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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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I'm Celia Hatton, and in the early hours of Saturday, the 23rd of May, these are our main stories. Donald Trump's director of national intelligence resigns for personal reasons, but Tulsi Gabbard also struggled with the president's decision to enter into foreign wars. Our North America editor wraps up another tumultuous week for the U.S. president.
And the Democratic Republic of Congo says Ebola cases have now been reported across several conflict-hit eastern provinces. Also in this podcast, we look at the legacy of Carlo Petrini, the founder of the global slow food movement. And the tennis legend Billie Jean King finally graduates the age of 82. It's just so great.
I just wish my parents could have been there because I'm the first in our immediate family to finish college or university. So I'm happy I finally did it. We start in the U.S. with the announcement of the resignation of another Trump cabinet member. Tulsi Gabbard is stepping down, citing personal reasons. She'd been serving as the U.S.
Director of National Intelligence, normally a position that wields great power and influence in the Oval Office. But long before she announced her departure, Tulsi Gabbard had largely taken a back seat in the administration. Once a Democrat, she'd switched her allegiance to the Republicans under Donald Trump and was a vocal supporter of his America First policy.
The president's interventions in Venezuela and Iran put her out of step with his inner circle. With internal tensions growing, Ms Gabbard will leave at the end of next month. Our North America editor Sarah Smith told me more about Tulsi Gabbard's political struggles in office. Tulsi Gabbard was a congresswoman from Hawaii.
As a Democrat, she was a big rising star in the party she even ran for president in 2020. But then she switched sides, became a big Donald Trump MAGA supporter. And when he returned to the White House, found herself actually being appointed to this job as Director of National Intelligence. But she has been a long-term critic of wars of choice of foreign intervention.
Now, of course, Donald Trump was as well during the election campaign, and that tied them closely together. But She's maintained that position during her time in office. And the result is that she was cut out of key meetings planning the military action in Venezuela when the then President Nicolas Maduro was captured by US forces and the war in Iran.
She also gave some rather inconvenient testimony to Congress when she was being asked about the intelligence in Iran. And she said that they had no evidence. that Iran was trying to rebuild its nuclear capabilities. And that was directly opposed to what Donald Trump in the White House was saying at the time. So there have clearly been tensions there for a while.
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Chapter 2: Why did Tulsi Gabbard resign as the US Director of National Intelligence?
So they pulled the vote rather than lose it. But the Republican leadership in the House can't put this off forever. The same War Powers Resolution is also going through the Senate, and it's getting much closer as well to a victory for the Democrats or for those who oppose the war in Iran.
And part of this is because Donald Trump has been challenging Republican lawmakers who he doesn't feel have been loyal enough. He's actually managed to back primary challengers against some other Republicans, and he's been successful in that. So come November, the pesky lawmakers who don't agree with him will no longer be in Congress.
But they're there for now and might yet deal him a few difficult blows. There's a lot of political wrangling within the Republican Party, as you've said, Sarah, also this week. Some pushback from Senate Republicans for funding for Donald Trump's ballroom and also a compensation fund that he's announced.
Yeah, very, very controversial compensation fund that he announced this week as part of a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service. And he says that this will be $1.8 billion of public money that people can apply for if they felt that they were victims of weaponized justice under the Biden regime.
Now, Donald Trump claims that he's a victim of that himself, but he says he won't be eligible to apply to the fund. But it could apply to all sorts of his friends and allies. And Very controversially, it could also apply to people who took part in the January the 6th riots. Now, that has absolutely infuriated a number of people and Republicans in Congress who say they simply cannot vote for this.
And also, at the same time, they're being asked to authorize billions of dollars of spending for the ballroom extension that Donald Trump is building on the side of the White House. What Republicans are saying is, look, we've got elections coming up in November and we are facing an electorate who are really worried about the cost of living, about the price of food.
petrol and of groceries, all of which are being impacted by the war in Iran. So they blame Donald Trump for a lot of that. We cannot go to the electorate and tell them that we are spending billions of dollars building a ballroom for the White House and compensating people who attacked police officers on the 6th of January and expect them to vote for us. They think this is political suicide.
Our North America editor Sarah Smith speaking to me from Washington. The Democratic Republic of Congo says Ebola cases have now been reported across several conflict-hit eastern provinces after the World Health Organization upgraded the risk assessment for the current outbreak to very high. The DRC said there were outbreaks in Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu.
In the regional capital, Goma, there's been one positive laboratory test, although the authorities have not formally declared any cases. More than 700 people have been exposed to the Ebola virus, with over 170 suspected deaths recorded. This news brings back memories of another Ebola outbreak a decade ago that happened in a different part of Africa.
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Chapter 3: What were the political struggles faced by Tulsi Gabbard during her tenure?
the most popular performers in Russia have already been forced to toe the line. But that is not enough for the authorities anymore, argues Russian sociologist Dmitry Dubrovsky. According to him, repression has worsened since the invasion of Ukraine, and steering clear of politics no longer means you are safe from the police.
Music specifically has turned out to be a source of unsanctioned freedom. The biggest problem for these bands is not what they perform, but the fact that they're independent. Independence is now apparently being seen not as neutrality, but as a threat. It's pretty obvious how they're trying to get back to controlling culture, music and so on, the way they did under the KGB.
Such raids have created an all-pervasive atmosphere of fear and repression. Both of the experts that we spoke to, Valeria Vietashkina and Dmitry Dubrovsky... are now living outside of Russia. The punk rocker from Tyumen only spoke to the BBC on condition of complete anonymity, while several other concertgoers refused to be interviewed, citing fear of police reprisals.
And this works just fine for the authorities, sanitised lyrics and set lists, and people who are afraid to speak out.
That report was by Vitaly Shevchenko. We asked the Russian authorities for a response, but have heard nothing back. The Italian writer and activist Carlo Petrini, who founded the global slow food movement, has died at the age of 76. What began as a protest against fast food culture in Italy became a worldwide campaign to change the way people think about food, farming and the environment.
Our reporter Carla Conti looks back at his life.
Food is a political act. Those are the words that Carlo Petrini lived by, and they led him to something of a cultural revolution under the name Slow Food. He founded the movement in the 1980s in protest of the spread of fast food culture, including the opening of Italy's first McDonald's in 1986, right by Rome's famous Spanish steps.
Born in 1949 in Bra, a town in the northern Italian region of Piedmont, Petrini spent much of his life arguing that food was never just food. His ethos, and that of his organization, was simple but groundbreaking, that good, healthy, locally sourced food should be a right for the many, not a privilege for the few.
For Petrini, that also meant joining the dots between cuisine, the land, and the people who work it.
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