Global News Podcast - China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

China says it won't give in to pressure from Donald Trump over tariffs but is willing to negotiate. Also: New prisoner swap between US and Russia, and research into mammal brains reveals a 'galaxy'.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Miles and at 1330 GMT on Thursday the 10th of April, these are our main stories. China says it won't back down in the face of a new 125% tariff imposed by President Trump. Sudan has taken its case, accusing the UAE of complicity in genocide to the UN's top court. And a quick saliva test could be the secret weapon in the battle with prostate cancer. Also in this podcast, that stimulus was like a series of

YouTube clips, like clips of Mad Max and The Matrix and so on and so forth. Why researchers have been showing movies to a mouse and how the results showed them a new cerebral galaxy. Donald Trump's 90-day pause on most of his higher tariffs has benefited every single nation apart from China. The US president has said that the 90 days will be used to strike deals and claims around 75 countries have asked the White House for talks.

Meanwhile, China has been hit with 125% levers. This was what the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian had to say. Out of its selfish interests, the US has used tariffs as a weapon to exert maximum pressure and seek selfish gains. Let me stress that tariff wars and trade wars have no winners. China does not want to fight them but will not fear when they come our way. Ke Yu-Zhun is a global economist and author of the new China Playbook. She thinks businesses will try to ride out the storm in the hope things change but the impact will soon be felt. Soon enough US suppliers will feel it just like Chinese suppliers are feeling it. The lesson of the first trade war is that when China slapped the 25% tariffs on US soybeans, it led to so much resistance

in agricultural states that it eventually led to the phase one agreement. So China believes that by exerting equivalent pressure and having US suppliers also share the cost burden along with Chinese is the only way to get the US back to rational negotiation. I spoke to our China media analyst, Kerry Allen, about reaction in China from top down. China's Ministry of Commerce has said that the door is open to talks with the US, but it regards the action in recent days as bullying China. So I'm seeing messaging today from the government saying that dialogue must be conducted on an equal footing and on the basis of mutual respect.

And there is a hope that the US and China will meet each other halfway. Another message that's very strongly coming out in state media is that if the US wants to get involved in a tariff or trade war with China, it will not back down. There's a lot of messaging stressing that China will fight to the end. And Kerry, what about what you've been hearing from ordinary Chinese people? How supportive are they? And if they're not supportive, would we hear from them anyway? Well, it's difficult to know online because on social media platforms like Sinaweibo, which is China's equivalent of a platform like X or Facebook, you've got a situation

where you've got click farms that put out patriotic messaging. You've also got censorship. So it's difficult to gauge how ordinary people feel. But at the same time, what I'm seeing today is video footage of ordinary Chinese in Beijing talking about how they feel. We all know that now China does not rely on other countries to develop and that we have the capabilities of independent innovation. With the tariffs imposed by the US, we can use our own goods instead of imports. Our Chinese people are united and our country is strong enough. We'll fight till the end.

China has the economic strength to take resolute countermeasures against the United States' tariff policies. Never give up. So Kerry, those people certainly needed no rousing up at all, but we have been hearing from some Chinese officials some historical references that would do just that. Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that Chinese media often do. They will draw on historical clips and say that the US in particular should learn from history. So there have been clips that have been pretty much going viral today in China. One of them is historical footage of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong saying, no matter how long a war lasts, we will never yield. And China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman has been sharing this. As to how long this war will last, we are not the ones who can decide. We'll never yield. We'll fight until we completely triumph.

So strong stuff there. So what next? Well, I think it seems very clear that China isn't afraid to back down. And there's just this messaging that if the US does want this fight, that China will keep on fighting back. And Chinese people feel that it will win. So I think we're expected to see more of this if Trump decides to up the ante even further. That was Kerry Allen. Well, despite the looming trade war and the threat of recession it seems Donald Trump can still count on a significant amount of support domestically particularly in the so-called red states. Professor Arlie Russell-Hokeshield has made it her life's

work to understand the nature of American politics and the reason for Mr Trump's appeal. She's the author of Stolen Pride, Lost Shame and the Rise of the Right Trump's appeal. She's the author of Stolen Pride, Lost Shame and the Rise of the Right. For that book she's been spending time in rural Kentucky, an area she describes as the whitest and second poorest congressional district in the US. She's been telling the BBC more about what she found. They're people, they divide into two. One half are elated, you know, the Savior has come. The others are, let's wait and see. I think they're already pleased somebody cares, somebody's addressing us, but that's not enough.

