Hundreds dead in Venezuela earthquakes

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0:38Hello, welcome to the programme. This is NewsHour from the BBC World Service. I'm Paul Henley. We're coming to you live from London. Offers of international help are mounting for Venezuela a day after two powerful earthquakes killed at least 589 people and injured probably thousands more. Venezuela's interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, announced on television that United Nations-certified rescuers would help search for survivors. Turkey said it was sending a team of search and rescue experts, including vehicles and dogs. Specialists from Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK will get involved.

1:16The Pope announced emergency aid from the Vatican, and the US said it was deploying two warships, transport planes and helicopters, as well as mobilising$150 million in aid for what President Trump called our new and great friends. For now, it is local rescuers that are hard at work. They pulled this woman, Graciela Mora, out alive from under the rubble in La Guayra.

1:47When the earthquake started, I clung as tightly as I could to the doorframe, so tightly that I broke my finger. I held on tight, really tight to the doorframe until all the floors collapsed. Jesus Armas is a resident of the capital Caracas. This is what he told the BBC late last night. People are trying to do their best, but the thing is that many, many buildings that have collapsed, there are not enough tools to find survivors. There are not enough rescue teams. There are not enough trained people to support the surge operations in Caracas. We are very sad. We have so many lives have been lost.

2:35This is very hard. The state doesn't have the capacity for this emergency. And the international help is coming. But I think it's not enough. and at the same time it will take time, especially because the logistic in Venezuela is really bad. Actually, the main airport of the country collapsed yesterday, so these are hard times. The government has promised that aid will reach affected areas, but already criticism of their response is growing. Arjenes has been searching for survivors in Caracas. Isn't it possible to call the military to say, come here, help us with this? The military officers that are right here, get on a tank and come help the people.

3:23That's what we want. Foreign help is still en route. Venezuelan expats are organising their own campaigns in Doral in Florida. More than 30 % of the population is Venezuelan originally, and donation drop-off points have been set up to gather supplies.

3:46I wanted to come to donate drinking water because that's what's needed most right now. I know people, close friends and family members who are missing and, well, I want to help as much as possible and do whatever little we can from here.

4:02Right now I am packing disinfectants. I'm here volunteering because I'm Venezuelan. I know the need my country is facing. I know my country isn't prepared for a situation like this. We are not a country that typically experiences earthquakes.

4:21We came to bring supplies for babies in Venezuela. I can't be in my country helping in the way I'd like to right now. And I felt this was the least I could do at this moment. Some Venezuelans there in Florida. We can hear live now from Venezuela and speak to Andres Ortiz, who is a gastroenterologist in Caracas. He works with the charity Healing Venezuela. He joins us from one of the main hospitals in the city where he's volunteering today. Dr. Ortiz, welcome. What is happening around you? What are the big medical challenges that people are facing? Yes, right now in the hospital, the hospital is pretty much full.

5:02The emergency room is, as the doctors say, there's a tense calm. They're expecting rescue, emergency rescuers to bring more patients in today. They say when they come in, it's really, really moving. But right now, in this moment, it's pretty much calm. Is the hospital where you're working undamaged? And have you got enough supplies, etc.? What are power and supply lines like? Yeah, yeah. This hospital was not affected. It's perfectly, the structure is perfectly fine. They have electricity and everything. But yesterday, the government, they issued some information and they're saying that they had to close down eight hospitals near Caracas and La Guayra.

5:54And they're moving all those patients from those eight hospitals towards the other hospitals in Caracas. So that's overflowing the capacity of all the hospitals in Caracas. A lot of people will know those who've died in what's happened. Your son is one of them. He's a medical student. He's lost friends, I hear. Yes, there were four medical students that were living in La Guayra. Their building where their living collapsed. Three of them died. One of his friends survived. He waited for around 10, 12 hours until they finally rescued him. and when they rescued him, they were waiting for him at the hospital where he works, in this hospital, Hospital Vargas.

