International News
UK’s Starmer Suspends Several Labour Rebels
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer suspended several lawmakers on Wednesday as he tried to reassert his authority over his ruling Labour party following a rebellion over welfare reforms.
Starmer was forced to backtrack on plans to slash disability and sickness benefits earlier this month after dozens of his MPs threatened to vote against the proposals.
MPs Brian Leishman, Neil Duncan-Jordan, and Rachael Maskell said they had been suspended while the Times newspaper reported that Chris Hinchliff had suffered the same fate.
All four voted against the welfare reforms on July 1 after Starmer made his authority-sapping climbdown to avoid a humiliating defeat in parliament.
Leishman’s office confirmed to AFP that the Scottish MP had been temporarily suspended from the party.
Duncan-Jordan, the representative for Poole in southern England, said he understood that voting against the government “could come at a cost, but I couldn’t support making disabled people poorer”.
Starmer has endured a difficult first year in power and has made several damaging U-turns in recent weeks.
Political scientist Steven Fielding said the purge was a bid by Starmer to reinforce party discipline.
“He wants to send a signal to all the others that rebelled over the welfare bill and have rebelled on other things that, ‘Okay, you’ve got away with this one, but if you keep going, this is going to be your fate,’” Fielding told AFP.
But the University of Nottingham politics professor added it was a risky strategy considering the large numbers of lawmakers who had opposed the welfare reforms.
“I think he’s going about it in the wrong way. He needs to talk (to) and understand why the MPs are doing this,” Fielding told AFP.
Labour did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Starmer’s popularity has plummeted since he won a landslide general election result in July last year, ending 14 consecutive years of Conservative rule.
Labour now trails Eurosceptic Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK party in many national polls, although the next election is likely four years away.
In June, the government reversed a policy to scrap a winter heating benefit for millions of pensioners, following widespread criticism and another rebellion from its own MPs.
The same month, Starmer — a former chief state prosecutor in England and Wales — announced a national inquiry focused on a UK child sex exploitation scandal after previously resisting calls.
The prime minister has a massive majority of about 160 MPs, meaning he should be able to force whatever legislation he wants through parliament.
But some in the party complain of a disconnect between Starmer’s leadership, which is focused on combating the rise of Reform, and Labour’s traditional centre-left principles.
Confirming she had been suspended, Maskell urged Starmer to engage with his backbenchers, saying she wanted to see “bridges built” and this would “make him a better prime minister”.
International Olympic Committee (IOC) said on Thursday it was reintroducing testing for gender to determine eligibility to compete in the female category, preventing transgender women from competing.
The screening will mean Olympic women’s sports at the 2028 Los Angeles Games will be limited to biological females, which would also rule out those with differences in sexual development (DSD) from competing.
The IOC is abandoning rules it brought in in 2021, which allowed individual federations to decide their own policy and implement a policy across all sports.
“Eligibility for any female category event at the Olympic Games or any other IOC event, including individual and team sports, is now limited to biological females, determined on the basis of a one‑time SRY gene screening,” the IOC said in a statement.
The test will be carried out through a saliva sample, cheek swab or blood sample.
IOC president Kirsty Coventry said: “The policy we have announced is based on science and has been led by medical experts.
“At the Olympic Games, even the smallest margins can be the difference between victory and defeat.
“So it is absolutely clear that it would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category. In addition, in some sports it would simply not be safe.”
The IOC is bringing in the new policy after the women’s boxing competition at the 2024 Paris Olympics was rocked by a gender row involving Algerian fighter Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan.
Khelif and Lin were excluded from the International Boxing Association’s 2023 world championships after the IBA said they had failed eligibility tests.
However, the IOC allowed them both to compete at the Paris Games, saying they had been victims of “a sudden and arbitrary decision by the IBA”.
Both boxers went on to win gold medals.
Lin has since been cleared to compete in the female category at events run by World Boxing, the body that will oversee the sport at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
Gender testing was first introduced at the 1968 Olympics and last used at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, but then scrapped after criticism from the scientific community
Defence Minister Israel Katz announced on Thursday that an Israeli airstrike had killed Alireza Tangsiri, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ navy.
“Last night, in a precise and lethal operation, the IDF eliminated the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ navy, Tangsiri, along with senior officers of the naval command,” Katz said in a video statement.
“The man who was directly responsible for the terrorist operation of mining and blocking the Strait of Hormuz to shipping was blown up and eliminated.”
Since the start of the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on February 28, Israel has announced the killing of several top Iranian officials, including supreme leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic republic’s powerful security chief, Ali Larijani.
In recent days, Israeli forces have carried out several strikes targeting the naval assets of Iran.
Last week, Israeli airstrikes hit several Iranian naval ships in the Caspian Sea, including ones equipped with missile systems, support vessels and patrol craft.
AFP
US President Donald Trump insisted Wednesday that Iran was taking part in peace talks, suggesting Tehran’s denials were because Iranian negotiators fear being killed by their own side.
“They are negotiating, by the way, and they want to make a deal so badly. But they’re afraid to say it, because they figure they’ll be killed by their own people,” Trump told a dinner for Republican members of Congress.
“They’re also afraid they’ll be killed by us.”
The US leader’s comments came after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that “we do not intend to negotiate”.
Trump repeated his assertion that Iran was being “decimated” in the conflict now in its fourth week, even though Tehran still maintains an effective stranglehold over the crucial Strait of Hormuz oil route.
Lashing out at his domestic opponents, Trump also claimed Democrats were trying to “deflect from all of the tremendous success that we’re having in this military operation.”
In a mocking reference to calls from Democrats for him to seek the approval of Congress for the conflict, Trump added: “They don’t like the word ‘war,’ because you’re supposed to get approval, so I’ll use the word military operation.”
The White House said earlier that Trump was ready to “unleash hell” if Iran did not admit defeat, while also insisting that Tehran is still taking part in talks.
Iranian state media had earlier cited an unidentified official as saying that the Islamic republic had responded “negatively” to a reported 15-point plan from Washington.
‘Talks continue’
“If Iran fails to accept the reality of the current moment, if they fail to understand that they have been defeated militarily and will continue to be, President Trump will ensure they are hit harder than they have ever been hit before,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters.
“President Trump does not bluff and he is prepared to unleash hell. Iran should not miscalculate again.”
Asked if negotiations with Iran had stalled, Leavitt replied: “Talks continue. They are productive.”
Leavitt declined to say whom the US was dealing with in Tehran following the assassination of supreme leader Ali Khamenei, whose son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public.
Reports have suggested the Trump administration’s interlocutor is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s speaker of parliament and one of its most prominent non-clerical figures.
The spokeswoman also declined to confirm reports that top US officials including Vice President JD Vance were set to hold talks with the Iranians in Pakistan, which has emerged as a key mediator.
Trump is moving thousands of airborne troops and extra marines to the Gulf amid speculation that he might order a ground invasion to either seize Iranian oil assets in the Gulf or secure the Strait of Hormuz.
The White House meanwhile appeared to stick to the four to six-week timeline it has previously given for the war.
Trump announced Wednesday that his visit to China to meet Xi Jinping had now been rescheduled for mid-May, having postponed it by six weeks to deal with the conflict.
“We’ve always estimated approximately four to six weeks (for the length of military operations against Iran), so you could do the math on that,” Leavitt added.
AFP
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