Trump backs Hegseth as he faces impeachment push

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1:06Stop paying for missing pieces. Go to Odu.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com to learn more. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson and in the early hours of Tuesday, November the 10th, these are our main stories. President Trump has backed his defence secretary in the face of impeachment articles brought by a Republican senator. France has blamed Iran for cyber attacks that heated up hundreds of supermarket fridges and freezers last month. Also in this podcast, Donald Trump says the FBI is looking into claims that the boss of the chipmaker NVIDIA had an affair with a suspected Chinese agent and... The evidence presented in this case showed Brand to be a manipulative sexual predator,

1:59using his growing fame and power to create situations in which he could pursue women sexually regardless of what they wanted. The British celebrity Russell Brand is jailed for growing fame and power to create situations in which he could pursue women sexually, regardless of what they wanted. The British celebrity Russell Brand is jailed for ten and a half years for rape and sexual assault. Also, how many moons are there above the earth? Not just the one you're thinking of, apparently. We begin in the United States, where President Trump has said he will stand by his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth if he's impeached. Mr Hegseth has been coming under mounting pressure over his conduct of the war in Iran since last week's midterm elections, in which Mr Trump's

2:40Republican Party suffered heavy defeats. The plot to oust Mr Hegseth was formally started on Monday by Republican Congressman Thomas Massey. He said the Defence Secretary should be held to account. Peter Hegseth, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to the Constitution if allowed to remain in office and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with his duties and the rule of law. Peter Brian Hegseth thus warrants impeachment and trial. Our White House reporter Bernd De Boesemann told me more about why Congressman Massey and his supporters are planning to try to impeach Pete Hegseth. In one way, it's no surprise Thomas Massey has been a longtime critic of President Trump for a number of reasons,

3:27including the war in Iran and the handling of the Epstein case. And he had signaled his intention to do this quite some time ago. And he's on his way out of Congress. But in his view and those of the people that support him, Secretary Hexeth essentially violated the Constitution by the conduct of the war in Iran, which went on for months without any sort of congressional approval. There's a few other items in there. I think one of the most notable is they've accused Secretary Hexeth of extraditional killings as a result of the strikes on boats alleged to be trafficking drugs in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific. There's very little chance that this is successful, given that the Republicans at this moment still have a majority in the House and Senate.

4:13And of course, this was something that will change in January. But Mr. Massey has said very clearly that even if it doesn't succeed, what he wants to do is pressure the Trump administration through this whole impeachment process into firing. that even if it doesn't succeed, what he wants to do is pressure the Trump administration through this whole impeachment process into firing Pete Kacif of his own accord for being essentially holding him responsible for much of what's gone on in this administration with regards to the Department of Defense. So is it going to work? Will President Trump stand by him in the long term? Well, at least for the moment, President Trump has come out quite strongly in his defense. I was at the White House

4:53this evening when President Trump came and he said in his view, Secretary Hexeth has done an excellent job at the Pentagon. He said recruitment numbers are up, for example. He praised the conduct of the military operation that toppled Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela and of the war in Iran. And we've heard similar from other administration officials today, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But at the same time, the public is very wary of this war in Iran. And it really came to haunt Republicans in the midterm elections last week. So I think there will be many Republicans that would implore President Trump to kind of allow Hegseth to become kind of a sacrificial lamb for this war, which he helped push in the White House

5:42and which ultimately was politically disastrous for Republicans. Yeah, and President Trump has been speaking about Iran. he helped push in the White House and which ultimately was politically disastrous for Republicans. Yeah, and President Trump has been speaking about Iran. He has been speaking about Iran. Unlike just a week ago, President Trump at the moment seems to think that there's very little possibility of a return to armed conflict. Just today, he had a meeting at the White House with the Qatari prime minister, and he seems to think the negotiated settlement is perhaps just around the corner. But at the same time, he said that the US forces are ready to go if necessary. Burnt to Boosman in Washington. French officials say

6:16they believe Iran was behind a cyber attack in October that raised the temperature in commercial fridges and freezers across France, forcing businesses to throw away millions of dollars worth of food. The French government has accused Iran's Revolutionary Guard of orchestrating the attack. Jean-Noël Baveau is the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs. We have, of course, at the very least, summoned the Iranian ambassador to France to protest this extremely serious act in the strongest possible terms. We will impose sanctions at the European level against all those responsible for this attack. And we will take all other proportionate necessary measures, public or private, to respond to this attack and deter those who might wish to

7:02repeat it. I would add to the matter is now before the courts. They will make their own decisions accordingly. Catherine Norris-Trent is a correspondent from the international news channel France 24. She told the BBC's Evan Davis more about France's accusations against Iran. The French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrault has said that this was an attack of an unprecedented scale and level of aggression, and saying that France will take sanctions at a European level against those behind this attack, which he says is Iran, and specifically the specialist cyber warfare division under it, the Revolutionary Guards Control. And France has summoned the Iranian ambassador this Monday. So this all coordinated with the judicial authorities as well. They clearly feel they've reached the evidential level to move forward on this.

