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

I'm Joe Lieberman. At 13 hours GMT on Friday, the 28th of August, these are the main stories. Japan's longest serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe, steps down for health reasons. So who will take his place? Donald Trump says that only he can safeguard the American dream.

This election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life or whether we will allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.

And the BBC has evidence linking the United Arab Emirates to a deadly drone attack in Libya, which killed 26 unarmed cadets in Tripoli. Also in this podcast, Amnesty International has accused the Delhi police force of siding with Hindus against Muslims during riots in February.

And the life expectancy of a radio operator was six weeks. And Nuri Nischan worked for three months with keeping the Gestapo on the run.

We hear about a wartime heroine who is being honored in Britain. Japan's longest serving prime minister has announced he's stepping down for health reasons. Shinzo Abe, who is 65, has suffered from colitis, which is a chronic disease of the colon. He served twice as prime minister and nine years in total as the head of the world's third largest economy. While many have criticized him for not boosting Japanese growth, in that time, he has brought economic stability and gradually inched the country away from its pacifist stance adopted after the Second World War.

Shinzo Abe has maintained strong ties to the U.S. but has had a fractious relationship with China. Here he is announcing his resignation through an interpreter.

You know, I needed to fight against the disease and be treated. And I was not really in a perfect state in terms of the health condition. And still, I have to make political decisions, the important ones that I cannot make any mistake in terms of important decision making. The support of the public is I have to respond to. So I'm not ready to respond to the mandate by the public. And I made a judgment I should not continue my job as a prime minister.

What I decided to step down as a prime minister.

This announcement took many people by surprise.

As I heard from our correspondent, Mariko I even within Japan, it came as a surprise. Of course, over the last week or so, he made two visits to the hospital and he told reporters that it was just a regular checkup, but he spent almost seven and a half hours the first time. So as you can imagine, that prompted a lot of people to speculate whether his health was deteriorating because, as you mentioned, he had this rare intestinal disease which forced him to resign from his first term as prime minister back in 2006 and 2007.

He then has said that he has managed to overcome the disease thanks to a new drug, and that's why he returned to power in 2012. And since then, he has just become the longest serving prime minister. But because of these hospital visits, people were speculating. But still, a lot of people thought that he would try and finish his term, which doesn't end until September next year.

Quite a long serving prime minister. What kind of legacy will he have left behind? I think it depends on who you ask. You talked about some of his main policies like Rubinomics, which, of course, has become somewhat very famous outside of Japan as well. He's been criticized quite heavily for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which is, you know, one can argue a bit ironic given the death rate in Japan has been relatively low and the impact on the economy has been, you know, they've been trying to minimize it as well.

But the public has been really frustrated by that. So compared to what he thought, what kind of summer he would have, you know, of course, Tokyo was supposed to host the Tokyo Olympics this summer, which was, of course, postponed instead of enjoying that game that he ended up having to deal with a pandemic. And because his rating has continued to suffer, I think he wasn't doing too well. And, of course, you know, a lot of analysts are speculating whether that had anything to do with the fact that his health has also deteriorated as a result of that.

What happens now? When exactly does he stop being prime minister and anoint some sort of caretaker prime minister?

Well, there is a deputy prime minister, Taro Aso, who's also a finance minister, but he was asked about that during the press conference and he said he feels confident that he can stay until his replacement is chosen. So no national election is required until next year. So it just means that the ruling party has to choose its new leader who will automatically become the country's new prime minister until the next elections. And they are a couple of names floating around and the kids there, quite a lot of factions within the ruling party.

I'm sure the race is on to replace. Mr Abe is beginning as we speak.

Marico, to U.S. politics now with fireworks spelling out his name and crowds cheering on the White House lawn. Donald Trump formally accepted the nomination from the Republican Party ahead of the elections in November. At a rally on the final night of the Republican convention, Mr. Trump painted a dystopian picture of what America would look like if Joe Biden and the Democrats were elected. This report from our North America correspondent, Nick Bryant.

President Trump has accomplished more for the American people in four years than any other president in history.

Much of this convention has been about creating new narratives that Donald Trump is the hero with the coronavirus, an ally of African-Americans, a friend of the migrants and the champion of women in the workplace. The aim is not just to energize his base, but to expand it.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ivanka Trump. And in a TV spectacle that often had the look of a high end soap opera from the 1980s, members of the Trump dynasty, such as his eldest daughter Ivanka, have served as character witnesses in an attempt to soften his image.

