Global News Podcast - European show of unity over illegal migration

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

EU interior ministers express strong solidarity with Spain over its handling of the Ceuta migrant crisis. In a video conference, they commended the swift reaction of the authorities in Madrid to the influx of more than 70,000 Moroccans into the Spanish territory last week. The surge was blamed on disinformation and people smugglers. Also: The world's biggest oil producer, Saudi Arabia's Saudi Aramco, posts record profits as the Iran war sends prices surging, and despite Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. A mass funeral has taken place in Gaza for over 100 people whose bodies have been recovered from rubble nearly three years after they were killed in an Israeli attack. A man accused of pretending to be a judge is ordered to stand trial in Egypt. Prosecutors allege he bribed officials with $60,000 to gain access to the Cairo courthouse where he had himself filmed as if he was presiding over trials. And we hear from one of the stars of The Odyssey -- Matt Damon's stunt double -- all 1.30m of her. 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]: Migrants wait in line to receive food and beverages from the Red Cross, following mass crossings of migrants on foot and by sea from Morocco into Spanish territory, in Ceuta, Spain, August 3, 2026. Credit: REUTERS/Violeta Santos Moura

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Growing businesses deal with the same problem, too many tools, too much back and forth, and not enough time. Odu helps bring it all together. It's an all-in-one business management platform, fully integrated from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, so your team can spend less time chasing information and focus on growth. Whether you're in retail, manufacturing or service, Odu gives you one place, to manage your business.

Visit Odu.com to book a demo. It's ODbolo.com. This is the global news podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Ankara Desai, and at 15 hours GMT on Tuesday the 4th of August, these are our main stories. EU member states put on a show of unity over migration, after tens of thousands of Moroccans illegally entered a Spanish territory last week. Ukraine carries out a series of further attacks on logistics warehouses

and oil infrastructure in Russia. The Saudi state-owned oil giants Aramco sees its profits sore, despite the war in the Middle East. Also in this podcast, exports of air conditioning units from China into the EU have risen more than 40% on last year. The question is how to get them to Europe quickly. We transported some units, some thousand units by train. We will not make much margin, but at least we can provide some some of,

of the portals because of this big demands. And how a fake judge in Egypt remained undetected for three years. The influx of migrants into the Spanish territory of Sueta may have abated, but the human and political storm it has created is still playing out. Many of those who crossed into Suita last week have returned to neighboring Morocco, but several thousand remain, prompting residents to question who will look after them. Susanna Rup is a nurse working in a community. Health Centre in the territory?

There is a lot of people wandering through the streets without a place to stay. They have a place for 500 immigrants, but they're almost 3,000. So as you can imagine, the situation is really dramatic for them. And also for the people in the city, Spanish people, because this is not a normal situation. In the past few hours, the EU Interior Ministers have been meeting via VideoLink. to try to calm the anger among some member states. The European Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration, Magnus Brunner, said the ministers had supported Spain

and praised Europe's handling of the migration issue. By every measure, Europe has not had this much control over illegal migration in decade. But of course, the events from Ceuta, that's also pretty clear, show that dramatic images, beat actually the best statistics. Are Europe correspondent Nick Beek is following developments and spoke to Regina Vardinavann. It does seem that all the main parties here

are downplaying any sort of row among the member states and that is a massive departure from the past three or four days where there has been a bitter disagreement between some of those key countries. Italy really going for Spain and over the weekend we had 22 countries including Italy writing this letter. suggesting that the policies of the Madrid government had acted as a sort of pull factor for some of the tens of thousands of mainly young men who tried to get to Souter last week. They were suggesting that the whole sort of integrity of the borderless Schengen zone

within the European Union was at threat because of what the Spanish were doing. And today, I mean, the language is really different. You've got Denmark and Italy suggesting that they're satisfied with Spain and that really they're all in this together. And I suspect, Regine, what's happened here is that governments across Europe have seen how hard right and far right parties really sort of leapt on the extraordinary issues we saw last week. And also the suggestion that a lot of Russian disinformation was really amplifying what was being reported online. And also a suggestion that in the first place, this surge was caused by some sort of internet hoax that was telling people to try and make this journey because they might well get a banished passport, which of course was. simply not true. And Spain have said, haven't they, Nick, that they've already returned to Morocco

