Wildfires continue to burn in France and Spain

0:03Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. Coming to you live from London, I'm Regine Vaidyanavan. Fires which have been raging for days across parts of Spain and France continue to intensify. Deep red flames, taller than trees and thick black smoke line the landscape as planes try to douse the fires with water. But it's not easy. France's interior minister said a fire in the Gironde region has a life of its own and that giant blaze is threatening the wine-growing region of Bordeaux. Meanwhile, Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has warned of difficult hours ahead, with the situation there hard to control as well.

0:43He said that fires like these are likely to become much more common. What we are living in is not a succession of isolated events. It is the most painful expression of a climate emergency that is making wildfires more voracious, heatwaves more frequent and as a result our territory more vulnerable. This is no longer an exception. It is the new reality. Summers are becoming increasingly difficult, destructive and deadly. Hundreds of thousands of people in Spain and France have had to leave their homes and it's unclear how long this will go on for. Our correspondent Sarah Rainsford's been watching developments.

1:28The fire they're battling in southwestern France is the country's worst in decades. In the Gironde region, around Bordeaux, the military are now helping firefighters and police, but still struggling to bring the flames under control. This firefighter says what they're facing is unusual, a fire that speeds up, then slows down, moves left then right, he says. It is very hard to read.

2:02Locals are pitching in, trying to protect property and land. Using tractors with water tanks or just buckets, attempting to dampen down smaller fires before they can take hold. It makes you want to cry. Honestly, it's horrible. We're overwhelmed. The firefighters are doing what they can, but there aren't enough resources. So we're helping them. But honestly, it's hard. It's really hard.

2:33Because every time one fire is doused, it seems there are more sparks.

2:42Tens of thousands of people have had to abandon their homes for camp beds in sports centres and in schools.

2:52Michelle left Arkashan on the coast on Friday and says the road back is now impassable. She had been hoping to go home today, but the fire is still spreading.

3:08The mayor of Bordeaux has stressed reports the city itself is being evacuated are false. But France's interior minister called conditions unfavourable, and a regional official has warned tourists to stay away or to leave until this fire has been contained.

3:32In Spain, there are now a dozen fires blazing, including new ones near Valencia, where helicopters have been shuttling through thick grey smoke to empty sacks of water onto the flames. Outside Madrid, the immediate danger seems to have eased, but the interior minister called the fires there the most aggressive Spain has ever seen. And the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, warned of difficult hours ahead. He said the flames had already torched six times more land than last year. One reason is all the vegetation produced by a very wet winter that's made more fuel for fires when the summer is as dry and as hot as this one.

4:22Michael Byrne is a climate scientist at St Andrews. It's really the perfect storm for wildfires and why we are very confident as climate scientists that this threat of wildfires is really only going to go one way and that way is more severe, unfortunately. In Spain and in France, the word used most often for these fires is unpredictable. And this week, once again, the temperature is expected to rise. The BBC's Sarah Rainsford reporting there. Well, let's now look at the situation in Spain in a bit more detail. Wildfires have devastated parts of the Madrid, Avila and Toledo regions. Well, Juan Navarro is a freelance journalist who works for the news website El Pais.

5:11He's in Cebreros, which is west of Madrid, in one of the worst hit parts of the country. He's been telling me what he's seen. Everything is black or burning. And you also see the same faces in people. They are exhausted. They are angry. they are very worried about the future because what's happening tomorrow or the day after tomorrow and they also want to know what will be of them in the future. I mean they live from the tourism, the first sector, the countryside and now it's black, it's over. Fear for the future. Right now what support are people getting? I presume a lot of people of course are living in emergency shelters, for example?

5:53They are very pessimistic. They have been like this almost one week. Sometimes they didn't see firefighters and they have to live with the fire on their own with their volunteers helping the firefighters when they appear. Just tell me about the weather in the last few years in terms of what you've seen as someone who lives a couple of hours from where the intense fires are. It's obvious, at least for me or for many people, that there's a climatic change out there. And the more time we spend fighting with negacionism is the time we are losing to find the solution of this phenomenon. And you can see that the summer is longer.

