Global News Podcast - US says it will target anyone doing business with Iran

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

The US promises to squeeze Iran by targeting anyone who does business with Tehran - but Washington has so far announced only limited sanctions. Our correspondent says the US wants to put even more economic pressure on Iran. Also: fire crews in Nevada say they've brought under control about a quarter of the wildfire outside Reno. Health workers helping to tackle the Ebola outbreak are attacked in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There's been an explosion of gambling in Brazil. Retired international cricketers are trying to help the former Pakistan captain - and ex-prime minister - Imran Khan, who's currently in prison. And there's been an apparent leak of footage from the new edition of the game, Grand Theft Auto.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]: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at a press conference to outline further sanctions against Iran, at the Treasury Department in Washington. Credit: Reuters

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Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and The Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me, wherever you get your podcast.

Thank you. Bye. This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Pete Ross, and in the early hours of Tuesday the 25th of August, these are our main stories. The U.S. is imposing more sanctions on Iran, this time targeting banks, businesses and countries that continue to trade with Tehran. Authorities in the U.S. state of Nevada say they're beginning to contain the huge wildfire on the outskirts of Reno. Also in this podcast, I think that if I was in a disaster zone and didn't have anything else to eat that I would eat it, but I'm not sure I would pick it off the shelf over an Oreo. Turning plastic into a cookie. We begin with the war in Iran, which is now almost six months old.

Despite its overwhelming firepower, the United States and its ally Israel have failed to bring the Iranian government down. In fact, in some ways, Tehran seems to have been strengthened. The Strait of Hermuz, which was open before the conflict, is now largely closed because of the threat to shipping from Iran. So the United States is decided on a new line of attack. to go after countries, companies and individuals that have economic ties with Iran. The U.S. Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, announced the move. It is no longer acceptable to operate in the gray spaces of this conflict. Countries cannot claim they are blind to enabling this activity.

Iran's enablers purchase, transport its petroleum. They facilitate the flow of its finances through exchange houses and free trade zones. They welcome Iran's flights and maintain registries on its behalf. They turn a blind eye to seaborne fuel transfers and overland transits. They condone illicit use of their banks, all the while concealing the extent of their complicity. But Mr. Besant didn't have a long list of those to be sanctioned. And there was only limited targeting of China, the country that buys the majority of Iranian oil. So who is on the U.S. sanctions list?

Our State Department correspondent is Tom Bateman. We did get some specific and concrete measures that the US Treasury has announced about sanctions on individuals, on companies and entities that they say support Iran in terms of its ability to export oil, in terms of getting money for that back into Iran. Not just about that, but also they say about international support for its ballistic missile program and also for cyber attacks. They say the Iranians are carrying.

out. So we saw a lot of sanctions detailed around all of that. But I would say, given the way that this announcement had been trailed, it was being described as economic deeday on Iran, the biggest financial operation to isolate a country in history. We didn't see that. You know, we didn't see a major announcement, for example, against a very large Chinese bank. The Americans accuse the Chinese of helping facilitate Iran to sell its oil and doing that through major financial institutions. So even though there was this very sort of belligerent language when it came to the nature of this sanctions operation

from the Trump administration, the actual actions didn't live up to what had been threatened. Yeah, if the US really means business about this, it's going to have to go after China, is it not? I mean, we know that oil is Iran's largest export and China buys the vast majority of it. Do we have any indication as to, given the way, as you say this was trailed, why they haven't gone after China?

Scott Besson answered that when he was pressed on it by saying that he wasn't quite ready to blow up the global economy, as he put it. And I think that is a nod to the risks involved for Washington if they go down the road of really trying to cut off from the US dollar system, major Chinese financial institutions in terms of their ability to continue selling into international markets because the Chinese will retaliate. And one of the ways that the Chinese can retaliate, and they've dabbled with this before,

is to cut off the export of critical minerals to the United States, that China has a huge monopoly over. And that would have huge consequences for America. It needs those things for batteries, for powering armaments and munitions, you know, its ability to wage warfare. And if Washington gets the reaction that it wants, do you think that's going to make much of a difference? Is any of this going to bring Iran back to the table for negotiations?

