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

I'm Jonathan Savage. And in the early hours of Sunday, the 14th of March, these are our main stories. The leader of a shadow civilian government in Myanmar has made his first public address, urging protesters to continue their fight against the military, which seized power last month. The former president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has called for members of the government that succeeded him to be punished, accusing them of carrying out a coup. Several arrests have been made.

Nearly 200 independent councillors from across Russia have been detained at a meeting in Moscow in what the opposition described as an illegal crackdown.

Also in this podcast, so basically the food sample points, local cops rediscover the secret weapon in the war on covid.

The leader of a shadow civilian government in Myanmar has urged protesters to continue their fight against the military, which seized power last month from hiding, he leads a group of legislators who have refused to accept the coup in his first public address uploaded onto Facebook man when King Tun had this to say.

Hu Jintao. No, no, no, no, no. There are more. This is the nation's darkest moment and the moment when the dawn is close.

This is the time for our citizens to test their resistance against the darkness in order to form a federal democracy, which all ethnic brothers who have been oppressed by the dictatorship for decades really desired. This revolution is a chance to put our efforts together when forming our resistance. Unity plays a vital role despite our differences in the past. This is the time to put our hands together to end the dictatorship for good. I will put all my efforts to protect the citizens in this revolution.

Daily demonstrations continue across Myanmar. As many as 12 protesters are thought to have been shot dead on Saturday. Our correspondent Jonathan Head has been following events.

A large rally in central Mandalay was just winding down, say eyewitnesses, when the whiplash sound of high velocity rounds cut through the crowd noise, sending protesters running for cover. Volunteers began dragging wounded people, some with terrible injuries from the scene. The strategy of Myanmar's military authorities is hard to discern. They keep saying against all the evidence that they are exercising restraint.

But the lethal volleys of gunfire come without warning and are aimed at head and chest level. Three died in Yangon when shots were fired first into people gathering to defend their neighborhoods from the military squads that rampaged through firing wildly and yelling insults. Then into a crowd gathered at a police station demanding the release of detainees. The days in Myanmar's cities are taken up with defiant rallies and the funerals of those killed in the protests or in custody at night. People are holding candlelight vigils for the dead, knowing that the toll will surely be higher.

The next morning, Jonathan Head, the former president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has demanded punishment for the people involved in what he described as a coup against him in 2019. His comment followed the arrest on sedition charges of the woman who succeeded him.

Jeanine Ania's, our Central America correspondent, Will Grant reports the former interim president Jeanine and described her arrest as irregular to a local television news team when she arrived at La Paz airport with a large police escort. There is not a grain of truth to the accusations, she said, describing the charges of terrorism, sedition and conspiracy against her as simple political intimidation. Later, pictures emerged of her in police custody as she was being processed. Several members of her former administration are also facing similar charges, as well as the military and police chiefs who demanded Evo Morales resignation following a disputed election in late 2019 will grant.

A minibus carrying Argentina's president, Alberto Fernandez, has been attacked by dozens of anti mining protesters in the country's Patagonia region. The president was visiting an area devastated by forest fires.

Are America's editor Leonardo Russia reports footage from the incident shows angry protesters encircling the minibus as Mr. Fernandez left the community center in Argentina, southern province of Chubut security appear to be quite weak, allowing activists to get close to the president, push him and even punch some of his advisers. Mr. Fernandez was there to inspect the damage caused by the fires, which have killed at least one person, injured many others and destroyed more than 200 homes. But the protest was organized by groups opposed to the resumption of large scale open pit mining for gold, silver and uranium.

They say this will damage the environment and harm indigenous lands.

Leonardo, Russia and Russia. Around 200 opposition politicians and local officials were detained on Saturday by police for attending a conference to discuss local elections. The weekend forum had just begun in a Moscow hotel when police burst in and said they were detaining everyone. Police said the event was arranged by an undesirable organization and in contravention of coronavirus rules. Lese Doucet's spoke to Maria Kuznetsova, one of those present and arrested.

He has United Democrats project. We organized a conference for municipal and regional deputies from all over Russia who are independent.

So basically deputies who are against Putin, who support democratic values and want some changes in the country. The rule, about 50 regions represented.

