Global News Podcast - Musk leaves Trump administration

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

Donald Trump has heaped praise on Elon Musk at a press conference marking his exit from the US government. Also: The scientist behind the abortion pill dies, and Taylor Swift buys back her master recordings.

This BBC podcast is supported money anywhere in the world. 12 million customers managing their international money with WISE can't be wrong. Download the WISE app today or visit This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Andrew Peetje and in the early hours of Saturday the 31st of May these are our main stories. Donald Trump has showered his billionaire backer Elon Musk with compliments at a news conference to mark the tech baronons departure from the US government. The UN has warned that Gaza's entire population is at risk of famine despite the partial lifting of an Israeli blockade.

Taylor Swift says her greatest dream has come true having brought back the rights to all her albums. Also in this podcast... If we consider that Russia could be allowed to take a part of the territory of Ukraine without any restriction, how would you phrase what could happen in Taiwan? A stark warning from the French president over Ukraine. Elon Musk's time in the Trump administration has come to an end after 129 days, during which the world's richest man took an axe to government spending, stirring plenty of controversy along the way.

While he was in the role for little more than four months, his work with the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, upended the federal government and had an impact not just in the halls of power in Washington but around the world. He said he would cut trillions. That hasn't happened. But there have been real cuts. Thousands of jobs have gone and Trump and Musk have remained close despite some openly expressed policy differences.

Here's some of what's been said since Donald Trump came to power. Goage. Perhaps you've heard of it. Perhaps. GOJ, perhaps you've heard of it, perhaps, which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign.

The president spoke about that at every rally. The people voted for major government reform and that's what people are going to get. They're going to get what they voted for. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw! We are moving fast so we will make mistakes but we'll also fix the mistakes very quickly. So I think that there are some worthy things, but overall, if you say what is the bang for the buck, I would say it was not very good. And there was far too much of what USAID was doing

was influencing elections in ways that I think were dubious and do not stand the light of day. Elon, I love the double F, right? Yeah. Thank you. God. It's the only one that can do it. Well, Mr. President, they say I wear a lot of hats. And as you can see, it's true.

Even my hat has a hat. The vast majority of people in this country really respect and appreciate you. And this whole room can say that very strongly. Really been a tremendous help. You opened up a lot of eyes stay as long as you want. At some point, I guess, he wants to get back home to his cars. In a farewell news conference in the Oval Office, President Trump called Elon Musk the greatest businessman the world has ever produced and then listed some of the savings he claims Doge has made. He said, he's been a great businessman.

He's been a great businessman. He's been a great businessman. He's been a great businessman. He's been a great businessman. He's been a great businessman. He's been a great businessman. He's been a great businessman. He's been a great businessman. He's been a great businessman. At a farewell news conference in the Oval Office, President Trump called Elon Musk the greatest businessman the world has ever produced and then listed some of the savings he claims Doge has made. Doge cancelled $101 million for DEI contracts at the Department of Education, $59 million for illegal alien hotel rooms in New York City, $42 million for social and behavioral change in

Uganda, $20 million for Arab Sesame Street in the Middle East. Nobody knows what that's all about. Nobody's been able to find it. $8 million for making mice transgender. Many of those, I could sit here all day and read things just like that, but we have other things to do. Donald Trump went on to say this is only the start and big savings would follow. Mr Musk said he'd remain an adviser to the White House and thank the President. I look forward to continuing to be a friend and adviser to the President, continuing to

support the Doge team. And we are relentlessly pursuing $8 trillion in waste and fraud reductions which will benefit the American taxpayer. So that's it really. Thank you Mr President. Thank you. So what did our North America correspondent Gary O'Donoghue make of it all? Well I think it was sort of an extraordinary send-off really. You know quite a lot of times when people decide to leave the Trump orbit it's not in the best of circumstances and

you know they often fall out with Donald Trump. Well these two don't seem to have fallen out. Donald Trump lavished praise on Elon Musk, gave him a wooden box with a golden key in it and all that kind of thing and they said they would remain friends and that Elon Musk would continue to advise the President. So I think in many ways, while this wasn't on the schedule, I think they thought it was kind of a last moment, maybe we should give him a bit of a send-off and he certainly got that. And the overriding message of the whole thing was that we're still mates, we'll still be in touch,

we'll still be discussing all these things even though Elon Musk won't be doing the job anymore. Do you do a good job? What's your assessment of his time in the White House? Well, I mean the target changed quite a lot. When he was on the campaign trail he claimed he would cut $2 trillion from discretionary federal spending. Now that's about a third of what the government spends and has control over. When they came into office that turned into a trillion and as of now their claim is that they've cut about $175 billion. Now a BBC analysis into those numbers says that around half of that is you know Identified has some specifics by it, but only around a quarter has sort of documentation to back it up So a lot of that is being taken on trust