Certainly it adds, more economic pressure makes more problems for the government in Tehran for the Iranian regime. These measures, not just over the last year, but for many years, and particularly as they've been amplified during two Trump terms, have resulted in the effect of strangulation of the Iranian economy. And you see the effect that has on ordinary people. Prices are a nightmare. The currency is massively devalued. Food is incredibly expensive. The protests that erupted in Iran at the start of this year, which really triggered the decision by the Israelis and the Americans to attack the country, thinking they could capitalize on that, those protests were in large part because

of the economic circumstances. So there is always this view within the Trump administration that the more they can ratchet up popular pressure on the regime, the hope is that it will then crumble. Tom Bateman. Firefighters have managed to get part of a blaze that's threatening homes in the city of Reno and the US state of Nevada under control. Crews said they'd carved out containment lines around a quarter of the wildfire. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated when a blaze in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada

spread to the outskirts of Reno, which has a population of around a quarter of a million people. Some of those who fled spoke of their experiences. The fire was coming so close. We did see the flames. That's when we just booked it. We just grabbed everything we could. We all got an alert on our phone

And all of the neighbors came out all at once. Boom. And we were like, okay, well, we've got to get out of here. And it was just really smoky and chaotic. Within 20 minutes, we got the alarm to go ahead and get out of there. So we saw the fire come down the hill. So I gathered up all the family and we took off. Officials say the wildfire was human-caused.

But how it started is still under investigation. The so-called hawk fire, named because it was first reported near the Hawk Meadow Trail, located just to the west of the city, began on Saturday. As fire crews started to get the blaze under control, evacuation orders in some areas were lifted, as our correspondent Shaima Khalil began by telling me. We've just heard from the Sheriff's Office about the Hawk fire, and they say that even though the fire remains just over 15,000 acres, the containment has really improved from zero to 27 percent contained. We understand that more than 900 firefighters and other personnel are now assigned to this operation, including crews from 15 U.S. states, but also they said including Australian and crews from New Zealand.

As it stand, officials say that roughly about 40,000 people remain under get set warnings, which is get set to go if needed warnings, meaning they need to be prepared to evacuate. But we also heard that some evacuation orders have been downgraded. So there are residents in the area of Somerset, La Brissas neighborhoods. These are mainly suburban residential neighborhoods. They have been told that the evacuation has been downgraded. They've been told that they can return, but they also must be ready to leave again. However, evacuation orders, they say that they have remained in force elsewhere.

I think the main message really from the authorities is that the picture is improving, but that there remains to be a huge amount of work. About 73% of the perimeter remains uncontained and that families who were told to go back to their communities need to remain vigilant because the conditions can change and the wind can change. It sounds like they are beginning to get part of this fire at least under some sort of control.

But as you say, there is a lot that is still raging out there over that 15,000 hectares. Are there fears that the fires could still spread then? I think the fear is that the weather conditions could actually turn against the firefighters. What they've been up against is are really, really dry conditions, which means that this terrain is bone dry. It's like a tinder box. And with gusts of wind, what happens is that these embers then turn into fuel that can travel fast and it can travel unpredictably as well. For the past couple of days now, what they've been doing since this fire has been reported on Saturday is that,

they've been fighting it from the ground, from the skies, with helicopters, with fire retardants. The problem is that the movement becomes really, really fast. And so one of the fire wardens today was saying, look, we only have so many resources. And it's almost like Wakamol, because you could be holding a line of fire in one area. And all of a sudden the fire literally jumps to another area. And I've seen this quite a lot in the fires that I've covered, for example, in Australia. under these types of wildfires becoming a more common event there. They are part of a bigger picture.

The hawk fire is the third major fire in Reno in the last two weeks. Nevada has recorded hundreds of fires this year and then millions of acres have burned across America's West Coast and it's taken a long time. It's taken weeks for some to be contained. Sharmachalio. Efforts to combat the deadly Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo have been made much harder by public distrust of the health.

health authorities, as well as the long-running conflict in the region. In the past few days, six workers involved in the Ebola response have been injured in three separate attacks, that's according to the Red Cross. The outbreak is the fastest growing on record with an average of 90 confirmed cases a day since it began just over three months ago. Oliver Conway heard more about the attacks from our reporter Richard Kigoy. There was a convoy that was helping with the response in the Tori province, which is in the east of the country and is the center of the outbreak.

