Musk leaves Trump administration
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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Andrew Peach and in the early hours of Saturday the 31st of May, these are our main stories. Donald Trump has showered his billionaire backer Elon Musk with compliments at a news conference to mark the tech baron's departure from the US government. The UN has warned that Gaza's entire population is at risk of famine despite the partial lifting of an Israeli blockade.

Taylor Swift says her greatest dream has come true, having brought back the rights to all her albums. Also in this podcast... If we consider that Russia could be allowed to take a part of the territory of Ukraine without any restriction, how would you phrase what could happen in Taiwan? A stark warning from the French president over Ukraine.

Elon Musk's time in the Trump administration has come to an end after 129 days, during which the world's richest man took an axe to government spending, stirring plenty of controversy along the way. While he was in the role for little more than four months, his work with the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, upended the federal government and had an impact not just in the halls of power in Washington, but around the world. He's also been in the role for a long time,

He said he would cut trillions. That hasn't happened. But there have been real cuts. Thousands of jobs have gone. And Trump and Musk have remained close, despite some openly expressed policy differences. Here's some of what's been said since Donald Trump came to power. Goj, perhaps you've heard of it, perhaps, which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight. The people voted for major government reform.

There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign. The president spoke about that at every rally. The people voted for major government reform, and that's what people are going to get. They're going to get what they voted for. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw! We are moving fast, so we won't make mistakes, but we'll also fix the mistakes very quickly.

Do you see it as a worthy cause, USAID? I think that there are some worthy things, but overall, if you say what is the bang for the buck, I would say it was not very good. And there was far too much of what USAID was doing was influencing elections in ways that I think were dubious and unethical.

do not stand the light of day. Well, Mr. President, you know, they say I wear a lot of hats. And as you can see, it's true. Even my hat has a hat. The vast majority of people in this country really respect and appreciate you. And this whole room can say that very strongly. You've really been a tremendous help. You opened up a lot of eyes as to what could be done

And we just want to thank you very much. And, you know, you're invited to stay as long as you want. At some point, I guess, he wants to get back home to his cars and his car.

In a farewell news conference in the Oval Office, President Trump called Elon Musk the greatest businessman the world has ever produced and then listed some of the savings he claims Doge has made. Doge cancelled $101 million for DEI contracts at the Department of Education, $59 million for illegal alien hotel rooms in New York City, $42 million for social and behavioural change in Uganda.

$20 million for Arab Sesame Street in the Middle East. Nobody knows what that's all about. Nobody's been able to find it. $8 million for making mice transgender. Many of those, I could sit here all day and read things just like that, but we have other things to do. Donald Trump went on to say this is only the start and big savings would follow. Mr Musk said he'd remain an advisor to the White House and thank the president.

I look forward to continuing to be a friend and advisor to the president, continuing to support the Doge team. And we are relentlessly pursuing a trillion dollars in waste and fraud reductions, which will benefit the American taxpayer. So that's it, really. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. So what did our North America correspondent Gary O'Donoghue make of it all?

Well, I think it was sort of an extraordinary send-off, really. You know, quite a lot of times when people decide to leave the Trump orbit, it's not in the best of circumstances. And, you know, they often fall out with Donald Trump. Well, these two don't seem to have fallen out. Donald Trump lavished praise on Elon Musk, gave him a...

wooden box with a golden key in it and all that kind of thing. And they said they would remain friends and that Elon Musk would continue to advise the president. And so I think, you know, in many ways, while this wasn't on the schedule, I think they thought it was kind of a sort of last moment. Maybe we should give him a bit of a send off. And

And he certainly got that. And the overriding message of the whole thing was, we're still mates, we'll still be in touch, we'll still be discussing all these things, even though Elon Musk won't be doing the job anymore. Did he do a good job? What's your assessment of his time in the White House? Well, I mean, the target changed quite a lot. When he was on the campaign trail, he claimed he would cut $2 trillion from discretionary federal spending. Now, that's about a third of what the government spends and has control over.

