US grants visas to Iran World Cup footballers

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1:32This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Will Chalk and in the early hours of Saturday the 6th of June, these are our main stories. With time running out until the start of the World Cup, Washington has confirmed the Iranian team will be given visas. But what will that mean in practice? The British Prime Minister's office rejects the intervention by the US Vice President over the murder last year of a white man by a British-born Sikh man. And why air leaks on the International Space Station forced a temporary evacuation of its crew to a spacecraft. Also in this podcast, Vladimir Putin dismisses President Zelensky's call for a face-to-face meeting, saying there's no point in talks until a peace agreement is reached.

2:19And Anthony Head, star of Ted Lasso and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has died aged 72. You're in a magic shop and you can't think what Tara would like. And we thought both profoundly stupid. We'll look back on his life.

2:39So in less than a week, the men's Football World Cup will kick off, with the tournament taking place in stadiums across Mexico, the US and Canada. But in the lead up, there's been a lot of uncertainty over whether the Iranian team would even be able to enter America to play their three matches, given the ongoing conflict between Iran and the US. The squad has, until now, been training in Turkey, while officials lobbied the US to allow them visas. This was the Iranian ambassador to Mexico, Abu Fazl Pasandide, on Thursday. Our action in coming to the US for football shows the world that Iran seeks peace and is not vindictive.

3:21We will try until the last moment to make it to the matches, but if they do not give visas, then we are not to blame. The whole philosophy of sport has been to bring nations closer together, and unfortunately, that is not the case now. Now, the US State Department has announced that the players have been granted visas to enter the country. The US ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barak, confirmed the news separately, congratulating the embassy in Ankara for processing the visas, saying sport transcends borders. The Iranian news agency Fars, however, has reported that some members of the Iran team's technical and administrative staff are yet to receive their visas.

4:02But the news does mean that this is the first World Cup since its inception in 1930, in which a host nation is set to receive a country it's at war with. Our North America correspondent Tom Simons is in Washington. The problem was that the Iranian team had decided to be hosted in Mexico. It was originally going to be based in Tucson, Arizona. But because of the difficulties of the situation, the team said, no, we're happy to go to Mexico. But they have several games in the US as part of the group stages. They're in a group with New Zealand, Belgium and Egypt. And that means matches in LA on the 15th of June and on the 21st of June and in Seattle on the 26th of June.

4:43So they did need to get these visas, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to take part. Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, has said anyone linked to the Islamic Republican Guard was not welcome. And that seemed to be a barrier to any potential visas being issued. But they have now been issued. An official at the White House has said that they will not allow the Iranian team to abuse these issuing of these visas to sneak, quote, terrorists into the United States under false pretenses. So that does seem to have been resolved. But Iran has also asked for respect for its flag, its anthem, some enhanced security and also, interestingly, that journalists don't ask questions beyond football.

5:28That's not something that's, I think, in the gift of the US government. Tom Simons there. Move on to a story that has dominated politics here in the UK this week. and it's the case of the British student Henry Novak. He was stabbed last year in England and as he lay dying in the street, the police arrested him. His killer, a Sikh man named Vikram Digwa, had lied to the police, claiming that Henry Novak had racially abused him. Vikram Digwa has since been given a life sentence. But as well as here in the UK, the case has also been drawing strong reactions from the US. The British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has already accused Elon Musk of trying to whip up division by amplifying claims on his platform X that the case shows police racism towards white people.

6:15And now the US Vice President J.D. Vance has intervened, blaming Henry's murder on what he called a mass invasion of migrants. Here is our UK political correspondent Joe Pike. The Vice President's 200 word intervention is made in terms which are far more controversial than anything we've heard from any mainstream UK politician. Really, J.D. Vance seems to be linking Henry Novak's death to mass migration, saying this. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.

7:00J.D. Vance also says the only response is righteous anger. We should say that I've been in touch with the Crown Prosecution Service and they have said that the murderer in this case, Vikram Digwa, was a British citizen born in the UK and therefore not an immigrant. Now, number 10 normally respond to the US president and vice president in a pretty cautious manner, but this evening they responded fast. They didn't mention J.D. Vance by name, but they did say and speak of people trying to interfere in our democracy. saying the Novak family does not want Henry's death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension, and that that should be respected.

7:37And so we end this week with one family's tragedy now becoming an international political debate. I think that's really because Henry's story and that body cam video was just so, so shocking. And that's Joe Pike there. Well, this isn't the first time that J.D. Vance or other Trump administration officials have weighed in on British domestic issues. But our White House reporter, Bernd DeBusman, told us the vice president's latest criticism served another purpose. It's notable because he also kind of framed it in a way that defends the Trump administration's own immigration policies and their criticism of the Biden administration.