Dad, people attack you for being unconventional, but I love you for being real. And I respect you for being effective. Donald Trump's entrance felt like the golden age of Hollywood descending from the balcony of the White House down a sweeping staircase to a stage bedecked with a blaze of American flags and bookended with giant screens greeting Trump Penn's 2020. Thank you very much. Never in recent times has this famous mansion become a partisan prop for a political convention, a highly controversial move.

This is the most important election in the history of our country.

And so, too, was the decision to address. A largely massless crowd sat shoulder to shoulder.

This election will decide whether we save the American dream or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny.

Much of his speech was an attempt to frame the election by claiming that Joe Biden was a Trojan horse for the radical left.

And this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life or whether we will allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.

That won't happen despite the deaths of more than 180000 Americans.

He congratulated his administration on its handling of what he called the China virus and claimed that Joe Biden would block the reopening if the U.S. economy, the cost of the Biden shutdown would be measured and increased drug overdoses, depression, alcohol addiction, suicides, heart attacks, economic devastation, job loss and much more. Joe Biden's plan is not a solution to the virus, but rather it's a surrender to the virus.

By the end of his long speech, he sounded tired and low energy.

We will make America stronger. We will make America prouder, and we will make America greater than ever before.

But then came pyrotechnics set off at the Washington Monument and spelling out the word Trump and 2020.

American voters will decide whether a fireworks display is fitting at a time of so much death and also whether the Republicans reality TV style convention has reflected the realities of the time.

I love you all. God bless you. And God bless America. Thank you. A report by Nick Bryant, the BBC has uncovered new evidence that a drone operated by the United Arab Emirates killed 26 unarmed cadets in Libya's capital, Tripoli, in January this year. The United Arab Emirates has previously denied intervention in the Libyan war, but the BBC's Africa team and BBC Arabic found evidence that the UAE had deployed drones and other military aircraft in support of its Libyan allies and that Egypt is allowing the UAE to use its air bases close to the Libyan border.

The BBC's Benjamin Strich has been working on the story, and I asked him what exactly the investigation had revealed.

So we've been looking at an attack at a military academy in which 26 young men who were all completely unarmed were killed. And this strike was recorded on CCTV. And the images are horrendous. And so we got in touch with one of them who is 20 year old Abdul Moneim. And he was in the classroom at the academy when the missile struck, killing his friends who didn't know what to do.

Who witnessed our colleagues dying, breathing the last breath and weren't able to do anything. There were guys whose torso was separate from the rest of their body. It was an awful crime, a crime that has nothing to do with humanity.

Now, no one has ever been held accountable for their deaths, but we found evidence that these cadets were hit by Chinese made missile and it was fired from a drone that came from an air base supplied and operated by the UAE.

So what evidence do you have that the United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai and Abu Dhabi, was involved in this in this investigation?

We use video and photo evidence to first reconstruct the shrapnel at the scene of the attack. And we found that it exactly matches the Chinese made missile called a blue our seven. Now, this is important because there was only one aircraft at the time in the attack on Tripoli that could fire a blue RS7. And it's called a Chinese made drone called the Wing Loon. And so we looked for where this drone might have come from. And by analyzing satellite imagery, we found that there was only one Libyan air base being used by windmilling drones at the time of the strike.

It's a place called Alladin. And we found evidence that the UAE supplied and operated the drones that were stationed there. And we also found a record of the UAE buying that exact type of drone and missile that was used in this attack.

But it's not just the UAE. The investigation also found evidence suggesting another foreign country might be involved in Libya's war. That's right.

So at some point in the first week of February, these drones disappeared from our site in Libya. And we found satellite imagery indicating that just a few days later, the exact same number and type of drones were moved into an airbase near Siwa, which is just over the border in Egypt. Now, these appear to be the same UAE drones that were previously stationed in Libya but are now safe in the Egyptian desert, still within striking range of Tripoli.

And we also found satellite imagery showing Mirage fighter jets stationed at a second air base in Egypt called City Bronnie. And that's just 80 kilometers from the Libyan border. And these jets are painted in colors that are not used by the Egyptian Air Force, but exactly match jets flown by the UAE. And in looking at this, we also tracked cargo planes flying from the UAE into the same airbase.

And it sort of suggests a possible air bridge between the UAE and an Egyptian military base very close to the Libyan border.

What has been the response from the governments in the UAE and Egypt? Well, we did put these findings to them last week and we haven't received a response yet.