Yeah. And when it comes to him and his way of governing, and we've been using the word chaos, does that matter to them? I think it depends on the results of the chaos. They have been told the United States is like a sick person, you know, it's lost its manufacturing, its manly jobs. So the doctor, the tariff doctor is Donald Trump to come to cure the patient. And they have been told, look, there may be some procedures that are painful, but you have to prepare for the pain because the doctor will make you well. I think the MAGA base, they're going for this metaphor. But the others are saying, do I trust the doctor?

Let's see if we get better. The other big change, I suppose, from the Trump presidency compared with the Biden presidency is simply the energy of the man. And I wonder whether that makes a political difference that continues actually for months, if not years. Yes, I even heard in this rural Kentucky, red piece of America, gosh, you know, Joe Biden, he has a visibility problem. Is he there? You know, is he being propped up by those around him?

And they don't say that about Trump? Of course. Every day, every minute, you know, look at me, look at me. They don't think he's perfect. They realize he's highly self-centered and so on. And they don't like that about him. But I heard people talk about the good bully. You know, we don't like bullies generally, but he's our bully. Professor Arlie Russell-Hokeshield was speaking to the BBC's Justin Webb. Professor Arley Russell-Hokeshield was speaking to the BBC's Justin Webb. It has been two years since Sudan was plunged into a civil war between the National Army and a powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces or RSF. Since then tens of thousands of people have been killed with reports of

atrocities on both sides. Now the International Court of Justice in The Hague is hearing accusations that the United Arab Emirates has been complicit in a genocide allegedly perpetrated by the RSF. The UAE strongly rejects the allegations. Our correspondent in The Hague, Anna Hologhan, was at the court. According to Sudan's filing here at the ICJ, the rapid support forces are alleged to have committed widespread atrocities. So in particular, targeting the ethnic Mas'alek community in Western Darfur. These crimes are alleged to include systematic attacks on these non-Arab groups with the intent to destroy them as a distinct ethnic group. The reports indicate around 15,000 civilians were massacred between May and June 2023. The RSF is also accused of using rape as a weapon of war against

civilians. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced into Chad alongside millions inside Sudan. Entire villages burned down. So widespread allegations put forward by Sudan. But of course, they can't bring the RSF to the ICJ because it's a political military organisation and the ICJ deals with disputes between states, which is why Sudan has focused on one of the RSF's alleged sponsors. And what is the allegation against the United Arab Emirates? So Sudan argues these atrocities were enabled by the financial, military and political support from the United Arab Emirates, including arm shipments, drone training, recruitment of

mercenaries. So it claims that this means the UAE is complicit in genocide and they're asking for reparations and also urgent measures to prevent any further genocidal acts. And what has the UAE said in response? We've heard a lot from the UAE over the last few days. UAE has strongly rejected Khartoum's allegations that it would seek an immediate dismissal. The ICJ, they say, is not a stage for political theatrics. It must not be weaponized for disinformation. This is nothing more, the UAE says, than a cynical PR stunt by Sudan, an attempt to deflect from its own well-documented atrocities against the Sudanese

people and its refusal to engage in genuine negotiations. And briefly, how could this case unfold for the UAE? So most legal experts appear to agree the case has little chance of going beyond this point based on previous cases and also the fact the UAE has a reservation or opt-out under the Genocide Convention but a decision due within weeks. An oligan in The Hague. A groundbreaking study has generated the most powerful and detailed map of a mammal's brain to date. Using a mouse scientists say they've made a

Google Maps for the brain and the images they've captured are striking. A series of 3D blueprints showing over three kilometres of neural wiring, close to a hundred thousand nerve cells and about 500 million synapses have been compared to a galaxy with different parts lighting up at different times. The research involved showing them out video clips, including the film The Matrix. Forrest Coleman is a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington. He co-authored the study and spoke to Jackie Leonard. This study is the the largest study of the mammalian brain that's able to map individual connections between individual neurons and that's really hard to do because the

brain is kind of like a giant ball of spaghetti. Its wires are all mixed up together and it is difficult to trace them all and find the points where those wires meet and the connections are made between neurons in the brain and so we reconstructed all of those individual wires with really incredible precision by taking the kind of metaphorical ball of spaghetti that is the brain and cutting it up into thousands of extremely thin slices and taking many really high resolution images of those slices using an electron microscope over almost 100 million images and then used a combination of computer science and machine learning to put all those images back together again and try to trace those individual wires through the ball of spaghetti to find the places where the cells connected.