70,000 of the 72,000 migrants who reached Sota. Yes, and I mean, Souter is a place where, obviously, right on the tip of Northern Africa, it's not in the Schengen zone, separated by the Strait of Gibraltar, so you've got 25 kilometres or so of seed separating that city, a Spanish city, from the Spanish mainland, but yet there was, you know, such a large reality. reaction to this. And in terms of, you know, how the governments play it from now on in, you've really got the feeling that prime ministers and presidents across Europe felt they had to say something because immigration for so many electorates is a really crucial important issue. We know that. It's one that the hard right have been picking up votes on. And so a lot of

politicians felt compelled to speak. And I think now in the cold light of day, there's been a dialing down of the temperature. Nick Beak reporting. And for an in-depth look at what really lay behind the surge of migrants into the Spanish territory of Sweta, search for our sister podcast, The Global Story, wherever you listen. Russians are getting used to waking up to news that there's been another Ukrainian drone attack on their soil. And although Ukraine has always denied targeting civilians, several people, including children, have been killed in the last couple of days, some on a busy beach. There have also been attacks on warehouses near Moscow and St. Petersburg, belonging to Russia's biggest

online retailer wildberries. Russia, meanwhile, has continued launching attacks on residential areas and cities in Ukraine, included in the capital, Kiev. So it feels like the war is intensifying. A suggestion I put to our Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg. It certainly is intensifying, I think, and you can tell that from the reports today. So Russian officials said that overnight drones attacked an industrial park south of Moscow, a warehouse caught fire, the local governor,

the governor of Moscow region, said that five people were killed. There was no official confirmation about who runs that particular warehouse. But later came more reports of two other drone attacks in two other parts of Russia, one near St Petersburg, the other in the Tfier region, both targeting warehouses belonging to Wildbris, Russia's biggest online retailer. And that fits into a pattern because since last month, Ukrainian drones have been attacking the whole string of Wildbris

warehouses. It seems that Ukraine wants to try to disrupt the operations of what is a massive Russian company, which is used by tens of millions of Russians to buy things and hundreds of thousands of Russian sellers to sell their goods. So by disrupting the operations of wildberries, Ukraine thinks it can put pressure on Russia. And Steve, Vladimir Putin hasn't responded to these latest events so far. Is he acting as if everything is normal? You know, it's such a contrast. We saw Vladimir Putin, or pictures of Vladimir Putin yesterday. He was appearing at a youth event in Siberia, beaming, looking very happy, being cheered by young people in the audience.

The Kremlin clearly is trying to project this image of Vladimir Putin as a super popular, super relaxed leader. Compared to the reports coming in of Ukrainian drone attacks in different parts of the country, he gives the impression of someone who is not about to U-turn, is not about to compromise and appears determined to push on with the war until he secures what he considers to be victory, despite everything that is happening around.

And yet what is happening is putting enormous pressure on him and on the country, just chatting to Russians this morning in the street. People are tired, people want peace. That was the message that so many people said to me. And I actually met one businessman whose company sells items via one. Wildberries. He was talking to me about how some of the goods of his company have gone up in smoke. Steve Rosenberg reporting from Moscow. The American-Israeli war against Iran has seen oil prices surging. That is bad news for customers, but good news for the Saudi state-owned all-giant

Aramco. The company has reported a 44% increase in profits. That's despite Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. I asked our global affairs reporter Sebastian Usha, why are we seeing such big profits despite the war? I mean, essentially because of concerns about scarcity that's coming up, I mean, that is propelling prices up. But, I mean, it's a double-edged sword, isn't it, for Saudi Arabia. I mean, Saudi Arabia is being threatened its security in a way that it never really has been before. This threat has been there from Iran in the past. Saudi Arabia has been hit by Iranian missiles, some targeting its energy infrastructure.

It's been hit by proxies from Iran in Iraq, malicious there. And most importantly, the Houthis in Yemen. So it has come under attack. It's energy infrastructure in a place called Yambo in Jaze. They've all had rockets come near them. But what we've heard from Aramco is that it hasn't really had any major impact on its ability to put out oil. And the way that Saudi Arabia's got around the blockade of Strait of Hormuz is it has a huge pipeline which goes from the east coast, which is where the Strait of Hormuz is, to the west coast, to the Red Sea.

