Spain dismisses reports US wants it suspended from Nato

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Moto Casino, America's social casino.

1:00Excludes Alaska and Hawaii. Visit your nearby Lowe's on South Holland Road in Chicago.

1:08This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Charlotte Gallagher and at 1500 hours GMT on Friday the 24th of April, these are our main stories. There are calls for unity within NATO after reports that the US might be seeking the suspension of Spain because of its opposition to the Iran war. Israel's military has ordered a southern Lebanese town to evacuate despite the ceasefire. And China releases a new advanced AI tool in the global race for online dominance. Also in this podcast, how Jeffrey Epstein kept alleged sex abuse victims in London flats. It's not just Epstein, of course, who's now dead, but his associates, but also what about the men that were using these women?

2:09America's war in Iran has led to several confrontations between Donald Trump and the leaders of some of Washington's NATO allies. Now the US is reported to be considering options for punishing some of those countries. Reuters news agency says that according to a leaked Pentagon email, these options include pushing for Spain to be suspended from NATO. Its Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has been a fierce critic of the conflict and has forbidden the US from using military bases in Spain. Mr Sanchez has been asked about these reports. We don't work on the basis of emails. We work with official documents and official positions, taken, in this case, by the government of the United States.

2:57The Spanish government's position is clear. Full cooperation with our allies, but always within the framework of international law. Another suggestion, reportedly in the leaked email, would be reviewing recognition of Britain's ownership of the Falkland Islands. NATO says the founding treaty did not provide for suspension of membership or expulsion. My colleague James Menendez asked our security correspondent Frank Gardner whether it was even possible for one NATO member to boot out another. Well I don't think it can. I put that question to a NATO official a couple of hours ago and he responded very quickly saying that in NATO's founding charter, it does not foresee any suspension or expulsion of another member.

3:43Now, there are things that the U.S. could do short of trying to, you know, I don't think it can expel Spain. And it would also, and I should point this out, it would be self-punishing for the United States. It's got the use of two strategically very important bases in Spain. Rota, which is a naval facility, I've been there, And that is incidentally where the U.S. and its allies sanitized all the hideous chemical weapons that were taken from Syria after 2012, 2013. There was a ship that was anchored just off rotor and did that. So it's got a strategic use. There's also Moron air base. But Spain didn't allow the use of either of those in support of this war of choice, as many are calling it, that the U.S.

4:29and Israel chose to wage against Iran. What about the threat to the UK over the Falkland Islands? People might have forgotten about them, but of course Britain and Argentina fought a war, didn't they, more than 40 years ago over them? I mean, is that potentially serious? The mention of the Falkland Islands is in the context that this Pentagon reportedly leaked email saying that the US is reviewing or might review its position over what it calls Europe's imperial possessions, in inverted commas. And that includes the Falklands, which are 8 ,000 miles, so what's that, 12 ,000 kilometers plus from the UK all the way down in the South Atlantic.

5:09Argentina claims them as their own. They call them Las Ias Malvinas. It's long been a bone of contention there. But the US has been largely supportive of the UK given what used to be called the special relationship between the US and Britain, which I is pretty afraid these days. but there was a referendum held a few years ago in the Falklands asking Falkland Islanders, do you want to belong to Argentina or to Britain? And 99.8 % voted to stay part of Britain. So the response from the UK Prime Minister's office this morning from No. 10 Downing Street is sovereignty is not up for discussion. What matters is the choice of the residents there and that is paramount and that hasn't changed as far as we know.

5:54What is the big picture here, given this spat and what this leaked email has sort of done to keep that spat going? I mean, is it that NATO just isn't functioning properly at a political level at the moment? NATO, I think, is still struggling to deal with the quixotic nature of the Trump White House. I think most members would agree that Donald Trump did NATO a favour in his first term by threatening to pull out if NATO countries didn't raise their defence expenditure. Donald Trump is absolutely right when he says that Europe has been free riding on US defence expenditure. The US has carried the bulk of by far of the expense of defending Europe, while European countries have run down their defence budgets and spent the money instead on welfare.

