World's oceans hit record-high July temperatures

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0:30Listen now. Search for Lives Less Ordinary wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Janet Jalil and at 15 Hours GMT on Monday the 10th of August, these are our main stories. Scientists warn that the world's oceans have hit record high temperatures for July. Drones strike targets deep inside Russia in one of Ukraine's deadliest attacks yet. FIFA's embattled president Gianni Infantino faces yet more criticism from football confederations. Also in this podcast, we hear how acupuncture is benefiting animals. It really works through increasing the body's healing response, through mobilising stem cells in the circulation, moving blood flow to the areas you're needling.

1:28We start with more grim news about our warming planet. Scientists have found that the world's oceans were hotter last month than in any other July on record. In a new report, the European Union's climate change monitoring programme, Copernicus, says average sea surface temperatures outside the polar regions hit nearly 21 degrees Celsius in July. It also says that Western Europe experienced its hottest June and July on record, driven by the El Nino weather pattern developing in the Pacific. Diana Urge-Forsatz from the UN's Panel on Climate Change said the data showed that urgent action was needed.

2:09Unless we stop global warming, these records are continued to be exceeded and the situation will continue to get worse and worse. More intensive heatwaves, more intensive droughts, more intensive downpours, as well as more places where white fires are burning up territories. And also the smoke is also very bad for an increasing area. Our environment correspondent Matt McGrath told me more. The figures from Copernicus, the 20.96 degrees temperature for the oceans in July, the highest July recording that they've ever had. I think the average in some respects hides the detail and the scale of the heating that's going into the oceans right now.

2:53So in some parts of Western Europe, temperatures in the seas were eight degrees Celsius above the local norm that you'd expect for that time of the year. So when we give these global average figures and people say, well, you know, that doesn't sound that much. When you see it on a local level, you see what's really happening in places like that, like in the Western Mediterranean. And this is happening in many, many parts of the world and has many implications, I think, for our oceans. We're creating marine heat waves of intense capacity around the oceans, which threaten sea life directly. But I suppose the biggest overall impact of the warming seas is the potential impact in sea level rise.

3:31Warming water expands. That pushes that water up onto the land in different places. And that can have a tremendous effect when it's combined with storms, heavy winds and other natural phenomena like that. So, yeah, there's a whole range of things hidden in the data here that have real impacts in real people's lives all across the world. And this comes on top of all the wildfires that we've seen across Europe and North America. Yes, absolutely. We're seeing this what's called a compound effect where you have this drying out caused by the intense heat and that soil that dries out then reflects more heat back into the atmosphere, makes the conditions warmer.

4:09So you get a vicious cycle, if you like, of drying heat in the atmosphere, drying ground, drying out continuously, and that is leaving a real tinderbox of effect. And we've had in Europe and many other places a very wet winter just a few months ago. Now it seems unbelievable to talk about it being a wet winter. But that winter fuelled huge amounts of growth of grass, bushes and other material, trees. And they all provided extreme, I suppose, fuel for these fires that have lit in North America, in Europe and many other places too. And Matt, can we turn this around? Is there still time? I think it's going to be very difficult in the next year or two because we have the impact of El Nino driving up the oceans, making the oceans warmer.

4:47we'll really feel the full effect of that next year. So I think for the short term, it's going to be very, very difficult. Longer term, you know, political attention on the climate question has waned considerably. I would be worried about that longer term. And I think short term, we're going to see perhaps many more difficult hours, many more difficult recordings of data over the next 12 months. Matt McGrath, in what appears to be one of the deadliest air attacks by Ukraine on Russia so far, At least 13 people, including a child, have been killed by a drone strike deep inside Russian territory.

5:24Nearly 40 other people were wounded. Ukraine's military says it targeted an oil refinery in the city of Nizhnykamsk in Tatarstan, which lies a long way east of Moscow. But the Russian authorities say civilian sites were also hit. I got more details from our Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg. Well, first of all, let me tell you a little bit about Nizhnykamsk. Yes, you're right. It's a long way away from Moscow, 900 kilometers or so. But clearly, Ukrainian long-range drones able to cover such long distances now. Earlier today, the mayor of Nizhnykamsk announced that there'd been a drone attack, a Ukrainian drone attack on the city on civilian and industrial targets, he said.

6:08He said there had been fatalities. A short while later, officials confirmed at least 12 people had been killed. The latest information we've just received is 13 people now confirmed dead, at least 39 people wounded in attacks there. No official confirmation of which sites were hit. But as I say, this is a major industrial city, a major hub for Russia's oil refining and petrochemical industries. And I would imagine that more information about what was struck will come out through the morning. And this is just the latest in a series of attacks by Ukraine, which has been stepping up strikes on Russian oil refineries in recent months, which have caused fuel shortages.

