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

I'm Joe Lieberman. In the early hours of Monday, the 22nd of March, these are the main stories. The US Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin has paid a surprise visit to Afghanistan. Thousands of homes are under threat from flooding in southeast Australia. The British royal family has begun a review of its diversity policies after controversial comments made by Prince Harry and Meghan also in this podcast.

I don't believe that the rights of women come from the government, from any government. I believe that women gain the right by their own efforts.

One of the world's leading feminists, the Egyptian writer and Dr Nawal Saadawi, has died in Cairo. Lloyd Austin was the first retired US general to become the defense secretary. He was also the first African-American in charge of the most powerful military in the world. Now he's made a surprise whistle stop tour to Afghanistan at the end of a visit to India. Mr. Austin spent only seven hours there, but in that time he met NATO leaders, as well as the Afghan president of the Trump administration had agreed after talks with the Taliban, but not with the Afghan government, to pull out all foreign troops from Afghanistan by May the first.

The Biden administration has been reviewing that, pointing out that Taliban violence has continued and General Austin was asked about it.

It's obvious that the level of violence remains pretty high in the country. We really like to see that violence come down. And I think if it does come down, it can begin to set the conditions for, you know, some some really fruitful diplomatic work. And in terms of an end date or setting a specific date for withdrawal, that's the domain of my boss. That's the you know, the decision that the president will make at some point in time in terms of how he wants to approach this going forward.

I asked our correspondent in the region, Secunda Kamani, about the significance of Sunday's visit by Lloyd Austin.

We're at a crucial time in the Afghan peace process and we're rapidly approaching made the first that if you remember a deadline set by a deal signed between the Trump administration and the Taliban last year for the withdrawal of all foreign forces. Now, the current US president, Joe Biden, has said he's reviewing that deal. He's criticized that deal. But he said and he said last week in an interview that it's looking tough to withdraw all American forces by that deadline.

But the challenge he has is how to how to manage that with the Taliban, because there's real concern that if America unilaterally stays on past that may the first deadline, the Taliban will intensify their violence even further. They'll resume attacks against international forces, really just about the one thing they haven't done over the course of the past year.

What sort of violence is there ongoing in Afghanistan? American officials and Afghan officials always talk about the the Taliban's failure to reduce violence. Well, at least in the open text of the US Taliban agreement that was signed last year, there was no commitment by the Taliban to reduce violence. My understanding from a secret annex to that report is that they committed not to launch large suicide attacks, for example, in major cities, which largely they have abided by. But we've seen, you know, high levels of violence in in rural areas on Afghan security forces, certainly not keeping within the spirit of the peace process.

And we've also, of course, seen this terrible campaign of assassinations of government officials and civil society members within the cities suspected in large part to be the work of the Taliban. You know, the fear is that if this peace process falls apart even further than well, we're going to see a resumption of these large suicide attacks in cities.

In addition to this ongoing level of violence, the presence of NATO troops still in Afghanistan is very important in this.

NATO was very critical when the Trump administration decided to bypass the Afghan government entirely to do a deal with the Taliban last year.

They would probably welcome US troops staying much longer, a problem that many of the member states of NATO face is that their troop presence in Afghanistan is logistically pretty much entirely dependent on the American presence there. They need the American air power to ferry them around the country, for example. So when I've spoken to diplomats from those member state countries, they admit that really they'll end up doing pretty much whatever America decides to do, whether that's leaving by May the first or whether that staying beyond me the first second to come to Australia now and the state of New South Wales, where torrential rain has caused what's been described as the worst floods for a century.

About a thousand people in the western suburbs of Sydney were told to leave their homes on Sunday. Others have already had to flee. Some properties were simply washed away. In the town of Port Macquarie, one local resident stood in the floodwater by her garage. She said it was the worst flooding she had ever seen.

I've just cancelled my flood insurance to save nine dollars a month right at the wrong time. I never thought this would happen. It's never, ever happened. Yeah, yeah. It's regularly happening down the road, but never here. Oh, yeah. It's just unbelievable. So we've just spent the whole day taking things up and down the stairs, up and down.

The rain is set to continue for the next few days and thousands more people may have to leave their homes. Daniel Mills is a reporter for the Australian digital news outlet mid-north West Coast News, and he's based in the flood affected area between Sydney and Brisbane and was talking to James Menendez about what he had seen. We're talking about isolated pockets, but we're talking about large areas, which is kind of being affected, and a lot of these places along this part of the world are quite close to river systems or catchments or creeks, which when an event like this happens, they just rapidly rise to the extent which people aren't prepared.

