Global News Podcast - President Trump again threatens to annex Greenland

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

The US claims that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority to deter threats from Russia and China in the Arctic. Washington hasn't ruled out the use of military force. Also: Ukraine and allies say they've made progress in talks to ensure the country's security in the event of a ceasefire with Russia; the Venezuelan military and government crack down on dissent; the anti-government protests that have engulfed Iran; an inside look at one of the world's first quantum computers; and Lego's high-tech upgrade.The Global News Podcast brings you the breaking news you need to hear, as it happens. Listen for the latest headlines and current affairs from around the world. Politics, economics, climate, business, technology, health – we cover it all with expert analysis and insight.Get the news that matters, delivered twice a day on weekdays and daily at weekends, plus special bonus episodes reacting to urgent breaking stories. Follow or subscribe now and never miss a moment.Get in touch: [e-mail]

This is the global news podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Will Chalk and in the early hours of Wednesday the 7th of January, these are our main stories. The US says it's discussing options to, as it put it, acquire Greenland, including the use of military force. Ukraine and its allies say they've made progress in talks to ensure the country's security in the event of a ceasefire with Russia. and the Venezuelan military and government continue to crack down on dissent. Also in this podcast, we get the latest on the anti-government protests that have engulfed Iran. And we actually ran a benchmark computation on this chip, which took just a few minutes, but it would have taken 10 septillion years on today's top supercomputer.

An inside look at one of the world's first quantum computers. Over the course of countless TV interviews, press conferences and speeches, Donald Trump has made a lot of claims, and it means sifting out the ones he's immediately planning to follow through on isn't always easy. But one idea that the US might take over Greenland seems to be increasingly picking up steam, so much so that it dominated a meeting of a group of Ukraine's allies, the so-called Coalition of the Willing,

in France on Tuesday. The meeting was supposed to be about security guarantees for Ukraine. Now, a number of those guarantees were established, but the Paris meeting also made a joint declaration on the issue of Greenland after Donald Trump again threatened to try and annex the island using force if necessary. Greenland has been owned by Denmark since 1814 and the European statement promised to defend the vast North Atlantic Islands territorial integrity. Trina Mack is a Danish MP and a member of the country's Foreign Affairs Committee. She's highly critical of the US's seeming contempt for international law. It's a very weird comment to come with in the 21st century

where we base state relations on the UN Charter that states quite clearly that people have the right to self-determination and we have to respect the state sovereignty. Now it's quite obvious that the current US administration has a very flexible approach. to international law. But a lot of European countries, Nordic countries, Canada has come out in support of Green's right to independence and protection. What counts right now that other countries step up and stand firm on international law. I asked our North America correspondent David Willis whether the Americans were really threatening to invade Greenland if Denmark

didn't hand it over voluntarily. It could really hardly be plainer. I have to say, well, a statement from the White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt, says the president and his team are discussing a range of options to acquire Greenland and that utilizing the U.S. military is one of those options. And that statement calls Greenland's acquisition an important foreign policy goal and a national security priority of the United States. It was no doubt intended to counter the statement, that is. European leaders' support for Denmark and the claim by Denmark's prime minister that a military attack by the US would, as he put it, spelled the end of NATO. Meanwhile, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that the United States wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark, not invade it.

And the Reuters News Agency, quoting an unnamed senior U.S. official, reported that another option was forming a so-called compact of free association, in other words, a close security alliance with Greenland. We've heard lots from the U.S., from Donald Trump, especially about why they need Greenland, why they want Greenland. But have we heard anything as a justification for why they should have Greenland? Well, that's a very good question, given that Greenland is the most vastly populated territory in the world with one of the harshest climates, 80% of it is covered in ice. According to the White House Press Secretary, acquiring Greenland is vital to deterring the United States' adversaries in the region. And by that, Caroline Levitt, I think it's referring to Russia and China, both of which have expressed interest in Greenland. not least, of course, because of the natural resources that lie beneath its ice caps, including those rare earth minerals such as iron and uranium.

