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This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson. And in the early hours of Wednesday, the 20th of January, these are our main stories. Donald Trump defends his record as US president. In a farewell video address, the top Republican in the Senate explicitly blames him for provoking the mob that stormed the Capitol building in Washington.

President elect Joe Biden has arrived in Washington as the Senate holds confirmation hearings for five key members of his cabinet. And the Italian Senate has backed Prime Minister Giuseppe Contee in a vote of confidence with the support of some opposition lawmakers. Also in this podcast, the smart devices that may soon be able to detect if someone has coronavirus days before they're diagnosed and police in Naples return a 500 year old painting to the church where it was stolen.

This is what gives us immense satisfaction is that we've given back an important piece to the city of Naples, rendering it maybe more famous now than it was before. With just hours to go before Donald Trump's presidency comes to an end, he's issued his final message to the American people in a YouTube broadcast that lasted nearly 20 minutes.

He summed up, the last four years we embarked on a mission to make America great again for all Americans as I conclude my term as the 44th president of the United States. I stand before you truly proud of what we have achieved together. We did what we came here to do and so much more earlier.

And a final flurry of activity. The outgoing administration condemned China for its treatment of Muslim wiggers and issued licenses for oil and gas exploration in the protected Arctic Wildlife Reserve. And that's without any sign as yet of the presidential pardons that we've been expecting from the departing president. But ahead of his speech, Mr. Trump was dealt what could be a body blow as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, one of his closest allies in Congress until now, voiced his strongest criticism yet of the president for his role in encouraging the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol building last week.

The mob was that was they were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government, which they did not like. But we pressed on. We stood together and said we would not veto power over the rule of law in our nation, not even a one night. Our correspondent Barbara Starr has been following the day's developments in Washington.

So what was her assessment of the outgoing president's farewell message, this lengthy list of his own achievements, which others might challenge him as? What will be his legacy, frankly, his greatest hits, as it were. That's how he mostly spent his speech. It seemed like he's trying to recast his legacy away from the controversy and violence of the past few weeks when his supporters stormed the Capitol. He did make a brief mention of it. He said the assault on the capital.

People were horrified. It's something we couldn't tolerate. But he made no mention of his own role in it, of his own supporters doing it. He made no mention of his defeat or of his big lie about winning and how that will have contributed to the atmosphere. And the best he could do for Mr. Biden really is wish him luck after all of that.

How significant could Mitch McConnell's intervention be?

I think it could be significant. He's a powerful man in the Senate, as you know, and it's the strongest statement yet. He had been moving in that direction with some hints. I mean, he did say clearly that Mr. Trump lost the election, although it took him a while to do so. He then let it be known that he was pleased about impeachment proceedings, or at least that he would consider them seriously rather than just voting against them.

And now with this statement, it just shows how angry he is because he believes he blames Trump for election losses. He believes that Mr. Trump is responsible for the Republicans losing the Senate. And if he does take this stance in the Senate trial, he could provide political cover for other Republicans who are wavering. That doesn't mean necessarily that they'll get the 17 Republicans they need to convict Mr. Trump along with the Democrats in the Senate. But it is quite a significant statement.

Barbara Plett, usher in Washington. For his part, the incoming US president, Joe Biden, spoke to the people of his home state, Delaware, about the journey he's made and is about to undertake.

I know these are dark times, but there's always light. That's what makes this state so special. That's what it taught me when I came home after graduating from Delaware and then going on to law school at Syracuse. I get home to Wilmington, to our county in a gone dark. Dr. King was assassinated. Wilmington had been in flames. The National Guard patrolling the streets. And that turmoil inspired me to become a public defender, a step I never anticipated would lead me toward this improbable journey.

We're 12 years ago, I was waiting at the train station in Wilmington for a black man to pick me up on our way to Washington, where we were sworn in as president and vice president of the United States of America. And here we are today. My family and I are about to return to Washington to meet a black woman, a South Asian descent, to be sworn in as president and vice president of the United States. As I told Bo on that station, waiting for Barack and Hutterites and actually I said, don't tell me things can't change.

They can and they do. That's America, a place of hope, light and limitless possibilities. And I'm honored I'm truly honored to be your next president and commander in chief. And I'll always be a proud son of the state of Delaware.