6:42And the US has said, well, why should the taxpayer pay this? And of course, that plays very well to Donald Trump's MAGA base. But he's gone too far in many cases, and this is one of them, where he has embarked on a war that has nothing to do with NATO. It's a war of choice. It's going badly for the US, not going quite so badly for Israel, which is very happy that it's destroyed much of Iran's leadership and its missiles, but it's going badly for the US because it is rightly being blamed for the logjam now in the Strait of Hormuz, whereby, while pretending that they are in complete control of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has effectively shut it.

7:19And we have more from Frank on this story on our YouTube channel. Search for BBC News on YouTube and you'll find the Global News podcast in the podcast section. A BBC investigation has found evidence that women who were allegedly abused by Jeffrey Epstein were housed by him in flats he rented in affluent parts of London after police decided not to investigate him. In 2015, Virginia Giuffre, an American woman who was Epstein's most prominent accuser, told police in London she was brought to the UK as part of an abuse ring. Our investigations correspondent, Chi-Chi Azundu, told me more about what her team has found.

7:57Like a lot of journalists around the world, we're combing through the millions of documents in the Epstein files. To put it into context, a lot of those documents are just single bits of paper. There's no context. Sometimes there's no dates. There's no analysis around it. It's just bits of information. And using our investigative skills, we piece together bits of information regarding Epstein's presence in the UK and whether he could have been stopped by police potentially after Virginia Dufresne complained in 2015. And what we found was that he had paid the rent for at least four flats in central London.

8:35He had also assisted some of the women to gain visa status, sometimes even paid for their education to learn English, for example, or to learn or go on an art course. We also noted that the number of flights that we thought he had transported women in and out of the UK had increased. We've so far found 120. and we noticed that he was moving women from the UK back and forth via the Eurostar to France. We put all of our findings to London's Metropolitan Police Force. It is the biggest police force in the UK, but it's not the only one that is involved in Epstein's movements in the UK. The Met Police basically, at the time of Virginia Dufresne's complaint in 2015, said that they weren't the right force to investigate her claims and so therefore did not launch a full investigation.

9:28This time round, we showed them our investigative findings. We showed them the flats. We talked about the Eurostar. They didn't directly comment on any of that. But they have said that they are fully engaged alongside other forces trying to find out more. They're also in contact with authorities in the United States to seek further detail and ensure information sharing. The Metropolitan Police is just one of a number of British police forces that are assessing the information in the Epstein files to try and find out whether they should launch a full investigation into him or any potential co-conspirators that may have helped him in the UK.

10:10Given that Epstein is dead, what can be done now? So given that Epstein is dead, that is a really valid question. He died in 2019 in prison whilst awaiting sex trafficking charges against minors. One thing doing this investigation that we have uncovered or we have had hammered home to us by multiple people and experts, no sex trafficking or human trafficking operation is done by one person. It is effectively a pyramid scheme. This person that wants whatever is being trafficked delegates. there would have been people helping him move women that might know more they might not have known they were partaking in that but they might have information that could help when it came to Epstein there was suggestion that some of the women were lent out to other men for them to abuse it's those kind of questions that we're now trying to answer and we're trying to dig into and now because of what we found because of the release of the Epstein files by the Department of Justice.

11:12It does ask the question whether that could have been interrupted after Virginia Dufresne made her complaint in 2015 to UK police. Could the women that we now know through their lawyers were part of his abuse victims not have had to go through that? The BBC's findings have prompted calls for further police investigations. Harriet Wistrich is the founder of the Centre for Women's Justice, a UK advocacy charity, and has been speaking to the BBC. We need to take lessons from this and look at the ways in which these men can be held to account. And of course, it's not just Epstein, of course, who's now dead, but his associates, but also part about the men that were using these women and getting the benefit, paying for their services possibly or exchanging benefits for their services.

12:05I mean, there's potentially an offence which is very rarely used about paying for sex with somebody subject to coercion and exploitation. A US Special Forces soldier involved in the military operation to capture Venezuela's former leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been arrested after being accused of placing multiple bets on Mr Maduro being removed from power. Nick Marsh has been following this and told me more. He's been identified by the Department of Justice as Gannon Ken Van Dyke, Special Forces soldier who the Department of Justice says was involved in the planning and the execution of the operation to remove Nicolas Maduro.

