US defends its deal with Iran

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1:00studios in London. I'm Sean Lay. It's very good to have your company this hour. The Palace of Versailles was not perhaps the happiest choice of venue for US President Donald Trump to sign the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran. In the decadent, declining years of France's monarchy, it was home to an elite entirely detached from the harsh reality of French life. Later, in 1919, it was where Europe's victorious powers carved up the defeated empires of Europe and the Middle East, arguably laying the groundwork for future wars. Thus far, the response of the President's party back home has been muted.

1:34John Cornyn, the majority leader in the Republican-controlled Senate, remarked that no deal was better than a bad deal, hardly an enthusiastic endorsement. Those already estranged from the White House have been outspoken. Mike Pence, Vice President in Mr Trump's first term, said it smacked of appeasement. Senator Bill Cassidy, who Trump supporters removed as a candidate in the forthcoming midterms called it the worst foreign policy blunder in decades. U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, who's led negotiations on the American side, gave a robust defense at a news conference, pointing out the apparent impact signing the memorandum of understanding had made on the price of oil.

2:13I think the president's peace plan in Iran is already bearing real fruits for the American people. Last night, 12.5 million barrels of oil went through the Strait of Hormuz. That is a high since the beginning of the conflict. Oil prices are down nearly at their level from the pre-war conflict. Gas prices dropped below$4 a gallon today for the first time since the conflict. And importantly, they're going to keep falling further given how low oil prices are. Vice President Vance insisted the US would be negotiating from a position of strength because it had destroyed Iran's nuclear programme and its conventional military.

2:46He went on to argue there were incentives for Iran to stick to the deal. The only way that they would ever get any benefit of the bargain is if they comply fully and change their behavior. And so you really have a win-win situation for the United States of America. If the Iranians don't change their behavior, their military and their nuclear program is still destroyed. If they do change their behavior, then they are going to have a transformative relationship with the Middle East, and the Middle East will have a transformative relationship with the people of Iran. that's a win for the American people and for the President of the United States, regardless of which option the Iranians ultimately choose.

3:25We obviously want them to choose the right option. Well, later on Thursday, Iran's Supreme Leader, Mujtaba Khamenei, said he'd authorised the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding despite holding a different view, after receiving assurances from President Masoud Pazeshkin that they would not yield if Washington made what he described as excessive demands. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister, called Thursday for the preservation of what he described as his country's vital relationship with the United States. I've been speaking to Yaakov Amidro, who served as national security advisor to Mr Netanyahu during the Obama presidency.

4:00He's now a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies. What's his assessment of this agreement? If I have to describe it in one sentence, the American paid cash and got a letter of intent with many ambiguities. I think that what the Iranians are getting is huge. They can recover, they can rebuild what they lost in the war. They will be accepted in the Middle East as the winner of the war. And what Americans got is promise to negotiate. What will be the results of the negotiations? The Americans were very determined that it will be a very good one. I have my doubts, but let's give the Americans the chance.

4:38Right. This is very interesting because you will have seen some of the commentary in Israeli newspapers today. Some of it is fairly incendiary. David Horowitz, the editor of the Times of Israel, called it a catastrophic capitulation in the headline of what was a very fiery opinion. It is. It's a capitulation of the Americans. They said that they will prevent Iran from being nuclear, and they have a promise for negotiation about it. They didn't get anything. They said that they will open the straits, and now it's in the hands of the Iranians. If the Iranians want to close it tomorrow, they will probably.

5:19The Iranians are very clear that they are going to charge every vessel in the Irma Strait in the future, something that the Americans were very much against it. And the Americans made a huge mistake by bringing the Iranians into Lebanon. They legitimized the involvement of Iran in Lebanon, something which is against the interests of the conversations that now they brought us and the Lebanese government to discuss the future of Lebanon. And now they brought Iran in and they're saying, the Iranian service say in Lebanon, in these circumstances, the chance that the Lebanese government will take the obligation to disarm Hezbollah is almost zero.

5:56So I think it's a very bad agreement, no question. But from our point of view, it's a mistake that the Americans did, and they are promising that in the future it would be better because they will achieve from the Iranians what they promised to achieve. I'm really interested that because of your period of service as National Security Advisor, President Obama was negotiating the JCPOA, the so-called Iran nuclear deal. I spoke to a military analyst last night who said that was less bad for Israel than this memo of understanding and a possible agreement with Iran and the United States on the current terms.