When they came into office, that turned into a trillion. And as of now, their claim is that they've cut about $175 billion. Now, a BBC analysis into those numbers says that around half of that is identified,

has some specifics by it, but only around a quarter has sort of documentation to back it up. So a lot of that is being taken on trust. It also doesn't account for some of the costs they've incurred while doing this, not least having to rehire, you know, a load of federal employees who they mistakenly fired and there's court cases and all that kind of thing that will have costs associated with it. Nevertheless, Elon Musk said that he believed that

that, quote, over time, unquote, the trillion-dollar figure could be reached, but we don't know how long that will take. We also don't know...

whether his leaving will kind of take the wind out of the sails a bit, whether the focus will drift onto other things. I mean, who's going to be there really forcing it through? I think that's the question. And what about the nature of the second Trump administration? The president is surrounded by people who agree with him, basically. That might be even more the case after Elon Musk's departure. Yes, he is certainly. He has staffed his administration in a very different way to the first time around. He

He picked people who he thought would come around to his way of thinking. Many of them did not. Even at cabinet level, they did not. This is a very, very different bunch. And they are very much signed up to not just the program, but also the

Donald Trump has to be affirmed and reaffirmed personally a lot of the time. So they do that. So, yeah, it's very, very different administration. And Elon Musk has had some differences with Donald Trump, not least this week over there, his tax legislation. But, you know, his time has come to an end. And Donald Trump didn't really go for him over that, even though there was a criticism. Gary O'Donoghue with me from Washington.

The United Nations has sounded another alarm bell for Gaza, warning everyone there is at risk of famine, with Israel allowing so little aid in while continuing its military action. And with no signs of a breakthrough in ceasefire talks, Palestinians see little hope of enough food or medicine reaching them any time soon. Jens Leck from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says civilians are suffering. This limited number of truckloads that are coming in

It's a trickle. It is drip feeding food into an area on the verge of catastrophic hunger. It's not a flood. Gaza is the hungriest place on earth. Staff at the last hospital in northern Gaza have said Israeli forces are carrying out a forced evacuation of patients and health workers. Israel doesn't allow international journalists independent access to Gaza. So from Jerusalem, here's our Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson.

At Al-Alda hospital today, the siren sounded for its own emergency. The last functioning hospital in northern Gaza. Now the latest casualty of the war. Staff trapped inside for the past two weeks by Israeli forces carried patients and supplies to ambulances waiting in the rubble. The patients, we are carrying them more than 300 meters because the ambulance is far away from the hospital.

Dr Mohamed Salah, Al-Auda's director, sent us these audio messages as he left. We put his claims to Israel's army, but they haven't yet provided a response.

Israel says it continues to target what it calls terrorist infrastructure across the Gaza Strip. But with little health care or aid in the north, there are fears that Israel is making northern Gaza unlivable to push its population to the south. That piece by piece, Gaza will be evacuated, just as its hospitals were.

Sudan is facing one of the world's largest humanitarian crises since war broke out between the country's army and the paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, the RSF, two years ago. On Friday, the World Food Programme reported the RSF were repeatedly shelling its warehouses in Al-Fasha, the capital of North Darfur. In recent weeks, more than 500 people have been killed and tens of thousands have been displaced. Our Africa correspondent Anne Soy told me more from Nairobi.

The World Food Programme said that their warehouses in El Fasha, in North Darfur, were repeatedly shelled and they are accusing RSF of doing that. Now, El Fasha is the capital of North Darfur region and it's the only area in the wide Darfur region that is still under the control of the army, the National Army, which has been fighting against the rapid support forces.

It has been surrounded by the RSF for over a year. And in recent weeks, they have made an attempt at

gaining control of the city. They have been bombing markets. They've been bombing camps for internally displaced people. And therefore, the World Food Programme believes that the shelling was coming from the RSF. We haven't had a response from them yet. However, the WFP says that their staff were not injured. They are all safe and accounted for. And help me with this, Anne. How does it help the RSF to be shelling a food warehouse?

