This BBC podcast is supported by the UK.
Hi, this is Charlotte Gallagher from the Global News Podcast.
We're bringing you the latest on the US-Israel war with Iran.
Today, President Trump dismisses an offer by Iran's president to stop attacking neighbouring Arab states as a surrender in response to relentless US and Israeli attacks.
Join us to hear that as well as our usual podcast with the day's top stories from BBC News.
Search for Global News Podcast wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
Does Benjamin Netanyahu have everything to gain from the war with Iran and Donald Trump a lot more to lose.
With elections in both the US and Israel this year, how risky is the decision to go to war?
This is the Global Story podcast, and we've been speaking to the BBC's international editor, Jeremy Bowen, about whether Netanyahu and Trump's visions for Iran align.
Listen to the Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Pity the people of Lebanon tonight, some 300,000 of them forced from their homes.
We're sleeping here in the streets.
Some are sleeping in their cars.
We are homeless.
Trapped between an Iranian-backed militia and perhaps an invading army.
I want Lebanon to be for the Lebanese and I don't want neither Hezbollah nor anyone else.
We want to live in peace with everyone.
This is World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm Ed Butler and today, amidst the intensifying bombardment, we're hearing from a restauranteur in Beirut who's determined to stay open come what may.
We're also hearing from a former big oil chief executive and finding out how you make a million playing Roblox, the computer game.
Explosions like this one have been lighting up the night sky over Beirut's southern suburbs.
In recent hours, the Israeli military has said it's carried out multiple waves of airstrikes targeting the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia.
The resulting death toll is now over 200, according to the Lebanese authorities, with some 300000 people homeless or displaced.
This is Jamal.
He's one of those who's fled to the capital from the south of the country.
We're sleeping here in the streets.
Some are sleeping in their cars, some are sleeping on the streets, some on the beach.
We are homeless.
They displaced us and we left.
This is what they call displacement.
I've never slept on the ground like this in my life.
I've been forced to sleep like this.
No one even brought a blanket.
They said tomorrow, after tomorrow.
And this is Sarah, a university student in Beirut.
Of course, it's unacceptable.
And honestly, as Lebanese, what confuses us most is that we don't know whose side to be on.
Both of them, as they say, are more oppressive than the other one, oppressing us as Lebanese.
That's why people can't find a way to console themselves over how things have got to this point.
Well, the two parties she's referring to there are Israel and Hezbollah, both of which appear to be approaching a final military showdown at the moment.
The Justice Minister of Lebanon is Adel Nassar.
Our position is that Hezbollah is dragging Lebanon in a war because Hezbollah is considering itself as part of the defensive system of Iran, and it is doing so at the expense of the lives of the Lebanese citizens and their properties.
Well, to get a sense of where all this humanitarian chaos has left ordinary Lebanese, I've been speaking to Aline Karnakian.
She's a restaurateur based in downtown Beirut.
Oh yeah, we're not sleeping.
The suburb of Beirut is like 10 minutes with car.
You have every place is being bombarded right now.
There are thousands of refugees, I'm reading, on the streets of the city.
Is that right?
Yes, they gave an ultimatum and there are more than 35 villages.
And then yesterday they gave also the threats to the suburb of Beirut.
The suburb of Beirut is heavily populated area.
So you have all the people on the street.
The government opened all the governmental schools. to be used as shelters.
They are not ready to be used as shelters.
It's cold.
There is no beds.
There is nothing.
The basic needs are not available.
And these shelters that they open are all filled.
So there is no more places.
So people are sleeping either in their car or on the street.
There is thousands of people sleeping on the streets.
And your restaurant is still open?
We're opening just to be there, just to make sure that everything is still okay.
But there is no customers right now.
No one dares to go.
I'm in the middle of Beirut.
No one dares to go there and sit.
Is it safe still to be trading?
In the vicinity of the suburb, it's not.
I don't know what is safe.
Right now, they are threatening before they are bombing.
Sunday night, they bomb without threatening.
The Ashrafieh part, my restaurant part, we do not have any Hezbollah members or any activities.
So maybe this is what we can call safe for now.
Honestly speaking, we don't know who's coming in in this area.
So they might follow someone with a car and you might be next to that car.
But it's a war after all.
It's not a clean thing.
What if someone from Hezbollah came into your restaurant?
You will not know.
Wherever you have Hezbollah people, it is not safe at all.
Then you could be a target.
Exactly.
We don't know all the members.
They know better.
We're not happy to have Hezbollah.
None of the Lebanese are happy to have Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is not Lebanese.
It's not from us.
They are taking orders from Iran.
And they proved it.
You know, when Lebanon was attacked, they didn't answer.
Now that Iran is attacked, they're answering.
So it's obvious.
