New threat to global oil supplies

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0:46That's O-D-O-O dot com. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. This edition is published in the early hours of Tuesday the 21st of July. Iran's allies in Yemen, the Houthis, threatened to impose a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia, further disrupting oil supplies. President Trump announces a new 50 % tariff on Canada in retaliation for what he called unequal treatment of US products. And scientists in Northern Ireland hail a 3D printed battery as a game changer for energy storage. Also in this podcast, Italy's growing problem with childhood obesity. I can't even sign him up for the gym because he's so obese.

1:36They don't want to take on the responsibility. He weighs too much. And? Women are getting notifications that their bodies are under some sort of strain, so their health scores have dropped, their temperatures are elevated, their heart rate's high, and yet they feel totally normal. Can fitness trackers really predict that a woman is pregnant?

2:03Following the deaths of at least three US soldiers in recent days, the United States has launched a tenth night of strikes on Iran, with President Trump saying the Iranians would pay many times over for killing Americans. For its part, Iran said it had attacked US military targets in Bahrain and Kuwait. It also claimed that two oil tankers had caught fire after explosions while attempting to go through the Strait of Hormuz. There are fears that another key waterway could soon be shut after Iran's allies in Yemen, the Houthis, threatened to impose a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia. That would suggest they intend to close the Bab el-Madeb Strait at the bottom of the Red Sea, further disrupting the global oil supply.

2:46But will they really go through with it and how would it affect the region? Rebecca Kesby asked Greg Holyoak, Middle East specialist with BBC Monitoring. We really don't know how serious it is as of now. They are known for making these escalatory remarks. How serious it could get is very serious, just to look back to what happened with Red Sea shipping and the price of oil and goods around the world when they were attacking ships that they said were connected to Israel and to Western powers in the past during the Gaza War. Because it is this chokehold, especially now that we're already losing access to the Strait of Hormuz, to add in the Bab al-Mando is going to be a significant shift.

3:26But what set Saudi Arabia aside during the Iran war was the fact that they have this port in Yanbu, which goes on to the Red Sea, which Qatar, the UAE, even Iraq had no access to. They had to use the Strait of Hormuz. And we saw that Saudi media in March were quite pleased announcing that they were redirecting a huge amount of oil, up to 5 million barrels a day, to this port on the Red Sea for export. And if it is a blockade and if they're not able to use this, this kind of puts them in the same position as a lot of those other Gulf countries. Talk us through why this is all sparked off now, because there has been a ceasefire in place for the past four years or so.

4:07There's a couple of different theories. We have seen quite a lot of escalation in terms of language, but also in terms of tit-for-tat strikes in the last couple of weeks. the Houthis tried to fire at a bunch of Saudi fighters who they said were trying to prevent an Iranian plane from landing in the capital, Sana 'a. After that, the airport in Sana 'a was bombed. They blamed Saudi Arabia for these strikes and fired at a Saudi airport. So what we're seeing with this is another escalation. But I think it's important that they're saying this is an escalation in a sort of tit-for-tat way. They haven't specifically said if they are going to proactively start striking or blockading.

4:46or if they're waiting for Saudi Arabia to make the next move. But as we've seen with other groups like the Taliban around the world, if you have this kind of guerrilla-style warfare that you can fight very effectively, they were able to completely hold global shipping to ransom beforehand. So they definitely have shown that without any formalised forces in terms of the Navy and Air Force, they still have a huge amount of power. Greg Holyoke from BBC Monitoring. Last week, President Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Canada over wildfire smoke drifting across the border and into US cities. Now he's slapped a 50 % levy on a wide range of Canadian products in retaliation for what he says is Canada's unequal treatment of American cars, dairy products and alcohol.

5:31The Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, said the US tariffs have violated the Canada-US-Mexico agreement, but has promised to step up talks. I heard more from my US correspondent, Peter Bowes. What we're seeing is a back and forth between the US and Canada in response to retaliation after retaliation. So Canada placed a 25 % tariff on some American vehicles and some provincial authorities in Canada removed US alcohol from their shelves after President Trump imposed earlier tariffs on Canada. So Washington is now characterising those Canadian countermeasures as unfair discrimination. Dairy is a slightly separate issue and an older issue, and it is linked to the way that Canada limits exports to protect its dairy farmers.