It also doesn't account for some of the costs they've incurred while doing this not least having to rehire You know a load of federal employees who they mistakenly fired and there's court cases and all that kind of thing that will have costs associated with it. Nevertheless, Elon Musk said that he believed that quote, over time, unquote, the trillion dollar figure could be reached, but we don't know how long that will take. We also don't know whether his leaving will kind of take the wind out of the sails a bit, whether the focus will drift onto

other things. I mean who's going to be there really forcing it through? I think that's the question. And what about the nature of the second Trump administration? The president is surrounded by people who agree with him basically. That might be even more the case after Elon Musk's departure. Yes he is certainly sorry. He has staffed his administration in a very different way to the first time around. He picked people who he thought would come around to his way of thinking. Many of them did not.

Even at cabinet level they did not. This is a very, very different bunch and they are very much signed up to not just the programme, but also the desire Donald Trump has to be affirmed and reaffirmed personally a lot of the time. So they do that. So yeah, it's a very, very different administration. And Elon Musk has had some differences with Donald Trump, not least this week over there, his tax legislation. But, you know, his time has come to an end and Donald Trump didn't really go for him over that, even though there was a criticism. Gary O'Donoghue with me from Washington. The United Nations has sounded another alarm

bell for Gaza, warning everyone there is at risk of famine, with Israel allowing so little aid in while continuing its military action. And with no signs of a breakthrough in ceasefire talks, Palestinians see little hope of enough food or medicine reaching them any time soon. Jens Lech from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says civilians are suffering. This limited number of truckloads that are coming in is a trickle. It is drip-feeding food into an area on the verge of catastrophic hunger. It's not a flood. Gaza is the hungriest place on earth. Staff at the last hospital in northern Gaza have said Israeli

forces are carrying out a forced evacuation of patients and health workers. Israel doesn't allow international journalists independent access to Gaza, so from Jerusalem, here's our Middle East correspondent Lucy Williamson. At El Alda Hospital today, the siren sounded for its own emergency. The last functioning hospital in northern Gaza, now the latest casualty of the war.

Staff trapped inside for the past two weeks by Israeli forces carried patients and supplies to ambulances waiting in the rubble. The patients we are carrying them more than 300 meters because the the ambulances is far away of the of the hospital because the roads are totally destroyed. Dr Mohamed Sala allowed us, the director, to send us these audio messages as he left. We are really very sad that we evacuated the hospital. The Israeli occupation forces threatened us that if we will not evacuate, they will enter and kill who is inside the hospital or bombing the hospital. We put his claims to Israel's army, but they haven't yet provided a response.

Israel says it continues to target what it calls terrorist infrastructure across the Gaza Strip. But with little health care or aid in the north, there are fears that Israel is making northern Gaza unlivable to push its population to the south, that piece by piece Gaza will be evacuated just as its hospitals were. Sudan is facing one of the world's largest humanitarian crises since war broke out between the country's army and the paramilitary group the rapid support forces the RSF two years ago. On Friday the World Food Programme reported the RSF were repeatedly shelling its warehouses in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. In recent weeks more than 500 people have been killed and

tens of thousands have been displaced. Our Africa correspondent Anne Soy told me more from Nairobi. Our Africa correspondent Anne Soy tells me more from Nairobi. The World Food Programme said that their warehouses in El Fasha in North Dapho were repeatedly shelled and they are accusing RSF of doing that. Now El Fasha is the capital of North Dapho region and it's the only area in the wide Dapho region that is still under the control of the army, the national army, which has been fighting against the rapid support forces. It has been surrounded by the RSF for over a year and in recent weeks they have made an attempt at gaining control of the city. They have been bombing markets,

they've been bombing camps for internally displaced people and therefore the World Food Program believes that the shelling was coming from the RSF. We haven't had a response from them yet. However, the WFP says that their staff were not injured, they are all safe and accounted for. And help me with this Anne, how does it help the RSF to be shelling a food warehouse? It could be the RSF trying to gain access into these warehouses and looting, which they have done in the past, looting the food for themselves, for the fighters and then on the other hand also just trying to make it more difficult for people to try and wrest control from the military of this region that is the only stronghold for the army in Darfur.

