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This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson and 13 hours GMT on Friday, the 9th of October.

These are our main stories.

They're out there in the most difficult, complex places in the world with us. War, conflict, climate extremes. It doesn't matter. They're out there and they deserve this award and wow, wow, wow, wow.

There's been a surprise and appreciation as the U.N. World Food Program wins the Nobel Peace Prize. The Kremlin is attempting to broker a ceasefire in Nagorno Karabakh. And China has joined the international alliance working to share resources for a coronavirus vaccine. Also in this podcast, everyone is asking, what should we do with our children when we go out to work?

What do we need to keep them so they are safe?

Outrage over the rape and murder of a toddler in Pakistan and an outspoken Sudanese filmmaker describes his experience of being jailed by the authorities.

Also, how the new leader of the Cook Islands has caused controversy by giving himself nearly all the posts in the cabinet. We start in Norway with the news almost no one was expecting.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2020 to the World Food Program.

The recognition by the Norwegian Nobel Committee of the world's largest humanitarian organization, and its work to provide 100 million men, women and children with vital food and assistance.

As she announced the award, the chairwoman of the Nobel Committee, Berrett Rice Anderson, explained why they had chosen to honor the U.N. organization for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict affected areas, and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.

The World Food Program's executive director, David Beasley, gave this reaction to receiving the award.

This is the first time in my life I've been speechless. This is unbelievable. Talk about the most exciting point in time in your life as the Nobel Peace Prize. It is because of the WFP family. They're out there in the most difficult, complex places in the world with us. War, conflict, climate extremes. It doesn't matter. They're out there and they deserve this award.

And and wow, wow, wow, wow.

Our chief international correspondent, Lisa Doucet's told me the 101st winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was widely unexpected.

I messaged a senior official with the World Food Program here in Afghanistan and I said, Tariq, which in Dari means congratulations. And he message back and said, Tariq, what? And then he said, Oh, my goodness. I just saw they simply were not glued to the announcement the way that some of the organizations and individuals who had been sighted in the runners and riders as the possible recipients of this year's Nobel Peace Prize. And it's a reminder that the the Nobel committee, who thinks very carefully about not just the individuals who should get the prize, are the organizations, but what are the issues we should highlight.

And I think this will be regarded as an inspired choice. But in what seemed to be these endless wars of our time, that food, hunger, starvation have become one of the most powerful weapons of all. I saw it myself painfully so for the people, the innocent people who were who were the victims of this, the the use with impunity of this weapon in serious war were besieging populations for years on end, denying them food and and medical supplies.

We saw it when we traveled to Yemen earlier this year. And the World Food Program was the heart at the heart of the conflict with the authorities, particularly the Houthi authorities in the north of Yemen. And the executive director, David Beasley, would say time and again that unless we can distribute our food according to humanitarian principles, that is the food goes to those who need it the most, not to the most powerful parties. Then we have to make the difficult, difficult decision of not distributing it to the extent that we feel that we have to.

So I think this is a powerful reminder of one. The biggest injustices of our time that the food we all take for granted on our table is used as this really, really painful but sadly powerful weapon of war in our time.

And that is the core of this, isn't it? Many people are not aware just how often food supplies. It's the weaponization of food supplies.

Yes, it's interesting because for some years now, there's been a discussion, particularly among those who are mediators for peace or peace organizations. They say, well, for example, years ago when they gave it to the man, Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, who was known as the banker of the poor people said, well, what does that have to do with peace? And of course, poverty has a lot to do with peace. And this year, it's to remind people that, again, as we've been saying, that not only is hunger a weapon of war, but it is also used to devastating effect by parties to the conflict.

We see here in Afghanistan how groups with guns approach families who have basically no money to put food on their table. And they say, give us one of your sons. We'll give you us, we'll give your son a salary, and you then can find food to eat. And families sometimes have no choice to give in whatever fighter bid from the government or from the Islamic State or the Taliban, whatever group knocks on their door, they have no they have no choice but to sort of make that decision.

