US seizes oil tanker off Venezuelan coast

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.

0:46I'm Chris Barrow and in the early hours of the 11th of December, these are our main stories. Venezuela has accused the United States of blatant theft and piracy after US troops seized an oil tanker off the country's coast. Meanwhile, Venezuela's opposition leader, Maria Carina Machado, has appeared publicly for the first time in 11 months after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Also in this podcast, tourists could be asked to provide five years' worth of their social media history to enter America. There is an underlying intention to monitor and restrict travellers to the US that are not aligned with the ideology of the current administration.

1:27And researchers in Britain make a significant discovery. This is huge because it transforms what we think about early Neanderthals and their abilities to create fire.

1:42For months, the Trump administration has been pressurising Venezuela's president, accusing Nicolas Maduro of being complicit in the drugs trade and blaming him for the large number of Venezuelan migrants entering the US. Warships have been moved to within striking distance of the mainland and several strikes have destroyed boats that are alleged to have been transporting drugs. Now, in the latest escalation, Donald Trump made this announcement. We've just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela, a large tanker, very large. Largest one ever seized, actually. It was seized for a very good reason.

2:18The White House then released a 45-second video showing military helicopters approaching the tanker then troops descend from ropes and board the vessel. The ship is accused of transporting sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran. Our Washington correspondent Nomiya Iqbal told us more. Mr Trump didn't go into many details on the matter. He said, to quote him, it was an interesting day. He said that more news would come out, but he didn't offer a specific deadline. Now, we know that the administration has been targeting alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean since September, characterizing it as the US being in an armed conflict with drug cartels.

2:57And then over the last month, the administration has built up military force in the region. We saw the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier sent to the Caribbean. And this is the latest move in terms of Venezuela. There are those who view the Trump administration as being after regime change. And that's certainly, you know, something that Donald Trump has even suggested that he wants Maduro to go quietly. Venezuela, we know, has the world's largest proven oil reserves, as is long coastline in the Caribbean Sea. It's a vital sea lane for U.S. goods that travel through the Panama Canal. And there is this belief that regime change for U.S.

3:37and European corporations could unlock vast wealth. And I should add, this is all happening as Venezuela's opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, is officially accepting that prize, and she has been pitching a post-Maduro future to US investors. The Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, has said there won't be a regime change and called for an end to the illegal and brutal interventionism of the United States. Caracas has accused Washington of blatant theft after the seizure. Our South America correspondent, Ioni Wells, has this assessment. The maritime risk company Vanguard Tech has identified this as an oil tanker known as Skipper, which it said was sanctioned by the United States for carrying Venezuelan oil exports.

4:23Now, while it isn't unprecedented for tankers to be seized because of sanctions around the world, this does certainly suggest new efforts from the US's perspective to potentially go after Venezuelan oil. Donald Trump was asked in a press conference what will now happen to that oil on the seized tanker. And he says, well, we'll keep it, I guess. Now, Venezuela has some of the world's largest proven oil deposits in the world. The U.S. has sent this huge military deployment to the Caribbean in the past two months. As you mentioned, it has carried out dozens of strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels, killing at least 83 people.

4:58It says this military campaign is to tackle drug trafficking. But Venezuela believes this is about the U.S. trying to grab Venezuelan oil. Certainly, this is a view shared, including by some Venezuelans who aren't particularly fans of the government, but certainly are sceptical of the US's goals in the region. Now, before this seizure was announced, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro had said in a public speech on Wednesday, again calling for peace in the region, but saying that anyone who wants Venezuelan oil must respect the law and that he wouldn't want Venezuela to turn into what he described as an oil colony.

5:31Ione Wells. When the announcement was made that the Venezuelan opposition leader, Maria Carina Machado, was receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, she was in hiding and barred from travelling out of the country. But she escaped and has finally managed to make her way to Norway. She arrived in Oslo hours after the official ceremony. Her daughter picked up the prize. People gathered outside Miss Machado's hotel and they've been singing and chanting freedom and bravery. The crowd cheered when, after not being seen in public for nearly a year, she stepped out onto the balcony of the Grand Hotel.

6:08Ms Machado waved and sang along with the crowd before going back inside, where she met our correspondent Lucy Hockings. When she came into the room, she greeted me with a hug and a smile. She is absolutely thrilled to be here, as you can imagine. 16 months in hiding in Venezuela, where she said she has had no physical contact with people. So it felt like now she can't stop touching people, touching her daughter, her mother, her children who are here, who she hasn't seen for so long, going outside to greet the crowd. So many friends and supporters were there as well. So she felt incredibly moved by this entire experience.

