Transcript of Iran foreign minister responds to Trump intervention threats

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This is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritsen, and on Monday, the 12th of January, these are our main stories. Images of piles of bodies of protesters make it out of Iran as the foreign minister tells the world, the theocracy is fully in control. The UN's top court opens a landmark case accusing Myanmar of genocide over its treatment of the Rohingya. The head of America's Central Bank says he's facing a criminal investigation because won't obey Donald Trump and cut interest rates. Also in this podcast.

I was introduced to him in the morning, and I was given away to him that night. He was a stranger to me.

We investigate child marriage in the United States. Demonstrations in support of the government are taking place in the Iranian capital, Tehran. The leadership in Iran says they're in complete control of the situation after days of deadly clashes between protesters and security forces. But despite a near total internet ban, footage of demonstrations against the government is still getting out.

Human rights groups are reporting casualties in the hundreds.

President Trump had threatened military action. Now, he says the leadership in Tehran wants to negotiate. On Monday, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Haragchi, said that Iran was ready for talks, but they must be based on mutual respect. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not seeking war, but is fully prepared for war.

We do not want conflict, but we are completely ready for it. The best way to prevent war is to be ready so that our enemies do not once again make a miscalculation.

What is happening at the moment inside Iran? We spoke to Gontsche Habibi Azad from the BBC's Persian Service.

The latest It is that Iran's Parliament Speaker, Mohamed Baur Al Qaalibah, was also present in the pro-establishment rallies in Tehran today. He has threatened that if the US attacks Iran, Trump will be given an unforgettable blessing. He has been saying previously that there are targets in the Middle East if the US attacks Iran. Everywhere is a target, shipping and military targets as well. We know that Iran targeted a US military base in Qatar back in summer during the 12th Day War with Israel. This is the threats that have been going on. At the same time, Trump has said that he's open to negotiations as well with the Iranian side. This is a signal that we are seeing from Abbas Al-Arashchi, Iran's Foreign Minister as well, that he has said Iran is ready for war and ready for negotiations as well.

The Iranians are insisting they are back in control of the streets, are they?

We can't say for sure because of the Internet outage. The information that we are getting is very Very, very limited. Bbc Persian is getting in touch with people via those who are using Starlink, Elon Musk's Internet, satellite Internet or other methods inside the country. But the information is very much limited. People are still chanting anti-establishment slogans from their homes at night. That's what we are hearing. But at the same time, the connectivity, even text messages. I've heard that some of the text messages have been cut off and they're just receiving propaganda, what they're saying as propaganda text messages from the establishment, threatening them not to go out. And also they have been invited, as they say by the text message, to participate in the pro-establishment rallies today.

If the Americans did choose a military option, they would presumably pick their targets carefully. It's been suggested, for example, the secret police headquarters. What would Iranians make of a limited, carefully chosen bit of military action by the US?

Iranians inside, and there's much a divided opinion between between them, we can't say for sure that they do want the attack or they don't want the attack by the US. We can't say that if they're a majority or minority, but there are voices inside that do support the attack by the US, and there are voices as well that are opposed to it.

Gontze Habibi Azad from BBC Pershian. And for more on the story, you can hear and see our international editor, Jeremy Bowen. Go to YouTube, search for BBC News. Click on the logo, then choose Podcasts and Global News Podcast. The International Court of Justice in The Hague in the Netherlands has begun hearing a case that will determine whether the army in Myanmar committed genocide against the country's Rohingya minority. Evidence suggests that the Burmese military carried out a series of atrocities against the Muslim ethnic group in 2017. The attack forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas to flee over the border and into Bangladesh. The prosecution is being brought by the mostly Muslim nation of the Gambia in West Africa. Its Justice Minister, Dorda Jalo, told the court why they had decided to bring the case.

We did not bring this case lightly. We brought this case after reviewing credible reports of the most brutal and vicious violations imaginable, inflict upon vulnerable group that had been dehumanized and prosecuted for many years. Sadly, me Myanmar appears to be trapped in a cycle of atrocities and impunities. Nobody has been held responsible for the crimes against the Rohingya.

Myanmar denies that it carried out genocide against the Rohingyas and previously tried to stop the case going ahead. Our correspondent, Anna Hologun, joined us from The Hague.

