Did the US carry out war crimes in Iran?

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0:46That's O-D-O-O dot com. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Celia Hatton, and in the early hours of Friday, the 18th of September, these are our main stories. Washington has rejected a UN report alleging the US military may have committed war crimes in the early days of the war on Iran. NATO Secretary General tells us why he thinks Russia's Vladimir Putin is becoming increasingly desperate over Ukraine. And new research explains why caffeine affects some people more than others. Also in this podcast... It is largely drawn in black ink and decorated in reds and oranges and yellows, sort of burnt colours, if you will.

1:35A manuscript telling the story of the Aztecs returns to Mexico after more than 180 years.

1:46We'll begin with a new report from the United Nations that's getting a lot of attention. Investigators with the UN Human Rights Council say there are reasonable grounds to believe that the United States carried out war crimes in the early days of its war on Iran. A fact-finding mission looked at two deadly missile strikes in February that killed more than 170 people, one on a primary school in the southern town of Manab. Another airstrike hit a sports complex in the town of Lemaire, also in the south. The Iranian authorities were also mentioned by UN investigators. Tehran's accused of committing crimes against humanity during its violent repression of anti-government protests that started last December.

2:31Iran has previously denied wrongdoing, though it's yet to say anything about this latest report. As we'll hear in a moment, the US has responded. Tom Bateman is our State Department correspondent in Washington. He told me more about the findings, starting with that strike on the primary school in Manab. What this UN fact-finding mission says is that it believes, like much of the reporting in the US has backed as well, that there was a targeting database error. Basically, the Americans were using out-of-date information, it suggests, about the school building itself, in effect believing that it was still a part of a military compound, which it wasn't and hadn't been for many years.

3:12So the report says this amounted to more than mere negligence, going on to say that the US acted recklessly. And this gave the fact-finding mission reasonable grounds to believe the US committed a war crime under international law. So that's as related to Minab. It then goes on to talk about the strike on a sports centre in Lehmert in Iran, the same day which killed 22 civilians. Also describing this as indiscriminate and therefore saying that they believe that too constituted a war crime. And Tom, I understand there's already been a response from the US State Department? Well, the State Department has put out a response to this because the fact-finding mission is appointed by the UN's Human Rights Council.

3:53The US has long had an issue with the Human Rights Council. It withdrew from the council itself some time ago and says in response to this report that the council pushes, it says, anti-American rhetoric and anti-Semitism, all the while appeasing repressive regimes. As such, say the Americans, we do not give credibility to the findings of this report. Interesting, because the State Department mentions anti-American rhetoric, but we should note that this UN report also criticised Iran's actions as well. Can you take us through that? Absolutely. I mean, this report is in two parts. And actually, this fact-finding mission was established in 2022, and it was largely to look at human rights abuses in Iran carried out by the regime.

4:34And so there is a very lengthy section on the uprising and the protests that took place at the very end of last year, the late December into the new year, which the report says involved a widespread and systematic attack by the Iranian authorities against their own civilians. It talks about this having amounted to crimes against humanity in the view of the fact-finding mission and goes into some detail about what took place involving unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances. It talks about the official death toll that the Iranians had said had been killed in these clashes of more than 3 ,000 people.

5:17It says that the actual death toll was likely to be far higher than that official figure. And also they're saying including at least 221 children reportedly killed, some of those as young as two years old. Tom, I wonder, our listeners might be thinking, well, what next for these findings then? If human rights experts at the UN say there are grounds to believe the US committed war crimes and that the Iranians committed crimes against humanity, what can be done with those accusations? Well, largely because of the countries involved, these things really reach an end point with these reports because, for example, as far as the US is concerned, I mean, the US has largely tried to disempower multilateral institutions that have the ability to investigate and also to adjudicate, basically, in instances where countries themselves won't do that.

6:06You know, these reports are significant because they put this information and these findings into the public domain. But in terms of any further action, well, that I think is likely to be extremely limited, if not non-existent. But what about the court of public opinion? I mean, this comes at a time when the U.S. war with Iran is relatively unpopular with American voters. Can the Trump administration brush off accusations of war crimes so easily? Well, I think particularly over the issue of the Manab school strike, it is something that has received coverage within the US and across US media. What has been very notable about that is the degree to which the Pentagon under Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has simply declined to say anything beyond its investigating.

