we are spending billions of dollars building a ballroom for the White House and compensating people who attacked Police officers on the 6th of January and expect them to vote for us. They think this is political suicide. Our North America editor, Sarah Smith, speaking to me from Washington. The Democratic Republic of Congo says Ebola cases have now been reported across several conflict-hit eastern provinces after the World Health Organization upgraded the risk assessment for the current outbreak to very high.

7:45The DRSC said there were outbreaks in Eturi, North Kivu and South Kivu. In the regional capital, Goma, there's been one positive laboratory test, although the authorities have not formally declared any cases. More than 700 people have been exposed to the Ebola virus, with over 170 suspected deaths recorded. This news brings back memories of another Ebola outbreak a decade ago that happened in a different part of Africa. The BBC brought together two journalists who covered that West African epidemic, which ended in 2016. American journalist Sherry Fink was on the ground for months in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

8:25And Umaru Fofana in Sierra Leone reported for the BBC. So what comes to mind when recalling that outbreak and the one happening now? First, Umaru Fofana. It's like the same script with just different names of places and individuals. Ambulances were attacked by people in Sierra Leone as well as in Liberia. Treatment centers were also attacked. I agree with Romaro. It is very familiar. I also remember in West Africa, the responders were really beating up on themselves because of those messages or the focus on bats. And they kept changing their educational approach. But sometimes what they found was it wasn't until people started to die in a particular community that the community got it.

9:09You know, their cooperation is so needed to really stem the deaths and get control of things. Well, it's interesting, Dr. Sharifi, you say that, because exactly when the whole outbreak was in West Africa, not least in Sierra Leone and Liberia, which are predominantly Muslim countries, the burial teams were much later established. And the idea that your relative has died, we're going to take the body, you sort of like said, no, I need to give them a befitting burial. And then it took some time before the responders would sort of like organize what was known then as dignified burials. The body would be put in a body bag and the burial teams would bring the body and they would allow just a small number of relatives to perform there, particularly for Muslims, funeral rites, and then they would take the bodies away.

9:51But on the whole, it was very difficult for them to understand. In some parts of Tierra Lynn in the South, somebody died who was an Islamic scholar. And they felt that if they washed the body and if the kids drank the water, it would sort of like make them become well Islamically educated. And bodies were washed and the water drunk by the kids and the Ebola virus just spiraled out of control. So a lot of educating is needed. I think that stigma is an issue with infectious diseases, Ebola, and even people who contracted COVID and recovered, I've heard in the US, in small communities, were stigmatized.

10:26I'd be in my protective gear. I would really keep my distance. And that sort of became a regimen that I had to be going through to the point that it became a part of my psyche. But at some point, my daughter, who was two years old at the time, had a very high fever. We thought she had been infected. And if she had been infected, I would have been the only conduit through which she would have had the infection because I kept going in and out. We were all scared. I quarantined myself within the compound. Eventually it turned out that, in fact, she didn't have the virus. But that was a very scary moment because it coincided with my interview with the country's only virologist, Dr.

11:01Shaq Omar Khan, who eventually got infected just days after my interview with him. And then he died. That was Umaru Fafana in Sierra Leone and Sherry Fink of The New York Times. In Russia, police have been raiding music bars and nightclubs as part of a practice which critics say is aimed against freedom of expression. From London, the BBC's Vitaly Shevchenko reports on what's happening inside Russia.

11:29A rock concert at the Forrester's Hut, a venue in the Siberian oil city of Tumene. The club says it offers visitors an atmosphere of camaraderie, rebellion and rock and roll. At a gig last month, this atmosphere was shattered as riot police burst into the bar. Here's how one concert goer described the raid. We'll call him Sergei. To protect his identity, we can't use his name or his voice. Everyone inside was forced to lie on the floor. They were armed. They literally prodded my face with a machine gun. A security officer then checked my phone. I didn't resist as I knew it would only make things worse.

12:10They used tranchions against everyone who did. The officer then gave me a lecture about how bad Ukrainians were. My friends were kept inside, but they were quickly released after they said they loved Putin and the special military operation in Ukraine. Some were pressured to enlist in the army. On the same day, police disrupted an activist festival of self-organisation, also held in Tumen, followed by a raid on a heavy metal gig in Yekaterinburg three weeks later. In all, the BBC has identified 21 cultural events raided by the police across Russia over the past 12 months. 15 of them were concerts, while the other six were theatrical performances, festivals and parties held at nightclubs.