It's nothing to be hidden.
Are you not considering leaving the city yourself?
I'm Lebanese.
I was born, raised and studied here.
I've been doing business here.
Where do you want me to go?
What is your hope right now?
That it ends as fast as possible.
That it's not something that we will go back to where we are.
It's been, since I'm born, we have this problem.
None of the time we fixed the problem, did the ceasefire or something, but we never fixed the problem as it is.
So I want Lebanon to be for the Lebanese and governed by the government and have the Lebanese army.
The Beirut restaurateur Aline Karnakian.
Well, there is tonight intensifying bombing over Iran as well.
Crude oil prices today reached $93 a barrel, the highest level since autumn 2023.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Qatar's energy minister said that the war with Iran could push the price as high as 150 a barrel because of difficulty getting crude out of the Middle East.
Saad al-Khabi warned as well that the wall could force the Gulf to stop all energy exports within days.
One man who's navigated an oil company himself through a fair few Middle Eastern crises is Lord John Brown.
He ran BP from 1995 to 2007.
Speaking earlier, he told me it is easy to see the oil price now rising quite a bit further.
We may lose 14 million barrels a day, which if it stays like that for some time and people see no chance of it being restored for a little while, then indeed it will make the price of oil rise quite significantly.
We could lose three to four days of stocks and history shows when that happens.
The price of oil definitely goes above 100, definitely.
And there is that feeling, isn't there?
I mean the energy minister.
Qatari energy minister pointed to this that we could also reach maximum capacity for storage in the Gulf, where they're having to stockpile their resources, their production, because they can't get it out.
And when those storage facilities fill up.
At that point they're going to have to shut down production, which could have longer-term ramifications, if and when anything can restart.
Right.
Well, it could.
I mean, stocks will, you know, tanks will go to the top and production will have to be shut in.
I think you have to do that very carefully.
I've done that myself.
You need to pick the most prolific wells first, the ones which don't need a lot of assistance to work.
And you go down and shut down very carefully, always with the mind that you're going to open up again.
I think the problem is bigger with natural gas.
Liquefied natural gas, which also comes through the Straits of Wilmers, is more difficult when you start shutting down the liquefaction plants, which you will need to do.
It's probably faster than you need to shut in oil, because there's less storage for liquefied natural gas.
And so that's actually one of the reasons why the price of gas has risen much faster and further than the price of oil because there isn't storage for gas.
So right now, gas in Europe, for example, is about six times as high as the price of gas in the United States.
And that has implications on electricity and industry and all sorts of things right now.
You were running BP at the time of the Second Gulf War, weren't you?
Does this bring back memories of that time?
It does.
I've been through actually several of these crises in my career, one way or another.
And so you do need to keep the supplies running.
We have an obligation in Europe to make sure that supplies are Of course.
You know there are very few times when we actually run out of product and there are huge lines in petrol stations.
Is $150 a barrel really realistic?
Well, it's possible, but I think it's foolish to suggest that we can forecast the price of oil at this stage.
It's a bit random, but the price of oil has been up there in real terms in the past not for long and it does have implications on households and individuals because the price of things that they need is going up and it eats into the household budget.
Will some of the oil majors be laughing today because they are not exposed?
Well, those that are not exposed to Middle Eastern oil?
Well, I hope they won't be laughing because I think there's a big human cost to all of what is going on at the moment.
They will make more profits though, definitely because the price of oil will go up.
The price of natural gas will go up.
And therefore their margins will go up and they will make more money.
From a business perspective, what's the takeaway of this crisis for countries and for energy majors, do you think?
Well, it just reminds us that volatility is here to stay in the energy markets.
Certainly there have been enough crises in the Middle East and there are plenty of signs of instability in the Middle East to say this is not the last time this is going to happen.
Lord Brown, listening to that with me is Chris Lowe.
He's the chief economist at FHN Financial in New York.
Chris, I mean, before we get deeper into this, I'd like to play you one other point that Lord Brown made when we were talking about other oil producing economies that could do well out of this conflict in the Middle East.
High oil prices are good for the United States.
It generally increases GDP.
It's not good for bits of the economy.
Equally, it's good for the economy of Russia, as they have indeed now relaxed sanctions on Russian oil going to India so they can produce more.
Good for US and Russia, he says.
Chris.
I mean, I suppose it's stating the obvious, but there will be winners as well as losers in this situation.
Yeah absolutely, and not surprisingly, given his experience in the industry, Lord Brown knows what he's talking about.
I think what's really interesting watching the markets today well, this week in fact is that traders here in the US seem to be betting that because the oil price increase was so dramatic and so fast, the impact on households the negative will be bigger than the positive boost to the oil producers.