6:34The winter is not that cold. So that when the rain appears in winter, it's very celebrated. We like the rain. But the problem is that in May, in June, we have head waves. So that in July or in August, I don't want to see the August that is coming, but in July, just in July, we have seen these crazy fires. Okay, we have had fires every single day in our lives. Okay, it's natural, but not never ever like this. This madness, this strength, because they are not only strong, but they are chaotic. They are erratic because of the wind. They generated their own climatic situation. So for the firefighters and the experts, it's very difficult to preview what are they going to do in the following day or that night or in a couple of hours.

7:23You've written a book about wildfires yourself, haven't you? Do you think that the government in Spain is doing enough? How do you think they are managing all of this? The central government is asking the other parties, the opposition, the right and the alt-right, to make a state agreement of the climatic change. but I think it will not prosper because they don't feel like that. Maybe the Conservative Party could do it in other times, but not nowadays. The society, Spain and many other countries need a solid response for this. You talk about the flames, the smoke, the unpredictability of these latest fires.

8:08Do you feel scared yourself? I think my mother did. She doesn't know where have I been these days, but I didn't feel scared because I work very close to the fire. I have to admit it, but I'm always in the back of the firefighters. I go with there and I say, hi guys, do your jobs. And if you have to tell me, go out of here, I will go out of here. Absolutely. I'm going to, I don't want to take a big risk. But in fact, when I feel kind of fear or I feel scared is when I don't see the fire. If I see the fire, I know what to do. I know there's this way for going out or whatever, but it can appear and I can trap you in the car.

8:52I mean, I'm never very close to that situation, but your mind sometimes is freaky. That's journalist Juan Navarro in Cebreros, west of Madrid in Spain. Now let's go to France and the situation in the area around Bordeaux, where a huge fire is inching closer to the city. David Chazan, a France correspondent at The Times newspaper, is in the region and sent us this. So I'm standing a few hundred metres from a fire. You can see huge clouds of noxious-looking black smoke billowing up into the air, and there's a water-bombing plane which is flying nearby. It's circling the area. Presumably it's about to drop water.

9:43And what you can hear now is a helicopter. That's a command helicopter which is coordinating the operation on the ground. There's three fire engines spraying water or fire retardants into the burning pine trees. Some of them are going up like matchsticks. They're bone dry.

10:09That's David Shazan there. Well, it's not just the challenge of putting out the flames, but also dealing with the heavy smoke hanging in the air. Hospitals in the city are on standby. as more people are suffering from respiratory and breathing issues. Dr Renaud Prevel is working in the intensive care unit at the University Hospital of Bordeaux. For a couple of days, we have been smelling the wildfire smoke. 15 to 20 kilometres, but still a couple of hundred kilometres away, they can smell the smoke as well. So it's far-reaching. What are the implications of inhaling that smoke from the fires? What we know is they can transport some bacteria and fungi for a long distance.

10:53And it's also able to create some inflammation within the lungs due to particulate matter, which are small-sized particles, which create and trigger inflammation within the lungs. And that inflammation can worsen or trigger some respiratory conditions or asthma. So this is the same kind of impact as living in a very polluted city when you've got that particulate matter that's being inhaled? It's associated with increased mortality when it's chronic exposure to wildfire smoke. Are you anticipating to get many more people coming into the hospital as that fire approaches Bordeaux? Yes, that's what we are preparing for.

11:35It's the next couple of days or weeks. We should be facing an increased proportion of patients with respiratory conditions. So we are getting prepared to face these income patients. How do you prepare for it? Do you have enough nebulizers or breathing machines or oxygen? I mean, I'm not sure what exactly you would need. What do you need and how do you prepare? Due to the COVID pandemics, we have all the ventilators and the machines we need. But it's a summer holiday in France, so we have to get people back. We have a huge wave of solidarity and people are coming back and volunteering to be back in the hospital.

12:11So for now, we have all the healthcare professionals we need. We are prepared because it will last a couple of weeks. So it's easy to be ready for a couple of days, but if I sit for several weeks, it will be much more complicated. That's what we are trying to anticipate. That's Dr. Renaud Prevel, who's been treating patients with breathing problems in the intensive care unit at the University Hospital of Bordeaux. And in the last few hours, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, held a crisis meeting of his cabinet to discuss that fire near Bordeaux, which is now only about nine miles from the edge of the city.

12:50You're listening to NewsHour.