So it's been able to divert its oil through that route and then send millions of barrels a day via terminals from there. Sebastian, you mentioned the Houthis. How do Houthi attacks in the Red Sea affect all sea exports? Well, that's what we're seeing. As I said, this is the route that they've opened up to avoid the Strait of Hormuz. But now that has come under threat. The Houthis have for the first time during this latest outburst of conflict between Iran, Israel and the U.S. have used that other key pinch point of a waterway for the world's energy and other supplies,

the Bablmandeb Strait, which is near the coast of Yemen. It's fired at Saudi vessels there. So that was a key route that the Saudis were taking. They're now going up through Egypt and through the Suez Canal. We've also, there's been at least one attack on an Egyptian port, so there is a sense that that might also be in danger too. At the moment, Saudi Arabia is managing to get those barrels out. There is a concern that there could be issues with their ability to continue to produce and export that much oil in the coming months.

And the whole global economy is obviously looking at that. Saudi Aramco is by no means the only oil giant, of course, which is posting these massive numbers. But most of those other ones, US ones in particular, aren't operating in the actual war zone, which is what Saudi Arabia is doing, which I think is why. It almost seems counterintuitive that Aramco is doing so well out of this. But as I say, it's because it's managed to find these other ways of getting its oil out. Sebastian Usher. He presided in court and handed out sentences.

But now an Egyptian man is standing trial himself for impersonating a judge. He did that for three years and he defrauded people, gaining about $200,000 in the process. I found out more from our reporter Yusuf Taha, who is himself Egyptian. This person who's unemployed and 30 years old has been impersonating a judge for nearly three years for the purpose of frauding people and making money out of it in the process. He persuaded people that he can allocate some government housing units for them, which they are not really entitled to.

And he made all sorts of videos that he put out on social media and even persuading some chat shows on TV to host him so that he would promote. himself as the judge who can get things done quickly and decisively. And people paid him for his services, even though they are not exactly entitled to those housing units, but they did pay him. However, after carrying on this for three years, one of his alleged victims had cried foul because the so-called judge did not deliver. So this victim reported him to the authorities who, of course, went on the hunt for him and went through all those videos that he put out

to find out that he was sitting in a courtroom because he managed to reach some deal and bribed three court officials in North Cairo who gave him access to the courthouse. Now, what's likely to happen to him now, then Yusuf? Well, he's facing an urgent criminal trial ordered by the public prosecutor, and during questioning, he did confess

to impersonating a judge and also when they arrested him, they found that he had some unlicensed weapon, firearm, along with some ammunition as well. Inasmuch hand, they found some printed stationeries for his alleged post of a judge and counsellor at this court, which he is not entirely entitled to. And faking and impersonating a judge in Egypt is a big crime. Yusuf Taha. So to come in this podcast, we have the possibly surprising. revelation of who did all the dangerous stuff for Matt Damon in his latest film The Odyssey.

My double was a woman, a female stunt performer. And when she came into the catering tent was the first time I met her, I went up and I hugged her and I thanked her for all the work. This is the Global News Podcast. A mass funeral has been held in Gaza City for 112 people whose bodies were trapped under the ruins of a residential block hits, during an Israeli strike in 2023. Our Middle East correspondent, Yuland Nell, has the details.

Huge crowds turned out for that mass funeral, which was held amid the rubble, all members of one extended family or clan in Gaza, the Hesena and Abosharia families. And it's said really to be the biggest funeral of its kind to have happened after one of these recovery operations. It took a couple of weeks. The operation led by Gaza's civil...

defence, which is part of the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, but also supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross. And this was a multi-story building that had really been flattened by Israeli strikes back in November 23, about six weeks after the Hamas led 7th of October attacks on southern Israel, which killed so many people. And really family said that in the chaos of that day. Many got trapped inside the building. Afterwards, the families were able to retrieve some bodies, but for all this time, there were others who remained there trapped. And the BBC was able to film this operation as it began with just a single bulldozer really picking through the rubble and still some of the civil defence workers, you know, having to use their hands to move

bits of concrete and try to recover the remains. So at that funeral, you saw that remains had been identified, that they had been laid out in rows covered with the Palestinian flag, and also, in some cases, pictures had been attached to the flags of some of the children in particular who had been killed, 40 children, 38 women, and seven people with disabilities, locals said, were among the 112 who were buried here. But poignantly, there were still dozens more people missing, so bodies still trapped in that rubble that they had not been able to recover from that one site in the Sabra neighbourhood of Gaza City. And, you know, humanitarian groups are saying this shows how there are really thousands of