12:47That was through the course of the month of December 2025 up until January, 3rd of January, when Maduro was removed. The Department of Justice is saying, though, that this individual, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, opened an account on Polymarket, which is a very, very popular predictions market. You can go on there and it's very simple yes or no kind of questions. You can bet on anything, really, genuinely baseball, the weather, but also things like will Nicolas Maduro be in power by the end of January? So the allegation is that he opened this account in late December and between the 27th of December and the 2nd of January placed a total of$30 ,000 worth of bets on some variation of the question, will Nicolas Maduro be in power in Venezuela or will the United States go into Venezuela sort of thing.

13:41So then on the 3rd of January he is removed, he wins over$400 ,000. And the thrust of these charges, which are all some kind of insider trading form of fraud charges, is that he acted on confidential government information. Wow, so a huge amount of money. And this is also part of a wider probe into accusations of insider trading around some of the US government's activities during Donald Trump's second term. Yes, I mean, there have been murmurings and suspicions of insider trading for quite a long time now. We've seen a lot of spikes in oil trades, for example, just before Donald Trump says something that moves the markets when it comes to the price of oil with regard to the war in Iran.

14:29I've done some reporting on that. It's pretty clear there are real clear and consistent patterns of these trades on the oil futures market. There's also questions about trades on the stock market. And there's questions about even people playing on poly market during this Iran war as well. So, look, this is the first arrest in this sort of area. We could see more, but, you know, this isn't just an isolated problem, that's for sure. Now, in our last podcast, we told you about how the current ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon has been extended for another three weeks. But tensions in the region remain very high.

15:05The Israeli army is still occupying much of southern Lebanon, necessary, it says, to stop the militant group Hezbollah firing rockets across the border. That's still going on, and there have been more Israeli airstrikes, although at a much lower level. And today, the Israeli military has issued an urgent evacuation warning to the residents of the southern Lebanese town of Der Amis, saying it wants to carry out operations against alleged Hezbollah militants there. Some families, though, have been able to return to their homes, particularly those living in parts of Beirut. The BBC has been talking to a family whose teenage daughter, Naya, documented an Israeli attack while making a video for social media.

15:57The video went viral. James Menendez spoke to Naya's mother, Gida, and asked her first about the extension of the ceasefire. You know, it feels like good and bad news at the same time because we know that hopefully, hopefully nothing will happen in Beirut and in Dahyun so we will not be hearing some bombs. But at the same time, I don't know if you can hear the drone over my head. The drone is something that's in the sky and it always comes along and it's very stressful for all of us and for the kids as well because when they hear it, they know that something bad is going to happen. that's how we associate it with and the drone comes and goes all the time the kids every time they hear it they start sending me messages from school why is the drone here what is happening are they going to hit etc so i'm not sure if you can hear it now yes i can just i can just hear it in the background a very faint sort of whine overhead yeah exactly that's the drone so today it started again so the drone is not good news for us at all i don't know what's happening So at the same time, what's happening in the south, they are still bombing in the south.

17:06They are levelling the grounds in the south. And you know, Lebanon is very small. It's just 10 ,452 square kilometres. So there's no way you don't know what's happening down south. They keep on bombing. They assassinated a journalist yesterday. We still have Hezbollah and the Israeli military exchanging fire. So, I mean, it's a strange ceasefire, isn't it, when the fighting is still going on, even if it's at a lower level? It is. But at the same time, you know, they couldn't be exchanging gunshots. But then again, why the levelling of houses? I mean, our village is Aitaron and Aitaron is on the borders.

17:42They have levelled the whole village. Why the levelling of the village? You have been able, though, to return to your apartment in Beirut. I mean, that's good news, I guess. It is very good news. But then again, my four-year-old, when we were coming back, he didn't want to come back. And he kept on crying. Why should we come back? I don't want to go back. But we kept on saying that this is our home. We have to. School is starting. So thank God now the kids are in school, which is good for them because it's a bit of normalisation for them. They see their friends. They go to school. They do some studying, which is very good.