6:20The other issue is the one that you mentioned, USMCA, United States, Mexico, Canada agreement, the free trade deal linking the three countries, which the United States earlier this month refused to extend beyond its present expiry date. and it's also demanding changes to the agreement. Now, these new tariffs come with a 30-day delay, which I think is significant to suggest that President Trump wants to use them as leverage to force concessions from Canada before they actually come into effect. Now, President Trump's so-called Liberation Day tariffs were thrown out by the US Supreme Court. What are the chances of these ones being upheld?

6:59These tariffs are on much stronger legal ground, although they're certainly not immune from being challenged. The Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump's previous tariffs because the emergency law that he used, the court ruled, didn't actually give presidents the power to impose tariffs. This time he's invoked another relatively obscure law which explicitly authorizes tariffs up to 50 % when a president finds that another country is discriminating against American commerce. Now, there is virtually no legal precedent for its use, so there could be a challenge. But I think right now there is a much better chance of these tariffs surviving than Mr.

7:38Trump's previous efforts. I mean, is there a way out of this? Could the Canadians come up with a better offer to win Mr. Trump over? Well, yeah, and I think because of this 30-day window, the Prime Minister Mark Carney could do just that. It could involve persuading some of the Canadian provinces to begin stocking American alcohol again, perhaps negotiating a reciprocal withdrawal of the vehicle tariffs and so on. And the Prime Minister has indicated that's exactly what he plans to do in terms of negotiations. He said, we stand ready to intensify those discussions in the coming weeks. He says Canada believes in the benefits of free and fair trade, as he says evidenced by our new government signing more than 20 new economic and security partnerships.

8:23So this is Far From Over. On North America, correspondent Peter Bowes. As in many developed nations, there's growing concern about childhood obesity in Italy. World Health Organization figures show Italian children are the second most overweight in the European Union. It's a somewhat surprising statistic given Italy's reputation for a healthy Mediterranean diet. But doctors say lifestyles and eating habits have changed dramatically in recent decades, as Sofia Pettica reports. When it comes to food, I have not seen anywhere in the world quite like Naples. Every cafe has a little window opening onto the street filled with fresh pastries and pizza slices.

9:08It's all the classics of Naples. I'm holding the city's most popular street snack, pizza fritta. It's an entire pizza deep fried in oil. But all this is linked to a child obesity epidemic. We've just arrived at the Britannia Hospital in Ponticelli, a suburb of Naples. Salvatore is 16 and is here with his mum, Anna. At 180 kilos, he's morbidly obese, meaning his weight is putting his health at serious risk. I can't even sign him up for the gym because he's so obese. They don't want to take on the responsibility. He weighs too much. Something could happen to him. Obesity can cause this. Salvatore is under the care of Dr Sonia Chiappetta.

10:04When obesity puts patients' lives at risk, she removes up to 90 % of their stomach. And demand is growing. World Health Organization figures show Italian children are now the second most overweight in the EU. The patients are getting younger. and normally the patient with obesity, with type 2 diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea, this was a patient I saw around age of 50. Now I see these patients around age of 16, 17, 18, 20. While Dr Chiapetta treats the most severe cases, Professor Roberto Bernicanani, one of Italy's leading pediatric obesity specialists, is trying to prevent children ever needing surgery.

11:01And how young are your patients? Two, three years. So you're seeing children who are two or three who are obese? Already affected by overweight or obesity. Normal child, two, three years of age, the weight, by the way, could be around 10 kilos, but you can find that child within, I don't know, 20 kilos, 25 kilos. Many children are unable to drink regular water. They are going to a Coca-Cola can, a Fanta can or a Gatorade. Professor Berni Canani says one of the biggest challenges is that many Italian parents simply don't realise their own child is obese. They're in denial. Carmen has brought in her 10-year-old daughter, Francesca.

11:47She weighs around 60 kilos. Her throat is irritated and she struggles to swallow. You don't eat vegetables, you don't eat salad, you really don't want them. I put them next to you, but you don't want them.

12:06Last year, Italy passed a law to officially recognise obesity as a serious disease, one of the first countries in the world to do so. Doctors hope that's the first step towards treating it earlier and preventing more children from reaching the point where surgery becomes their only option. That report from Italy by Sofia Bertizza. One of the problems with renewable energy like wind and solar has been how to store the power generated so it's available even when the wind doesn't blow or sun doesn't shine. Scientists at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland have developed a 3D printed battery that they believe could be a game changer.

