Global News Podcast - Trump demands Iran's 'unconditional surrender'

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

Donald Trump has demanded Iran's "unconditional surrender" and is said to be deciding if the US will join Israeli strikes on Iran. Also: offloading e-waste in Thailand, and how a 3D printed face changed a man's life.

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The Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner, Nagas Mohammadi, has condemned the leaders of both nations saying they promised a better future but were taking their people to hell. Also in this podcast... Those businesses have expanded into what becomes a sort of a garbage site, an international garbage processing facility in Thailand, which is not what we want at all. How countries are offloading their e-waste in Thailand. In his election campaign, Donald Trump vowed to keep America

out of new wars and end existing ones. But US officials say the president is now considering attacking Iran alongside Israel. A final decision has not been made and there are reported to be disagreements among his security advisors. But President Trump has stepped up his rhetoric, demanding Iran's unconditional surrender and saying he knows where the Iranian supreme leader is hiding. The EU foreign policy chief, Kaya Callas, says US action against Iran would only make things worse. When it comes to United States getting involved, then it will definitely drag the region into

a border conflict and this is in nobody's interest. And from my call with Secretary of State Rubio, he emphasised that it's also not in their interest to be drawn into this conflict. Some of the MAGA movement's strongest cheerleaders, including Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have also criticised the idea of US involvement. But Mr Trump has pushed back, even lashing out at his intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard after she testified that Iran was not thought to be building a nuclear weapon. So is the president considering military

action against Iran? I asked our US State Department correspondent Tom Bateman. I have to say from my sense of the entire administration and particularly at the sort of senior levels in a national security establishment. There's never really a sense necessarily of the direction things are going other than what Donald Trump is going to decide to do directly himself on his own and he might change his mind at any given moment. So we're totally in the realms of speculation. I thought it was quite interesting that the Vice president JD Vance in a situation that has been basically this entire crisis its stages being marked by Posts on social media by both the president and the vice president the JD Vance said effectively There's a lot of speculation out there

Some of which is crazy But on the other hand Donald Trump has always been clear that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon and he may decide to take further action to stop Iran's nuclear enrichment. So clearly the threat of military action is heavily in the air. What we don't know is how close things are to a decision being made. We know there is a big movement of American military firepower towards the Middle East at the moment. Some of it may be signalling to try to put pressure on the Iranians to do the deal that Donald Trump wants. On the other hand this may be the early stages of a decision to join the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu in military action against Iran.

President Trump has said he's working on something better than a ceasefire. He's also posted the words unconditional surrender. Is it possible that there could be some kind of negotiated way out? Well he's always said that his preferred option is a deal and I think that makes sense for a whole range of reasons running from the domestic pressures on him that you mentioned from parts of his MAGA base. The fact that he has always seen himself as a world-class dealmaker, the fact, frankly, that he has taught repeatedly about wanting to win a Nobel Peace Prize, and he has

always seen sort of doing this deal alongside others as one that might help him get there. And he's always been quite plain and said, you know, I'd rather get a deal and do it that way. Now, remember he actually pulled the US out of a nuclear agreement with the Iranians, the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that was signed by the Obama leadership and other world powers back in 2015. So clearly the Iranians had done that deal but Donald Trump always says it wasn't strong enough and his would be tougher and more binding and last longer. But they were talking. Remember, they were due to have talks with the Iranians on this Sunday gone. Clearly, that is now

completely abandoned. But when Mr. Trump was asked about this in Canada over the last 24 hours, he wasn't ruling out the possibility that he might ask Steve Witkoff, his envoy, still to go and meet the Iranians. And so you have the level of rhetorical belligerence and the threats being utterly ramped up at the moment by Mr. Trump and the White House with a view they would suggest to still try and do a deal. But clearly at the same time, as I say, this big potential military deployment, the Iranians are going to be looking at with a deep level of distrust and suspicion. Of course after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many in the US are wary of a long involvement in a foreign adventure if you like.

