Nato welcomes new US-Denmark deal over Greenland

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1:09Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. Coming to you live from London, I'm James Kamarasamy. And we begin with a deal about the future of Greenland that is being presented as a win by the White House and a win-win by the authorities in Denmark and Greenland. It was announced by Donald Trump on social media late on Friday and confirmed shortly afterwards by the parties sitting on the other side of the negotiating table. The agreement's details are for the moment hazy, but it appears to fall short of total American control over Greenland, the autonomous Danish territory that President Trump has repeatedly claimed the US needs to own.

1:48At the start of the year, that apparent threat of annexation led to much soul-searching about the future of NATO and perhaps the biggest internal crisis in the history of the military alliance. Well, now Mr Trump says Washington has secured permanent control over security and all other needs in Greenland and has a veto over any American adversary establishing a military presence on or making sensitive investments in Greenland. The Danish and Greenland prime ministers, meanwhile, have said that the still unpublished agreement recognises their sovereignty and territorial integrity. From the people of Greenland today, a mixture of defiance and head-scratching, some are asking what rights the deal gives the United States that weren't already in the current US-Denmark agreement that's been in place for three quarters of a century.

2:35Haven't it been like that since the 50s, that they more or less could build all the bases they want. So I was a little confused when Trump, he said in the beginning that we will go and take over Greenland and say, but you had an agreement already. Why not just put more troops here? That's a little weird. Greenland should not be taken over by the US. That's the most important thing. The US shouldn't control Greenland, I believe. I think it's better if we have cooperation with NATO. Well, NATO has also spoken positively about the deal, which is expected to be signed at the UN General Assembly next week.

3:14Naya Nathanielsen sits as an MP in Greenland's parliament. She's from the Inuit Atakatijit party. So how does she feel about this deal, or at least about what we know about it so far? Well, I'm really feeling hopeful about the whole situation. It's been some very hard years actually in Greenland with this uncertainty going on. And right now, I think it seems like we're getting really close to an agreement all three parties can accept. And I think that's great news. Are there questions you have, though? Well, of course, we have questions until we all have access to the entire agreement. But you can say when the Danish prime minister and our premier goes out and clearly states that the red lines have not been crossed, that we still have sovereignty of the country and that Greenland can decide their own future and our rights as an indigenous people should be respected.

4:06For us, that is really, really important. And when Donald Trump says that the United States has security control over Greenland forever, permanent control, what do you make of that? Well, you can say to some extent that that's already the case, isn't it, right? With the 1951 agreement, we just not have an end date as well. So I think let's see what the content is of the finalized agreement. And let's get back to that. Yes, because that 1951 agreement, it is linked to NATO being in existence, isn't it? That seems to be the difference. I mean, does that in any way cause concern that this is envisaging potentially a time when NATO is no longer there as, you know, guarantor of security?

4:51You know, I think this discussion would be much easier if we knew the content. So I think we should not go into details of what we might think could be in the agreement and maybe just stick to what's been said from my parties, which is all I can really relate to. And they have given me no cause for concern so far. Understood. But what about the public? Because we've certainly heard from Greenlanders who are worried, sceptical and are thinking back to the fact that they had to prepare not so long ago for a potential invasion by the United States, something that would have been unthinkable just a few months, a year ago.

5:31It's been an enormous stressor, this whole situation, and I cannot underscore how much it's been a strain on our society. It really has been difficult, and many people have been scared. And I think these statements that have come out so far from the Danish Prime Minister and our Premier, Svarek Nilsson gives me great hope because I think they are much more than I hoped we could get. Do you think, though, and again, this is something we have heard directly from Greenlanders today, that it will take a long time to get over the kind of blow to security that has been caused by all of this and the threats to annex Greenland?

6:13Well, absolutely. We shouldn't be naive about this thing. I look forward to seeing the agreement in its full text and dive into it and there will be a parliamentary debate on the content. And so, of course, we have some ways to go yet. And I hope this will be an agreement that will bear the signature of a free party. So let's hope for that. But this agreement will not change the fact that geopolitically we are still in an uncertain situation that will not change with this agreement alone. No, let me just end then on that positive note. You're trying to take the positive from this. I mean, clearly it is talking about keeping the territory of Greenland sort of safe from Western adversaries, Russia and China specifically.