6:53And there has not been any publication of any findings. And it was widely understood that there was an initial probe that found it likely that a US missile, a Tomahawk missile, was the cause of the strike on the school in the first place. but the Trump administration has simply not wanted to talk about these things and I think that has been noted among the public but I think largely what the opinion polling suggests is that for Americans at the moment in the run-up to the midterm elections this war is unpopular but the doorstep issues for Americans are because that has led to a rise in the price of gasoline and petrol and that has made Mr Trump unpopular beyond that he had said that he'd gained election on the basis of not taking America into what he and others are called forever wars, these kind of foreign entanglements.

7:42For parts even of his own base who feel pretty aghast that he then appears to have done that in their view, that will cause him and is causing him some problems in terms of the perception of his foreign policy. Tom Bateman in Washington. On Thursday, sirens sounded in eastern Poland, military aircraft were scrambled and two airports temporarily suspended flights after Russian strikes on Ukraine landed close to the Polish border. This is just the latest example of Russian military activity edging closer to NATO territory. Speaking to the BBC's Chris Mason, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said this all points towards an increasingly rattled Vladimir Putin.

8:27It's clearly an example of increasingly reckless behavior by Russia and its president, but also evidence of him being increasingly desperate. Should NATO intercept Russian drones that are over Ukrainian territory if they are approaching a NATO border? There is a limit to what I can go into in a public interview, but I can assure you we do everything to make sure that NATO stays safe, NATO territory stays safe, that we can defend every NATO territory. Again, I can never get into those operational details. I was told afterwards drones were not, at least yet, intercepted by NATO while still over Ukraine.

9:07How worried are you? How worried should we all be that Russia will attack or invade a NATO country in the coming years? If you are willing to sacrifice 1.2 million of your own people in this crazy, unprovoked fight, let's not be naive about what Putin could do. But we are stronger. I mean, it could happen. It could happen in the coming years. I don't think so, because we are strong, so strong that he will not try. But we have to make sure of is that we are as strong in two, three, five years from now. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte speaking to Chris Mason. Now, are you someone who needs a cup of coffee in the morning to get going?

9:47But if you have a coffee after 3 p.m., you're up all night. Why does caffeine make some people buzz and others barely notice its effects? Our health reporter has been looking into this, but we also asked listeners to send us voice messages about their coffee drinking. Here's two from Egypt and then Tenerife. I do like coffee and I'm a little bit of a coffee addict. In Egypt, for instance, I'm always like to have two to three cups, which is a lot. and also changed with the age, because in the past, you know, I didn't really feel anything, but now I'm feeling the caffeine, maybe because the consumption has increased.

10:30Almost everybody takes a cup of coffee in the morning with the breakfast. It is very important because it is a stimulant to have energy and to finish waking up. As I mentioned, our health reporter Jim Reid has been investigating coffee and caffeine. He spoke to James Reynolds and began by telling him who drinks the most coffee. These figures are from the International Coffee Organization, so, you know, take that as you will. But two billion cups a day is the figure. When you think there's only eight billion people in the world, that is an awful lot of coffee. I think it works out at around 26 ,000 cups a second that are consumed around the world.

11:14In terms of which countries, so actually, when you look at the figures, Scandinavia and Northern Europe tops the list. So Finland is number one, four cups of coffee a day, a day on average in Finland. Norway, Iceland, Denmark, then you get the other big European countries, the UK, Germany, France, come down a little bit further down the list, the USA. Asian countries tend to be much lower. There are exceptions, but, you know, Japan, China, much lower in coffee consumption, partly because there's more of a culture of tea drinking in large parts of Asia. So let's get to one of the points of the story.

11:48Does coffee affect people differently? And clearly it does, looking at the different personalities in this newsroom. If so, how? Interesting thing with caffeine is it's a very weird drug for that reason. I spoke to researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago about this. They've done some work pretty recently. And a lot depends on how quickly you can metabolise or break down that coffee in your body. and that can take from 6 hours to 20 hours depending on the individual. The interesting thing with caffeine is it doesn't give you more energy. All it's doing is that there's a chemical that builds up in your brain all day called adenosine that makes you feel more sleepy and all the caffeine is doing is blocking that chemical coming through so it's not giving you really a boost in that sense, it's just stopping you being more tired.