Gazans who are still missing as a result of the war. Their bodies believe to be trapped under the rubble. Yelan Nell reporting. A key selling point of the iPhone maker Apple has always been its better and more secure privacy. But now that's in danger, as the British government wants to have the right in very particular circumstances to access encrypted data. Apple have hit back and have launched a new legal challenge against this so-called backdoor policy. Privacy campaigners believe this sets a terrible precedent. As Amarajan heard from Silki Carlo,

director of Big Brother Watch. It is wrong in principle for the government to want to be able to spy on millions of people at one time. It's not wrong for the government to want exceptional powers to invade an individual's privacy if they're a suspect of serious crime. And the security intelligence agencies already have exceptional powers, very strong powers, and rightly so, to be able to break into the phones of targets. But that's not what this is about. This is about creating a backdoor into a product that's used by around 35 million people in the UK that allows the government to then dip into phones whenever it likes. And that's very different. That's a mass surveillance power. It's completely unprecedented in a democracy. and it puts the privacy and security of millions of us at risk, and it's incredibly dangerous. And what's been worrying for a long time now is that the British government has created powers for extraordinary levels of mass surveillance, of our phones, of all of our electronic communications,

our internet browsing, and the agencies seem to have developed a culture of just collect it all. That's what we saw in the Snowden revelations from the NSA whistleblower over 10 years ago, is that this kind of culture had emerged of mass surveillance and are eye-watering powers to collect all of our data all of the time? When you say mass surveillance by the British state, what's the new thing there that people ought to be worried about that wasn't happening, say, 20 years ago before iPhones came to market? Well, let's just remember as well what was exposed just over 10 years ago

is that even our own domestic agencies like GCHQ were, for example, creating web browsing profiles of every single visible user on the internet. when we look at something like Apple's product being broken, it's incredibly worrying because the way in which we use them these days, the amount of private and sensitive data that we will use, the role that it plays in business and in our everyday lives, means that if data is compromised en masse, there are national security consequences.

I mean, it's really quite incredibly serious, let alone the consequences for individuals. And the powers that the agencies have, you know, also extends to, for example, accessing journalistic material and journalistic sources. So there's really serious implications for us as a democracy too. This is a secret order, by the way. It's kind of a miracle that we even know that this landmark legal challenge is happening because Apple is committing a criminal offence if it even talks about the existence of this order from the British government to break into iCloud. So it essentially means that the agencies would be able to process and access the

data of tens of millions of people in this country through our phone data, but it also actually has implications for everyone around the world that uses Apple's products. So it has serious consequences for Apple as a whole business. Silky Carlo. Europe has spent this summer trying to buy its way out of the heat. Exports of air conditioning units from China into the European Union hits nearly $3.8 billion in the first half of this year. That's up more than 40% on last year. Many shops across the continent have sold out and prices have climbed. Sam Fenwick has been following the money chain behind Europe's airconbu. This is a queue outside a discount supermarket in Paris one morning in July.

The queue goes round the building. They're not there for freshly baked bread. They're there for a box with a fan in it. Within minutes, the shelves are empty. There are scoffles in the aisles and fight. breakout. Only about a fifth of European homes have air conditioning at all. In northern Europe, it's more like one in ten, but France alone has had four heat waves since May. Most of Europe's air conditioning is made in China. Midia is one of the biggest manufacturers. It's sold out of

portable units in June and is still not keeping up. The problem isn't making them. It's getting them here. By sea from southern China takes two to three months with customs, so a unit ordered when the heatwave starts arrives after the summer's over. Tobias Strobel is Medea's head of innovation for Europe. We transported some units, some thousand units by train. We will not make much margin, but at least we can provide some of the portals because of this big demands. So this was the strategy. Air conditioners put on a freight train across Asia because the ships are too slow.

That's how short of them Europe is. And then you switch the thing on and everybody switches theirs on at the same time a hot evening after a hot day when the sun's gone down and the solar power's gone with it. Dr Chris Roslow is a senior analyst at the Energy Think Tank Ember. Well, the most intense heat wave so far this summer happened in late June

and in the evening period especially the grids came under quite a lot of pressure so we had in France power prices spiked above 300 euros per megawatt hour In Belgium, we actually saw a spike up to 900 euros per megawatt hour. And just for context, power prices are typically around 50 to 100 euros. So this is kind of several multiples above normal. That's the price to keep the lights on when the whole country turns its air conditioning on at once. And gas has to fill the gap the sun leaves behind.