6:59If it does achieve that, would that be the best outcome? Well, I think for a long time in the Arctic, we have been really promoting that Arctic should be a low-tension area. And I think we have come to recognise over the last couple of years that things have changed and I think we should all get, if not used to, then accept that there will be a more permanent presence of military installations and maybe even personnel in the high north. And I think that's just the reality of things as it is right now. But that's just one of the issues we are facing. I think as a Western alliance, we see a lot of the rupture that Mark Carney is talking about and all of these things and uncertainties and trade wars and the war in Iran and the war in Ukraine and what's happening in Gaza.

7:49And there's so much going on. And all these problems will, of course, not fade away just because of an agreement with Greenland, the US and within the Kingdom of Denmark. But some of it will be solved. And I'm really hopeful about that. That was Naya Nathanielsen, an MP from Greenland.

8:14In recent weeks, the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen have stepped up their pressure on Saudi Arabia, blockading a key Red Sea shipping route and attacking Saudi oil facilities with drones. Today, they have claimed responsibility for attacks on the Saudi capital, Riyadh, and on the Red Sea city of Yanbu. A thick plume of black smoke could be seen near Riyadh's international airport today, where a fuel depot appeared to have been hit. Some flights were cancelled. It was the first time the city's residents had received an alert on their phones and been urged to stay indoors since the recent escalation.

8:48I've been hearing more from Aziz Al-Gashian, a senior non-resident fellow at the Gulf International Forum, who's in Riyadh. What I am reading is that I think there was an attempt by the Houthis to really strike at the airport. There seemed to be confusion regarding the actual strike and whether it hit the airport or not. Moreover, I think there was this context beforehand that there were strikes in and around, I think, Riyadh. And, you know, many people have been discussing that there were alarms going off on their phones. And that's something that's happening here. And basically, these alarms are to make sure that we have to take some safe refuge.

9:28Since this recent advance by the Houthis in Yemen and their blocking off of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and also the drone attacks on the east-west pipeline, is this the first time those alerts have gone off? Yes. In Riyadh, yes. I think for the people in the south of Saudi and places that we would call Abha, Khamis Mashaik and Asir and Najran, these are the places that are really close to the Yemeni border, close to the Houthi stronghold. They receive it far more there. However, I think for Riyadh, the last time something like this happened was actually when the Iran-US war was still in its full swing.

10:10And so that was a few months ago. That was maybe in April. I remember it very vividly in March and Ramadan when the phones were going off. But, you know, it's rare, I think, for Saudis to have it and people here living in Riyadh. It was concerning. A bit of a sort of wake up call for the people of Riyadh that things are going in potentially in a bad direction? Before the ceasefire that happened that took place in 2022, in 2021, I remember vividly also hearing loud explosions. But, you know, since then, I think the Saudi authorities took it upon themselves to say, we have to really install alarms and early warning systems for citizens and people living here.

10:53I would say the wake-up call is literally a wake-up call because it did wake us up around 3, 4 in the morning. And it just reminds everyone that there is a situation that's happening. It's also worth noting that Riyadh is actually very, very big. You know, it is a huge city, actually. So while people may hear it in one place, they may not hear the explosions and see the remnants of these explosions in other places. So the Saudi social media, the official accounts keep indicating time and again that, you know, giving these warnings and saying, hey, there are these warnings that are happening. So I have to say there are these reminders, but it's a reminder that there is a simmering situation.

11:35Situation is under control. That's what they're trying to communicate. You're about to take a flight. How do you feel about taking a flight from Riyadh International Airport? I feel confident because I think, you know, if I was closer to the border, I would be more concerned. Moreover, I think because I am a traveler and a researcher. And so I think being stuck in airports due to conflicts, you know, something I'm kind of a little bit used to. So I think I'm a little bit apprehensive and hopefully that this won't be something more than just a delay. But in my opinion right now, I think because we are in Riyadh, we are really literally in the heart of Saudi Arabia.