Mr. Biden then flew to Washington, where on the eve of his inauguration, he attended a covid memorial service with lights illuminating the night sky in tribute to the 400000 Americans who have now died of the disease.

Also at the event was Vice President elect Kamala Harris.

We gathered tonight a nation in mourning to pay tribute to the lives we have lost, a grandmother or grandfather who was our whole world. A parent, partner, sibling or friend who we still cannot accept is no longer here. And for many months, we have grieved by ourselves. Tonight, we grieve and begin healing together at the same time, the president's principal cabinet nominees have been undergoing confirmation hearings before Senate committees.

In her testimony, Janet Yellen, the proposed treasury secretary, urged lawmakers to act big on the next stimulus relief package despite the cost. She pledged to improve the overall economic outlook for all Americans with support for workers and small businesses.

The former French prime minister, Edouard Balladur, has gone on trial accused of financing a failed 1995 presidential campaign with illegal kickbacks from international arms dealers. The 91 year old is the latest high ranking French politician to find himself in the dock over a scandal that poisoned the country's political life for more than a quarter of a century. His former defense minister, Francois Leotta, is also being tried. Both deny the charges. The case arose out of investigations into a terrorist attack in Karachi 19 years ago when 12 French naval engineers were killed.

Sandrine LeClaire, the daughter of one of the victims, expressed her frustration that it had taken so long to get to court.

When I think of it this way, do you think this is what we are waiting for, the truth to be told and for justice to be done? So now there are two possibilities, either Mr. Balladur and Mr. Liotard to sit down at the table and confess. But that means they show dignity, morality, responsibility, and that they stop saying that they don't remember anything, that they didn't know anything and that they didn't decide anything. Because when you look at the facts, well, the facts speak for themselves.

Our Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield has been following the case. They're supposed to have embezzled money from a big arms contract to pay for his presidential campaign, the connection with the 2002 bombing in Karachi. It's not established. There's certainly a link in many people's minds between the two. And it may be the explosion. The terrorist attack, in effect, was some act of vengeance because commissions that have been promised by Ballajura weren't being paid. It was that theory which led investigators back in the early 2000s onto the trail of commissions for arms contracts.

And that led to the revelation in inverted commas, because it's not proven that Ballajura had partly financed his 1995 election campaign with money from kickbacks and the classic form of corruption, which was very, very current in France and elsewhere. In these big foreign arms deals, you pay commissions to a middleman and then you arrange for part of those commissions to come back into your country for whatever purpose. And as part of the deal, a secret clause said, and some of that money will come back to us for our purposes in France, the illegal kickbacks from international government arms deals, it sounds huge.

How big a scandal was this at the time?

Well, it wasn't a scandal at all. At the time, because no one knew anything about it after the 1995 election campaign in which Ballajura did well, but not well enough to break through to the second round. And he was eventually Jacques Chirac won it.

The accounts were all passed by the Constitutional Council, which is the body which checks over election campaigns, and they were all given the all clear. So at the time, no one suspected anything. It was only because after the terrible events of 2002 and the terrorist attack which killed these Frenchmen in Karachi, that investigators look into that and the families of the victims started saying, hang on a sec. What's all this about commissions being paid for this arms deal to Pakistan?

And what is all this about the commissions having been stopped by Jacques Chirac, who was, of course, his rival? So then the theory started to emerge. The terrorist attack had been because Chirac had stopped paying the commissions. And that led investigators to the idea that there had been commissions that had come back to Balladur just before the election.

How much coverage is it getting now in France? Everyone recognizes that the length of time is just inordinate and almost makes this trial a bit of a travesty. It's so long ago that people can't even remember the election unless you sort of well into middle age, 91 years old is how old Edward Balada is. François Alioto, 78, is not a well man. There is a feeling that this is something that which in classic French style has lingered far, far too long in the dusty, musty corridors of the post of Justice.

It's now come to this peculiar court, the Court of Justice La Republique, which tries ministers for things that they allegedly did back when they were in power. But it's so long ago, I think that many people must have the feeling that this is not really serving the interests of justice, because how can you allow somebody to have for a quarter of a century the possibility of being brought to trial hung over him and Evrard only to come to pass at such a late stage in his life?