12:57Media reports give reasons such as looking for drugs, extremists, LGBT symbols, which are banned in Russia, and manifestations of Satanism, also banned. After one raid at a rock club in Yaroslavl, the police said they had detained six people with extremist views, who demonstrated prohibited symbols. But Russian human rights lawyer Valeria Vyacheskina argues that there is more to these raids than just upholding law and order. The authorities and the security services which implement their orders are utterly terrified of any manifestations of dissent. This is shown by their actions against books, music, theatre, films and so on.

13:40They censor everything. The most popular performers in Russia have already been forced to toe the line, but that is not enough for the authorities anymore, argues Russian sociologist Dmitry Dobrovsky. According to him, repression has worsened since the invasion of Ukraine, and steering clearer politics no longer means you are safe from the police. Music specifically has turned out to be a source of unsanctioned freedom. The biggest problem for these bands is not what they perform, but the fact that they're independent. Independence is now apparently being seen not as neutrality, but as a threat.

14:19It's pretty obvious how they're trying to get back to controlling culture, music and so on, the way they did under the KGB. Such raids have created an all-pervasive atmosphere of fear and repression. Both of the experts that we spoke to, Valeria Vyacheskina and Dmitry Dubrovsky, are now living outside of Russia. The punk rocker from Tumen only spoke to the BBC on condition of complete anonymity, while several other concertgoers refused to be interviewed, citing fear of police reprisals. And this works just fine for the authorities, sanitised lyrics and set lists, and people who are afraid to speak out.

14:59That report was by Vitaly Shevchenko. We asked the Russian authorities for a response, but have heard nothing back. The Italian writer and activist Carlo Petrini, who founded the global slow food movement, has died at the age of 76. What began as a protest against fast food culture in Italy became a worldwide campaign to change the way people think about food, farming and the environment. Our reporter Carla Conti looks back at his life. Food is a political act. Those are the words that Carlo Petrini lived by, and they led him to something of a cultural revolution under the name Slow Food. He founded the movement in the 1980s in protest of the spread of fast food culture, including the opening of Italy's first McDonald's in 1986, right by Rome's famous Spanish Steps.

15:51Born in 1949 in Bra, a town in the northern Italian region of Piedmont, Petrini spent much of his life arguing that food was never just food. His ethos and that of his organization was simple but groundbreaking, that good, healthy, locally sourced food should be a right for the many, not a privilege for the few. For Petrini, that also meant joining the dots between cuisine, the land and the people who work it.

16:21A gastronome who isn't an environmentalist is a fool because you can't talk about gastronomy without seeing that we're losing genetic varieties of fruit and vegetables that we have to defend water that we have to protect the fertility of the soil but I also say that an environmentalist who isn't a gastronome is sad and sadness doesn't change the world That sense of food being both pleasure and responsibility helped turn slow food from a local protest in Italy into a global movement. Today, it works in more than 160 countries, supporting small producers, defending local food traditions and campaigning for biodiversity.

17:03In 2004, Time magazine named him a European hero. Four years later, he was the only Italian on the Guardian's list of 50 people who could help save the planet. But perhaps Petrini put it best himself. He who sows utopia reaps reality. Carla Conti reflecting on the legacy of Carlo Petrini. Still to come in this podcast. I've done a lot of training in my time in different environments, but never at this kind of gravity. It's just unbelievable. The British scientist trying to create a gym for astronauts in space.

17:46This is the Global News Podcast. At one point on Friday, 97 of the 100 hottest cities in the world could be found in a single country, India. Heat waves there are not exactly new or rare, but it seems they are getting hotter, with temperatures of 47 degrees Celsius recorded during the day. That's 116 degrees Fahrenheit. Anjal Prakash is a professor of public policy at Flame University in Pune and the lead author of the UN Climate Change Panel's most recent report on climate change and cities. In terms of the heat wave that we are experiencing, there has been what we call the super alnina effect, which is also impacting.

18:27So world's climate is changing, but the impact of this is becoming very strong on Indian city. There's also other issues of urban planning. So many Indian cities also have dense concrete and a little green cover, which also amplifies the urban heat island effect. There's a low humidity in some regions in which it makes the air hotter. It is all culminating into a huge heat wave which is sprawling all across India. Adaptation is something which one can do immediately. So Indian Meteorological Department actually has issued daily heat wave bulletins and the color-coded five-day forecast. And also urban cooling measures have also been taken up by the government.

19:03We have seen about 250 districts in 23 states are being covered in the heat wave. And that is a huge, huge number that we had not expected to come. About 37 direct heat related deaths have occurred. There's an extreme pre-monson heat push temperature, which has almost gone to about 45 degrees centigrade in many regions. And in some regions, it's crossed 46.9 degrees centigrade. And these are extreme temperature that we have not seen before in those areas. So the bottom 40 percent of people, especially the migrant workers who are exposed to extreme heat conditions due to their work in construction areas are under huge threat.

