Houthis tighten squeeze on crucial shipping route

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1:00I'm Celia Hatten and at 14 hours GMT on Friday 11 September. These are our main stories. Hoothy Rebels reportedly take control of a Yemeni island in a key shipping route. Sparking fears about global oil supplies. Anthropic says it has detected attempts to use its AI models to develop biological and conventional weapons. Events are held across the United States to mark the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 terror attacks we go to New York City. Also in this podcast. They were able to gain trust of these perhaps lonely pensioners and business people. They were able to defraud them and they disappeared into thin air. Six Nigerian nationals accused of defrauding more than 100 women through online romance scams are being extradited from South Africa to the US.

2:00Let's begin in Yemen. It's in a strategically important spot right next to the Baal Baal Mandab straight. It's a narrow waterway that connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and has become even more vital to global shipping traffic now that the waterway next to Iran, the state of Hormuz, has been closed. And now in Yemen, we're learning that the Iran-backed Hoothy Rebel Group has seized a key port on the Baal Baal Mandab straight, the city of Mokha. Adding to that, local officials say Yemeni forces have withdrawn from an island in that waterway, allowing the Hoothies to move in. Our senior international investigations correspondent, Nawal Al-Maghaffee, knows Yemen well and has reported from there. She gave me her thoughts on this latest development. It's incredibly significant. These are locations that the Yemeni government have had control over for nearly a decade now. You know, Baal Baal Mandab is significant worldwide because of it being one of the main shipping routes.

3:01And you know, the Hoothies in the last couple of months have launched the fancives on multiple fronts. They've launched an offensive in Tais, which is in the southwest of Yemen, in Merib, which is in Central Yemen, and then also in Mokha, which sits right next to the Baal Baal Mandab straight. And that one is the most important because as soon as they have control of it, it means that they have direct access to all that shipping that is passing through Baal Baal Mandab. And as you know, Baal Baal Mandab has become a lot more important these days because what's happening across the Arabian Peninsula in Iran, and Iran having complete control of the streets of her mues and having a huge impact on the shipping that is passing through there. So having Iran in charge of the street of her mues and its friends in charge of Baal Mandab is, you know, incredibly complicated and also threatening to the global economy. No, how might the Hoothies use that ability that they've expanded their presence in that region next to the Baal Baal Mandab straight? How might they use that control?

4:06I mean, for now, they're saying that they are only going to target ships that are linked to Saudi Arabia and that their fight is with the Saudi coalition. But of course, one of the things that's going to come out of this is that it will give Iran an extra bargaining chip. It will give it more leverage on that negotiating table with the United States that it's in control of the straight up her mues and its allies of Hoothies are in control of Baal Mandab. There are reports that Saudi Arabia has asked the United States for help in order to deal with this emerging problem that the continual threat posed by the Hoothie rebels. But how might the Saudis or even the Americans try to address this expanding presence in Yemen by the Hoothie rebel group? I think something that's really important to note is the forces that were based in Mokka, the forces that are part of the Yemeni government. They were being supported by the UAE for nearly a decade now in this conflict. And the UAE pulled out of Yemen just under a year ago.

5:11And ever since then, they've been relying on the Saudi-led coalition. Now, I've been speaking to commanders that were leading that fight against the Hoothies for the last couple of days. And they told me that the fight is fierce. We don't have enough supplies. We don't have enough weapons. There is no way of confronting the Hoothies without air power. And we need that air power from the Saudi-led coalition and we're just not getting it. And so it's clear that the UAE pulling out and they're not having that kind of support from the Saudi-led coalition is what's gotten us to where we're at today, the Hoothies in complete control of the city of Mokka and now in control of the island that sits across it. And so it is incredibly important for that support to come in in order for the government forces to be able to retake control of that region. And it is not difficult. It's desert terrain. And so with air power, they can retake it. And the Hoothies don't have significant air power. But whether the Saudis want to involve themselves in the war without US support is a different question. They've been able to distance themselves somewhat since 2022.

6:18And so I think they are afraid of taking this on all by themselves. And that's probably why they've asked for support from the US. And while we've been talking about the big players involved in this conflict, but just a focus on the humans at the center of this fighting for a moment, there are reports that 46,000 people have fled from the area to escape these battles. What more are you hearing about life on the ground in that part of Yemen? It is absolutely devastating. You have the people who had their homes in that region. It's completely erupted and disrupted from the fighting that has happened in the last couple of weeks. And they don't have refugee camps to go to. They don't have alternative places. I've been speaking to people in Aden who have said they've seen tens of thousands of people in the streets. And so the humanitarian situation will deteriorate significantly over the next few weeks. And NGOs are finding it very hard to get there to help them. In the last few hours, BBC Verify has been examining material which shows fighters inside that key Red Sea port city of Mocha.