And as this civil war continues, elsewhere in the country the military have been pushing the RSF back, but less so in the north. That's right, and we saw that the escalation of fighting in Darfur and the attempt by RSF to finally seize control of al-Fasher was happening at the same time it was losing control in the capital Khartoum, and now the army says that it has taken full control of Khartoum and essentially kicked the RSF out of the capital. And the rhetoric that we're hearing from both sides is not one of wanting to come to the table to negotiate. The army says that it is resolute, that it will fight until it gains victory.

The RSF in the past have been more willing to come to the table, but that is when they controlled Khartoum. And we have seen the fighting now moving to other areas such as Kordofan, where RSF is trying to gain ground. And soy with me from Nairobi. In Thursday's podcast we reported on the sea of mud, rock and ice which practically wiped the small village of Blatton in southern Switzerland off the map, the catastrophe caused by the nearby unstable glacier. Now a new study has found that nearly 40% of the world's glacier ice will be lost even if global temperatures stabilize at their current levels. Researchers say 75 percent of glaciers will melt if global warming reaches 2.7 Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Some are predicting that will happen by the end of this century. Here's our climate reporter Mark Pointing. Get used to the sound of this.

Glaciers melting at a rapid pace. Scientists say the sobering truth is that this will continue even if global temperatures are stabilised at their current levels. That's because the world has been warming so quickly due to human activities that these frozen rivers of ice are way out of balance with today's climate. But the authors of the new study argue that there is also reason for hope. They say that limiting warming to the international 1.5 degree target could still save half of today's glacier ice. The study's co-author, Professor Daniel Farinotti of the Federal Institute for Technology in Zurich, says this is crucial for coastal populations. If you look at the very large scale, sea level change is one of the main issues. So you can melt

enough glaciers as to make sea levels rise. And this is an issue not necessarily because the glaciers are melting, but because there is very many people living kind of very close to the sea. The hazards posed by melting ice have been further highlighted by the partial destruction this week of the Swiss village of Blattn, when a nearby glacier collapsed under the weight of rock debris. Researchers say the scale was unprecedented in modern Switzerland. And while the link between this particular event and rising temperatures is uncertain at the moment, scientists expect climate change to bring further hazards in the years ahead. Our climate reporter, Mark Pointing.

And still to come in the Global News Podcast. For people who support the right to choose to have an abortion, his creation, his development has been increasingly groundbreaking. We look back at the life of the man who invented the abortion pill. This podcast is brought to you by Wise. Wise is the fast, affordable way to get the currency you need at your fingertips. Tap the WISE multi-currency card to spend pounds in London or download the app to move pesos to Mexico City. WISE always gives you a fair exchange rate with no markups and no hidden fees. So when you

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Lithuania has broken away from the Soviet Union and declared itself a fully independent sovereign state. Basketball. The amazing sports stories wherever you get your BBC podcasts. The Shangri-La dialogue, Asia's top defense summit, has historically been the setting for top-level encounters between the US and China. It's an arena for the superpowers to set out their vision for security in the region. It opened on Friday in Singapore with a keynote speech from the French President Emmanuel Macron. Our key challenge is how to preserve peace and stability and prosperity in this current environment and in a moment when the competition between China and the United States for global

leadership could create constraints and a side effect for each of us without us willing or even able to imagine handing our interests over to one or the other how to react. Our security correspondent Frank Gardner told us more about the takeaway messages. So we've had a very forthright keynote speech here by the French president Emmanuel Macron who is currently touring the region. He's had a lot of bilateral meetings, but he's had a very strong message that he delivered to a big audience here of defense chiefs, defense ministers, diplomats, spies, journalists, you name it. And his message, I think his strongest message, was that if, as he puts it, we let Russia take territory in Ukraine, then what kind of a message does that

send for Taiwan and the Philippines? China has said that it wants to take back, as it puts it, the island democracy of Taiwan, and the Chinese Coast Guard is clashing almost daily with Filipino fishermen over fishing rights in the South China Sea. He talked about North Korea. He said that if China doesn't want Western interference in this region, then it needs to rein in North Korea, which is, after all, sending troops to Europe to fight Ukrainians on Russia's behalf. He talked about needing to create a coalition on strategic autonomy, as he puts it, of European and Asian nations warning that they mustn't fall into a trap of being essentially casualties, collateral damage between two big superpowers, the US and China.