6:45And one of the things I also asked her is just what it's been through over the past few days. And there are lots of different stories. It's kind of the buzz in Oslo, because there's been the big banquet tonight, everyone talking about her escape, clearly quite dangerous. She's considered a fugitive by the Venezuelan government, so faces arrest if she goes back. She was worried always about being disappeared in Venezuela, but there are some reports saying that she had to go through 10 military checkpoints. She wore a wig, a disguise. She got a fishing boat to Curaçao, where she then, in a complicated way, got a private jet all the way here.

7:24to Norway. Quite a few stories going around about how she actually got here. I asked her about that and she wasn't keen to comment, other than to say she was very grateful for all the people who risked their lives so that she could be here today. Lucy Hockings in Oslo. Can you remember what you posted on social media five years ago? Well, the United States wants to know. A new proposal from the White House would require tourists from dozens of countries to submit five years' worth of their social media history as a condition of entry to the United States. Farsha Alji is a US immigration lawyer.

7:58It's also about the ideology that one has. So we think that there is an underlying intention to broaden this, to basically monitor and restrict travellers to the US that are not aligned with the ideology of the current administration. Our State Department correspondent Tom Bateman is in Washington. The US is a destination for millions of European tourists every year. Most don't need a visa, instead filling in an online waiver form. But the Trump administration's proposals could make coming to America a far more arduous process. So I've just gone through the first couple of pages on the current ESTA website, where you have to put in your passport details.

8:47And then you get to this page, where it asks you for some basic personal information, contact details, and then this, social media, asking for Facebook page, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, if you have it. But crucially, this is all optional. What would change under the new proposals is that would become mandatory and you would have to put details for the last five years. In addition, applicants could also have to supply phone numbers and email addresses for up to the last 10 years, family member names and potentially even biometrics, photos and fingerprints, though it's not clear how these would be gathered.

9:26Asked by the BBC about the proposals, Mr Trump said tonight it was about stricter vetting. We just want people to come over here and save. We want safety, we want security, we want to make sure we're not letting the wrong people come into our country. The US has for years required social media details for some types of visas, but the Trump administration has broadened its use, including for student visas, when it said officials could look for what they called indications of hostility towards the culture or government of the US. It comes ahead of a bumper year for travel to the US, which is co-hosting the World Cup.

10:03These are still proposals, but they amount to a far more invasive series of checks than now. A move the administration says is to protect liberties at home, but adding to the scrutiny in crossing America's borders. Tom Bateman. An update now on the Ukraine peace talks. It's from Donald Trump speaking in the White House, and in it he doesn't sound particularly positive about a phone call with the leaders of Britain, Germany and France. Well, I think we had some little disputes about people, and we're going to see how it turns out. And we said before we go to a meeting, we want to know some things.

10:44You know, they would like us to go to a meeting over the weekend in Europe, and we'll make a determination depending on what they come back with. We don't want to be wasting time. Sometimes you have to let people fight it out and sometimes you don't. But the problem with letting people fight it out is you're losing thousands of people a week. It's ridiculous. The whole thing is ridiculous. The US president was speaking after Ukrainian officials said they'd submitted their proposals to Washington for ending the war, which included revisions to an initial US plan which would have required Ukraine to surrender uncaptured land to Russia.

11:26From Washington, here's our North America correspondent, Sean Dilley. U.S.-brokered peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia appear to be in something of a holding pattern with no sign of an agreement about the future of land seized by President Putin's army. In public, Germany, France and the U.K. have praised President Trump's leadership and efforts to secure peace. In private, European leaders have been lobbying the United States about widespread perceptions that an earlier draft peace agreement asked too much of Ukraine. Last month, US officials engaged in meetings with Ukrainian and European counterparts in Geneva, prompting further talks between Ukraine and the United States, described by US negotiators as very productive.

12:08Now, though, it seems President Trump is frustrated. He told reporters at the White House his allies wanted to hold a meeting in Europe this weekend. He said the US would decide whether to attend based on, in his words, what they come back with. Sean Dilley. The discovery of fire is one of the main things that shaped humanity. From forming social groups to early religious beliefs, it's played a part in almost everything. And after finding a Stone Age lighter at a site in southern England, scientists from London's British Museum now think it happened 350 ,000 years earlier than previously thought.

12:43Professor Nick Ashton is curator of Paleolithic collections at the museum. He brought the artefacts in to the BBC and showed them to my colleague Paul Henley. First of all, we have these heat-shattered hand axes. I'm just pulling up one now. And here you can see the pop-marking and the crazing on the surface of the flint, and it's actually shattered, and that's caused by high heat. It looks very like a heavy oyster shell, actually, and you can see it split through. Yeah, the colouration, that sort of grey colouration, a little bit like an oyster shell, but you can see the heat-shattering and the pop-marking on that surface, which shows its classic signs of heating.