18:16And how is Naya? She, of course, had a very traumatic experience, caught on camera that obviously went viral. How is she doing since that experience of that huge wave of Israeli airstrikes? Naya is fine, except now every time she hears the drone, she messages me and her dad asking why is the drone here. Yesterday she was asking if the explosions are going to start again, if the strikes are going to start again. Especially there was a bit of an escalation two days ago between Israel and Hezbollah. So she was asking, does it mean that they're going to start all over again? So we told her, inshallah, no, it will not start all over again.

18:53She told me yesterday she couldn't study, she couldn't focus. She had a lot of tests the past week. So we understand that she's going to go through that. I'm trying to calm her as much as possible and ensure her that it's okay. All of us are going through this. Even her friends are going through enough time. So it's okay to feel that. and she is free to speak to me or to her therapist or to her friends anytime she wants. Does she find the therapy that she's been having, does she find that useful? She is refusing to speak directly with her therapist. So I am the one liaisoning between the therapist and herself.

19:28So I speak with the therapist and I see what to do. And then I try to take tips from her and I deal with Naya. Because she's trying to play it strong and she's, no, there's nothing wrong with me. I'm fine. I'm OK. But I know that she needs some help. And I've also spoken to the school about it, and they are keeping an eye on her. Kida Margi speaking to James Menendez from Beirut. Still to come in this podcast. When I started it, I thought, surely they don't believe all these outlandish ones. And you realise that actually it's a way of making sense of the world. We hear about a film that explores the appeal of conspiracy theories in MAGA, America.

20:37We'll be right back. America's Social Casino. Download the Moto Casino app today. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Jewel Osco. Take care of yourself this spring with great savings on all your favorite wellness brands. Now through April 28th, save$5 when you buy three or more participating wellness items. Shop in-store or online for products like Centrum Silver, NXIVM 24-Hour, Tums Ultra Strength or Smoothies tablets, and Flonay Spray. And save$5 when you buy three or more. Get these deals before they're gone. Offer ends April 28th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit jewelosco.com for more details.

21:17Hey there, this is Thomas Jermaine, co-host of The Interface, the show that decodes how technology is rewiring your week and your world. On this week's episode, Apple's CEO is resigning, and we'll look at what that means for the future of smartphones. We'll talk about whether your latest favorite band is actually a secret marketing ploy, and how the AI data center boom has finally met its match, public backlash. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

21:53At the last COP30 climate summit in Brazil, attempts to accelerate a move towards renewable energy were fiercely opposed by countries that produce oil and gas. Now around 60 countries are attending a conference in the Colombian city of Santa Marta. It aims to plan a complete move away from fossil fuels. Our environment correspondent, Matt McGrath, has been telling me more. It is a meeting of countries, I think, who were quite disaffected by the COP process meeting in Brazil last year, where a large number of countries there, more than 80, wanted to take more steps away from fossil fuels. It had been agreed in the COP back in 2023, the meeting in Dubai, that countries would transition away from fossil fuels.

22:36Countries, when they met in Brazil, really wanted more information. How are they going to do this? How are they going to make this happen? They didn't get that. There was big opposition from a number of countries. The United States wasn't there, and a lot of Middle Eastern countries, oil producers, objected. Nothing happened. Now those countries are meeting in Colombia. They're saying, well, this is a coalition of the willing. We're the ones who want to go ahead with this. So we're going to have our meeting and see how we can help and cooperate and drive this agenda faster. What can be agreed, though, if some of the big producing countries and also the countries that consume a lot, if they're staying away from this summit?

23:10That's right. You're not having the United States there. No Russia, no China, no India. None of the Middle Eastern countries are going there. But you do have a big cohort of countries who are kind of in the middle. That's countries like Australia, Turkey, Norway, Brazil, Canada, big fossil fuel producers, all of them. Vietnam, a big coal producer. They account for about 20 % of global production. And they're looking at this and saying, look, we're thinking very seriously about this. We want a timetable. We want to get agreement. And more than that, I think they want to give confidence to those other countries, many of them in Africa, who are a bit afraid of coming out and saying we're moving away from fossil fuels.