7:22One verified image shared on Telegram shows four armed men outside the Mocha Airport terminal building. Another video shows armed men in pickup trucks driving in the center of the city. Now it's an important day in the United States. Commemoration are taking place across the US to mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks. Nearly 3,000 people were killed when planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania. As we record this podcast, remember and ceremonies have got underway. But while it's usually a time for solemn remembrance, this year's anniversary of the September 11th attacks has become embroiled in divisive American politics. There are controversial calls for New York City's first Muslim mayor to sit out the event, including from Rudy Giuliani who was New York City's mayor on the morning of 9-11.

8:26Mr. Giuliani said he was offended that Mayor Zoraan Mamdani would attend the memorial from New York Nettoffique reports. This is the site of the deadliest foreign attack on American soil in modern time, the World Trade Center and Memorial, a fulfilled promise to rebuild and to never forget. Today events of 9-11 are a moment in history for the youngest generation, but for those who lived through it, it's a pain that never fully fades. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, Al Qaeda hijackers flew commercial planes into the 110-story twin towers. Nearly 3,000 people died that day, their bodies later recovered from the rubble. Thousands more would lose their lives in the following years from breathing in the toxic cloud of dust that remained. That day forever changed America, altering lives both domestic and foreign policy and putting a target on Muslim Americans. 25 years on from 9-11, Muslim Americans are experiencing a record rise in discrimination according to rights groups.

9:29While the city has its first Muslim mayor and a sign of some progress, there's also been an increase from politicians on the right amplifying conspiracy theories about the community. Rudy Giuliani, New York's mayor on 9-11, was recently condemned for these comments about the current New York mayor, Zoraan Mamdani. They want to dominate us. That's what they're taught from the day they begin their extremist religious education. Mandami is a clear supporter of that. All of the right Muslims, he supports, are murderers. Zishan, whose brother Salman Hamdani died in the North Tower, says that kind of rhetoric adds to the pain of the day. I have three kids. It's more painful because now I have explained to my kids the hate of Islam. The hijackers from 9-11 hijacked the religion, right? They hit the towers. I'm like, Islam is being hijacked now to cause the vision within our country.

10:40You gotta be better. My brother gave his life, he's a Muslim. Does his name not belong there now? He's a Muslim? On a day meant to unite, it's still proving difficult for America to put to rest its divisions. Nettofik The head of Britain's Domestic Security Service, MI5, has used today's anniversary of the 9-11 attacks to warn the UK's government can no longer handle national security alone. Ken McCollum says the government must partner with businesses and academia to help defeat looming threats. The BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner told me more. He's basically saying that the government can't do it on its own. This isn't a budget thing. It's a capability thing. He calls it a cold warms to cooperate with business, with industry, with academia. Together, this is a whole of society approach to tackling not just terrorism, but threats. The threat landscape he says has changed dramatically since 2001.

11:44So back then, they were dealing with really big, major plots. But today, they're having to deal with lots of internet and spard plots. Sometimes in some cases, just somebody in their bedside and their bedroom being inspired by what they're seeing on the internet. They're also having to deal with state-backed threats. So for example, there have been over a dozen kidnapper murder attempts. They say by Iran using proxy groups, using low-level criminals to attack dissidents who are critical of the Iranian regime, for example. There are Russia backed and China backed spying attempts that they haven't to deal with. So they're pretty stretched and they're saying that they need help from academia and from industry. Frank, how is state intelligence changing to try to keep up with these threats? They're adapting a lot. Let's take MI6, for example. That's the secret intelligence service, kind of the coolant of the CIA in America.

12:44They had a disastrous thing in 2003. So just in the run out to the Iraq invasion, the US-led invasion of Iraq, Britain got dragged into the whole shirad of thinking that Iraq had weapons of vast destruction. And certainly Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president, the time was behaving as if he had something to hide. But they didn't have any. They had all been destroyed after 1991. And Britain's MI6 had supplied intelligence that turned out to be flawed. There was flaky from somebody who essentially it wasn't properly checked. And that was fade into the whole government effort to send troops into Iraq. But probably wouldn't have happened if the intelligence had been correct. And the intelligence simply wasn't there. They've had to do a big root and branch change in how they operate. So no days, for example, agent runners who get the raw intelligence from people inside Iran, North Korea, Al Qaeda, wherever they supply that.

13:44And that's got to be then checked by a reports team. And often it's sent back, almost like having homework marked saying, no, try again. You need more substantiation on this. And my five have changed the way they operate. They now operate very closely with the police. They sit in, well, initially in fusion centers. And now in a combined counterterrorism unit in London. In America, the 9-11 Commission report identified a serious failing of imagination in intelligence, a failure of policy, a failure of strategy. Because the CIA and FBI had the little pieces of the jigsaw that if they could put it all together, they could have stopped 9-11. At least that is the accusation. And today they share that intelligence. How difficult is it still to plan a large scale terror event like 9-11? How have we come on from that? I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it's much, much harder. Because that takes a huge amount of planning, which will be very difficult to do under the noses of intelligence agencies.

