Global News Podcast - Artemis II astronauts fly around the Moon

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

The Artemis II astronauts have travelled farther from Earth than any human in history and successfully looped around the far side of the Moon. The NASA crew is now on its way back home after taking photographs of the lunar surface and witnessing a solar eclipse. Also: Donald Trump dismisses concerns that the US targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran could be a war crime; the BBC gets special access to a siezed scam compound in Myanmar; Albanian environmentalists protest against Ivanka Trump's plans for a luxury island resort; and fancy a curling match for a night out? The Global News Podcast brings you the breaking news you need to hear, as it happens. Listen for the latest headlines and current affairs from around the world. Politics, economics, climate, business, technology, health – we cover it all with expert analysis and insight. Get the news that matters, delivered twice a day on weekdays and daily at weekends, plus special bonus episodes reacting to urgent breaking stories. Follow or subscribe now and never miss a moment. Get in touch: [e-mail]

This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Will Chalk, and in the early hours of Tuesday, the 7th of April, these are our main stories. The crew of Artemis II are on their way home and have been talking about their mission to the far side of the moon. And we saw sites that no human has ever seen before, not even in Apollo, and that was amazing for us. President Trump claims Iranians want the U.S. to bomb their country and has repeated his threat to destroy civilian infrastructure. We'll hear how Iranians are preparing for the possibility of that happening. Also in this podcast, nine police officers in India

are sentenced to death for fatally assaulting a father and son in custody. And... This is very exciting for us. We've done a lot in the sport, but seeing a professional league come about within my career span is quite exciting for me, I think. The first ever professional curling league gets underway in Canada. It's been a big few hours for NASA with a first for humanity as four astronauts on board

Artemis II looped around the far side of the moon and in the process traveled more than 400,000 kilometers from Earth. The crew were out of touch with NASA headquarters for nearly 45 minutes as they went behind the moon. This is the first trip there in more than 50 years and it's in preparation for a potential lunar landing by 2028. The crew have been taking pictures and recordings during their seven-hour fly-by, and they are now on their way home. President Trump congratulated the four astronauts and asked what the most memorable part of their trip had been. Reed Wiseman is the commander of the mission.

I have to tell you, as we came around the near side of the moon, seeing all the sites that we've seen from Earth for all of our lives, but we're seeing them from a different perspective. And we saw sites, Oriental, sites that no human has ever seen before, not even in Apollo, and that was amazing for us. And then the surprise of the day, we just came out of an eclipse where the sun sun and the entire dark moon about that big right out the window that we were watching.

We could see the corona of the sun, and then we could see the planet train line up and we did it Mars, and all of us commented how excited we are to watch this nation and this planet become a two planet species. So that's Reid Wiseman speaking after the crew had looped around the moon, but I'll play something from a little earlier as well.

This is what crew member Jeremy Hansen had to say when they broke that record of 248,655 miles from Earth that was set by Apollo 13 in 1970 to travel the furthest distance ever. We do extraordinary. I spoke to Nicole Stott, a retired NASA astronaut in Florida. It is a pretty amazing day,

and I'm so happy that you guys have been following along all day long with me. We'll put this in context, then how momentous is this mission? Well, I think it's huge. And to me, it's impressive to think about how it's really a first step, again, towards bigger things, too, towards even more important things as we, you know, proceed from this mission to go back to the moon and establish a permanent presence there. And you could give us some pretty amazing perspective here,

because we watch the feeds of the people up in the spacecraft, you know, they all look calm, tinkering away or whatever they're doing. The people in mission control, they look calm. Is it, when you're up in space, is it as calm as all that? Or is it quite scary sometimes? Actually, it's pretty calm. You know, we do a lot of training with consideration for all the things that we either think or know could go wrong. And so I think when you're actually in space, when you're experiencing it,

if something goes wrong, you feel like you'll be able to deal with it if that's humanly possible. And so you just focus on the mission and really the joy of the place where you are at the time. And how does it feel you build up to these missions, you know, and in many ways you have so many eyes on you and you train, you know, for your whole life for it? What's it like kind of heading back down towards Earth and decompressing and everything after everything's over? You know, I mean, I could only speak to my experience coming back from the two space station missions. and, you know, I think you're really anxious to share it in so many different ways, you know, whether it's through pictures and imagery or talks or, you know, exchanges like this that allow you to get to a broader audience.