6:54You know, Russians are getting used now to waking up in the morning and hearing news reports that Ukraine has launched a major drone strike on warehouses, on industrial facilities, on oil refineries. This has been going on for weeks now. And yes, this is having consequences. In terms of strikes on oil facilities, these have sparked a fuel shortage in Russia during the summer. The situation isn't so bad in Moscow at the moment. The authorities have made sure about that. But fuel shortages remain in other parts of Russia. And because of that, Russians are more than ever, I think, feeling the consequences of the war.

7:37in Ukraine. You know, for so long, so many people here kind of pretended that it wasn't happening, or that they didn't feel in their own lives, the effects, the consequences of the war. That has certainly changed now. And judging by recent opinion polls, judging by what people tell us on the streets, more and more people, you know, would like this war to be over. Steve Rosenberg in Moscow. Meanwhile, Russian attacks on Ukraine have continued. Officials say five people were killed by Russian artillery in the Kharkiv region. Our Ukraine correspondent Dan Johnson, who's in Kyiv, told us more. In a small village close to the front line in Ukraine's east, Russian shelling which hit residential areas there.

8:22The regional prosecutor's office says that five people were killed and that there is an investigation ongoing to gather evidence there into a potential war crime. It shows you the continued threat that people in the east close to the front line are facing, but right across Ukraine as well. There was an air raid alert here in Kyiv, potentially in response to what Russia suffered last night at the hands of Ukraine's long-range drones. And the amount and distance of attacks have ramped up, especially over the last few weeks and months. Ukraine now has the capability to hit targets hundreds of miles into Russia, and it is doing that repeatedly every night.

9:01There were hundreds of drones launched last night. The authorities here haven't commented on the civilian deaths that we're hearing from Russia today, but they have confirmed that they struck that oil refinery and that there was an explosion and a fire. The head of Ukraine's unmanned vehicles unit, essentially the drone unit, said that they were still assessing the consequences of that hit. But they consistently denied targeting civilians and said that this was a target carried out with the aim of reducing Russia's military capability. Ukraine feels it is on the front foot here. There is still that vulnerability with the lack of Patriot interceptors, meaning that Russian missiles still pose a real threat right across Ukraine.

9:42But the conflict is essentially frozen in the east. Ukraine has had some success in pushing the Russians back there. And this strategy of increasingly taking the war into Russian territory is designed to hurt the Kremlin in terms of income, damage Russia's economy, mean that there's less fuel and supplies getting to its military, but it's also designed to make the Russian people feel the impact of this war, to give them a taste of what Ukrainians have lived through for the past four and a half years. Dan Johnson in Kiev. BBC Africa Eye has seen exclusive evidence that suggests a South African police detective was killed by the country's special forces.

10:22France Matiba was looking into their alleged role in the disappearance of a suspected Islamic State group militant before he was found shot dead in his car on 6 August 2023. Matiba's family and former colleagues are now demanding justice. Seven special forces soldiers and one other are due to stand trial in connection with a detective's murder. Of those, seven are accused, alongside four others, of kidnapping and murdering the suspected IS militant. They deny the allegations. For the BBC World Service, Dino Matani has been investigating in South Africa.

11:06So this is the final road on Matheba's last journey. It is indeed. And we are about to, in just a few metres, approach the site where he died. On a Sunday evening in August 2023, Lieutenant Colonel Franz Matiba was found shot dead in his car by the side of the N1 motorway outside Pretoria. The 53-year-old detective was a veteran of the Hawks, an elite police unit whose responsibilities include investigating crimes against the state. He was the finest man. He was a trusted and loyal man. That is how Franz was. Brigadier Paulina Sekopela was Matiba's commanding officer. She says Matiba was killed while investigating whether Special Forces soldiers were behind the disappearance of suspected IS militant Abdallah Abadiga in December 2022.

12:02Matiba had applied for a court order to force the military to hand over information. But after one meeting with the Special Forces, he made a chilling prediction to his boss. He said, Brigadier, you know, is the people that are going to kill me? I'm going to die. Police say that two days later, on the 6th of August 2023, Matiba was lured to a petrol station in eastern Pretoria, where he believed he would meet an informant. But they didn't show up. BBC Africa Eye has seen CCTV pictures, which show Matiba driving away on the motorway with a black BMW following him. He was shot dead shortly after.

12:45Seven Special Forces soldiers and one other are due to stand trial in connection with the detective's murder. Of those, seven are accused, alongside four others, of abducting and murdering Aberdeega. They deny the allegations. Give me a lighter. You can just light the papers. Over a backyard barbecue, Colonel Tolly Frichtenberg, a former counter-terrorism police chief, tells BBC Africa Eye that South Africans should be concerned by Matiba's murder.

