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Hello, this is the global news podcast from the BBC World Service with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news, seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising.

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This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service.

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Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. We're recording this at 14 hours GMT on Wednesday, the 27th of January, a French pharmaceutical firm says it will mass produce a covid jab developed by a German rival. But will it ease Europe's supply problems? Also, there's a mistaken belief by some countries that they can vaccinate their populations and that they'll be safe. It simply is not true. No one is safe until everyone is safe.

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A stark warning about the danger posed by new variants and survivors of the Holocaust commemorate the millions who died at the hands of the Nazis.

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Also in the podcast, Guana laid to rest one of modern Africa's most flamboyant and controversial leaders, Jerry Rawlings.

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And it's made me more optimistic and it's made me feel like people are looking for something to brighten their day a little bit. And I'm really glad that I've had the chance to be that for them.

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Why one man in the U.S. has started baking and giving away free pizza. A French pharmaceutical company has taken the unprecedented step of agreeing to help manufacture a covid-19 vaccine developed by a German rival, 125 million doses of the Pfizer by Untack Jab will be processed by Sanofi starting in July. Sanofi has been under pressure from the French government to help out after suffering problems with its own vaccine development. The European Union is currently struggling with supply issues and has hit out at the British Swedish firm AstraZeneca after it cut planned deliveries because of production issues at a factory in Belgium.

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Germany wants the EU to be able to block exports of vaccines made there. The Latvian foreign affairs minister, Edgars Renk, which says they may even resort to legal action but has been calling for greater coordination in the European Union.

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And they say that the commission is taking action. We to understand some objective issues, but these things are not improving. We should also take a look at a coordinated legal action across our member states that are actually signing contracts. And if things are not improving considerably, let's say in a month or so, then we should explore all options on the table.

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While the row simmers in Europe, the head of the World Health Organization has criticized richer countries for prioritizing vaccines for their own populations. Tedros Adenomas IBSA said it was vital that commitments made to the international vaccine scheme Kovács were kept.

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To put it bluntly, many countries have both more vaccine than they need. It is critical that Colebatch receives those extra doses soon, not the left overs. Many months from now. Lives depend on it.

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Our correspondent in Brussels, Gavin Lea, told me more about the groundbreaking move by Sanofi and how it's gone down in France.

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Rather than carry on with their own production of their own vaccine, which they were doing with hand in hand with GlaxoSmithKline, the UK firm, they will now delay that launch up until, well, it'll be late next year. Now instead, they will help Pfizer in Germany and they will produce around 125 million doses of the vaccine. It also gets political as well, because on the one hand, it helps the EU fulfil that target that it needs to get for getting the vaccines out.

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But on the other hand, politically, the centre right Republican Party has tweeted this morning to say in this race against the clock, the Pasteur Institute is working with Sanofi. They have both thrown in the towel.

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This scientific decline is a slap in the face, but this won't end the supply problems any time soon, will it? No, because it's going to be a few months time and just a step back from this. The EU is in a position at the moment where they are really angry. You know, I could use a much stronger word than that, and I haven't seen them this way. Even during Brexit, EU officials, commission officials particularly, that just feel ripped off, basically, frankly, because they are in a position where they've got a contract prepaid up front, 350 million euros with AstraZeneca.

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They were promised, they say, up to 80 million vaccines by March. They're not going to get that. They're going to get between 17 and 30 million instead. Now that the boss of AstraZeneca, Pascal Osorio, has given this interview to La Repubblica, where he said that they always said it was best intentions they had the EU had asked for this contract and signed it three months later than the UK. So they were always going to be playing catch up, even though they asked for the roll out at the same time.

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Now, there's a small bit of detail. It takes a little time, but let me explain it. Why it's so important that the heart of this back in December, the UK had problems with AstraZeneca and AstraZeneca used its manufacturing sites in the EU, in the Netherlands and Belgium to help the British with the British sites were having problems. Now the EU cites the Netherlands and Belgium are having problems and so they want to access the UK. AstraZeneca sites and the British government have in their contract stipulated those sites are only for the British government.

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So that's where the difficulty of the politics are. And that's why the EU is so angry. Still with AstraZeneca, who are meeting again with EU officials tonight.

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David Lee in Brussels, South Africa's top coronavirus scientist, has added his voice to calls for a fairer global distribution of Jab's, warning that wealthier nations won't be safe until everyone is safe. Africa correspondent Andrew Harding has been speaking to Professor Selim Abdul-Karim, chief scientific adviser to the South African government, about the virus, the vaccines and the variants.

