LONDON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will discuss efforts to support Ukraine in its war against Russia, as well as the response to the conflict in the Middle East, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other UK officials in London on Tuesday.
In meetings with Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Blinken will also discuss issues including the Indo-Pacific region and the AUKUS defense pact between the US, Australia and Britain, the State Department said.
The trip comes as a senior Iranian official denied reports that Tehran had supplied Russia with ballistic missiles, information a European Union spokesperson described as “credible.”
CNN and the Wall Street Journal reported last week, citing unidentified sources, that Iran had transferred short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, as Moscow continues to wage war in Ukraine more than two and a half years after its 2022 invasion.
Thousands of civilians have died in the war, millions of Ukrainians have been displaced and cities and villages have become piles of rubble.
Russian forces have been slowly advancing in eastern Ukraine. A month ago, Ukrainian troops launched their first major assault on Russian territory, capturing a swath of the Kursk region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pleading for Western nations to supply more long-range missiles and lift restrictions on using them to hit targets such as airfields inside Russia.
Blinken’s visit to London also comes a week after Britain suspended some arms export licenses with Israel over equipment that could be used in the war in Gaza.
The administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is running to succeed him, is under pressure from critics of the war to suspend some arms deliveries to Israel, Washington’s closest Middle East ally.
While Blinken is in London, he and Lammy will open talks on a UK-US Strategic Dialogue to strengthen ties which deliver growth and security, the British government said.
This will cover key elements of the UK-US relationship, including defense and security, Europe, Ukraine, the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, and other global priorities, it added.
“In a more volatile and insecure world, it is even more important that we are highly aligned nations,” Lammy said in a statement ahead of the meeting.
Blinken to discuss support for Ukraine in meetings with senior officials in London
https://arab.news/nck6k
Blinken to discuss support for Ukraine in meetings with senior officials in London
- Blinken will also discuss issues including the Indo-Pacific region and the AUKUS defense pac
- Blinken’s visit to London also comes a week after Britain suspended some arms export licenses with Israel
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
