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

Hello, I'm Oliver Conaway. We're recording this at 13 hours GMT on Wednesday, the 30th of September. Our main stories, Donald Trump and Joe Biden go head to head in their first presidential debate. And it's far from civilized.

I'm not going to answer the question because said that because the question on the question is yes. Is the left will you shoot? And who is on your list, Joe? We'll have reaction from Ohio.

And our correspondent in Lebanon speaks to a father whose two year old son died at sea as they try to reach a better life.

Also in the podcast, senior figures in India's governing party are found not guilty of inciting Hindu extremists to demolish a mosque.

And the way we are cultivating crops nowadays, not sustainable. It's not good for us and it's not good for the planet.

Why? Some experts believe we need to have a revolutionary change in our diet.

The first presidential debate of the U.S. election campaign has received some pretty damning reviews. It was almost unwatchable. According to The Washington Post, Donald Trump and Joe Biden disagreed on everything from covid-19 to racial tension and even whether to respect the outcome of the vote in November. But it was the bitter tone of the exchanges which disappointed most observers. The president interrupted a whopping 73 times, and both men exchanged insults. Our North America correspondent Nick Bryant sent us this report.

I'm not here to call out his lies. Everybody knows he's a liar. But you. I just want to.

This was the ugliest presidential debate in American political history where senator and the worst president in America has ever had a chaotic, ill tempered with highly personal attacks and constant interruptions.

It's hard to get any word in with this clown. Excuse me. Just let me just say. No, no, no.

A train wreck, a car crash, a multi-line pileup, or maybe all of the above.

Because the question is, just is the left, will you?

And who is it started with Donald Trump and Joe Biden clashing over covid-19, a viral onslaught that's claimed more than 200000 American lives. And if you were here, you wouldn't be doing it.

It would be two million people because you were very late on the draw. You folks at home, how many of you get up this morning and had an empty chair at the kitchen table because someone died? A covert bullet lost. Far too many people, far more people.

Even after almost four years in the White House, Donald Trump portrayed himself as the insurgent, an outsider, and vilified his opponent as a pillar of the Washington establishment in 47 months.

I've done more than you've done in 47 years, Joe. We've done things that you never even thought of.

The former vice president presented himself as the anti Trump and benefited from the low expectations created by his opponent, who mocked him beforehand as Sleepy Joe, a 77 year old whose barely coherent.

Under this president, we've become weaker, sicker, poorer, more divided and more violent.

Perhaps the angriest exchange came when the former vice president accused Donald Trump of calling American soldiers killed in combat suckers and losers and brought up his late son, Beau, who served in Iraq.

He was not a loser. He was a patriot. And the people left behind. There were heroes. And I resent you talking like that. Are you talking about my son, Beau Biden you're talking about? I don't know, Beau.

One moment that Democrats have seized upon is when the president was invited to explicitly condemn white supremacists.

What do you want to call him? Give me a name. Give me a white supremacist. And would you like me to conduct this and write to my face? Stand back and stand by.

But I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what. Somebody's got to do something about Antifa and the left, because this is not a right wing problem. This is where I direct this as a left wing, like the prior boys is a far right group.

When its members celebrated online adopting Stand back and stand by as a new slogan.

Well, you know, now that we're done, sir, admirers describe Donald Trump's performance as gladiatorial and his base has always loved his destructive energy.

Your party wants to go. Socialist Party is more socialist right now. I am. And they're going to dominate you, Joe. You know that I am the Democratic Party right now.

But his political problem in this campaign has been retaining the support of voters who backed him four years ago, but did so holding their noses, many of them suburban women who find his behavior abhorrent.

President Trump, Vice President Biden has been an interesting hour and a half. I want to thank you both for participating.

This was a debate that will be talked about for decades to. But which many viewers would rather forget. Thank you and good night. That report by our North America correspondent Nick Bryant. So what did supporters make of the debate? The Democratic Party strategist Jamal Simmons says the president missed opportunities to win over undecided voters, that Donald Trump didn't go out there to score points.