And I think ultimately you're really, it is a decompression a little bit. There was this huge buildup to it, but there's so much, I think, that comes from the experience that can be brought back to Earth in a, you know, a power. and hopefully meaningful way that you're anxious to do that as well. Retired NASA astronaut Nicole Stott speaking to me from Florida. And they also spoke to Chris Lentot, a British astrophysicist from Oxford University, who has also been following the mission. I think the thing that we'll remember from this evening is sort of what it means to put people

into these situations. Really, this is a mission about technology. It's about testing this rocket and the Orion capsule. But it's actually been the emotions and the experience of the astronauts that have captivated people. We've been listening in this evening as they've expressed surprise and excitement and what was described on the feed as moon joy from getting a close-up look that no one's ever had before. They're seeing things that no one's ever seen before. And throughout all of that, they were clicking away, taking pictures with cameras that they've got on board.

And once we get those back, I think I'm really excited. to see what they made of it, really, to see the best set of holiday snaps we'll see in a long while. Yeah, and so much of the talk about what this might lead to, why do you think we're in this era now of renewed interest in the moon after so many years kind of away from it? Well, I think we're mostly back into a race. So with China having plans to get back to the moon,

lots of other countries showing an interest, we are back in the conditions we had in the 60s of a race to the moon and we'll see what happens in the next few years. Professor Chris Limtott. Now, hours after Iran rejected a temporary ceasefire with the US because it said it wanted a lasting deal, Donald Trump has issued yet another warning to the Islamic Republic. The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be Tuesday night. As this deadline for the regime to make a deal or open the strait of Hormuz inches closer,

President Trump doubling down on threats to take Iran back to the Stone Age if his demands aren't met, He also dismissed concerns that targeting civilian infrastructure may amount to war crimes. And he claimed Iranians want the U.S. to continue attacking their country. They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom. We've had numerous intercepts. Please keep bombing. Bombs that are dropping near their homes. Please keep bombing.

Do it. And when we leave, they're saying, please come back, come back, come back. Your messaging on the war has moved from, the war is coming to an end. to we're going to be bombing Iran to the Stone Ages. So which is it? I don't know. I can't tell it. Depends what they do.

This is a critical period. I can tell you they're negotiating. We think in good faith. We're giving them till tomorrow, 8 o'clock, Eastern Time. And after that, they're going to have no bridges. They're going to have no power plants. Stone ages, yeah. Deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure violate the Geneva Conventions and international law.

Are you concerned that your threat to bomb? power plants and bridges amount to a crime. No, no, no, I hope I don't have to do it. But we're never going to let Iran have a nuclear weapon. Our North America correspondent, David Willis, gave me this assessment. We've heard President Trump make threats of this kind before, haven't we? But this time he seems more determined to follow through. He's even laid out this four-hour timeline, starting from a deadline of 8 o'clock.

in the evening Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, which is midnight GMT, during which he says every bridge and every power plant in Iran would be attacked, decimated, to use the President's favorite word, returning that country to the Stone Age, unless that vital shipping lane, the strait of Hormuz, is reopened. And President Trump has said the entire country could be taken out in one night. Well, of course, attacks on civilian infrastructure are banned under the Geneva Convention. They constitute a violation of international law.

And as we heard just now, the President was asked about this at the news conference today, and he said he was not worried, adding that it would be a war crime in his view to allow a country with what he called a demented leadership to acquire a nuclear weapon. But as we heard just there, and indeed as you reference, you know, facing quite extreme questions on this, Donald Trump, beyond the kind of the usual level of questioning he gets. That's right. And he has said that he believes that so-called reasonable leaders in Iran

are negotiating with his administration at the moment in good faith. But he said that the outcome of those talks is remaining uncertain. And of course, Iran has rejected proposals for a ceasefire. it's calling for a permanent end to hostilities, together with the lifting of US sanctions. But it's thought that any meaningful progress, really, in negotiations is going to come down to an agreement on a ceasefire. And that is something that is going to be very difficult, I think,

to achieve in the current climate. David Willis. Well, if Donald Trump's language is increasing in intensity, so is Iran's. A spokesman for Tehran's army said, the rude, arrogant rhetoric and baseless threats of the delusional US president have no effect on Iran's operations against American and Zionist enemies. Fresh aerial strikes were reported across the region on Monday. Despite what President Trump has said,

voice notes sent to the BBC from Iran show people there do want the war to end. Their messages have been voiced up by our producers for safety reasons. It feels like we're sinking deeper and deeper into a swamp. What can we do as ordinary people? We can't stop him. We're worried about Donald Trump's threat to unleash all hell on Iran if Iran does not make a deal. We're stocking up on water and essentials. I don't see a bright future for Iranians at the end of this. With all these attacks, Iran won't be a place we can live in anymore. BBC Persian's Hashaya Janadi is monitoring developments inside Iran from Washington, D.C. and told me what the situation was like, as