And when the orders came through on Friday night, we know our state emergency services told residents that they need to be out some with sort of giving themself an hour to two hours to prepare. And they didn't have that. You know, it was like you need to leave now sort of thing. And some people stayed well into the night and then the home started filling up with water. And then they started getting phone calls and text messages from emergency services saying, you know, you have to leave.

Now we're talking about boats which were actually driven along the rivers and up to people's homes. And people were actually escorted out of their homes and put onto these boats. And, you know, they were going from door to door, picking up people and taking them to the evacuation centers where they had to go because they had nowhere else to go. We're looking at dead livestock, which has been washed away down river systems and washed up on the beaches.

And we're also talking about houses which have been washed off their foundations and one house in particular, which like covid yesterday, the couple that were living in the house that were due to get married yesterday, luckily, they weren't in their property at the time that it got washed away. But when they found out the next day, you know, that was their whole day, they had to call off their wedding. This is not an unreal story. These stories are happening everywhere.

We're talking about people which have to get choppered in. A woman had to get choppered into her wedding day because she couldn't get over the floodwaters.

So for most people, it was people's attitude to such extreme weather. Given that, you know, at one point we're talking about sort of drowned in that part of Australia, the sort of record temperatures. Now it's record rainfall of people sort of pragmatic about it, sort of thinking, hold on a second, there's something seriously wrong here.

We're sort of saying this La Nina effect this summer, which which we sort of say every four or so years of the levee system, which kind of builds up in the South Pacific and it brings with this intense rainfall and persistent and consistent rainfall over such a sort of a long period. So we haven't really experienced the summer. And this is after all, these communities had to go through what was probably the most severe drought and bushfires that, again, we might have experienced in such a long time.

And so the rainfall then obviously brings this new growth to the underlying forests and farm land. And so what's going to happen, you know, when we come back to the next summer is we're going to have all this this new growth and how we're going to prepare for that new summer season. How are we going to deal with it? I don't know.

Daniel Mills of mid-north West Coast News, talking to James Menendez and staying with Australia. It's begun an urgent rollout of covid-19 vaccinations in the Torres Strait part in northern Queensland because of a sharp rise in infections in nearby Papua New Guinea. Cases have increased in the last month from fewer than 900 to more than 3000 thousand. The Pacific Island nation has managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic. Up to now, Natalie Whiting is the ABC's Papua New Guinea correspondent, and she's in the capital, Port Moresby.

We've been seeing a very concerning surge of cases in the past month. Its numbers have more than tripled the rise we've seen and the very low testing rate are both concerns. There's only been around fifty five thousand tests conducted in PNG over the past year. So those figures are strongly thought to be an incredible underestimation of the number of cases that they probably are in the community that are going undetected. The prime minister has actually said it could be as many as one in four people who are infected.

There's around nine million people in Papua New Guinea, but only about 500 doctors. So there's not enough beds in the hospitals. There's not enough nurses, there's not enough doctors. We've already seen services being shot at several hospitals while they try to just be able to focus on emergency patients and on covid. Australia has said that it's stepping up to help. We're expecting the first of its medical workers to arrive tomorrow. They're going to do a scoping mission before sending more.

Australia is also sending 8000 AstraZeneca vaccines to try to immediately vaccinate health workers here. Papua New Guinea will be receiving more vaccines under the World Health Organisation's Kovács facility, but they're not expected for a couple of weeks. And Australia is also pushing to get another million AstraZeneca vaccine sent from Europe. The European Union had previously blocked those supplies to Australia. Australia is now a. Healing for them to be released so they can be sent here to to Natalie Whiting of the ABC in Papua New Guinea, the largest asteroid to pass by Earth this year, reached its closest point to us on Sunday, giving astronomers an opportunity to observe a space rock that formed at the dawn of the solar system.

NASA says that at its nearest point, it is still two million kilometers away. Professor Alan Fitzsimons from the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast has been speaking to Samantha Simmons.

We're not exactly sure, first of all, how big it is. We suspected it was perhaps a kilometer across, but recent measurements imply it may be about half that size. We'll know more when we get more observations over the next couple of days. Now, it is travelling quite fast.

This is travelling at about well over 34 kilometers per second or over 120000 kilometres an hour. So if it were to hit us in the future or even today, it would it would be quite a serious thing. But we know from observations of this asteroid over the past 20 years that it's not going to hit us for the next 200 years at least. So this is one asteroid that we don't have any immediate concern about, although, of course, we want to track it and we further refine our knowledge of its future path for future generations.

And what do asteroids tell us about our galaxy? Well, asteroids are relics of the history of the birther and the evolution of our solar system. And by understanding what they're made of and how they're created and even how they come to be in orbit around the sun, that can bring them closer to our planet, we get a much better idea of how our planetary system has changed and evolved and continues to change right now.