7:59The Paris public prosecutor has launched a judicial investigation into this cyber attack unit of the Revolutionary Guards and has issued international arrest warrants against its head and two of its deputies. Oh, OK. And have they offered up evidence? I mean, it sounds like they're pretty sure. This isn't, we suspect, we think there might be, and we'll start investigating. This sounds like they really think they're onto it. Yeah, they're using pretty definite language. So we don't know the details. What the Paris prosecutor said in her quite brief statement said that they had identified several factors which allowed them to state this with such certainty, such as the use of Farsi and the use of IP addresses, which they eventually managed

8:46to trace back to two addresses in Iran. So I think that's why they're so certain. And Le Figaro newspaper broke the report before it came out officially. And they had a source saying that French intelligence agencies had identified the Iranian role clearly. So they're clearly feeling a level of certainty around this. Have we any comment from Iran yet out of interest? We haven't had any reaction from Iran. We don't know what came out of that meeting, of course, with the Iranian ambassador in Paris. This all came out after that meeting took place and we haven't heard any response from Tehran as such. Catherine Norris-Trent from France 24. Former British comedian and actor Russell Brand is beginning a prison sentence of ten and a half years

9:33for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others between 2004 and 2009. The judge at court in London said Brand was a sexual predator who displayed staggering arrogance and used his status to protect himself. In a victim impact statement, one of the women said she'd been in shock and turmoil for years. Our correspondent Helena Wilkinson was in court. When Russell Brand was handed his substantial ten and a-year sentence for rape and sexual assaults. He stood in the big glass dock and looked ahead at the judge. He showed no emotion. In his sentencing remarks, Mr Justice Benathan told Brand he was a sexual predator who had told a series of lies. All those women had to face being confronted and being told they'd lied or twisted the truth

10:26and or they'd agreed to your sexual demands. That was all done because of you on your instructions. Before sentencing, the court heard victim impact statements from the four women who Brand had attacked. Their statements have been voiced by producers. This came from the woman raped by Brand 17 years ago. Even now I feel that I am living with the trauma of what happened. It is something I carry with me every day and it often feels never-ending. Because of who he was and the influence he held, I did not feel confident speaking openly about what had happened. I did not know who I could trust or confide in. I felt that if I reported him, I would not be believed. His fame, wealth and influence created a power imbalance which made me feel powerless.

11:13One of the women said it was difficult to see Brand in the public eye after he'd sexually assaulted her. For many years, as his star was rising, it was impossible to escape seeing him all over the media, being celebrated for his disgusting behaviour against women, like it was all a joke. There were many times I felt visibly sick at the sight of him, parading around thinking he could get away with it all. David Roberts, a senior prosecutor from the Crown Prosecution Service, spoke outside court. The evidence presented in this case showed Brand to be a manipulative sexual predator, using his growing fame and power to create situations in which he could pursue women sexually, regardless of what they wanted, with a complete disregard for the

12:03impact of his actions. Detective Superintendent Andy Furphy, who led the police investigation, said he hoped that the outcome would provide some measure of closure for the women and allow them to continue building their lives. A van believed to be carrying Brand left Southwark Crown Court. Photographs taken through one of the windows captured a picture of a crucifix and a suit jacket. Helena Wilkinson. So how significant is this verdict? Helen Rumbelow is a journalist from The Times who has written about the case. I think it's absolutely profound and that's because I don't think it's just about Russell Brand I think what this case became was very symbolic it was the crown versus absolutely decades centuries if not

12:55millennia of old-fashioned and archaic attitudes to women in sexual assault cases and not just in the courtroom where we saw these very kind of, you know, extremely old fashioned, you know, defence being used against these female witnesses, but also in the case of consent, you know, this very modern era of consent was being tried against something, again, deeply, deeply old-fashioned. And to get convictions showed that we are at the start of a kind of future era. Times journalist Helen Rumbelow. Still to come in this podcast. You talk glibly about your life being changed, but it's weird when it happens. I feel like a proper writer at last, totally lacking in confidence. The author who's become the oldest ever winner of the prestigious Booker Prize.

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17:27might have compromised US security through his romantic involvement with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy. The company's shares have fallen sharply since it announced it was investigating its CEO's relationship with Alice Huang. She was managing director of a Singapore-based company which is suspected of routing Nvidia chips to China. President Trump has said the FBI is investigating. Raja Krishnamoorthi is a Democratic congressman who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. He's pushing for legislation to block the export of Nvidia chips to China and has raised concerns about the Trump administration's reaction to the situation. We have to continue our investigation, not only from Congress,

18:14but obviously finish the executive branch and the intelligence community's investigation. Jensen Wang has access to not only NVIDIA's trade secrets, he's also influential in our export control policy. I'm extremely concerned about Donald Trump's blasé attitude toward this situation, even as his national security advisor and others are sounding the alarm about Jensen Huang. So could these congressional committees have an impact on NVIDIA and Jensen Huang? North America technology correspondent Lily Jamali is in Santa Clara, where the company has its headquarters. They could. And what's interesting is there's been so much focus on Democrats taking control in January after last week's election in which they won majorities in both houses of Congress.