Hugh Schofield in Paris. The UK has recorded the highest number of. Daily coronavirus deaths since the start of the pandemic, a further 1610 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for covid-19, taking the total by that measure to more than 91000. In contrast, the number of new cases has continued to fall, with just over 33000 new infections registered. Meanwhile, antibody testing carried out by the government has thrown new light on the rapid spread of the disease in the winter months.

It suggests that across Britain, at least one in 10 people have had coronavirus. Our science correspondent Paula B'Gosh has been looking at the figures.

The record number of deaths was what scientists had expected there, a consequence of the surge in new infections which peaked at the beginning of the year. There's inevitably a delay before the number of deaths also rises. But as new cases are now falling, so too will the numbers who go to hospital and who die, but probably not until next week. The survey of antibodies by the Office for National Statistics shows that the vast majority of people in the UK have yet to be infected, and so any relaxation of restrictions at this stage would lead to another rapid rise in infections.

The study indicates that the number of people found to have had coronavirus last month was approximately double the figure for October, according to Professor Lawrence Young from Warwick Medical School. The surge was driven in part by the new variant of the virus.

It is a huge increase and I guess it also tells us perhaps something about this more infectious variant of the virus that we know is fuelling the infections from last year. And I guess part of what we're seeing here is that increased transmissibility of this new UK variant virus.

A separate analysis found that care home residents accounted for around a quarter of covid deaths in England and Wales, registered in the first week of the year. Care home residents account for less than one per cent of the population. So the latest numbers demonstrate that they continue to be much harder hit than the rest of the population. But the deployment of vaccine should see a sharp drop in deaths in care homes in the coming weeks pile up.

New research in the United States has found smartwatches or wearable digital devices may be able to detect if someone has coronavirus days before they're diagnosed. In some cases, products made by companies like Apple or Fitbit can predict a covid-19 infection even before the user becomes symptomatic or the virus is detectable by standard tests. Professor Michael Schneider from Stanford University led the study. So how do these devices work?

They're actually measuring you for all kinds of things that measure resting heart rate. Your skin temperature depends on the device, some of the measure of something called heart rate variability. What's powerful about them is they're measuring you 24/7, so they're always following you. So you can actually follow people's normal baseline parameters, if you will, their heart rate, things like that.

And when they get ill, there'll be a sudden jump up in those parameters. And in our case, we can pick it up by resting. Heart rate would be elevated when people get ill. One smartwatch costs about one hundred dollars and in the future there'll be even cheaper. And the reality is they'll measure you all the time. They can measure you for several years, whereas test you may get them for a few dollars. For most people, they cost more like one hundred dollars and you can only use them every now and then.

And they also only return the results, usually anywhere from one to three days after you take the test. So don't measure you in real time like a smartwatch can do. Imagine running around with a car that has no dashboard. That's what we're doing right now. But just like a car is very useful by presenting you information about your engine health, if you will, your fuel, everything else. The same is true for a smartwatch. They can tell you what your health status is at all times and that can be very, very valuable.

Professor Michael Schneider from Stanford University.

Still to come, we look at the subject behind a new German exhibition about female SS guards who worked at Ravensbruck concentration camp.

I think they were awful people, but they liked it probably because it gave debarked, gave them lots of power over the business.

So why did so many of them escape justice?

We have a special report. On Monday, the Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Contee, won a vote of no confidence in the lower house of parliament. Now he's won a similar motion in the upper house. The crisis was triggered last week when the former prime minister, Matteo Renzi, pulled his party out of the ruling coalition over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. So how close was it? Mark Lowen is our Rome correspondent.

Too close for comfort, Alex, for Giuseppe Conte there, because even though he won a majority of votes cast in the Senate with 156 votes in favor, 140 against and 16 abstentions, he did not win an absolute majority of votes in the Senate. That would be 161 seats, five short of that. That basically means that he can continue to lead a minority government, but it means that effectively, every legislative move in the Senate would require horse trading and negotiations with the opposition to pass.

And that is really at the very worst time in the midst of a pandemic that's killed more than 83000 Italians and unleashed the deepest economic crisis since the Second World War. So it's really not what he or what his government needs. He may decide to continue or he may decide the time's up and he needs to go to the president and tendered his resignation just to remind us why Mr. Renzi and Mr. Conti fell out.