8:15This is something we've seen before in the past. The State Department also described this as two-tier policing and the result of ideological conditioning. And that's very, very similar rhetoric than what we see in the United States. An instance, for example, when an undocumented immigrant commits a crime here in the United States, you see very, very similar rhetoric from U.S. politicians, including many in the administration. And I think they're speaking to a domestic audience about U.S. domestic policies, too, and using an incident in the U.K. to kind of frame those policies. The Trump administration's never been shy about weighing in on British domestic politics.

8:52We've seen it many times in the past. President Trump will comment on British energy policy, on British immigration policy. Last year at the Munich Security Conference, we saw J.D. Vance claim that religious Britons are in the crosshairs. And across the administration, they've commented on regulations governing social media in the U.K. as well. And I just think it shows that this administration really isn't shy to weigh in. It's not just the U.K. You have President Trump endorsing candidates in different parts of the world, sometimes with success, sometimes not with success. burned to Boosman there.

9:25Move on to a story from the International Space Station because astronauts there were told to take emergency shelter earlier after air leaks were detected in the Russian section of the spacecraft. Normal operations have since resumed. Our science editor Rebecca Morrell has more. Station Houston on Space to Ground 2 for all USOS crew members needs you to execute the EMA procedure 3.4. Crew Dragon establish safe haven. This was the moment Mission Control asked five astronauts on the International Space Station to take shelter in their docked spacecraft. On the Russian side of the ISS, two cosmonauts were attempting to fix an air leak and the rest of the crew were sent to a SpaceX capsule in case an emergency evacuation was needed.

10:11NASA said it was acting out of an abundance of caution and two Two hours later, Mission Control said the astronauts could come out of their shelter. This isn't the first leak on the ISS. A service module on the Russian side has suffered from small amounts of escaping air for several years. There are concerns about the age of the orbiting lab, which has had crews of astronauts living there since 2000. But Libby Jackson, head of space at the Science Museum, who used to work in Mission Control, says there's always a way for the astronauts to get home. After now nearly 30 years of operation, it's perhaps not surprising that the space station is developing signs of old age.

10:48But even in an extreme case of perhaps a hole being punched in the International Space Station by a piece of space debris and the air rushing out, the crew would still have a few hours to respond to the emergency, to trace the leak and then get in the spacecraft and get home. There have also been questions about the future of the ISS since Russia's war with Ukraine. Russia's part of the space station and the international components can't operate separately, so the nations have had to collaborate in space. Operations on the ISS are currently scheduled to end in 2030, when the lab will be de-orbited, although its working life is expected to be extended by a few years.

11:31Rebecca Morrell. Across the United States, people are getting ready to mark the 250th anniversary of liberation from Britain. But here a Brit and an American speak today and the differences are usually pretty obvious. So what did an American accent sound like in 1776 and how has it changed? Good question, isn't it? Simon Roper is a dialect coach and YouTuber and Valerie Friedland is a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno. Sean Lay spoke to both of them and started by asking Simon Roper, how did the accent sound all those centuries ago? Just after 1776 was a big kind of splitting point between my kind of accent and American accent.

12:15Before then, both accents would have been rhotic, which means that in a word like cart, the r would have been pronounced. So cart, which is obviously how Americans mostly still say it. And I don't say that anymore. I say cart without a r sound there. That was shortly after this revolution. Valerie Friedland, would every English colonist in the Americas have spoken like that? We see a really interesting development right after the colonies got established by the early British settlers, where people commented on a uniformity of speech that had developed in the colonies, so that unlike back home in Britain, where you could tell where someone was from 20 miles away because they sounded different, in the new colonies, people sounded the same across those colonies.

12:56But they also sounded different from the people left behind in Britain, because there was something called a linguistic leveling that occurred, where a lot of the really prominent features that might have made you stand out as being distinctive kind of got eased out or erased. But by the time of the revolution, there were some concerns about the way that different area dialects were going to push those fragile states apart. In this country, the way we speak is often revealing not just of geography, but also a social background, which we kind of sum up with the word class. Why not in America, Valerie?

13:29Well, a lot of that had to do with why people came here, because they didn't like what they had back home. So a lot of people came here to kind of get land that they couldn't get back home, get upward mobility that they couldn't get there. And it developed also from this need for intense collaboration. If you are going to die, if you don't work together, then your accent won't matter. You're going to talk to each other And the more we talk to each other, the more those class distinctions level out. But it was also about what the democracy was built on, this idea of an egalitarian nation where anybody, no matter their rank or station, could rise up and become whatever they wanted.

