Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at background briefing.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin the Trump threatening to sue the BBC for a billion dollars in a trumped-up case

like the flimsy lawsuits against his enemies, Comey, James, and Senator Schiff, which in this case

amounts to an editing mistake in a panorama documentary, Trump, a second chance, that hardly misrepresented his

January 6th call for insurrection since we all saw what he said and what his supporters then did

as they went to the Capitol and stormed it in a violent display of murder and mayhem.

Joining us from the UK is John Sweeney, a writer and reporter who spent 17 years at the BBC

with Panorama and Newsnight. He lived and reported in the Ukrainian capital during the 2022 Battle of

Kiev, and he's the author of 12 books, including the best-selling novel set in the war in Burma,

Elephant Moon, as well as

Killer in the Kremlin, a gripping an explosive account of Vladimir Putin's tyranny,

and he is the host of the podcast, Hunting Galane, which is adapted from his book of the same

title. Then, with the COP 30 climate talks underway in Brazil's Amazon, absent the US and our mainstream

media, we'll examine how the annual COP meetings are sabotaged from within by Petro-States,

Saudi Arabia and Russia, and now the US, because of the requirements for consensus, not majority

rule.

Joining us is Michael Mann, a presidential distinguished professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn

Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.

He contributed to the award of 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2020 and is the author of numerous books, including dire predictions, understanding climate change, the new climate war, the fight to take back our planet, and his latest book, Science Under Siege, How to Fight the Five Most

Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World. Then finally we'll assess whether Trump wants to be like

Putin or is taking orders from Putin since, either way, he is destroying the United States

...