I think Donald Trump went out this were a boxing match, went out to just clench it up for as many rounds as he could and then maybe try to get Joe Biden to make a mistake here or there. I don't think Joe Biden made any mistakes. And when Donald Trump had the opportunity to do things such as denounce white supremacy and racism, he didn't do it, that Donald Trump had the opportunity to show some niceness and human sympathy to Vice President Biden for losing his son, who was a military vet.

And he didn't do it. So he had chances where he could have scored points. And the president seemed to leave those points on the floor.

But Mr. Trump's base thought he performed well. Here's the activist S.J person.

I think President Trump communicated a clear plan for where he sees this country going, and he talked about his record as president. We've seen a president who's right about one of the biggest economic rallies that this country has ever seen. We've seen a president who has led this country in the face of this pandemic. We've seen a record low black unemployment rate. We're seeing record gains in the stock market. And we also saw Joe Biden, who simply couldn't keep up.

Now, these gotcha moments of the press is playing. They can continue to do that. The American people know the president says they know where his heart is. And I've seen a president who is called out every single group of hate in this country for what it is.

Shortly before we recorded this podcast, I spoke to our correspondent, Gary O'Donahue, who was still in Cleveland, Ohio, where the debate was held. Did he think there was a clear winner? It's difficult to say.

I mean, because there was a lot of shouting, a lot of insults. I don't think the president necessarily necessarily capitalized on some of the opportunities he had. The only time where you really saw Joe Biden on the back foot, I think, was when the president asked him about whether or not it and the endorsements from law enforcement organizations. And in the first section, when they were talking about the Supreme Court, the president got sort of headed off by Joe Biden into a discussion on health care, which is an area where the Democrats are very strong in an area where they campaigned hard in the midterms in 2008 and reaped the benefits of it.

So the president also looked a little bit belligerent. He was very interrupting, very bad tempered, argued with the moderator. I think none of that necessarily goes down particularly well.

And Joe Biden, he was a pretty low bar by the president. Did he get over it?

Yeah, I think that's an interesting point, because as you as you allude to, the president sort of talked down Joe Biden, you know, over the last few days. Sleepy Joe suggested he was on kind of performance enhancing drugs, that he would kind of barely get through this thing. So all Joe Biden had to do in some ways, thanks to the president, is show up and not mess up. And that's exactly what he did. So that is something I think the Biden camp will be pleased about that in a sense, they didn't have to manage expectations.

The president did it for him. And Joe Biden succeeded to that extent. But I think a lot of Americans would have been turned off by the whole spectacle. And that will reflect on both men, I suspect, because you only have to watch it for 10 minutes. And you had a headache, quite frankly, didn't you, whether or not Americans in the tens of millions they did last night will tune in for the next to for another couple of headaches.

Who knows?

Yeah, the first one usually has the biggest audience. And from what you're saying, it sounds like it didn't change anyone's minds.

Well, I think I wouldn't have expected to change large numbers of minds. America, as you know, is incredibly entrenched, incredibly partisan stuff doesn't shift all that much. Pretty much. You know, most people have made up their mind about Donald Trump and certainly most hard and fast Democrats are not going to switch at this stage.

But what you're focusing on is that that really small number of switches and independents who will decide the outcome really just tens of thousands of votes in the key states, the key swing states that can make all the difference there, not only here in Cleveland, Ohio.

In other news, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has accused Turkey of warlike rhetoric as fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh continued for a fourth day. Tony Abbott has the details.

On a visit to Latvia, Emmanuel Macron said he was extremely concerned about Turkey's recent statements about the conflict. He called them dangerous, warning that they serve to remove Azerbaijan's inhibitions in trying to reconquer Nagorno Karabakh. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he stands ready to help his ally, Azerbaijan, by any means.

The two countries have close economic, religious and ethnic. Ties, but Turkey denies Armenian accusations that it's intervening in the conflict militarily.

