Funeral begins for Iran's late Supreme Leader

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. When you hear the phrase made in China, what do you think? I'm Tristan Redman. And I'm Asma Khalid. And together we host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. And today on our show, we look at the origins and evolution of made in China, because it actually wasn't inevitable. What we're talking about is the world's largest communist nation is at the beating heart of the capitalist system. For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:41Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. We're coming to you live from London. I'm Paul Henley. First today, in Iran, mourners have begun paying their respects to the country's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who was killed at the start of the war launched by the US and Israel in February. Today he sees the start of a week of events during which Iran will curate the image it portrays to the world, beginning with the display of the Supreme Leader's coffin at the Grand Mosala Mosque in Tehran.

1:20Alongside his are the coffins of four family members, including a toddler granddaughter killed with him. Khamenei's foreign policy centered on the promotion of Shia Islamism in the region and on exporting the Islamic Revolution. Days of funeral ceremonies and processions are planned in cities across Iran and Iraq, culminating in his burial in his hometown next Thursday. I've been speaking to Omid Khazani, who is an Iranian journalist in Tehran. There is an enormous security build-up in Tehran as the procession is going to kick off tonight. Actually, delegations from different countries are still arriving to pay tribute to the late leader of the Islamic revolution.

2:06And, you know, there's checkpoints across the city. And the city is not a normal functioning city anymore because it is expected that more than six or seven million people from across the country arrive in Tehran in the next two or three days. Ayatollah Khamenei was killed on the first day of the war, the end of February. Why is his funeral only taking place now? It was obvious that Iranian officials are not going to hold such big, big event for the late leader when there is the chance of further escalation between Iran and the United States and even Israel. They had to make sure that the security of the processions and funeral is guaranteed somehow.

3:00And I mentioned that the coffins of other members of the Ayatollah's family were on display too. Has there so far been any sign in public of his son who took over as supreme leader? The new leader, who is the son of the late leader, has not shown in public yet. and all we had so far are the written, even not oral, written messages read out by other officials from his behalf. It's not so clear that if he's going to show up for the funeral of his father on Monday, which is going to be a huge, huge procession with millions of people on the streets. Can you tell me how the funeral of Ayatollah Khamenei compares to that of his predecessor, the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khamenei, in 1989?

3:57As far as I was 10 years old at the time, it was a big, huge ceremony. And it is said that it's been recorded as the greatest funeral in history and it carries the Guinness record. But I, as a journalist, I expect that the funeral of the leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, will be even much, much greater than that. and after it is carried in the streets of Tehran, it's going to be sent to the religious city of Qom. And also there are news that they may also hold kind of procession, a funeral ceremony in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq as well. But finally, it's going to be laid in rest in the religious city of Mashhad, where he's a hometown.

4:57And the events of this week will be a big opportunity for the government in Tehran to project, to curate its image about the strength of the country. What message will they be sending, do you think? Obviously, it will send a great message to the world that the Islamic Republic as a government and establishment is still hugely popular with its people and people are enormously supporting its leaders and establishment and authorities. That was Omid Khazani, who's an Iranian journalist in Tehran. Joining me live here in the NewsHour studio is Taraneh Fatalian from BBC Persian. Welcome, Taraneh. Thank you.

5:41Who is attending this funeral from the international community then? Well, so far, as well as the senior officials in Iran that have shown face today, we have seen some arrivals from senior officials from neighbouring countries and some other countries like Belarus. So far we have seen senior officials from Tajikistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Belarus, Pakistan. These are either the leaders of the country or the parliament speakers who have attended so far. Representation from the government in Moscow would be something of a coup, wouldn't it? Probably, yes, probably. And do we know if anyone from or close to the Trump administration is attending in any capacity?

6:28It's very unlikely. The Iranian officials have made it very clear that they do not want anyone from the West. They said that they haven't invited anyone from the West attending their ceremonies. And it seems like they're still a bit sore about everything that has happened in the past few months. So I don't believe anyone would be invited. And if they were, it's very difficult to guess if they would go to Tehran. Let's talk a bit more about the message the Iranian authorities want to project here. How would you sum it up? Well, the Islamic Republic is in a very difficult position right now. The leader of the establishment has been killed along with dozens of other senior officials.