They could lose their son, but at least they're able to eat. Can the awarding of this prize actually change things?

Isn't that what we always ask when crises like this are given in such a distinguished prize as the Nobel Peace Prize, the highest laureate when it comes to peacemaking? David Beasley, the executive director of the Food Food Program, all through the global pandemic where the world was so concerned about getting the people getting the vaccine, he was saying that hunger will be the most deadliest pandemic of all and was pleading for money and resources.

Let's see if they listen to him now, at least Doucet, our chief international correspondent, as we record this podcast.

A meeting is due to begin in Moscow between the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan to talk about the fighting in Nagorno Karabakh. In the past couple of weeks, 300 people have died and tens of thousands of others have been displaced.

But Nagorno Karabakh is an old wound that's been reopened. There were similar fighting in the early 1990s. Our correspondent Orla Guerin has been speaking to some of those who are driven out of the area then. And she sent this report from the Azeri capital, Baku.

Hello. I'm in a courtyard and some children have just come running, gathering around. I'm surrounded by apartment blocks very roughly, filled with a lot of exposed bricks, pipes sticking out, and there are washing lines strung across from one building to another. This is a place called Darnel Goule. 2000 families were housed here after the war in the early 90s.

These were families from Nagorno Karabakh and many here still dream of returning like a Vasilyev, a moustachioed 74 year old grandfather in a flood camp year after the Armenians took our homeland, they forced us to come here and we have been living here for 27 years.

Yashoda, there are seven or eight people in one room. It's very hard to leave in this conditions for all these years.

While you've been here 27 years, you've been away from Nagorno Karabakh. How much have you thought about it?

Russia says, I even see it in my dreams.

I'm always yearning for it or I cannot forget about it. It's my motherland, my dear land.

How do you feel about the people who are there now, about the ethnic Armenians? Could you live with them as neighbors together?

Oh, yes, of course. Of course we can live together. We have been very friendly with them. They also don't want the war. The only ones to blame are those sitting at the top. If you ask my opinion, we can live together.

The young man standing beside you is is shaking his head. Can I ask you, how do you feel about the idea of living side by side with with Armenians, this people?

No, I can never live with Armenians there because it's a very old area which belongs to Azerbaijan. Karabakh is Azad Baojun. And today I have signed as a volunteer to fight in the war. I am ready with my soul and my blood to fight for my nation and my motherland.

There's a real sense here of. Impermanence. It doesn't feel like a place where anyone has settled and wants to stay. And many here tell us they're counting the days they believe they will soon get the chance to go back to the place they still call home altogether.

And reporting from back to the International covid-19 Vaccine Initiative is a communal approach to combating coronavirus. Now, China, where most people agree the disease originated, is joining in. A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Hua Chunying, told a news briefing that Beijing was doing so to encourage other capable nations to support the initiative to engage in torture.

You know, even when China is leading the world with several vaccines in advanced stages of R&D and with ample production capacity, we still decided to join Kovács. We're taking this step to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines, especially to developing countries, in the hope more capable countries will also join and support this program.

To find out more about why China is participating. I spoke to our Asia Pacific editor, Celia Hatton.

Well, China is joining us for a few reasons. First, it seems that it's put itself into a bit of a tough position because Beijing has overpromised vaccine doses to some countries around the world. So for the past six months, in order to really beef up its relationships with some countries, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and others have been promising quite a few low income countries that it will share doses of Chinese made vaccine. So countries like the Philippines, Myanmar, many African countries in South America, the list is growing, quite frankly.

And the problem is now that the head of China's vaccine development team says that China is expected to have around 600 million doses of the vaccine by the end of this year and around an extra one billion by the end of next year. At one point, six billion might sound like a lot, but when you consider that China's entire population is over one point three billion, it really isn't as many as it might seem. And so by joining into this global collaboratives scheme, Kovács, it might end up trying to deal with this problem.