What I think is striking in my experience since –
Oil production really took off in the U.S. about 10 years ago.
Every time we've had a sharp increase in prices like this, they bet the same way.
And every time, in fact, the U.S. economy accelerated.
As for Russia benefiting?
India is a huge market.
If they're given the green light to buy Russian oil, they will buy.
Yeah, I mean.
The US Treasury Department has temporarily eased sanctions to allow India to buy Russian oil currently stranded at sea.
The Treasury Secretary, Scott Besson, said this waiver will allow oil to keep flowing, but won't make that big a difference to the Russians, because it's just the stuff at sea.
I mean, what's your take?
Yeah, I mean, there's some truth to that.
Although, look, you know, they're not being paid for the stuff at sea and they will be now.
It will benefit the global economy though, because if India is buying from Russia, they're not buying elsewhere.
That means lower prices for everybody else, relatively lower.
OK, one quick last thought.
US job numbers.
They didn't look great, did they?
They were awful.
And the market looked at them, reacted as if they were awful and then rethought.
And I think the reason is.
We've got a ton of other data suggesting employment actually improved in February.
The way the government does the survey, it's one pay period very early in the month.
Most of the southern US was still iced in.
That's unusual.
And it looks like people just couldn't get to work.
So chances are we get a rebound in March.
Chris Lowe, thank you very much.
You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
Now, in other war-related news, the US Treasury has announced a 20 billion reinsurance facility to restart maritime cargo and oil commerce.
The DFC chief executive, Ben Black, and Treasury Secretary Scott Besant unveiled the plan.
It follows a directive from President Trump to help support global shipping.
Lorianne La Rocco is the global supply chain reporter for CNBC.
I asked if she thought the plan would help to get shipping moving again.
I don't think it's going to help the insurance market.
You have to have tankers buy into this where, yes, I can get reinsurance or cheaper insurance.
It's more about the seafarer lives.
They do not want their vessels getting blown up.
And everything is so fluid that you have owners from around the world, you know, looking to weigh that risk.
To show you the impact of this war, they've only had 44 to 45 vessels transit last week.
That's a 90% decrease of what they normally have.
How are you going to convince these owners and operators to change their calculation in moving these vessels through the strait?
It's people over profits.
It's interesting, a clutch of vessels I was reading in the Gulf under enemy fire have adopted a ruse using transponders to declare themselves to be Chinese.
I guess the hope is that they won't get shot at if they do that.
Well, it just depends on in terms of the friendly fire.
I mean you can change your signal, but there's also a lot of jamming of signals where it's very hard to see even the true positions of vessels.
The safety of that region, even if you're moving and you're a beacon, because every vessel has a beacon.
That way, vessels know where they are.
It's a safety mechanism.
But, as a result of the war, you do have vessels turning off their signals and also, as you pointed out, changing their origin, if you will, to try to play safe.
So how is cheaper insurance or reinsurance going to entice them to go through the waterway?
It's still way too risky.
And that's what I've been told in terms of mitigating that risk.
That's the sound of crowds of Indonesians gathered outside their embassy in Phnom Penh last month, seeking safe passage back to their home country.
There's some of thousands of former scam workers who found themselves released from criminal compounds recently, where they were mostly being forced to sell fake investment schemes to people around the world people like you and me.
There are reports of murder, rape and torture inside these compounds, according to Amnesty International, which has identified at least 53 inside Cambodia alone, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of people trapped inside them.
The Prime Minister, Hun Manet, says his government is leading the way in cracking down on the scam centres.
The scam network is destroying our honest economy.
It's put a better petition on Cambodia, distract tourism and investment.
So this is the reason why we need to clean this out, so that the real economic activities can be promoted.
Export-oriented manufacturing, auto industries, IT, this is more beneficial for our economy.
Cambodia's prime minister.
But is this the whole story?
Cambodia itself stands accused by rights groups of fostering the scam network itself, which may now be generating more than half of Cambodia's GDP.
The crackdown, according to investigative journalist Nathan Southern, who's in Phnom Penh, has only come about now after the pressure from the US, China and other regional powers.
Pressure from China was coming at the same time as pressure was coming from the United States.
There was also a lot of pressure from South Korea and from Japan to curb this scam trade.
And Cambodia needed to project an image to the world that it was not a base for scam operations.
So what they did was they launched this quite enormous so-called crackdown campaign on scams across the country.
They have deported around 30,000 people right now.
They are sending 400 or 500 Chinese people out each day.
They have hangars by the airport that are just full of thousands and thousands of people taken from scam compounds.
The scam economy in Cambodia is possibly worth around 60% of the GDP.
So they're projecting a very strong image of cracking that strike me as a genuine crackdown.
