Licence

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has said the world gave Israel a ‘licence to torture Palestinians’ as she presented her latest report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. She criticised governments for allowing violations to continue with impunity.

The outgoing Director General for the BBC, Tim Davie, has spoken out in the defence of the licence fee, which has risen to a huge £15 a month, making it more expensive than multiple streaming services

The BBC is in “crisis,” departing Director General Tim Davie has said. The broadcaster has been criticised for its planned increase to the licence fee, which will rise to £180, from April 1.The increase, required by the 2022 Licence Fee Settlement, will rise by £5.50 for the year. This means a standard colour TV licence will now cost each home £15 a month, more than a subscription to various streaming platforms.

Speaking on The Rest Is Entertainment podcast, Davie insisted that the BBC – and other institutions – are certainly in “crisis”. He says: “Trust is built and I’m semi-obsessed by this – trust is built by people absolutely believing that someone is acting in their interest and that they listen to them. And if you think about an old-school broadcaster, it broadcasts….

“I think there have been too many instances where institutions and the BBC is definitely not exempt from this – where, call it what you will, metropolitan, a certain lens on life.”

According to Davie, as long as the BBC is providing value, then there should be no problems about an increase in the licence fee.

“We’re at a consultation phase, but we have set out a very clear preference which is and I would do this to the point about restarting where we’re at – I think there is a model which says: look, if we can deliver value for every household and really work at that, then everyone contributes fairly, and I think that is a model that’s worth fighting for,” he says.

“I don’t see it as something potentially trapped in the past. I actually think it could be something exciting for the future – quite enlightened. You don’t have to go exactly where the market is going currently. You have to make markets, and I think we can do that.”

The BBC have been hit by serious allegations that one of their Panorama documentaries misled viewers by editing a speech by Donald Trump. The BBC’s director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness both resigned in November.

It had been alleged in a leaked internal BBC memo that those working on the Panorama programme edited two parts of the speech together so that Trump appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riot back in 2021. Trump has since launched a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against the BBC, which is scheduled to go to trial in February 2027.

He did not explicitly reference any specific errors the BBC had made under his tenure but he said the world was in an age of “weaponisation”, where the broadcaster was under strict scrutiny over one thing – but not referencing all the good work they’ve done.

“We’ve made mistakes, sometimes serious mistakes, which we regret. But weaponisation is selectively taking one fact – it may be a fact, so you’re standing on a fact – but what you’re not standing on is any effort to be proportionate,” he says.

“You’re not saying, look, a thousand stories run, we’re running, and one didn’t get it right, or overall this is where there’s no balance of data. It’s literally just selecting a fact to make a case.”

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The licence follows a push from US President Donald Trump to open Venezuela’s resource sector to international investment.

The United States government has authorised a limited licence for the export of Venezuelan gold, following a high-level meeting to expand mining in the country.

On Friday, a notice appeared on the US Department of the Treasury’s website announcing the licence.

It allows Venezuela’s state-run mining company Minerven and its subsidiaries to export, transport and sell Venezuelan gold to the US, within the parameters set out under US law.

Under the licence, however, no Venezuelan gold will be permitted to be exchanged with Cuba, North Korea, Iran or Russia.

The licence also requires payments to sanctioned individuals to flow through Treasury accounts known as Foreign Government Deposit Funds, the same system that has been used to store the proceeds from Venezuelan oil sales.

Minerven and other state-owned industries have faced US sanctions for years, as a penalty for the push to nationalise Venezuela’s resources under former President Hugo Chavez.

But the US has been pushing for inroads into Venezuela’s oil and mining sectors since January 3, when it launched an operation to abduct and imprison the country’s then-president, Nicolas Maduro.

The January 3 military operation has been condemned as a violation of international law, and critics argue that US President Donald Trump has since sought to exploit Venezuela’s natural resources for his country’s gain.

Trump and his allies maintain that Venezuela’s oil resources were stolen from the US, citing the expropriation of assets from US businesses in 2007.

But international law guarantees that countries have permanent sovereignty over their own natural resources, which cannot be exploited by foreign powers without consent.

So far, the government of interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez has complied with Trump’s requests to surrender oil to the US and open the country’s oil and mining sectors to foreign investment.

Just this week, Rodriguez agreed to send a mining reform law to the country’s National Assembly, following a two-day visit from Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

And in late January, Rodriguez signed into law a separate reform that allowed for the expansion of private investment from abroad in Venezuela’s oil sector and lowered taxes on the industry.

Venezuela’s economy has struggled under tightening US sanctions and government mismanagement, forcing millions of citizens from the South American country to flee its borders over the last decade.

Proponents of the reforms say outside investment can help revive Venezuela’s ailing economy and fund upgrades to its outdated mining infrastructure.

On Friday, Venezuela’s central bank released its first inflation statistics since November 2024, showing that inflation skyrocketed to 475 percent in 2025, when the US placed an embargo on Venezuelan oil exports.

Gold production from Venezuela in 2025 amounted to nearly 9.5 tonnes, according to the government, and the country sits on some of the largest oil deposits in the world.