And why is it important? What's it for? Neuroscientists' best idea about how do our brains function is that information flows through these complex networks and is processed through the really complicated intricate patterns that these neurons are making with one another in the synaptic connections. And so having a map of that is a kind of foundational resource to try to understand how the brain is doing that. And to carry out this study, the mouse in question watched a lot of videos, didn't it? Yeah, we didn't just map the connections, but before we did that, the animal was actually

imaged in a different kind of microscope that made the neurons glow brighter when they were active. And so we were able to record how individual neurons are responding to the visual stimulus that the mouse was given. And that stimulus was like a series of YouTube clips, like clips of Mad Max and The Matrix and so on and so forth. And so in that way, we can sort of try to understand each of these individual neurons, what aspect of the movie clip tends to make that neuron active. I have to ask now, did the mouse have a favorite clip? Well what's remarkable is that mice don't have a favorite clip but individual neurons do.

Individual neurons only respond to a certain visual and our colleagues at the Baylor College of Medicine were able to build a machine learning model that in certain circumstances was able to really highly predict how individual neurons are able to respond to any visual stimulus. So in this way they built a kind of AI twin of the mouse's brain and then they can show that sort of twin any visual stimulus and predict how the individual neurons were going to respond and then we are able to use that to analyze the combination of these two things, the wiring diagram and the functional responses.

Dr Forrest Coleman, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Still to come in this podcast. The fun part about this is we get to do a play about a subject matter that's very close to our hearts, which is telling the truth and holding truth to power. Why George Clooney's Broadway debut is being seen as even more resonant in Donald Trump's America. Unless you've been hiding under a very large pixelated rock, you've probably heard of Minecraft. It's the best-selling video game of all time, and the franchise's first feature film is in cinemas now.

But how much do you know about the game's creator, software developer Marcus Persson? Find out about the man behind Minecraft on Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast exploring the minds, motives and money of some of the world's richest individuals. Good, bad billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Rescue workers in the Dominican Republic are still searching for survivors after a roof collapsed at a nightclub in the capital Santo Domingo. At the time of recording this, 218 people are now confirmed to have died at the jet set club

during a concert by a popular Dominican singer. Our Central America correspondent Will Grant reports from Santo Domingo. It was a night of music and dance which turned to tragedy in an instant. As revelers and the band began to notice debris falling from the ceiling, suddenly it caved in, killing dozens and trapping scores more. Among the victims, the singer that night, the hugely popular Dominican artist, Rubi Perez, as well as two beloved former baseball players and a local politician. By day, the scale of the tragedy became apparent. The entire roof had collapsed onto the band and audience alike.

Body after body was brought out on stretchers, covered by blankets. Occasionally, a survivor would emerge too, bolstering hopes of finding more people alive beneath the rubble. As I look through the doors of the Jet Set nightclub there is simply rubble and open air where once there was a roof. People are speaking in hushed tones because it's believed there are still survivors beneath that rubble and the teams are working around the clock to try and reach them. This was supposed to be a concert by one of the country's most celebrated singers, now the biggest tragedy of its kind in

modern Dominican history. I do have hope. I know my dad is strong. He has to pull through. Like he needs to. Outside the collapsed building, family members sit in the shade, waiting anxiously for news. Among them was Shailin Pena, whose father, Maximo, was still inside, along with her stepmother and aunt. The uncertainty was becoming unbearable, she said. I feel like the urge to just go in.

I want to go in there, get rid of all the rocks that are in there, but as much as I want to, I can. So I really just have to like set it out and wait. We want to address the families affected by the tragedy that happened last night in Jet Set. In due course, the relatives will also want to know what caused this tragedy and whether it could have been avoided.

Many blame a fire at the venue two years ago, will also want to know what caused this tragedy and whether it could have been avoided. Many blame a fire at the venue two years ago, which they fear may have structurally weakened it, especially if the repairs were not properly carried out. The nightclub owner released a video to express his condolences, saying his team was complying fully and transparently with the authorities. Every few hours, the emergency team delivers a grim update, generally a sharp rise in the number of dead. However, the director of the emergency operations centre, Juan Manuel Mendes, insisted survivors could still be pulled out alive.