23:47I think they want to show by having this meeting that they have a strong united front and a plan to move away from fossil fuels, even in the middle of a war or conflict right now, which is putting real pressure on fossil fuel supplies all over the world. A G7 meeting on the environment began in Paris on Thursday. But people might think this is quite strange because climate change has been left off the agenda. that's right i saw that the french ecology minister monique barbus was saying that they wanted to have unity more than they wanted to have a discussion about climate change so they felt that with the united states there they couldn't have that without having no g7 so they've decided to leave climate change off the agenda much to the annoyance of many countries to keep the united states in the tent so i think it's an interesting example of the i suppose the Trump effective for seeing this in climate and in ecology generally.

24:37Matt McGrath. China has released an AI tool which it says rivals and even outperforms the likes of ChatGPT and Google Gemini. It's the latest in a back and forth race for global dominance. Our reporter Will Chalk told me more. Cast your mind back to January 2025. I think a lot of the world was still getting to grips with the AI tools that were coming out of Silicon Valley. You know, you mentioned ChatGBT. I'm still going to grips. Well, yeah. To be honest. Even more so that time last year, though. You know, we were working at what they were good at, what their limitations were. And then bang, this Chinese rival called DeepSeek appeared pretty much out of nowhere.

25:18And within days, it was top of Apple's US and UK app stores. And what's more, its developers claimed they built it for$6 million. And that is a drop in the ocean compared to what Silicon Valley was spending on the other tools. That then caused a huge plunge in stock values for AI-based companies. And actually, NVIDIA alone saw$500 billion wiped off its value in a day. That led to Donald Trump saying this. The release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win. but actually after all that initial excitement deep seek kind of turned out to be a bit of a flash in the pan international users quite quickly switched off it um a big reason being that well several countries actually including italy and south korea banned it on government devices because of its links to the chinese state but it didn't go away entirely and now we have deep seek version four that's popped up with its makers once again making big claims about how good it is now it's been built, we're told, in conjunction with Chinese tech giant Huawei.

26:27So it can run on Chinese chips. And this is significant because earlier versions used American design chips. So this clearly has some implications in the tech race between the two companies. And you spent the morning playing around with it. What do you think of it? Well, actually, weirdly, not very much. And the reason is because this race for dominance is being played out at such a high level, right? The differences are how quickly it can process 10 books worth of data on an entire code database. So actually, in terms of user interface and usability, it's much like any others. There are some big differences.

27:03One, unlike its competitors, using the chatbot at basic level for DeepSeek is completely free with no daily caps at all. But it also suffers from the same big problem it had last year, and that is censorship. So earlier I asked it what happened in Tiananmen Square and it replied, I'm sorry, I can't answer that question based on the information I have. Now, as to how big a deal this would be, for everyday users not in the tech world, it might be a sacrifice worth making. You know, other AI tools have been accused of bias as well, maybe not on this scale. But if you're using the tech to make big decisions across an entire company, and that is actually how DeepSeek wants people to use this, how it's going to make its money, having so many limitations may well be a bigger deal.

27:50That was Will Chalk. Finally, when the American academic Noelle Cook went to the US Capitol on January the 6th, 2021, to cover the so-called Stop the Steal march, she ended up witnessing the Capitol riots. As an ethnographer who studies and describes cultures, one thing that stood out to her was just how many women in their 40s and over were in the crowds. It set her off on a journey of discovery, and the result is a documentary made by Noel Cook and the British filmmaker Liz Smith called The Conspiracists, an attempt by them to understand the rabbit holes some of these women have gone down. One of the women they met was Tammy.

28:29Here she is in a clip from the film talking about waiting for the bus to DC for January the 6th and mentioning McDonald's using human flesh. When I heard about January 6th, I was excited and I saw that there was a bus trip. leaving from my around my house so i thought oh that's awesome hopefully i'll get a seat and um i won't be by myself i can meet some more people you know i was always trying to meet people somewhere i drive to mcdonald's and there's no bus there and i'm like what the heck so i go and this is before i knew about mcdonald's too i got myself an egg mcmuffin What about McDonald's?