It was 2017. The Gambia brought this case alleging that Myanmar committed genocide during clearance operations. During that time, there was a military campaign involving the army, also Buddhist militias. And according to UN fact-finding report, the following year, there were genocidal acts committed. They cited the torching of villages, the sexual violence, widespread killing. And so the Gambia brought this case because it says it has a responsibility under the genocide Convention to ensure that genocide is not committed. So if you think back, for those of us who are familiar with the term never there again in the context of the Holocaust, Rwanda, Srebrenica, this case is one of the few concrete attempts to try to enforce that promise. Myanmar, as you say, has argued that this was a counterterrorism operation, that it was a legitimate response to attacks by Rohingya militants. But what we heard in court today, it's a packed courtroom, both sides, Myanmar and the Gambia. All the benches are full. Public Gallery, too. It's attracting so much attention, this case. What we from lawyers representing the Gambia is that this was not a legitimate military campaign, because if it's counterterrorism in the proper use of that word, then efforts are made to protect civilians.

And they said, in this case, children were thrown in fires, women and girls were gang raped and mutilated, and the villages were burned down, and the army was shooting any Everything that moved. So these are strong allegations from the Gambia, and Myanmar will have a chance to respond in court once the Gambia has had its say.

And of course, there are still hundreds of thousands of people in those refugee camps in Bangladesh. How long are these proceedings going to take, and when are we going to get a ruling?

Three weeks. And unusually for these types of hearings, we will be hearing from witnesses, or rather, we won't be hearing from witnesses because those sessions will actually be closed to the public and the media, but witnesses will be hearing in court. So survivors, Rohingyas survivors, Myanmar is also calling witnesses. We don't know who they are yet. But this case, it has a wider significance, too, because it's ultimately down to the interpretation of the law on genocide and the degree to which judges view intent as being so critical to that and the extent to which killings and other crimes under the Genocide Convention have to be proved to have a certain level of intent in order to be characterized as genocide. So that's why This case is being watched around the world, including especially in relation to cases involving Gaza, Ukraine, and Russia, too.

Anna Hologun in The Hague. Federal prosecutors in the United States have opened a criminal investigation investigation into the chairman of the US Federal Reserve. It relates to testimony Jerome Powell, who guides US monetary policy, gave to Congress about a renovation project at a Federal Reserve building. Mr Powell says the investigation has much more to do with the central bank's refusal to bout a pressure from the White House to cut interest rates. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public rather than following the preferences of the President. This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions, or whether instead, monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation. The criminal investigation is the latest escalation in the long running clash between President Trump and Mr. Powell. I spoke to our business correspondent, nick Marsh, and asked him if this investigation was unprecedented.

It does appear unprecedented. This is investigation launched by the Department of Justice about the renovation of the Federal Reserve building, which has run several hundred million dollars over budget, and essentially whether Jerome Powell lied to Congress about the scope of it.

Is this another example of Donald Trump essentially using the courts to target political opponents?

It's no secret that there is no love lost between President Trump and Jerome Powell, who was actually appointed by Donald Trump back in in 2017 during his first term. But since then, President Trump has repeatedly, aggressively criticized Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve for not reducing interest rates quickly enough. But the Federal Reserve is independent from political interference, at least it's supposed to be. Jerome Powell has repeatedly said that it's economic conditions that guide monetary policy, not whoever's in the White House. The Federal Reserve has consistently said that inflation is still too high to justify the rapid rate cuts that President Trump has been consistently demanding.

Might the pressure work, though? Might Jerome Powell bend when faced with a lawsuit?

It doesn't seem to be the case. It's quite unprecedented for a Federal Reserve chair to come out and give a public statement accusing the White House of political interference. It doesn't appear this will have any effect on any decisions that he makes on monetary policy, but his term is due to expire at the end of May this year. Donald Trump has already said that he knows who his successor is going to be. It's widely believed to be Kevin Hassett, who's one of Donald Trump's key economic advisors, a close ally to Donald Trump as well. Jerome Powell does have until 2028 to see out his term as a governor on the board of the Federal Reserve. But interestingly, Donald Trump himself was asked by US media about this case brought by the Department of Justice shortly after the news broke, and he said he didn't know anything about it.

nick Marsh. How do you sum up someone's life in 175 words? According to research led by Michigan State University, of 38 million online obituaries, 175 words is the average length posted by families and loved ones. In those few sentences, across nearly 30 years of tributes, the What is that families consistently chose to highlight to honor a life well-lived were those of kindness and tradition. Anna Tremkin is Deputy Obituaries Editor at the British newspaper The Times. First, does an emphasis on kindness feature in her own work?

