China: 'critical stage' after deadly Nepal floods

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Is the hit Netflix show Emily in Paris just harmless escapist TV? Or is Emily ruining Paris? I'm Asma Khalid and I host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. The president of France has described the show as super positive for his country. Soft power through cinema. But is TV tourism good for a city? For more, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:40Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. We're coming to you live from London. I'm James Menendez. And coming up later in the programme, King Harold of Norway has died at the age of 89. So is his son Hawken, who succeeds him, popular enough to move the royal family beyond some recent scandals? Even the Republicans in Norway say that they liked King Harald and I think they'll more or less think the same of King Horkon VIII. That story coming up in half an hour. But our top story today remains the urgent search for survivors in Nepal and Tibet following Wednesday's deadly flash flooding and the operation to help those who've lost everything in the disaster.

1:20Entire villages were swept away in the torrent of water, mud and debris that swept down the narrow valley that leads down from the Tibet border into Nepal. There, the number of dead has risen to nearly 550. It's believed hundreds, possibly close to 1 ,000 people, are still missing. The BBC's Azadeh Moshiri is in Trishuli, the area in Nepal, hit the hardest. You may be able to hear the helicopter that's flying above me right now. I've reached army barracks in Tushuli in the northern part of Nepal. And here, helicopters have been dropping off the injured survivors every few minutes. They're also taking off with some supplies.

2:01And on the other side of the army barracks gates are just some of the people in Nepal who are hoping for news of their loved ones. Because here, the army has been publishing a list of people who have been found. So many of the people here are gathering around that, hoping they'll see a name that they recognise. They're also taking names of more people who are said to be missing. That number, sadly, does keep rising, including hundreds of pilgrims and foreign tourists who are still missing. Poor weather is said to be hampering the rescue efforts. And there are worries about more flooding because of a lake that's formed high up over the border in Tibet.

2:40Let's talk to our China correspondent, Laura Bicker, who joins us on the line. Laura, good to have you with us. Just tell us about this lake and the sorts of dangers it poses. Yeah, Chinese officials say that search and rescue operations have reached what they are describing as a critical stage. Now, there was a bit of panic caused earlier today because this is a lake that has been formed within the debris of the landslide. And it's in a critical area for China because this is the real epicentre of the disaster area in Tibet. Now you may remember that dramatic footage where a torrent of water comes down the V-shaped valley and wipes away all the buildings at the main border crossing between Nepal and Tibet.

3:26You see hundreds of people running for their lives. That is the area just above that, about 10 kilometres from there, is where this lake has formed. Now, rescuers are desperate to get to the hardest hit areas, but obviously all rescue operations had to be suspended while they examined this lake. And what happened was there was an avalanche of water, another avalanche of water, came down the steep mountainside and fell into this lake, which started to overflow. That prompted fears of further flooding. Alerts went on all the way down the valley into Nepal. All rescuers were removed from the scene.

4:05People were told to get to safety. But now Chinese officials say they're monitoring it. The water levels have gone down, but there are still further fears because the rain is continuing to fall. How is the search for survivors going in Tibet? And what sort of numbers do the authorities think are missing on that side of the border? There's still 558 people missing, we're told, by Chinese state media. As for the rescue efforts, they are facing major obstacles, even for experienced teams, which we do have here in China in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, as China calls it. I think when it comes to the teams, we've been told by Chinese state media that the first search and rescue teams, experienced search and rescue teams, have only now reached what they call the Girong port, that land border.

4:54And they're beginning to search for survivors now with search and rescue dogs. The footage of them trying to get there, Chinese state media has just released it, and they're having to cross a very, very rapid moving water using ropes. They're then having to abseil down the side of mountain and scale other mountain cliffs. It has obviously been a difficult journey to get there, and that's just a handful of rescuers. Now, the People's Liberation Army is also involved, but they're trying to get heavy machinery and debris cleaning machinery anywhere near, and they've been struggling to do that. So it gives you an idea of just how difficult this operation is.

5:34Laura, thank you very much indeed. That was our China correspondent, Laura Bicker, joining us live. Well, despite difficulties with communications, more accounts are emerging of the moment that the torrent of water struck. Mark Shacham Dangle lives in the United States, but was visiting family in the valley when he had to flee. Everyone was lined up in the bridge to watch the flood. I myself made it to a temple, which is also right next to the river, but in an elevated surface, about 30 metres elevated. And the river has never gone anywhere close to that distance. But as I was recording, I saw it come with very intense force.