14:47Because they've got far more oversight. Now they share much more, they're much better informed. They've got better agents, their systems are better. And they're sped up in many cases by AI. So for example, if you've got a vast amount of data, let's say it's mobile phone metadata. The artificial intelligence can help them sift through that to do mass searches for things and can identify in milliseconds. Oh, this person here phoned that person on such and such a day. They can't necessarily know exactly what was discussed, but they can find that metadata very quickly. You've got biometric recognition, face recognition, gate recognition. There's all sorts of things that make it much harder for terrorists to get across borders. And they can't just go to the bank gardener. Still to come in this podcast. Love the NFL been going for years. We flew in from New Jersey. Yeah, big diet. Come live in one of this time for a while. An American sport touches down in Australia.

15:48This is the Global News Podcast. The artificial intelligence company andthropic says it's uncovered attempts by some malicious actors to use its AI models to develop biological and conventional weapons. The findings can be found in the firm's recent threat intelligence report as our technology editor Zoe Kleinman began by telling me. This report is just based on activity from this year. And it says that it has spotted people around the world trying to misuse its AI models in various ways. It didn't really name check many people, but it did name check countries. So it says it was attempted to be used for espionage, for surveillance, for fraud, for scams, for cyber activities in countries like Russia and Iran and Yemen. The most concerning and I think the one that's made all the headlines today was research within a military institute.

16:49We don't know in which country into a virus called chicken gunner, which could either have been an attempt to develop a vaccine, but it could also have been an attempt to look into whether it could be made into a bio weapon. And I think it's fair to say that, you know, it's been a scary week for AI news. And today is no exception. This report is an extremely sobering read. Andthropic says obviously this is activity that it has spotted and it's blocked and it has deleted those accounts. So those people no longer have access, but it says it is publishing this because the world needs to know that the tools are getting better at doing both good and bad stuff and people are trying to do bad stuff with them. So you mentioned that it's been a scary week for warnings around AI. Earlier this week we reported that an AI researcher was putting the chance of AI wiping out humanity within the next decade at more than 10%. And can you reflect for us on these series of increasingly alarmist warnings? They're not new are they? We have been hearing various warnings from various AI bosses for the last few years.

17:53And the growing call now is of course the regulation to step in. You know, there is still very patchy regulation around the world. There are still companies all doing their own things on AI safety. We've had incidents where we've seen powerful AI agents getting around their guardrails and doing stuff that they're not supposed to be able to do. And now we have a former researcher saying giving us this 10% figure. So I think there's a lot to bear in mind here. It is only his opinion. He works in AI safety. So he will have been exposed to the absolute worst case scenario disaster planning. And that will no doubt have given him a perspective that perhaps other people don't have. You've got to bear in mind these companies also want their tools to appear to be very powerful and dangerous because it makes them more powerful and also more valuable. I spoke to a top executive at one of the AI giants yesterday actually and he said, we need a UN style body for AI safety governance. It needs to happen now. It's been visionary in the past. It's been a kind of nice idea.

18:53Now he says it's pragmatic. But I think it's important to know that he was not volunteering to be the person that started it. And he also said, and I am troubled by this sense that something bad is going to happen before the world sort of leaps into action. Our technology editor Zoe Kleinman. Donald Trump has doubled down on his promise to pay every American adult citizen $5,000 if his party wins the midterm elections in November. Critics have pointed out that offering payments to influence voting is illegal under US federal law. And they've questioned how his government could afford it. But speaking of the closing of the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, the president said it was possible because he said the US is taking in trillions of dollars. Our North America editor Sarah Smith was watching on. It was Donald Trump's own idea to have this extraordinary Republican convention just like his idea to make the midterms campaign all about him.

19:54And look, he definitely infuse these supporters here and exciting mega fans across the country. But the crucial question is, will he have one over any of the voters who are so frustrated about the high cost of living and the war with Iran that's driving prices up further? There was a very extravagant promise to try and get their attention with Donald Trump saying he will pay $5,000 to every American citizen if Republicans win in November's election. Quite a few people might be rather skeptical though about whether they would ever actually see a check. Donald Trump has made promises like this before and he's never actually paid out. It was really noticeable tonight. What an enthusiastic response the crowd gave the vice president JD Vance when he made his speech. They were shouting JD48 indicating they want him to be the one to take over from Donald Trump in two years' time. That's got to give him a significant advantage over his closest rival, the Secretary of State Mark Rubio.