I think many people would broadly agree with this study from Michigan State that being kind and benevolent is more important than what you may or may not achieve in your career. But obviously, when you're researching and writing about someone who's lived their life in the public eye and has had a role on the world stage, I think that question is very different. Certainly, I think that newspaper obituries would be rather boring and uninformative reads if they just focused on how kind someone was. They wouldn't make for particularly illuminating reads. Well, I suppose the other thing as well is the tradition crops up as something that seems to be very important to people or when a family is referencing it. I can't imagine that necessarily crops up a lot in the more official formal obituaries that you would write. No, that's right. I think obviously there's a distinction to be made here between memorial notice or death notices that appear in newspapers or memorial websites, there's a distinction to be made between them and a formal newspaper obitory because obviously that's much more detailed. It's much more a short biography of the life. It's meant to be written objectively, whereas memorial notices or death announcements are often placed by the families who obviously have a different perspective on the person's life.

Indeed. What are you aiming to do to provide a well-rounded account?

Yes, absolutely. The idea is that an obitory should be a well-rounded short biography. It should give a balanced account of a person's life. Actually, for that reason, that's why the Times is one of the papers that actually doesn't publish obituries with bylines. They are anonymously written. It's partly so that the writer has the freedom to give a very candid account of the person's life without fearing any potential backlash. But it's also so that it's more the papers verdict on that person's life rather than the writer's. How much research goes into it? As much as possible. Obviously, it depends on the amount of time that a writer has to put the piece together. If it's someone who is very much a household name and we've got to get into the paper that day and we weren't expecting them to die, and it's not someone who we've already prepared an obitory for, then obviously, there's only so much you can do in the day that you've got. But as much as possible, we would always try to speak to a friend or a relative, someone who obviously knew the subject and can really give an insight into that person, their key achievements, and their key personality traits.

To some extent, you have to, when somebody has just died, gloss over the worst of their characteristics, don't you? I would actually disagree with that. I think obituaries are, they're not hagiographies, they're not eulogies. Actually, they have to acknowledge or they should acknowledge a person's shortcomings as well as their successes. We do always strive to do that. People are often surprised to learn, for instance, that the Times published obits for people like Hitler and Stalin. We do cover villains as well as heroes. I do think it's important for an obitry to acknowledge a person's shortcomings as well as their successes. Do you have any particular favorites? Well, a good example on that note, actually, is the obitry that we ran for James Watson, who died a few months ago. He was, of course, the American biologist who co-discovered the structure of DNA along with Francis Crick. He was a really complex character. Actually, he became just as famous for his rather shocking and offensive remarks as for his scientific genius. The obitry was very candid about that and acknowledged the complexities of his legacy.

Anna Tremkin of the Times newspaper was speaking to Sarah Montagu. Still to come in this podcast. The sound We have I, the chimpanzee who's died at the age of 49, acing a memory test. She played a vital role helping scientists understand the primate mind, and by extension, our own.

We live in a world where the news is at our fingertips. But how often do we stop scrolling and just listen? I'm Malika Bilal, and this is The Take, Al Jazeera's Daily News podcast, where we bring you the context and the people behind the global stories that matter. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

To Gaza now, Now, are we about to enter the second phase of Donald Trump's plans to bring peace to the territory following the ceasefire last October? Hamas has announced that it's ready to hand over control of Gaza's governing institutions to an independent Palestinian Technocratic Committee, which is still yet to be set up and approved. So is this a genuine offer to hand over power? After all, Hamas is resisting calls to disarm. Meanwhile, the post ceasefire death toll has continued to rise in Gaza, with both Israel and Hamas accusing each other of violating the deal. Our correspondent, John Sudworth, spoke to me from Jerusalem.

Well, these are comments that have come from Hazam Kacem, a Hamas spokesperson, posted to his Telegram channel. Essentially, as you've been outlining, they're calling for the speeding up of the establishment of this technocratic committee, which is meant to be taking over the governance of Gaza under the Trump-backed peace plan. Reports suggest that Egyptian officials are going to be meeting representatives of Hamas and various other Palestinian factions this week to put forward ideas of who might be on the committee. But we are a long, long way from not only having those names being made public, but knowing whether any of them will be acceptable to Washington or to the Israelis. There is, of course, meant to be no role for Hamas at all in the future governance of Gaza.