And will scientists have much time to learn much about this? Well, they're travelling quite fast because it was discovered back in 2001. We know we've known about this close approach for some time. So yesterday and today and tomorrow, it's been studied by various telescopes on Earth, including, for example, radio telescopes that were paired with radar and measuring the precise size and also the distance and velocity with respect to our planet. It's also going to be studied with telescopes on Mauna Kea.

That's one of the big observatories over in the Pacific Ocean on the island of Hawaii. And that will tell us exactly what it's made of, the kind of rocks and minerals that are on its surface. And all of this will go into our general knowledge about these potentially threatening asteroids so that if we do find one in the future that we really do need to be concerned about, they will have that background of knowledge to help us figure out what to do and how much are they as a possible threat to the planet.

Well, asteroids, these this side are quite hazardous. In fact, we think something about this size or about one kilometer across or larger could cause global effects if it hit our planet. But the good news is, first of all, that we found most astronomers believe that we found most of these and we're in no immediate danger. But our attention is now turning towards the smaller asteroids, perhaps just a few hundred metres across where if they hit us, they would certainly devastate a small region of our planet.

And so the next few years, both NASA and the European Space Agency are performing their first planetary defense mission where their test technologies and our understanding of how we might divert a future threatening asteroid so that it doesn't actually hit us.

That was Professor Alan Fitzsimon speaking to the BBC's Samantha Simmons'.

Still to come, I felt like having it so long ago that we had this kind of a mini music festival to test whether to reopen the Netherlands to larger events.

The pioneering feminist and writer Náhuatl Saadawi has died at the age of 89. The activist dedicated her life to improving the political and sexual rights of women in Egypt and around the world. Here she is speaking to the BBC in 2018.

I don't believe that the rights of women come from the government, from any government. I believe that women gain the right by their own efforts. I didn't believe that Nasser would bring liberation to us or solution or Sadat or Mubarak or any ruler. We women should organize ourselves and be aware of our problems and fight.

Our correspondent in Cairo, Sally Nabeel, told me more about her life.

She did a lot for women's rights, to be honest. She is a physician and a psychiatrist and above all, a writer and a campaigner for women's rights. She raised the flag at a time when FGM, for example, female genital mutilation was a very widely common practice in Egypt, and it still is up till today. She campaigned against that in a number of her books, and she herself was a victim of FGM when she was six years old.

This is why she was a very outspoken critic of this practice, which was criminalized in more than 10 years ago. But it's still very much in practice here in Egypt. So she is a women's rights advocate, by all means, and she pushed against many boundaries and she went against all odds. She dared to speak the truth or at least speak her mind at a time when many would reconsider saying what they firmly believe in.

And that cannot have been easy. And that must have angered many governments and Islamists, especially down the years.

This is true. She spoke openly about sex related topics. And Egypt is a conservative society. And the fact that a woman dared to speak about sexual issues in her books was a big taboo for society to hear, as well as for those in power, of course. So she went against social and political establishments and this has cost her her freedom at some point. She was jailed during the rule of President Sadat and in the early 80s. And she was also a target for many Islamists who sued her, who threatened her.

And we have to put that into context, because in the early 80s, after Mr. Saadawi was released at that time, Islamist groups were very activist in Egypt. They picked up arms. They were very violent. They threatened her. And that pushed her to leave the country in the late 80s and lives in a self-imposed exile for more than 10 years.

That was our correspondent Sally Nabeel, speaking to me about the death of Nabal El Saadawi. Earlier this month, the British royal family was rocked by Oprah Winfrey's tell all interview with Prince Harry and his American wife, Meghan. One of the most damaging allegations by the couple was of potential racism within the royal family. Now, Buckingham Palace has announced that it's reviewing diversity policies across all royal households. Charlotte Gallagher reports.

Whatever the royal family had feared, the reality of Megan and Harry's interview was much worse. Megan spoke of how she considered suicide and was denied help. And Prince Harry revealed the strained relationship between him and his father, Prince Charles. But the most damning claim was that a member of the family had asked what colour skin make it in. Harry's son would have the allegation made headlines across the world. Just days later, Prince William said the royals were very much not a racist family.

Now Buckingham Palace is reviewing diversity policies across all royal households. The work is said to have begun before the Oprah interview, but comments made by Meghan and Harry will be looked at. The review team will work with people from minority backgrounds, disabled people and gay and transgender communities. A source said the family were listening and wanted to get this right. The public relations fight back from the royals seems to have begun as well. One Sunday, newspaper carried a glowing report about Prince William another and interview with William's friend, who's black, and said he'd never seen a hint of racism from him.

Magnin Harry have made their feelings about the British press very clear, taking legal action against several newspapers. The rest of the royal family appear to have an easier relationship with the media. Charlotte Gallagher.