12:36Tell us about building up a tolerance. That's definitely something you can do. And this is where the body, James, is pretty amazing. So if you drink coffee over time, your brain can actually form more of the receptors that let that tiredness chemical, adenosine, get through. So caffeine seems to have less of an effect. Then if you suddenly sort of give up coffee for a couple of weeks, your brain can actually revert very quickly, just in a matter of days or weeks, to its normal state. Then you suddenly have a coffee again after a period of not drinking for a couple of weeks. and that is when it can really hit you because your brain and your body is just just not used to it so it's amazing how quickly your body can adapt to these things how much is the limit i mean to people in finland are they getting close to that limit they're on four cups of coffee a day it's pretty difficult because that there's there's no great answer to that it does depend on individuals the exception is pregnant women because there is pretty decent evidence that intake of caffeine can be linked to low birth weight other complications so there the advice This is, for most health regulators, 200 milligrams of caffeine a day.

13:41That's about the same as two cups of filter coffee. For healthy adults, the advice again from regulators, anything under four cups of filter coffee, you're pretty safe. To be honest, you're only going to really have a major health problem if you consume a lot more caffeine. And that is unlikely with coffee, because you'll simply get jittery and stop drinking it. It is possible, though. So recently there's been a big fad for kind of caffeine powders and supplements. And that's where you can get in trouble because it's difficult to regulate how much you're taking in. And you can overdose on those.

14:15And there have been a handful, not very many, but a handful of deaths connected with that in some European countries. So for the most part, completely safe. But in isolation, in rare cases, it can be quite dangerous. Health reporter Jim Reid. Let's focus now on a manuscript from the 16th century, which tells the story of what happened to the Aztec people who lived in what's now central and southern Mexico. The Codex Azcateclan depicts the fall of the Aztecs after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. It's widely considered to be among the most valuable and insightful tellings of the history of Aztec civilization.

14:54Now the Codex is going on display in Mexico after more than 180 years abroad. It had been held in France since 1898, and it had already spent decades outside Mexico before that. Camila Townsend told Paul Henley about the Codex. She's a professor of history at Rutgers University in the U.S., and she's a specialist on the Aztecs. The Codex Azcatitlan is a really beautiful work of art, one of the loveliest of the Mexican codices. It is largely drawn in black ink and decorated in reds and oranges and yellows, sort of burnt colours, if you will. And it proceeds in a very beautiful way through their history, from the earliest legends up to the period of the arrival of the Spanish.

15:39It is illustrating all sorts of aspects of Mexica, as they call themselves, Aztec history, some warlike and some times of peace. For example, just describe what the figures look like. They're fairly primitive to some modern eyes, aren't they? Yes, they are. I guess you might use the word cartoon, but I don't mean cartoonish. They are two-dimensional but suggest three-dimensional. It's clearly by artists, Nahuatl or native indigenous artists who had gone to school with the friars and learned about Western perspective. One has the impression that they've learned to draw Western style quite recently.

16:15And so they're mixing Western presentation of the human body with all sorts of indigenous images and artwork. They show a road with a human footprint going along the path to indicate motion. And here and there, they do stop and war with their neighbours, but also do dances, sing songs, etc. So there they are living their lives when the Spaniards arrive. And do we know for sure that it was Aztec artists that did it? And were these pictures drawn at the time or as historical documents? We are certain that these were Aztec artists, indigenous artists, because the imagery is so loaded with native iconography, with stories that the Spaniards didn't even know.

16:58There would be no way for a Spanish person really to have created this piece of work in the colonial era. This is based on legends and histories that were passed orally amongst the Nahuas. And we know these stories because they sometimes stopped and wrote them down in their own language for each other. So the codex is coming home. How big a deal is that? It's a very big deal. The Mexicans know, on some level they all know, what a grand history they have, the extraordinary nature of the civilizations that existed in Mexico before the conquest. But very few of them have the time, energy, resources to go and get their PhDs in this subject, so they don't know much about it.

17:37And of course, making matters worse, much of their heritage was taken from them, literally removed from the country, largely by the French, although some by English and Americans. Is there implied criticism of the Spanish, which wouldn't be surprising given that they were the invaders, the killers? The Spaniards appear not to good advantage on several occasions. They are violent. The people, even women and children, are having their limbs cut off. The very last page shows friars involved in torturing Indigenous people who are tied to wooden sticks. Camilla Townsend. Still to come in this podcast.

18:15For me, it's amazing that there is still new species waiting to be discovered. So we don't have to go to a volcano or an island or deep in the sea. We have it around us. A new type of cat hiding in plain sight in Bolivia.