6:12I saw it hit a house and that's when everyone started running. I don't know if everyone who was in the temple made it. Me and a few people made it up. It was a very close call. I think as I climbed 20 seconds up a nearby hill, I looked down and the temple was going down. So I assumed the volume of water was very intense. So we kept running up. At this point, there was about 50 people that were already trying to climb up through various parts of the hills. And as I looked down a couple of five minutes later, I saw the entire village of Betrauti was fully covered in water. Sudhashan Neopan is the director of the charity Water Aid in Nepal.

6:49He grew up in Rasuwa district. That's another of the regions that have been badly affected. I have fortunately been in touch with my immediate family members who are safe, but I cannot tell you the amount of devastation that has happened. A lot of people I know of from my village or my community still have gone missing. So it's really heartbreaking from that side. We can't practically get to the depth of how people are feeling, but I can sense there's a panic as a lot of people are still waiting for church and rescue as they might have been in the jungles or have been in the cave. We've heard that there were people who got stranded in a far off, almost like inaccessible jungle area.

7:42Well, I've been speaking to the United Nations resident coordinator in Nepal, Laila Peters-Yaya, who's just come back from some of the affected regions. She told me what she'd seen there. So what I saw, I saw a lot of sad faces, a lot of people who looked traumatised, but also who had a lot of hopes because the aid was coming, the rescue was ongoing. We met with some people who had been stuck since the 26th of August and they'd been rescued by the search and rescue team of the government of Nepal. And, you know, so there was a lot of smile, a lot of hope. The other thing we saw is very, very well organized search and rescue team.

8:27You have over 13 ,000 security officers who were deployed. They were very, very well organised. We spoke about the challenges. The challenges is we have over 40 roads which are broken or completely destroyed. And we saw some of them. We saw some of the bridges which no longer exist. And so therefore for people and for the rescue team to reach those people if you don't have helicopter, it's very difficult. Just on the villages, I mean, what has happened to those villages in the path? I mean, just describe that to us. I mean, presumably some of them have been completely wiped out. Yes, we went down to the riverbank.

9:07So, you know, all the villages, we saw what was a market. The hardest part for me was when I heard the witness, you know, some people who survived. And they explained to me, they say, you know, we were on the other side of the riverbank and there were people on the market and we heard them screaming, you know, when the big wave came and took them away. So what you see is unreal, actually, the level of destruction. It's just unreal. You see that there was life in those buildings. And so what happened, a lot of the people who were able, we didn't meet a few villagers who told us they were able because they were lucky, actually.

9:44A lot of them, they said they had their friends who were up and who told them, well, this is happening. So they were able to run. And the police, they told us the government, and the local police had siren telling everybody, go up, go up, go up, go up. And so a lot of people went up to the hills. And so this is what they explained to us. And so what you see in those villages, in the lower part by the riverbank, there's no more people. People are living up. And what we heard is a lot of people are being sheltered by friend, by family. We've heard also a lot of people have gone to Kathmandu because that's where they have family.

10:20Because, you know, we're not too far from Kathmandu. You know, it's about, I think it was about 60 kilometers. And it took us three hours to get there. Yeah. But amazing what you say about, you know, the people did manage, some people managed to get out of the way of this torrent of mud and mortar. Yes. And also the other thing, you know, as we were there, we all received in our mobiles the WhatsApp message from the government telling us, you know, to move out and to go to find safety because we had an alert. and it was impressive to see. We had arrived, I think it was about nine o 'clock. We saw people active.

10:57They were, and suddenly everybody went up the hill. So we have a system. There is a system in this country and it works. So I was very, very happy to see that because obviously there will be, I hope not, but there might be another burst, you know, of this lake. But what we see is if you give alert to people, they know. But you see a lot of trauma in faces. We met this man. He explained to us how he saw his nephew. You know, he could not save him. And, you know, he lost all his livelihood, but he still had his wife. He had his children, so he was very grateful. But, you know, I've never seen so much trauma.

11:35The magnitude of the disaster and how much the number of people affected is really big. Yeah. Can I just ask you about that? I mean, I know we're in the rescue stage at the moment. But as you say, people have lost everything. They've lost their homes and in many cases, their livelihoods. Nepal is a poor country. This is going to be a huge task in the weeks and months ahead, isn't it, to try to rebuild those communities? Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is also what I was just talking with the Minister for an Affair we talked about, is this is going to be, you know, we're going to need a lot of support, a lot of investment to help Nepal, you know, rebuild.

12:16And also because they're going to have to rebuild also some of those hydropowers because we've lost about 10 % of electricity, those roads, and you're going to have to look also how you're going to rebuild all that. So we're going to need also to bring much more technology, new know-how, and that's costly. But we have very, you know, Nepal has also a lot of very skilled young people. also in terms of having access. But there's going to be a need of massive, massive investment. And Nepal, like you said, is a low-middle-income country. And so, therefore, this country will need a lot of support. And I was speaking there to the UN's resident coordinator in Nepal, Laila Peters-Yaya.