6:36Do you agree with that? Are you worried that this will be worse than the JCPOA from your point of view? I think that it is too early to judge. The whole issue of the nuclear project was remain on the ice. It should be negotiated between America and Iran. If you judge it based on the circumstances today, it's very bad because the Iranians are getting the money which allowed them to renew the facilities and everything that was destroyed in the world. despite the fact that they promised not to advance in the nuclear project. Let me ask you finally, I mean, many observers have described this as Benjamin Netanyahu's war, that he persuaded, some would say dragged America into this, that there were promises made and things, the objectives that Mr.

7:27Netanyahu wanted, ideally regime change or enough disruption that it would cause an uprising by Iranians and bring down the regime, certainly the complete removal of any nuclear facilities or nuclear program. Judged on those criterias, this war failed, didn't it? I want to correct one in one remark. Please. We didn't grab the Americans to the war. We didn't want the war in February. We wanted the war in June. The Americans wanted the war in February. The Americans, after promising the Iranians that are coming to save them, put pressure on us to make the war earlier than what we wanted. So we didn't drag the Americans to the war.

8:13It was an American war decided by the Americans based on American promises to the Iranians. And with all due respect to Benjamin Netanyahu, we cannot drag America into a war. About what were the goals of the war? Yes, we thought that we have to prepare the situation that it would be easier for the Iranians to make the regime change. No one in Israel had the illusion that we can make the regime change by ourselves. It was clear that it should be done by the Iranians. And at the end of the day, we did what we could. And the Iranians decided not to change the regime now, maybe in the future. That's the former Israeli National Security Advisor, Yakov Amidro.

8:56Well, Paul Downs was an official in the first Trump administration, then director of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, a blueprint for President Trump's second term. At one point, he was a candidate in the Senate primary in South Carolina. Does Paul Downs think America has made huge concessions to Iran? One, I don't really think of it as a deal or an agreement. This is a framework for going towards peace. And peace is to be celebrated. This is what we need to aim towards. So I really congratulate President Trump and Vice President Vance and really the whole team, our partners in the Gulf, for getting to this point.

9:33Look, the US, as President Trump said, holds all the cards, it continues to hold all the cards. We essentially have our foot on the neck of Iran, but it's time to relent and see if they're ready to change their behaviour and indications are they are. Right now, this is what peace will look like and we have to let this negotiation play out. Well, it's peace for 60 days, isn't it? Because it extends the ceasefire, Although the president, for all his saying, that he's willing to start bombing Iran again, he clearly thinks that, for example, Iran should have missiles. He says, I can't stop having them.

10:11Stop them having them. Saudi Arabia has got them. It's fair enough for them to have them, too. I mean, there has been some quite significant shifts and clearly some in the Republican Party are not happy about that. I think Bill Cassidy, who is still a Republican senator for now, at least, said Ronald Reagan would be rolling over in his grave. Right. I think you ticked off Cornyn, Cassidy and Tillis. And Mike Pence, the former vice president. These guys are literally packing their bags from the U.S. Senate. They've been run out of town. They are not representative of the sentiment of the U.S. And they lost for a reason.

10:48Look, this is the perpetual war crowd. This is exactly what America first stood up to defeat. So, yes, they're licking their wounds, but they don't do this. Look, they're the same group that didn't want to get out of Afghanistan. They're the same group that's perpetuating the war in Ukraine. And here, you know, when peace breaks out, it's kind of like daylight to a group of vampires. These guys are squawking. But I really give President Trump and his team the charge to do this. We're going to be celebrating our 250th independence, our birthday here in the United States coming up on July 4th. This is really a moment in time where we have to celebrate this country, but what it's done for humanity and actually advancing, you know, civilization, but also peace around the world.

11:36And that's ultimately what the U.S. stands for, peace through strength. Well, the question is the strength, though, isn't it? A lot of observers have suggested that actually Iran has emerged stronger from this than it was before the war for two reasons. Number one, the war. For all, it managed to destroy a lot of Iran's military capability. The regime had managed to survive and reinvent itself. And secondly, that having not previously restricted access to the Strait of Umur, Iran discovered that it had this powerful economic weapon that the president of the United States faced with rising oil prices and the risk, therefore, of damage to the economy in the United States and the political consequences of the midterm elections, he had to blink first.