20:58He's in Peru right now, not here in Texas with the party faithful. But this event was designed to keep the spotlight on one man and that's Donald Trump. Because he thinks he's the one that can drive voters to the polls in November and by making himself the face of the Republican campaign. That means he's going to have to own it if Republicans are defeated in November. And right now that's what polls suggest is likely to happen. Sarah Smith. Let's go to South Africa now where police are handing over six Nigerian citizens who are wanted in the US for allegedly being involved in an online romance scam. The group is accused of targeting more than 100 women in the United States and defrauding them of more than $6 million. Our Global Affairs reporter, Richard Gugoy, told us more. They are accused of defrauding 100 women in the United States through what police in South Africa described as sophisticated online as scams.

22:00So what they would do basically is that they would pose as a romantic partner that they're currently on a trip to South Africa, where they're backing on a project. And then they get back to them and tell them that they have been robbed. They have been, you know, scammed by people in South Africa and they desperately are in need of cash. They need to buy phones, you know, laptops. And even to pay legal fees because say there's an emergency that has come up in the course of doing business. And so that's what they were able to do. But principally, they were able to gain trust of, you know, these perhaps lonely pensioners and business people. And then over time, they were able to request them to send them money. So in the process, they were able to defraud them. And they disappear into thin air. It must have been heartbreaking for the people involved on the other end of these scams. I mean, Richard, I wonder if you can tell us more about the rise of these love scams in general.

23:00Is it fair to say that a lot of them originate in Nigeria? Well, you would say that predominantly some of the cases are originator from Nigeria. But then if you look at this group, it's an organized criminal network called at their black arcs. And that's why the police arrested at these six suspects five years ago in South Africa because they were targeting this network that has been operating not only in South Africa, but in many parts of the world. But it did originate from Nigeria as just a student movement. And then it evolved into what it has become right now as a criminal syndicate. And then also in Nigeria, you'd have groups of young people who call themselves Yahoo Boy. So they just network of individuals. So they don't have jobs maybe because perhaps the social economic situation in Nigeria. So you have a huge population of young people who are educated, but they don't have, you know, job opportunities. And so for some of them, they see that online, you know, romance scams are an easy way, a lucrative way out of poverty. So that's why you would see some Nigerian nationals have really been caught up in this crime.

24:04Richard Kaguay. And finally, a new frontier is opened up for American football. The NFL has played regular season games in seven countries. Now, it's held its first ever game in Australia. The city of Melbourne hosted the NFL game with the San Francisco 49ers taking on the LA Rams. More than 100,000 fans packed into the Melbourne cricket ground to watch the game. These fans couldn't wait for the NFL to touch down in Australia. Love the NFL been going for years. It's actually our fourth Rams game. So first one at home, but a bit to a few in LA in the US. Fantastic. We've been non-er fans for like a long, long time. So we flew in from New Jersey. Yeah, big day. Can't wait. Everyone in this time for a while. Melbourne radio presenter Charlie Pickering was there. What definitely happened here and what we definitely saw today was that there are a lot of NFL fans here in Australia. And they came out in force. It was stunning like getting on the train to come into the ground today, hitting in. You started to spot more and more people who were wearing their team jerseys of all different teams.

25:07And the names on the back, the players on the back suggest these have been fans for a long time. And this is probably the first time they've all been in one spot like this before. It was like, I don't know like a massive family reunion. People who didn't know that there were other people like them out there that actually was so serious about their football. So I was saying that there are a lot of fans here in Australia. We love sport and there are a lot of NFL fans. But this was probably the first time that they could all come together. See a game obviously for the first time in Australia and really feel like they had a community. And I think the NFL American football is something different again. It's so uniquely American. There's literally only 32 teams in the entire world that play at the highest level. And it is such a spectacle. It's safe to say that football got a foothold today. I think that's absolutely true. Maybe it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it is building an audience definitely. And the results, the 49ers beat the Rams 27-7. And that's all from us for now. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk.

26:15You can also now watch our episodes in full just search for the Global News podcast on YouTube. This edition was mixed by Kalamaklain and the producer was Alfie Halversson. The editor is Karen Martin. I'm Celia Hatten. Until next time, goodbye. Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. When a plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Paul Carrus had to make a split-second decision. Hear how an act of kindness saved his life. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get to your BBC podcasts.

27:27One of the most notorious gangs of hackers that ever existed. All of your files were encrypted with military-grade algorithms. Making outrageous demands. Let them pay millions. I'm Jeff White and I'll take you inside a business like no other, where cybercriminals piled up the cash. Until divisions grew and somebody took revenge. Cyberhack season 4, the Conti Files. All episodes available now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. When a plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Paul Carrus had to make a split-second decision. Hear how an act of kindness saved his life. Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get to your BBC podcasts.