13:01As ever, you can get all the latest developments on our live page. It's at bbc.com forward slash news. There is some dramatic footage there of people being rescued from a tunnel at a hydropower project that's been flooded with mud. We are going to be returning to this story later in the programme too. We're going to be talking to a woman who is still searching for news of her father. That's coming up in half an hour. You're listening to NewsHour.

13:34This is James Menendez with NewsHour Live from the BBC. Violence by Jewish settlers in the Occupy West Bank is set to reach record levels this year. As human rights groups warn, they're increasingly spreading into new areas of the territory. Attacks on Palestinians have risen under Israel's current government, alongside a rapid increase in Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law. Our Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson has been looking at reports of settler violence across the West Bank over the course of one week.

14:10A teenager shot dead, beatings, arson attacks, a donkey tortured. You might have seen the worst attacks by Jewish settlers here in the occupied West Bank, but behind those lies a much wider campaign of violence against Palestinians. We've counted more than 60 incidents here just in the past week, including daily incursions and intimidations that never make the news, some of which aren't even reported by the victims at all. On Saturday, amputee Saeed Al-Amour was beaten by a settler with an iron bar as he stooped to pick up one of his crutches. A shocking video recording the assault clearly shows his attacker, who's now under arrest.

14:58Saeed, who lost his leg last year after being shot near his house by a settler security guard, says settlers are constantly harassing the family. They want me to leave this place. It's not only me who's targeted, it's everyone. If I leave, they'll go after my neighbor down the road, then the next one, then the one after that, until they remove everyone from these areas and replace them with Zionists. On Friday, a large group of Jewish settlers, some of them armed, walked through the Palestinian village of Saire, near Hebron, past the house of 17-year-old Karim Shalalde. His father, Sanad, told us Karim was killed while filming the settlers.

15:49The second bullet struck my son. I ran to him before he fell and held him in my arms. I would rather die myself a thousand times than see it happen to my child. Israel's army said it had received reports of Palestinians throwing stones. Karim's mother, Saul, eight months pregnant, said she had lived each day in fear of losing her children. I was not able to hold him or say goodbye. My heart breaks over Karim. I wish I could have just one more day with him. Each reminder of the settler outpost nearby, now more painful for the family. Last night, they started flashing a spotlight at us, Karim's father told me, as if to say, we killed your son, and it doesn't matter.

16:45Jewish settlements here, illegal under international law, are expanding, and settler attacks are rising as well. The Israeli human rights organization Yesh Deen says more than 90 percent of police investigations into settler violence end without indictment. There is a problem of violence in the West Bank. Doran Spielman, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister's office, spoke to the BBC late last month. There are Jews who are a very small number of Jews. They are human beings. They have names. They're not just called settlers who have, in fact, been prosecuted by the police by the vast, the largest estimate would be maybe 300 or 400 youth that are involved in this out of a population of 750 ,000.

17:31This week, Zvi Sukkot, a settler lawmaker in Israel's governing coalition, filmed himself destroying a village memorial in the West Bank because, he said, it honoured terrorists. It triggered a rebuke from Israel's foreign minister and from the office of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Jewish settlers were also filmed torturing a donkey, tying it to their vehicle and dragging it along until it was dead. A sadistic act of aggression that shocked Israelis more than it shocked Palestinians. Our Middle East correspondent, Lucy Williamson there.

18:14Now, France is notoriously strict about the way it protects its local food and wine, but this year's series of heatwaves in Europe have forced the authorities to relax some of their rules on the production of certain famous types of cheese.

18:35Prized products such as Beaufort, made in the Alps, and Conte from the neighbouring Jura Mountains currently face exacting controls on what the cows supplying the milk for the cheese can eat. The problem is some of their traditional food hasn't been there this year because it's been too hot and dry, even in the high mountains. Patricia Mitchelson knows all about those rules. She's the founder of a small chain of high-end cheese shops in London called La Fromagerie. And one of the products affected is the signature cheese of her business from when she set it up 35 years ago. It's called Beaufort Chalet d 'Alpage.

19:09She's been telling my colleague Paul Henley why this particular one is so prized. They're all priced in their own way because they are very specific styles of cheese and very specific breeds of herds. But the Beaufort Chalet d 'Alpage is from the Morienne mountain area, which is very small. If you go skiing, it's Courchevel and Meribel and places like that. And in the summer, it's called transhumance. The herds travel from the valleys up to the higher pastures, the alpine pastures, which are wild. They're untouched. And if those cows are in the southern region of those mountains on the French-Swiss border, then their cheese was particularly affected because that was the driest area, right?