14:06And that was something that was really important to the founding fathers and really drove this idea of the American language as distinct from back in Britain. Simon, you mentioned it already. We dropped the erotic R sound. Do we know why that happened? People, when they're talking quickly, they try to, well, subconsciously make their articulation easier. But also you don't want to make it too easy, otherwise words start sounding the same. So it was just sort of those pressures led to that sound kind of being dropped or being absorbed into the preceding vowel. And is it still a difference that you can note in language to this day between people who speak with this R sound and those who don't?

14:43Yeah, I mean, both Britain and America have both systems. So like in a lot of East Coast urban places in the US, there's non-roticity like in the UK. In the West Country or in Scotland, Ireland, Lancashire, there's still roticity in the UK. Just one last quick thought, Valerie. Was the Southern American draw in any sense a reaction to defeat in the Civil War? It absolutely was. I think a lot of people are shocked that the Southern accent hasn't been here for eternity because it's so indelibly etched in the American consciousness. But we don't find a lot of evidence for things like y 'all or the drawl or merging of words like pin and pen until after the Civil War.

15:23Two things happened. First of all, the South kind of retreated to nurse its wounds together and it kind of gave them a Southern identity. But also there was post-war reconstruction that really brought people into contact around railroads and country stores like they hadn't been before. And it's contact that breeds language, familiarity and distance. So the more you're with people, the more you sound like them. That's Valerie Friedland and Simon Roper talking to Sean Lay. Still to come in this podcast, the French banquet craze taking over towns and villages. It's like a gathering of people living a good life, working to eat together, drink a bit.

16:01Atmosphere, friends, alcohol, food. And survives. And survives. But why are some left-wing politicians unhappy about them?

16:17President Putin says there's no point meeting Volodymyr Zelensky until the terms of a possible peace deal have been agreed. He was reacting to the Ukrainian president's offer to meet face-to-face to try and end the war in Ukraine. But speaking at an economic forum in St. Petersburg, the Russian president said military operations would only cease when Moscow had achieved its goals. Mr Putin also questioned what he called Kiev's reluctance to allow the Trump administration to serve as a guarantor of any eventual deal. Our Russia editor Steve Rosenberg reports.

16:53For Vladimir Putin, an economic forum is also a political stage. He used it to dismiss Volodymyr Zelensky's open letter. Ukraine's president had taunted him about his age, about Russian setbacks in the war, but had proposed they meet to talk peace. Parts of this letter are plain rude. What's this for? To bring about a meeting and talks? Or to make that impossible? I think it's the latter. So it's not the author of the letter I need to respond to, but our soldiers on the front line. I say to them, the country is proud of you. Keep at it, brothers. So I'll take that as a no. But now I don't see the point.

17:44No hint of compromise there, even though continuing conflict is harming Russia's economy. Here at the Forum, the Kremlin said it was open to Western businesses returning. They're not rushing back. In terms of, you know, a revision of the commercial relationship that we had before, that's obviously going to require a peace agreement to be in place. And, you know, that is anybody's guess when that's going to happen. I mean, there are too many sanctions to be removed quickly. It'll probably take years to unwind all the sanctions because there's thousands of them. But those sanctions haven't shifted the president's priority, winning the war.

18:24In its war on Ukraine, Russia has suffered huge battlefield losses. Ukrainian drones are now penetrating deep inside Russia and the economy is under pressure. But judging by what he said in St. Petersburg, none of that is making Vladimir Putin change course. The war goes on. An hour's drive from St. Petersburg, we found there was a fertile soil for Vladimir Putin's hard line. This cattle farm is a long way from Ukraine, but the farmers say that attack drones have landed in the fields around here. Larissa Puklikova blames Europe for supporting Ukraine. She thinks Vladimir Putin is being too gentle.

19:11This can only end with our victory, Larissa says. As in the past, we should fight all the way to Paris and Berlin like our forefathers did. Only this time, we won't be so stupid and pull back. Not all Russians have such extreme views. But across Russia, many people have said to me that since there is a war on, they don't want to lose it. Steve Rosenberg reporting from Russia. The United Nations has warned that an Israeli plan to take control of 70 % of Gaza will increase suffering among children already hit by the impacts of severe overcrowding. Prime Minister Netanyahu describes the territory Israel has seized in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon as buffer zones that can stave off potential militant attacks following the October 7th assault that triggered the latest Gaza war.

20:06But Palestinians view Israel's widening Gaza buffer zone as part of a strategy to permanently displace them. Since the war began, more than 1.9 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have had to leave their homes but remain within the Strip. The prominent Israeli human rights lawyer and activist, Sari Bashi, has relatives in Gaza. She wrote an essay for the BBC about the story of one particular relation who's been displaced several times over the decades. Two weeks ago, my 83-year-old mother-in-law returned to Gaza after two years of exile in Egypt. In the photos and videos, her smile is radiant.