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And these coronaviruses are quite widely and the ability to to create mutations is quite significant. We can expect a lot of different variants to occur and they probably are occurring. We're probably just not looking for them enough. And if we start looking for them, we're going to see this occurring much more commonly. And if it's going to occur more commonly, we're going to have to ensure that our vaccines are able to neutralize them, because if the. Not that means we're back to square one and then we got to play this cat and mouse game that every time we put the amount of pressure on the virus by vaccinating people, the virus learns how to bypass that.

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So the idea that the vaccines that are going out now could mean that this pandemic is effectively over within a matter of months. You say that's not really feasible now.

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I'm not saying that. I'm saying that we're likely to see many new variants and that as those variants start spreading and as we vaccinate the population, we're going to see more. And so they're able to escape immunity. And in terms just broadly of the vaccine spread around the world of the distribution.

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So fundamentally, there's a mistaken belief by some countries that they can vaccinate their populations and that they'll be safe. It simply is not true in this world that we live in.

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Would this coronavirus no one is safe until everyone is safe because of these mutations?

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Yeah, because if you vaccinate in one country and you have continual spread of the virus in another country, those mutations are going to occur and those mutations are going to reach out to the rest of the world. That's how we got a pandemic in the first place. So it's in everyone's interest to actually vaccinate as many people across the world.

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From Britain's perspective, we hear the health secretary talking about cutting off travel from South Africa, where South Africa is actually in a pretty good position to identify its variants of mutations when new variants are created. There's a very small window in which travel restrictions are effective, and mostly that window is long gone. By the time we actually know about the new variant because of the time lag, it takes us to do the gene sequencing. I would be most concerned about travel from countries that don't do enough genomic surveillance and less concerned about countries that actually know what they're circulating.

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Strains are Professor Salim Abdul-Karim talking to Andrew Harding.

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The Russian president Vladimir Putin has said a deal agreed with the US to extend a key nuclear agreement by five years is a step in the right direction. He and President Biden discussed the new START treaty in their first telephone conversation. The US account of Tuesday's exchange emphasized Mr Biden's straight talking on various issues, including Russia's treatment of the opposition and its alleged meddling in foreign elections, but wants the Kremlin's view.

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I asked our Moscow correspondent, Sarah Rainsford.

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Well, the official readout of the call is rather different to that one coming for the White House. The White House listing all the complaints and problems that the United States has with Russia, including election meddling, including its concerns about the fate of Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader here who's now behind bars.

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Russia's readout was much more positive. It talked about congratulating Joe Biden on the presidency, talked about a businesslike and frank conversation, and stressed the fact that the two sides have agreed the contacts would continue. And Mr Putin apparently underlines that normalizing relations between Russia and the United States will be there, would be in the interests of both countries, given what he said apparently was the responsibility that both have for security and stability. So really stressing the importance of this extension of the START three treaty, the new START treaty on nuclear arms reduction.

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So that's the thing that Russia is focusing on, saying the fact that the two sides have managed to agree on extending that treaty after a long, long negotiations, negotiations with Donald Trump's administration. They're saying that here as a very positive step and saying that this has been done on Russia's terms.

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Yeah. What exactly does it mean? Because in recent years, controls on nuclear weapons have been falling away somewhat.

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Yes. And this is pretty much the last remaining treaty that's still in place. And that's why it's so critical. It does limit the number of strategic nuclear weapons that the United States and Russia can have. And Donald Trump had essentially threatened to walk away from it because he wanted to include China in the treaty. And the negotiations with Russia just weren't going anywhere. Joe Biden had said that he would extend it. He committed to extending it. And that has now happened.

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And it's been extended not just for a year as a sort of holding pattern, but in fact, for the full five years, which some in the United States think gives Russia rather a free hand to carry on developing other nuclear weapons that are haves that aren't covered by the treaty. I think that it is giving Russia a little bit too much leeway.

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Sarah Rainsford in Moscow. Around the world, people are marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In Germany, politicians are warning of the. Continuing dangers of anti-Semitism in Britain, purple lights are being shone on landmarks and people being asked to light candles in memory of the millions of Jews and members of other minority groups who were killed by the Nazis. Our correspondent Fergal Keane has been talking to survivors.

