Global News Podcast - More questions about Swiss fire

Episode Date: January 3, 2026

Officials investigating the ski resort fire in Switzerland say they're focussing on the bar's safety measures. Also: Iranian officials warn the US against intervention over protests; swapping life in the US for life in Russia; Argentina's 'tax innocence law'; the AI chatbot, Grok, says it will fix safeguards; and Venus Williams wins a wild-card entry to the Australian Open.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] by: Reuters

This is the global news podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Charlotte Gallagher, and in the early hours of Saturday, the 3rd of January, these are our main stories. The latest on the investigation into the deadly fire at a Swiss ski resort. Everything leads us to think that the fire started from sparkling candles or sparklers which were put on bottles of champagne that was moved too close to the... ceiling. Why hundreds of billions of dollars are stashed under mattresses in Argentina. As Donald Trump warns Iran, the U.S. will intervene to protect protesters. There's fighting talk from Tehran. The United States and colonialists are always bullying and plundering the world. We must steadfastly uphold our own policies and unite as one. Also in this podcast. But there was just this flood of emails

that I kept getting from people who were like, we want to move to Russia to escape a terrible American tyranny. I was just like, oh, man, guys, the graph of all the greener on the other side of the fence. The Americans moving to President Putin's Russia, and U.S. tennis star Venus Williams will compete in the Australian Open at the age of 45. A fire which killed 40 people at a bar

in the Swiss ski resort of Kram, Montana, appears to have been caused by sparklers placed on champagne bottles that were too close to the ceiling during the New Year celebrations. Investigations are continuing with officials saying they're focusing on the bar's safety measures, its capacity and the number of people inside at the time of the fire. Officials said the 119 people injured included 71 Swiss citizens, 14 French nationals and 11 Italians.

For those yet to hear of what has become to their loved ones, the weight is agonizing. Letitia Broder has been searching for her son, Arthur. I must find my son. And today, I must go through this kind of thing to find him. It's been 30 hours since my son disappeared. 30 hours. 30 hours since I've had no news of my child. So now I'm on social networks.

I started it yesterday. I want the photo of my child to be everywhere, just in case. Just in case someone recognises him. They can call me, contact me. So that's it. Our correspondence, Sarah Rainsford, is at the scene of the fire. All day long, people here have been laying flowers outside the Constellation bar, pausing to remember the dozens who were trapped by fire.

Today, officials said they were still working to identify the bodies, forced to use DNA samples from relatives because they were so severely burned. For the families, the process is agonising. Many have been posting images on social media, hoping their own loved ones are still alive and that someone, somewhere, will have news. Most striking is their young age, so many of the missing and the injured are teenagers.

And now prosecutors believe they know how the fire started. They've been checking phones found at the scene and questioning witnesses, focusing on images of flares stuck into champagne bottles. Beatrice Pilu is the Attorney General for Valet Region. Everything leads us to think that the fire started from sparkling candles or sparklers which were put on bottles of champagne that was moved too close to the ceiling. From that, a blaze began quickly, very quickly. Other videos from inside the bar show the moment when the fire first took hold on the ceiling,

and young partygoers, perhaps unaware of the huge risk, tried at first to stop it with their clothes. Within moments, though, it was raging. The only exit from the basement bar, a narrow stairway, and many couldn't get out. Swiss officials will now investigate who is responsible for the enormous loss of life here. Check safety measures, overcrowding and other possible violations. violations. So far though, few here are talking about that. All the focus is on those fighting for their lives in hospital on identifying who exactly has died and returning their bodies to their families. Sarah Rainsford, investigations into the cause of the fire are likely to take some time.

Our correspondent Tom Simons has been looking at the early evidence. A chilling photo shared with the BBC of party goers holding up flaming champagne bottles appears to have been taken seconds after the fire started. It suggests flames had already spread to the low ceiling in the club. The surface of the ceiling looks to have been covered with grids of black dimpled acoustic foam, usually fitted to improve the sound in the room and prevent echoes. Richard Hager, president of the UK Association of Fire Investigators, believed it may have played a part.

If you look at the flames in between the grids, and that really looks like the start of the fire on the ceiling. Because it looks not fire retardant, it was spread really rapidly across the ceiling. Acoustic foam is usually made up of flammable polyurethane, but fire retardant versions are available. A key question will be what safety specifications were required for ceilings in the club and whether they were adhered to. Fire regulations are enforced by individual local government areas in Switzerland.

Investigators said previous inspections had not identified defects. However, there is a precedent for insulation materials causing fires in nightclubs. In 2003, pyrotechnic sparks ignited during a gig at a nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island in the USA. A hundred people were killed. Another factor may be the speed at which the fire spread, with some witnesses describing an explosion. Experts said this might have been a flashover when hot gases from flammable material instantly ignite. Smoke from the fire may also have contributed to deaths.

