Iran fast tracks protester trials

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

0:47I'm Celia Hatton, and at 1600 GMT, Wednesday the 14th of January, these are our main stories. The Iranian authorities have said they'll fast-track trials for suspected protesters involved in anti-government demonstrations. At least one man has already been sentenced to death. Russia continues to attack Ukraine's infrastructure, forcing many people to live in unheated homes in winter temperatures well below freezing. And China last year had a record trade surplus, despite tariffs imposed by President Trump. Also in this podcast...

1:30How two political leaders used a jamming session to cement diplomatic ties.

1:39Let's begin in Iran, where information's still coming out about the scale of nationwide protests over the last few weeks and the numbers of people who died at the hands of the authorities who tried to stop them. A U.S.-based human rights group, Hrana, believes that more than 2 ,500 protesters have been killed. The government has said it will fast-track trials for suspected protesters. We already know of one man, 26-year-old Arfan Soltani, who's been sentenced to death. On Wednesday, the authorities held a mass funeral for more than 100 members of the security forces.

2:25Coffins were displayed on the back of open trucks with hundreds of pro-government supporters lining the streets. The government appears to be trying to show that it's back in control. I put that development to Lise Doucette, our chief international correspondent. Yes, that's been happening for a few days. And that very moment where it seemed like using deadly force had largely emptied the streets of that roar of people calling for change, political change, economic change. Then they went out to reclaim the streets with huge rallies, which State TV said millions of people, that seemed quite a large estimate, but certainly lots of people, the streets were flooded by supporters of the government.

3:08And now today there's been a state funeral, as we've been hearing. Certainly security personnel have died in this violence. And insofar as we can ascertain in our very partial picture, because of the communications blackout, there have been protesters who have set fire to buildings, who have opened fire on security personnel. But then the officials then extrapolate from that to say, yes, there is a high death toll, but it is all the work of terrorists and troublemakers backed by foreign enemies, which is code for Israel and the United States. So they are trying to say these are really bad people.

3:43And today the head of the judiciary is saying we're going to fast track the executions. They have to pay. And the greatest charge is for waging war against God, which raises the death penalty. To keep our focus outside the country for a moment, we are hearing some reports that some U.S. personnel are being moved off of their base in Qatar. What can we read into that if those reports are true? These are all the signs that you see when a region is preparing for a possible attack. We heard the calls yesterday for any U.S. nationals in Iran to leave as soon as possible. Then we heard reports that some military, U.S.

4:23military, have been moved, as you say, from the Al-Udeid base in Qatar. It is the U.S.'s biggest military base in the region. And Iran is making it clear that if Iran, if it is attacked by the US, all, in their words, legitimate targets will be in their sights, which is why we are hearing reports, Celia, that powerful players in the region, and they have President Trump's ear, and we've seen it on the Gaza crisis, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, they're saying don't attack militarily. It will destabilize the entire region, including economic issues, money making. Lisa, as more phone calls are being made from Iran, as more images are coming out and we're seeing the extent of what's been happening over the past few days and weeks, what images have really stood out for you?

5:09What's really made you sit back and take a moment? I think I have to say, and I'm sure many of our listeners have also seen it, is the open-air morgues. People are wailing, and you look closely, and there are body bags, and they go on and on, and you see behind them the white refrigerated trucks. More body bags are arriving, and some of the body bags are open. The most chilling of scenes, and this is always the most terrible of moments in times like this, where families desperate to know where are their loved ones. So they go to the morgue, desperately searching. And we've also had stories, Celia, which are cruel, that some bodies are being held back, bodies are being buried without permission of the family.

5:52And of course, the government has aired these images of open morgues and saying, see, these are the bodies of the dead killed by the protesters. Our chief international correspondent, Lise Doucette. Well, as we've been hearing, getting information from inside Iran is difficult, as there's still an internet blackout. Take this protest, for example.

6:18Evidence of this huge demonstration in Tehran six days ago has only just made it to the outside world. To find out more about how we know what's happening inside Iran, I spoke to Cheyenne Sadurzadeh from BBC Verify. Since the protests began on the 28th of December, we've been getting a large number of videos posted on social media, which is how Iranians usually communicate with the outside world when something like this happens. Because Iranian state media or state-linked media are not going to cover the protests. Or if they do cover them, they cover them in a negative light. So we actually verified over 200 videos along with our colleagues from BBC Persian of these protests up until Thursday night.