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I have to say, everybody, Goodman's a language that once echoed across the vanished Jewish world of Central and Eastern Europe is being revived by a unique community. This is the weekly online Yiddish class for a British Holocaust survivors. The teacher is a young woman.

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Tamara Greeson, many of whose own forebears were killed by the Nazis, have already created a community that has been such an amazing opportunity.

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We really like and plus one devoted attendee is Harry Olmer, who was 12 years old when Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939.

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According to the polls, it was at about six o'clock this morning that the first full scale attacks began. These were air raids on big towns in the corridor.

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And Saleisha Harry Olmer, now aged 93, lost three siblings, parents, grandparents and numerous other relatives in the Holocaust.

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After four days, trains arrived and herded everybody. My grandmother was dead.

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My mother and sisters were all herded into the trains very quickly. So my mum Harry was sent to a succession of camps there.

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He witnessed the daily selections of those deemed fit to work and of those who would be murdered.

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And one man standing next to me, all the men, the nobles, they took him out to school and he started pleading with the Germans. He spoke a beautiful German and strong he said someone took the gun and shot him dead and dead.

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Among the two thousand eight hundred nineteen liberated Auschwitz inmates, there were a hundred and eighty children. With the liberation of the camps by the allied armies in the spring of 1945, thousands of orphaned child survivors were in need of homes. Several hundred were brought to Britain, where they made successful lives. Zdenka Hoser Lova was born in the year the war broke out. She was taken with her mother to Terzian stock camp in what was then Czechoslovakia. But her mother was deported from there to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.

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Her father was also killed in Poland. Zdenka was six when she was brought to Britain in 1945. When we meet, Zdenka is carrying a photograph of herself and her mother, a treasured memento that took decades to find.

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I wanted to see a photograph of my mother and it took 50 years until I saw this. I looked at this photo and then I said, Who is this woman? Imagine you didn't know what your mother looked like. It was said. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood, 500 men and boys lay there in two piles. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.

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The larger message of the Holocaust screams from history, especially in a time of rising extremism and intolerance. What the individual stories of Harian Zdenka tell us is that while genocide is the crime of crimes, the attempt to exterminate an entire people, it is also the destruction of individual possibility and promise.

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That report by Fergal Keane. And as Holocaust Memorial Day is commemorated around the world, Jewish leaders have highlighted China's treatment of its wigger minority, comparing it to the behavior of the Nazis.

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Still to come in this edition of the podcast, I just became a grandfather and our grandson still may be able to skate on Naturaliste, but I think when he will be grown up, then there might be not naturalise anymore.

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As global temperatures rise, how long will people in the Netherlands be able to continue their winter custom of outdoor ice skating?

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One of Africa's most charismatic and controversial leaders has been laid to rest. Jerry Rawlings twice seized power in Ghana but eventually returned the country to democratic control. Initially, a committed socialist, he later introduced free market reforms and made Ghana a major player in UN peacekeeping missions. His critics accuse him of gross human rights abuses, including the ruthless execution of three former heads of state. I spoke to our correspondent at the ceremony in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, Thomas Nardy.

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A solemn funeral ceremony is currently taking place here at the Black Star Square in Accra. And it's expected all those attending are in the traditional attacks for funerals in this part of the country. And covid-19 protocols are to a large extent observed. Sanitizers have been made available. People are also required to wear masks. But social distancing is a bit of a problem here.

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Yeah, I guess it's difficult when you've got so many people attending an event like that, certainly because Rollins was a man of the people.

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And I suspect that a lot of people have come here to witness the event. But the government yesterday encouraged the masses to try as much as possible, watch it live on television because of the covid protocols.

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Why has it taken so long for this to take place, given that he died more than two months ago?

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Well, the funeral was originally scheduled to take place in December last year, but had to be postponed because some traditional leaders needed to agree on the place of burial. Some wanted him to be buried in his home region, which is the volatile region in south eastern Ghana. But today it's agreed that he'll be laid to rest at a military cemetery here in the capital, Accra.

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And tell us more about why so many people want to be there to pay their respects.

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Well, as you mentioned in the intro, a general is was a charismatic leader who cared a lot about ordinary people. He built this country on the principles of social justice, probity and accountability. And these these were his reasons for staging the two military coups in 1979 and 1981. He is described as a selfless and committed leader who worked tirelessly for the good of his country. Even after retirement, he still worked as a philanthropist, supporting brilliant but needy students in this country.