7:23And it's in quite a rocky place. And it seems like with planning this, as they say, the funeral of the century, they want to show that they are still standing, they are still powerful and they're not going anywhere. And any sign of dissent would be publicly stamped on, wouldn't it? Publicly, yes, absolutely. But on social media, we're saying a lot of people cheering the death of Supreme Leader. Many people remember him as the big dictator of the country. So they're happy that he has been killed. They're reposting the picture of his coffin as, I quote, therapy, and they remind him, they remember him as a person who is responsible for so many lives.

8:20Many thanks, Taraneh Fatalian from BBC Persian. Meanwhile, a fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran might be holding, but one of the world's most strategically important waterways remains under intense scrutiny. Control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has proven to be Iran's key bargaining chip to end the strikes and to bring the US to the negotiating table in the first place. The BBC World Service's senior international investigations correspondent, Nawal Agmar-Rafi, has travelled to the southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. And this is the first international broadcaster to report from the strait itself to see how Iranians at the heart of this crisis are living through an uncertain peace.

9:07We're on a fishing boat off the southern coast of Iran, heading out into the strait of Hormuz. It's early in the morning and already the stifling heat is overwhelming. As we sail further out to sea, we find dozens of boats anchored, waiting for permission to move. We are right at the heart of the Strait of Hormuz. And behind me is an international ship that's been captured by the Iranians. It's easy to forget how vital these ships are for day-to-day life. They're carrying fuel, they're carrying fertilizer. And when they're stopped, prices go up for all of us. In the last few months, this waterway has become a bottleneck and a crucial weapon for Iran.

9:47We're in the car driving across Bandar Abbas City on our way to the mayor's office. I want to speak to him about what he thinks about this war and about the ceasefire and its fragility. We arrive at a government complex and meet Mehdi Nobani in his office. He's been the city's mayor since 2021. There are many in Israel and in Washington who say this war has been a success, they've killed your supreme leader, they've killed multiple military commanders, they've attacked military sites, weapons depots, radar sites. What would you say to that? Not at all. Iran has been successful because Israel and the US haven't reached their goals.

10:30If the ceasefire breaks down, Iran will close the strait for sure. As that fragile ceasefire continues to hold, life carries on as normal. We're heading out to a local market. The alleyways are lined with produce and motorbikes weave through the crowd. I'm just walking around the market in the heart of Bandar Abbas and it is bustling with people. It's quite late in the evening, around 8pm, and it's packed. People are buying fruits, they're buying cherries and grapes, which are quite popular here. There are shops that are selling sunglasses, selling toys, and each one of them is quite busy because the weather here is scorching hot and so the day really starts at night.

11:16And it's made me think that Bandar Abbas is always seen through the lens of its strategic importance, through the lens of the Strait of Hormuz and the impact it has on the global economy. but we very rarely see it through the eyes of its people. They've had no say in this war and yet they're the ones that have had to endure it. And so it's very interesting just walking around and speaking to people about the impact it's had on them and how it's affected their lives. We meet two women, Fatima and Mesoume, who are selling fruit from their stalls. Most are still too afraid to speak, scared of the repercussions.

11:56Fatima has begun selling peaches once again. Her son lost his job during the war. Her family now relies on what she alone can bring home.

12:09We didn't want a war. Trump wanted a war. He attacked us unexpectedly. We didn't want this. The rhythm of the market has returned, but war is still the topic of conversation. Nearby, 40-year-old Masumi is listening and wants to join in.

12:37Everywhere is a problem. It causes a lot of economic issue, but that's war. Everyone needs to get used to it. We need to be patient. Standing amongst the people of Bandar Abbas, it becomes clear that this city's story can't be told through the lens of geopolitics. Behind every calculation about global trade is a family whose life hangs in the balance. The BBC's senior international investigations correspondent Nawal al-Maghafi was reporting from Bandar Abbas in Iran on condition that none of her material was used on the BBC's Persian service. Those restrictions apply to all international media organisations operating in Iran.

13:20This is the BBC World Service. We're live from London. We're NewsHour.

13:38Coming up, just as the US is about to celebrate its 250th birthday, a remarkable discovery is unveiled in the UK. There were these big letters, declaration on the top, and I thought, wow. So I called over to my boss and said, I think you need to come and have a look at this. I opened it up and realised it was a declaration of independence in the United States of America. I could feel my stomach sort of thinking, oh, I think I need to calm down. Two other headlines. The UN says a catastrophe is unfolding in Sudan's North Kordofan state, accusing the paramilitary rapid support forces of executions, torture and sexual violence.

14:20And Iran's president has paid his respects to the country's late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the first of a series of public funeral events.