7:00And that's when the floor on information was still available to Iranians. But then since Thursday evening, there has been a near total internet blackout. So since then, the floor of videos has almost entirely stopped. But up until Thursday, we have a very good idea of how widespread and big these protests were. And they were very, very big. We have been able to verify videos of protests in 68 towns and cities across the country and over 20 of the 31 provinces. And bear in mind, Iran is a vast country. It's a huge country. So when we're talking about 20, 21 of the 31 provinces, we're talking about pretty much most of the country.

7:39And there are parts of the country that are uninhabitable. So when you look at a map of the country, pretty much every area of the country where there are towns and cities and there are people living in those places, residential areas, pretty much in all of those places that have been protests have been recorded based on videos that we verify. Chayen, can you talk us through how you go about verifying information coming out of Iran? So obviously we have a Persian service and journalists who are actually Iranians or Iranian born and raised in many cases. I myself was born and raised in Iran although I've now lived nearly half of my life in the UK I speak the language I know the country there's some of the towns and cities I've been to I've seen in my own eyes the same applies to colleagues in BBC Persian so when these videos come through we have a very good idea of how to go about and verify them what we want to know is first of all that these videos are new and then second we want to know the exact location where they've been filmed.

8:35So, you know, on this particular street or on this particular road or from the rooftop of this residential area in this town or city. And because Iran is a country that has seen many, many waves of protests in the last 10 or 15 years, so we want to make sure that this is not from protests in 2022 or 2019 or 2018. We want to make sure that these are new videos. And we also have sources inside Iran because most of us, for some parts of our lives, we live there. We know people, We have sources inside so we can check with them. We can get eyewitness accounts from people. Was there a protest in your town?

9:08Was there a protest in your city, in your community, in your neighbourhood? So we put all of those things together and we can come at a pretty convincing conclusion in terms of when we say a video has been verified, we're pretty confident that it is 100 % from this wave of protests in this part of the country, in this town or in this city. And when we say something's verified, we're 100 % certain. Cheyenne, Sidor Zadeh. To Kiev now, where temperatures are expected to drop to a low of 18 degrees below zero today. Russia's continued strikes on Ukraine's energy infrastructure have left thousands without enough power to heat their homes or even to cook their food.

9:48Some have begun sleeping and spending time on special trains to keep warm, as our correspondent Weira Davies reports. After almost four years of war, the daily grind facing many Ukrainians has never been worse. Despite talk of a possible ceasefire, Russian attacks intensify. The winter is the worst they've seen for years, and here in Kiev, at least, there are few crumbs of comfort. We've now come to a railway station in Kiev, and there's a train on the tracks, but it's not going anywhere. It's a train that's got hot food, it's got water, it's got electricity, it's got bedding if people need it.

10:27And this has been put on by the Ukrainian railways and a variety of other charities for people whose lives have been affected by the bombing. They can't be at home all day long because they haven't got electricity. The noise you can hear in the background is a generator providing the warmth and electricity they can't get at home. Among the passengers, Alina and her son Taras. It's a welcome break for Alina, whose father was killed earlier in the war. I live in a new building on the 17th floor and we have no elevator, no electricity, no water supply On this invincibility train there's a whole range of people a couple of old babushkas come for a chat and some warmth and some electricity also a lot of kids, school kids on the train because again they haven't got electricity or power at home and they come here to socialise amongst them is 11 year old Staz Stas doesn't really remember what it was like before the war.

11:26I forget sometimes when I hear something is flying. That's really scary. Because you don't know if it explodes right now or it goes away and you will survive. It's hard. There are all kinds here seeking warmth, comfort or just company.

11:52President Zelenskyy accuses Russia of deliberately exploiting the winter, targeting power stations, energy facilities and other critical infrastructure across Ukraine. With outside temperatures well below minus 10 degrees Celsius, we go to meet a couple now in a temporary home after their apartment was hit in an airstrike. The first thing you notice when you come in this apartment block is it's still cold inside. and the second thing is at the elevators, the lifts aren't working. So Yulia, your and their one-year-old son, Markian, every day have to walk up six flights of stairs to get to their apartment.

12:39For the first time in a while we have a real winter in Ukraine as it is supposed to be and with this minus 12, minus 16 at night and no heating while the apartment gets cold pretty soon.

12:56Yor heats bricks on a gas stove in the kitchen to warm up the rest of the house. They had just four minutes of electricity the day before our visit and the family has decided to move from Kiev after another Russian drone strike just across the yard from their temporary house. Day and night, engineers repair infrastructure and power lines directly or indirectly affected by airstrikes. With electricity supplies so fragile, power surges damage cables and collapse networks, says Andriy Sobko from Kyiv Electric Networks. The power system is currently in a critical state. We are working around the clock to restore the damaged equipment.