So the convoy was ambushed, one person was seriously injured and two ambulances were destroyed. Then also we had two volunteers who were injured while trying to conduct a burial in How to Whel a province, which is also where Ebola has been detected, the vehicle was damaged, and they were evacuated for medical care. And also in North Kivu province, we had three volunteers who were attacked, the vehicles as well, you know, and the equipment that they were using for the response was also destroyed. So they have just given a summary of what has happened, especially in the past 101 days since the outbreak was declared. They say that 12 volunteers have been injured and this has been involved in 11 incidents. Yeah. And are these incidents linked to people who are worried

about what these health workers are doing? Or is it linked to the conflict that's dogged this region for many years. In this particular case, it's not related to armed conflict in the eastern DSE, much as we've had many groups are operating for decades. Now, this involved the local community. So you'd have situations like the one in Houtouelle province where the burial was being conducted. You have communities who are hostile towards health workers. Their disagreements when it comes to burials using the various health protocols regarding Ebola. So communities have been very skeptical about health workers. Whenever they're trying to make indrude, especially in the rural areas,

where people are still skeptical about the whole Ebola outbreak. They don't believe that it exists. And some of them believe that health workers actually are the ones who are bringing the disease to their communities. And so as a result of that, there's a result of that. There's this pushback, these resistance. And that's why some of them have even really gotten violent when dealing with some of the health workers. And can anything be done to reduce the suspicion of the local population and get them to accept that they need help to fight this outbreak? There have been several initiatives. They are engaging community leaders. They are very influential.

And what they're encouraging them is to be on the forefront to educate the communities about the outbreak itself, the threat that it poses, and why it's important for them to collaborate with health workers to contain this particular outbreak. Richard Kigoy. Still to come in this podcast. It's quite destructive to kind of have their work put out into the ether like this. This is the better work of a decade put into this. One of the most anticipated video games of all time is partially leaked online.

Your sales order says one thing. Your inventory says another. Your spreadsheet says, good luck. Odu brings your business together on a single platform, from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing. Visit Odu.com to book a demo. It's O'DO.com. Hello, Greg Jenner here.

I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and The Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith Bino joining us.

And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parris. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to your dead to me wherever you get your podcast. Thank you. Bye. But first, to Brazil, where more than 200, million people live and more and more of them are becoming gamblers. Online betting has

exploded in the country. The Self-Help group Gamblers Anonymous says it's receiving thousands of calls each month. Politicians are worried in recent years restrictions have been introduced, but the government says it wants to do more. Bob Howard reports from Sao Paulo. My name is John. I'm a compulsive gambler. And when I discovered poker, I think I discovered the best thing of my life that will fix all my problems. John works in IT and is in his early 40s. He comes from Rio de Janeiro, but now lives in Brazil's biggest city, Sao Paulo.

Like millions of other people in this country, he has a gambling habit. I used to travel a lot to US, and in a weekend I entered there and I expend $75,000. And I spend a lot of money of my wife. I destroyed her credit cards, so I was completely out of control. John was taking part in a gambler's anonymous meeting

in a Sunday school classroom attached to a church in Sao Paulo's financial district. He didn't want us to use his real name because he doesn't want to be recognized. There are about a dozen people attending so far, mostly men. Ervano Tavares is a psychiatrist and also an associate professor at the Federal University of Sao Paulo, where he runs a clinic which helps around 300 patients a year who have been diagnosed as being clinically addicted to gambling. And we're talking about 2.1 million people needing treatment today.

And those are just people with a clinical diagnosis. If you look at the people with moderate or severe problems, those who have financial, emotional or relationship problems from gambling, the number of people impacted reaches 7.5 million. Do you think there will be enough psychologists and psychiatrists in the world to treat that? I don't think so. Although most of the people Professor Tavares' treats are men, there are increasing numbers of women suffering from addiction as well.

Hosangela, a businesswoman in her early 50s, told me about her addiction issues. After the new year, I started losing. I took loans from three different banks and was still hiding from my family. Sometimes they would say something and I would laugh and reply, are you crazy? I am not gambling. I couldn't work. My business was suffering. I didn't eat properly anymore. I didn't shower. I went so far as to say that I had a constipation problem to justify why I was spending so much time in the bathroom. In fact, I was gambling. A new law means gamblers can register their ID cards with betting companies

to block themselves from sites if they're becoming addicted. Hosangela has asked to be blocked. She's made good progress, but she doesn't feel yet in control of her addiction. Bruna works with Professor Tevares and is a supervisor of the outpatient clinic. She fears the number of women gamblers suffering addiction issues may soon equal the number of men. There has always been a demand for women to undergo treatment. But the profile was older women who played more bingo games. After the legalisation in 2018, we observed a change.