Tom Simons. And for more on one of today's big stories, you can go on YouTube, search for BBC News, click on the logo, then choose podcasts and global news podcast. There's a new story available every weekday. Next, Iranian officials have warned the US against intervention in mass protests over the cost of living. President Trump has said the U.S. would come to the rescue

if anti-government protesters were killed. Videos show clashes between demonstrators and security forces in cities across the south of the country. Six people have been killed. Our diplomatic correspondent, Paul Adams, has this report. After almost a week of protests, a day of funerals across Iran. From east to west, north to south, public anger mounting amid reports of demonstrators being shot dead. Since last weekend, popular fury has been increasingly visible on Iran's streets.

The Islamic authorities lashing out in response. And now Donald Trump has weighed in. If Iran kills peaceful protesters, he warns, America will come to their rescue. We're locked and loaded and ready to go. A senior advisor to Iran's supreme leader hits back. The American people should know Trump started this adventurism. They should be mindful of their soldiers' safety. More fighting talk at a ceremony to commemorate

top Iranian commander Kasim Soleimani assassinated on Donald Trump's orders six years ago. The United States and colonialists are always bullying and plundering the world. We must steadfastly uphold our own. policies and unite as one. But facing mounting discontent, Iran's reform-minded president is trying to strike a conciliatory note. People are dissatisfied, Massoud Pazeshkiyan said yesterday, we are at fault.

Don't go after America as the one to blame. It is we who must make the effort to find solutions. Solutions are urgently needed. This latest upheaval has been triggered by a collapse in currency. and the soaring price of food on the back of crippling sanctions and economic mismanagement. But there's another fear looming that Israel and the United States will once more attack, as they did last summer to devastating effect. Donald Trump hosted Benjamin Netanyahu at Mara Lago earlier this week,

both men accusing Iran of ramping up production of ballistic missiles. Faced with popular. Unrest, Iran's hardliners have generally been ruthless in the past. With pressure coming from inside and outside the country, which way will the regime turn now? That was Paul Adams. Traditionally, the usual response from the authorities to any internal dissent has been repression. But senior officials are conscious that the triggers for these latest protests have been economic, with the national currency losing nearly half its value.

against the dollar since September, while inflation rates are up to 42.5%. The BBC did manage to speak to one young protester in Tehran. We're not giving her name. We don't have any kind of liberty here. We fight every day. We face the most brutal things every day. We want to end it even with the price of our lives. We start at night every day because every spot in this city has a security.

cameras and they can spot us easily and they can silence us. So will President Trump's warnings actually result in any changes in US policy? Our Washington correspondent, Tom Bateman, has this assessment. Well, that 3am social media post from Donald Trump intended for the Iranians containing a clear military threat, I think it is meant to signal to the demonstrators that they have the backing of the US president, but is also meant to deter. a further violent crackdown from the Iranian security forces. All of that said, Donald Trump has in the past equivocated on the issue of US backing for regime change in Iran. They're also pretty strong domestic political pressures against foreign entanglements and such an intervention.

And, you know, I think what Donald Trump has always regarded as a red line when it comes to Iran is the issue of its nuclear ambitions. they want a policy of zero enrichment of uranium in Iran, something the Iranians see as unacceptable. And so I think what Mr Trump is doing here and has always wanted to do is try to really cajole or coerce the Iranians back to the table to do a deal with him on the nuclear issue, but on his terms, something they have said would be, on his terms, basically a capitulation.

But I think the administration is looking at what is happening on the ground in Iran and sensing weakness by the regime and the potential to capitalize on that for what Mr. Trump wants. That is, though, a pretty high-risk strategy. We've had a response from Abasarachi, the Iranian foreign minister, accusing Mr. Trump of being reckless, and another Iranian official threatening to retaliate if there is any American military action. Tom Bateman. Still to come in this podcast, the AI chatbot Grok says it's working

to fix lapses in its safeguards after users reported it was generating sexually explicit content of children. This is the Global News podcast. Hundreds of thousands of Russians are thought to have left their country since the start of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But less reported is the small number of Westerners traveling in the opposite direction in search of a fresh start. Many governments actively advise their citizens not to travel to Russia

and a number of U.S. citizens have been detained in recent years. Our correspondent, Christina Volk, has been talking to families who swapped life in the U.S. for Russia. In a restaurant in Russia, the Hare family is trying local dishes. Leo, Chantal and their three teenage sons are sitting around a table. in Ivanovo, a city 150 miles northeast of Moscow. This was shortly after arriving from their home state of Texas, seeking refuge, as they say, because they felt their way of life was under threat in the U.S. There's the LGBT movement.