So and we had around 200 participants.

So just 40 minutes into the conference, police broke out and they started to arrest everyone first. And they arrest all the speakers, including Andrei, people who are of coordinator for United Democrats. And Vladimir Kara-Murza actually started to say that this is a conference of an undesirable organization or some foreign agent and that everyone who is involved would be arrested. And basically they didn't let anyone out and arrested. Yes. So as you know, now more than 170 people, but we don't have that particular number yet.

And you also were caught up in it.

Yes. So I was also arrested and they just released me. Did any of you resist? No, no, no.

It's quite dangerous to resist police in Russia because you can have extra arrests for this. Yeah.

And so you were held for about an hour. What happened to you that hour? Did they question you? Did they say anything to you?

For each person arrested? They made the protocol that we knew that there was a consequence of an undesirable organization. They call upon Russia. So and they believe that Open Russia is a British organization. So we cannot have any conferences or any of us and we will have court hearings in a few days.

But so you use the word undesirable. But yeah. Was the gathering illegal under Russian law?

No, because what they call an undesirable organization doesn't exist because a foreign organization can be named. So and this conference was followed by a Russian politicians who created United Democracy Project.

So you're working with the the UK based Open Russia and working with the United Democrats. What is the relationship between those two organizations?

We don't consider that we work with the UK Open. Why should we consider that we work for Russian organization up in Russia and there is no such an organization as that UK based. It actually doesn't exist legally open. Russia is just a Russian independent organization that was created by Russian politicians, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Maria Kuznetsova.

Our Moscow correspondent Sarah Rainsford gave me more details about what happened at the conference.

The police essentially stormed, if you like, the room and they announced that they were going to take everyone out of there. They were detaining everybody. They said it was an illegal event, illegal gathering. And they said if anyone resisted, then they would use force. And they promptly went on to arrest the police themselves. They 200 participants of this event, which we know from the the paperwork that was then handed out to those people detained, they've been accused, many of them, of taking part in an event organized.

What's known as an undesirable organization, which means an organization that's been banned here in Russia for carrying out political activity, but for having links to foreign organizations and foreign funding, which is something the Russian authorities are extremely concerned about.

Now, of course, his opposition figures say that they think these were politically motivated arrests are they are significant challenge to Vladimir Putin given their working at municipal level.

Now, these people may be challenging and may be representing Russia at the very lowest level of the electoral scale, if you like. But they are perhaps some of the most well-known faces amongst Russia's opposition. But it is a pretty beleaguered opposition and it is a fairly normally quite quiet and cold one. But these certainly are the most, as I say, the most hardcore, the ones who are prepared to try least to continue to carry out political activity. But the problem is that the organization that was involved with setting this event up does have links to one of Vladimir Putin's most vocal and fiercest critics, a former oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who lives abroad now unto himself.

And he is bent on trying, he says, to bring democracy to Russia. But as far as Vladimir Putin sees it, it's about regime change.

Sarah Rainsford in Russia. Police in London have scuffled with protesters at an unauthorized vigil for a woman allegedly kidnapped and murdered by a policeman. There were chants of shame on you as officers broke up the gathering. The vigil took place on Clapham Common in the south of the city, close to where Sarah Everard was last seen as she walked home. Police said the gathering breached covid restrictions. Catherine Ashton session followed Saturday's events.

All day, people came to the bandstand at the centre of Clapham Common to leave flowers and messages and pay their respects. This site, near to the last place Sarah Everald was cited during her walk home 10 days ago, has become a focal point for sorrow and tributes, as well as the public debate over how safe women are on our streets. The Duchess of Cambridge is one of those who made a brief private visit this afternoon, joining many hundreds of others.

The whole situation has just really, really got to me. And I think that for all women and I just wanted to be here today to stand in solidarity where local will be looking at all the profiles. I have a from the same age. It could be anybody that we know just very, very upsetting. It's meant a lot to a lot of people, you know, I think a lot of people. But for the grace of God, it could be it could be them.

We've all walked across this coming. We've all you know, it could have been any one of us.