6:50Even he had some professors waiting for him in the trauma-shocked area, but he didn't make it. He died before he got to the hospital. Sorry to hear that. Tell us about the scenes in Caracas itself, the wider city. A lot of people sleeping rough because of fear of aftershocks or because their homes have been destroyed. What can you see? Yes, on my way to this hospital, I did see a lot of people sleeping on the streets and a lot of people sleeping in tents near the hospital. And like in parks and green areas around the city, you can see a lot of people sleeping in tents. and not only tents but provisional tents that the government has set up, I guess.

7:44I guess you as a medical volunteer will be hoping that you are very busy in the very near future. It's a small window, isn't it, left for finding survivors? Yeah, yeah. Every minute is counting. Today I saw in the news that a plane with medical supplies and a lot of workers who are specialized in rescue people came into Venezuela. That was a plane from Germany came in this morning and a plane from Spain. That's what I could see in the news today. All right. Thank you very much for coming on the program, Dr. Andres Ortiz, working in one of the big hospitals in Caracas. As he mentioned, thousands of Venezuelans have spent a second night on the streets as the race continues to find survivors trapped beneath the rubble after Wednesday's quakes.

8:38Eleanor Rakes is head of programme delivery at the International Rescue Committee. She's currently in London. Eleanor, welcome to NewsHour. What are you hearing from your team on the ground first? Thanks for having me. well the first thing we were able to do in the immediate hours after the earthquake struck was to confirm that all of our staff in Venezuela are indeed safe and accounted for and we were very relieved that that was the case we have a team in Venezuela we also work very closely with a number of Venezuelan organizations partner organizations so we've also been in contact with them and making sure that the people are safe, but also that we're able to now mobilise and support what is going to be a complicated emergency response effort to the effects of this earthquake.

9:33You'll have dealt with similar things before. What are the humanitarian priorities now? In the immediate days when something like this happens, it is obviously search and rescue, as you've just been talking about, delivery of basic relief items, food, water, shelter, and access to medical services. Those are the most critical things in these hours and days ahead. Very quickly, though, and we're preparing for this already, the aftermath, the humanitarian impact of earthquakes like this, this is going to take months, not days or weeks. Venezuela, before the earthquakes hit had a very under-resourced public service infrastructure, in particular the health sector.

10:20And so it will be essential to really shore up hospitals and health clinics in impacted areas beyond the emergency medical services for impacted people and support other civil protection and other services in the area. and think about mobilising mental health, psychosocial support services, protection services. The needs are going to be fairly significant with an earthquake of this scale in hitting a country like Venezuela that was already experiencing political and economic turmoil. Your team will discover the impact of years of economic crisis on the ground there. What are you hearing about how equipped the authorities are to respond?

11:04there is mobilization happening as you as you spoke to internationally as well as nationally and certainly a great outpouring of support from venezuelans overseas and within the country um i think in the the days ahead there was still um fairly significant barriers to accessing the most impacted areas um you reference the airport is damaged that's going to be a big uh impediment to getting the volume of supplies into the country. We've got prepositioned stock inside the country that we're using and then some additional stock in neighboring Colombia. But, you know, there is infrastructure damage, there's internet connectivity challenges, telecommunication issues that will all hamper the relief effort.

11:48So those are typically, you know, often what we see in the aftermath of an earthquake. Obviously, you have the infrastructure damage that then also impedes the recovery effort, which adds to the challenge. You additionally have here, though, a population that, many of the impacted population, were already struggling to meet their basic needs before these earthquakes hit. So you have a pre-existing vulnerability that needs to be addressed and makes this all the more challenging. Could the recently dramatically improved relationship between the US and Venezuela help here? I was certainly encouraged to hear the reaction from the US and the commitment to mobilize significant funding to support the response, especially because over the last year or so, Venezuela, among many, many other countries, has been impacted by quite significant reductions in humanitarian aid funding from the US and elsewhere.