It could be the RSF trying to gain access into these warehouses and looting, which they have done in the past, looting the food for themselves, for the fighters. And then on the other hand, also just trying to make it more difficult for people to try and rest...

control from the military of this region that is the only stronghold for the army in Darfur. And as this civil war continues, elsewhere in the country, the military have been pushing the RSF back, but less so in the north. That's right. And we saw that the

The escalation of fighting in Darfur and the attempt by RSF to finally seize control of El Fasher was happening at the same time it was losing control in the capital Khartoum. And now the army says that it has taken full control of Khartoum.

and essentially kicked the RSF out of the capital. And the rhetoric that we're hearing from both sides is not one of wanting to come to the table to negotiate. The army says that it is resolute, that it will fight until it gains victory. The RSF in the past have been more willing to come to the table, but that is when they controlled Khartoum. And we have seen the fighting now moving to other areas such as Kordofan, where RSF is trying to gain ground.

Anne Soy with me from Nairobi. In Thursday's podcast, we reported on the sea of mud, rock and ice which practically wiped the small village of Blatten in southern Switzerland off the map. The catastrophe caused by the nearby unstable glacier. Now, a new study has found that nearly 40% of the world's glacier ice will be lost, even if global temperatures stabilise at their current levels.

Researchers say 75% of glaciers will melt if global warming reaches 2.7 Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Some are predicting that'll happen by the end of this century. Here's our climate reporter, Mark Pointing. Get used to the sound of this. Glaciers melting at a rapid pace.

Scientists say the sobering truth is that this will continue even if global temperatures are stabilised at their current levels. That's because the world has been warming so quickly due to human activities that these frozen rivers of ice are way out of balance with today's climate.

But the authors of the new study argue that there is also reason for hope. They say that limiting warming to the international 1.5 degree target could still save half of today's glacier ice. The study's co-author, Professor Daniel Farinotti of the Federal Institute for Technology in Zurich,

says this is crucial for coastal populations. If you look at a very large scale, sea level change is one of the main issues. So you can melt enough glaciers as to make sea levels rise. And this is an issue not necessarily because the glaciers are melting, but because there is a

very many people living kind of very close to the sea. The hazards posed by melting ice have been further highlighted by the partial destruction this week of the Swiss village of Blatten, when a nearby glacier collapsed under the weight of rock debris. Researchers say the scale was unprecedented in modern Switzerland. And while the link between this particular event and rising temperatures is uncertain at the moment, scientists expect climate change to bring further hazards in the years ahead.

Our climate reporter, Mark Pointing. And still to come in the Global News Podcast. For people who support the right to choose to have an abortion, his creation, his development has been increasingly groundbreaking. We look back at the life of the man who invented the abortion pill.

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Again, genesight.com for more information and to move forward on your journey to mental wellness. The Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia's top defence summit, has historically been the setting for top-level encounters between the US and China. It's an arena for the superpowers to set out their vision for security in the region. It opened on Friday in Singapore with a keynote speech from the French President Emmanuel Macron. Our key challenge is how to preserve security

peace and stability and prosperity in this current environment. And in a moment when the competition between China and the United States for global leadership could create constraints and a side effect for each of us, without us willing or even able to imagine handing our interests over to one or the other, how to react? Our security correspondent Frank Gardner told us more about the takeaway messages.

So we've had a very forthright keynote speech here by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who is currently touring the region. He's had a lot of bilateral meetings, but he's had a very strong message that he delivered to a big audience here of defence chiefs, defence ministers, diplomats, spies, journalists, you name it. And his message, I think his strongest message, was that

If, as he puts it, we let Russia take territory in Ukraine, then what kind of a message does that send for Taiwan and the Philippines? China has said that it wants to take back, as it puts it, the island democracy of Taiwan. And the Chinese Coast Guard is clashing almost daily with Filipino fishermen over fishing rights in the South China Sea.

He talked about North Korea. He said that if China doesn't want Western interference in this region, then it needs to rein in North Korea, which is, after all, sending troops to Europe to fight Ukrainians on Russia's behalf. He talked about needing to create a coalition on strategic autonomy, as he puts it, of European and Asian nations, warning that they mustn't fall into a trap of being

essentially casualties, collateral damage between two big superpowers, the US and China. And he also talked about the need to avoid double standards of being accused of defending Ukraine but not doing enough to defend the rights of Palestinians which is why he said they condemned the actions of Israel. He said we cannot abandon Gaza. So there were a lot of different messages on different topics there. Tomorrow we've got Peter

Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary, who's going to be giving his, laying out his address, which he is almost certainly going to be talking about Taiwan, and hopefully giving some kind of a clue as to what US policy is on its big strategic rivalry with China in the Pacific Ocean. Frank Gardner in Singapore.