19:55Yes, that was particularly, well, over the last couple of years we found it. Last year we had the same thing as well. We had calls from the cheesemakers saying that there was depleted cheese this year because they take a year to mature, remember? So it's the wild high alpine pastures that make a particular flavour. Tell me if I take a knife and a fork to this cheese here, which is a big triangle, that looks like Comte. No, no. What am I cutting into? You are cutting into the Beaufort Chalet d 'Alpache and it's August 2024. Oh, gosh. I broke the knife, but it's only a wooden knife. Don't worry.

20:32It's August 2024. Right. And I'm going to cut you a piece as well, and we can both taste it at the same time. You'll be better at describing what it tastes like while I take a bite. First, give it a little sniff, like a fine wine, because it will have this wonderful sense of cheese, but fruit. Strong smell. Strong, fruity smell to it. What's so lovely about it? It's got this sweet fruitiness to it. It's got layers of flavour. People describe it as nutty, is that right? It's nutty, yes, as well, but it's fruity. And you can taste sort of the pasture in it, the greenness of it. So say the French government relaxes the rules and brings in, I don't know, hay from Normandy to feed the hungry cows.

21:22No, that's not going to happen. What will happen is that they will start producing extra feed for them on the farm. The relax rule is that they are going to give them this extra feed of hay because the pasture isn't there. And will you be carefully watching for a change in next year's delivery of cheeses? Absolutely. It sounds like it's a very slight relaxation of this appellation d 'origine protégée, which it's not going to threaten the authenticity of the product. Well, it is in a way because the recipe is going to be changed. it's not going to be solely on an alpine pasture that's untouched.

22:01Would you say that climate change was becoming a threat to French cheese as we know it? It's becoming a threat to everything that has a tradition and a season and a way of being made. Yes of course it is. Cheesemonger Patricia Mitchelson talking there to NewsHour's Paul Henley. You're listening to the BBC World Service. Do stay with us here on NewsHour for the next half hour.

22:35Is the hit Netflix show Emily in Paris just harmless, escapist TV? Or is Emily ruining Paris? I'm Asma Khalid, and I host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. The president of France has described the show as super positive for his country, soft power through cinema. But is TV tourism good for a city? For more, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

23:07You're listening to NewsHour. In the US, the high-profile murder trial of Lindsay Clancy is now in the hands of a Massachusetts jury. After five weeks of testimony, jurors will determine if she's criminally responsible for the deaths of her three children in 2023. The defence is arguing that she suffered from postpartum psychosis, a severe mental health emergency that begins suddenly after childbirth. Shaima Khalil reports. We're going to take a break this time. Lindsay Clancy admits to killing her three young children, but listening to details of their death in court was at times too much for her to bear.

23:47Cora was five, Dawson three, and Callan was eight months old when they were strangled by their young mother. The question at the heart of this case is whether she was legally responsible. She's living her own health. She knows what happened with those kids. In January 2023, Lindsay killed her children while her then-husband was out picking up dinner for the family. She then tried taking her own life. Patrick Clancy described finding his kids in the basement. And then I went to the other side of the basement and he was in my office. And when you saw Dawson, what condition was he in? I knew he was gone.

24:27Lindsay's lawyers say she'd suffered postpartum psychosis after the birth of her youngest child, that she repeatedly sought help and warned she was thinking of harming her children. When she told you that she was having intrusive thoughts, did you ask her what they were? Yeah. And what was her response? She described thoughts of hurting the kids. Shortly before the killings, she admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital, but was discharged days after. Prosecutor Shannon Buckingham told the jury the mother was fully aware of her actions. This was not a woman in the throes of psychosis on January 24, 2023.

25:06This was a woman who acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly to accomplish a very specific goal, to kill. Clancy then attempted suicide, which left her paralyzed after she jumped out of a window.

25:25Beyond the courtroom this case has divided America, hundreds of women, many with their own experience of postpartum illness, have rallied in support of Clancy. We all relate in one way or another, and that is definitely attracting each of us here to support her. So many women in the world go through this, and we really don't know much about psychosis, particularly with women who have given birth. But not everybody believes she deserves sympathy. As far as I'm concerned, this whole situation is about those babies, okay? I think what she did was horrible. I support mental health. However, in this case, three children were murdered.

26:05Millions coast to coast are waiting and watching as this case will soon head to the jury. A conviction would mean life in prison without parole. If she's found not criminally responsible, this could mean indefinite confinement in a secure psychiatric hospital. Whatever the verdict, nothing changes the terrible loss. Three young children dead and a family destroyed. And that was Shaima Khalil reporting.