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20:40This is the Global News Podcast. A major news study has found that since 1979, more than 11 trillion tons of ice has melted into the oceans from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. And researchers say all that melted water has led to an average sea level rise of three centimetres. That might not sound like a lot, but that water is distributed unevenly across the planet, and it means tens of millions of people in coastal communities face increased risks from flooding. And as the climate continues to warm, the rate of melting could accelerate, raising sea levels even higher. Inez Otasaka, an ice scientist at Northumbria University in England, led the research.

21:2411.3 trillion tons of ice is a very large amount of ice. And if you convert that to sea level rise equivalent, that's three centimetres. We know that for every centimetre of sea level rise, about two to three billion people around the planet are put at further risk of annual coastal flooding. So that's obviously something that's very important and we really need to keep on tracking ice sheet melting. Can you take us through that a little bit? Because when I think about three centimetres of water rising, it doesn't sound like much. Why does it affect so many people around the world? How does that work?

21:59So here we're talking about three centimetres of global mean sea level. So that's really when you project all of the water that's being released by the ice sheet when they melt onto the planet. And because of the effect of gravity, it's not redistributed uniformly across the world. So it doesn't mean that everywhere it will rise by three centimetres. There will be areas around the planet where it's going to be much more than three centimetres and some area, for instance, very close to the ice sheet where it will actually be a sea level four. I see. OK. So tell us more about the report and how you collected the data in it.

22:36How can we be accurate? Yes, we have used satellite data from 27 different satellite missions. We are tracking how much ice the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are losing from year to year. And now we have extended the satellite data record backwards in time to the 1970s. And this really confirms that ice loss started around the 1990s and they have increased since then. In fact, we found that the pace of ice loss increased by a factor of four between the 1980s and 2010s. So how should we think about all of this then, the findings? What are the long-term consequences for sea levels if this trend continues and actually speeds up, as you've indicated?

23:20There's a really clear long-term trend showing that glaciers are flowing faster into the ocean. If we cross certain warming thresholds, then we could have even higher sea level rise than currently planned for. So, for instance, by 2100, depending on the warming scenarios that we're going to follow, in a low emission, we have a total sea level that could be between 28 to 55 centimetres. But then if you look at high emission scenarios, then by the end of that century, that's around two metres. And then if you look at even a bit longer time scale by 2300, 15 metres sea level rise cannot be ruled out.

23:57Wow. I mean, Ineza, as you're talking, the numbers that you're throwing out there just sound quite mind-boggling. Yeah, and it will have really large implications for coastal communities around the world, because we know that about 40 % of the global population are living in coastal areas. So it really shows that we urgently need to develop plans for protecting our coastal communities from the impact of ice melting. Ice scientist Ineza Otasaka. scientists have discovered a new species of wild cat hiding in plain sight in the forests of bolivia the small feline with leopard-like spots was long mistaken for another kind of tiger cat which is normally found in brazil until dna testing revealed the bolivian cat was a species all of its own helen briggs tells us more the story starts with a cat nicknamed tegrino living at a rescue sanctuary in Bolivia.

24:52Researchers noted something unusual about his markings, but since tiger cats have very similar spots and stripes, even experts can struggle to tell them apart. To solve the mystery, the scientists compared DNA from living tiger cats with samples from museum collections, and the results show that Tigrino belongs to a distinct species, now named Leopardus tilkayo. He's the only known living tiger cat of his kind, though there are thought to be more living wild in the forests. Dr. Payola Nogales-Ascaroon says it shows how much we still have left to discover. For me, it's amazing that there is still new species waiting to be discovered, so we don't have to go to a volcano or an island or deep in the sea.

25:40We have it around us. The researchers say this is only the first step. They need to find how many of these tiger cats exist and how to protect them. Helen Briggs. One of Syria's biggest stars, the singer Asala, has performed in the capital Damascus on her first return to the country for 15 years. Asala openly expressed her fierce opposition to the regime of Bashar al-Assad as the uprising against his rule began. She was not based in Syria at the time, but her opposition led to what was effectively a ban on her return to the country. Our Middle East analyst Sebastian Usher told Pete Ross more about her.

26:23These are big, big stars, the Arab female pop singers. And she's one of the biggest, I mean, as she's known by one name, Asala. I mean, there you go. That's a big thing, isn't it? She has an extraordinary voice. She's a little different in her sound from a lot of the other big Arab singers. She's a little bit the same. She's got a special timbre to her. And she has been out of Syria for quite some time now. What were the circumstances that led to her leaving the country? Before the uprising began in 2011, she was able to come and go to Syria. That stopped when the uprising began against President Assad.