So 10 years ago, 25% of our patients were women. Now it's around 40%. President Lula's government started regulating both sports betting and online casinos at the end of 2023. That's brought in large tax revenues and somewhat reduced the number of people gambling illegally. It's restricted gambling ads and it's trying to reduce the exposure of children to advertising.

But critics argue, that more needs to be done to try and halt the increasing addiction to betting of more and more Brazilians. That report from Bob Howard. In their heyday, they were rivals on the pitch, but now cricketing grates from across the world have come together to raise concerns about the treatment of Pakistan's ex-captain Imran Khan, who served as the country's Prime Minister after ending his sporting career. The 73-year-old has been in jail since 2023,

on charges of corruption, which he denies. His family and friends say they're worried about his health and prison conditions. A letter signed by a host of former top players is calling on Pakistan's current Prime Minister to ensure proper treatment and visiting rights for Mr Cam. Former England cricket captain David Gower is one of those who is signed. It's not for me nor us as a group to intervene in the judicial process, but you'd expect that in other circumstances may,

be elsewhere in the world, that things might move more quickly. Do you think you yourself could help move things along then? Would you consider a trip to Pakistan with some of the co-signatories, perhaps? Well, last time I was there, I asked that same question. So, Imran Khan was in jail at that point, was he? Oh, yes, very much. The last time I saw him, he was Prime Minister. I went to see him in the Prime Minister's House in Islamabad, and very impressive it was, too.

The last time I was in Pakistan a couple of years ago, I spoke to one of his lawyers, saying, well, is there any way one could actually make contact? And let's face it, his close family, so Jemima, ex-wife, the sons, you know, they found it very hard to speak to their ex-husband and father, respectively. For me, coming in just as a former cricketer, there's zero chance I would get anywhere near him. That's what I found out very, very quickly. What would you say to the assertion from the government and government doctors that, first of all, Imran Khan is receiving the best possible medical care and that he is in good health? One would treat that statement with a little bit of suspicion.

The news, as I see it in front of me, is that the Supreme Court, no less, had agreed that he should be looked at by a board of physicians. So as an impartial observer, which is what I try and be here, if a Supreme Court says he should be allowed to be assessed by a certain board of independent doctors, albeit one of those would have been his own sister and his own positions, maybe just for them to be reassured as to his condition. When he's only allowed to see a board of state appointed physicians, surely that's not really enough. You're amongst a group of international, well-known cricketers who've signed this letter. But what's quite telling, isn't it,

that there are only two other Pakistani cricketers who've actually been speaking out about Imran Khan. Why do you think that's the case? That could be as simple as if you are living in Pakistan under the current government, one of the things you'll probably want to do is keep your head down. What's interesting to me is that the list includes, obviously, generated by Greg Chaplin and Australian. We've got some of the English captains from my time starting with Mike Brearley, Mike Atherton. You've got Australians, you've got Indians, Sonnyogabasca, who's an immensely well-respected figure.

So you've got a consensus across the world, and I think that's more telling than the absence of anyone who might feel it's more sensible to keep their heads down. David Gower is speaking to the BBC's Rajini via Janathan. Grand Theft Auto is one of the biggest video game franchises of all time. The last in the series sold over 200 million copies since it was released in 2013. If you've ever played it, you'll know that most of the fun lies in cheating, stealing and manipulating your way to the top of the criminal underworld. There's an irony then, perhaps,

that the game's developers here in Britain are struggling to track down a hacker who seemingly got hold of their upcoming GTA 6 and is leaking footage online. I asked our reporter Will Chalk to put into context just how big a deal this game is. Well, the short answer, Pete, is absolutely massive.

I mean, I think the global gaming industries worth hundreds of billions of dollars is actually worth more than the music and movie industries combined. And GTA 6 is right at the pinnacle right now. You know, it's probably the most anticipated video game of all time. It's cost somewhere around $1.5, 2 billion to make. And its predecessor, GTA 5, as you said,

was the fastest selling entertainment product in history. Now, given that this game has been, it's taken around a decade to develop so far, its release date has been delayed twice. And so far all fans have seen an event is this. I'm here for Lucia Camino's. She's supposed to be getting out. What's your name?

Jason Duvall. So that's a snippet there from just one of two short official trailers on YouTube. So basically fans have seen so little of it, and that means the appetite for any content about the game itself is absolutely huge. Lots of anticipation then, and I guess this is where this hacker comes in there. Yeah, the timing is really interesting, because actually on Thursday, GTA's developers, Rockstar, have announced they're having a Netflix special,

which they say will give people an extended look at gameplay. But since earlier in this month, a series of leaks have already been showing gameplay online, you know, maps, fully played sections, and they've all come from this anonymous account called CyberLeague. Now, as to whether they're real, this is quite interesting. So evidence would seem to suggest, yes, we've had no official comment, but take two interactive, which is Rockstar's parent company.