Well, that's a very good question, because to most Italians, according to opinion polls, they just simply don't understand why Matteo Renzi, a former prime minister, decided to pull the plug on his party in the coalition a couple of weeks ago and unleashed this political crisis, basically a deep seated hostility between the two men. But it was sparked really by disagreements over how to spend EU recovery funds to rebuild Italy after the coronavirus. Matteo Renzi, the leader of this small party, just three percent in the polls, believes that the prime minister does have a contest, centralise too much power over how to use the funds.

And so he decided to withdraw his ministers from the coalition, sparking this crisis and now, therefore, depriving Giuseppe Conte of his majority in the upper house. So it's now the ball is very much Mr. Conti's court, whether he continues to limp on whether he tenders his resignation. But after Alex, they've been 66 governments in Italy since the Second World War. So a political crisis. You might have a feeling of deja vu. You'd be right to feel that.

Our Rome correspondent Mark Lowen, staying in Italy and police in Naples have returned a valuable 500 year old painting from the school of Leonardo da Vinci to the church from which it was stolen. The work is a copy of the world's most expensive painting sold at auction Salvator Mundi, a depiction of Christ that's believed to have been painted by DaVinci. Tony Abbott picks up the story.

It's a painting of great serenity Christ as savior gazing out at the viewer, the fingers of his right hand raised in blessing. In his left, he holds a crystal orb symbolizing the world it's thought to have been painted by a follower of Leonardo, copied from the Masters original. And it was recovered from a cupboard in a Naples apartment on Saturday. The police said they were acting on a tip off. They've charged the owner of the flat, a 36 year old man with receiving stolen goods.

Surprisingly, perhaps for such a valuable artwork, the local church it belonged to didn't even know it had been stolen from the museum at the Basilica. San Domenico Majorie has been closed for months because of coronavirus. The police think the painting may have been stolen to order. Now it hangs again in a cupboard, but a far grander one, which the museum uses to house the work. Alfredo fabric of Naples police said the operation to retrieve the painting had been complex, but well worth the effort to get on this.

But certainly that is what gives us immense satisfaction is that we've given back an important piece to the city of Naples, rendering it maybe more famous now than it was before.

So one mystery has been solved, at least partially before it was even known to exist. But mystery still shrouds Leonardo da Vinci's original Salvator Mundi. It was sold at auction in 2017 for a world record price, 450 million dollars. But the attribution isn't universally accepted. And although it was due to be unveiled at the Louvre, Abu Dhabi the following year, it is yet to appear on public display.

Danny Eberhart in Germany, a new exhibition reveals a relatively unknown part of Nazi history. The female SS guards who worked at Ravensbruck concentration camp. More than 120000 women were imprisoned at the female only camp at Ravensbruck. Many were resistance fighters, Jews, lesbians or sex workers at least a quarter. Right in the camp, but most of the women who worked as guards there and later in other camps escaped justice, as our Berlin correspondent Damien McGuinness reports.

The prisoners arrive, the second truck contained the women SS guards accused equally with the men of appalling crimes of cruelty and mass murder. It's 1945, and in this black and white newsreel, a group of young German women climb out of a British army truck. They're being tried in court for crimes committed while working as SS guards in concentration camps.

One of the most prominent among the women prisoners is Irma Graser, number nine at the age of 22. Now, my Graser was sentenced to death by hanging young and blonde. She was dubbed the beautiful beast by the press. Ever since, people have been fascinated by these female SS guards.

This is the best part of the camp.

Eight houses where the female guards were living very charming with wooden balconies, shutters, gabled, roof doctor and against the director of the museum at Garvin's Park.

Former concentration camp shows me where the women left an attraction.

And coming to work here means better living conditions coming perhaps from poorer families. But a lot of children there had higher income. So there were a number of reasons to work in a concentration camp. So this was a certain position, perhaps more attractive than working in a factory inside one of the houses.

A new exhibition shows photos of the women in their free time, laughing arms linked as they go for walks in the forest with their dogs. It all looks very innocent until you notice the SS symbols on their clothes. And you remember that those same Alsatian dogs were used to torment people in the concentration camps after the war. Of the 3500 women who worked as SS camp guards, only 77 were brought to trial and very few of them were actually convicted. They claimed they were ignorant helpers.