Danny Abbott and France's president, Emmanuel Macron, addressed another crisis in a speech at the weekend. He warned that Lebanon would face a new civil war unless its leaders agreed to form a new government even before the devastating explosion in Beirut last month. Lebanon has been struggling with an economic meltdown and with many people fearing further chaos. Some families are turning to people smugglers to get them to Europe. But as Martin Patience reports from the city of Tripoli, the dangerous journey has already cost the life of one young child.

Little Sufyan Mohammed love going to the beach, you can see the delight on the two year old's face in a video his father filmed the sufian cakes, a white ball into the waves.

I thought it's a long to come here, says his dad. Do you want to swim? That had earlier this month, Sufan small body washed up in the same shore. He was one of the latest victims of Lebanon's devastating economic crash. All sorts of to near my home here at the moment, Sufian started to ask me for water.

He was breastfeeding, but since his mom wasn't eating, their milk dried up.

This is her friend's dad, Mohammed, when he couldn't find any work in Tripoli. He paid for smugglers to take his family by boat to Cyprus, but they ran out of fuel. And for days they drifted with no water or food in an open boat. Mohammed didn't know what to do when Sufyan grew thirsty.

I don't know how I filled up a bottle with seawater and he kept drinking from it. But then he was crying. He was going crazy. I thought, what am I going to do? He's going to die.

Sufian body was wrapped in a shroud and he was buried at sea. He was among dozens of Lebanese trying to abandon their broken country in recent weeks. Days after he died, Sufian parents were rescued by a U.N. frigate. A story of Sufan is a sign of just how bad things have gotten in Lebanon, the country's economies imploded. Half the population is now living in poverty, and nowhere has been harder hit than here in Tripoli, Lebanon's poorest city. Parents are now doing what just a year ago would have been unimaginable.

They're prepared to risk the children in rickety boats.

Walleyed middle age has already sold this furniture and plans on trying to get his eight children to Europe on the home that was built in 1999.

I think we're not scared of the Shia anymore. Details about whether we stay or go either way with dance and nobody comes into the.

As for Sufan, his body was recovered a few days ago. To the sound of gunfire, which is surprisingly common at funerals in Lebanon, he was given a proper burial in his home city of Tripoli. The only reason his family had left, his father told me, was so Sufyan could have a future. Martin Patience reporting from Lebanon in Paris on Wednesday morning, residents were alarmed by a loud bang. It sounded like a large explosion, according to witnesses, it caused brief shock and concern at the French Open tennis tournament where Stanvac Rinker of Switzerland and his German opponent, Dominic Cooper, paused after hearing the noise.

Police in the French capital confirmed the bank was, in fact a sonic boom as a military jet broke the speed of sound on its way to assisting another plane.

And still to come in the podcast, that's what they've been taught at home. And people think it's quite good fun to start off with. And then when they start saying it in front of children, local victor and things like that, it becomes a problem.

How parents ability to mimic human speech has been causing difficulties at one bird sanctuary. Senior figures in India's governing BJP party, including the former leader L.K. Advani, have been found not guilty of inciting a mob of Hindu extremists to attack a 16th century mosque. The demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 sparked riots that killed several thousand people. Last month, a BJP prime minister, Narendra Modi, laid the foundation stone for a Hindu temple to be built on the site, which is revered as the birthplace of a Hindu God.

Our Delhi correspondent Zubair Ahmed told me more about the case.

These politicians who all belong to the parties and at the party, which is now the ruling party at the centre, were accused of inciting the mobs, which eventually went and demolished the medieval structure. They were also accused of conspiring to involve these right wing Hindu elements in order to demolish the mosque. Now, the court has passed its judgment, saying there is no hard evidence against the defendants and therefore all the accusations should be removed.

Of course, this case relates to events 28 years ago and there was a large crowd of Hindus at the site. And some of these politicians did give speeches at the time.