How will the President's MAGA base respond if the US does attack Iran? You know I think that's been one of the most interesting elements of the last sort of three or four days in that, you know, in Congress, the vast majority, if not the majority of Republicans are still extremely pro-Israel. They fully back the many billions of dollars that is spent on arming Israel. And yet you have parts of the MAGA base, as you say, who say that they want to hold Donald Trump to his so-called America First policy that, in their words, they should drop Israel. Tom Bateman in Washington. Well, Israel and Iran have continued to launch attacks on each other's territory.

The UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, says it has detected the first signs of direct impacts by Israeli strikes on Iran's nuclear facility at Isfahan. 400 kilometres to the north, people have been scrabbling to evacuate the Iranian capital after President Trump warned all 10 million residents of Tehran to leave. For many Iranians though, fleeing the city isn't an option, as I heard from Mara Nabassi of the BBC Persian service. It's a city of 10 million people and evacuating at such a short notice is impossible for a lot of them. Some of them they don't have anywhere to go or they don't have transport

access to transportation. And even if they do, there's heavy traffic jam. A lot of people have been stuck in traffic for sometimes 11 hours when they want to leave the town. I talked to a pregnant woman who said that she cannot physically cope with being stuck in traffic for hours and so she decided to stay in Tehran. It's a very difficult situation but some people who live outside of Tehran have offered their homes to those who are living in the city. Some of them have offered those who don't have access to transportation, have offered them a ride. But still it's a very difficult situation for millions of people. Now Iran has already suffered a heavy bombardment from Israel.

How might it respond if it was attacked by the US as well? Iran has threatened previously that it will target US military bases in the region if the US gets directly involved in the war. But it really depends on how much military strength it still has because top Iranian military commanders have been assassinated. Iran's defense capabilities have been targeted over the past few days and Israel and now the US say that they have complete control of Iranian skies and Iran might also be cautious that if it does attack American military bases in the region it might come under even a heavier

attack by the US. Yeah, I mean given its weakened state and these threats from President Trump, might it come forward with concessions and negotiate? It's very difficult to say. Iran had previously said that, including the Supreme Leader and top officials, had said that Israel will not dare attack Iran. And now that it has happened, the situation has changed in the sense that Iran has always, the Islamic Republic in the past decades, have always prioritised its own survival. And if it comes to the point that it believes that its survival is at risk and is imminent, it might decide to surrender. But at that point, it might be too late. Baran Abbasi of the BBC Persian Service. Israel says it managed to block most of the missiles

fired from Iran on Tuesday. The Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar says regime change in Iran is not Israel's aim, although it might be the result. First, we cut the hands of the octopus when we dealt with Hamas and Hezbollah. Now we are dealing with the head of the octopus. We are dealing with the most significant threats and there are the ballistic threats and the nuclear threat and Those threats are combined with their allies to the Iranian axis. We are No doubt getting a progress in achieving this objective. Well, we're the latest from Israel Here's our correspondent Lucy Williamson in Tel Aviv

from Israel. Here's our correspondent Lucy Williamson in Tel Aviv. The missile attacks have continued all through last night and all through today, the last one just a couple of hours ago. But Israel's army is making the point that these barrages appear to be getting smaller and they say that's proof that their strategy of targeting Iran's launchers is working. Meanwhile, tonight there's been speculation on Israeli television about whether the United States will get involved in the military offensive and Israel's national security chief has come out tonight saying the war in Iran won't finish until the underground site at Fordow is attacked. That's the site that Israel is thought to have won American help for. Benjamin Netanyahu has been very

careful to say this is a US decision, but he's clearly very keen to have US support amid questions about where this war is going next and how it will end. Lucy Williamson in Tel Aviv and we'll have more on the Israel-Iran conflict later in the podcast. But now some other news and a 10th century burial site believed to have belonged to a noble Viking family has been uncovered by accident in Northern Denmark. The remarkable treasure trove was discovered during construction work. Richard Hamilton has the details. Archaeologists working at the site near Lispierre, a village to the north of Aarhus. As a trading hub on the mouth of the river of the same name,