12:45So, as I said, this has exacerbated the vulnerabilities in the country that existed before the earthquake. We do now need, therefore, a robust response to the impact of this disaster. What we would also say is we need sustained humanitarian funding for countries like Venezuela beyond this, because if you take it all away and you significantly reduce humanitarian services, then when a disaster strikes, the impact is even worse. Many thanks. Eleanor Rakes, Head of Programme Delivery at the International Rescue Committee. You're with the BBC World Service. This is NewsHour. We're live from London.

13:35Coming up, an intriguing discovery deep below the surface of the Red Planet. On Mars, we can fairly confidently say that there'll be far more near-surface metal deposits than we once thought. And that's quite exciting because it suggests that these deposits could one day support mining and perhaps even long-term human settlements. The headlines this hour. Venezuela's interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, says nearly 600 people are now known to have died when two huge earthquakes struck on Wednesday. Iran has again insisted on its right to control shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, a day after a vessel was struck as it took a route near the coast of Oman, and a court in Germany sentenced a Saudi man to life in prison for an attack on a Christmas market that killed six people in 2024.

14:22More on that soon.

14:36I'm Paul Henley and this is NewsHour, live from the BBC in London. A crucial World Cup match between Egypt and Iran in the US city of Seattle this week will unfold against a backdrop of local pride celebrations after FIFA said fans would be allowed to bring rainbow flags into the stadium. Both teams' football federations had objected. Homosexuality and any symbols of pride are criminalised in both countries. Seattle's local World Cup organisers have designated Friday's Group G fixture a part of the city's Pride weekend. FIFA, however, is distancing itself from that label, insisting it's simply another World Cup match rather than a Pride fixture, even as Pride-related celebrations take place around it.

15:21Our North America correspondent Shaima Khalil reports from Seattle.

15:28There is plenty of excitement here at one of Seattle's fan zones, Supporters in different shirts gather in front of a giant screen cheering as yet another team edges closer to the knockout stages at the World Cup. And that is exactly what Egypt and Iran are hoping to do. Both teams face each other in a crucial match. It also marks the start of Seattle's Pride Weekend, a celebration of LGBTQ plus communities that both countries' football federations have objected to on cultural and religious grounds. homosexuality is illegal in both countries and can result in harsh punishments. FIFA says rainbow flags will still be allowed inside the stadium, but insists this is not a FIFA Pride match, simply another World Cup game taking place in a city marking Pride weekend.

16:15Egyptian-American fan Macarius Damien says for him the focus is still on football. I don't see it being the main part of the game. Right now it's about two teams trying to get to the next round. Pride match for no pride match, that's not what matters. Welcome to Seattle. This is how we pride. All humans. Seattle organizers insist the timing was not designed to provoke. Pride weekend had been planned long before the World Cup draw paired Egypt and Iran in the city. And they say the answer to discomfort is curiosity rather than retreat. We're excited to have you in Seattle. You are welcome in Seattle.

16:52While you're here, learn about who we are. Learn about our culture. Hedda McClendon is a senior official on Seattle's World Cup 26 local organizing committee. Be curious about our culture. Ask questions. It might not be how you want to live or how things are in your country, but this is something that makes us unique and we want you to experience it and be curious. On the pitch, there's plenty at stake. The Egyptian squad comes into this match with momentum after beating New Zealand and with a real chance of taking control of Group G. At the pre-match press conference, Egypt manager Hossam Hassan would not engage with questions about the Pride-related celebrations, insisting his focus was on football.

17:36Iran, meanwhile, arrive in a very different mood. Their tournament already shaped by politics, travel restrictions and complaints about preparation time, even if they have now been allowed to get to Seattle earlier than before. Their head coach, Amir Kalinoy, also refused to engage with questions about the pride-related celebrations.

17:57We are here to play football, not for other things. We think about football. Our concentration is on the match and on being successful. As for things that are forbidden in our religion and do not exist, we do not want to talk about them. We only talk about the match, football and the beauty of the game. So it's got rice, lentils, garbanzo beans, elbow macaroni, garlic tomatoes. Not far from the fan zone, an Egyptian restaurant pop-up is getting ready for the match and for fans craving a taste of home. Owners Amani and Ayman Abouamo say the discomfort around the game is real, but they see it less as a confrontation and more as awkwardness rooted in cultural misunderstanding.