Donald Trump's ultimatum inches closer. When this war started because of the bloody crackdown on the protests in Iran in January, many people who opposed the regime were welcoming such an action because they believed that this war will target the regime leaders, the commanders, and so on. So at the beginning, when the leader was killed, when some certain high-level generals of the IRGC were targeted, you would see that people are rejoicing and people are happy. But 36, 47 days have passed from the war.

And now not only the IRGC, but also economic infrastructure are being attacked, both by the U.S. and Israel, petrochemical complexes, steel plants, universities. And with such attacks, the number of people who are now more opposed to the war has been rising. So as President Trump said, yes, of course, there is part of the Iranian society which has welcomed the war and are happy with the bombings. But as the war progresses, the number of the people who are welcoming these attacks is decreasing. And people are very much concerned about the future of Iran without these infrastructure. And now with this certain threat, the deadline, which is Tuesday, 8 p.m., Eastern Time, U.S., many people have really voistered concern that if communications are going to be cut off, if all power plants are going to be

hit, how living in Iran will look like, there is a question mark what will happen after this. And let's not forget those who oppose the regime welcome the war because they believe the war will remove the current government. Now many people are expressing anxiety that what if this war destroys everything and we are going to remain under this same regime with this further dictatorship and their suppression. Hashaya John Adi from BBC Persian on the situation inside Iran. Well, meanwhile, in Israel, authorities have confirmed the bodies of four missing people have been found in the wreckage of a residential building in Haifa, which was targeted by an Iranian

missile on Sunday. The victims include a man and a woman in their own. 80s. Our Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson filed this report from Haifa. We've just seen rescue teams bring out four body bags from the rubble behind me. One of the residents here who was watching with us said living here felt like a daily gamble of Russian roulette despite the efficiency of their defences. And we opened the balcony and we see all the smoky outside and we hear scream of people like, help us, something like that.

More Barrel lives in the building opposite the block hit yesterday with her husband and three children. How long can Israel live like this? I don't know. I think we are strong, but we pray that it will be finished close. Of course, we pray for it. Down at the bomb site, search teams with the mechanical digger were still combing through the rubble, almost 24 hours after the strike. Colonel Weiss Dovev is a spokesman for the local emergency services. The missile did not explode.

We tried to intercept it. There were issues with that. We are still investigating it. But the missile landed. It's a very heavy kinetic force. And you can see the destruction. It's destroyed almost 50% of the house behind us. Overwhelming support for this war among Jewish Israelis

has started to weaken over more than five weeks. of fighting, with Israel's schools still shuttered and its residents woken most nights by missile alarms. Israel's leaders have been talking up their military success, claiming to have taken out the vast majority of Iran's ballistic missile launchers and intercepting more than 90% of Iranian attacks. But Iran is still firing at Israel. Its target is Israel's sense of security, and it only takes one missile on one building to hit that. Lucy Williamson in Haifa. Still to come in this podcast?

He says that she will get all that part over there from Sazan Island. She will take away the whole village. We hear about Ivanka Trump's plans to turn a former military base in Albania into a luxury holiday destination. This is the Global News podcast. Astoria from Indian X that has put police brutality back into the limelight there. Nine police officers have been sentenced to death for fatally assaulting a father and son while they were in custody. The judge in Tamil Nadu state said the two men were stripped and ruthlessly assaulted in 2020.

Our global affairs correspondent and Barrasan Etirajan has more details. P. Jai Raj and his son Jay Benix were picked up by police for allegedly keeping their mobile phone shop open in breach of COVID lockdown rules. They were kept in a police station overnight in Tamernadu, and they were beaten and tortured by the officers. They both died two days later, triggering outrage and widespread protests against police brutality. The officers can appeal against their sentences. Rights groups say hundreds of people die while in custody in India every year.

They point out that torture and abuse to extract confessions. from suspects have become very much part of policing in India. Experts say there have been persistent reports of beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence and denial of medical care, often in both official and unofficial places of detention. Police who engage in them are rarely punished. Earlier this year, several UN experts called on India to undertake major reforms to modernize policing in line with international human rights standards. The Cambarasan Etirajan.