13:41But to repair everything like it was before the war, that will take years and years. People here put a brave face on things. This extraordinarily cold winter won't last for more than a couple of months, and the energy crisis should ease. What most fear is that the war itself and the inevitable loss of life will last much longer. We are Davies in Kiev. President Trump's decision to slap substantial tariffs or taxes on many foreign imports last year was, in part at least, designed to address the large trade imbalances that the US runs with countries around the world, and in particular with China.

14:22So have tariffs damaged China's export-orientated economy? Not according to the latest figures. Beijing has recorded its biggest ever global trade surplus, a surge in exports in 2025, pushed that up to nearly$1.2 trillion. So how did it do that? Ginny Yen, chief China economist at the Chinese-controlled ICBC Standard Bank, told my colleague James Menendez. China is now a manufacturing powerhouse. So as China starts to produce higher value goods, So machineries, high tech end products. What's happening is that China is selling more to the rest of the world than it buys from the rest of the world.

15:06So this is why China is running a trade surplus. And this is not just happened suddenly. It's building up over the years as China strives to become a powerhouse when it comes to global trade. And why is it continuing to grow and it's grown again this year, especially given Donald Trump's tariffs? In 2025, of course, the threat of tariffs meant that Chinese exporters very much wanted to accelerate the process of exporting to other nations to avoid the tariffs. So what happened was the front loading, meaning that lots of orders were done very quickly or quicker than anticipated, which meant for particularly in the first half of the year, we had lots of export orders.

15:55That momentum has slowed towards the end of the year. So actually, the recent strong performance in terms of export is already showing some slowdown momentum. But that said, the structural shift in terms of China becoming a higher value exporter to the rest of the world is showing and demonstrating that China is diversifying the types of goods that it's trying to trade with the rest of the world. What does it mean for the rest of the world? And is it bad for the rest of the world that China is exporting so much and not importing very much? Quite the contrary. The fact that China is exporting the types of goods that means that it needs partnership all over the world.

16:40So what that means is that China is producing things, not only better things, but actually cheaper. So for the rest of the world, it doesn't mean the price of goods may become cheaper. So it's producing jobs and producing growth as part of that for the rest of the world. Jenny Yan. Still to come in this podcast... Oh my goodness me! He's won a million dollars! Amateurs and celebrities face the world's top tennis players, with one winning big money.

17:19If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

17:59This is the Global News Podcast. At least 32 people have died after a construction crane fell onto a moving passenger train northeast of the Thai capital, Bangkok. Our Southeast Asia correspondent Jonathan Head reports from the scene. I'm actually standing on the railway line where this happened and behind me, they've moved away now using heavy cranes, the crushed carriages. This is a brand new high-speed line that they're building on top of this existing railway line. And that huge crane, that is now tilted at a really dangerous angle. Big parts that became crashing down, crushing at least three of the carriages, setting one of them on fire.

18:36It really was a dreadful scene. They're trying to clear it up now. There are dozens of people still being treated in hospital. And the government has announced what it says will be a very fast investigation into what went wrong. But this is a highly prestigious project. This new railway line is meant to link Bangkok with China. It's part of China's Belt and Road Initiative. So it's a very prestigious project. And to have such a major disaster happen on it is a real blow to what for Thailand was meant to showcase its modernizing infrastructure. There have, I have to say, been other accidents like this before in Thailand.

19:11I think there'll be a lot of skepticism about what kind of action is going to follow this one. Jonathan Head in Thailand. Now to the sound of diplomacy.

19:24Believe it or not, that's the Japanese Prime Minister, Sinai Takeuchi, and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung drumming along to some K-pop hits on the first day of their summit in Tokyo. Our correspondent Jake Kwon is covering the talks from the South Korean capital, Seoul. So do these two have a future as pop stars? I think if you just heard some little offbeat playing, I think that was South Korean president, Lee Jae-myung, because I think Ms. Takahichi probably has an arguably better chance. I mean, she has been a drummer in a heavy metal band in her university. And she says she's a fan of bands like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden.

20:01And even today, this 64-year-old politician, she has a drum set at home, which she says she bangs out songs whenever she's stressed by her husband. And what we're hearing is that this was Mr. Gai-ji's idea to invite Mr. Lee Jae-myung to play with her because he told her at the last meeting several months ago that he had a lifelong dream of playing drums. But this is something that I heard actually quite often from South Korean politicians of his age, because when they were growing up, I mean, South Korea was a very, very poor place. And Mr. E himself had to spend time working during the day in the factory and then, you know, studying for middle school and high school at night.