12:25Well, respectfully, I think that's preposterous. We've completely annihilated their nuclear weapons regime. Their navy is at the bottom of the sea. All conventional armies are basically disposed of. So anybody who's telling you they're stronger. Look, I think that we were sold a little bit of a bag of goods there in the situation room. and being told this kind of phonied up intelligence that the Iranians would collapse, you know, the moment they were hit again. And look, the Persians have been around for 3000 years. Every day after that showed you that this was almost an opportunistic move that really, you know, we hit them so hard back last July with Operation Midnight Hammer.

13:09you know this this was kind of told to us that we had to get rid of some short-range you know ballistic missiles but ultimately the president's been consistent. That's Republican Paul Dan speaking to NewsHour here on the BBC World Service.

13:50Coming up here on NewsHour, Ukraine hits an oil refinery on the outskirts of Moscow. How are attacks of this kind impacting daily life in Russia's capital? One of the most obvious effects is the shortage of gasoline in Moscow, in the city's capital are already some petrol stations which do not sell gasoline at all, or no more than 20 litres for each car. More on that story in 15 minutes' time. First, our headlines this hour. The US Vice President says the memorandum signed with Iran on ending the war is already bearing fruit and Assistant Washington holds the cards in coming negotiations. A message attributed to Iran's Supreme Leader, much to Bahamini, says that President Trump came to the deal out of desperation and that Tehran will not submit to any excessive demands that Washington might make.

14:49I'm Sean Lay in London and this is NewsHour. Twin girls from Nigeria, born conjoined at the head, have been discharged from hospital after a surgical separation assisted by artificial intelligence. Mercy and Goodness, now three years old, are the first to have the new parts of their skulls designed by combining the physical with interactive 3D graphics. The BBC spent time with the surgeon in the days leading up to the twins' final operation, a high-risk procedure carried out in Abu Dhabi. Here's reporter Ruby Gleeson with the story. Wow, just like magic. Because I'm not expressing before. Just like magic.

15:31Parents Ola and Joy are looking at their conjoined twin daughters apart for the first time through mixed reality goggles. What you're hearing has been filmed by the team at the hospital who have been caring for them over the past two years. The plan for tomorrow is to open up the skin, take out the plates from around, remove the belt and then you have the babies as two separate babies. Their head, you just look like not. Yeah. Yeah. Then you'll be fine. I have been living that.

16:07Originally from Nigeria, twin girls Mercy and Goodness were born conjoined by the head, a rare and life-threatening condition. For the first year and a half of their lives, they'd never seen each other face to face. But that all changed when they were separated last January with the help of cutting-edge AI. It took over four months to get to this point, under the careful medical eye of this team. It's not just the surgeon of the vistas doing the work. There are many engineers, software specialists, that are doing all this planning and modelling using the scans. So it's a big, big team that's putting their brains together to think about how it's the safest way to separate these two baby brains.

16:48Led by paediatric neurosurgeon Professor Awais Jelani from Great Ormond Street Hospital. I spent time with him as he prepared for the final stage of the operation. Mercy and goodness is what we classify as a total vertical craniopagus, which essentially means they are longitudinal, the head's a joint, top on, and their feet are away from each other. So it's quite a complex way of being conjoint. So what you then do is you do the separation of the brain and the blood vessels, then you try and expand the skin, and once you feel you have enough expansion, then you do the separation. So, where does the AI come in?

17:25The technology that we have now, the augmented reality, mixed reality technology, it really takes it to the next level where you don't have to do a lot of that 3D processing in your head. It is done for you and you can have those 3D images either suspended in space or superimposed onto the children that you're operating. It just makes your understanding of the whole anatomy and the problem so much more accurate and reduces the chances of causing harm. The operation is not without its risks. Some previous pairs of twins have been separated at the cost of serious complications. Strokes, brain damage and even loss of life are all very real possibilities.

18:03However gentle you are, it does cause some trauma to the brain that you're pushing out of the way with these steel retractors. When you're doing the separation of conjoined twins, at certain points you have their entire brain surface exposed on the surgical table. and the potential for causing injury to the brain is there and we've had that with our previous cases. The optimal way of doing the surgery is you do the separation whilst causing no trauma to the brains and this technique essentially allows us to do that. From the start, we've called Goodness Twin 1 and Mercy Twin 2, correct? Months of planning, every move choreographed.

18:47And then, at last, it happens. Mercy and goodness, after 19 months of life together, finally separated.