The BBC's Benjamin Strich. The United Nations envoy for the Middle East has warned that the situation in and around the Gaza Strip is rapidly deteriorating. Israeli warplanes carried out airstrikes in Gaza overnight. Yolande Knell reports from Jerusalem.

The IDF said it struck military sites belonging to Hamas, the Islamist group which governs Gaza, in response to the continued launch of incendiary balloons from the Palestinian territory that have burned Israeli farmland. Gaza militants then fired six rockets towards Israel during a second round of Israeli strikes. There were no reports of any casualties recently. Hamas has been trying to pressure Israel to ease its blockade of Gaza and allow in more investment. Mediators from the United Nations, Egypt and Qatar have been negotiating between the two sides with tension high.

Israel has closed its only commercial crossing with Gaza to all but humanitarian supplies.

Yolanda, now the U.S. retail giant Wal-Mart has said that it will team up with Microsoft to make a bid for the American operations of Tick Tock. Tick Tock, which was created in China, has been given 90 days to sell its U.S. arm or face a ban in the country. President Trump has alleged that it shares its user data with Beijing claims, which Tick-Tock denies. To find out more about Wal-Mart's strategy. Philip Hamsher spoke to Josh Kansteiner of Signal via a venture capital firm that specializes in new technology.

Wal-Mart is a pretty high tech company. They have a lab and accelerator for startups, and they really saw an opportunity to power all of the payments at e-commerce through tick tock, hoping that they would help creators be able to sell their own merchandise or products. They're doing sponsored content for two millions of users, including those red state users that really are going to help propel this deal through the US government.

The talk is this will be a joint deal between Walmart and Microsoft to go after. Ticktock. What does Microsoft need Wal-Mart for? Surely Microsoft has all the expertise it needs.

Microsoft knows exactly what to do with Tic-Tac. It already bought and runs LinkedIn as well as Minecraft. But what it really needs is more political clout. And Wal-Mart, with its heavy emphasis on red states, its conservative owners, they would give it some extra power to get through regulations and push Trump to actually allow this deal to go through.

Is there some risk than the steel might not go through? There are still several competitors. Oracle, another large U.S. tech company, is vying for the deal. They want to pay 10 billion in cash, 10 billion in stock and still give the Chinese owner a bite dance, 50 percent of the profits. And Google was actually in league with Wal-Mart trying to buy this. But they have so many antitrust problems given they already own YouTube. So Microsoft really would be the best owner, even if it's a joint deal with Wal-Mart.

But if nobody can come to an agreement with Tic-Tac before the deadline, the U.S. government won't allow anyone to make a purchase.

What happens then?

At that point, Tic-Tac could be banned in the United States. And this purchase deal was hopefully going to be for the America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. So the UK version of Tecktonik and other versions around the world would still be operated by the Chinese company and still be able to continue working. But Tic-Tac could get kicked out of the United States, which would leave tons of those influencers and content creators left out to dry after spending years dancing and making comedy skits trying to win the public's affection.

Josh Kansteiner speaking to my colleague Philip Hamshire.

Still to come in this edition of our podcast, My Grandmother's Generation, it breaks their heart that here we are spending our 20s having to fight for our right to live.

We hear from people who'll be taking part in a march through Washington, D.C., linking the Black Lives Matter movement to the legacy of Martin Luther King.

Last February, violence broke out in the Indian city Delhi between Muslims and Hindus at the time, the BBC reported that the police appear to have supported violence against Muslims. Now, a comprehensive report by Amnesty International has backed up that assessment. The human rights group has accused the Delhi police of beating protesters, torturing detainees and even taking part in riots with Hindu mobs. Our India correspondent, Yoga LeMay gave me more details.

Well, Amnesty has accused the Delhi police of committing human rights violations during the violence that took place in the city. You know, it was religious violence. More than 50 people were killed. Two thirds of those who were killed were Muslims. And what Amnesty International has said today is that the police actively participate in the violence, that they acted alongside rioters, that they committed custodial torture, used excessive force against protesters. They've also said that when Muslims who were afraid that they were in danger were calling the Delhi police, the police responded in a very mocking way to them.

They've said that they've they've scrutinized videos that surfaced on social media at that time and that they've also spoken to dozens of eyewitnesses, riot survivors, lawyers and activists. Some of the top findings of this report are also what we found when we investigated the Delhi police's role back in March. And we found evidence that the police had been complicit in acting along with Hindus against Muslims, that they had used excessive force. And just to sort of give you a background of how this violence began, it essentially started as clashes over a controversial citizenship law that India passed last year.