And those minerals are likely to become more accessible, its thought, as global warming leads to the melting of the ice cap. And such resources have been a focus, of course, of the Trump administration elsewhere in the world, including, of course, in Ukraine. Yet, whilst Donald Trump will covets Greenland, opinion polls show that most Greenlanders, anyway, aren't quite so keen. And whilst they favour their eventual independence from Denmark, there is overwhelming opposition on the part of Greenlanders to becoming part of the United States. David Willis. Well, let's return to what the Paris meeting was officially about security guarantees from Ukraine's allies.

When we recorded the last global news podcast, the summit was underway, we now know what was achieved. The agreements included a declaration of intent by France and Britain to deploy troops as part of a post-cease-fire multinational force. But the delegates also acknowledged that peace in Ukraine may still be a long way off and that Russia must accept that any deal would have to involve compromise. Hosting the talks in the Alise Palace was the French president Emmanuel Macron. coalition on the basis of all the work done in recent months, so we have consolidated our approaches. Firstly, with the setting up ceasefire monitoring mechanisms to be placed under American leadership with contributions from several states that said they were willing and able to do so,

then long-term support, firstly to Ukrainian armed forces that are and will remain in the front line of defense and deterrence against aggression. We also heard from the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He was speaking through a translator and he had this to say. We want to be ready so that when diplomacy reaches peace, we can place the forces of the coalition of the willing. The details will be set out in other documents. We're working on which countries are willing to contribute

and guarantee security in the air. At sea and on land, we are assessing which forces are necessary. Also at the Coalition of the Willing Summit was our Ukraine correspondent, James Waterhouse. He sent this assessment of what the talks achieved. As their name suggests, this mostly European coalition has always said it's willing to help Ukraine after the fighting stops, but never how. In Paris, though, there was the first bit of detail, a promise from this. the UK and France to send troops once a ceasefire is in place. We're told thousands as part of a reassurance force across land, sea and air.

This is a vital part of our ironcast commitment to stand with Ukraine for the long term. This group of almost 30 nations also promised to help monitor the frozen front lines to make sure fighting doesn't break out. But the most influential people in the room weren't. season politicians, but Donald Trump's friend and real estate investor Steve Wittkoff and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both now senior ambassadors. European confidence to help Ukraine with troops has been hampered with an American reluctance to step in if there was a direct confrontation with Russia, although not now, they

claimed. The president does not back down from his commitments. He is strong for the country of Ukraine and for a peace deal. Those words might have been more reassuring if Donald Trump hadn't staged an extraordinary military intervention in Venezuela and repeated his desires to take over Greenland, a Danish territory. This US delegation has also been accused of being more friendly to Russia than Ukraine. Before the meeting has even started,

European leaders have put out this statement in support of Greenland after Donald Trump's repeated claims of wanting to annex the terrorism. So you have this scenario where the ambitions of NATO's most powerful member are making the rest of the alliance nervous. Europe is trying to unite around Ukraine against Russian aggression, as well as attempting to take America with it. And we don't even know what Moscow will agree to. In these geopolitical times, this is a continent having to tread carefully.

James Waterhouse at the Paris Summit. Now, if you think of all the things we can achieve on computers right now, then imagine they were a trillion times faster, it's a pretty mind-boggling thought. Well, quantum computing uses quantum mechanics to create a new type of computer able to solve problems that ordinary computers can't. If successful, it would make possible calculations that would take today's systems trillions of years and help unlock discoveries in many fields. The building blocks of quantum computers are called qubits, which are incredibly fast, but also very sensitive, difficult to control and prone to errors. Our correspondent Faisal Islam has been to visit one cutting-edge laboratory in California. We've just arrived in Santa Barbara a couple of hours away from Los Angeles, and we're about to visit one of the most important technological developments in the world right now, which is the quantum. lab of Google. So we're going to go in and actually have a look at one of the world's

first functioning most advanced quantum computers. Hello. I'm Hartmut. I'm the founder and lead of the quantum AI lab. I'm Julian Kelly. Yeah, senior director of hardware. Thanks for showing us around this facility. Okay, so we're coming into a restricted area now and we're starting to see the real deal, the actual conversion of this. high theoretical physics into an actual computer. Let's take a look at our latest chip called Willow. The chip is actually comprised of two parts. A larger part here, this large silver rectangle.