It went to court on Friday. It was getting court orders that require Microsoft and Discord to give it data to help try and find the hacker. And as part of this court appearance, they have to acknowledge that some of the material that had been posted online had violated their copyright. In other words, they're acknowledging that these videos are real and do show things that they own from the game. Now, as for why this all matters, for a start, it's not a great look, right? Firstly, these leaks often appear to be riddled with mistakes. But Shea Thompson, a gaming journalist, says this is likely because the game will be far from finished, even at this late stage. Things get scrapped last minute just because they don't end up working.

And so it's quite destructive to kind of have their work put out into the ether like this. This is the better work of a decade put into this. To have it leaked in such an unceremonious manner, I think does more harm the good. Now this court date was on Friday, but it doesn't seem to have put cyber leaks, whoever they are off. It's continued and the latest leak came in the last day or so. And when a hacker does something like this and leaks a game that people have been waiting a long time for, it's often just for the kudos of doing it, right? But there's a little bit more to this case, is there?

Well, there could be, yeah, it could be about money. So every time they do a leak, they've been asking for people to give them cryptocurrency donations. there is something on their website about doing this to protest against anti-consumer practices in gaming, specifically from Rockstar, but it does look like it is more about the money. Will Chalk. Now, how would you feel about eating a biscuit or a cookie that started life as a piece of plastic? Scientists that a NASA-funded project in Illinois and the US have used specially designed yeasts to transform plastics and agricultural waste into edible proteins,

fats and flavorings, which they've then turned into a cookie. James Kumera-Sami heard more from Mary Rolofts, a science writer with Forbes magazine. It's important to note that humans aren't eating raw plastic, even in these cookies. Microbes, you know, like bacterias and alges, are eating the plastic, and then breaking it down into the nutritional molecules that we think about, like proteins and fats and vitamins. And then war yeast are reassembling those things back into a food product, and then a 3D printer is actually turning the final mixture into a little cookie that's reportedly quite nutrient-dense. Reportedly, but no one's actually tried it yet.

They did do some smell tests. And most participants said that they would eat the cookies in a resource-limited setting, you know, if there wasn't a lot available. It passed a sniff test then. Barely, I think, but yes. And the word vanilla has been mentioned about the aroma. Yes, apparently the scientists were able to use brewer's yeast to add a vanilla flavoring. Why? What's the idea behind this?

I think the main thing they're going for is food that would sustain life in a really difficult settings. So the work was conducted as part of a NASA-led project aimed at creating food for deep space exploration. And then the researchers have also said that it could sustain life in disaster zones or, you know, in space limited places like submarines or even in moon colonies. But for the wider public, is it something that people have looked at before, this kind of reusing plastic? Scientists have achieved this on a bit of a smaller scale. A study a few years ago converted plastic into vanilla flavoring. And researchers here in the U.S. have engineered a fungus capable of eating styrofoam and packaging. But this is the first that I personally have heard

about it being used to make all of a real food, you know, as opposed to just an additive. Do you think I can get past the ick factor, if you like? I think that if I was in a disaster zone and didn't have anything else to eat that I would eat it, but I'm not sure I would pick it off the shelf over an Oreo. Are there plans for other types of food to be made from plastic like this? I do know that these researchers are hoping to make even more than what they've already made using microbes. So they want to also be able to add starch and fiber and sweetener.

And if they can do all that, I don't know why we couldn't turn it into something other than a cookie. But we do have to first get this sort of permission for it to be digestible by humans, don't we? Yes, exactly. It has been cleared by safety testing, but they're still awaiting that sign-off before conducting taste tests. And are you looking forward to trying it? Oh, looking forward to, I'm not sure, but I'd be willing. I'm not sure I would. Mary Roloff's, who is speaking to James Kumerasami. And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at global

podcast at BBC.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service, use the hashtag Global NewsPod. And don't forget our sister podcast, the global story, which goes in-depth and beyond the headlines on one big story. This edition of the Global News podcast was mixed by Martin Baker. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Pete Ross. Until next time, goodbye. Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes History Seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that's

with Kyle Smith Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their phone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcast. Thank you. Bye.