12:50The details from our environment correspondent, Louise Cullen. That's the sound of a 3D printed flow battery cell being tested in the lab here in Stranmelis under the watchful eye of Dr Hugh O 'Connor who created it during his PhD I was really interested in looking at how I could change the shape of the flow battery cavities to make them perform better and I went to buy some commercially available flow cells and they were like£1 ,000 to£2 ,000 and instead of modifying them I was like, OK, I'll try and make my own so I started 3D printing them. After a lot of trial and error, eventually these started to work really well.

13:27Its various components, the printed structure, then some electrodes and membranes, among other things, all assembled in a precise order. So just what is a flow battery and why does it matter? Dr Josh Bailey works in the lab with Hugh. Most people will have come across a lithium-ion battery that might be found in your phone or in your laptop or increasingly in cars but a flow battery is different. It's not based on storing electricity in solids. It's instead the charge is stored in liquids. So liquids are circulated around tanks and then they go through a central cell and that's where you charge and discharge.

14:02But flow batteries usually use a metallic element called vanadium. It's only produced in a few places around the world, which makes it expensive, and that has hampered research. But this affordable 3D-printed flow battery cell based on iron is making a difference. because Hugh and his colleagues passed up the chance to make money out of the discovery. We discussed it and genuinely felt that it could make a big difference to the field if we gave this away and it could really help our careers and our research here as well. So we really feel like it can really benefit this technology, hopefully. There's like sort of, say, ten components that go together.

14:37But how you assemble them can be quite important. So it was really important that we sent out like an IKEA-style instruction manual to our participants and I think they followed it quite well. Flow battery research is not always reproducible. It's fun to know that the things that we've made here are out there and that we're all working together to improve standards in flow batteries. And that could help reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. If flow batteries are scaled up to the size that they are in other places in the world, like China, in principle, we could be storing a large quantity of our renewable electricity in flow batteries.

15:12It doesn't have to be the silver bullet, the one-size-fits-all, but it could definitely play a huge component of the solution for storing renewable energy. Dr Josh Bailey ending that report by Louise Cullen. Still to come on the podcast. We are going all out with the marketing campaign. You can imagine Lionel Messi, the American players who played in the World Cup. The theme is kind of thanks world, we'll take it from here. How the World Cup could transform major league soccer in the US.

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18:34The US leader said they had a very good conversation and would meet in the not-too-distant future. Andy Burnham also spoke to President Zelensky and told him Britain would continue to provide steadfast support for Ukraine. In one of his first decisions, Mr Burnham appointed the former Labour leader and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband as the new UK Foreign Secretary. Mark Malek-Brown, who was a Foreign Office minister in a previous Labour government, thinks it's a good choice. Ed Miliband is no slouch on the international stage. His passionate commitment to the climate issue and the fact that there's a ton of international work around that, conferences, etc.

19:14I mean, he's a well-known figure internationally. And from my point of view, it's a welcome appointment because Ed will take that seriously. And under the Starmer government, it's been completely eviscerated. Burnham has other domestic priorities, but I think at the very least, international development will get a lot more oxygen under Ed Miliband than certainly it got under Yvette Cooper and Keir Starmer. Well, as we just heard, Andy Burnham has expressed a desire to focus on issues that affect UK voters. But given everything that's happening in the world, what are the international challenges he will face?

19:52I asked our correspondent Jeremy Bowen in Downing Street. Well, top of the agenda and top of his briefing list at the moment is the situation in Iran, where there have been more American strikes. And one of the things that the British have to decide upon is the degree to which they cooperate with the Americans in terms of making bases available and so on, if this thing escalates further, which it might. There's a lot of other stuff, of course, the war in Ukraine, support for Ukraine. And one thing that new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said is that there would be a tougher line on Israel, that Labour had got it wrong at the beginning of the Gaza war.

20:27He was referring to the period when Kirsten was very reluctant to call for a ceasefire and didn't do it. Took a lot of flack as a result of that. He even said at one point, he walked the words back, but he said them, that Israel was justified in cutting off all supplies going into Gaza as a matter of self-defense. Now, people pointed out that as an international lawyer, he should have known that that is actually against international humanitarian law. And he pulled back from it, but he said it. So there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done. And Ed Miliband is a man who has a reputation of being a very hard worker, being very intelligent.

21:00But what he doesn't have is a background in foreign affairs. So he has a lot of learning to do. And in terms of the change in attitude over the Middle East, what's likely to be the practical impact for Israel? Well, one thing that is being discussed is putting some more muscle on Britain's declaration, which was September last year, they recognized an independent Palestinian state, and not a great deal more was done with that afterwards. So they're definitely pressured to strengthen that up a bit, and they've done various things. I mean, they've put sanctions on some of the extremist ministers in the Israeli cabinet, for example.