Indeed they did. And then I spoke to a Muslim lawyer who was involved in the litigation. He told me that there was enough evidence in terms of speeches of these leaders making speeches just 100 yards or 200 yards away from the mosque. And these pieces of evidence were submitted in court. But the court decided to reject these pieces of evidence, saying the audio and the video quality was not very good and audio is not audible and therefore they cannot be admitted as evidence.

So the Muslim lawyer and other people in the case from the Muslim side have expressed disappointment and they also plan to challenge this verdict in higher courts.

And what is this likely to mean for tensions between Muslims and Hindus? Because there's been a lot of developments surrounding the site at Ayodhya over the past couple of months.

Absolutely. It was not just the last couple of months, over the last three decades, last 28, 30 years that I can remember. It was a single biggest polarizing issue in the country. But there appears to be fatigue setting in both among the Muslims and Hindus who want to move on. The new generation, in fact, born after 1992, are not. The new generation is not even aware of the implications of the case, and they all want to move on.

Having said that, there are various other issues at present in India which are actually increasing religious strife and dividing the country. For example, you have this Citizenship Amendment Bills Act, which was contentious, and the Muslim community came out on the streets last year and protested. Even this year, there were many people who were arrested subsequently and this was being discussed on religious lines.

Zubair Ahmed in Delhi. The Israeli parliament has approved a controversial new anti coronavirus measure that will drastically restrict protests. The law was narrowly passed by the Knesset after an all night session. Tom Bateman reports.

The measures mean demonstrators are confined to capsule's of no more than 20 people and must stay within a kilometer of their homes. For weeks, big protests have taken place in Jerusalem against Benjamin Netanyahu's leadership. The PM has described them as virus incubators, but without backing up the claim with evidence, protest organizers called the vote for new powers an execution ceremony for democracy. Israel is nearly a fortnight into a second national lockdown. New Delhi cases reached more than 8000 last week.

Tom Bateman. Now, you might not have heard of Fonio Porridge or AKB Omelet, but scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew here in Britain say these could be the foods of the future. In a report called State of the World's Plants and Fungi, they say two fifths of our plants are threatened with extinction and we need to diversify our plant intake if we are to survive as a species. Richard Hamilton reports.

The Royal Botanic Garden says that at the moment, the world depends on just 15 plants to provide 90 percent of its food. And four billion people currently rely on just three staple crops maize, wheat and rice. This, it says, is not sustainable. The lack of plant diversity makes these crops vulnerable to climate change. The researchers identified 7000 edible plants, only six percent of which are commonly consumed around the world. Professor Alexander Antonelli, who's the director of science at Kew, says we are failing to harness.

Vast treasure chest of different species by increasing our diet. This will not only provide us with better nutrients and improve our health, but also make societies around the world more resilient to climate change, because many of those crops and other plants are really better adapted to climate change and to the local environment than the widely cultivated crops we have seeing today.

But what would that entail? A completely new way of thinking about how we eat. I mean, would it be a revolution?

We absolutely need a green revolution. We need to embrace the diversity of plants and fungi to feed our world, because the way we are cultivating crops nowadays is not sustainable. It's not good for us and it's not good for the planet.

Professor Antonelli thinks plants and fungi could provide the cure for coronavirus or the next pandemic. The report also identified nearly 2000 plants and more than 800 fungi that were previously unknown. Among these new discoveries were rare snowdrops and wild relatives of cassava, tea, spinach and garlic. They also found a fungus that threatens half the world's banana crop, enabling scientists to look into how to eradicate it.

Richard Hamilton. In July 1940, during World War Two, a ship named the Under a Star was sailing from Britain to Canada, carrying hundreds of British Italian men who were regarded as enemy aliens. The vessel was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine with the loss of more than 800 lives. Now, a Welsh theatre company that performs for schools here in the UK has turned the story of that wartime tragedy into a play due to covid restrictions, it couldn't be performed in front of the usual audience of schoolchildren.

So it's been turned into a radio drama, as Michael Rossi reports.