12:15I'm feeling more confident than apprehensive. What about the defences and what about the help that Saudi Arabia has asked its allies with the defences? Is that arriving at all? In my opinion, I think the scale of the defenses is still yet to be undetermined. We just don't know. For many people, it's becoming more clear that the Saudi capabilities, while I think are capable and able to do this, I think the scaling up of these capabilities and defense capabilities is something that I think is becoming more essential for us in the future. I think there's going to be more militarization in the region and there's going to be more investment in defenses.

13:01What about diplomacy in the region? Are the Saudi authorities speaking directly to the Iranians who back the Houthis and telling them to back off, telling them this is unacceptable? They are. And that's why the Saudi diplomatic channels and the bilateral relationship has not been severed during the war. While we have our diplomatic channels with them, we are also using and trying to leverage the diplomatic channels that we have with both China and Pakistan, our new ally, in order for them to begin to influence upon or encourage Iran to rain down the Houthis. That was the Riyadh-based Saudi analyst Aziz Al-Gashian speaking to me from the Saudi capital there.

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14:39A study by the University of Arizona has found evidence of a loss of the Y chromosome in the tissue cells of men adjacent to cancer tumours. Although scientists have long known about the so-called loss of Y phenomenon in white blood cells, it's not previously been identified as a possible early signpost of cancer. Mark Jobling is an emeritus professor of genetics at Leicester University in England and he began by explaining what Y chromosomes are. The Y chromosome is sex determining so what that means is when an embryo is developing if it has a Y chromosome then it will become a male and if it doesn't then it will become a female.

15:19So normal females have two X chromosomes, as well as the set of other chromosomes they get from both parents, while males have an X and a Y chromosome. So its primary role is to determine maleness. And what we're talking about here is the loss of Y chromosomes. How do cells lose Y chromosomes? Well, when cells divide, they have to carry out a kind of complex dance of the chromosomes to make sure that the two daughter cells inherit the right numbers of chromosomes. And sometimes that goes wrong, and it goes increasingly wrong as we age. So as we get older, we see a phenomenon that's called genome instability developing, and that's where errors of various kinds in the genome, including this mitotic segregation, as we call it, increase.

16:12And the Y chromosome is actually the smallest chromosome we have, that may make it more vulnerable to this kind of problem. And we've known about what's called the loss of Y, L-O-Y, for decades, but now research is drawing a link between that and cancers. That's right. So I think in 1963 was the first observation of this, but it's become, with new technologies, it's become easier to measure this and observe it. And there've been some big studies done of tumours in men and also in normal men to see what the loss of the Y chromosome looks like. So in the general population, about 40 % of men over 70 show this phenomenon.

16:58And it's not all the cells in the body that lose the Y chromosome. It's a proportion and that proportion will vary. That loss is associated with a wide range of cancers, not just male-specific cancers, but these are cancers that affect both men and women. But if we look in men with these cancers, we see increasing incidence of them correlated with the loss of the Y chromosome in those men. Does this knowledge in any way help prevent cancers? Well, it seems that men who have loss of Y chromosome, their tumours may be differently sensitive to certain chemotherapeutic drugs and to radiotherapy. So it could be in the future that if a man has loss of Y chromosome, then he may be treated slightly differently.

17:48It's rather early days in that though. Right, so not preventative, but it could help with treatment. Exactly, prognostic, and it's what cancer biologists call a biomarker. So it's something useful you can measure that might tell you how you should treat that particular patient. But could it be, identified early and patients with those biomarkers followed more closely for potential signs of cancer? Well I think as with any screening protocol you need to justify it in terms of the cost of testing and I think the argument wouldn't be strong to pre-test men for loss of Y although that may change in the future as knowledge improves.

18:28And is it linked to other risks beyond cancers? Yes, so loss of Y chromosome is associated with increased all-cause mortality, so that's general death. It's also linked to increased risk of Alzheimer disease. Men live five years on average less than women do, so this could be the contributing factor to that. Professor of Genetics, Mark Jobling. Now, although we are used to listening to music digitally, there's still a lot of love for old-school vinyl records. But there is an even older school, because before sound was stored in the grooves and lumps of vinyl, it was captured on a different analogue medium, and that's wax.

19:09This week, at London's Royal Academy of Music, a group of guitarists recreated that old form of recording live on stage, with the stylus etching the sound vibrations onto rotating wax cylinders. The audience listened to the original music and and then to a playback of the wax recording. I heard both versions at a rehearsal for the concert with the musicians and the musicologist who organised the event.