Aarhus was one of Denmark's most important cities during the Viking Age. They found the site contained around 30 graves dating back to the 10th century, during the reign of King Harald Bluetooth. He's best known for unifying Denmark, introducing Christianity, building ring fortresses and giving his name to modern Bluetooth technology. Mats Raven is the archaeologist at the Morsgaard Museum in Aarhus. This could have been one of Harald Bluetooth's yarls or stewards. He was an important king who was building founding towns and some of those amazing ring forts that we know of. He made a very long bridge over a fjord

further south. He was an entrepreneur and he was gathering some important people around him who were taking care of certain regions. We see a strong tendency towards the concentration of power of one king. One of the graves, which scientists believed belonged to an important noble woman, contained a rare casket. And inside this, they found human teeth and hair, as well as pearls, a gold thread, and a pair of scissors. Vikings were buried with some of their possessions, believing they could take them with them to the afterlife.

Helle Strehle is the museum's conservator. This box is very well preserved. We got it up in total. Of course it's smashed, but all the bits and pieces are there and also there's something inside it. And in the grave lying somewhere else is a key. The final excavations at Lispierre are due to be completed this week. Experts will then begin the painstaking task of analysing the artefacts and pinning down their precise age. Richard Hamilton. And still to come on the Global News Podcast…

I feel much more comfortable in myself. If I look in a mirror, I look reasonable. How a 3D printed face has changed a man's life. Ever feel like car shopping is designed to make you second guess yourself? Is this a good price? Am I making the right choice? With CarGurus, you don't have to wonder. They have hundreds of thousands of cars from top rated dealers and advanced search tools, deal ratings and price history. So you know a great deal when you see one. That's cargurus.ca. Cargurus.ca. For over 75 years, Puerto Rico has been a trusted manufacturing hub, home to top global pharma companies and over 70 FDA-approved medical device plants. Today, with shifting US tariffs and rising mainland costs, it's the perfect time to reshore. Puerto Rico delivers

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E-waste from electrical and electronic products is a global problem as consumers ditch their old phones, computers and fridges, etc. Some of it gets exported generally from wealthier to poorer nations where recycling is cheaper and waste can be dumped more easily. Thailand has seen a big influx of e-waste and our correspondent Gideon Long has joined government officials on a visit to a plant in Chonburi province. There's a big warehouse full of piles of scrap metal and other junk. Some of it looks like it's car parts, bits of car engines. There are also smaller items, some keyboards, some circuit boards and lots of metal cables as well.

Suddenly a man appears and the government officials start questioning him. Is this man the owner? They call him the manager, director. He's one of the managers of the factory? The man says he's just looking after the site for its Chinese owners. He says the scrap all came into Thailand from abroad. In a second warehouse, we find a big crushing machine which is used to grind the waste into a kind of gravel and everywhere you look there are huge sacks of this stuff.

I asked my translator Mao what's being said. This is obviously is e-waste because you look at this you will see so many like cable and metal mix here. Some spring and board. And the woman who heads the ministry team is still grilling the manager of the site to find out what's going on here. Eventually they tell the man that he and his Chinese associates are likely to be prosecuted and we leave. Thailand is not getting anything from these businesses at all.

That's Thailand's industry minister, Akhenat Promfan. I met him in Bangkok. There's no value to the economy. It destroys the environment. it poses threat and endangers the livelihood of the people. So we are very serious and I form a special task force to engage in a full-on crackdown on these businesses. Those businesses have expanded into what becomes a sort of a garbage site, an international garbage processing facility in Thailand, which is not what we want at all. Now, you remember that gravel that I saw back at the recycling plant, that kind of ground-up electronic waste? Well, that all has to be smelted down to get the valuable metals out of it.

And it's a dirty business. I went to talk to a farmer who lives close to one of the unlicensed smelting plants that have popped up in eastern Thailand in recent years. His name is Sing. He's 58 years old. He lives with his dogs in a one-story wooden house next to a plot of land where he grows cassava. He tells me he's been living there since long before the factory was there. At first it was just one building, but it's grown and grown since then and there are now about seven buildings.