That whole thing to me is just the degradation of everything that I believe in. It goes against every American ideal I have and even my religious beliefs. That's still one of the reasons why I've moved to Russia. After President Putin sent his troops into Ukraine in 2022, he has used his public speeches to attack the Western way of life, often portraying Russia as a rare protector of what he calls traditional values. This resonated with the hairs at the time. The Hare family was granted asylum in Russia in mid-2020.

Ceremony was covered on state TV, and they have since become the face of Decree 702, a fast-track migration pathway based on so-called shared values. It's a big system working as a clock, I would say. Maria Butina is a lawmaker with President Putin's United Russia Party. She oversees people from the West moving to Russia and claims around 200 U.S. citizens have done so. The BBC is not able to independently verify these numbers, and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow has refused to comment. Justice Walker is a preacher and farmer from the U.S.

In the 90s, as an 11-year-old, his parents moved to Russia for missionary work. He moved back and forth, but eventually settled in Siberia. I don't know what happened, but there was just this flood of emails that I kept getting from people who were like, we want to move to Russia to escape the terrible American tyranny. I was just like, oh, man, guys. I mean, the graph of all the greener on the other side of the fence. Migration as a propaganda tool is a vast area and nothing new, says Kelly Greenhill, Professor at Tufts and MIT.

Regimes can use propaganda domestically. They can herald the fact that folks want to flee from their adversaries. That can be a way for leaders to make their populations feel better, to distract them from things that they might be unhappy about domestically. you know, just be used as powerful set of advertisements. Back in Ivanovo, Chantelle and Leo Hare say although they became the poster family of Degree 702, they did not receive any financial benefits.

Russia is trying to attract big families with a common ideology. The hares did fit the bill, and they still see their future in Russia, where they also share their daily life on social media. on making dinner. Even though now two of their three sons have moved back to the U.S. We kind of put a stumbling block before them. We're sorry that it happened that way.

Essentially, I did it for them, but I was just basically ignorant of the culture here, of the effects it would have on the family. It was just a bad deal. Leo Hare, ending that report by Christina Volk. Up to $250 billion is thought to be stashed under mattresses in Argentina, and hidden in offshore bank accounts. That's six times as much money as the reserves in the country's central bank. Their president wants them to be put back into the country's banking system.

The so-called innocence tax law ratified by Javier Malay on Friday will mean that fewer questions will be asked about where the money came from. But why is so much wealth squirreled away in the first place? Luis Fajado is our Latin American specialist from BBC monitoring. Argentina has a huge underground economy. It's very frequent, even for middle-class families to have very large amounts of money that do not enter the formal financial system. There's many reasons for this.

Among them, the memory of a couple of instances in which the previous governments, actually a few decades ago, during serious economic crisis, decided to seize the savings of the people to try to solve the financial crisis. So people in Argentina have a very, very strong distrust of the financial system. And because of that, there is a lot of money either in foreign accounts or actually in US dollars in cash held in people's homes. It is not entirely unusual for large real estate transactions, for example, to be done in cash. And this is part of what the government is trying to solve with this law that is providing a lot of incentives for people to put their savings back in the banks in the formal financial system. What are the incentives that Javier Malay is offering people to put their money into banks?

The main incentive is that the thresholds under which you have to explain to the authorities how that money was obtained, this threshold has been raised very substantially. Now, the Argentinians can deposit several tens of thousands of U.S. dollars in bank accounts without explaining, without questions about where the money came from. And this precisely has given rise to one of the criticisms of this new law, the opposition to the government of Milay, is saying that this could create a situation in which money laundering becomes much easier because one of the main things here is that authorities are going to be a lot less restrictive about asking where the money came from. There's also mechanisms by which even if you were to be facing the threat of prosecution, if the Argentinian citizens faced with this threat, it pays the amount owed, the criminal prosecution would stop. It would be dismissed. And I imagine, as you said, that people have long memories and a lot of people will still not trust the government and they'll go, I'm not handing any of my money over to the bank because I don't know what will

happen to it in the future. Argentina has had, unfortunately, a very long history of financial instability, but it is seen by many people, many observers, as crucial to try to convince citizens to trust the financial system. It is said that there's nearly 250 billion U.S. dollars being held, as they say, under the bed of Argentinian citizens. This, to give you an idea is nearly six times the amount of the central bank reserves. And if this money entered the financial system, the supporters of this measure are saying it would go a long way to help strengthen the Argentinian financial system and the general economic stability of the country as a whole. However, as you say again, a lot of people in Argentina who will certainly remember other instances in which stability was promised, and in fact, a lot of people with savings saw their savings being severely affected by measures taken by previous governments. and that is what Milley again is promising not to do again. Luis Fahado.