19:03I'm so, so happy. I'm so happy. I'm jumping now. Six months on and the girls are on a long road to recovery. It's not been without complications, but the family are living a life that once seemed impossible. Before, they can't be able to crawl, they can't be able to sit, they can't be able to stand up by themselves. But now, now I thank God. They work without supporting, working by themselves. You can see how happy they are, can't you? Very happy, very, very happy. The way they are looking at you, they're really happy. They certainly are, according to the family, talking there to Ruby Gleason.

19:46It was a nostalgia fest for Democrats in Chicago Thursday as US President No. 44, Barack Obama, and his wife Michelle, the former First Lady, attended the opening of the Obama Presidential Library. The couple have deep connections with the city. She grew up on Chicago's south side, and they met when Michelle Robinson, as she then was, was asked to mentor a student taking a summer job at the law firm where she worked. His presidential victory speech in 2008 was delivered in Grant Park, Chicago. Oliver Wainwright, architecture and design correspondent for The Guardian, is currently a fellow at Harvard University's Department of Architecture.

20:21Here's his description of the building. Well, it's been nicknamed the Obama-lisk because it rises above the south side of Chicago like a kind of truncated obelisk. It's this very weird, enigmatic granite tower rising to 70 meters, very few windows, and has this kind of chiseled shape. It's been likened by some to a Klingon prison, because it definitely has the kind of sci-fi quality. And to me, it has a slightly kind of funereal air. It almost seems like a bar mausoleum, where you might go to see his kind of perfectly preserved body lying in state. So yeah, something slightly kind of sinister and morbid about the architectural expression of this building.

21:03You talked to the architect. What did they have to say about the choices they'd made? Well, they were surprisingly honest and actually said that Obama was a very, very hands-on client in quite a frustrating way. These architects are usually very pragmatic. They're called Todd Williams, Billy Chen. They're known for doing exquisite cultural buildings and museums across the US, but often very restrained. And Obama clearly wanted this kind of iconic form. So he kept asking them to make it more sculptural, you know, add some more facets and make it, he actually used the word iconic, which is often a word that architects are allergic to.

21:41Yes, I see that in the article you wrote about this, Billy Sen, you quote, is saying, I don't think you can design something to be iconic. Exactly. Yeah, they think that comes from a building's performance and its use, you know, not from its form. But in this case, they were very much encouraged to make a kind of iconic, unusual form and then fit the program inside the form. And yeah, you almost think Obama should have just designed it himself if that's what he wanted, rather than pick these architects and then kind of force his own very dogmatic idea onto them. He said in the past he wanted to be an architect before he chose war.

22:18He saw this as his final chance to kind of wield his conceptual chisel. Yeah, it might have saved a bit on the$850 million that had been spent on this project. Did you get any idea of what locals think of it? Because the south side of Chicago, traditionally quite a poor part of Chicago, the bit of the city that he was first a community organiser in, what, 40 odd years ago now. I just wonder what the neighbours think of it. It's very mixed. I mean, everyone wants to believe in it and wants to support it because Obama is, you know, a kind of saint in this particular district of Chicago. but I think it's also seen as an alarming harbinger of gentrification.

22:56I mean, ever since this site was announced, land values in the area rocketed, and you now see a kind of cluster of high-rise luxury apartment buildings on the edges of this neighbourhood. It's also been very controversial because it's actually built on public land. It kind of annexed 19 acres of a public park to build this complex. And to be fair to the Obama Foundation, they have made improvements to the park, and there is this amazing 19-acre lakeside campus now which will be free and accessible to everyone. But I think just the symbolism of building on public land when there are so many vacant lots in that area that they could have chosen didn't go down particularly well.

23:34Oliver Wainwright at Harvard University's Department of Architecture speaking to NewsHour on the BBC World Service. We're back after this short break.

23:52How did the United States build the largest soft power empire in the world with the help of some tiny metal objects? I'm Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. To mark 250 years of the United States, we speak to Roman Mars of 99 % invisible. This soft power, this influence was an incredible invention. For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

24:45That's schwab.com slash Washington Wise.

24:53Welcome back to NewsHour. To the Democratic Republic of Congo, the DRC now, and the ongoing outbreak of Ebola. The most infectious phase is one when someone who has contracted the disease dies. How the dead are handled determines how quickly an outbreak can be controlled. The BBC's Anne Soy has followed volunteers from the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent as they conducted a burial in Ituri province in the northeast of the DRC. We are about to accompany the family of a 34-year-old mother of four. She has died from Ebola.