This is our control electronics chip. And the qubits themselves, they sit in this little darker squares. The exponential power of quantum is what you're trying to harness with this chip we're holding here. Yes, for certain computations. the power of these chips is rather mind-boggling. So in December we actually ran a benchmark computation on this chip, which took just a few minutes here on the Willow chip,

but it would have taken 10 septillion years, this is the one with 25 zeros, on today's top supercomputer. So there's a special feature of this process, which it happens at extremely low temperatures. And Julian wants to show us just how. how low that temperature is, with some liquid nitrogen? Liquid nitrogen. Yeah, it's around minus 200 degrees Celsius or 77 Kelvin. So we've got here just, for example, a nice little clover,

and we can dump some liquid nitrogen onto it. And so what's the relevance of the cold to the chip? Our chips are superconducting, and when you get certain metals cold, in our case, aluminum, they become superconducting, and they have zero resistance. It is one of the coldest places in the universe. older than you'd find in outer space or really anywhere else. And then just behind us we have this sort of bronze barrel which has an intricate lattice of wires going up to some connectors

and a series of golden and silver discs. And this is the quantum computer. Yes, so this is the quantum computer. And so there's a couple of different pieces to it. At the very bottom, this coldest stage is where our willow chip actually lives. And then these different plates that kind of ascend vertically that all these wires are connecting. They go up higher and higher in temperatures.

So at the very top, we have room temperature. So the wires connect our quantum chip to these control electronics that are sitting in racks behind the computer room temperature. And those are the things that actually program and manipulate the chip. Take us 20 years into the future.

What are we doing with quantum computers? I think we will use it to help with many problems that humankind has. It will enable us to discover drugs more efficiently. It will help us make food production more efficient. It will help us with the energy economy, like to produce energy, to transport energy, to store energy. I think just by virtue of being able to model nature at its finest level,

to essentially speak the language of nature. This allows us to understand nature much better. and then unlock its secret to build technologies that make life more pleasant for all of us. Faisal Islam. Still to come on this podcast, it's not just computers, LEGO's getting a high-tech upgrade too. So you hear the door unlock, the engine start. As I move the car around, you'll see it respond.

Even swerving around corners. Maybe I'm going to crash it. But does it really need it? First, though, let's turn to the situation in Venezuela. The acting President Delci Rodriguez has declared seven days of morning for members of the military who were killed during that US raid to capture leader Nicolas Maduro. As Donald Trump celebrates Mr Maduro's removal and transfer to the United States,

residents of Caracas say military personnel are visible on every street corner of the capital as the government of Delci Rodriguez continues to crack down on dissent. This man told the BBC that while he was happy at Maduro's downfall, he hasn't been marking the event publicly. On the outside, in the street, it is quiet, it is nervousness. There is still the same secret police, the same political police, the same Gestapo, which is the desecim and the Sevin. Those guys are still the same guys in the street.

So you can't really go out to protest. You know, I delete my phone every time I go out of my house. For more, I spoke to our correspondent Will Grant, who is on the Colombian border with Venezuela. I started by asking him about this military presence. On one level, I feel like it's the obvious thing that the Venezuelan government would do. They were always going to mobilize the military

from the moment that those military targets inside Venezuela were targeted by U.S. forces. And, of course, that was all part of their operation to remove nuclear. Nicolas Maduro from Venezuelan soil. So on that level, it's not unexpected, but of course it does represent greater repression, more crackdowns. And don't forget that in Venezuela there is a second group of armed forces in a sense, which are the militia groups loyal to both Nicholas Maduro, but more broadly to the Bolivarian Revolution. They have been out in force too. And to have