Nothing can be ruled out. We are going to go over every inch of the rubble here to give the families of those caught up in the disaster some kind of closure. For now, the families are clinging to that hope, staying as optimistic as they can under the circumstances. But with each passing hour, they know all too well that the hopes grow a little slimmer and the chances of success begin to dwindle. Will Grant reporting. Russia and the United States have carried out another prisoner swap, the second since

Donald Trump came into office. Steve Rosenberg is our Russia editor in Moscow. Two people are involved. So the Russians have released Ksenia Karelyna, who is a Russia-U.S. dual national. She's a resident of Los Angeles, an amateur ballerina. Last year she came back to Russia to visit her family. She was arrested. She was convicted of treason, her crime being that she donated around $50 to a US-based charity that supports Ukraine. And she was sentenced to 12 years in a penal colony.

So she's been freed. The Russians have freed a Russian-German dual national, Artur Petrov. He was arrested on Cyprus in 2023 at the request of the Americans. He was extradited to America. He was accused of conspiring to ship sensitive U.S. microelectronics to Russia. So he's been freed. And I think this adds to the desire by both Moscow and Washington to kind of boost relations, improve the atmosphere between Russia and America. There are talks going on today in Istanbul, diplomatic

talks about improving the functioning of diplomatic missions, Russian and American. So you can see where this is leading, even though there's been very little progress in terms of ending the war in Ukraine, US and Russia, I think, determined to do what they can to improve their bilateral relations right now. Steve Rosenberg, the influencer Andrew Tate has been accused of putting a gun in a woman's face in court documents seen by BBC News. Four women are suing the self-proclaimed misogynist accusing him of rape or assault. One of them who we're calling Sienna told the BBC that when she slept with Tate,

the sex was initially consensual, but things took a turn. As a warning, this clip contains strong language and distressing details of alleged violence and sexual assault. He started saying really horrible things. He'd say he held me kind of against the wall by my neck and said he owned me and told me to tell him that I belonged to him. And then he put his hands around my neck and strangled me until I passed out. And then I kind of recovered and came back around from consciousness and he was still having sex with me. Andrew Tate denies all the women's claims saying they are a pack of lies. Our special correspondent Lucy Manning reports.

The court submissions seen by the BBC contain detailed accounts of alleged rape, assault and coercive control from four women in the UK who were suing the influencer and self-proclaimed misogynist. Andrew Tate is accused of pointing a gun in one woman's face and telling her, you're going to do as I say, or they'll be held to pay. He denies this. Another woman says she saw a gun on his sofa, but didn't know if it was real. He says he may have had a toy gun.

The civil case concerns incidents the women say took place between 2013 and 2015. Some of the women claim he would strangle them and rape them. Andrew Tate denies the allegations claiming everything was consensual and that he never used violence. He is currently under investigation in Romania accused of rape and human trafficking which he also denies. Lucy Manning, a simple saliva test could turn the tide on prostate cancer, that's according to scientists in the UK. Each year more than a million people around the world are diagnosed with the aggressive

form of cancer, more than a third of them die. Professor Rosalind Eales from the Institute of Cancer Research led the study. We mailed out a saliva kit to over 6,000 men in London, so you spit in this tube and then you can extract the genetic material from that. And then we actually look at the coding of various parts of the genome, about 130 letters within the very large human genome, and we can actually then give somebody a risk or, in other words, predict what their risk would be of developing prostate cancer. James Gallagher is the BBC's health and science correspondent.

This is a test and it's not looking for any signs of cancer inside the human body. Instead, it's making an assessment of how likely it is that your body is prone, genetically programmed to developing prostate cancer. So it's looking for 130 different mutations that are in men's DNA, adding up which mutations you have, which mutations you don't, to come up with an overall risk score. And then what they have done in this study is they've taken the top 10%, so the 10% of men that have the highest risk of developing prostate cancer at some point in their lives, and then it has taken those men and offered them either, well, a combination of MRI scans of the area and prostate biopsies to see if there are any prostate cancers there when these men are aged between 55 and 69 and that's what they've done in this study. So it's not looking for cancer, it's looking for the people that

are most likely to get it. So it's a screening programme if you like? It is because the starting point of this is that all of the men appear outwardly completely healthy and that's the whole point of screening programs to try to get cancer at a stage before they're symptomatic at an earlier point when in theory they are easier to treat and that has always been really problematic with prostate cancer because at the moment, the main tool that we have for understanding what's the state of a prostate cancer growing