A little bit of China can give some doses of the vaccine away to a system that will distribute them where those doses really need to go. It might solve this bilateral crunch that China has put itself in.

Is China almost doing its own PR with this? This is reputation management, from what you're saying.

Absolutely. I mean, China's reputation has taken a huge hit in the wake of covid-19 with many countries around the world accusing China of mishandling the virus outbreak. And so really, it doesn't do China any harm to engage in this collaborative effort to get vaccines to to the world's most vulnerable people.

And really, China, on a wider scale, is trying to recast itself as a global player, as a country that cares about other countries. It's trying to set itself apart, for example, from the United States. China is really trying to show other countries that it really does care about the world as a whole. And it's not just a self-serving country.

Celia Hatton, our Asia-Pacific editor at large numbers of supporters of Catalan independence, have turned out in Barcelona to protest against a visit by the Spanish king Felipe.

There's a heavy security presence there.

As Danny Eberhart reports, anti monarchist sentiment runs high among those who support Catalan independence. They were angered by a strongly worded intervention by the king following an unsanctioned vote on independence three years ago. No one from the region's governments was there to greet the monarch, and Barcelona's mayor is shunning him, too.

She said King Felipe needed to explain the fortune accumulated by his father, the former King Juan Carlos, who recently fled to the United Arab Emirates amid a corruption scandal.

Danny Eberhart. There's been outrage on social media in Pakistan following the rape and murder of a two year old girl in the north. A number of suspects are understood to have been detained, but it comes amidst a growing focus on sexual violence in the country following a spate of high profile incidents. Secunda Kermani reports from Islamabad.

The mutilated body of two year old Zainab was found abandoned in a sugarcane field. Her family had reported her missing earlier this week. Her uncle, then Alameddine, told the BBC everyone in the local area had been left horrified.

Everyone is asking, what should we do with our children when we go out to work?

Do we need to keep them so they are, you know, the whole. It's full of sorrow. My sister is crying so much, she falls unconscious. I try and control her, but I keep trying to.

The case has revived memories of a similar unrelated child killing nearly three years ago in another part of the country which attracted global attention and angry protests. That victim's name was Zenab to. Women's rights activists in Pakistan have been calling for greater efforts to be made to tackle all forms of sexual violence, building on public anger over the gang rape of a woman stranded by a motorway last month, Secunda Kermani.

Still to come in this edition of our podcast, Bolivia is beginning to receive help from abroad to deal with devastating wildfires. But is this assistance anywhere near enough? Spain's federal government is locked in a dispute with the local authorities in Madrid over coronavirus precautions. Last week, national leaders imposed a partial lockdown in and around the capital, but the region pushed back.

On Thursday, a local court struck down the covid restrictions, saying they violated people's personal liberties. Now the federal government has declared a state of emergency to impose the lockdown. Our correspondent Guy Hedgecoe is in Madrid. And I asked him just how bad is the coronavirus outbreak there?

Well, Madrid has become the epicenter of the second wave of coronavirus in Spain. It's the city and the region which is providing by far the highest number of new infections, around a third of all new infections in Spain are coming from the city of Madrid and its surrounding region. So it has become a big concern. It's not just the spread of the virus within Madrid. There's another concern there that the virus is spreading beyond its borders to the surrounding regions.

So that's why the capital and its surrounding region have become such a concern.

So tell us more about this divide between the national and local governments, because there's politics here, isn't there?

Well, there is politics. You have a national government, which is a center left coalition, and then you have a regional government in Madrid, which is right of center. And they've had disagreements in the past over various issues related to the handling of covid. But those differences are really come to the fore. Over the last couple of weeks or so, the central government has been much keener to introduce tougher and broader restrictions in Madrid in order to try and reduce the spread of the virus any further.

It sees Madrid as a real priority at the moment, and the local government has insisted over the last few weeks that that's not necessary. The restrictions don't have to be as tough as the central government says that they can be more specific to certain areas of the Madrid region, that there are concerns about the economy if they take these broader blanket measures and use those. And so that's been at the core of the clash between the two governments, the national one and the region.

