Iran closes Strait of Hormuz a day after declaring it open

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1:05Subject to change. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Miles and in the early hours of Sunday the 19th of April, these are our main stories. Iran's Revolutionary Guards say they are completely closing the Strait of Hormuz once more because of America's continuing blockade of Iranian ports. Hezbollah has denied being responsible for an attack that killed a French UN peacekeeper in southern Lebanon. Police in Kyiv have shot at a man said to be from Moscow after he shot at least six people in Ukraine's capital. Also in this podcast. President of the United States made some comments about myself.

1:49Much of what has been written since then has been more commentary on commentary, trying to interpret what has been said. Arriving in Angola on his tour of Africa, Pope Leo downplays his row with Donald Trump.

2:05For just over 24 hours, the crucial waterway known as the Strait of Hormuz looked like it just might be getting back to normal. Iran had lifted its threat to shipping. Now ships are avoiding it once again. The Speaker of Iran's Parliament, Mohammed Bakar Khalibaf, said Iranian forces are in full control of the strait and passage through it would remain restricted unless the US removed its blockade of Iranian ports. President Trump has said the US will continue to stop vessels going to or coming from Iran until a deal is reached with Tehran. Let's get more on the latest developments from our diplomatic correspondent, James Landau.

2:49You are over there. Go back to the airport immediately. Do you get my message? OK, copied your message. I will turn back. The message from the Iranian authorities to seafarers, they would not be passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran's foreign ministry had said the seaway was fully open. The country's army and security chiefs said no. They would continue to control traffic. In a statement, Iran's Supreme National Security Council said

3:32This, they said, would continue until America's warships ended their own blockade of shipping to and from Iranian ports, which the US says will continue both in the air and on the sea, a blockade which Iran describes as piracy. They can't blackmail us. In fact, a lot of the ships are coming up to Texas. Donald Trump said Iran was being a little cute with the US, but exuded his usual confidence. Pretty good, but it's going actually along very well. But not so well for some. The UK Maritime Authorities said Iranian gunboats fired on a tanker north-east of Oman. They said a container ship in the same area was hit by an unknown projectile.

4:16In a message posted on social media, Iran's supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, said Iran's navy was ready to inflict new bitter defeats on its enemies. Satellite imagery showed some vessels had hoped to transit the strait, only for most to turn around, as it became clear the threat from Iran remained. There is some diplomacy underway before the two-week ceasefire expires on Wednesday. Pakistan's army chief has been in Tehran, and there's talk of a possible memorandum of understanding between both sides, followed by a comprehensive deal in 60 days. But Iran said no date had been set for talks, and it had yet to respond to the latest US proposals.

4:58For now, it seems Tehran is happy to display its confidence and its control of the seas. So, to what extent have the latest developments lowered expectations of a resolution to the conflict from the Trump administration's point of view. Simi Jula Osho is in Washington. Well, it doesn't seem to have dampened hopes here. Publicly, President Trump has insisted that the standoff hasn't derailed negotiations, even if the reality looks more complicated. He's remained optimistic. He said that Iran cannot blackmail Washington, but he's also said that there are very good conversations going on between the two sides.

5:36He has acknowledged that the US has taken a sort of tough stance in these negotiations. It seems that the US is simply continuing to apply economic pressure on Iran until they get a deal that they're satisfied with. And in the meantime, ships are turning back from the Strait of Hormuz as we speak, worried about being fired upon by Iran, possibly spiking oil prices as well. That's going to put pressure economically on Donald Trump as well, too, isn't it? Yes, indeed. We know that the Strait of Hormuz was a sort of central pressure point for President Trump throughout this war. It kind of made it difficult for him to end this war on his own terms.

6:20So we know it's kind of propelled him to get these talks going, to get a negotiation done. He's been put under pressure here in the US as well because global oil prices rising also affects oil prices here in the US. Now, he has continued to receive support from Republicans and members of his own party. But Democrats have continuously criticised this war and said that President Trump isn't focused on affordability and that this war has made it worse. That was Simi Jula Osho. Meanwhile, for people living inside Iran, they have now been in a government-imposed internet blackout for seven weeks. Back in February, Tehran effectively shut down internet to everyday users, with traffic consistently reduced to below 1 % of normal levels.