A vigil planned for today on Clapham Common by the campaign group Reclaim the Streets was cancelled after police banned it under lockdown restrictions and a high court judge refused to intervene. The organisation instead urged people to support a doorstep vigil. But this evening, more than a thousand people gathered, some chanting and waving banners. Pictures on social media showed police attempts to clear the bandstand with some women being led away from.

Officers describe the gathering as unsafe and warned people to go home.

Catherine Instantiation, a policeman when cousins appeared in court on Saturday for the first time on charges of kidnap and murder, he was not asked to plead and was remanded in custody until another hearing next week. Completely unfounded with those words, the Ethiopian government has dismissed accusations of ethnic cleansing in the northern region of Tikrit. The accusations were made by the US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, who also called for an end to human rights abuses and an independent investigation into the conflict.

I asked our Africa regional editor well, Ross, for more details on the accusations.

There have been a lot of accusations in recent weeks about human rights atrocities in the Tigray region, where there's been this conflict now for four months. And on Wednesday, the American secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said that he wanted to see Eritrean forces and regional forces from the region replaced in Tigray by what he said were security forces that would respect human rights and not commit acts of ethnic cleansing. So in effect, he was saying ethnic cleansing has been going on in the Tigray region and that's why he spoke out and called for this international investigation.

Would Ethiopia accept such an investigation?

Well, for a long time, it was extremely reluctant to allow any international presence in the Tigray region, let alone people who would be investigating abuses. It sort of saw this as an internal issue, but under intense international pressure that has changed. And just this week, we've heard the Ethiopian authorities start to speak about a willingness to see an investigation. But it seems to be that they are very keen for it to be done by the African Union. And there will be people who follow the work of the African Union that would say perhaps it's not done a very good job investigating atrocities before, whereas possibly, you know, UN experts more experienced in different parts of the world may do a more thorough job.

So that may be why the Ethiopian government is seemingly preferring to stick with the African Union on this issue.

Well, Ross, in a separate development, Ethiopia has begun its coronavirus vaccination program with a warning that the outbreak there has reached an alarming stage. A senior health ministry official complained that many people were no longer taking basic precautions to stop the spread of the virus.

If the EPA has officially registered two and a half thousand deaths, although it's thought the true number could be far higher. It received about two million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine through the Global Sharing Initiative Corvax know to Jordan and on Saturday.

King Abdullah was met with angry crowds at a hospital where a shortage of oxygen led to the deaths of at least six coronavirus patients. The incident near the capital, Amman, has led to the resignation of the health minister. Rory Gallimore reports.

Royal visits to hospitals usually involve smiles, applause and the ceremonial unveiling of plaques.

This time, there were furious demands for answers. For nearly an hour on Saturday morning, oxygen supplies at the government run facility ran out. It's not clear what caused the shortage. An investigation is underway. Announcing his resignation, the health minister said he accepted full moral responsibility for the deaths. State media said he'd been ordered to step down by the king, Rory Gilmore.

Still to come, Europe is one of Jupiter's moons that has an ocean world. So it holds three times more liquid salt water than there is on the planet Earth. It also has all the ingredients you need for life to have taken hold at some point.

So instead of asking, is there life on Mars, should we really be saying, is there life on Europa?

Staying with covid-19 and a number of European countries are reporting significant increases in new cases of the virus in Germany. The figure has risen by a third in a week. Italy is imposing additional restrictions, forcing schools, restaurants, bars and museums to close. And Poland has reported more than 21000 cases, the biggest daily number since November.

From Warsaw, Adamstown, Poland saw the number of new infections rise by more than 40 percent, compared with one week ago. Alarmed at spiraling hospitalizations, officials have ordered two and a half thousand more beds be readied in temporary hospitals across the country. Experts say the spike is due to the rapid spread of the UK variant and the flouting of safety rules, especially by young people. Footage on social media shows crowds of people in bars which are supposed to be closed while popular Warsaw Pub has got around the rule by rebranding itself.

A museum of beer bottle tops cases in Germany went up by a third compared with one week ago. And the Czech Republic and Slovakia currently have some of the highest death rates per capita in the world. Restrictions are being reinstated in both Italy and Poland over the coming days.