18:39It's really confusing because first, here is the culture, but it's kind of acceptable to the people here. Everyone is used to that. Back home, people are not used to that. And it's a cultural thing that they cannot get it. So it's just like this piece of confusion that each party cannot understand the other party. I don't think it's going to have any effect. People going to the match are going to be at the match. People at Pride Fest are going to be there. Soccer fans are here for soccer. They really are into the game. As Egypt and Iran try to edge closer to the knockout stages, this match here in Seattle is a glimpse into what happens when a World Cup lands in a city celebrating one set of values, while two of the teams taking part arrive carrying very different ones of their own.

19:34The BBC's Shaima Khalil reporting from Seattle. Now, scientists here in the UK have drawn close comparisons between the way human beings and apes laugh. In fact, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom are the only creatures capable of laughing audibly other than ourselves, and the new research opens a window on the way laughter and therefore speech evolved. Italian national Chiara de Gregorio is a primatologist at the University of Warwick, and she is lead author of this study. When we talk about laugh and laughter, we could say that we, angry apes, have it Because it's really the same type of signal organized in the same way and also used in the same social context.

20:17But something similar is still present in other human animals. If we think about like dogs playing, for example, they use some facial expressions when they are playing together. So it has a similar function. So many animals have some sort of play phase. They can make some kind of sound in a situation. and these tell us that this kind of vocal behaviour is so important that it's present in many, many mammals, not just, you know, humans and great apes. But it's the great apes' laughter that can be compared to ours and I think we've got a clip here of a chimpanzee making a laughing sound.

20:56So the sound that the chimp makes isn't that similar, but it's about the rhythm, isn't it? Yeah, so we actually found that we and other non-human great apes, so the chimp you just listen to, but also bonobos, orangutans, gorillas, we all share the same rhythm while laughing. That is a regular rhythm that we can call isochrony, and it is like the ticking of a clock or the ticking of a metronome. So a very regular type of signal. And we all, you know, laugh in the same way, apparently. And that gives us an insight into the way communication, speech evolved, does it? Yeah, because the thing is, speech is something that only humans have.

21:38So it's difficult to understand how it evolved because it's difficult to make comparison. But actually, latter, it is. A very important point in the evolution of human language and speech has something to do with the ability to control our mouth and our lips and our tongue. because actually the vocal tract of other non-human primates, it's already speech-ready. It could produce speech. What is missing there is the ability to move, you know, mouth, lips, tongue. And by looking at laughter, we actually have seen how during evolution the rhythm and the tempo of laughter accelerated. And this tells us something about the fact that with evolution we got more, you say, good at moving our mouth, which can be, you know, it may seem very simple, but it really tells us something about we evolved to get to the point where we were able to produce complex sounds at speech.

22:36But rhythmic laughter, we can now say, dates back about 15 million years. Are we saying that the first meaningful vocalisation was laughter, which is quite a nice discovery? Yeah, I would say that maybe the first that we actually really share, because, of course, the new one primates can communicate with some very also complex vocal behavior. The more we studied them, the more we actually found that they do crazy things. But of course, it's different. We use they use that for different function and purposes than, you know, human speech. But actually, Lasser, that's that's the same. that's still using the same kind of sound for the same kind of social situation and social relationship.

23:20Chiara Di Gregorio, who is a primatologist at the University of Warwick in England. This is the BBC World Service. NewsHour.

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25:04Welcome back to NewsHour. Hundreds of thousands of people in Japan have been ordered to evacuate their homes because of a risk of flooding and landslides as two tropical storms approach the country. And the way those storms interact could end up making matters worse. Let's speak live from Tokyo to our correspondent Kurumi Mori. Kurumi, welcome. What's the latest? Is it obvious the storms are near? Hi, Paul. Absolutely. I just got caught in a flash rain myself just going from the train station to the studio here in Tokyo. That number about the evacuations is now one million residents across Japan.