Iran's supreme leader rejects demand from Donald Trump to reach a nuclear deal or face a potential military response. Also: South Korea's impeached president released, and International Women's Day celebrations.
Chapter 1: What are the main stories in this episode?
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Bernadette Keogh, and in the early hours of Sunday the 9th of March, these are our main stories. Iran's supreme leader rejects the demand from Donald Trump to reach a nuclear deal with the US or face a potential military response.
Poland's prime minister says overnight Russian air attacks on Ukraine are a result of appeasing a barbarian. Shock and fear in Syria's minority Alawite community as more than 600 civilians are reported to have been killed by Syria's security forces. Also in this podcast, South Korea's impeached president gets out of jail. And International Women's Day through the prism of Spain.
We are still being killed. There are many things that need to keep changing. I don't want to see the upcoming generation going through what the previous generations and even us have gone through.
Chapter 2: How did Iran respond to Trump's nuclear deal demands?
Iran has responded defiantly to President Trump's warning that it faces possible military action unless it agrees to nuclear talks. Mr Trump says he told the Ayatollah in a letter that Iran must never be allowed to become a nuclear power and could face attack.
The Islamic Republic's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Iran would not negotiate under pressure from what he called a bullying country.
Some bully governments insist on negotiations, but these talks are not aimed at solving problems. Instead, they want to use them to dominate others. By all means, let's negotiate, but let's do so to push for what we want. If the parties sitting on the other side of the table accept, all the better. If they don't, they will take the blame.
Tehran has repeatedly denied that it's planning to develop nuclear weapons, but has enriched its uranium supplies to near weapons-grade level. Parham Gabbadi from the BBC's Persian service told me more.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei was furious today. He called the United States a bully, a country that is bullying Iran and is trying to come to a deal with Iran through intimidation. He did not lash out at the United States. He also targeted the European countries as well, the three European countries, United Kingdom, France and Germany.
The signatories of Iran nuclear deal called them intimidators. said that these countries are shameless because they're asking Iran to stick to its nuclear commitments. So he was extremely angry. But this is let's remember that this is not the first time that Donald Trump has sent a letter to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei back in 2019 during his first term after Iran.
giving up the nuclear deal. He also sent a letter to Khamenei through Shinzo Abe, late Japanese prime minister. And at that time, Khamenei gave the same response. He said that it was not worthy. His letter is not worthy a response. And in front of the cameras, he did not even agree to accept the letter.
What's at stake for Iran if it refuses President Trump's demand for a deal?
So a lot of things have changed since President Trump's first term, because last time the tension was not this high between Iran and Israel. So Iran and Israel have targeted each other, directly attacked each other, twice at least, in the past few months. So that has changed.
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Chapter 3: What is the current status of the Ukraine-Russia conflict?
Parham Gabbadi. Now to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Fighting is intensifying in the Ukraine-held Kursk region. Ukraine's military says it was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in over 100 clashes on Saturday after Russian attacks killed at least 25 people overnight. The escalation follows the US limiting Ukraine's access to its military intelligence and satellite imagery.
Major Vladimir Omelyan, a former Ukrainian minister of infrastructure now serving on the front line, says this has crippled Ukraine's ability to anticipate Russian attacks.
Using this intelligence, using satellites, we are able to foresee Russian Red Army actions, to understand what kind of supplies they provide to the front line, to understand what kind of attacks they are already doing. By cutting that, we become almost blind. We still have some access to our own surveillance, but it's mainly short, mid-range surveillance.
You cannot prevail or you cannot destroy the enemy if you don't understand its actions.
America's shifting stance on Ukraine has caused grave concern in Europe. Neighbouring Poland has already announced military training for all adult men this week. And its Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, said this latest attack is what happens when you appease barbarians. Our Ukraine correspondent James Waterhouse reports.
It was the turn of the town of Dobropylia to feel the weight of another Russian drone attack. Eight apartment blocks, people's homes were damaged or destroyed. There are casualties and injuries, says Pavlo Dierchenko from the local police. Crews are at the scene extinguishing fires, he says, and dealing with the aftermath of the attack. What was left are shells of a previous existence.
The country's ability to defend itself has been hampered by America's blocking of its military aid, its intelligence and now satellite imagery. The technology company Maxar has told the BBC that it's suspended some pictures for Ukrainian accounts at the request of the White House. Defending troops had used them to identify Russian positions. One officer says it's now like fighting blind.
President Trump has threatened large-scale sanctions and tariffs on Russia after its bombardments. But in the same breath, he also suggested that anyone in Vladimir Putin's position would be doing what he's doing. How Russia's invasion ends is dominating political agendas.
Zakir Starmer is heading to Paris on Tuesday to meet defence chiefs from countries willing to send troops here after a ceasefire is signed. And despite the White House warming to Moscow and being more hostile to Kiev, President Zelensky has been forced to mend his relationship with Donald Trump because of the reality that both Europe and Ukraine still need the military might of America.
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Chapter 4: What is happening with Syria's Alawite community?