13:25He believes Matiba was close to uncovering the truth behind Abadiga's disappearance. Colonel Fruchtenberg has revealed that before he went missing, Aberdee was being used as an intelligence asset. But he thinks his handlers underestimated him. I cannot say which intelligence organisation used him. Which intelligence organisation, domestic or international, I will go that far. Most probably he's laying somewhere in a shallow grave. The BBC contacted the Department of Home Affairs and the South African National Defence Force for comment. They did not respond. Meanwhile, three years on from Matiba's death, his daughter Basitsana says her family are still waiting for his killers to be held to account.

14:13I'm never going to hug my dad anymore. Why? Why my dad? Because he was doing his job. We need justice. We need justice. Basit Sana, the daughter of France Matiba, ending that report by Dino Matani.

14:57Minister Narendra Modi's authority, the education minister, was forced to resign after similar nationwide demonstrations. Ambarasan Ezhe Rajan has more on these latest protests.

15:11Thousands marched towards the state legislature in the capital, Ranchi, in eastern India, climbing over police barricades, holding placards and waving the national flag. The demands include overhauling of the examination system. The Jharkhand government has sought to diffuse the protests by accepting some demands. Several members of the civil service body overseeing the examinations have stepped down. The young protesters are demanding a federal investigation into the irregularities. The protest follows weeks of youth-led demonstrations in Delhi that led to the resignation of the country's education minister over National Medical School entrance test paper leaks.

15:51The demonstrations are seen as reflecting wider frustration among young Indians who see government examinations as a key route to employment in a country where millions compete for limited public sector jobs. Ambrasan Atirajan. Still to come in this podcast, we hear from the actor campaigning to bring justice to communities devastated by toxic chemical waste dumped by factories. The people who are responsible for this have been able to get away with it. So I hope that this will spark enough outrage from the public to push to get something done about this.

16:49Came into our relationship with a lot of complicated pieces. Stories that show that sometimes love is all you need. Lives Less Ordinary love stories from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for Lives Less Ordinary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

17:11This is the Global News Podcast. Let's turn now to the crisis engulfing world football. FIFA and its embattled president Gianni Infantino have come under renewed fire as the fallout continues over his controversial plan to bring private investment into the World Cup and other tournaments. He's been accused of breaking trust through deception in an open letter issued by three football confederations from three continents. UEFA, CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation, who between them represent 136 nations, that's more than half of FIFA's membership, said Mr Infantino's now abandoned plan to sell off stakes in the World Cup raised questions about the integrity of the game and those elected to lead it.

17:58Our football issues correspondent Dale Johnson told me more. The three confederations also cited Infantino shutting out the FIFA council members and basically just creating a meeting of its own staff to assess what happened with this FIFA forward enterprise proposal, which of course was cancelled after just a few days. Now, if you look at the way they've approached the criticism of Infantino, who is not actually named by person, it says things like the integrity of those who were elected to lead it, and it mentions an individual who placed himself above the collective and that duty has been abandoned.

18:33So, while they're not mentioning Infantino personally, there is clearly a case here that they feel that Infantino's position is untenable and they feel he should resign and there should be a new FIFA president as soon as possible. Can he survive this growing pressure? Well, this is a big question. Now, you mentioned just there that the three confederations have 136 votes. It takes one or six to win an election. But the problem is we do not know if these confederations will all vote to get rid of Infantino. For instance, eight of the Asian nations have already come out in recent days and said they back him for re-election.

19:10So we're at this stage where he could possibly win an election of the 211 member associations, but the presidents who run Asia, Conquer Catherine and Europe may not back him at the FIFA council meeting. So the next FIFA council meeting takes place in October, where half of the council will be against Infantino and half will be for him. So just how can we get to a stage where FIFA are able to make decisions which are politically viable? It just doesn't seem like there is a way he can continue in his position with that level of authority that he needs. One of Infantino's key roles is unifying football, and it doesn't seem like he can do that in his current position.

19:53Dale Johnson. Tupac Shakur is considered to be one of the most influential rappers of all time. Tragically, he was killed at the age of just 25 in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas 30 years ago. It's one of America's most high-profile unsolved murders. Now, the trial is due to begin of a former gang leader, Duane Keffy D. Davis, over his alleged involvement in the killing. BBC journalist Anushka Mutanda-Dowity is host of the Fame Under Fire podcast. She's covering the trial. Tupac Shakur is arguably one of the most successful rappers of all time, but he kind of transcended being a commercially viable rapper into almost a political figure.

20:36He was rapping about African-American experiences, police brutality, black women's position in society. And then he tragically died at 25 years old, which has kind of cemented him as this legend within the hip hop community. and that death has become very mythologized because nobody was charged until 2023, if you can believe it in this case. There are so many theories and conspiracy theories about what happened that night. But the prosecutors in Las Vegas are alleging that in 1996, on the Las Vegas Strip, Tupac was in a car with Suge Knight, the owner of Death Row Records. A white Cadillac pulled up next to him and shots were fired from the Cadillac that ended up ending his life.