Taylor Swift has bought back the rights to her first six albums, ending a long-running legal battle over the ownership of her music. She said her greatest dream had come true. Here's our arts correspondent, David Sillitoe.

It's a saga that began in 2019 when music manager Scooter Braun bought Taylor Swift's former record label and with it the rights to her first six albums. Taylor Swift was not happy. She wanted to buy the Master Tapes herself and fought back by re-recording her albums and stopping the originals being licensed for movies and commercials. Six years on, the investment fund that now owns the Master Tapes has agreed to sell them to the singer. In a statement on her website...

She says all her singles, videos, album art, her entire life's work now belongs to her.

The abortion pill was first approved for use in France in 1988. Ever since, it's had a significant impact on many societies. It offered a non-surgical method of ending early pregnancies, and the fact it could be posted by mail hugely increased its availability. It also sharpened the disputes about abortion rights and became something of a symbol of these ideological divides.

The French scientist Etienne-Emile Beaulieu, who invented the abortion pill, has died at the age of 98 in Paris. Pam Bellock is the health and science reporter at the New York Times and spoke to my colleague Owen Bennett-Jones. He was the leading person who developed the abortion pill mifepristone. And, you know, he came up with this idea that if he was able to sort of rearrange a molecule...

in a way that could inhibit pregnancy, that if, you know, women could take this pill and it could block the development of pregnancy, allowing them to terminate pregnancies in cases where they needed to. Right, which, of course, is highly controversial. And he did pay a price for that, didn't he, in terms of threats against him and so on? Yeah, he had a lot of, you know, opposition against

But he also had a lot of supporters. And, you know, this was at a time when abortion was not legal in a number of places. And women were still trying to find ways to carry out abortions when they felt they needed to. And the methods that they were using were, you know, were very unsafe. And

And so his point of view was, this is going to be something that some women are going to need to do. We should provide a way for them to do so safely. So yes, it was very controversial, both as it still is, obviously, a very, very divisive issue. But, you know, for people who support the right to choose to have an abortion, it's

His creation, his development has been increasingly groundbreaking. Yeah. And I mean, a lot of the accounts of his life talk about the impact he had on Western societies, Western culture. You tell us, I mean, presumably the morning after pill, the abortion pill is now available pretty much globally, right? Yeah, it is. Yes. I mean, mifepristone is available worldwide.

It is restricted heavily in a number of places, and it continues to be restricted to some degree in the United States. But it has become more available. There are generic versions now. And, you know, in the United States, for example, more than two-thirds of abortions are carried out using this pill now. Gosh, that's an amazing figure. Sure.

He had quite a hinterland. I mean, I don't know how much you know about all this, but he was in the French resistance against Nazi occupation when he was 15. And then in the 60s, he got to know Andy Warhol.

So he's a very interesting man. Yes, he's quite a colourful and charismatic figure and very courageous. You know, he transported guns as a teenager for the French resistance. He briefly joined the Communist Party and then he quit that when he, you know, differed with their ideology. And he spent some time in America and hung out with artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns.

And, you know, he's just a very cultured, just a really fascinating person. And when I spent time with him in Paris a couple of years ago, he was already, you know, 96 years old at quite an advanced age. But he was still able to recall all of this incredible history. And he was very interested in painting and art and music and just a really fascinating, fascinating person.

Archaeologists in Guatemala say they've unearthed the remains of a 3,000-year-old Mayan city in the depths of the rainforest in the north of the country.

The city, named Los Abuelos, Spanish for grandparents, is about 20 kilometres from another important Mayan site in Ouachactun. Tim Franks spoke to Diane Davis, who's a Mayan archaeologist, about the discovery. Los Abuelos, amongst other recent sites that have been found, have shown that the Maya were a lot more advanced than previously thought at a lot sort of earlier time period as well.