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But what of the human rights abuses, of course, coming to power at a very early age of 32? Yes, some excesses were expected to be committed. And within the climate of a revolution, some of his men took advantage to do certain things that they were not supposed to. I should mention three former heads of state were executed when he the regime embarked on what they describe as a housecleaner exercise, trying to get rid of corrupt officials, both military and civilian.

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Also, some three judges were murdered during his regime, and he's always described that as regrettable and denied involvement. But all those who were found culpable for that crime have paid the ultimate price.

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Thomas Nardy talking to me from Accra. Almost two thirds of people around the world believe climate change is a global emergency. That's according to the largest ever opinion poll on the matter, which included the views of about half a million teenagers. Conserving forests and land emerged as the most popular solution for tackling climate change, the least popular with switching from meat to plant based food, as we heard from researcher Dr Steven Fisher of Oxford University.

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It might just be that the idea of plant based diet is a really big step for a lot of people. Even though it was at the bottom of the list, it's still garnered 30 percent of support, which is now close to one third, which is a significant minority. It might be that people need more education about the importance of plant based diet, and we need to do more research to find out.

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Well, for more on the findings, I spoke to our environment correspondent, Matt McGrath.

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I think it's interesting in terms of its scale, it's the biggest it's ever been carried out on climate change, one point two million people around the world in 50 countries. And the clear message from it is that people see this as an emergency. Large numbers of young people took part in the study and yes, very clearly from them that climate change is an emergency, a very interesting correlation between different countries in that the level of education seem to be the determining factor here.

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One of the determining factors, people in countries as diverse as Bhutan, the DRC, the U.K., France, the higher the level of education, the higher they saw the likelihood of climate change being an emergency. So it was a very clear correlation on that.

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Now, you mentioned the young. The people who took part, how did they reach them? Yeah, it's a rather innovative study in that sense, especially the numbers involved. They took adverts basically in computer games that people play on their phones. They had millions and millions of responses from that. And they followed up with this one point two million people who filled in the surveys and answered the questions on climate emergency and how you would tackle it. So rather innovative in that sense.

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They've got 550000 people in the 14 to 18 age bracket, a group that they wanted to hear from because they believe this group is not represented politically, it doesn't have a voice. And they wanted to be able to find out what they were thinking about climate change so that they could feed that into the big political debates that are happening around that issue at the moment.

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Yeah, I mean, if two thirds of people surveyed say it is a global emergency, does that make it easier for politicians to act? Will they act now?

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I think it would be too simple to say that that is the case. But I think it adds to the growing body of evidence from the scientists and from other groups that people recognize this as an emergency. One of the things that was coming through from the people behind the study was that people were seeing the examples for themselves when they saw fires in Australia or California or drought in other parts of the world or heavy rains. They making the connection more and more with a changing climate.

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And they're actually saying we need to take action on this.

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Our environment correspondent, Matt McGrath. Well, let's look at more of the impacts of climate change on our world.

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And in the Netherlands, winter used to mean ice and ice skating. But as average temperatures there have risen and Dutch winters become milder, it's become harder to find ice thick enough to skate on safely. Now, one small town in the east of the country is trying, at least in part, to reverse that trend. Matthew Kenyon reports from Winter's Vike.

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If you travel around the Netherlands, you'll soon spot the ice rinks, a lot of towns and villages have one lying on their outskirts, but these days they're often rather forlorn, looking, rarely used, floodlit fields. It's not how it used to be. You want skating, everyone.

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When I was a small boy and there was a school in the between the hours of 50 minutes, you are free and you were ice skating. It was normal for everyone, for every child that it's not anymore. Henry Vanco lives near Venters Vike, whose Skating Club was the only one in the Netherlands to have a single short day of action on naturalise. And the whole of 20-20, he and his colleagues are trying to save their sport and their new rink is nearly ready.

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What is brand new is the insulation under the asphalt. There is no other ice rink in the Netherlands and probably not in the world, which is on purpose. Insulated from below.

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Hendrickx from prior has been the driving force and it's taken a lot of thought and effort.

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Two years ago, a club not far from here measured the temperature of the soil when they had natural ice and the competition on that naturalise, they had three centimeters of ice, but one metre down in the soil, the temperature was 12 degrees and that heat tends to go up. Then my son in law, he said you should insulated from from below. And we started researching and after three months concluded the best way would be to insulate it by means of a layer of sell concrete, as they call it.