British survivors from the Adam, a cheerful enough in spite of their ordeal when a Nazi, a British news report from July 1940 during World War Two, which recounted the sinking of the SS, are under a star, a converted liner that was on its way to Canada with hundreds of Italian and German internees.

The ship was sunk by a German Hubert off the coast of Ireland with almost 800 drowned. More than half of the dead were Italian internees, most of whom had lived in the U.K. for years, running cafes and shops. This year, a theatre company in Wales has created a radio play about the sinking theatre. Nonorganic creates new plays, which they would normally bring into local schools. At this time of year, but covid meant a rethink, and rather than cancelling, they decided to make it into a radio play for the schools to use.

Gayner Stiles is the artistic director of Theatre Nonorganic, allegedly keen for it to be like a series.

We did discuss it with teachers and they said, you know, listening skills is one of the things that is just dropping off the edge at the moment, and it would be a fantastic opportunity. So it's completely different to what we've ever done before. We've never done a radio play before.

The radio play tells the story of a fictional character called Lena as she struggles to cope with the loss of her father, Guido on the Erendira star and how she and her mother Carmella survive. And a time of war and prejudice. Lina helps her mum in the cafe, but is desperately keen to become an opera singer. Good evening to you all. It is, I'm Lina Falcone. It is an honor to be here with you.

This gonna the most famous opera house in the world and I'm turning it from a stage play into a radio play has been a real team effort, especially as they hadn't done radio drama before. For one, rehearsals had to take place over a zoom as everyone got headphones and just remembered.

Yeah, Alan Haymond played the character of Carmela, the Italian mother who loses her husband on the ship.

Usually when you're getting to know your character, it's with the other actors, you know, and a lot of that is found within the rehearsal room, you know, through interacting. I wasn't sure how quiet that was all going to come together, but it really did.

We made the decision fairly early on that we were going to try and get our actors on each other in one room.

Dan Lloyd, director of the production, that meant the theater then had to bespoke build for soundproof plywood cubicles, but it meant that we were still able to maintain eye contact between the four actors. So there was still a sense of that connection happening.

This experience of making a radio drama is something both actress Ellen and director Dan are keen to do. Again, this is a really important thing.

And if it's not going to be happening for a while, I think it's important that there is another way to tell stories.

The act of listening to something and engaging with something is a tricky concept to get young people engaged in. And I'm looking forward to seeing how they get on without an iPad in front of them.

That report by Michael Rossi. Finally, during the coronavirus pandemic, some people here in the UK have been getting rid of their pet parrots, reportedly because they're now having to work from home and they're annoyed at the birds. Constant squawking places like the National Parrot Sanctuary in England have been taking the birds in.

But as its CEO Steve Nicol told us, some of the African greys have had to be removed from public viewing after they started swearing and hurling insults at visitors.

It's very unusual for us and I think they only do it quite simply because that's what they've been taught at home and people think it's quite good fun to start off with.

And then when they start saying it in front of children and local vicar and things like that, it becomes a problem.

But unfortunately, it triggers a reaction from people. And the African greys like to talk that little was common things that they say and is the one the most notorious swear word which begins with F all five of them say that quite often. One of them repeats it three or four times before it really shouts it. And then the other one is the old pregnant goldfish named for whatever reason. One of them likes to shout that at me when I'm walking past, but the word fart in front of it and I'm not.

I've just lost to it after all. So it's definitely not me.

Steve Nicol of England's National Parrot Sanctuary.

And that is all from us for now. There'll be an updated version of the Global News podcast later. I'm Oliver Conway. The podcast was mixed by Philipot. Our producer was Wrong Sonic and the editor is Karen Martin. Until next time. Goodbye.

Hi, I'm Kathy Kay, and I'm Carlos Watson. I'm a journalist and host for BBC World News based in Washington, D.C. and I'm an entrepreneur and journalist based in California, which is rather what I'd like to be instead.

Together, we are the hosts of a brand new podcast called When Kathie Met Carlos.

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