20:41So playing music was just something that only the very rich, the top 1 % could do. I think it's amazing to see footage from that drumming session because the two of them just look absolutely thrilled. They're smiling from ear to ear, aren't they? But we have to remember that ties between Japan and South Korea haven't always been this friendly, have they? No, but they are supposed to be best friends. I mean, they have a lot of shared culture. And most importantly, there's a very security alliance here. But because of the sordid past where Japan occupied and colonized Korea, and there was a lot of brutality during this time, this has been an area of contention that just constantly comes up when we talk about these two countries.

21:22And when Mr. Yi won the election, there was a lot of unease in Tokyo because they thought he was a staunch nationalist. And same exact thing happened in Seoul when Ms. Takahichi was elected because of her reputation as a nationalist. And the relationship between Seoul and Tokyo is one where they could really benefit if they cooperate. But any snag in the historical issue can come and upend all of that. Just briefly, Jake, I mean, what are we expecting to come from this summit? Any big announcements? Well, they talk about, you know, trade and stabilizing the region, of course, and the world could use a lot more of that.

21:54But what was not mentioned is, of course, this huge conflict that China and Tokyo are now engaged in over Taiwan issue. And so, you know, Mr. Yi was just in Beijing last week and he had a chat with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. So I'm sure Ms. Takahichi is keen to hear what Mr. Xi had told him about this issue. And she would love to hug South Korea closer during this time of spat with Beijing. Jake Kwan in Seoul. Tennis now. The Australian Open doesn't really get underway until Sunday. But the on-court action has already started with an event that's being called the Million Dollar One-Point Slam.

22:34Amateur tennis players had the opportunity to win one million Australian dollars. That's about 650 ,000 US dollars when facing some of the world's top tennis stars in a single point showdown. A game of rock, paper, scissors decides who serves. The nerves are setting in. Rock, paper, scissors. We're ready for it. Rock, paper, scissors. Rock, paper, scissors. I return. So what's this all about? our tennis correspondent Russell Fuller joined us from Melbourne. The idea has been to pit some of the very best players in the world, and that includes the likes of Coco Goff and Iger Svjantek and Carlos Alcaraz and Yannick Sinner, against some amateur players and some celebrity wildcards to see who will end up winning the first prize of one million Australian dollars.

23:25And the twist in the tale is that each match is decided by just one point. And if you are a professional player, you only get one serve. So it's about entertainment. It's also about trying to put more eyes on this lead-up week to the Australian Open, the week that the qualifying matches take place, to try and make the Australian Open, like the other Grand Slams around the world, effectively three-week events rather than two-week events. And it's certainly a unique format that has created a lot of interest. Oh, it sounds really exciting. Tell us more about the amateurs. Who did they find to play these pros?

24:00They had some qualifying competitions in the eight Australian states at the end of last year. And there was a state champion in each of those. And they received flights to Melbourne and three nights accommodation and a place in the main draw. Now, in almost every case, those state champions are very fine tennis players. They may have considered a professional career. They may have had a college tennis education in the United States. But they are ultimately amateurs. And so to see them up against the likes of Yannick Sinner and Coco Goff is that extra area of unpredictability. And Russell, there's some big prizes on the line, right?

24:38Well, one million Australian dollars is actually more money than you would make for reaching the quarterfinals of the singles when the Australian Open begins on Sunday. There's also a brand new car for the last amateur standing. So I think the money is definitely a factor, although some of the players involved are multi, multi millionaires. It was a chance for some celebrities to take to the stage, the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne as well. There was a former Australian jockey called Damian Oliver. He won the Melbourne Cup three times, who managed to win a round. And also an Australian breakfast TV presenter, Karl Stefanovic, who also managed to win a round when his opponent served a double fault.

25:19So often in this format, if you elect to put your opponent in, you may need to do absolutely nothing to win the match. I wonder if they'd let a BBC World Service presenter have a go. So tell us, who is the target audience for this? Are the organisers trying to bring in new audiences? I think when you try something like this, then you are very much trying to bring in audiences that may not sit through the Australian Open itself, or at least will not be watching for hours and hours on end as matches perhaps stretch into a third, fourth or fifth hour. There's perhaps a hope that it will attract younger audiences to the sport as well.