13:20And these small blackish fragments that you've got alongside? Yep, they're the second part of the evidence, and these are tiny fragments, literally sort of fingernail size, tiny fragments of iron pyrite. And iron pyrite can be struck against splint to create sparks, and sparks, if you have the right tinder, will ignite, and then you have a flame. How can you know that these items were not affected by, say, wildfires, which must have existed then? So the third part of the evidence is heated sediment. And we found an isolated patch which has a reddened colour. It's a bit like a terracotta pot or a garden flower pot.

14:00And initially we thought, yes, this looks as though it's been heated, but we had to do geochemical tests to actually demonstrate this was the case. And that's why it's taken so long to actually prove. These tests are things like changes in the magnetic properties of the clay. and the magnetics also show repeated use of fire in that one area. Lightning may occasionally strike twice in the same place but it's unlikely to strike multiple times. Because presumably early humans learnt of the usefulness of fire if they, I don't know, pounced on a lightning strike and kept the flame burning, they'll have discovered the importance for cooking and for heat.

14:39But how do you think they got to setting up a fire, striking a flame themselves. I think we have to look at this deep period of time and the multiple generations of people experimenting by chance. Huge amount of experimentation, some of which may not have taken off, and then one maverick in the corner suddenly said, look, how about this? And what do you think the primary use was? So I think apart from warmth and apart from protection, I think the primary use and the really important use is cooking, and this transforms their lives. I like the idea of the maverick in the corner. That was Professor Nick Ashton from the British Museum speaking to my colleague Paul Henley.

15:21This is the Global News Podcast and just a reminder, we're now on YouTube, covering a news story in depth every weekday. Just search for BBC News, click on the logo and then choose podcasts and Global News Podcast. Still to come though in this episode... There's a lot of sort of like faux, fake critics slash influencers that don't really have the training or the verbiage or anything to be talking about our films, and I think that's a shame. The death of the film critic, why people prefer to get their film reviews from social media.

15:57If 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.

16:36A severe winter storm has hit Gaza, where most of the residents are displaced and living in tents. Forecasts to last for several days, the risk of flooding means that up to a third of Gaza's residents may require winter shelter. The Israeli military body, which controls the border crossings, says it's working on a response. We've been sent these messages from people across the Gaza Strip. Thank you very much for reaching out. But right now it is raining cats and dogs here in Gaza. I don't know if you can hear it in the background, but it's really heavy. It's really windy. And the thunder is really heavy.

17:14When we talk about Gaza, as we are starting a new chapter of tragedy right now, hundreds of thousands of people are living in tents and in temporary shelters made out of nylon. and this is something from this weather. It's like literally people are sinking in their tents. It's very cold in front of my eyes. The streets are completely destroyed, full of water destruction around me. It rains heavily here in Gaza, and people are living inside tents surrounded by water. Everything is destroyed. The infrastructure is completely destroyed. The water is running in the streets. It's been three years now they are living inside tents and even in destroyed houses without electricity, without water, without any source of heating.

18:09I'm speaking to you as the storm has truly begun to creep into the sky of Gaza. The claps of thunder and flashes of lightning closely resemble the sounds of explosions That our children haven't yet been able to forget And the storm is tearing tents apart Leaving those who are inside unable even to escape or to find a protection There is no shelter for people to seek refuge from this storm and here in gaza i think we're not yet prepared well for the winter season how can we as devastated people face the storm of winter before we have recovered from the storm of war now next nicolas sarkozy became the first president in modern french history to be sent to prison.

19:11He was given a five-year sentence in September for allowing his aides to seek money for a presidential election campaign from the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi. In the end, Mr Sarkozy served just 20 days inside, but that hasn't stopped him writing a 216-page book about his ordeal behind bars. It's called Diary of a Prisoner. Our Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield told us more. It's La Sante prison. It's a very old prison. It's a kind of Victorian-era prison. It's been done up recently, so it's not as terrible as it has been in the past, but it is overcrowded, and that is very much part of the picture here.

19:49Now, Nicholas Sarkozy was in a special wing next to cells where there were rapists, dangerous Islamists, and so on, but he never saw them, because when you're in that bit of the prison, you can't see anyone, but he could hear them. One of the things he says over and again in the book is how it's the noises at night which were the most frightening and unsettling. One of the people on his wing chanting and rattling the metal plate against the rails and all this sort of stuff. And the lights coming on in the middle of the night suddenly for no reason. One thing that got him through this was his daily round of exercise in the tiny gym where he could go and do his running on a machine.

