The Global Story

** This episode contains some very distressing details, including of killings, sexual violence and the experiences of children in war**

More than 150,000 people have been killed and about 12 million have been forced from their homes since Sudan's civil war began in 2023. But more than two years on, the reasons for the conflict are still not clear. And there are questions about why the international community - including the Unite...

The American lawyer, oil lobbyist and master strategist Don Pearlman is said to have chain-smoked his way through almost every UN climate gathering from the early 1990s until his death in 2005.

Some of those who saw Pearlman operate in Kyoto, where the first legally binding international agreement on climate change was agreed in 1997, say he created the playbook for stalling climate talks. The Kyoto protocol was never ratified by t...

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – MBS – will be welcomed at the White House on his first visit to Washington since the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi led to global outrage. MBS has always denied involvement in Khashoggi’s murder. Nevertheless, both he and Saudi Arabia were ostracised after the killing. Tuesday’s meeting between President Trump and Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler will build on a relationship between the...

In the last 72 hours, comments from President Trump and his administration have sparked fresh debate about whether the US could – or should – resume the kind of nuclear weapons tests that were halted over 30 years ago.

The current debate centres on whether Trump plans to test nuclear delivery systems, such as missiles, or nuclear warheads. The latter would be a major reversal of a long-standing policy, as the US has not tested a nuc...

**This episode contains themes of sexual abuse and grooming**

Calls to release all the Epstein files are growing, after Wednesday’s bombshell release of over 20,000 pages of documents related to the sex trafficking scandal. The private messages released by the estate of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have increased scrutiny on what President Trump may have known about Epstein’s behaviour. The White House has told the BBC th...

Donald Trump has spent this year trying to negotiate a deal to end the war in Ukraine. So far, Vladimir Putin doesn’t seem interested in the US’s proposals.

One man who has successfully negotiated with Russia – and with many of America’s adversaries – is Roger Carstens, former Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. From 2020 to 2025 he worked to free dozens of US citizens taken hostage and wrongfully detained around the wo...

The BBC has this week been rocked by a series of controversies, leading its Director General and Head of News to resign, and President Donald Trump threatening to sue the corporation over an edit it made to his January 6th, 2021 speech in one of its programmes, which the BBC admits was misleading.

How did the management of the world’s most trusted news broadcaster reach crisis point, and what does this tell us about today’s media l...

For much of the 21st century, our social lives have been shaped, at least in part, on the internet. But in an age of influencers, generative AI, complex algorithms, and politically entangled technocrats, some users say social media is growing less, well, social. So, is social media dead? Or is it just becoming something else? We speak with New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka about what happened to social networks, and what their tr...

President Donald Trump has warned that he will target Nigeria if the government there "continues to allow the killing of Christians". For months, campaigners and politicians in Washington have been alleging that Islamist militants were systematically targeting Christians in Nigeria. But how true are the claims that there is a persecution – or even a genocide – of Christians in the West African country? And how does Nicki Minaj com...

The man Donald Trump has called a "great leader", and who has long provoked admiration in MAGA circles, suddenly finds himself in an unusual position – at odds with the US president on an issue of critical importance.

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, is visiting the White House on Friday to try to resolve a dispute over Russian oil and gas. Orban wants to keep buying it, but Trump wants countries to wean themselves off Russi...

Even before Zohran Mamdani was elected as New York’s first Muslim mayor, his critics frequently cited London as a sort of cautionary tale, suggesting that New York under Mamdani could go “the way of London.” That’s because London already has a liberal, Muslim mayor - Sadiq Khan. But is that where the similarities end?

We talk to Tim Donovan, a former BBC reporter who covered London politics for decades. And we ask Mr Khan himself ...

For years, Colombia has been one of the United States’ closest allies in the region – a key partner in the war on drugs. But now this relationship is coming under strain amidst a personal feud between President Trump, and Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro.

In today’s episode, we speak to BBC Mundo’s William Marquez to examine the history of the US-Colombia alliance, and what might be at stake if it falls apart.

Producer: Aron Ke...

The Trump administration faces a Supreme Court challenge on Wednesday over its use of tariffs, an economic policy that has upended global trade.

This case, which has been described by the President in epic terms, questions the legality of Trump’s signature economic policy - and poses one of the biggest existential threats to his second term so far.

In today’s episode, we speak to small business owners across the US, and to BBC busin...

Discussion of nuclear weapons has returned both to our news cycle and to the cultural conversation.

Last week, President Donald Trump said that the US would resume testing nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, several recent films and books imagine a near future scenario where a nuclear attack is threatened or carried out.

Tristan talks to Carlo Masala, professor of international relations at the Bundeswehr University Munich and author of I...

On Thursday, Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping of China held a closed-door meeting in South Korea. The subjects of negotiation ran the gamut — from rare earth minerals, to fentanyl, to computer chips — and, according to President Trump’s subsequent news conference, the two parties reached a long-awaited deal. But exactly what did the world’s two most powerful men agree to? The BBC’s China Correspondent, Laura Bicker, joins us ...

The Trump administration has centred on Tren de Aragua – a Venezuelan prison gang – as a justification for cracking down on Venezuelan immigrants, and for several attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea.

When President Trump designated the gang a Foreign Terror Organisation, and invoked a 1798 law that allows presidents to swiftly deport citizens of enemy countries, civil rights groups accused his government of using these measures a...

After months of tense negotiations, President Trump has announced that he has terminated trade talks with Canada. The reason: a new Canadian TV commercial featuring an anti-tariff message from an old Ronald Reagan speech. The ad played during a World Series game and ran on various US cable channels, angering President Trump.

The ad is just the latest skirmish between the US and its neighbour to the north. We speak to the BBC’s senio...

The controversial right-wing podcaster Candace Owens is being sued by the French president and his wife in a US court. The Macrons are accusing Owens of spreading a conspiracy theory that Brigitte Macron was born a man. So where has this theory come from?

We speak to the BBC’s Anoushka Mutanda-Dougherty, host of the Fame Under Fire podcast, about what the Macrons are risking by filing the lawsuit – and whether it’s only adding more ...

President Trump is in Asia this week to strike deals with several countries, including with China. One of the big questions overshadowing the trip is Taiwan’s future. China has long vowed to "reunify" with self-governing Taiwan and has not ruled out the use of force. On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US wouldn’t abandon the island in exchange for a favourable deal with China. But a tug of war has been playin...