The Cambodian government has said it will eliminate the international scam businesses within its borders by the end of April, after pressure from countries like China and the US. The scam compounds, which are built by powerful local business leaders, but run by Chinese crime syndicates, have proliferated in Southeast Asia, and they're used to defraud people all over the world of billions of dollars. Our correspondent Jonathan Head was given a rare glimpse of this lucrative and abusive business during a visit to a scam compound that was captured during Thailand's border war with Cambodia last year. We are standing at the entrance to the casino complex located here.

At a now deserted crossing between Thailand and Cambodia, Rear Admiral Surasankhenghsi describes what he's about to show us on the other side of the border gate. has the scam centres. The Thai military captured two casino complexes there from Cambodia last December. What they found was a warren of buildings where workers brought from all over the world had been running online fraud schemes. We really didn't anticipate that we would find

such a large-scale scam centre operating out of this facility. So we're walking up inside. These are really big buildings, several stories high. mess and rubbish everywhere and there would have been judging with the size of it thousands of people working here every room has got

its own reconstructed scenario to persuade victims to part with their savings and this one there are two very convincing looking Vietnamese police hats you can see piles and piles of documents with lists of

hundreds of phone numbers numbers on them. These are all Vietnamese phone numbers and there are so many of them. So this is a room full of makeshift booths with soundproof foam. There are perhaps eight

chairs to a row that just a few months ago were packed with human beings and there's a quite convincing backdrop from the Brazilian federal police and judging by the Portuguese language here this room was targeting

Brazilian victims. Every time we would hear a bomb, even the building sometimes would shake, would vibrate. Later, we managed to contact Wilson, a young Ugandan man, who was working in that scam compound when the fighting broke out. He's now

in the Cambodian capital trying to get home. He described an unforgiving regime run by his Chinese bosses. You're supposed to get someone who would deposit at least $5,000. Failure to do so, you are put into punishment.

Some people were electrocuted. After years of denying the problem, the Cambodian government has this year been raiding dozens of scam compounds in response to rising international pressure. Prime Minister Hunmanet wants the world to believe he's sincere. The scam network, what we call the black economy, is destroying our honest. economy. So this is the reason why we need to clean this out. But the complex we saw, like so many

others in Cambodia, wasn't owned by a shadowy criminal network, but by a prominent business figure with close ties to the ruling family. Jacob Sims, a transnational crime expert, believes there are good reasons for skepticism over the government's claim to be shutting the scam business down. This is likely the largest industry in Cambodia's history, structurally embedded at the highest levels of Cambodia's political economy. The crackdowns are real, but they're tending to target low-level criminals. They're very unlikely to produce meaningful disruption. Already there are reports of scam workers from closed compounds being moved to lower profile locations in Cambodia to continue their fraud schemes. With no other industry offering such

rich rewards, it will be hard for Cambodia's elite to give it up. Jonathan Head reporting from Cambodia. Now, why does Ivanka Trump, the daughter of the US president, want a beach in the Balkans, which is currently home to some precious sea life and the odd sheep? Well, earlier this year, she was spotted in Albania sizing up plans to invest more than a billion dollars to transform a former Soviet-era military base into a luxury tourist resort. But as Emily Wither has been finding out, locals and... environmentalists are fighting over the land on Sazan Island in the country's courts.

We've just come to the top of the village. There are rolling fields of olive groves where blueprints show they want to build villas. Right now there's barely anything on the land. We're overlooking the long sandy beach where Ivanka Trump stood in January with reportedly 100 architects and surveyors. The secluded Nata Lagoon Ninsvonets is a protected, idyllic, ecological site. Villagers say her visit was shrouded in secrecy. He says that she will get all that part over there from Sazan Island to, as long as I heard from the villagers.

She will take away the whole village. Locals first learned of the development when plans were posted online by Jared Kushner's investment firm, Affinity Global. They were baffled. The land sloping to the sea is. both protected and privately owned. He says that everything that you can see belongs to the village and every part of the land, it's bordered with other lands,

which means that every land has an owner and everyone knows what land belongs to. The country spent nearly half a century under communist rule, largely cut off from the world. Almost by accident, it has miles of unspoilt natural beauty. And that's why it's caught the eye of this American power couple. We're really trying to design this to be a place that we would want to spend the summer. And as I tell different friends and I show them different renderings of what we're doing,

they all say, oh, can we get a place there next to you? So I really think we'll build a tremendous community. But the land is subject to ongoing court cases with multiple claims of ownership. It's a nationwide issue that Vladimir Karai, a local journalist with the Balkan investigative reporting network, has been tracking for 20 years. Property conflict is one of the biggest conflict in the country. More than 10 years ago, at least a third of the murders were related to property conflicts.