7:11That's leaving over 90 million people confined to a tightly controlled government-approved intranet. Hadi Nili is technology correspondent for BBC Persian. So what are people in Iran seeing when they try to access the internet? You hit a wall. What exists is something closer to a domestic nationwide intranet, a government-approved system with domestic apps, local search engines, banking services, but the global internet largely gone or barely trickling in. For most of these 50 days, data traffic, meaning the actual connectivity to the world, dropped to around 1 % of normal traffic for Iran. So imagine opening your phone and nothing loads.

7:52No WhatsApp, no Instagram, no independent news. And it's not just an inconvenience, I should say, like what you feel when you have a glitch in your network at home or in the office. It's information isolation. More than 90 million people being kept in dark about what's happening in their own country during such an intense conflict, the Israeli-U.S. war on Iran. All internet traffic flows through state-controlled infrastructure. They can simply order a shutdown and it's implemented in minutes. Second, high-tech filtering. They use AI to inspect users' data and how they are connected, like if they're using VPN and anti-censorship tools or using satellite internet via Stirling terminal, which are all criminalized in Iran now.

8:35And most effectively, throttling speed to unusable levels so users just give up, frustrated. Third, physical control. Seeing cards of activists and citizens who post on social media platforms get cut off entirely. My mom, who is a retired teacher, is tech savvy because she needs to have anti-filtering tools on her phone to be able to connect to me on WhatsApp, to have a video call so she can see her grandson growing up here in London. But millions of people have been using these tools. It's becoming more and more restrict and more and more hard to make them work because the VPNs are getting more and more expensive.

9:13A friend of mine told me they had to forget about buying new clothes for the Iranian New Year and instead buy these anti-Secondvention tools. Hadi Nili. Three days into the ceasefire in Lebanon and it remains fragile. A French soldier in the south of the country with the United Nations peacekeeping force UNIFIL has been killed in an attack which the UN and France has blamed on Hezbollah. The Iranian-backed armed group denies any involvement. Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, has called for such attacks to stop and for Israel and Hezbollah to respect the ceasefire. According to the Lebanese Health Ministry, more than 2 ,100 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes during the six-week war.

9:57Israeli forces are still occupying parts of southern Lebanon. They say to stop Hezbollah fighters returning to attack northern Israel. The BBC Arabic's Karim Torbe sent us this report from southern Lebanon. This is one of the main entrances to Khiam. It is a border town between Lebanon and Israel that's so very heavy fighting throughout the 45-day war between Hezbollah and Israel, as the Israeli army was trying to advance into it and to occupy it. At the moment, the Lebanese army is erecting this barrier to stop the residents from going back into the town, as it is still partly under Israeli occupation.

10:42But this town and other towns in the area have seen very intense explosions. And the thud of these explosions were heard in large parts around it. And they are believed to be coming from detonations carried out by the Israeli army to houses and structures inside those villages. Of course, parts of the normal life are coming back to the south of Lebanon or to parts of the south of Lebanon after the ceasefire came into effect. And as part of this, the UNIFIL, the UN Peacekeeping Forces in south Lebanon, has resumed its patrols in parts of the south. This has stopped due to the hostilities in the past weeks.

11:34On the political level, there is still a very strong division about the way ahead. And this division came to light after the Lebanese president has announced that he is ready to go whatever is necessary to liberate the land and to protect the people. Of course, he was alluding to some sort of direct negotiations with Israel. And this is a very deeply divisive subject in the country. Corinne Torbay reporting. Pope Leo seems to be downplaying his dispute with President Trump, who accused him of being weak on crime. The Pope is now in Angola on his tour of Africa. But en route, he said that comments he had made in Cameroon about abuse and tyranny had been misinterpreted.

12:23There's been a certain narrative that has not been accurate in all of it, aspects, but because of the political situation created when on the first day of the trip, President of the United States made some comments about myself. Much of what has been written since then has been more commentary on commentary, trying to interpret what has been said. Our global affairs reporter Richard Kagoy told Valerie Sanderson more about the Pope's comments. Well, he said that his remarks that he's made regarding issues to do with exploitation, leadership, which is very tyrannical. You know, he's talked about issues to do with corruption were not necessarily targeted at President Trump.