20:44Although she uses a cane, when she entered the room, filled with beaming relatives, she dropped it and walked toward them, unassisted, as if coming home had healed her. Thank God, she told us over the phone. She had feared dying far from her family. Fatma has been displaced by the Israeli army four times, starting at the age of five. In 1948, she fled her village of Isdud as the Israeli army approached. Like more than 700 ,000 other Palestinian refugees, she wasn't allowed to return. She grew up in a refugee camp in Gaza, stopped attending school, and was married before her 14th birthday. But even inside Gaza, Israeli soldiers continued to displace her.

21:30In the 1970s, they demolished her home to widen the camp streets for tank patrols. In October 2023, they ordered her and every other resident of northern Gaza to evacuate. And in March 2024, they closed in on the language school in southern Gaza, where she was sheltering. Her sons pushed her to evacuate to Egypt. Fatma has debilitating arthritis and can barely walk. The family needed to flee. They would never have left her. And her staying would have endangered them all. But for us, Fatma's exile was sweet, too. I'm an Israeli Jew, married to the only one of her sons to leave Gaza. We live in the West Bank, just 80 kilometers from Gaza, but Israeli authorities don't allow travel between Gaza and the West Bank.

22:25For two summers, we traveled to Egypt. Our two children, aged 8 and 12, met their grandmother. My partner hugged her for the first time in 12 years. And I got to know this strong, resilient lady who raised my partner as a single mother with such fierce love. Last week, Israel's defense minister said he's working on plans to help Palestinians from Gaza voluntarily relocate to third countries, as ultranationalist groups promote plans to resettle Gaza with Israeli Jews. Even as Fatma rejoiced in kissing the great-grandchildren born during her absence, her grandchildren struggled to see a future there.

23:13Their homes and universities have been destroyed. Her eldest grandson was killed in an airstrike. Reconstruction remains blocked. Israel's defense minister says the destruction of Gaza, wreaked by the military he controls, justifies his so-called relocation plan for Palestinians. But there's another solution. Fatma and her family have a right, as do other Palestinian refugees and their descendants, to return to the homes they lost in 1948. One Friday last year, I drove to the site of her destroyed village, now an Israeli industrial park, to reach the stunning vaulted ruins of Isdud's mosque. I took a stone from the mosque and wrapped it in pink ribbon.

24:03Against the odds, Fatma managed to return to Gaza. I'm keeping the stone for her until she returns to Istud too. It's the Israeli human rights lawyer Sari Bashi, who's also the author of the recently published memoir Upside Down Love. In France, there's a new battleground in the culture wars that seem to be everywhere at the moment. Over the last couple of years, there's been a sudden craze for staging mass popular banquets. They're huge festivities in the provinces where participants feast on local food and wine and sing along to well-known songs. But with less than a year from the presidential elections, the banquets are now under attack from the radical left for, as they see it, promoting the nationalistic ideas of the radical right.

24:50Hugh Schofield went to the town of Colmar in Alsace, near the German border, to try and unpick the truth. So we've just arrived outside the Parc des Expositions here in Colmar, where the Alsacian banquet is about to take place. And I am staggered by the number of people who are here. The line goes right way around this huge building. We've been told there are more than 3 ,000 people waiting to take part in this event. It really is enormous. I'm surprised. Let's go inside. It's like a gathering of people living a good life, We're going to eat together, drink a bit, have fun, think together, and that's going to be it, you know, and then we head back home.

25:31Oh, a lot of music, a lot of dance, and a lot of smile. L 'ambiance, les copains, l 'alcool et la nourriture. Atmosphere, friends, alcohol, food. And the vibes. And the vibes. Yes. In the space of a few years, these banquets, run by a company called Le Canon Francais, have become a spectacular success. The idea, as I heard from founder Pierre-Alexandre de Bois, is to tap into the French tradition for the good things, food, wine, company, chat. What we love the most with my associates is when we see, you know, the lawyer sitting next to the baker, who is sitting next to the butcher. I mean, sometimes we are alone at home, surfing on Internet, losing a lot of time, but we don't speak each other anymore.

26:17So if we have a huge banquet, it's good because people can be together again. All this fun, but there's a snag. The radical left-wing party LFI now has Le Canon Francais in its firing line. It says that these banquets are all white affairs designed to exclude people of different origins, that there's racist chanting, that it all helps promote the hard-right national rally. And when a stake in the company was bought by an ultra-conservative financier called Pierre -Édouard Sterrain, who promotes hard-right ideas on banning abortion and reversing immigration, that, for the hard left, was proof that their accusations were true.