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Drones at sea, an AfD speaker and two outbreaks · Pollar Sounds

• 0:00
  Hi there, this is Pollar, and welcome to 3x3.
• 0:04
  Three stories, three angles: what happened.
• 0:08
  How it's being told.
• 0:10
  And what we don't know yet.
• 0:12
  And after each story, we want to hear what you think.
• 0:15
  So, let's begin.
• 0:22
  First up, the Black Sea. What happened?
• 0:25
  On Monday, drones hit a cargo ship with Turkish owners, carrying Ukrainian corn,
• 0:31
  in Romania's economic zone of the Black Sea.
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  The Royad Mammadov caught fire and sank.
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  Eleven of its 13 crew were rescued.
• 0:40
  Romania says the other two, the captain and the cook, died.
• 0:45
  Then early on Tuesday, drones from the air and the sea struck two more cargo ships,
• 0:50
  this time off Bulgaria, more than 100 kilometres out from the town of Byala.
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  One of them, the Alfa Watan, sank.
• 0:59
  Rescuers found an overturned boat and empty life rafts, but none of its crew.
• 1:04
  On the other, the Able, all 18 crew were taken off, and two were badly hurt.
• 1:10
  The Associated Press calls it the first attack on shipping in Bulgaria's economic zone.
• 1:16
  Rumen Radev: An absolutely unacceptable attack in Bulgaria's exclusive economic zone.
• 1:21
  Rumen Radev: An absolutely gross violation of maritime law, of international law.
• 1:25
  "An absolutely unacceptable attack in Bulgaria's exclusive economic zone,"
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  said Bulgaria's Prime Minister, Rumen Radev.
• 1:33
  "An absolutely gross violation of maritime law, of international law."
• 1:42
  How it's being told.
• 1:44
  Nobody has claimed the attacks.
• 1:46
  Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy,
• 1:49
  says Ukraine's forces "did not conduct any operations in this area of the sea",
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  and blames Russia.
• 1:55
  Russia's embassy in Sofia denies it,
• 1:58
  and says the two ships weren't among Russia's targets that night.
• 2:01
  Bulgaria's Prime Minister says that, logically, the result works in Russia's favour,
• 2:06
  but that it's only a hypothesis until there's proof.
• 2:10
  And ships are being hit on both sides of this war.
• 2:13
  On Tuesday evening, a tanker caught fire off Russia's coast near Sochi.
• 2:17
  Russia's transport ministry says sea drones attacked it.
• 2:20
  In Brussels, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen,
• 2:25
  called attacks on civilian shipping "unacceptable",
• 2:28
  and said the EU stands "in full solidarity" with its member states on the eastern flank.
• 2:34
  Bulgaria and Romania have since asked the EU for satellite images of the area.
• 2:41
  What we don't know yet.
• 2:43
  Who launched the drones.
• 2:45
  Bulgaria is investigating where they came from.
• 2:47
  And whether the Alfa Watan's crew will ever be found.
• 2:51
  Syria says 10 were on board, nine of them Syrian; Bulgaria says 12.
• 2:56
  Bulgaria has called off the search, and Syria wants an independent investigation.
• 3:01
  Over to you.
• 3:02
  If the drones are traced back, what should Bulgaria and Romania do,
• 3:06
  and should the EU or NATO start protecting ships in the Black Sea?
• 3:10
  Is the war now spilling into the EU, or is it still a war next door?
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  And when grain ships are hit, who pays:
• 3:17
  the countries at war, or the people waiting for the grain?
• 3:22
  Second, Germany.
• 3:25
  On Tuesday, the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt, in eastern Germany,
• 3:29
  elected Tobias Rausch of the far-right Alternative for Germany, the AfD,
• 3:35
  as its president, the person who chairs the chamber.
• 3:38
  He won 48 votes out of 82 in a secret ballot.
• 3:42
  The AfD has 39 seats,
• 3:44
  and the five members of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance had said openly they'd back him.
• 3:49
  So at least four votes came from somewhere else.
• 3:52
  Saxony-Anhalt's domestic intelligence office
• 3:55
  classifies the AfD there as right-wing extremist.
• 3:59
  Rausch is the first AfD politician ever elected president of a German state parliament.
• 4:04
  The AfD won almost 44% in the state election in September,
• 4:09
  three seats short of a majority.
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  The other main parties have refused to govern with it,
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  a policy known in Germany as the firewall.
• 4:17
  Eva von Angern: …Rausch, you have hereby been elected President of the Landtag of Saxony-Anhalt
• 4:21
  Eva von Angern: for the ninth legislative term, and I congratulate you.
• 4:25
  "Mr Rausch," the chair told him,
• 4:27
  "you have been elected President of the Landtag of Saxony-Anhalt. Congratulations."
• 4:33
  In his first speech, Rausch promised
• 4:35
  to be president of the whole chamber, not just his party.
• 4:39
  He also said the days of political firewalls should be over.
• 4:45
  How it's being told.