Many households in Europe may have to celebrate Easter alone for the second year, running Adamstown in Poland as the UK gets ready to start lifting covid restrictions, monitoring local outbreaks for a country that has seen more than 120000 deaths will be ever more important.

Sewage can play a role in that. A pilot study has shown how taking samples of it can provide a reliable early warning of spikes in infection, giving the National Health Service and the government valuable information. Tom Fielden went to the south of England to investigate.

So basically the crude sample point is local cops. It may sound like a bucolic babbling brook, but this is the main sewage outflow from the city of Southampton is it arrives at Southern Water's slow helicopter water treatment works in March. And it's a pretty grim sight, to be honest with you. Is it all sorts out there? Yeah, it's a it's say dock. It's a sort of sludgy, gloopy dump, brown with fragments of AFTRS of blue paper in it as it goes through the sluice gate.

That's the beauty of crude, isn't it? Just get all sorts coming for all sorts. With me is Keith Bailey, sampling team leader for Hamshire in the Isle of Wight. And Keith, we're going to take a sample. This machine here is what we use to take the 24 hour random samples for the sampling. So now we have the container there, put a lid on that and make sure the sample itself has a good mix up there, giving it a thorough shake shake.

And that's got a true reflection of what's gone into the machine last 24 hours.

The sewage comes through that door, that area, the Southampton samples and others from more than 90 treatment plants involved in the National Wastewater Epidemiology Surveillance Program that delivered here to the environment agencies.

StarCrossed Laboratory at Tallish, near Exeter registered are added onto one of these wonderful trolleys that can see here and then zoom up to Jonathan, his team, so they can start processing them as soon as possible.

OK, so you can see Jacques is opening the centrifuge tube.

Jonathan is molecular biologist Dr Jonathan Porter.

So a sample comes in, we concentrate it, we extract the nucleic acids from that concentrate, and we then measure the coronavirus specific genes within that nucleic acid extraction because infected individuals shed virus in their feces.

Telltale biomarkers for covid-19 turn up in raw sewage. Data from those samples has been used to spot spikes in transmission as much as a week before the signal turns up in the pattern of conventional PCR testing, giving and test and trace vital early warning of an outbreak.

What we're doing in the wastewater program is that we can actually get an aggregate or a holistic view of what covid prevalence might look like within the community.

It's information that doesn't depend on people coming forward for a test or volunteering details about close contacts. And it can be used to target local search testing much more accurately.

And we can do that whether people are asymptomatic or asymptomatic. And we can do that whether people have been tested or not been tested.

The projects being run by the Joint Biosecurity Center deputy director, Dr Andrew Angeli.

And we can detect covid in those wastewater samples to a level that equates to about one case in. So if we imagine in a town where there were 10000 people living in that town and one of them might have covered and might not know they have covered because they're not symptomatic, we would be able to detect that in the wastewater samples that we're drawing.

In the early days, we used wastewater as an early warning system where it was emerging in a way the hot spots.

But a sewage sample can tell you much more than simply whether covid is present or not.

On top of that, we're also sending off for sequencing so we can look at the different lineages.

Sequencing the genetic code of the virus could even tell you which variants you're dealing with. Professor David Jones from Bangor University. And I think what it'll be able to do is essentially provide an early warning system for the emergence of these new variants, track where they are and track their spread.

The plan now is to roll out testing across many more sites, sewage outflow points outside schools, prisons and hospitals, even large office blocks.

That report by Tom Fielden. No to outer space. And while the focus recently in terms of space exploration has been on the perseverence rover on Mars, what might we learn from a mission to the outer planets beyond the asteroid belt? A new book, The Mission A True Story, tells us about the struggle to get approval for a mission to Europa, one of Jupiter's icy moons. It's also said to be one of the places beyond earth most likely to have complex life, fish or even sea monsters.

David Brown is the author of The Very Human Story behind NASA's Europa Clipper Mission, which is now scheduled to take off in October 2024. Paul Henley asked him how likely is it there's life on this faraway moon?

Europe is one of Jupiter's moons. It is an ocean world. So it holds three times more liquid salt water than there is on the planet Earth. It also has all the ingredients you need for life to have taken hold at some point. If, in fact, life took hold at some time in the past, that would have had quite a bit of time, billions of years, in fact, to evolve. So unlike what we're searching for on Mars, which are ancient extinct microbes from three billion years ago, Europa could very well host complex life.