21:38They've toughened up their rhetoric, but there's a couple of concrete things they could do. One of them is banning trade with Jewish settlements in the West Bank. That might not go down very well with Americans, but it's something that's definitely on his agenda. He's talked about it. And the other one is the British government recognising and putting its weight behind an advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice saying that the Israeli occupation, not just Israeli settlements being illegal under international law, it said that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and territories was illegal and should end forthwith and compensation should be paid to those people who've suffered as a result of that.

22:17Now, of course, it was dismissed by the Israeli government, but that is one thing that Britain could get behind to show very strongly its support for Palestinian sovereignty, which is definitely implied in recognising Palestine as an independent entity, an independent state. And what about relations with President Trump, who, of course, dismissed Andy Burnham as mayor of a town not that long ago? Actually, if you take away the fact that Trump's on the right and Burnham, in comparison, is on the left. That actually the tone that they have taken of regional uplift, of trying to bring up to speed those parts of the country which believe that they have been left behind, the kind of thing that Trump says is that one diplomat pointed out to me.

23:01And so there's some hope there that that could be the basis for a certain degree of understanding. But foreign leaders and diplomats have learned in dealing with Donald Trump that he's not just very unpredictable, His moods can shift very, very markedly and very rapidly. Our international editor, Jeremy Bowen, talking to me from Downing Street. The controversial Manosphere influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate have appeared in court in the United States after the British authorities issued 38 new charges against them, including rape, actual bodily harm and human trafficking. UK prosecutors want the brothers extradited.

23:38Speaking outside the court in Miami, their lawyer said they would fight that. We are, of course, objecting to extradition because Andrew and Tristan are innocent. They've never done nothing wrong. They shouldn't be extradited for crimes they did not commit. Keir Steimer just retired. I'm sure he's mad that Andrew and Tristan Tate had a lot to do with his fall in Great Britain. And there's a new guy in there right now. But this is the last vestige of attack of a prime minister who didn't do a good job. And I'll just leave it there. Well, our North America correspondent Tom Bateman was in court and afterwards he spoke to Will Chalk.

24:12It was a very short hearing as us in the media were brought in sitting at the back of the courtroom. I could see Andrew and Tristan Tate. They were already seated. They were in brown prison uniforms. As we stood when the federal judge came in, they were then brought to face her. And then we heard the only words they spoke when the judge asked them if they understood their rights. And they said, yes, your honor. But this case, I mean, it lasted around 10 minutes and it was a hearing to schedule a further hearing in which the defense attorney said that they would be seeking to reject the extradition request by the authorities in the United Kingdom, which was laid over the weekend when the two brothers were arrested here in Miami.

24:55Now, how do these new charges fit in with the other charges they're facing, including in Romania as well? Well, this is a series of new charges that were laid over the weekend by police in southern England. It brings to more than 50 the total charges that are now faced by the two brothers that have been laid by British police. They include alleged offences of rape, of alleged offences relating to sex trafficking. And this new tranche of charges relates, say, the police to four women alleged victims who they have been in contact with. So they're now looking at alleged offences over a seven-year period from 2010 and now have a total of seven alleged victims that the police have been in contact with.

25:40That is in addition to a criminal case that had been investigated by authorities in Romania because the siblings were arrested there in 2022, along with two Romanian women and accused of participating in criminal schemes to lure women for sexual exploitation. Again, they denied all of those allegations. that did not move forward because of procedural issues and it was last year the travel restrictions in Romania were lifted against the Tate brothers and they then traveled here to Florida as dual US and British nationals they have US citizenship. Right and we heard in that clip the brother's lawyer suggesting that their case might have played a part in the downfall of Keir Starmer and that this case is motivated by him as well I mean is there any evidence for that?

26:23There's no evidence for that whatsoever. It's been consistently the response of the Tate brothers and their lawyers that all of this is politically motivated, whether it's authorities in the UK and to a certain extent in the United States as well. The prosecuting authorities in England use an evidence-based system when it comes to alleged offences. So it would be the police and the Crown Prosecution Service there that will be looking at files of evidence. There is no connection to the political system in the United Kingdom. But as I say, it has long been an attempt by the attorneys of Mr. Tate to link this, they say, to political motivation.