• 4:47
  The leader of the Social Democrats, Lars Klingbeil,
• 4:51
  called it "a taboo breach to elect right-wing extremists to such offices".
• 4:56
  The Christian Democrats' leader in the state,
• 4:58
  acting premier Sven Schulze, had asked his 15 members to abstain.
• 5:03
  Fourteen were there, but there were only five abstentions in the whole chamber.
• 5:08
  The Left's leader in the state parliament, Eva von Angern,
• 5:11
  says Schulze has no authority over his own group.
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  And the AfD's Hans-Thomas Tillschneider,
• 5:17
  who also won a vice-president's seat on Tuesday,
• 5:20
  said he'd do the job "inconspicuously".
• 5:24
  What we don't know yet.
• 5:27
  The ballot was secret.
• 5:29
  Rausch says some came from the CDU,
• 5:31
  and that four CDU members will back the AfD's candidate for premier in December.
• 5:37
  The CDU says none of its members voted for him, and nobody has owned up.
• 5:41
  On Wednesday, Chancellor Friedrich Merz called the vote a historic break,
• 5:46
  and said anyone who helps a far-right MP into the job
• 5:49
  has to square it with their conscience.
• 5:52
  He also hinted that other parties might have voted for Rausch to make the CDU look bad.
• 5:57
  The Greens called that outrageous; the Left called it nonsense.
• 6:01
  In Magdeburg, the Social Democrats have dropped their plan for a cross-party government,
• 6:06
  and some CDU members are talking about leaving their group.
• 6:10
  The AfD's Ulrich Siegmund plans to stand for state premier in December.
• 6:14
  He needs 42 votes, and his party has 39.
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  Over to you.
• 6:19
  Is electing an AfD president respecting how people voted,
• 6:23
  or the moment the firewall broke?
• 6:25
  If some of his votes came from other parties,
• 6:28
  should voters get to know who cast them?
• 6:30
  And what does it mean for the rest of Europe,
• 6:32
  where far-right parties are moving closer to power?
• 6:37
  Third, two outbreaks.
• 6:41
  In Siberia, a 28-year-old technician at a plague research institute
• 6:45
  in the Irkutsk region died in hospital on Friday the 2nd of October.
• 6:51
  Russia put nearly 200 people under medical observation.
• 6:54
  Russian health officials say she died of pneumonia of unknown origin,
• 6:58
  and that tests found no link to the microbes she worked with.
• 7:02
  Among her contacts, they found two cases of coronavirus
• 7:06
  and two of rhinovirus, a common cold virus, and nothing else.
• 7:11
  And on Monday, in Nairobi,
• 7:13
  a Kenyan man who had been living in the Democratic Republic of Congo died of Ebola.
• 7:18
  It's Kenya's first case.
• 7:20
  The outbreak in Congo has now passed 8,700 confirmed cases
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  and 4,200 deaths, the country's deadliest ever.
• 7:29
  It's a rarer type of Ebola, called Bundibugyo,
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  and there's no approved vaccine or treatment for it.
• 7:36
  How it's being told.
• 7:39
  Online, the rumours ran ahead of the facts:
• 7:42
  a dropped test tube, a trip away.
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  Russia's health watchdog says it found no accident at the institute,
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  and the Kremlin pointed people to the watchdog.
• 7:52
  The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio,
• 7:55
  said it's "incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world".
• 8:00
  Donald Trump offered American help.
• 8:02
  The Kremlin said offers of help are always welcome,
• 8:05
  but a local official said they'd manage on their own.
• 8:08
  The World Health Organization asked Russia for details.
• 8:11
  Russia told it no plague case had been reported there.
• 8:15
  But the WHO says it still doesn't know what killed her,
• 8:18
  and on Wednesday it said it couldn't do a full risk assessment.
• 8:22
  On Tuesday it had called the risk to Europe very low.
• 8:26
  In Kenya, the health ministry says 57 contacts have been identified,
• 8:30
  and teams are still tracing some of them.
• 8:33
  What we don't know yet.
• 8:36
  On Thursday, Russia declared its checks over,
• 8:39
  said nearly 5,000 tests had found no dangerous pathogens,
• 8:43
  and denied reports of a second case.
• 8:45
  It still hasn't said what caused the pneumonia.
• 8:47
  And whether anyone caught Ebola from the man who died in Nairobi.
• 8:51
  Over to you.
• 8:52
  Should Russia have to share what it knows, and who could make it?
• 8:55
  After the pandemic, are we any better at telling a real threat from a rumour?
• 9:00
  And does Europe pay enough attention
• 9:02
  to Ebola when it's in Congo, rather than on its doorstep?
• 9:08
  Those were three stories, in three angles.
• 9:12
  The sources for each are at pollar.news.
• 9:15
  Tell us what you think, in the comments or on Pollar's socials.
• 9:19
  In the next episode, we'll read out the best answers.
• 9:23
  Thanks for listening to this episode of Pollar.
• 9:29
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• 9:31
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• 9:34
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