One Guy Hedgecoe speaking to me from Madrid. Like many parts of South America in recent years, Bolivia has been experiencing extreme heat and a prolonged drought. Now the government there has declared a state of disaster following hugely destructive wildfires in the east of the country. Jonathan Savage got more details from our America's editor. Counterspy it.

We've seen now outbreaks of individual fires in five Bolivian departments or regions, including Chooky, Sakar and Santa Cruz in the east where fires were raging last year and where thousands and thousands of hectares were destroyed. Now, these fires include pristine national parks and virgin forests, and it's created a really intense sadness from scientific communities and environmentalists as well as indigenous groups. They're saying that more than a quarter of the fires have been in protected national parks, wildlife preserves and regions that are under indigenous land.

So these fires are really destroying Bolivia's environmental heritage.

Do we know yet what caused the fires?

Well, it seems that is the legacy of the policies under Bolivia's former president, Evo Morales. Last year, he changed the policies to allow farmers to clear more land than before with controlled burning. He quadrupled the allowance from five to 20 hectares that people could clear in this way. And this practice, which is known in Bolivia as Jakiel, is a slash and burn practice. It's very cheap and easy to clear land in this way, but it's also very inefficient and dangerous, especially when you get high winds like these areas are experiencing at the moment.

Also, at a time of high temperatures, Bolivia has also been experiencing a very serious drought for months. So this is a really, really bad combination.

So the former president getting some of the blame. So what's the current administration doing about it?

There's been a lot of criticism that they haven't tackled this soon enough. But the defense minister, Luis Fernando Lopez, has been very blunt about this. He said that we're talking about vast areas which don't have roads which are mountainous. And he said firefighters and troops have been battling the outbreaks. They've made a titanic effort, but they've just been overwhelmed. And he said they've particularly been hampered by these high temperatures. I mean, the whole of the south of South America at the moment has been going through weeks of 40, 42 degrees, temperatures and months of drought.

And he's finally called for international help.

Petare, America's editor, speaking to Jonathan Savage, a group of nearly a dozen Sudanese artists who were found guilty of causing a public nuisance and then sentenced to two months in prison have all been set for. After an international campaign for their release, one of them is a prominent filmmaker, Hajaj Cuca, two weeks ago he told the BBC from his prison that he'd been jailed because of a backlash by members of the old regime who are refusing to cede power to the new government.

Today, he's a free man, and he told Alan Kasuga about the experience of being in jail.

It was very stressful. Every day something new is happening. There is a lot of stress from figuring out am I going to stay trying to deal with the guards that actually don't adhere to human rights. So anything could happen to you in any moment. So it was very, very stressful. Also, we had one of the artists who was there was this young guy who is 19 years old, but he looks way younger. So it was very stressful trying to like having him in jail and trying to make sure that nothing bad happens to him.

What was the threat to him? I mean, and to the rest of you, you talk about being beaten by the guards and that when they realized that the international community was demanding your release, they stopped the beatings. Tell us a bit about the threats that you faced in jail.

The jail still operates the same way as the old military dictatorship. Nothing changed for them. And when I talk to the guards after the beatings stopped, they said nobody ever came talk to them. So they just continued the old way. So basically, you get insulted all the time. And I'm talking about really serious, really bad insults. I got my half my dreads cut off just as the saying if we can do anything to you, your dreadlocks were cut off.

Half of them. Yeah, the right half of my dreadlocks were cut out when I came to jail and that was like cut off while we were insulted, extremely insulted. I got randomly whipped randomly. We're not doing anything. You just get whipped and a lot of people get randomly. So there's this idea. The moment you get into jail, you need to be broken so then they can control you. Well, and especially because of the international campaign, I feel like the people in government, some of them were awakened to they haven't done enough.

They're concentrating on the economy and we're but they're not fixing things that could actually be easily fixed.

And to have a big impact on the and hopefully everybody is recovering fine and especially the ones who were beaten badly. Everybody is getting better.

