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

I'm Rachel Wright, and in the early hours of Friday the 13th of December, these are our main stories.

Four days after Bashar al-Assad's flight, the U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is holding talks in Turkey on establishing stability in Syria.

The funeral is held in the capital,cus of a prominent critic of the former Syrian regime,

whose body was found in the notorious Sednaya prison.

Also in this podcast, new research suggests modern humans may not have survived to populate the world without

interbreeding with Neanderthals. An 18-year-old Indian man becomes the youngest player ever to win the

world chess championship. The result has just sent shockwaves around the world. When he won the title,

he's been a poker-faced all the way through the match, 14 games,

and he won, and there were just floods of tears of joy.

And Kyrgyzstan wants to update its national anthem because it sounds too Soviet.

It's now four days since President Assad fled Syria and the collapse of his brutal and repressive regime.

Families are continuing to search prisons and hospitals for news of missing loved ones.

Meanwhile, Israel has rejected calls to withdraw its troops from the demilitarized buffer zone it shares with Syria. The Israeli

foreign ministry said that the seizure of the Syrian-controlled part of the Golan Heights was necessary

because of threats posed by jihadist groups operating near the border. Syria's new administration

has suspended Parliament and the Constitution for three months, saying it was

necessary to smooth the transfer of power. Our chief international correspondent, Leis Ducet,

gave us the latest from the capital Damascus. With every day that passes, there are more signs

about what kind of a new governance is taking shape in Syria after the extraordinary reversal on Sunday when 50 years of the Assad family came crashing down.

The new government is taking steps to try to reassure Syrians that they're working on stability.

They've said they're going to dissolve the armed forces instead of new security

...