14:37I'm Paul Henley and this is NewsHour, live from the BBC in London. A BBC Eye investigation has discovered the tech giant Meta is running paid advertisements on Instagram in India promoting child sexual abuse material. The ads use terms including rape and child video and they link to content on other platforms. Here's a warning. This report by Divya Arya contains descriptions that some listeners might find distressing. It began with a video on my Instagram feed, a clip of an Indian influencer. Her style is flirtatious, even provocative, but it's not pornographic. Watching that video led to more.

15:23Instagram's algorithm quickly began serving up similar content and my feed soon filled with accounts I'd never searched for. Increasingly, sexual and explicit videos featuring scantily clad women. Everybody know I'm a good girl. Is it? Using a new phone and an alias account, I followed the trail laid out by Instagram's algorithm to see where it would take me. Within days, and in violation of Instagram's own policy, I was shown an advertisement featuring naked men and women having sex. Then it took a darker turn. The ads started promoting material involving exploitation of children. They linked out to apps where users could buy videos of child sex abuse.

16:09One ad showed what appeared to be a 7 or 8-year-old girl crying, with text indicating she had been sexually assaulted. I reported it to Meta. They replied, saying the ad did not violate their guidelines. While Meta does have safeguards in place to remove and report material showing the sexual exploitation of children, it appears that illegal content can still slip through the net. not just as user posts, but as paid advertising. I worked at Facebook for 11 years in a variety of leadership roles, helping to shape product and market strategies. Brian Boland is a former vice president at Meta. He helped build the company's ad strategy, but later left Meta and publicly raised concerns about user safety on its platforms.

16:57When an advertisement hits, is uploaded into the system, it goes through an automated review process. So there's been an increased reliance on technical solutions. And then some they may put into a human review process. And then people have to review and manually approve those ads. And how high do these decisions go about how much the algorithm, how strictly it should be monitoring or how loosely it should be monitoring? For those decisions, it's hard to say exactly who's responsible, but you don't get major decisions without the most senior people and knowing about it. Meta, which owns Instagram, later told us it doesn't knowingly target ads featuring children to users identified as having an inappropriate interest in such material.

17:42But acknowledged its ad review process may not detect all policy violations. At the Mumbai Tech Week, Meta's innovations are being celebrated. So ladies and gentlemen, welcoming the MD of Meta, Arun Srinivas. Arun Srinivas is the head of Meta in India. I took my chance to confront him with our findings and to ask for answers. Excuse me. Excuse me. Mr Srinivas, I'm from BBC and we have discovered that Instagram has got pornography and child section abuse videos as ads on its platform, sir. Will you agree for an interview and speak to us about it, sir? Sir, you headed the ads business, sir. You were the director before you became head of Meta India, sir.

18:33Mr Srinivas disappeared backstage and his security guards prevented me from following him. In a statement, Meta told us, they fight child exploitation on their platforms, block links to third-party websites hosting this material, remove ads and accounts found to violate their policies and report such content to the authorities. They said they had removed content flagged by the BBC and denied prioritising revenue over user safety. Divya Arya reporting for the full BBC Eye documentary. You can search The Careless Machine, exposing Instagram's darkest secret on the World Service YouTube page or on BBC iPlayer.

19:18Now from India to the Mediterranean Sea and to the plight of the bottlenose dolphin.

19:31These highly intelligent marine mammals, known for their stubby beaks and a mouth that looks like they're smiling, are finding it harder than ever to catch enough food, and they're increasingly following fishing trawlers to scavenge. A new study in the Adriatic between Italy and Croatia found that more than three-quarters of local boats were followed by bottlenose dolphins, up from 10 % in the 1990s. Nikolas Entrup is Head of International Relations for Ocean Care, an international conservation group that collaborated with the researchers. Well, the research that has been done now by Dolphin Biology and Conservation compares data of eight years of research, and it clearly shows that we see a shift in the behaviour of bottlenose dolphins in two key areas.

20:19And the results suggest, yes, they get hungrier, there is a prey depletion which forces them to follow trawlers to get their catch. And are they scavenging fish that fall out of the net? How does it work? What are they eating? The researchers have observed all sorts of kind of foraging. First of all, feed on the fish that the trawlers go behind. They also feed on discards that has gone overboard, and even on non-targeted species, meaning that they also forage on fish or other, for example, cephalopods that may not have been originally in their diet. This kind of behaviour is risky for the dolphins, isn't it?