He says it wasn't a problem at first, but over the past couple of years he's really felt the impact. And what has that impact been? The worst thing, he says, is the terrible smell from the plant, especially at night, which is when it seems they smelt the e-waste. It's so bad you just can't sleep, he tells me. And if you walk past the factory when they're smelting, you have to hold your breath. The fumes are so strong.

He says it's affected his crops too. His cassava plants don't flower like they used to, and his harvests are smaller. In some parts of the world, governments have passed laws to try and make sure gadgets are recycled once they reach the end of their life. The Thai government has promised to follow suit. Industry Minister Akinat Promfan again. I'm hoping for the enactment of this new legislation as soon as possible, maybe towards the end of this year, maybe at the beginning of next year. In the meantime, the battle goes on and I'm fully committed to take full

actions against this illegal business and drive them out completely. Thailand's industry minister ending that report by Gideon Long. It's not just physical waste that has an impact. Keeping old digital records like emails and texts also has an environmental cost. And here in Britain the authorities are worried about the water that this storage requires. England is thought to be facing a water deficit in the coming decades of billions of litres a day and the environment agency suggests that one thing we can all do to help is to delete our digital waste. Astrid Wynn from the sustainabilityability Special Interest Group at the Data Centre Alliance spoke to Evan Davis.

People are so used to transferring data and storing data that they're not really aware of what they've got. So you take WhatsApp, for example. I send a photo to Temma of my relatives on WhatsApp. That's stored on WhatsApp, it's stored on my phone, it's stored on all of their phones and it's probably backed up in 10 versions of cloud storage as well. So you've got this ripple effect by sharing data and then forgetting that you've got it. You know, you replicate that with applications that we use to play

games that's storing data on location and behaviour. Yeah, no, I sometimes look at my phone and realise stupid WhatsApp photos. I'm sitting there taking up space. Can I just ask though, where is this data stored? Because yes, England has water problems, but is it actually being stored in England? I always assume it's being stored somewhere where the resources are ample and they don't have to worry about these things because that's where you would put the data. Yeah, it's not transparent where data is stored, if it's stored with a cloud service provider, because they organize their data across multiple data centers, depending on what works best for backup availability and all the rest of it.

A lot of the US data centers are in the Midwest, which has got huge water scarcity issues at the moment and in fact is still building data centers. So you couldn't assume that just because you store data to the cloud that it's stored in the UK. Tell us Astrid about good practice. What do you do? What do you delete? What do you keep? Are you selective about what you archive and what you throw away?

Yes, I attempt to practice digital sobriety, which is the term coined by a French think tank called the Shift Project on this. But I think one of the things that I would flag is that storage pales into insignificance when it comes to comparison with data transfer, data sharing and fast inquiries and re-enquiries through things like AI. Astrid Wynne talking to Evan Davis. The communist authorities in China are cracking down on excessive dining and alcohol consumption by government workers.

Officials are banned from eating in groups larger than three and from going to expensive restaurants. More than 16,000 were punished in one month for so-called dining offences. The details from our Asia Pacific regional editor Celia Hatton. I'll tell you about just one of them. It took place in China's central Hunan province last month and 10 officials gathered for a lunchtime banquet. They were attending a training day together. So 10 men polished off five bottles of very high potency rice liquor. One official ended up dying because of alcohol over consumption.

And the other nine tried to cover up what had happened. They tried to offer payments to his relatives and tried to brush the whole thing onto the carpet. When it came to light, all nine were punished, they were demoted or even sacked from their jobs. And that was just one case. And it's really fed to a lot of anger in China, at a time when the economy really isn't doing well. Ordinary people really don't want to hear about officials enjoying themselves at elaborate banquets. Over five million officials have been punished over the years. Some ordinary people are really happy about it. But there has been a lot of fear among officials because they simply don't know what the rules are.

This new rule, for example, that groups of no larger than three are allowed to dine together, it's all under the same anti-corruption campaign, but there is a lot of concern. So you can see companies, for example, state companies going to excessive levels. The Maotai, which is China's biggest state liquor company, they even served non-alcoholic blueberry juice at their big company banquet last month because they were so worried about being seen to be serving alcohol. Celia Hatton. Since its invention in the 1980s, 3D printing has revolutionised many fields, including medicine.

