Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hi, I'm Ankur Desai, and in the early hours of Friday, the 12th of December, these are our main stories. Donald Trump heaps more pressure against Venezuela, including sanctions against shipping companies and the family of President Nicolas Maduro.
President Zelensky says the fate of land in eastern Ukraine is still a key point of disagreement with Washington over how to end Russia's full-scale invasion. Also in this podcast, Disney and OpenAI announced a $1 billion deal to allow AI to create short videos of Disney's famous characters from Mickey Mouse to Darth Vader.
The best thing we can do is educate ourselves to try to figure out all the possible revenue streams that can come from AI and just lean into it. Many football fans react with anger at the cost of tickets for next year's men's World Cup finals. And cameras attached to killer whales have captured extraordinary footage of whales swimming and foraging with dolphins and catching fish together.
The United States has imposed new sanctions on relatives of Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, as well as a businessman close to him and six shipping companies. The White House says the tanker, its forces seized in the Caribbean on Wednesday, is being taken to a port in the US where the oil it was carrying will be seized.
The White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt, was repeatedly asked about the issue at a news briefing.
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Chapter 2: What sanctions has the US imposed on Venezuela?
Essentially, that is a demilitarized zone where Ukrainian forces would withdraw from the Donbass. And President Zelensky has been highlighting with journalists today some of the problems of this suggestion. And that is, he says, if Ukraine is being asked to... withdraw its troops five to ten kilometres, well, why isn't Russia being asked to do the same?
He's also saying, who is going to police this territory to make sure that Russia doesn't take it in the future? Now, he's not ruling it out. He is saying that this is something that would have to be decided, as he always has, by the people. either in an election or a referendum? And then you're into the practicalities.
How do you hold an election or a referendum in wartime when your country's under attack? I think the truth is that most people in Ukraine would have the same questions President Zelensky has raised. if it was put to them, that essentially, how do we know Russia is not going to take that territory? How do we know that they may not try to take more?
So it's back to security guarantees there, which clearly has to be resolved too. So I do not see this revised U.S. peace plan. as being any more acceptable to Ukraine as the last peace plan. But clearly, President Zelensky is not ruling it out because he still needs American support. He wants to keep America on side. He has the Europeans backing him.
And he clearly wants to try and get some kind of deal that can end the war.
Jonathan Beale reporting from Kiev. Meanwhile, the head of NATO has warned that many European leaders are too complacent about the threat posed by Russia. Mark Rutter warned that members of the alliance must move to a wartime mindset and are Russia's next target. Our Europe editor Katya Adler told us more about the speech.
Mark Rutter is known to favour quite colourful, bombastic language at times, but he had a message he wanted to send loud and clear to three very different audiences. First of all, to European members of NATO, to the UK, to Italy, to France, Germany and others to say, spend, spend, spend on defence, not sometime in the future, but now, because Russia's at your door.
He was also talking to Donald Trump in Washington, desperately trying to keep him on the side. The US remains NATO's most important and powerful ally. If it walks out of the door of NATO, there's a question mark over the whole organisation and wider security in Europe. And we have heard, as we were hearing there from Jonathan Beale, real impatience from the U.S.
president over Ukraine and even questioning whether Europeans can be relied on as allies. Don't give up on us, Mark Rutter was saying today. We will do more for our own defense, just like you asked us to. But finally, he was also speaking to Moscow. Don't even think of invading a NATO nation, he said, because we will be armed and we will be ready.
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