20:27But I mean, the book is not a complaint. Very deliberately, Sarkozy is taking the high ground. He had some very spiritual moments, he says, having conversations with the chaplain every Sunday. He's very full of praise for the staff who treated him with great respect and professionalism and so on. And that's very much the pitch of the book. It's a man rising above it all. He would not be doing himself any favours if he came out complaining. That's not what he's doing. Hugh Schofield. If you're thinking of going to see a film and you want to know whether it's worth two hours of your time, you can get advice from lots of different places.

20:58Audience reviews, online, social media videos and sometimes simply just good old word of mouth. One source, though, that we're all apparently resorting to less is professional film critics. In the US, a large number of critics are being made redundant, leading to what's being described as a crisis in criticism. Tom Brook reports from New York. Everybody on your left. This week, American cinemas will be showing a new release, Hamnet, an adaptation of an historical novel on William Shakespeare's family. What do you wish to do, Hamnet? I shall be one of father's players. But moviegoers will be going to see the film influenced by word of mouth, advertising and by what they have read online.

21:41Back in Analog Times, it was newsprint and the sacred words that film critics wrote which held sway and guided moviegoers. But that has changed. Now full-time critics and newspapers and other media outlets face possible extinction. Alyssa Wilkinson at the New York Times is one of America's top film critics. This year has been pretty rough on the full-time film critics. In America in particular, a lot of people have lost their jobs. New York's Museum of the Moving Image recently held a special panel discussion on the so-called film criticism crisis. Participating were top critics who recently lost their jobs.

22:19One of them, Richard Lawson from Vanity Fair, was chief film critic for 12 years. It's a really big problem. I think there is something important about people being able to make a living doing it because that means they can see more. They have more time to really devote their passion to it, which helps everyone. So I'm nervous. I don't see a lot of the jobs that are going away coming back. Outside this New York cinema, filmgoers don't appear that concerned. Many don't read traditional film reviews, relying instead on TikTok and different social media and other sources to determine what films they will go and see.

22:54people's recommendations online like instagram reviews and stuff like that i think critics just have less and like a lot less influence than they do in general in all fields but michael koresky senior curator of film at the museum of the moving image who brought the panel discussion together fervently believes film criticism is a vital and necessary art i think good art criticism is so essential to understanding and appreciating art, one can't really live without the other. Defenders of traditional film criticism will argue that it's being marginalised because the claim is made that we live in an age when the characteristics of a critic, which include knowledge, expertise and independence of thought, are not valued as much as they once were.

23:40Alyssa Wilkinson again. Criticism complicates art, right? It tells you that there are shades of meaning, that There's a range of reactions that you can have to a work of art, even that different people can have different reactions to a work of art, that we don't all have to have the same kind of response to art. And that scares people. That scares people in power. That scares people who would prefer for us to all kind of be uniform in our reaction to the world around us. Filmmakers, too, are alarmed by the thinning ranks of critics. A few years ago, a low-budget documentary, Detropia, portraying the decline of the city of Detroit, got a lot of recognition.

24:21One of its co-directors, Heidi Ewing, claims that only happened because of a film critic. Our film Detropia only got a big profile because a critic in The New Yorker decided that he loved the film. And it really was our springboard. And I love film criticism. I don't like being on the negative end of film criticism, but that's part of the game sometimes. They don't like your work. So I do worry about it. And there's a lot of faux, fake critics slash influencers that don't really have the training or the verbiage or anything to be talking about our films, and I think that's a shame. Now the faithful are saying they just can't imagine a world where there is film without film criticism.

25:01But the stark reality is that the traditional film critic in many countries has now become an endangered species. Tom Brook reporting from New York. Italy has achieved a first by having its entire national cuisine recognised as culturally significant by the United Nations. UNESCO added it to its prestigious Intangible Cultural Heritage List, which already has Italian favourites that include pizza and espresso. It's thought that this new status will bring more visitors not only to Italy, but also to Italian restaurants around the world. The newsroom's Alex Ritson went down to one of them, Conchilia, here in central London to meet the owner.

25:43My name is Giovanni. I'm from Pompeii. Vitalione. So you know how to cook Italian properly? Well, I know how to eat Italian food properly, yes, definitely. Are you surprised? I mean, it's an extraordinary thing to have the first country ever to have its entire cuisine listed for this status. No, I'm very happy, actually, because I think it's something that we have achieved throughout the years because we are fussy people. We are very fussy in what we're eating. We are very particular, and then we make sure that whoever does the cooking does it properly. What's the secret ingredient in Italian food?