And he also talked about the need to avoid double standards of being accused of defending Ukraine but not doing enough to defend the rights of Palestinians, which is why he said they condemned the actions of Israel. He said, we cannot abandon Gaza. So there were a lot of different messages on different topics there. Tomorrow, we've got Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, who's going to be giving his, laying out his address, which he is almost certainly going to be talking about Taiwan and hopefully giving some kind of a clue as to what US policy is on its big strategic rivalry with China in the Pacific Ocean.

Frank Gardner in Singapore. Taylor Swift has brought back the rights to her first six albums ending a long-running legal battle over the ownership of her music. She said her greatest dream had come true. Here's our Arts correspondent, David Siliteau. It's a saga that began in 2019 when music manager Scooter Braun bought Taylor Swift's former record label and with it the rights to her first six albums. Taylor Swift was not happy.

She wanted to buy the master tapes herself and fought back by re-recording her albums and stopping the originals being licensed for movies and commercials. Six years on the investment fund that now owns the master tapes has agreed to sell them to the singer. In a statement on her website she says all her singles, videos, album art, her entire life's work, now belongs to her. The abortion pill was first approved for use in France in 1988. Ever since it's had a significant impact on many societies, it offered a non-surgical method of ending early pregnancies and the fact it could be posted by mail hugely increased its availability. It also sharpened the disputes about abortion rights

and became something of a symbol of these ideological divides. The French scientist Étienne-Emile Beaulieu, who invented the abortion pill, has died at the age of 98 in Paris. Pam Bellac is the health and science reporter at the New York Times and spoke to my colleague Owen Bennett-Jones. He was the leading person who developed the abortion pill Mifflopristone. And he came up with this idea that if he was able to sort of rearrange a molecule in a way that could inhibit pregnancy, that if women could take this pill and it could block the development of pregnancy, allowing them to terminate pregnancies in cases where they needed to. Right, which of course is highly controversial and he did pay a price for that, didn't he,

in terms of threats against him and so on? Yeah, he had a lot of opposition, but he also had a lot of supporters. This was at a time when abortion was not legal in a number of places and women were still trying to find ways to carry out abortions when they felt they needed to and the methods that they were using were very unsafe. His point of view was, this is going to be something that some women are going to need to do. We should provide a way for them to do so safely. So yes, it was very controversial, both as it still is, obviously a very, very divisive issue. But for people who support the right to choose to have an abortion, his creation,

his development has been increasingly groundbreaking. Yeah. And I mean, a lot of the accounts of his life talk about the impact he had on Western societies, Western culture. Do you tell us, I mean, presumably the morning after pill, the abortion pill is now available pretty much globally, right? Yeah, it is. Yes. Certainly the morning after pill, the abortion pill is now available pretty much globally, right? Yeah, it is.

Yes. I mean, Mephroprystone is available globally. It is restricted heavily in a number of places and it continues to be restricted to some degree in the United States. But it has become more available. There are generic versions now. And, you know, in the United States, for example, more than two-thirds of abortions are carried out using this pill now. Gosh, that's an amazing figure. And he had quite a hinterland.

I mean, I don't know how much you know about all this, but he was in the French resistance against Nazi occupation when he was 15. And then in the 60s, he got to know Andy Warhol. So he's a very interesting man. Yes, he's quite a colorful and charismatic figure and very courageous. He transported guns as a teenager for the French resistance. He briefly joined the Communist Party and then he quit that when he differed with their ideology. He spent some time in America and hung out with artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. He's just a very cultured, just a really fascinating person. When I spent time with him in Paris a couple of

years ago, he was already, you know, 96 years old at quite an advanced age, but he was still able to recall all of this incredible history and he was very interested in painting and art and music and just a really fascinating, fascinating person. Archaeologists in Guatemala say they've unearthed the remains of a 3,000-year-old Mayan city in the depths of the rainforest in the north of the country. The city, named Los Abuelos, Spanish for grandparents, is about 20 kilometres from another important Mayan site in Huachactun. Tim Franks spoke to Diane Davies, who's a Mayan archaeologist, about the discovery.