13:08He says that he is just promoting a message of peace based on the observations and the issues that he's been able to observe around the world. So he sort of set the record clear that anything that he's been saying has not been necessarily directed at President Trump, because part of the messaging or the speeches were prepared well even before the criticism by the US leader. He's now in Angola. What are the preparations there for him? Well, there's been lots of preparation and quite a lot of anticipation. If you walked even through the streets of the capital, Lwanda, you know, you could see the pictures on the billboards of the Pope.

13:44People have just been lining up on the route from the airport, leading into the city with a lot of expectation. There's going to be a huge mass. We're expected to have about 200 ,000 people attending, celebrating mass with a Pope on Sunday has been prepared. And kitchens have been being set up just to cater for lots of people who will be doing even a night vigil as they prepare to attend a mass on Sunday. And this is the Pope's third stop in his tour of Africa. What is the impact he's having, do you think, on the continent? I think the fact that a lot of people are seeing his visit as being very symbolic and also strategic in the sense that it does reflect the importance of Africa in Catholicism.

14:28Because if you look at, you know, Africa's in terms of the population of people who do identify as Catholics, it's about a fifth of the world's Catholic population. and for them to see the Pope really taking his time for close to about 10 days, his second trip since he took the position is very symbolic because just saying that Catholicism in Africa is very important to the Vatican and a lot of people do really appreciate this, even for the very times that even his predecessors have made in the continent itself. Richard Kagoi in Nairobi. Still to come in this podcast. The discipline and the hard work and the fact that it's a very technical and very mental sport, it just seemed to suit China very, very well.

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17:56At least six people have been killed and more than a dozen others were wounded after a gunman opened fire in Kyiv. Video shows the attacker running in the streets of a suburb of the Ukrainian capital, shooting at random from an automatic rifle. He then entered a supermarket where he took hostages and continued shooting. Ukraine's interior minister is Iho Klimenko. Police negotiators spoke with him for around 40 minutes. We tried to persuade him, realising that there was an injured person there. We offered to bring in tourniquet to stop the bleeding and so on, but he did not respond, so the order was given to eliminate him, especially after he killed one of the hostages.

18:37Our correspondent in Kiev, Jessica Parker, was at the scene of the attack. There's a cordon up around the supermarket that an armed unit stormed earlier as part of the response to this shooting. Now, in terms of the suspect, what we've been told is that he's a 58-year-old man, originally born in Moscow, but a Ukrainian resident. So that's what the authorities have been saying about the suspect so far. I think for people in Kiev, this has been a huge shock. Of course, it's a city within a country that is used to drone attacks, missile attacks, sirens going off at night. But a shooting like this is extremely rare.

19:20And I think a lot of people are going to be watching closely as investigators try and find out exactly why this happened. Jessica Parker. Nigeria has the largest population of any African country, more than 240 million, according to some estimates. According to the United Nations, this figure is predicted to reach 360 million by 2050. But as the population soars, tens of millions of Nigerians with disabilities are being left behind because they're living in a country which remains inaccessible to them. Toda Opanyemi has this report. I am currently in Ibadan, Oyo state in southwestern Nigeria. Over the past few weeks, I have been speaking with people living with disabilities in different states across the country.

20:07And while each person faces unique challenges, one issue keeps coming up, accessibility, or the complete lack of it. In Nigeria, an estimated 15 % of the population lives with a disability that is roughly 35 million people. Yet, the spaces they're expected to move through, streets, schools, government offices, banks, hospitals, are largely built without them in mind. Ibada is not designed for persons with disability. In many places where persons with disability can go. Abiyose Falade is a 43-year-old author based in Ohio State, living with a physical disability. She has learned to map her city, not by distance, but by what is reachable.