21:14They have charged Dwayne Keefe D. Davis with being the architect of that crime. So criminally liable for his death, although they haven't accused him of actually firing the gun. And why has it taken so long to come to trial? Well, I mean, a lot of this has to do with the undercurrent of gang ties. Tupac was associated with mob pyro, so the Bloods, the other car, the white Cadillac, Keefy D, they're saying, was in there who was quite high up in the Compton Crips gang. And there's just a do not talk to police rule. You know, this is set against the backdrop of police brutality. So there was a high level of scepticism about speaking to law enforcement.

21:49Those who did speak didn't offer anything very helpful. It wasn't actually until 2018, 2019, when Dwayne Davis, Dwayne Keefe D. Davis, started talking about what he says happened on that night on podcasts, in interviews, and then eventually wrote his own book on it, that the investigation was reopened into what happened that night. And this is an interesting case because it's Mr. Davis's own words that will be used as evidence against him. He's the defendant, but he's also the star witness. Yeah, it's a legally very interesting case. It is Dwayne Keefe D. Davis against Dwayne Keefe D. Davis. He wrote a book.

22:25Here's the interesting legal distinction. In the book, he claims to have been in the white Cadillac, to have supplied the weapon, put it in the back seat, to have known what was going on. He's since come out and said, the book's fictionalised. I made this up to sell copies. But the judge has said, sir, you kept cosigning on the veracity of the book. You kept going in public places and saying, if you want the truth, read the book. So therefore, the book is going to go before the jury. Now, he has every single right to get up on the stand. He doesn't have to, but he can get up on the stand and say, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm a liar.

22:55I made all that up. Don't listen to a word I said. Don't read the book. Don't listen to the book. But essentially, if he does that, he will be cross-examined using his own words. Anushka Mutanda-Dowity. In 1967, a farming consultant named Douglas Gowan was called to look at a badly deformed calf at a farm in South Wales. Gowan came to believe that the cause was the dumping of highly toxic chemicals from a Welsh factory. Such practices have since been banned in the UK. Over years of campaigning, he fought to raise awareness of the impact of these so-called forever chemicals on the environment and on humans.

23:33Decades later at home in Los Angeles, the actor Michael Sheen stumbled upon the story online. He chased down Douglas Gowan and asked if he could meet him. Come quickly, was the reply. I only have months to live. It's a journey which took the actor back to Wales and to the US state of Alabama and has now culminated in a documentary Buried with Michael Sheen. He's been speaking to Henry Zeffman. The more I found out about it, it started to push all kinds of buttons in me. So obviously, the fact that it was happening sort of just up the road from where I grew up, it turns out that when I was born, and I was born in Newport in South Wales, Douglas was there.

24:15He was doing his investigations and exploratory stuff around that time about the Monsanto plant in Newport. So, you know, without me knowing, I was I was connected to it from when I was born. But finding out more and more about the possibility that these communities and the places where this happened had a pattern to it, whether it was in Wales or in Anniston, Alabama or wherever, that this tended, this dumping tended to happen in places where there was a history of of chronic illness. So it could be masked potentially. They also tended to be places that didn't necessarily have much of a voice that wouldn't be heard.

24:52They tended to be places that were desperate for employment. And all of these things started to just outrage me more and more. And it felt more and more personal as it went along. And of course, once I'd met Douglas and I spent time with him and I had that sort of personal connection and then him dying so soon afterwards. And he believed as a result of contaminated contact with PCBs and that kind of stuff. You can't help but feel it personally then. And so, yes, it was a combination of factors, really, I think. And you mentioned Aniston, Alabama there, because one of the things you do in this documentary is you go to Alabama and you meet people who've been waging a pretty similar campaign in Alabama to the campaign that you encountered in Wales.

25:34Did it feel like essentially the same frustrations even across that wide Atlantic Ocean? Well, of course, the story of what happened for the community in Aniston, Alabama, is different to what's been going on, particularly in Wales, in that they were the first ones to actually take a case to court, take Monsanto to court and get compensation. But they are a long, long way down the track from where things are at, certainly in Wales. And just to see, you know, I spoke to Donald Stewart, who was one of the attorneys who represented the community over there. And to see him breaking down in tears when I'm asking him about, you know, why was this community chosen?

26:16Why did they do it here? And him saying, because they have no voice. Our chemist, Dave Megson, who did the testing over here and tested my own blood, when he was describing the results of the tests, seeing him, you know, start to break down as well. You don't expect to see these sort of things. But then when I actually sat there and I was told what I've got in me and what the more dangerous ones are and which ones of those I've got and the levels they're at and explained that that is not a safe amount. That is just what you would expect to find anywhere. I was really shocked. But then, of course, when we saw the results for other people, people who might be even more exposed to it and saw the kinds of levels there, that was incredibly shocking.