19:02But even right now, as the Republicans continue to actually control key committees, those Republicans are asking for Jensen Wang to come to Washington and testify next week behind closed doors at some key committees that are in charge of overseeing U.S. national security. I spoke to NVIDIA about this today. At this point, they are declining to comment as to whether Mr. Wang will show up in Washington on the 18th. And all this despite support from Donald Trump. That's right. Mr. Trump was asked about Mr. Wang again today. He has said not only that he thinks of Mr. Wang as being an honorable man who was, quote, suffering greatly, he also revealed that he has spoken to Mr. Wang by phone. Mr. Wang apparently told the president that he had no idea that this

19:51woman, Alice Wang, head of this Singapore-based data center firm, was an intelligence concern. And Mr. Trump, for now, says he believes him. And there is real concern that some of NVIDIA's most secret, most powerful AI chips could have made their way into the hands of China. That's right. So Ms. Wang heads this company called Megaspeed. They have been probed in the past for diverting these very in-demand, sophisticated AI chips made by NVIDIA into China. NVIDIA told me last night, those allegations have been debunked. They've said that before. Nevertheless, this remains a shock because clearly this was still a concern to intelligence agencies here in the United States. And today we saw markets react to this. So NVIDIA shares tumbled today. They were down at one point as much as 8% on a day when a lot of other tech stocks were actually doing quite well,

20:50including the top competitor to NVIDIA, AMD, which happens to be run by a distant cousin of Jensen Wang's. They ended up settling around 4% to 5% lower on the day. Briefly, if the chips did make it into the hands of a competitor, would they be possible, easy to copy? You know, to be blunt, this is something that I think Silicon Valley has long wrestled with because China does have a reputation for taking valuable intellectual property and replicating it. So it's certainly possible that they did, and possibly with the help of this woman that is believed to be an intelligence asset. Lily Jamali. It's just over three years since Storm Daniel triggered the worst flood disaster in the world this century in the Libyan city of Derna.

21:37At least 4,000 people lost their lives. But now the city has been reborn with reconstruction led by the authoritarian Hafta family that rules the east of the country. The BBC's Tim Hewell has been to Derna and has been speaking to some of those affected. This, as you can see, this is all impact for the flood. The water reached a level of four or five meters. We go upstairs to the roof and we're forced to swim. I know to swim, but you know children with one year and four years old, they can't. In the pitch black, all power was lost of an autumn night three years ago. Izz al-Nasr ibn Zayu lost his wife, mother-in-law, and all his seven children as floodwater engulfed their home in Durner. Today the house is an empty shell. Apart from

22:32children's possessions, he can't bear to part with. Durner's mental anguish is still raw, but physically the city's been reborn. The authorities haven't fully restored Izz al-Nasr's house yet, because he's also got an apartment in an undamaged area of the city. But most people whose only home was destroyed have already been rehoused. It's a whole mini-city that's been built here on the edge of the sea. There's row after row of identical gleaming white housing blocks. There's a football field here with artificial grass. There's a library and a hospital. All the work's been planned and paid for by a reconstruction fund with a budget of $2 billion, headed by Belgassam Hafter, a son of the military strongman who rules eastern Libya.

23:21Claudia Gazzini of the international crisis group Think Tank, a Libya expert who visited Derna recently, is impressed by what's been achieved. Considering that it has only been three years since the disaster, it's quite remarkable. But the fund doesn't publish its accounts. And Kordia Ghazini thinks that as well as helping people, the rapid rebuilding served a political purpose. Coming just a few years after Belgassum's father, Marshal Khalifa Haftar, defeated Islamists who had run Derna with considerable local support. The Haftar authorities wanted to win people's hearts in Derna, but they also used Derna as a showcase for what they were pitching to the rest of Libya. What started as a Derna reconstruction project

24:10then turned into a Libya reconstruction project. Man of the people, humble and kind. They sing over this video of Belgassam Haftar opening a rebuilt sports club in Durna. Libya's split between a pro-Haftar administration in the east and a rival one in the west. In Durna, though, they've got many satisfied customers, including flood survivor Abdul Wahab Damdoum, who's just been given a new apartment by the state. Hamameen. Two bathrooms. Kitchen. Kitchen. Balcony. Three bedrooms. Sala. Abdul Wahab Damdoum, who's just been given a new apartment by the state. Two living rooms. For a family of only four people. When you saw this for the first time, how did you feel? Brilliant, brilliant. I thank Engineer Bilghassim because Allah sent this kind of person who picked up the city from a disaster.