Diane Davies, M.D. Los Abuelos, amongst other recent sites that have been found, have shown that the Maya were a lot more advanced than previously thought at a sort of earlier time period as well. So we have, in Maya archaeology, we have this sort of main peak period called the Classic period, sort of AD 200 to 900. And that's where we assumed we have the peak of Maya civilization with writing and pyramids and so forth. But from various discoveries, it's sort of showing that actually no, the Maya were much more developed earlier on in time. You mentioned that this site's been called Los Abuelos, the

grandparents. Why is that? Because there's two rock sculptures that have been found and basically they are sort of male and female, they could be grandparents or perhaps ancestors. And that's maybe why they were built perhaps in sort of dedication to the building that was created there. They found a few other sites nearby. I mean they mentioned remains of pyramids that are there, there's a ceremonial centre. So when excavations are carried out they'll be able to give us a lot more information on the sort of

society that lived there. So yeah, it's sort of an exciting find and it's given us further proof about how to develop the myow work. Salt marshes, those muddy flats around coasts and estuaries where plants have adapted to being washed daily by salty sea water, are a haven for bird life but could also hold some secrets or clues to adapting to climate change. Salt marshes are estimated to cover about 55,000 square kilometres of the planet and are found in many coastal regions including in Australia, the US, Europe, China, even Madagascar. Oliver Conway heard more about them from our science correspondent Victoria

Gill. They play a lot of different roles actually, they're kind of these spongy buffer zones between the land and the sea so they provide a natural flood defence. And because they are these open, muddy, creek-ridden tidal flatlands, they were seen as really quite useless across a lot of the UK. So this was a UK-focused study, but there are salt marshes, of course, all over the world. They've been drained for agriculture, but that's been a real problem because it's meant that we've lost this muddy habitat and we've lost this way that this carbon is locked away in the mud, which is what these scientists were studying. I went out to a salt marsh just off the north west coast of England with a team from the WWF and also with Alex Piggott from RSPB, who was waxing lyrical to me about just how incredibly important salt marshes are for wading birds. The River Estuary is a mixture of

salt marsh and a lot of open mud flats and that is what is important. It is like a service station for birds. They can reach down to different depths you know some of them are taking mollusks kind of not too far down others are going for those kind of lug worms and things further into the mud. So as well as being really good for the breeding birds out here getting that food source is so important in the winter as well. Those mud flats we get over a quarter of a million birds that spend the winter here. Just feeding, yeah just in that mud, in that water, sifting and digging. So waders, wild fowl as well, curlew, oyster catchers in the hundreds, thousands, probing in that live, loving it.

Alex Piggott from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. So what can be done to protect these areas? Well this is partly what this research that's been led by the WWF is after. It's looking at how we can value salt marshes more. So there's a lot of work that's been done by researchers around the world looking at salt marsh mud and how much carbon that contains because they're this quite unique system where because they're flooded by the tides, all of that mud and decomposing material, plant matter, gets buried in deep layers and it kind of lays down new layers of mud that keep the carbon from that plant material that's breathed in in the summer as those plants grow underground. And this new

study has put greenhouse gas monitoring stations on this restored, lovely, healthy marshland. What they found over the course of a year is that the marshland plants, this carpet of long grasses and other plants, breathe in more carbon dioxide in the summer than they breathe out in the winter. And that's really important because that means that there's a system in these marshes for sucking in and locking away planet warming carbon dioxide, locking away greenhouse gases. So what they want is for salt marshes to be included in an official inventory of how much carbon is taken in and how much is emitted every year. And that's something that the UK government is using to kind of calculate its progress towards net zero. In recognising the official role that salt marshes have in protecting the planet from climate change, what they say is this

will provide more incentive and more funding to bring back and restore these habitats because in the UK we've lost about 85% of our salt marshes in the last 150 years or so. Our science correspondent Victoria Gill. And that's all from us for now. There'll be a new edition of Global News to download later. If you'd like to comment on this podcast, drop us an email globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk or you'll find us on x at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag globalnewspod. This edition was mixed by James Piper, the producers were Alison Davis and Judy Frankel. The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Andrew Peach. Thank you for listening and until next time, goodbye. time. Goodbye. the world.