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So concrete with foam in it, with the air in it. Five thirty in the morning, the temperature on the surface of the asphalt, minus one point five between the asphalt and concrete, zero point one should be must be possible to add at least a small layer of ice. That's right.

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The water for that ice comes from a spray system which needs thawing out with a gas burner before it can be put to work. Propelled around the track by a battery powered vehicle, it leaves a thin layer of water, which then freezes on the insulated asphalt, less water needs less time to freeze. So with a few layers done and DAYBREAK not far off, it's time to check. This is a great moment. We did it one and a half millimeters of ice and we can skate in this race is really great.

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Ice six o'clock in the morning. Yes, it worked.

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But despite their ingenuity and their joy at their new system working, the winters makers know that this is just a temporary success. Hopes of letting the public use the new rink the following day melted in rising temperatures. And Hedrick Van Praagh is realistic about how big an impact their innovations will have in the long term.

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We are just postponing the moment that we won't be able to skate anymore. I just became a grandfather and our grandson still may be able to skate on Naturaliste, but I think when he will be grown up, then there might be no naturalise anymore. When there's no ice, the pristine asphalt track can be used instead for inline skating. But that's not the same. Matthew Kenyon reporting from Vinces Mike in the Netherlands, finally, when the coronavirus pandemic began, a university student named Ben Berman in the U.S. city of Philadelphia said about cheering up his local neighborhood.

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He did it by making pizzas and then luring them from his second floor apartment to people in the street below the pizzas. Afraid, but many who've enjoyed them then donate money to charities that help local homeless people and those going hungry.

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Ben told James Copnall how the project started.

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I guess I've always loved to cook, and it was one way for me to always be connected to friends. I sort of tell people there is no place that I'm more comfortable than around the dinner table. And so in March I had made a big batch of pizza dough was a recipe that I've been working on for about a year. At that point and can tell your pizza seriously.

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I started to take my pizza pretty seriously at this point, but the pandemic had started and I knew it was a bad idea to have friends over for dinner party. And so instead of having them over, I bought 40 feet of string on Amazon. I told them to swing by my apartment.

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I lower them slices of pizza out my window instead as a certain dramatic flair to that, isn't it? I mean, you could have gone to the bottom of the building and just left them at the door.

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There definitely is a little bit of dramatic flair. I think it was a week where there was so much uncertainty and I was searching for a way to just make people smile, just make my friend smile, just give someone something to laugh about. And this felt like an easy way to do it. It was just something to keep myself entertained, make a few friends smile. And it's just has grown so much from there. Yeah.

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Tell us about growth. It's not just the friends enjoying free pizza right now.

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Yeah, it's not just the friends anymore. It sort of took off during the summer, as you might expect. When you're lowering pizza out your window on a busy street in Philadelphia, people tend to stop and look and ask what's happening now?

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A very busy street in Philadelphia, I guess so little by little, a few people start to follow on Instagram that I had a couple of famous influencers on Instagram comes the barstool sports game, and they tried my pizza and things started to take off. And these days I do weekly pizza nights. I bake pizza. On Sunday, I put up a lottery online on Fridays. Last week we had 1100 people sign up for the lottery and there's only twenty pizzas each week.

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It's a few more than just my friends.

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At this point you have to start employing people.

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Well, the fun part about all of this is pizza is totally free. So the flower, the tomatoes, the cheese, the pizza boxes, that's all my personal contribution to the cause. And I'm so psyched to be able to offer that as part of this. And then I just ask people if it makes them smile, if they saw us on Instagram and they were inspired a little bit by what I'm trying to do, I asked them to donate to some of our hunger relief and homelessness organizations in the city.

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And it's been an amazing way to raise funds for some really great organizations.

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And one of the kind of things people say to you, I think one of the most rewarding parts about this whole experience for me has been people reaching out to say I was inspired by seeing this or I lost my job this year. And I've been feeling really down about the world. And this gives me a little bit of hope. I don't feel like I've done anything that's special, to be honest with you. I just like to cook. And it's been fun to be able to make people smile through this.

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But I think in the messages that I've started to receive, it's made me more optimistic and it's made me feel like people are looking for something to brighten their day a little bit. And I'm really glad that I've had the chance to be that for them. Ben Berman in Philadelphia talking to James Copnall.

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And that is all from us for now. There'll be an updated version of the Global News podcast later. This edition was produced by Rahho Sonic and mixed by Pete Love. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm all over Conway until next time.

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Goodbye.