Most later got married, changed their names and disappeared into society. But one woman, Haueter Bota, did talk publicly in 1999, shortly before she died. She only served a few years in prison despite evidence of brutal crimes, and she remains unrepentant. How are you feeling about did I make a mistake?

No, no definition.

This is a mistake was that it was a concentration camp, but I had to go there. Otherwise I would have been put into it myself. That was my mistake.

That was an excuse often given. But we now know it wasn't true. Some new recruits did leave when they realized what the job was without suffering negative consequences.

Well, I think they were awful people, but they liked it probably because it gave to Borgerson to give them lots of power over the prisoners. Some prisoners very badly treated, beaten 98 year old Salma Funder.

Pedro was a Dutch Jewish resistance fighter who survived Ravensbrück. Her parents and sister were killed in the camps.

She's just published a book about her life. And from her home in London, she tells me how she feels about the female guards.

Definitely wanted to survive. I didn't want them to give the satisfaction of having killed me.

My name is Hanna Schmitz. You joined the SS in 1943. They were looking for guards since the war, SS female guards have been fictionalised in books and films. The most famous was The Reader, a German novel that later became a movie with Kate Winslet. Often the women are portrayed as exploited victims or sadistic monsters. The truth, though, is even more horrifying. They were ordinary women responsible for monstrous crimes.

That report from Damien McGuinness is a huge drawback of electric vehicles. Is the limit on how far you can drive without having to stop for a recharge, which can take a while. But now it seems there's hope of a five minute rechargeable battery. These lithium ion batteries developed by an Israeli company store and manufactured in China. Ana Thomashefsky is a chemical engineer at Imperial College London, focusing on battery technology. She's been speaking to Julian Marshall.

When you charge a battery, you have to move lithium ions from the positive electrode to the negative electrode. And the main limitation to fast charging is that the rate of transport is relatively slow. So what students have done is use faith and nanostructures electrodes, and that just provides a shorter, more optimal path. I think five minutes is quite optimistic, like it is achievable, but we would have to deal with the heating problems as well. Other practical limitations.

So, for example, if you were to charge a car in five minutes, then you'd need a very heavy cable with a lot of cooling. So you need to be really smart with a design to make sure people are actually able to lift it. And then you have problems with the electricity grid as well. So there are a lot of issues to resolve.

You're introducing lots of caveats and not as fast maybe as store claims and probably a lot more expensive than the batteries currently being sold. But you do think this represents some kind of progress?

Yes, it's definitely progress. And I would expect to see those batteries probably first and more performance driven applications that are not as sensitive to the pace as electric vehicles tend to be. I will probably be quite a few years before we can see something similar in electric vehicles.

And what are the competing technologies? Are there other silicon's definitely one of the key material developments in the battery space right now. And second glance with graphite already on the market. So I'm sure these manufacturers will be able to gradually transition towards more and more silicon. But many others are also focusing on the engineering level solutions. So, for example, Tesla is now making bigger batteries with optimized design that can store more energy and charge faster.

PhD student Ana Thomashefsky. Let's end this edition where we began the US presidential inauguration just before noon Washington time. Joe Biden is due to give his inaugural address, which typically gives new presidents a chance to deliver a speech that sets the tone for their term in office. Some great lines have been uttered in past speeches and in fairness, some not so great. Here's a reminder of those more memorable moments.

So my fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

It's kind of a nation we will be.

What kind of a world we will live in. Whether we shape the future in the image of our hopes is ours as determined by our actions and our choices. Honesty is always the best policy. In the end, my fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. In this present crisis. Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. This ceremony is held in the depths of winter, but by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring, a spring reborn in the world's oldest democracy.

That brings forth the vision and courage to reinvent America, those values upon which our success depends. Honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism. These things are old, the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now, and that's all from us for now.

But there'll be an updated version of the Global News podcast later with all the very latest from the build up to Joe Biden's inauguration. If you want to comment on this podcast, all the topics covered in it. You can send us an email. The address is global podcast at BBC, dot com dot UK.

This edition was produced by Niki Valrico. The studio manager was Joe Leeds. I'm Alex Ritson. Until next time. Goodbye.