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

I'm Valerie Sanderson, and in the early hours of Wednesday, the 23rd of April, these are our main stories.

The International Monetary Fund downgrades global economic growth forecasts

and warns that the risk of a recession in the US has significantly increased.

In Kashmir, more than 20 people have been killed

after gunmen opened fire on tourists.

Also in this podcast, how the next Pope is chosen.

And the priest from the only Catholic Church in the Gaza Strip

remembers the late Pope Francis.

The Pope called for more than one year and a half every day with a small message or sometimes

under the bombing to give a hope.

We start with the forecast from the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Outlook.

The IMF has downgraded its forecast for global growth, predicting that Donald Trump's tariffs and the uncertainty they've caused will lead to a significant slowdown.

The IMF said growth in the US.S., the world's biggest economy,

could be almost a full percentage point lower this year than previously predicted.

Pierre Léviour-Grunsha, the IMF's chief economist,

said the U.S. could be the hardest hit.

For the United States, the tariffs represent a supply shock that reduces productivity

and output permanently and increases price pressures temporarily. This adds to an already

weakening outlook and leads us to revise growth down by 0.9 percentage point to 1.8% with a 0.4 percentage point downgrade from

the tariffs only, while inflation is revised upwards. He said the prospect of the U.S. economy

going into recession had significantly increased. We were seeing already consumption numbers coming down.

...