So we have in my archaeology, we have this sort of main peak period called the classic period. And it's sort of AD 200 to 900. And that's where we assumed we have the peak of Maya civilization with writing and pyramids and so forth. But

But from various discoveries, it's sort of showing that actually, no, the Maya were much more developed earlier on in time. You mentioned that this site's been called Los Abuelos, the grandparents. Why is that? Because there's two rock sculptures that have been found. And basically, they are sort of male and female. They could be grandparents or perhaps ancestors. And that's maybe why they were built perhaps in

sort of dedication to the building that was created there. They found a few other sites nearby. I mean, they mentioned remains of pyramids that are there. There's a ceremonial centre. So when excavations are carried out, they'll be able to give us a lot more information on the sort of, you know, society that lived there. So, yeah, it's sort of exciting find.

and it's given us further proof about how to develop the my work. Salt marshes, those muddy flats around coasts and estuaries where plants have adapted to being washed daily by salty seawater, are a haven for bird life, but could also hold some secrets or clues to adapting to climate change.

Salt marshes are estimated to cover about 55,000 square kilometres of the planet and are found in many coastal regions, including in Australia, the US, Europe, China, even Madagascar. Oliver Conway heard more about them from our science correspondent, Victoria Gill.

They play a lot of different roles, actually, Oli. They're kind of these spongy buffer zones between the land and the sea, so they provide a natural flood defence. And because they are these open, muddy, creek-ridden, tidal flatlands, they were seen as really quite useless across a lot of the UK. So this was a UK-focused study, but there are salt marshes, of course, all over the world.

They've been drained for agriculture. But that's been a real problem because it's meant that we've lost this muddy habitat and we've lost this way that this carbon is locked away in the mud, which is what these scientists were studying. I went out to a salt marsh just off the northwest coast of England with a team from the WWF and also with Alex P.

Higgott from RSPB who was waxing lyrical to me about just how incredibly important salt marshes are for wading birds. The Rivel Estuary is a mixture of salt marsh and a lot of open mudflats and that is what is important. It is like a service station for birds.

They can reach down to different depths. Some of them are taking mollusks not too far down. Others are going for those kind of lugworms and things further into the mud. So as well as being really good for the breeding birds out here, getting that food source, it's so important in the winter as well. Those mudflats, we get over a quarter of a million birds

that spend the winter here. Just feeding, just in that mud, in that water, sifting and digging. So waders, wildfowl as well, curlew, oyster catchers in the hundreds, thousands, probing in that mud, loving it. WHISTLE BLOWS

Alex Piggott from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. So what can be done to protect these areas? Well, this is partly what this research that's been led by the WWF is after. It's looking at how we can value salt marshes more. So there's a lot of work that's been done by researchers around the world looking at salt marsh mud research.

and how much carbon that contains, because they're this quite unique system where because they're flooded by the tides, all of that mud and decomposing material, plant matter, gets buried in deep layers and it kind of lays down new layers of mud that keep the carbon from that plant material that's breathed in in the summer as those plants grow,

underground. And this new study has put greenhouse gas monitoring stations on this restored, lovely, healthy marshland. What they found over the course of a year is that the marshland plants, this carpet of long grasses and other plants, breathe in more carbon dioxide in the summer than they breathe out in the winter. And that's really important because that means that there's a system in these marshes for

sucking in and locking away planet-warming carbon dioxide, locking away greenhouse gases. So what they want is for salt marshes to be included in an official inventory of how much carbon is taken in and how much is emitted every year. And that's something that the UK government is using to kind of calculate its progress towards net zero. In recognising the official role that salt marshes have in protecting the planet from climate change,

what they say is this will provide more incentive and more funding to bring back and restore these habitats. Because in the UK, we've lost about 85% of our salt marshes in the last 150 years or so. Our science correspondent, Victoria Gill.

And that's all from us for now. There'll be a new edition of Global News to download later. If you'd like to comment on this podcast, drop us an email, globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk, or you'll find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag Global News Pod. This edition was mixed by James Piper. The producers were Alison Davis and Judy Frankel. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Andrew Peach. Thank you for listening. And until next time, goodbye.

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