Nobody lost power, but somebody paid for it that evening. Those spikes get averaged into what your supplier pays and reach you in your bill a few months later. The bigger cost is what comes next, because this isn't a one-off summer. Professor Diana Ulget Vorseps is vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By 2030, the International Energy Agency projects

that cooling will add more new demand to our electricity than artificial intelligence. In fact, it's probably more like six times as much as artificial intelligence. You can imagine it's really very massive. In countries, most European countries, the peak demand used to be in the winter, but now we increasingly see than more and more countries reach these peak in summer during air conditioning and needs. And it changes when the grid is most under strain. Europe's grids were built for cold, dark winters. Now the hardest moment of the year is a hot night in August and they weren't built for that. Improving grid infrastructure and resilience

costs money, and in Europe that cost already sits with consumers. Network charges are roughly a quarter of what a household pays, and Europe's energy regulator says the amount being invested in the grid needs to double if energy needs are to be met. Sam Fenwick with that report. Even if you're not seen the film everyone's talking about, you probably have seen the poster for The Odyssey, in which a sword-wielding Matt Damon is confronting giant ironclad warriors

the Lestrogenians. Now, except that's not Matt Damon. It's his stunt double. Devin Dalton, who's a muscle-bound woman just one meters, 30-centimetres tall. When Damon spoke to the happy, sad, confused podcast with Josh Horowitz, he paid tribute to his stunt double. Well, you know, when we did the forced perspective stuff of the Lestragonians, I don't know if there's been a thing about how we did it,

but there were, you know, there were these kind of stuntmen who were all seven feet, right? and then they got stunt men who were under five feet. And so my double was a woman, a female stunt performer, who had the greatest arms I've ever seen. And when she came into the catering tent was the first time I met her, I went up and I hugged her. And so, you know, and I thanked her for like all the work she'd put in. Huge praise indeed.

So did Matt Damon's double Devin Daughton know how much he thought of her? He did complimently when we got a chance to work together. but, you know, I really wanted to impress him and I'm so happy that, you know, it really did impress him. And no, you know, I was completely, it was unexpected that he would give me a shout out in a video. I certainly wasn't expecting it. I knew it was me on the posters,

but, you know, as a stunt performer, you're used to being, even though you're in front of camera, you're kind of used to being behind the scenes a bit as well. So it was a pleasant surprise, and it's just been amazing ever since. And it surprised me that Matt Damon Stundouble was a woman. that as unusual as I think it is, or is it more common? Yeah, you know, it's obviously not that common, but it does happen. You know, this is a unique situation. And I think men have been

stunt doubling women for longer in the industry. That has been more common over the years. But obviously, you have to be the best physical match. But what it really comes down to is the skill and, you know, what they're trying to get done for the story. And I just happened to be a great match for what they need it this time. So I never thought I'd be stunt doubling, you know, Hollywood's leading man, and here I am. So it's pretty amazing for me. And, you know, one of the coolest things on my resume. And also, you know, Matt was just so lovely and humble to work with. So give us a sense of the things you had to do. Well, you know, you've got to be super ready and prepared to go. You don't get a lot of time when you're on these big productions. Everything's moving very fast and

furious. So being physically ready and mentally ready is a huge deal. And oddly enough, it's not my first time fighting giants. Being a smaller performer, I've been hired a few times on different projects to fight giants. So it wasn't my first rodeo, so to speak, but this was definitely the coolest one, I would say. And how crucial were these biceps? Were they specially developed for the part, or were they already pretty well honed? You know, they were already pretty well honed. That's why I was chosen for that specific role. But obviously, when I found out, I definitely put in some extra work. I didn't have a lot of time, but I tried to get a bit more growth before I got there. So a lot of upper body strength workouts and it all paid off. And I'm so happy that people are celebrating

a strong female and muscles. And it's just been really fun for me. Stuntwoman, Devin Dalton, speaking to Nick Robinson. And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at global podcast at BBC.com.uk. You can also find us on X. at BBC World Service, use the hashtag Global NewsPod. And don't forget our 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 Callum McLean.

And the producers were Paul Day and Oliver Burlough. The editor is Karen Martin, and I'm Ankara Desai. Until next time, goodbye.