The AI chatbot Grok, which is owned by Elon Musk, has said on X, it's identified lapses in safeguards and is urgently fixing them. Users have claimed it has turned pictures of children and women into erotic images. Grok said improvements were being made to block orders involving images of minors, saying it was illegal. Samantha Smith, a journalist in the UK, has first-hand experience of this. I saw in the comments a digitally altered image of myself in a bikini. So I posted a side-by-side comparison of the original image

and a screenshot of the digitally altered image, the deep fake that would be made of me. And came back to about 10 million views and hundreds of comments. Many women speaking out about their own experience, But what was more startling was the number of men that were in my comments either blaming me and saying that it is my fault because I am publishing photos of myself online or the men in my comments who were recreating the trend

and doing that classic, hey Grok, put her in a bikini, make her turn around, have her bend over. GROC does reject demands for nude pictures but appears to fulfill requests to remove some items. of clothing. Before X announced it was tightening its rules, we asked Jess Weatherbed from the technology news website, The Verge, how easy it is to put safeguarding rules in place. No safeguarding practices have been proved to be perfect so far, but we've had it proven by other AI providers like Open AI, Google, who each have their own image generation and editing

models, that you can definitely provide far more robust safeguards than what X AI is providing. Again, kind of referencing other platforms, it can be quite hard to force other platforms to generate pictures of a real person in underwear or swimwear, for example. But X doesn't seem to have any issue generating requests for people in bikinis. You can upload any picture to the platform, which is fairly damning, and simply tag their chat bot and request people in mini skirts. It goes against the platform's own usage policy rules. They know this. They have that usage policy in place because, uh, the EU already prohibits making non-consensual intimate images. We have been seeing some success

with actual ex-users reporting any images that are being created without their consent and getting them removed. There currently isn't any permissions to opt out of these settings. If you have pictures uploaded to your ex-account, you're effectively giving any other user on the platform free reign to edit those images in any which way. So the best preventative simply would be to not have any images on your ex-account at all. Finally, the American tennis star, Venus Williams, has won a wildcard entry into the Australian Open, which gets underway in just over a week. She's a seven-time Grand Slam winner, but hasn't competed professionally for several years,

and at the age of 45, is well past the usual retirement age for elite sports. So can she still cause a problem for players half her age? Ricky Macy trained both Venus and her sister Serena when they were. were teenagers. What does he make of her Australian open bid? First off, it doesn't surprise me simply because VW still loves to play. She loves to compete. And the people that run the tournament, any tournament, know that when she plays, it's must see TV. The fans will be in the stands, the curiosity factor. She can still hit and she still has weapons. But she just loves to play and I think it's great for the sport. Well, that's the thing.

isn't it? Because back in the day, she was formidable and almost unbeatable. I think Serena managed it a few times, including in the Australian Open. But, I mean, that's some years ago now. She would be safely considered middle-aged now. And she's had health concerns. What might be some of the limitations on her abilities now? Well, she hasn't played very many tournaments. That's number one. But obviously, it's the mobility. You know, as you go down the Yellowbrick Road and you get a little older, that's the number one thing. And remember, she just got married. So I don't, I don't know how much she's been practicing, but it's not even about that. You know, she can be competitive with anybody, you know, but when you get on the run, she's not going to have the firepower like

she did back in the day. Is there a risk of reputational damage if she doesn't do very well, or will people just be pleased to see her? Listen, her legacy is cemented. People don't look at it like that whatsoever. I think it's great for the sport. And when she says, I'm not going to do it anymore, I'm making a prediction. I think her and Serena will play doubles one more time, and that would definitely be must-see TV. Rick, you know the Williams sisters from many years ago when they were just sort of starting out. And you talk about this drive that Venus has got. Is that something that you could see in those early years? You know, when I went to Compton in 1991 and got on those courts. I didn't see it at first. But to answer your question, once we start playing competitive

points, and this is the wild card, there was a rage inside these two little girls, especially Venus, because she was more mature. I never saw, and I never saw to this day. And that makes you bulletproof and you'll be better under pressure. But did I think she'd be playing this long? No, but she just loves to compete. She's not planning on winning the tournament and people know that, but I think it's just great for tennis. That was Ricky Macy,

talking to my colleague Rebecca Kesby. And that's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast, all the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is Global Podcast at BBC.co.com.

You can also find us on X at BBC World. Service. Use the hashtag Global NewsPod. This edition was mixed by Holly Smith. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Charlotte Gallagher. Until next time. Goodbye.