And still there are cases, at least one or twice a year, cases of murder or heavy crime that happens because of the conflicts of properties. Land disputes are a legacy of Albania's past. Property was nationalized under communism, then shed out again after its collapse. When Prime Minister, Eddie Rama came to power 14 years, ago he promised to resolve the crisis and return stolen land but has had little success. Marina Saza was a biologist with Pepinaya, Albania's first independent environmental group. They record the wildlife in the area.

We walk every summer in this area across the side of the sand and the beach to monitor the sea gardens. Also the Mediterranean Monksil is a highly important species. Eddie Rama wants to tap luxury tourism, changing the law to allow development in protected areas, and a new airport is being built nearby. Marina's group is fighting it in court. Everyone that wants to come here wants to come for this. They miss this in their country.

And I think people that are attracted to come here by car and to have luxury, they will miss everything because this will disappear. Albania wants what its neighbours Italy and Greece have, tourism revenue. And standing here on this untouched coast, you can see what that vision could bring, but also what it would take away. Emily Wither reporting. Unless you're really into curling, you probably only pay attention to the sport when the Winter Olympics come around. But there are attempts to change that. The first ever professional curling league is underway in Toronto, Canada.

And the organisers are hoping it will become as popular as darts with families. dressing up and treating it as a night out. Bruce Mowat won a silver medal in the men's team event for Great Britain at the recent Winter Olympic Games in Italy, and he's the captain, or skip, of one of the six franchises taking part in the competition. He told James Kumar-Assami how Rock League works and why this is a big moment for curling. This is very exciting for us.

We've done a lot in the sport, but seeing a professional league come about within my career span is quite exciting. for me. I think we've had a lot of good moments in the career and this is another one to add to that growing list, which is exciting for all of us. So what should people watching expect? Well, I'm now getting to compete against my teammates, so it's going to be pretty fierce competition. We're going to be pretty competitive against each other. We know all the athletes that are here. Like there's 60 incredible athletes participating and every single one of them is as competitive as the next. So it's going to be a very fierce competition and exciting to see all the different mashups and communication styles between

different languages. Yes, I mean, it's interesting. You've got different people from different countries playing for not sort of the normal continent that they are from. Yeah, we've got like imports as well. Like my team is the only team that's actually got 100% from their continent. So like I'm a European franchise. I've got nine other teammates that are all from Europe. But some of the other franchises have imports, so like Grant Hardy, who I normally play with, he is playing for the American franchise, and Bobby Lammy is playing for the Asian franchise, so they're imported into that franchise. Which already tells us this is going to be different. It's not a normal event, is it? I mean, and also, what, slightly different times and slightly different, not rules, but

it's truncated, isn't it? Yeah, so similar to like the 100 in cricket or a couple other sports disciplines. They've tried to like shorten the game. So we're we're now only playing seven ends at the Olympics. We play 10. They also have reduced the amount of time that we're able to play in. So we have to be quicker on our feet. We have to think really quickly to hopefully not only make lots of shots, but to not run out of time and lose the game. And what about the audience? Because I read that they are going to be encouraged to get a bit more darts like in their approach to it. Is that Right. The owners, they enjoy the idea of an engagement in the sport and creating a good atmosphere for them. Quite a lively atmosphere. They're playing music. Like the first draw is going on just behind me and they're playing live music.

Well, maybe not live, but a DJ's sort of playing in music and, you know, fans are having a good time. Some of them have dressed up in costumes similar to the darts. So, yeah, it looks like a good atmosphere in there. So there's bananas. There's some people that have dressed as like crayons because of, the draw that we play. So yeah, those are the two creative ones I've seen so far, but I'm excited to see what else people come with. Dressing up like a crayon and going to the curling, you can't beat it, can you? Bruce Mout, a team G.B curler speaking to James Kumar-Assami. And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at global

podcast at BBC.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. use the hashtag global news pod. We've got a sister podcast, The Global Story, which goes in depth and beyond the headlines on one big story. This edition of the Global News podcast was mixed by Sid Dundon. The editor is Karen Martin and I am Will Chalk. Until next time, goodbye.