12:57This is Rajini Vaidyanathan with NewsHour, coming to you live from the BBC in London. Well, let's turn to events in India. And days after thousands of young people ended their mass protests, could they start up again? For weeks, the youth movement, the Cockroach Jantha Party, took to the streets, angry over the leaking of exam papers. The nationwide demonstrations led to the resignation of the Education Minister, Dhamendra Pradhan, which was their key demand. But hundreds of students who were detained after police fired tear gas and used batons to disperse protesters have not been released across different parts of India.

13:34While the Cockroach Jantha Party is accusing the government of backtracking on its promise to release them. The BBC's Sumedha Pal is in Delhi for us. Currently, we don't see any kind of momentum like that. Of course, in the eastern state of Bihar, the protests, of course, they had been intensifying over the last few days, even after the resignation of the Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. Over the weekend and even today, we've been seeing a series of crackdowns that are taking place by the administration, by the police authorities across Indian states. There are people who are being currently detained.

14:12There have been students who have been allegedly detained and there is legal support now that they require. The Cockroach Janata Party organized a press conference today to address the fact that will the protests resume or what will be the further course of action because this was one of the demands that they had raised with the union minister and this is a part of a deal that they had with the government. So the criminal charge sheets which were registered against the protesters, a big demand of the Cockroach Danta party and its spokespersons was that all these charges will be dropped and nobody will be sort of involved in any kind of police action against those who are protesting.

14:52The other demand was that all the police persons who are responsible for attacking the students, for lati-charging them, which is using sticks and batons against students, will be charged, will be identified and punished by the agencies. So these were two very big demands. And today they held a press conference to state that the part of this agreement was not actually honoured by the government because action against protesters is continuing across India. So they think that the government hasn't stuck to its side of the bargain, as it were. What's the government saying? They haven't responded to this yet because the Kokrit Janata Party just did their press conference.

15:35We know for a fact I was at a press conference where the union minister, J.P. Nutta, honoured these promises when the deal was done on Saturday, on the weekend, when finally Dharmendra Prithan's resignation was accepted. He did admit that, yes, there will be action against those police persons who were involved in attacking the students. and, of course, that there will not be any action against the protesters. So they have launched an online portal where they will be recording all these instances of police brutality, where they're trying to investigate and identify those who were responsible for the violence against the protesters.

16:13They have not said anything about the movement sort of reconvening at all. And Sumedha, the Delhi police and the Indian government have largely denied those allegations of unprovoked or unlawful police brutality. They maintained that their actions were a necessary and proportional response. So you say we haven't heard from them in the last few hours or so, but it's unlikely they are going to necessarily change their position on these charge sheets then, even though they did that deal. Yes, absolutely. Because the police and the administration have from the beginning maintained that they had imposed Section 163 in this particular area, which meant that anyone assembling on the protest sites, it was unlawful assembly.

16:57So according to them, I don't see that they will be responding to this or doing much about it. These are the signs as of now, because according to them, the protesters were unlawfully getting together and protesting in this space. So that begs the question, doesn't it? What might come next from the Cockroach Janta Party, the Cockroach People's Party? As of now, the movement is also in itself dealing with a lot of criticism. There are young people, again, the same supporters on the internet who were making reels in their support, who were tweeting in their support, are sort of questioning the leadership and what will the future entail.

17:35There are a lot of questions about the political aspirations of the spokespersons or where the spokespersons might now take the movement because videos surfaced online where they were seeing, celebrating and partying after the resignation of the Indian education minister. So a lot of questions were being raised on these celebrations, on the actual support that the spokespersons and the leadership are providing to the students on the ground who are currently facing police action and are responding to charges against them. So these are criticisms which are currently surfacing online, as well as the Corporal Janta Party spokespersons have also tried to respond to these criticisms.

18:16So it will be interesting to see what unfolds in the next few days to come. That's Sumedha Pal there, reporting from Delhi.

18:27Now, the Normandy beaches used for the D-Day landings are to be given UNESCO World Heritage status as universal places of remembrance, bearing a message of freedom, peace and unity among nations. The Allied offensive in World War II by the US, Britain, Canada and France also involved soldiers from many other countries, including Poland, Greece, Australia and Norway. But the site will commemorate all of those who died, including around 200 ,000 German soldiers. Well, it's unusual to make a battleground the UNESCO site. So why this one? Well, Dr Kate Vigas is an author and historian who specialises in the Second World War.