It looks like what could be happening is a consolidation of control of this multi-billion dollar business that got so out of hand that it was starting to harm the economy of Cambodia.
You mentioned all the people who have been sprung from these scam centres.
Many have been deported.
Now, a lot of those, I guess, are either the Chinese kind of gangsters who are in charge, or they could be people who've been trafficked to work inside them.
I mean, are you seeing many of those people, nationals from all around the world, who are now literally trying to find their way home?
Cambodia is in a complete humanitarian crisis that nobody is talking about.
There were at least 150000 people human trafficked and forced to scam inside Cambodia up until a few months ago.
The numbers are likely much, much higher.
As this crackdown began, no one has been labeled as a human trafficking victim.
There is one shelter. that exists in the entire country.
There are thousands and thousands of people just roaming Cambodia right now with no visas, overstays on their visas, no passports, no money.
The doors of a scam compound have opened up and they have just fled.
Some have been found in the jungle and in cow sheds and in Phnom Penh, the capital city.
There are people just roaming the streets desperately trying to find a way to get home, and they can't.
That's extraordinary.
Are they talking?
Yeah, they are.
They are sharing their experience of what happened inside these scam compounds, and the stories of torture and abuse are horrific.
The stories of how much money was being made by these groups, but how little, if any, these people were able to keep are incredible.
But their main issue is just absolute desperation of of what possible way there is to get home.
There's this assumption that international organizations are going to come in and pay for the airfare.
So people are even handing themselves into police stations, thinking they'd be arrested and deported.
And they're being turned back and the police are saying we'll come get you when we want to find you.
And there are enormous risk of re-trafficking because these compounds are continuing but they're building up in more quiet, remote parts of the country.
And they are recruiting hard on these people who are even more desperate than they were when they were trafficked from Uganda or from Myanmar or from wherever it was.
So we are just seeing most of the top-level criminal groups have just moved operations to Laos or Myanmar, Sri Lanka.
Many operations from the same Chinese criminal groups are growing in Madagascar, in Uganda.
This is growing across the world.
It's just shifting its operations and it's an incredibly fluid industry.
Is there no consular help for these people, diplomatic help?
There are no African consulates or embassies in Cambodia.
It's really down to a lot of individuals are trying to help.
Some of the NGOs have been cut so hard from USAID cuts that there's just not enough money in the pot to pay for the airfare for these people to get home.
And it's shocking, the absence of international organizations or support, or even a conversation about this humanitarian crisis.
Journalist Nathan Southern in Phnom Penh, who says he's now crowdfunding to pay for some of the migrants' flights home.
Now, in case you're not aware, the famous gaming platform Roblox is where teens, or at least some of them, get to create games of their own within an invented digital universe.
It's got some 85 million regular users and now some of them are using it reportedly to make up to 400000 a month.
They're doing this by creating and peddling games within the platform.
Roblox paid out $1.5 billion to game creators last year.
Let's speak to Jenny Svoboda.
She is the CEO of Lovespun, a Roblox user-generated content platform.
And she's herself a brand collaborator based in Texas.
Hi, Jenny.
Remind us, simply for the uninitiated, how Roblox works and how you make a game on it.
Hello hello, and thank you so much for having me.
Um so on roblox um, and how it works uh basically uh, roblox provides most anybody who wants to join the platform a free space.
You don't have to pay to jump in and just hit a game dev.
Um, even if you're a uh novice creator or somebody who is, you know, uh well versed in the universe um, it's a free platform for you to be able to create on, whether you have to pay or not.
So um yeah right, so there must be thousands of games out there, right?
I mean how, oh my god, so many yeah, exactly how do you promote and spread your own to make, i don't know, four hundred thousand dollars a month, for example?
Oh my gosh, there's so many avenues, from social medias to Roblox themselves.
They promote mostly like high performative games that they're, you know, feeling that are doing really well on the platform.
But also TikTok is, you know, a huge, a huge thing in Roblox and the Gen Z and you know just everybody, the whole world.
So TikTok is a great way.
Twitter and, of course, Roblox themselves, is the best way to definitely remind me.
I use it.
I use as paying subs.
Or is it advertising that's paying for all of this, this bonanza for teen game creators?
Say again, is it advertising that's funding all this?
I think if it's advertising, it might be self advertising.
So I don't know if, like a creator or a developer, might want to like invest, to advertise, to get a bit more view.
How much have you made out of it?
Oh gosh, I don't necessarily want to disclose that, but a lot in the sense that I would love to be, like you know, flying off to, like you know, a million different countries and different, like things like yachts and all these luxury things.
But for me, it's helped me a lot and family.
So, you know, and just supporting.
You can always dream, Jenny.
Thank you for being with us.
That's it for us and World Business Report.
Thanks for listening.