This woman, who has friends and family there, told us what she'd been hearing. She didn't want to be identified, so one of my colleagues has voiced her comments.
One of my friends is a pharmacist whose husband was killed yesterday and today she was shot as well while pregnant and she's bleeding on the streets. People are in their houses, staying safe in their houses. They're not doing anything. They would come in and knock on their doors and if they don't open they would just spray all the house with bullets and they would kill anybody that's in there.
It's just ethnic cleansing there against Alawites in that area.
Dozens of Alawites have fled to Lebanon. From Damascus, our Middle East correspondent Lina Sinjab sent this report.
Videos and images on social media of bodies lying in the streets are causing anger among many Syrians. The coastal city of Banias is believed to have witnessed the worst violence, with women and children among those killed by forces affiliated to the new authorities. Those forces are reported to include Chechen fighters.
Violence erupted after remnants of the Assad regime from the Alawite minority ambushed security and army personnel, killing dozens of them. Syria's interim president, Ahmad al-Sharra, has vowed to hold anyone who attacked civilians accountable. So far, his forces seem unable to control the situation.
Many of his supporters have a hardline Islamic agenda that could pose a real threat to the unity of the country.
The United States executes dozens of people annually, but Friday was the first time for 15 years that a man was put to death by firing squad. Brad Sigmund was 67 and was executed in Columbia, South Carolina, where he'd chosen to be shot rather than being given a lethal injection or sent to the electric chair.
This more than two decades after he'd confessed to murdering his ex-girlfriend's parents, battering them to death with a baseball bat. Paul Moss spoke to our correspondent in Washington, Merlin Thomas, and asked her first why Brad Sigmund had made that choice.
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Chapter 5: Why was Brad Sigmund executed by firing squad?
And there have been questions around the effectiveness of, say, the lethal injection, because... In South Carolina itself, the three most recent cases of men who were sentenced to death by the lethal injection were declared dead after 20 minutes but appeared to stop breathing after just a few minutes.
And there's also been questions around the lack of transparency in terms of the lethal injection because there was a new law that was brought in in 2023 which shielded the names of the suppliers and the exact contents of those lethal injections. And so lawyers and other critics have said that Because they don't have that information, they can't properly analyse what's in the lethal injection.
And it should be said that this is a really rare instance. Brad Sigmund will only be the fourth person since the country reintroduced the death penalty in 1976 to be executed by firing squad.
Well, rare, but I see that three other states have now legalised firing squads. Given that, and also those widespread difficulties you were describing about lethal injection, is there a chance we're going to see more people executed by a firing squad in the US?
It's very possible. In Idaho, there was recently a bill that was passed that could make death by firing squad the primary method. And also, it's still the secondary method in several other states as well, if, for example, a lethal injection drug can't be obtained.
And it is worth saying that according to a Gallup poll just last year, 53% of Americans are in favor of the death penalty of a person convicted of murder. And so it's still a majority of Americans who are still in favor of this. Merlin Thomas.
Still to come on this podcast what the Danes think of Donald Trump's plan to take over Greenland.
I find it really scary everything he sees he just wants to get everything in some kind of way.
On our podcast, Good Bad Billionaire, we explain how the world's billionaires made all their money.
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Chapter 6: What is the situation with South Korea's impeached president?
Well, what we could see is if he is removed as president, then it could open him up to a whole load of other charges that he hasn't been subjected to yet because of that presidential immunity. Because there is a separate process that's happening here. So you've got the criminal process, but then you've also got President Yoon's impeachment process.
And this is going to decide whether to permanently remove him from office. So he was suspended a couple of weeks after he declared martial law. The parliament suspended him. But the courts have to rubber stamp that. So they've been holding a trial for the last few weeks and going through the evidence. And they're going to rule just in the coming days, really.
We're expecting it next week about whether to permanently remove him from office. And, yeah, that does change his status. And that could change things quite a lot. What we weren't expecting was to have him walk free before the court decided whether or not to bar him from office.
And we know he has supporters. We heard them there. But have you any sense of where the balance of public opinion is across South Korea?
Yeah, so martial law lasted for six hours in the end. But what has been staggering is how much it has polarised this country. And we're seeing still the ground and the crisis deepen here. So still more people want to see him permanently removed from office than want to see him reinstated. But the number of people who do want to see him back has been growing. And people really...
His supporters, what we've seen, I mean, I've been at many of these protests all along, and what I've really noticed is that they are becoming more loyal, his supporters, and more agitated. They see him as a martyr. They think that he is being mistreated, and they're out on the streets and they're celebrating because they see this as a victory.
So whatever the courts decide in the coming weeks about whether to remove him from office, it is going to obsess a lot of people here, and the authorities are bracing themselves for potential unrest.
The government in the Democratic Republic of Congo has offered $5 million for anyone helping to arrest the rebel leaders who've been capturing territory in the east of the country. Last year, they were prosecuted in absentia by a military court and were given death sentences for treason.
The Congolese government has also offered $4 million for the arrest of two journalists living in exile who've been critical of President Felix Tshisekedi. Africa regional editor Will Ross told me more about those being targeted.
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