the human body is looking for a marker in the blood, something called prostate-specific antigen or PSA. You may have heard of the PSA test. The problem is if you just look at the blood of completely healthy people with no other signs or symptoms, the danger and the reason we don't have prostate screening in the UK is the assessment is that that causes more harm than it does good in terms of the numbers of cancers it's detecting and the types of cancers it's detecting. So there's a huge amount of medical research going on to try to figure out what is the best way of screening for

prostate cancer. And this is a relatively new idea in this field about helping to profile and figure out who are the people most at risk and therefore who are the people that you could target screening at the highest risk people rather than the whole population. James Gallagher was speaking to James Kumrasami. The American actor George Clooney has been a famous TV and film performer for many years and now he's also enjoying success on the stage. His Broadway debut, Good Night and Good Luck, is a stage adaptation of a critically acclaimed film of the same name that was written by, directed and featured George Clooney in 2005. It's a

historical drama set in the early 1950s during the McCarthy era and is being seen as a cautionary tale about what could happen to press freedom in President Trump's America. Tom Brook went to see the play in New York. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent. Good night and good luck the movie was released 20 years ago. It earned six Oscar nominations. Directed and co-written by George Clooney, it starred David Struthurn as the celebrated 1950s US broadcaster and newsman Edward R. Murrow.

Good evening. Now Good Night and Good Luck has been transformed into a big Broadway play, ushered in with a splashy opening. In the new production, George Clooney plays Murrow. It shows how despite considerable political and corporate pressure not to do so, the celebrated broadcast journalist went up against Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy at the height of the anti-communist witch hunts in the US in the 1950s. Murrow ultimately prevailed.

The play is a celebration of him and the fearless, vigorous independent journalism he pursued. Hello, hi everybody. George Clooney's enthusiasm for the play was evident at a pre-opening press conference attended by camera crews and journalists. The fun part about this is we get to do a play about a subject matter that's very close to our hearts, which is about this is we get to do a play about a subject matter that's very close to our hearts, which is about everything that you guys all do, which is telling the truth

and holding truth to power. And so it's a play we're very excited to do. It's not a civics lesson, it's an entertainment. Edward R. Murrow set the standard for American television news journalism in its so-called golden age. At a time when President Trump routinely derides traditional news media as fake news, this play can be seen as taking a stand in favour of objective, fair, balanced, verifiable journalism. It also presents audiences with the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had little

respect for due process. It's a period piece that resonates in today's America. Tim Teeman is senior editor and writer at The Daily Beast. The audience when they're watching the play, and I've seen the play, are very much receiving it in the present day. The play itself is a critique of authoritarianism, of governments acting against their own citizens, and of the actions of Joseph McCarthy. And so the echoes into the present day for Americans who are directly opposed to Trump

and all his administration stands for are very tangible. Inevitably, comparisons are being made between this Broadway production of Good Night and Good Luck and the original 2005 film. That picture is seen by many people as a great black and white classic. It had excellent cinematography, a great black and white classic. It had excellent cinematography, really strong acting and compelling content. And some people say this Broadway

production can't quite match the magic of that. While George Clooney has been praised for his portrayal on stage, there has been criticism that some of the other characters are underdeveloped. Clooney's ideological foes may dismiss this play as theatre, which liberals can come to and have their biases confirmed. But many of the stars who came to the opening night support him in the belief of having independent journalism for the people, among them actor Pierce Brosnan. We have to have a voice.

The people have to have a voice now more than ever. For George Clooney, this new play can be viewed as a career triumph. He was last on stage 40 years ago. Now at the age of 63 he's made his Broadway debut and succeeded, emerging as a credible leading man on stage. It's a significant milestone. Tom Brook reporting. And that's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later on. If you enjoyed this podcast, please feel free to subscribe on your app platform and share it with a friend or fellow news enthusiast. If you want to comment on this

podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on x at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag globalnewspot. This edition was mixed by Adrian Bargevar. The producer was Stephanie Prentice. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Nick Miles. And until next time, goodbye. In the fall of 2001, while Americans were still grappling with the horror of September 11th, envelopes started showing up at media outlets and government buildings filled with a white, lethal powder, anthrax. But what's strange is if you ask people now

what happened with that story, almost no one knows. It's like the whole thing just disappeared. Who mailed those letters? Do you know? From Wolf Entertainment, USG Audio, and CBC Podcasts, this is Aftermath, the hunt for the anthrax killer. Available now.