19:41Anjal Prakash in Pune in Western India. Let's focus on Cuba now, where students, state workers and supporters of the Cuban revolution have held a rally in Havana in support of the island's former leader, 94-year-old Raul Castro. Mr. Castro, the brother of Fidel, was charged by the U.S. with murder and other crimes this week over the shooting down of two U.S. civilian planes in 1996. The Cuban government says the charges against him are simply a means by which Washington can justify military action and force regime change on the Caribbean island. From Havana, here's our correspondent, Will Grant.

20:23From dawn, supporters of the Cuban revolution gathered outside the US embassy in Havana in defiant mood to reject the murder charge recently brought against their former president, Raul Castro. The 94-year-old ex-Cuban leader wasn't present for the event himself, but his handpicked successor, Miguel Diaz-Canel, led the support for him, as numerous speakers denounced what they see as a politically motivated pretext for a US invasion. The rally came after Mr Castro was indicted on murder and conspiracy to murder charges over the shooting down in 1996 of two US civilian airplanes by Cuban fighter jets.

21:00Four people, three of them Americans, were killed. At the time, Mr Castro was the island's defence minister. Speaking to the media, his daughter, Mariela Castro, said the nation was prepared for the possibility of conflict. We are used to receiving constant threats. some moments have been more dangerous than others. But life brings what it will, and whatever we must endure, we'll be ready for. At the same time, the war of words continues across the Florida Straits. The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has voiced doubts over the possibility of a diplomatic solution with Cuba, saying the island represents a national security threat to the US.

21:40In reply, the Cuban Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodriguez, accused him of telling lies to instigate a military aggression against Cuba. Will Grant in Cuba. British engineers have recruited an Olympic rower to test out an exercise machine that could one day be in space. The team is developing a gym for astronauts, as Harriet Bradshaw reports. Astronauts, especially those on long space missions, have to work hard against the effects of microgravity to maintain muscle mass and bone density in space. Currently that means spending at least two hours a day exercising while they're on the International Space Station.

22:21But a British team is trying to find more efficient ways to stay fit in space. They're developing a multi-gym called High Frequency Impulse for Microgravity, or HiFiM. We're at a really exciting moment in space exploration because we have the International Space Station, we have whatever space stations are coming next, and we have the Artemis missions going back to the Moon and this time to stay. So devices like this are the future. It could be on the moon, maybe even one day on Mars, because that's the ultimate goal. They've previously tested the setup that would help astronauts jump in space, but brought Matthew Wells in to trial the rowing attachment.

23:00He tested it during a parabolic flight, which allowed him to float for 22-second intervals as the plane ascended and nosedived to mimic space conditions. I've done a lot of training in my time in different environments, but never at this kind of gravity. It's just unbelievable. Space agencies around the world are involved in the space gym's development. It's hoped it could end up on moon bases and space stations in future. Harriet Bradshaw. Now, do you remember Billie Jean King, widely regarded as one of the greatest tennis players in history? She won 39 Grand Slam titles, but she never finished her university degree in history.

23:41Instead, she dropped out to pursue a career in tennis. But now, guess what? At the age of 82, she's finally graduated from Cal State, Los Angeles. My colleague Katya Adler spoke to her and began by congratulating her on this achievement. Well, thank you so much, Katya. I'm still trying to wrap my arms around everything because I had so many people respond. I cannot tell you. Many more than when I went to Wimbledon. Of course, that was in the old days. It's just so great. And I'm really excited. I just wish my parents could have been there because I'm the first in our immediate family to finish college or university.

24:19So I'm happy I finally did it. Can you tell us why was it that you weren't able to complete your degree 65 years ago? Because that was my one opportunity to become number one in the world. I always wanted to be number one since I first picked up a racket. And so I accomplished that. But it's been on my mind ever since I left school back in 64 or 5. So it's taken 61 years. Everybody's teasing me. And I want people to know that it's never too late, usually, if you can still think, you know. That's what's so inspiring. You're 82. You've achieved so much. So many of us say, oh, I must go and learn this, do this, learn a new language, a skill or finish something in education.

25:02But you actually did it. That's another one I want to do, but I don't know if I'll get to it. I'm going to definitely take music lessons again because piano was my first love and didn't quite have as much ability in that as I did in sports. So but I want to go back and start taking music lessons, I think. Just so many things I want to get done before I'm out of here. When you graduated, what you told the 6 ,000 students there, I loved it. You said, have fun, be fearless and make history. Do you think that's a lesson for all of us? And reflecting back on your career and the sexism that you face and you fought, do you think we live in a better world today?