And essentially this law grants amnesty to illegal immigrants from three neighboring countries except Muslims. So it's been criticized as being anti-Muslim.

What has the response been from political groups representing Muslims, but also from the police?

The Delhi police have not commented yet on Amnesty's report. We, of course, went to them with detailed sort of right of reply when we aired our report in March. And at that time, they hadn't chosen to respond to us before the piece went on air. However, after that, they spoke to the BBC's Hindi language service and they were asked about sort of the two sets of videos that we looked at, one of which showed police sort of working alongside Hindus, and the other one showed police using excessive force against a Muslim man.

They said they will be looking into these videos and investigating. However, many, including amnesty, today, are asking that how can the Delhi police be trusted to conduct an impartial probe when there are allegations against their own men?

Yoga, our India correspondent. Back now to the U.S. and its nearly 60 years since Martin Luther King made his famous I Have a Dream speech in Washington, D.C.. Well, as we record this podcast in a few hours time, a new march will take place in the U.S. capital city organized by civil rights activists after George Floyd was killed by a white policeman in May. The rally hopes to build on the momentum of the Black Lives Matter protests and push through policing and voting reforms, which have again been brought into sharp focus since Jacob Blake was shot in the back last weekend.

These students from George Washington University explained why they would be marching.

I think the past few months sparked something in the nation that made it OK for us to be outwardly upset and outwardly feeling what we've always felt day to day, going through life, being black. This is for the goal that this is to have to keep happening because my grandmother's generation, it breaks their heart that here we are spending our 20s having to fight for our right to live black lives matter. Like that's not radical. It shouldn't be radical.

For more about the background to the march, I spoke to our correspondent in Washington, D.C., Barbara Plett.

Usher, as the demonstrators were gathering, they started to organize this year after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And now this. Exactly this week, they've had the police shooting of Jacob Lake in Wisconsin. So it is a reminder of why organizers feel this march is necessary. But what they aim is, is to try to harness that anger, to harness that passion that we've seen in protests across the summer and channel it into real concrete change.

So the focus here is going to be on calling for legislation about police reform, also calling for legislation on voting rights, protecting voting rights, because, of course, this is an election year.

Do you think there is a risk for the Black Lives Matter protesters that this will benefit Donald Trump, who cites himself as the law and order candidate in the election?

So I think you're referring to the violence that has accompanied the protests and it has had an impact. Polls show. That a majority of Americans do support Black Lives Matter and their demands for greater police accountability. But there have also been images of on the televisions a lot this summer about violence that does accompany the largely peaceful protests. And we've seen a hardening of attitudes about that. People are concerned. Also, the Republicans are using that to emphasize their law and order election message and President Trump in particular.

So it is becoming more polarized. But I think what the organizers are hoping to do is to galvanize a new generation of leadership that has been thrown up by these protests, organize them and also bring in people who are on the sidelines and especially mobilize them to get out the vote for the election.

Barbara Plett, usher in Washington, D.C.. In Colombia, the spread of the coronavirus has reached a critical stage with more than 18000 fatalities and over half a million confirmed cases.

It's against this backdrop that scientists in Bogota's LA Sabena University have designed and deployed a locally made ventilator. It costs a fraction of what a conventional one would. Alan Kazuyo found out.

More from Professor Andreas Philippe Ramirez Heim, who's one of the researchers involved in the building of the machine that has been nicknamed the HEREN.

Their ventilator looks like any other commercial ventilator he has, like a monitor to screen where you have a curve that shows the pressure of the long airway. It has a curve that shows the volume that we are sending to the patient, and it has a control panel that can change every single parameter on how you send air oxygen mixture inside the patient's lungs.

Is it any different at all from the ventilators that are on the market at the moment? Yeah, I mean, our ventilator is called a low cost ventilator, but it's not low cost because it's a bad thing, but it's more low cost because it lacks some features that you may have on several other commercial ventilators. So during the pandemic, it was proven that in order to ventilate covid-19 patients, you require a mode call, a volume control mode. So that's the main focus of our ventilator.

So what prompted you to build it? Ah, university.

It's located in a small town next to Bogota called Chia and we have a medical school, so we have a hospital. And when the pandemic started, nobody was ready to was going to happen. So the government, the Colombian government designated our hospital to be like the focus to treat patients from all the Americas region. So that's about three to four million people. So at the time when the pandemic started, these hospitals only had like 15 ventilators.