I mean, it could be microbes, but it could be fish.

And yes, it could be sea monsters, in which case they'd be stuck under miles and miles of ice on this moon.

That's correct. And that ice is actually one of the vectors by which life could have taken hold and sustained itself that that ice through a series of plate tectonics actually oxidizes that ocean. So it's feeding this ocean one of those necessary ingredients.

How do we know all this from such a fantastical distance? Well, in the 1990s, a spacecraft called Galileo circled Jupiter multiple times, and whenever it encountered Europa, it acted sort of like a metal detector at an airport. Jupiter has a massive magnetic field and that magnetic field was being induced in Jupiter. Short version of all this is just as a metal detector, as detecting and induced magnetic wave and the metals in your pocket when you walk through at the airport.

Galileo was doing the same thing with Europa and it found, in fact, there was a subsurface conductor. The only thing that fits is liquid saltwater ocean.

This book of yours ends with the amazing revelation that a mission would actually take place. It hasn't been an easy path to that mission, hasn't its been an argument that seems to have been won by an interesting collection of obsessives and misfits. I think your description.

Right. Right. It took 20 years for the scientists and engineers behind this mission to convince NASA to actually launch this thing. It's going to launch in 2024. It's going to be an international mission. NASA led, obviously, but it's going to have contributions from the European Space Agency and other space agencies from around the world. The people behind this mission are just as diverse cast as we're ever going to find. I think this is a heist story. So just as in, say, Ocean's Eleven, a group of people come together with diverse skills, each with some weird and unique background.

And at the end, I don't know, rob a bank or steal money from a casino. At the end of this story, they come together and they managed to steal themselves a spacecraft.

Tell us about one or two of the characters. Well, there's Luis Proctor. She was a late career scientist. She didn't go back to school until she was an adult. She was an office supply saleswoman for quite a bit of time and in England. And she decided she wanted to maybe give something, something else in life, a shot. So she enrolled at the Open University and found that am pretty good at the science business. She would go on to become one of the most important planetary scientists in the world.

There's John Culberson, a Texas Tea Party congressman who is certainly not the sort of person that she would picture getting on board with this sort of high stakes, high science adventurism, but would actually become enamored with the prospect of finding the second Garden of Eden. That the bottom of this this alien ocean, the author, David W. Barrone, the British motor racing commentator Murray Walker, has died. He was 97 in a broadcasting career that spanned more than half a century.

Walker became the voice of Formula One.

Here's our sports reporter Andy Suess with his frenetic, passionate, high speed delivery.

Few commentators captured the essence of their sport, like Murray Walker.

Now he's getting about. That's it, that's it. Bang, bang it off. It was once said that even in his quieter moments, he sounded like his trousers were on fire. He'd been brought up on motor racing, making his debut behind the microphone at Silverstone in 1949. His boundless enthusiasm and his gaffes may have been lampooned by impressionists, but they also won him millions of fans around the world.

Andy Suess, more than 35 years after he last donned his cape and rocket boots, Superdad is returning to television screens. He's won in a long line of classic cartoons. Many of them broadcast around the world to make a comeback recently, including fireman Sam Thomas, The Tank Engine, My Little Pony and postman Pat Clear run Akers reports.

This is a story about an ordinary teddy bear superdad, a defective teddy bear rescued from the factory floor and transformed with cosmic dust by yellow and green spotted alien into a superhero was a firm favourite with the young princes, William and Harry. The character was created by Mike Young, a food mixer salesman in Cardiff, to try to get his four year old stepson to sleep. The tales of the crime solving superhero with a start of a new career for him, he went on to become an award winning animator working in Hollywood.

In its heyday, the show was broadcast in 128 different countries and dubbed into 32 languages. Work on new episodes is expected to start later this year.

Claire, runnicles, and that's all from us for now, but there will be an updated version of the Global News podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is Global Podcast at BBC, Dalziell Dot UK. The studio manager was Abby Marchenko. The producer was Liam McAffrey. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jonathan Savage. Until next time. Goodbye.