A facility in the British city of Bristol is now using the technology to create bespoke prosthetics. Dave Richards lost half his face after being knocked off his bike three years ago. Now he's got a new 3D printed facial prosthetic including skin and an eye. He says it's been life changing. People just accept the way I am. If I want to socialise a lot I feel much more comfortable in myself. If I look in a mirror, I look reasonable. Amy Davey is the reconstructive scientist who treated him.

What we've been able to do is far more than we were doing before we had 3D printers and 3D scanners. So primarily for us, we're trying to replicate some anatomy that's no longer there. So what we do with our 3D technology is we're able to 3D scan him on a surface level, mirror over one side to the other to replicate what might have been there before, and then use that technology to then basically reconstruct using prosthetics. So a lot of that we do need to do by hand in terms of the artistry of the silicon and the colours, repainting the eye for example. But what we're able to do with the scanning is not only look in a 2D form in terms of appearance, but in a 3D form in

terms of realistic reconstruction. We've been working with the little bits of technology here and there for a number of years, so the individual parts of it aren't too new to us, but it's amazing that we've been able to create a dedicated centre for it with all of those things together. Reconstructive Scientist Amy Davy. Returning now to our top story, the war between Israel and Iran. The Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner, Nagas Mohammadi, has often fallen foul of the authorities in Iran. The human rights campaigner has been arrested 13 times and sentenced to more than 30 years in prison and over 150 lashes. She was let out of jail

on medical grounds in December. She has cancer and was due to start further treatment in Tehran when the Israeli bombardment began. She has now fled the capital. She's been speaking to the BBC. One of our colleagues has translated her words. I spent 10 years of my life in prison for simply defending human rights and defending peace. So now that we are amidst a full-fledged war between Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran, I feel that we are in another chapter of the war between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the people of Iran. So as an Iranian who has always supported human rights and who has always supported peace, I feel like I am at a very huge crossroads today, a crossroad between war and peace.

As a supporter of democracy, I have to demand that Israel stops this war, that the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel reaches ceasefire, stop this war, and I condemn this war in the strongest terms. You've called it, Nagas, a dire threat to the very foundation of human civilization. Why are you putting it in such strong language?

So Middle East is right now in fire and blood. Where in the Middle East can you see any signs of a hope for peace? It's politicians like Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, who are bringing about these events, this violence, because they are promising that they can show people a better future through war and terror, and that's not possible. So imagine this, we have a misogynist theocracy in Iran with the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the top, who took us to hell whilst promising heavens, and at the same time,

Netanyahu is also taking us to hell while promising us freedom and democracy. Nagas, you called specifically for the Iranian government to stop uranium enrichment. Why stop uranium enrichment? Because Israel says you should, or the United States says you should? says you should or the United States says you should. Our circumstances are that we are governed by a dictatorship, by a theocratic dictatorship that does not respect the will of the people. And I've always said that this government is a lying, deceptive government, inept and

unreformable. Therefore, despite what the regime says, the people of Iran have not benefited from uranium enrichment whatsoever. They have not been able to provide us with a new source of energy. We have hours and hours of electricity blackouts a day. They said that they need enrichment to carry out research in the field of medicine and healthcare, but this never happened. Therefore, the Iranian nuclear program has had no benefits for the

Iranian people and on the contrary, it's become a source of a lot of international hostility. Therefore, I must say that the Iranian nuclear program carried out by the regime is not a project of the people, it's a project of the government, which has practically taken people hostage. The words of Nobel Peace Prize winner Nagas Mohammadi talking to Tim Franks. And that is all from us for now, but the Global News podcast will be back very soon. This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll and produced by Alison Davis and Stephanie Zachrisson. Our editors, Karen Martin. I'm Oliver Conway. Until next time, goodbye. Ever feel like car shopping is designed to make you second-guess yourself?

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