21:06It is risky in a way because, you know, it's of course documented that, you know, pair trawlers or button trawlers can also result in a direct injury or, you know, so-called bycatch. But I think the overall picture of concern is a shift in the entire ecosystem. Overfishing that has been now constantly documented for the Mediterranean and especially the Adriatic is continuing for years now. And that change of behavior and in the publication, you see the researchers also discussing comparable data from the 1990s. There is a major increase in dolphins following trawlers now to get their prey. And I think this should be really, really boring.

21:46And this is being passed down generations of dolphins, I hear. Yes. You know, the scientists apply a methodology called photo identification. So you have a clear sense of the groups involved, of the individual animals involved in that type of behaviour. And what has been documented is that, of course, knowledge and behaviour is passed on from adult animals to the juveniles and the calves. And so it goes on. So the question then is, what are the consequences for us human beings in terms of managing fisheries? And we really have to warn that not the wrong conclusions are drawn. For example, that deterrent acoustic devices needs to be employed to shy dolphins away.

22:28what we really need is to fish less, to use less destructive nets, and to allow fish stocks as well as other marine species to recover and restore. That's the way to go. But, you know, that's not what human beings have been managing or implied management measures recently. Is anything like that happening in the Adriatic? Well, we do have a very, very positive proposal from the European Commission that has said already in 23 that the countries of the entire European Union need to phase out bottom trolling in at least the marine protected areas by 2030. But it's the member states that have to pass the management measures into play.

23:11And what we see is huge reluctance by the countries to enforce and comply with those measures. So we have MPAs for marine protected areas where, for example, bottom fishing is still allowed, but kite surfing is prohibited. That's the wrong signal. That's the wrong way. And we should be much more progressive, which at the end of the day will help fishermen as well to continue their business. Nicholas Entrup.

23:40When you hear the phrase made in China, what do you think? I'm Tristan Redman. And I'm Asma Khalid. And together we host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. And today on our show, we look at the origins and evolution of made in China, because it actually wasn't inevitable. What we're talking about is the world's largest communist nation is at the beating heart of the capitalist system. For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

24:13Welcome back to NewsHour. Fans of Taylor Swift are heading to the streets of New York around Madison Square Garden Arena. It seems to be preparing for one of the most anticipated weddings of the year between arguably the most famous pop singer on the planet, Taylor Swift, and the American star footballer, Travis Kels. They haven't confirmed their plans, though one of Taylor Swift's representatives did announce the couple had donated$26 million to charities across the US this week. Swift fans have been arriving, as I said, in the streets by the truckload to try to get a glimpse through the curtained-off entrance.

24:50As police set up barriers around the venue, a pre-wedding bash is believed to have happened already. Here's our correspondent in New York, Neda Taufik. On Thursday evening, all efforts were made to hide those arriving in midtown Manhattan at the rumoured location for the most anticipated celebrity wedding celebration in recent US pop culture history. Such is the secrecy and mystery surrounding global superstar Taylor Swift and football champion Travis Kelsey's Big Bash. Reportedly, around 100 close relatives and friends attended a pre-party to kick off Swift's bridal era before a much larger celebration tonight.

25:30Is Taylor Swift really getting married here at Madison Square Garden? All signs point to yes, despite its lack of curb appeal. And fans have been coming down to get a look for themselves. We're just scoping out everything that's going on. We're trying to see if we can catch any glimpse of anything of this royal wedding. I just had to come see what I could find out for myself. There's so many rumors around this, so I wanted to see, you know, if it's possibly true. And it's definitely really inspirational to see where she's come to, and it makes me really want to, like, be there and see everything going on.

26:05You can see that barricades are up all around the stadium. Street closures are in effect, and there are hundreds of police all around the area as well. 1 ,000 people from the world of entertainment and sport are invited, the BBC understands, to today's festivities. One New York tabloid suggested the pair may already have exchanged iDos privately beforehand, but that hasn't been confirmed. Those spotted arriving in New York leading up to the event include Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Graham Norton. I just mean that I was going to invite you to it. It was told by the pop star during her appearance on his show that he would be included on the long guest list.

26:46If you're inviting me, it's very big. For days, the hive of activity and deliveries to the stadium have been cataloged for any clues. It looks like lobster is on the menu and the theme might be garden party, with rumors of a castle being built inside surrounded by trees. A similar version perhaps to the pair's engagement. They released professional photos of the proposal in a joint social media post last August, having been together since 2023. New York has hosted a whole range of iconic major events. It increasingly looks like the city is adding Taylor Swift's wedding to that list. Neda Torfik reporting from New York.