19:38Today we are here because we are doing something very exciting and very unusual, I think.

19:48My name is Inja Stanovic. I'm a senior lecturer at University of Surrey. We are exploring early sound recordings and guitar playing. Specifically wax cylinder recordings. When did you first become aware of them? Why are you interested in them? Well, it was a long time ago now, but I'm a pianist and a musicologist and during my PhD I heard these wonderful things and I was very shocked because they preserve playing styles which are not in use anymore. And how did these people do it? In one take, there is no magic button for volume, so there is no volume control on phonographs, and so what you record, that's what you get.

20:42How do the sound waves react, if you like, with the wax? I still, OK, I deal with these recordings for over a decade and I still think it's magic. You wind the phonograph up and I have a little piece here which has a stylus made of sapphire. And it cuts while it's cutting. I will have to blow on the cylinder to make the wax shavings go away. While it's recording. Yes, while it's recording. So my job is very simple in a way. I need to be very close to it and make sure that the wax residues don't block the stylus. And so we will record in one go and then we will set it up for reproducing because I will need to change the recorder to a producer and then I will use a different horn, which is a reproducing horn.

21:43Different stylus as well? Yes. So one stylus cuts, the other one reads the groove. But it's as easy as that, that I just change one little piece of phonograph.

22:00Hi, I'm Marco Ramelli. I will play two songs, a medley, of Levino Albano de Concesao, that is a blind guitarist from Brazil that actually record with the same system. For a guitarist, what does it mean to then record on a wax cylinder like this? You have to make your sound brighter. You have to play some notes louder. Also, we have only two minutes, so you have some time to speed up, some time to work with time, because you have a limit. For a listener then, what do they get from listening to a wax cylinder recording that they don't get from other recordings? A window to the past, a freedom which is forgotten, this type of freedom of improvisation, the freedom towards the mistakes, you know, mistakes.

22:51I do know I present live programmes, so I know it's not perfect. And it's so good to have a disc where there is a mistake, it's a normal thing. And believe me, it doesn't spoil the musical magic of what is registered.

23:11Not so much waxing lyrical as waxing musical. Ineja Stanovic and the guitarist recording their music onto wax. You're listening to the BBC World Service and this is NewsHour, coming to you live from London with James Kamarasamy.

23:33President Trump has signed into law a bill that gives him broad powers to impose a new range of sanctions and tariffs on Russian individuals and institutions, as well as on countries purchasing Russian oil and gas. The bill that was named after the late Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Ukraine's strongest allies in Washington, has been welcomed by President Zelensky as being critically important legislation. Keir Giles is with the Russia and Eurasia programme at London's Chatham House International Affairs think tank. how significant does he think the legislation is? The significance of the bill depends entirely on how much of it is going to be implemented and how it's going to be used.

24:09In particular, the waivers and the discretion that's given to the president for whether or not some of these very stringent terms that might be intended to punish Russia are actually going to be implemented or not. Russia has immediately said, well, this makes a peace agreement less likely. And there's no doubt that Russia would be distinctly upset if some of these provisions were to be put in place. the personal sanctions, for example, on a huge range of different Russian leadership and military leadership figures. And how does this differ from what's in place already? There are stepping up of sanctions on third parties that import Russian energy.

24:42The idea being, of course, that that constrains Russia's ability to make money to fuel its war machine. There are directly personally targeted sanctions on quite a wide range of individuals within the Russian system. And there are 500 % tariffs on imports of Russian goods and materials into the United States. On the face of it, these look like pretty swinging measures. But then, of course, there are all the carve outs, the waivers, the exemptions. And the fact that all of this is contingent on Donald Trump actually deciding that he's going to go ahead and do it. Is that the big question, what his real intention is?

25:16I mean, he says, and he said it all along, that he wants a deal, but what is he prepared to do to get one? That's exactly it. And in some respects, some of the provisions of this sanctioned bill work directly against what his negotiators are attempting to do in Moscow. It says there should be a prohibition on any new future US investment in Russia, and yet investment opportunities should be precisely what Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are chasing when they visit Moscow. President Zelensky has welcome this bill. I suppose it would be difficult for him to do anything other than that, would it?