Everybody's getting better. Everybody is slowly getting better and hopefully will end up strong.

Sudanese film maker Hajjaj Cuca speaking to Alan Kasuga in the South Pacific, the newly appointed leader of the Cook Islands government has undertaken an almost clean sweep of power after naming himself to nearly all the portfolios in the government.

Gareth Barlow has more details.

Most people would consider being prime minister a full time role, but not Mark Brown, leader of the government of the Cook Islands, a tiny island nation in the heart of the South Pacific, around 3000 kilometres off the coast of New Zealand. Since taking office last week, Prime Minister Brown has revealed that he's placed a staggering number of ministerial portfolios under his control, 17 to be exact, and they are finance, foreign affairs, Attorney-General and Immigration, Energy and Renewable Energy, Marine Resources, Seabed Minerals and Natural Resources.

Police, Outer Islands and Telecommunications. Public Service Commission. Financial Supervisory Commission. Financial Services Development Authority. Cook Islands Investment Corporation. Audit Slash. Public Expenditure Review Committee. Cook Islands National Superannuation Oh and head of State Opposition. Politicians have noted the Prime Minister had said he was excited by the potential of his cabinet, but then appointed himself to the roles. The Opposition Leader, Tina Brown. No relation, therefore questioned how much confidence the Prime Minister has in his colleagues.

But the PM's spokesperson said it's a temporary situation and that Mark Brown will redistribute some of his 17 roles in due course.

Gareth Barlow, it's time for news from elsewhere. Our weekly look at some of the less reported stories from around the globe.

And with me, Ian Lee of our monitoring team, which tracks news media in many different languages.

Ian, I understand our first story today concerns a struggling food stall in India's capital, which has been given a little boost by social media.

Hello, Alex. Yes, 80 year old Cantave Assad and his wife run a small roadside stall in Delhi called Baba Córdova that stole it's simple meals operators, rice and curry. Like many other small businesses, though, their takings have been really hit by the coronavirus pandemic. The couple have been earning something like one US dollar a day, and I've often had to take on food that they cooked up. Sold earlier this week when a food blogger visited the stall and asked them how they were doing, Mr.

Persad found it difficult to hold back his tears and said he wasn't really making ends meet. Now, this move the blogger to send out an appeal on Instagram for people to eat there. It spread to other social media platforms, was boosted by Bollywood and cricket stars, and has now been viewed millions of times. The result of which is that Mr. Prasad stole sold out by noon today. He's also received donations and help from other businesses. One popular food delivery service has listed his stall on its site, and the dating app Tinder is encouraging users to go there for a meal, while many people have been happy to help the couple.

The story has also been accompanied by police and social media for everyone to help their local businesses and to keep doing so, not just for one day.

A rare good news story. And Applecross then and I understand in the Netherlands, there's been another public plea for assistance. A very different kind, though. Yes.

So you know what aniseed smells like. You know that sweet herbal scent. Then the Dutch authorities want your help. So in the aptly named province of Flavor Island in the Netherlands, they're handing out scratch and sniff cards impregnated with this smell to three thousand households to raise awareness of the fact that it approximates the smell of the drug ecstasy. Now, the authorities want the public to be able to recognize where criminals might be housing drug laboratories are dumping waste products for making the drugs alone is a wide area with a lot of nature reserves and agricultural land, which makes it quite difficult to police.

But as one town mayor has said, we know the sort of smells that belong to a farm. If you smell something that is out of the ordinary, it could be a signal.

Thank you very much to Ian Lee of BBC Monitoring for bringing us this week's news from elsewhere.

And that is all from us for now. But there'll be an updated version of the Global News podcast later. Producer today was Rahul Sanok, the studio manager, Peter Luff, and the editor Karen Martin.

If you want to comment on this edition or any of the topics we've covered in it, send us an email, the address Global Podcast at BBC, Dot Seo Dot UK. I'm Alex Ritson. Until next time. Goodbye.