It's meant to be a technocratic non-political body.

Nor do we even know who's going to be on the Board of Peace, which is meant to be overseeing this new government body's work. Of course, that question of disarmament looming over at all. No clear idea yet on how the international stabilization force, another key part of the peace plan, will be set up, who will be part of it, and how disarmament will be either verified or enforced.

That has to be key, doesn't it? Because if Hamas doesn't disarm and it's not offering to disarm, presumably, the whole thing is meaningless.

Yeah. I mean, this statement may be seen by some as something of a positive sign of intent from Hamas, but you're right, disarmament is one of the big key sticking points. Both Hamas and the Israeli government clearly skeptical of the good faith on either side here.

Both Hamas's intent to disarm and also the question of Israel's intentions here.

It has not yet, of course, fully withdrawn from Gaza. It's holding its troops at the yellow line and strikes continue on an almost daily basis.

Yeah, which feeds Then to my next question, is the ceasefire holding?

Fragile at best, I think, is the way it can be described. Both sides accuse each other of repeated violations. Gaza's Health Ministry reports more than 400 Palestinians having been killed in Israeli strikes since the truce was signed three months ago. Of course, the Israeli Prime Minister signaling he is keeping the option open for further military action.

Hamas disarmament, he has said, can be done the easy way or the hard way. John Sudworth. More than 300,000 children were married in the United States between 2000 and 2021, mostly girls wed to adult men. Recently, child marriage was banned in Maine, Oregon, Missouri, and Washington, DC. But in California, for example, there is no minimum age to get married. Those who want to ban child marriage say it's especially difficult to change the law there, with some progressive organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, supporting it. The BBC's Reagan Morris reports from Los Angeles.

In California, it is legal for children to get married. As long as a parent approves the marriage and a judge rubber stamps it. Women who escaped child marriages want that to change. I was introduced to him in the morning, and I was given away to him that night. He was a stranger to me. At age 15, Sarah Tasneem was forced by her father to marry a man nearly twice her age. I was legally trapped with no place to go, no education. By 16, Sara was a mother. Her father and husband were part of a religious cult. Sara was removed from school, and she was expected to raise her daughter the same way, to become a wife and mother while she was still just a girl. When I had my daughter, I think everything changed. It just made me understand that this is a much bigger life than just me. And whatever the impacts were of what was going on was going to impact her as well. I didn't know the entirety of what had happened to me was so why it was so wrong, but I knew that I had to get out for her.

Child marriage is mostly practiced within conservative religious groups and cults. But in California, it is powerful, progressive organizations like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood who have deposed banning child marriage. Both organizations declined interview requests, but in a statement, they said they worried that a law outright banning child marriage could force young people in abusive relationships further underground and negatively impacted attract children who want to get married. It is mind boggling. Freddie Reese is a forced marriage survivor who runs Unchained at Last. So we're taking away a child's right to marry. That's like saying that banning child rape takes away a girl's right to be raped. I mean, child marriage is not a right. It's a human rights abuse. There we go.

Our next speaker is Chelsea Clinton. She's an advocate, an investor, a teacher, and the mother of three.

The movement to ban child marriage has a powerful ally in Chelsea Clinton. But I would like for us to have some righteous anger about actual children being actually trafficked into statutory rape situations with judges and other institutions that should be protecting children, not only complicit, but actively cooperating. On stage with Unchained at Last in Los Angeles, she urge the audience to help ban child marriage in California. I very much believe in the ongoing work of changing hearts and minds. I also believe in the hard legal work of changing laws and enforcing those laws. And laws are changing. A decade ago, child marriage was legal across the US. Now, it is banned in 16 states. Many say it's time for the Golden State to do the same.

Regan Morris. Rewilding is a movement aimed at restoring damaged environments and increasing biodiversity. Here in Britain, a flag project that's been going for 20 years has shown what can be achieved. The NEPS state in the County of West Sussex in Southern England has seen an explosion in wildlife since it began rewilding, with its bird numbers increasing tenfold in the past two decades, and a variety of butterfly species doubling. Isabella Tre is a writer and conservationist who co-owns NEPS. She spoke to my colleague, Emma Barnet, about what had been achieved.