So at that time, we knew that wasn't enough. I mean, that wasn't just does this happen all around the world? You may be wondering why did we design a ventilator from scratch? If the ventilator was already invented, you could just go ahead and buy ventilators from these big ventilator manufacturers. But it turns out that during the pandemic, most governments restricted the sale of ventilators. For instance, if you have companies from Germany or from Switzerland or from the US, they were just selling ventilators inside their own country.

That's the reason why we needed to to design our own ventilator.

Andres Philippe Ramiro Simay speaking to Alan Kasuga. The Royal Canadian Navy is dropping gender-specific ranks in an attempt to be more inclusive and recruit more women. It's a move, though, that has caused division, as Jonathan Savage reports.

High stakes on the high seas. We got one guy in there and one guy, Mark. The training we provide to the students, it's highly realistic. This is to maintain operational focus. Glossy and dramatic YouTube videos like this partly exist to make the Royal Canadian Navy appealing to potential recruits, but senior officers believe is going to take more than blood pumping images of warships being boarded to make the RCN attractive in the 2020. After months of public consultations, Navy ranks are going gender neutral.

The term Seaman Common Worldwide will be replaced in Canada by sailor. Almost 18000 current and veteran Navy crew were also polled on the idea, with three quarters in favor. The new terms will also better align with their equivalents in Canada's other official language. French pretty straightforward, you might think, but the change hasn't been welcomed universally. Political correctness has been one common accusation. In a letter to Navy personnel, Vice Admiral Art McDonald, the commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, admitted that the pool and accompanying dialogue has revealed that we continue to have prejudices and hate in our ranks, a discovery he described as heartbreaking.

The new terms come into use next month. Jonathan Savage reporting.

Now here's an extraordinary story of Britain's first Muslim war heroine. Nor any outcome code named Madeline was a British spy during the Second World War who was captured by the Gestapo, tortured and executed.

Now she's become the first woman of Indian origin to be honored in Britain with a blue plaque, an award that honors famous people by unveiling memorial plaques on buildings they were connected with. The sign is being put on the house where she lived in central London before being sent to Nazi occupied France. Her biographer, Shravani Basu, tells us about her story.

She was the first woman radio operator to be infiltrated into occupied France, it working in the most dangerous area in the field in Paris and lasting three months, which is more than any of the male colleagues. You know, the life expectancy of a radio operator was six weeks, and Noorie Nischan worked for three months keeping the Gestapo on the run and she would have come back to tell her story. Unfortunately, she was betrayed and then she was imprisoned, tortured, brutally tortured.

But she never gave away any names, never revealed anything, not even her real name. And finally, she was transported to Dachau concentration camp where she was shot. So it's a very intense story. But she went down screaming Liberté. For me, that is the main thing, that they could not kill her spirit Shravani bazoo on the life of nor any other can.

Finally, have a listen to this.

What you heard, there were whistles from a bottlenose dolphins and they could be used to identify individuals. Now, scientists have succeeded in using such whistles to estimate the size of dolphin populations where previously they would have relied on photographs. The study is led by Stellenbosch University in South Africa and the University of Plymouth here in the U.K. We heard more from one of the researchers, Emma Longdon.

Bottlenose dolphins produce quite a wide variety of sounds. Their signature whistle is used a little bit like a name, so each dolphin has their own unique whistle. And you can see on a spectrogram that they have this unique shape that humans can identify to the individual. We do sometimes get instances where the animals cockier or might repeat it back to the whistle, but it does just belong to one animal. So how we estimate the population is using a method called Mark reCAPTCHA.

So in this instance, Mark is the individual signature whistle and we capture it on hydrophones. And by capturing it over time and at different places, we can count the number of animals in the population and understand things like how far they range. The estimate of the population size that we got from this study was 54 to sixty animals, which is quite small. So it's important that we're able to monitor them to see if there's any decreases in that population size.

And also in populations like this one along the coast of Namibia, it's quite weather dependent. So often through the Namibian summer, we can't get all that often to study them. There's locations along the coastline that are really hard to get humans out in boats. So by using this passive recording of this sounds, we can record them all year round and in different places.

Emma Longdon from the University of Plymouth in the south west of England. 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 edition or any of the topics covered in it, please send us an email. The address is Global Podcast. All one word at BBC. Dakoda. Chuck, I'm Jolina. Until next time. Goodbye.