25:21Tim Hewell reporting, and you can hear more from him about the reconstruction of Dirna on assignment on the documentary podcast. A moon is any natural celestial body that moves in a stable orbit around a larger planetary body. And while most of the planets in our solar system have multiple moons, Earth just has the one that we refer to as the moon. But now astronomers have made the shocking announcement that we've actually got another moon that's fallen into our planet's gravitational pool. But it's a lot smaller than the one we're used to at only about a metre in diameter. Dr Jennifer Millard is an astronomer at Cardiff University in Wales and told us more. So it was discovered on the night of the 19th to the 20th of August by a Hungarian asteroid hunter,

26:05Christian Sarsnicki. But at first, we didn't actually know if it was an asteroid or whether it was a bit of space junk. It took another two months of observations to figure out if it was perhaps the upper body of a rocket stage or if it was indeed an asteroid. But we've confirmed it is an asteroid and we do have temporarily for a few months months a second moon. So it's called a mini moon, an asteroid. It's a small body that is truly in orbit around our planet for a little while. So this could be weeks. It could be months. It could be a few years. And in the case of this one, we expect it to disappear by January. Whereas a quasi moon is something that's orbiting the sun on a trajectory that's really similar to our planets. And so from our perspective, it kind of looks like it's going

26:52around us, but it isn't really. It's just a bit of a coincidence. Whereas this mini-moon for a few months has been captured by our gravity. And this is really on the smaller size of asteroids that we find in the near Earth environment because there are, we think, millions of asteroids out there, you know, around our planet. The solar system is really busy. You see those posters of, you know, oh, there's the sun and there's all the planets and there's not a lot going on in between and they are not true. But our catalogue is only about 43,000 of these and most of these we're talking are either dozens or hundreds of metres or even bigger in size. So to have one of these small objects discovered and tracked and we can monitor it and try and understand it is so important for us to

27:38really understand what our neighbourhood is like and just how busy it is out there and how many things are hitting our planet and what could be a risk for us. Astronomer Dr Jennifer Millard. Oxford University has handed over the remains of 39 people who were taken during Britain's colonial role of India. They were originally from the Naga community in Nagaland which is a mountain estate in north-eastern India. A delegation from there was in Oxford for a ceremony to mark the return. More from our Global Affairs correspondent, Anbarasan Etirajan. The Oxford Museum has more than 6,000 objects representing Naga culture, the largest collection in the world. The Naga remains were added between 1910 and 1940,

28:27mostly collected by two colonial administrators who were anthropologists. One of the Naga tribal leaders called the handing over of the remains, mainly skulls, a historic occasion and said they would be put to respectful rest. There are plans to bury them under a joint memorial in a park back home. The Naga people once practised headhunting, severing the heads of enemies as trophies, but they also kept the heads of their own chiefs at the centre of villages. The Pit Rivers Museum, founded in the 19th century, has handed back human remains to other indigenous groups from Australia, New Zealand and the United States. And Barasan Etirajan. The winner of this year's Booker Prize has been announced

29:11with 81-year-old M. John Harrison lifting the literary accolade for his dystopian novel The End of Everything, set years after an obscure global crisis. He's the oldest recipient of the prestigious award, which honours the best novel written in the English language. The winner gets a $67,000 prize and a huge boost in profile and, usually, sales. Ellie Price was at the ceremony in London. The End of Everything by M. John Harrison. M. John Harrison, who has been writing for six decades, is now the oldest Booker Prize winner, aged 81. He said it was worth the wait. You talk glibly about your life being changed, but it's weird when it happens. I feel like a proper writer at last, totally lacking in confidence.

30:03The End of Everything is, on the surface, about two characters living on a near-future post-apocalyptic Kent coast following an undefined catastrophe and a mysterious invasion. The protagonist and indeed the reader don't know exactly what this catastrophe is and why it's happened, but then the judges said there was a twinge of optimism as well. Is that fair? Yeah. It wasn't intended. I got about two-thirds of the way through and I suddenly realised that I'd got an ending that would transform itself as easily into faint hope, as it were. The chair of the judging panel, Dame Mary Beard, said the judges' decision that it should win was unanimous. People, I'm afraid, will say, he's 81, this is a lifetime

30:46achievement award. No, it's not. It's for this one brilliant, eye-opening, gobsmacking book. High praise from Dame Mary Beard, ending that report by Ellie Price. And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag Global News Pod. And don't forget our sibling podcast, The Global Story, which goes in-depth and beyond the headlines on one big story. This edition of The Global News Podcast was mixed by Chris Cusaris, and the producer was Marion Straughan. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritson. you next time.