20:52There's a list of places I can go and a list of places I can go. Luckily, I'm someone who doesn't even like going out to start with. For 19-year-old Ove Friday, living in Nasarawa state. The barriers took on a different shape. He lost the use of both hands at 13 after being subjected to a ritual by a family member who accused him of witchcraft. When he later tried to register for Nigeria's university entrance examination, the system had no accommodation for him. Fingerprint checks locked him out. I was supposed to write the exam two years ago, but because of the hands, like, they don't print, like, I have to stop.

21:37It took a journey to Nigeria's capital and sustained pressure before officials agreed to accept his toe print instead. He is now a first-year English student, but the fight to be included did not end there. I wish I had my five fingers complete here. That would be maybe easy for them, but I didn't have, like, the five fingers complete. In 2019, Nigeria passed the Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities Prohibition Act. But years later, the man charged with leading its implementation says the pace has been a struggle. To a large extent, it has been more or less of a snail's speed, but the journey of a thousand miles, they say, begins with a step.

22:22Ayuba Buruki Higufwan, Executive Secretary, National Commission for Persons with Disabilities. I wouldn't say categorically that Nigeria is accessible yet. It's a work in progress. We still have a lot to cover in making Nigeria accessible to all persons with disabilities. Across different cities and states in Nigeria, I spoke with people whose lives look nothing alike. But the frustration they described was the same. The wish, too, is simple. They want the quiet dignity of moving through their country and sitting for exams without having to fight for it. And the institutions still waiting to catch up.

23:11Toda Opayemi reporting. France's president, Emmanuel Macron, has led tributes to one of the country's most celebrated film stars, Nathalie Bey, who has died at the age of 77. He described her as an actress with whom we love, dreamed and grew up. Nathalie Bay, who had been ill with a neurodegenerative disease, was a four-time winner of the César Awards, the French equivalent of the Oscars, and she received the Légion d 'Honneur, the country's highest order of merit. She was also known to international audiences for her roles in the period drama Downton Abbey, A New Era, and Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can.

23:52Jeannette Vincent-Doux, Emeritus Professor of Film Studies at King's College London, specialises in French film. She said it was Nathalie Bay's work with great directors like Spielberg for which she will be best remembered. I think what made her unique is a very long and very distinguished filmography and her ability to make a great deal of great movies with quite a range of directors. So she worked both with really eminent figures in French cinema, like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat. She also worked with a few Hollywood directors and also a number of great women directors.

24:34I would call her generally a cinephile star, somebody who made films that will remain as part of French cinema history, but also a few popular films. In 1982, she made a film called La Balance by Bob Swain, actually an American director working in Paris, for which she got a César Prize. And that was really a popular thriller, which had quite an international career. The same year, she also made The Return of Martin Guerre, co-starring with Gérard Depardieu. But then she appeared in films by Diane Curis, Tony Marshall, a number of great women directors. We also find her in some popular television series called My Agent, Die Pourcent in French, about stars.

25:20She appears in one episode with her own daughter, Laura Smet, who was her daughter with Johnny Hallyday. In 2022, she's in Downton Abbey 2, the film. So it's such a great range of different kinds of films. Somebody who made really great choices in the films she made. Because she didn't exactly fall into the sex symbol category, did she? Although she was very beautiful. And she wasn't your typical celebrity, although she was married to the darling of the French tabloids, Johnny Alliday. She was hard to pigeonhole. Yes, she was not a kind of celebrity. Let's say she had a celebrity moment in the early 1980s when she met Johnny Alliday, the singer.

26:04I think in France at the time, I remember it was really perceived as two worlds coming together. The actress from films by great auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard, who was together with a very, very popular rock singer. And it felt like it was incredible that they were together and they produced a daughter. The relationship didn't last very long, but it was quite intense. The rest of the time, yes, she was much more discreet. And as you say, somebody who was very pretty, very attractive, very seductive, and yet wasn't playing the sex bombs, wasn't glamorous in that way. And I think that her great talent was this kind of discretion and a versatility which enabled her to range across all these films, but also a subtlety in her performance, a kind of naturalism, which made her, I suppose, young people now would say relatable in the characters she played.

27:00Jeannette Vincent-Door speaking to Paul Henley. 57 years ago, the BBC launched a programme called Pot Black.