these sort of armed civilian militias known as collectillos, intimidating the populists, turning out in force. As we were hearing from that Venezuelan in the clip there, it really does paint a very, very intimidating and frightening picture, particularly when we add the uncertainty of not knowing exactly what's coming next. We've heard lots of comments from Donald Trump on this, and I think in a lot of them he sounds quite celebratory about the military action. How's that going down in the region. Well, I think obviously there are those who never wanted Nicholas Maduro in power. You know, I haven't wanted to see him there for a long time and voted against him only to see him remain in power after the last election. So they have that relief that he's gone, but they can't

turn out to celebrate it anyway because of the intimidation we've just been talking about. And maybe they don't necessarily share that celebratory tone that you're referring to that Donald Trump is showing when he addressed Republicans and so on, because they just don't feel that. because at the moment it is so uncertain, it is so dangerous for ordinary Venezuelans. They feel like the thing is on a knife edge. They are, of course, trying to return to a semblance of daily life. I was talking to a Venezuelan friend. She said people are out shopping.

They're beginning to think about sending their kids back to school after the holidays next week. Things like that, the semblance of normal life. But it is anything but normal in so many ways. The United States has just launched a first strike against a Latin American nation since the Cold War and remove a sitting head of government. So they're still sort of processing all of that altogether. So that tone doesn't necessarily help. And I mentioned you're on the Colombian border. What about reaction from Venezuela's neighbours in the region? Well, it's been an interesting one from Colombia in the sense that the first thing they did too was move troops to this border region

where I am. And they are showing a pretty clear presence. There are tanks at the border crossings. There are troops in larger numbers. 30,000 more troops were sent here. They, in part, are monitoring the movement of irregular forces, as they put them. That is the left-wing rebel groups, again, who are protected by and who have been allied to the left-wing revolution in Venezuela. So there is tension really all over. That's this side. And, of course, out to the Caribbean, there's the question of Cuba,

which is so dependent on Venezuelan oil and really doesn't know what Delci Rodriguez will mean for their future either. Will Grant there on the Venezuelan-Colombian border. Now, President Trump has said very little about the continuing repression that Will was mentioning in Venezuela. But he has said he'll work with the new president, Delci Rodriguez. Whatever his plans, though, Donald Trump appears to have sidelined the opposition leader Maria Carina Machado, who late last year won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to bring democracy to Venezuela. She said she wants to return home, but it's not clear when that might happen or what kind of reception she would get.

Our South America correspondent Ione Wells reports. Maria Corina Machado has long been the main face of Venezuela's opposition. She was banned from running in the last elections in 2024, but she attracted huge crowds on the election campaign. Opposition parties united behind a candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, to take her place, and afterwards they published tallies from electronic voting machines, which they said definitively showed they, not Nicolas Maduro, had won the election. She has been living in hiding ever since, but briefly travelled to Oslo last

to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. Donald Trump had made it clear he believed he should win the prize and there is some speculation. It is why he claimed in a news conference on Saturday that she did not have support or respect in Venezuela. Despite this, she continued to praise his intervention in an interview with Fox News.

I do want to say today, on behalf of the Venezuelan people, how grateful we are for his courageous vision, the historic elections he has taken against these narcos, terrorist regime to start dismantling this structure and bringing Maduro to justice. Since the U.S. intervention, she has called for the release of political prisoners in Venezuela. For months, she has advocated closer ties with the U.S. and a free market pro-business approach, including an opening up of the oil industry to foreign companies.

She told Fox News her movement was ready to win a free election, but she added she had not spoken to Donald Trump since the 10th of October. President Trump, though, seems to have different plans. He said the US had to fix the country before elections could be held and has reiterated his belief the US is in charge. In reality, the Venezuelan government is still running the country, but he has threatened the new president, Delci Rodriguez, with a worse fate than Mr Maduro if she doesn't do, in his words, the right thing. Ione Wells. Anti-government demonstrations have again fled up in the Iranian capital, Tehran. Large crowds staged a sit-in at the city's Grand Bazaar, chanting slogans,

against the country's supreme leader Ali Homeni. There were clashes between police and protesters, with security forces firing tear gas and closing down areas of the city's historic market. BBC Persian, together with BBC verifies Merlin Thomas, have this assessment of what's been happening on the ground. Iranians have taken to the streets in the largest protests the country has seen since 2022.

