Latest / The Rest of the World Podcast / The Rest of the World Report | September 30, 2026 — Morning Edition

Transcript

The Rest of the World Report | September 30, 2026 — Morning Edition · The Rest of the World Podcast

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning from Paris.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Rudy Martinez with The Rest of the World Report for Wednesday morning, September 30th.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Tompkins County District Attorney is reopening a case he closed two years ago.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: This time, Cornell's own rugby club got there before he did.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: A woman identified as Jane Doe filed a lawsuit on September 14th.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: She alleges she was drugged and gang raped at Cornell's Chi-Fi fraternity house in 2024.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: The complaint cites fraternity group chat messages and names seven men as defendants.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew Ingalls,
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Winston Lee,
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Scott Kretschmar, Jonathan Newell, Gilio Lopez, Diego Sarabia, and Scott Norris.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: It also names Orazio Petita, the fraternity's former president, separately.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: It accuses him of failing to supervise the chapter, not of direct involvement in the assault.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Chi-Fi, Tri-Delta,
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Cornell University,
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: and Mooney's Bar and Nightclub are named as institutional defendants.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: The suit alleges Mooney served dough alcohol despite visible under-21 markings on her hands.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: It alleges the bar kept serving her while she was visibly intoxicated,
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: a claim invoking New York's Dram Shop Act.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Cornell temporarily suspended the seven men after the 2024 complaint.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: It then offered them a chance to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays to the university.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: District Attorney Matthew Van Houten's office had declined to file charges in November 2024.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: His office announced September 28th that it is reopening its review and preparing
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: to present evidence to a grand jury.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: New York Governor Kathy Hochul has separately called for outside counsel to conduct
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: an independent review of how Cornell handled the original complaint.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Cornell Rugby Football Club got ahead of the story on its own.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Three days before the DA's announcement on Friday,
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: September 25th, the club posted a general statement on Instagram.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: It said players connected to the allegations were permanently removed from the team
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: and alumni network.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: The Post did not name anyone.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Cornell Sun independently matched the case against the club's own roster,
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: and it found four defendants on them.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Petito and Kreshmar appeared across three seasons, 2023 through 2024, through 2025 through 2026.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Ingles and Lee appeared on the 2023-24 roster alone.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: What American readers need to know, none of this resolves anything on its own.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: The grand jury has not convened and no charges have been filed.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: But a university athletic club naming its own alumni
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: before prosecutors moved shows how much pressure has built since 2024.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Gaza's government media office said Israel committed 5,147 ceasefire violations
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: since the truce took effect on October 10, 2025.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: It says 1,421 Palestinians have been killed as a result.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Those figures, published September 29th, come from a party to the conflict.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: They need an independent check before they run as fact,
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: and the best available one is close, but not identical.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: OCHA, the UN's Humanitarian Coordination Office,
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: cites Gaza's Ministry of Health rather than the Media Office.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Its September 18th report put the death toll at 1,381,
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: covering the period through September 13th.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: A building collapsed on September 16th, killing 21 more people, 12 of them children.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: That pushed the running total to roughly 1,402 by mid-month.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: The media office's count of 1,421 by September 29th,
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: two weeks later, tracks that trajectory closely.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't match exactly.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: OSHA's figures count total deaths since the ceasefire began,
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: and the media office counts deaths it attributes specifically to violations.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: The aid figures diverge more.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: The media office says only 35% of aid trucks are getting through.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: OCHA's September 18th report gives two separate numbers.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: The overall offloading rate for UN and partner agencies was 70%,
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: down from 77% the prior period.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: The Egyptian corridor specifically had fallen to 35%.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: The media office's figure matches the worst performing single corridor,
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: not the overall rate, which is double that.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: What American readers need to know.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Both numbers are true.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: They describe different things.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Reporting Gaza's aid access as 35% without saying which corridor that describes is
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: the exception as the rule.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Alexander Vucic is resigning as president of Serbia.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: He's not leaving power.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Vucic dissolved parliament on September 9th and called a snap parliamentary election
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: for October 25th.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: He had told reporters two days earlier he would resign on September 25th or 26th.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: He first signaled the intention in June.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: His Serbian progressive party has nominated him to run for prime minister in the same election.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: If he wins, he trades one office for another without an intervening day out of government.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: The resignation follows two years of the largest anti-government protests of his rule.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: They were triggered by the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: in November 2024, which killed 16 people.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: The protests never fully receded.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Bucic's party has a more durable hold on parliament than his own approval rating does.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: His move to the parliamentary track is widely read as a way to survive the protests.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's a foreign policy wrinkle underneath the domestic one.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Serbia has historically aligned with Moscow.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Russian commentators have criticized Belgrade for drifting from that.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Belgrade in August
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: to discuss economic cooperation and prospective free trade agreements.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Serbian-made ammunition has also been reaching Ukraine through third-party buyers.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: What American readers need to know.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: This kind of maneuver rarely reaches American coverage.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Serbia is an EU candidate with a historic tilt toward Moscow,
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: and its ties to Kyiv have been quietly shifting under Vucic.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: How he holds on to power will shape which way that keeps moving.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And a couple of quick briefs before we go.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: In Nigeria,
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: authorities recovered 28 skulls from
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: the suspected kidnapping camps raided September 27th in Umaniyoki, Abia State.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: The site sits inside a documented ransom economy estimated at $5.8 million tied
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: to bandit and militant groups operating across northern and southeastern Nigeria.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: In Haiti,
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: the UN Security Council voted 12-0-3 to extend the mandate of gang suppression force
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: through March 31st, 2027.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: The resolution was sponsored by the United States and Panama.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: And finally,
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: in China,
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: the National Archives planned to show Xi the Treaty of San Francisco
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: during his September 25th through 26th Washington visit.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: The itinerary also included the Declaration of Independence,
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: The 1951 treaty's ambiguous language
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: on Taiwan status reportedly upset Xi's delegation once they saw that it was on
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: the itinerary.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Xi's tour was cut short of the planned viewings.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: The three communiques China wanted included were never on the U.S. side's list.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's it for this morning's edition of The Rest of the World Report.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for listening.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Rudy Martinez, and I will see you all again this evening.