Computer chips are in short supply around the world, and that's likely to have an impact on all sorts of products, including smart. Jones, of course, Samsung says it may not be able to release the new model of its Galaxy range of phones because of the shortage. So what is happening? James Menendez spoke to the cyber policy expert, Emily Taylor, who is the chief executive of Oxford Information Labs.

It's like a perfect coming together of three factors. There's an impact from the coronavirus climate change and sanctions imposed by Donald Trump. So the Corona virus has altered our patterns of consumption. We're all sitting at home doing different things. We're not driving cars. We're buying consumer electronics. So that's had big impacts on the way that markets plan. And that has also had a knock on effect on the semiconductor industry and patterns of demand. Climate change comes in because Texas had a very cold weather event about a month ago.

We had lots of snow and power outages. Now it turns out that Austin, Texas, is the home of several foundries, as they're called, the factories that make these semiconductors. And it's an incredibly delicate process to make these chips. It involves managing toxic gases. And the transistors are absolutely miniature. You know, up to a thousand can fit on a cross-section of human hair. So these are factories that if they shut down with a power outage, it can take them weeks, even months to recover.

And the third element is the impact of trade sanctions imposed against China by the Trump administration. So towards the middle of last year, the Trump administration prevented certain Chinese firms from accessing American technology in semiconductors. And this led to a great big stockpiling. So Chinese firms buying up whatever they could find.

Yes, as you say, it does sound like a perfect storm. Just tell us a bit more about changing consumer patterns. I mean, this is probably an ignorant way of looking at it. But I mean, even if people start buying more personal electronic gadgets and they're not doing other things, can you not just shift the chips around? It doesn't quite work like that.

It doesn't seem to work like that. It's very difficult to make computer chips. And even if you're aware that patterns of supply and demand are changing, you can't just sort of turn very quickly to change the way that the manufacturing processes are working. So part of it would be contractual, but also part of it is tied up with how delicate and tiny and amazingly difficult the production process is.

Emily Taylor speaking to James Menendez. More than a thousand people have been attending a two day music festival in the Netherlands as part of an experiment to determine whether large social gatherings can be restarted safely. Coronavirus infections have risen sharply over the past week, and some critics question whether the government backed event was reckless. Our correspondent Anna Holligan sent this report from the festival in Bejing Hoser near Amsterdam.

Standing on the edge of a market filled with by one thousand five hundred people, none of them are wearing masks. They're dancing, hugging, hands in the air, pyrotechnics going off right now in the middle of a pandemic. It feels surreal, but euphoric. It's like, oh, I miss this very much because I really love dancing. Yeah. But is this reckless? I asked Andreas Voss, professor of infection control and a member of the outbreak management team, which is advising the Dutch government, it will only give us the data to reopen society.

If you plan it right, you can do same thing. So this is not an unsafe event as all these people are tested. And no negative. You have to see them as test bunnies during an experiment.

This is not normal life. There will be people who think it's unethical to use these young people like guinea pigs. All these people, all the participants know that there's a minor risk, we believe, from the first data that we can say the risk is not much higher than staying at home and test it with your contacts. So everyone in there is wearing a sensor which will detect the group dynamics, follow their interactions, and the science is being paid for by the government.

We measure all the contacts between people, what distance and what length.

Dmitry Pontiffs is from the Field Lab, a fence company which is organizing this festival.

If you look at the risky context in the Netherlands, we define it. This within one point five meters over 15 minutes. And we can tell from everybody, all the fifteen hundred people who are here today how many of those contacts they have had at this festival.

The government is also using this pilot festival to test its own covid. Everyone in inside had to show a negative test taken within 48 hours to get in and be tested again next week to see if this event has been the source of an outbreak. This combination of tickets and negative test generates a QR code that could be used as your ticket on this technology is being trialled by the Dutch Ministry of Health to see whether it could work as proof of a negative test or vaccination in the future.

The sense of relief here is palpable. Well, it feels like coming home again, you know, like I've missed this for so long, I haven't been able to go to a party and know each other. And now we can go to a party again if it feels like every just like we live in different cities. But this way we get to meet each other. We're very lucky. It's just like I'm so happy I can't be happier. This is amazing.

Yeah, but this feels like a revolution of freedom. I'm happy to be able to meet like this again. Yeah, it's just so surreal. Meet different people and like handshaking, hugging and hugging. Yeah.

And a Holligan reporting from bidding wars in the Netherlands.

And I'm green with envy about all those people having party and fun together. And that's all from us for now. But there will be an updated version of the Global News podcast a little bit 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 Dakotah, U.K.. The studio manager today was Mike Adley.

The producer was Shirley Gordon and the editor is Karen Martin. I'm Joe. Until next time. Goodbye.