19:08And she's been speaking to my colleague, Rebecca Kesby. They originally thought of them as symbols of division. You know, where something bad happened, people were against one another. They're now saying that the way that the sites have developed, the way we're looking at them, bears a message of freedom, peace and unity among the nations. And I guess that's reflected in the numbers of people who visit these sites from all over the world for various reasons. So the rule has changed. And I, for one, I'm very pleased about it. And how significant is it that German soldiers are also going to be properly commemorated now here at the same site?

19:50I think it's a very interesting decision. And as a historian, you know, it's a slightly contentious one in that the battle was only fought because Europe was under an enemy occupation. that said the soldiers on the beaches were your ordinary fellows you know they weren't fanatical they weren't uh ss these are your normal soldiers and actually the more i've thought about it the more it's right that they are commemorated in this number they lost their lives too and many would have been conscripts of course as well yes that's right i mean a lot of these people had absolutely no choice whatsoever in what they were doing or who they were fighting for.

20:33So officials have said that they're going to improve the information and also signage around the sites. Why is that important? I think that's important for anyone going to the site who maybe doesn't have a broad knowledge of it. And when you know where you're standing and what happens there, it can have such a profound impact on you. So to improve that signage and visitor information is absolutely phenomenal that they're going to be doing that. Well, I mean, we are in a period in politics now, I guess, where history keeps being dragged up, doesn't it, to justify current policy and ideologies. So how important is it to make sure people really have an accurate understanding of the past?

21:16It's absolutely imperative. You know, the further things get away, the more mythologised they become, the more fictionalised they become. So to have an accurate understanding, as you say, As a historian, my remit is to learn from the past, stop making the same mistakes. And unfortunately, mankind will always carry on making the same mistakes. But if we can try and caveat that with good information, strong research, telling people exactly what did happen rather than what politicians wanted to think happened, maybe we can influence people's thoughts. Dr Kate Vigers there. You're listening to NewsHour from the BBC.

21:55I'm Regine Vaidyanathan. Welcome back to NewsHour. Traditionally, Brazil's hip-hop scene's been dominated by men. Now on the domestic and international stage, it's women who are at the forefront of the genre. Ebony from Queimados in Rio de Janeiro is one of them. Adopted into a white religious family in what was one of the country's most dangerous areas, she's captivated listeners with her high-energy storytelling. She's been speaking to the BBC's Phoebe Hobson ahead of her first show in London. And a warning, her report does contain references to alleged abuse. When I was like 16 to 17, I had this like really dark teenage moment in my life.

22:41I was struggling a lot with my sexuality. Raised in a strict church, the music Ebony could listen to growing up was restricted. And so was her identity as a bisexual woman. We couldn't hear any music that wasn't like allowed by the leaders. When I was like 11 or 12, I got super mad at this rule. I felt betrayed. Music is such a good and powerful thing and has the capacity of like changing what we believe, changing our perception of the world. I would not follow this rule. Like I don't connect with it. I need to see the world. I need to listen to more music. Her path to becoming a professional musician was set when a song she recorded on her phone went viral.

23:27A lot of people on the internet was like, you need to release this for real. I knew that, like, this is what I want to do. I'm not lost anymore. I found my place, you know. A few years later, her breakout track Intrusive Thoughts threw her into the mainstream. Now with several albums under her belt, she gets millions of listens and is a key player in the Brazilian hip-hop scene that's being transformed by women. But in a genre that's often associated with feuds, Ebony tells me from her home in Sao Paulo that the leading women are choosing to support each other. The USA female rap scene is like a lot of fighting and we were very quick in thinking either you like me or not.

24:10So are we going to be sneak dissing each other or are we going to sit down and talk like grown women? In her most recent album, KMA2, she focuses on how she grew up, a black child adopted by a white religious family. The album cover shows a church and a gay couple, two overarching themes that have shaped the person she is today. This cover is a reflection on how I felt like the adults were paying way more attention about kids discovering their sexualities, that they should be paying attention to adult grown men doing stuff with kids. Ebony is upbeat when she talks about herself and her life, exuding positivity.