Protesters stood in front of police water cannon, refusing to move. Others shouted death to the dictator and set fire to statues. Anger initially broke out in the capital Tehran on the 28th of December after the value of the country's currency sharply dropped. In the latest protest, police and security forces seemed more restrained at first. But that changed this week. Verified footage shows a demonstration taking place outside a hospital.

People stand chanting. Then security forces opened fire. Using verified funeral videos and interviews with family members and friends, BBC Persian has confirmed the identities of at least 15 people reported dead since the 28th of December. Human rights groups, HRANA, says at least 35 people have been killed. This violent crackdown by the authorities coincided with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's first public reaction to the unrest, when he said that rioters must be put down. The Iranian regime is already facing regional instability.

instability and a crumbling economy. Now it must deal with the biggest wave of protest since 2022. Merlin Thomas. For generations, the humble plastic Lego brick has been a big part of children's toy boxes and the shelves of some slightly nerderier adults as well. But if you've got fond memories of making pew-poo and zoom noises as you played, that might soon be a thing of the past. Because after much secrecy. Legos unveiled some smart bricks, which it says will allow toys to come alive. Ina Aslam, built this report. Lego hasn't changed for nearly 100 years. You build an item out of tiny colorful bricks and then harness your imagination to play with it. The new 2x4 bricks look the same,

but have a tiny chip, sensors, LEDs and mini speakers. So you can now move around what you've built and, depending on what you're doing, the bricks light up and make sounds. The technology was demonstrated in a toy car at the CES show. So you hear the door unlocked, the engine start. As I move the car around, you'll see it respond. Even swerving around corners. Maybe I'm going to crash it. Here's do that.

Toy expert Peter Jenkinson says Lego's new creation is revolutionary and will allow the Danish company to move for the times. It features NFC, which is near-field communication inside, which enables these smart bricks to sense motion, position and distance. So it's a super clever brick. It's the biggest thing they've done for 50 years since they introduced the mini-figure. Lego has also released smart mini-figures with different personalities and smart tags as part of the new high-tech world.

The first smart sets will be Star Wars themed, so you'll be able to have realistic lights. Here are 2D2's hard to impersonation. and give Darth Vader a dramatic entrance. The Brits will also communicate with each other to decide whether you've delivered enough laser blasts to blow up a spacecraft. But many have voiced concern that in an age where children are turning to video games and iPad screens, introducing technology could undermine Lego's historic strength.

Josh Golan is from the NGO. fair play. Adding these smart bricks is actually going to undermine children's creativity and imagination, which was really the strong suit of Lego. And when we transfer that power of who's making the noise, who's driving the play, who's creating the story around what's happening with the toy from the child to the toy maker, we really lose a lot of what's so special about toys and play. But Lego's vice president, Tom Donaldson, says bricks that play back will inspire children. There's no screen inside. There's not even a power button on this thing. with a Lego smart brick responds to what kids do, generating reactions to their actions.

It becomes an instrument for their play, and it unleashes their imagination. Reactions from parents and older users have been mixed. Some say they would rather pay less and continue making the swoosh and pew-poo sounds themselves. But others are excited for the future, with one fan asking, when a Lego Titanic, complete with a smart brick playing Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On, might hit the market. I know Aslam. Although she didn't commit to the pew-poo noises quite like I did. That is 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 or the topics we've been covering, you can send us an email. Our address is Global Podcast at BBC.com.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service. Use the hashtag Global NewsPod. This edition was mixed by Nick Randall. the producer was Wendy Urquhart. The editor is Karen Martin and I'm Will Chalk. Until next time, goodbye.