It's absolutely astonishing. It's more than we could ever have possibly imagined when we started out on this project about 20 or so years ago. I mean, for example, we have now some of the most endangered species in the UK, including nightingales. Last year, we had 60 singing males, which is about 1% of the population in the UK. Having gone from being a very depleted, polluted, dysfunctional farmland, we're on very, very poor soil here in Sussex. We've now become one of the most significant biodiversity hotspots in the UK. It's not just the endangered species that we're seeing here, which is so thrilling, it's the abundance of life. I think that's what this 20-year survey is showing. It's the enormous uplift in biodiversity, which is changing everyone's minds about how much the land can actually hold. We should be much, much more ambitious, I think, for our nature reserves and our rewilding projects. Yeah, it shows that it can be brought back, even as you say, from very humble soil and humble beginnings. What do you have to do when you're rewilding and when you were rewilding NEB? How much of it is just leaving that land to its own devices, or how much do you need to give it a bit of a helping hand to improve it?

Well, I think rewilding really is all about letting go. It's about putting nature back in the driving seat. It's different to conventional conservation, where quite often you're protecting a tiny remnant of important habitat, and you're doing everything to keep that in stasis, as it were. With rewilding, you're just giving nature free reign. You're allowing thawny tawny scrub to recolonize, and that's where we have a 900% increase in breeding birds is in that thawny scrub. You're leaving dead trees standing. You're putting in drivers, so large roaming animals like cattle and ponies and pigs and deer, to drive the system, to keep a very dynamic mosaic of habitats. That's what seems to be rocket fuel for wildlife. For us, this is really important because in the UK, we pledge to return 30% of our land to nature by 2030, and we're not doing that fast enough. We can see that with rewilding, it's a really powerful tool to get nature back in a relatively cheap way, actually. It's very easy to do, and it's very, very fast.

Writer and conservationist Isabella tree. A chimpanzee, which played an important role in the study of memory and language, has died in Japan at the age of 49. She was brought to Kyoto University from Africa in 1977 and exposed to learning materials, including computers, from an early age. The female chimp, named I, was known for her intelligence, including the ability to recognize letters and numbers. Our reporter, Pete Ross, told me that she also had a remarkable memory.

I think she displayed many remarkable cognitive feats over the many decades of research in which she took part. But yeah, as you say, it's perhaps her memory and her performance and that of other chimps that took part in a series of memory tests in 2007 that first grabbed the world's attention and for which perhaps she's best well known. Now, during these tests, she and other chimps that took part showed astonishing powers of recall, demonstrating a photographic memory and easily beating their human counterparts, the people that were competing against in these tests. The test involved participants trying to put numbers that appeared briefly on a screen before disappearing in the correct order. The way the test would work, you had the numbers 1-9 on a touch screen, a computer touch screen. They'd appear briefly. And then when the chimpanzee selected the number one, the other numbers would immediately disappear, and they would have to then try and put those numbers back into order, one to nine. So one, two, three, four, and so forth. I think we've got a clip. We've got a clip of one of the tests. Now, you're not hearing a lot here, but what you can hear is those clicks, and you hear how quickly where those clicks are.

That's how quickly the chimpanzee is. She's hitting number one, and then instantly they disappear, and within a second, as you can hear, she's immediately putting those numbers in order.

I'm actually quite blown away by the idea that chimpanzees could do that quicker than humans. Presumably, scientists have looked at this.

Why? How? Well, first of all, think about it yourself. When do we have to put numbers into order? These days, maybe when we're using our phones and we have a little code, I don't know about you, they're normally about six digits long. So to put nine digits in the correct order placed randomly on a screen is pretty remarkable. Scientists say essentially the reason that this happens is that humans and chimps are on a DNA level, almost identical. So at some point, we probably had this ability to recall things, take a snapshot, a photo, and we've lost it over a time. Essentially the reason for that is evolution. Basically, you have to give something up in order to gain something. And what we've gained is our ability to communicate, our ability to have language, using tools and other things. And that therefore means that while in the past we did have this amazing memory, we've subsequently lost it.

Pete Ross. And that's all from us for now. But there'll be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. And for one story in-depth that gives you the backstory behind the headlines, you can seek out our sister podcast, The Global Story, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email. The address is globalpodcast@bbc. Co. Uk. You can also find us on x@bbcworldservice. Use the hashtag #globalnewspod. This edition was mixed by Chris Hanson. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Alex Ritz, and until next time, goodbye.