Reuters World News - Iran attack, Harvard racism allegations, GOP at border and Pistorius release

Episode Date: January 4, 2024

Iran has blamed unspecified “terrorists” for two explosions that have killed nearly 100 people at a ceremony to commemorate a former commander. Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard president is being described as a political win for Republicans. House speaker Mike Johnson has said the U.S. has reached "a breaking point" with illegal immigration, after a visit to the Mexico border. Plus, Oscar Pistorius is set to be released on parole and Ukraine and Russia exchange prisoners of war. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, explosions at a memorial for Karsim Soleimani in Iran add to tensions in the Middle East. Harvard's former president said she received death threats and racist insults before she resigned. And Republicans put pressure on Biden over border funding as Congress is set to reconvene. It's Thursday, January 4th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. every weekday. I'm Tara Oaks in Liverpool. Crowds in Tehran before a speech by Iranian President Ibrahim Raeisi. He was speaking hours after two explosions killed nearly a hundred people at an event to commemorate commander Karsim Soleimani. More than 200 others were injured. Raeisi told the crowd

the Zionist regime will pay the price. Iran is blaming unnamed terrorists and the attack adds to tensions across the Middle East. There's no indication. of foreign involvement, though. Ashad Mohammed is our diplomatic correspondent in Washington, D.C. Ashad, how do these attacks change a situation in the Middle East? It's another spark in a region that's already on fire, in a sense, with the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. That said, it's by no means clear that these blasts in Iran are actually going to lead to a wider conflagration. Do we have any sense of who's behind the attacks? No, no one has claimed responsibility for them. The United States has said that they had nothing to do with this and that they have no

reason to believe that Israel had anything to do with it. And in the absence of a claim of responsibility, it's hard to tell. That said, there are other groups that have conducted violent attacks in Iran in the past. They include Islamic State or ISIS, at least a branch of it. In addition, of Baluchi separatists and ethnic Arab separatists have also conducted attacks in the past. As you mentioned, this is yet another spark in an already tense region of the world. Do all these add up to an escalation in the Middle East? So the fundamental question is, who really might want the conflict to spread? Israel clearly does not. They seem to feel like they have their hands full in Gaza and are not looking to a wider war. The United States has made abundantly clear that it doesn't want to see it spread.

Hamas, which triggered the Gaza conflict with its brutal incursion into southern Israel on October the 7th, despite having called for other anti-Israeli groups to launch attacks, it really has not gotten anywhere near the kind of support that it might have wanted from groups like Lebanese Hezbollah. Is the killing of Hamas operative in a Hezbollah dominated part of Beirut enough to bring that group into a full-blown war? That's an open question, but it's not as if the Israeli attack was a broad-scale attack on Hezbollah itself. It was fairly targeted at one Hamas leader, although it also killed five other people. An emotional reunion in an unknown Ukrainian location

after Kiev and Russia completed their first exchange of prisoners of war in nearly five months. More than 200 have been freed by each side. The negotiations were described as complex and involved mediation by the United Arab Emirates. Court documents from a civil lawsuit involving Jeffrey Epstein's close associate Ghelaine-Maxwell have been unsealed. Most details have been previously reported.

including allegations to Prince Andrew groped a woman at Epstein's home in Manhattan in 2001. The Prince has always denied the allegations. More documents are expected to be unsealed or unredacted in the coming days. Eleven years after killing his girlfriend Reveston Camp, the former Olympic and Paralympic star Oscar Pistorius is set to be released from prison on Friday, who has granted parole in November under certain conditions. Bargavacharya is in Johannesburg. In November, when Pistorius was granted parole,

Veeva's mother had issued a statement and said she had forgiven Pistorius and had no objections to his release. She said she was satisfied with the conditions imposed by the parent board on him. That said, she was not convinced that he had been rehabilitated or had shown any remorse for his act. A senior official in the U.S. Education Department has resigned over Joe Biden's handling the conflict in Gaza. Tariq Habash, a special assistant, said he could no longer turn a blind eye to the atrocities

committed against innocent Palestinians. Harvard's former head says she was called the N-word countless times and emailed death threats before she resigned. Claudine Gay made the comments in a New York Times op-ed after yielding to pressure by the Ivy League school's Jewish community to resign over a congressional hearing and allegations about her academic work. Her resignation is being held by Republicans as a political win. Gabriela Borta is covering the story. Gabby, a lot of a conversation on the right over Gay's tenure has focused on the issue of DEI. Firstly, what is this? And how does she come to represent

this issue for Republican lawmakers? So DEI refers to diversity, equity and inclusion. And it is an effort by companies, corporations, as well as educational institutes to recruit and retain staff, students, faculty of diverse backgrounds. And it has become a target of the Republican Party, the political right in the U.S. because they consider it to be reverse racism. They think it is discriminatory against white people and other minority groups that may not benefit as much from the efforts to promote representation of certain groups. And for many on the political right, Claudine Gaye sort of became this symbol of DEI and higher education. She is the first black president of Harvard. She has been focused on increasing Harvard's diversity equity inclusion initiatives since she was a faculty

member there. And so what might be the effect of her resignation? Gay from the start of her presidency was scrutinized in a way that often black women uniquely are in positions of power and academia and other fields where often white critics have looked at them in their roles and wondered if they earned those roles with merit or through some hiring process that gave preferential treatment to people of color. And Gay and the university said in their emails about her resignation on Tuesday that she had been subjected to personal, sustained, often racist attacks via phone calls and emails sort of behind the scenes as all of the public controversy over her testimony and the plagiarism allegations were playing out in the public eye. So there's definitely a concern that her resignation could have a

chilling effect in higher education and on efforts to hire more diverse leadership at universities. Time for markets now, and the latest Fed minutes have splashed a dose of cold water on hopes for a US soft-lunding sooner rather than later. Minutes of the Fed's December policy meeting did show officials were convinced inflation was coming under control. And there were concerns about the risks the central bank's overly restrictive monetary policy on the economy. But there were no clear-cut clues on when the Fed could begin easing rates, the policymakers still seeing a need for rates to be higher for longer. Last month alone, we saw the most illegal crossings in recorded history. House Speaker Mike Johnson and his fellow Republicans at the U.S.-Mexico border near Eagle Pass, Texas.

It is an unmitigated disaster, a catastrophe. And what's more tragic is that it's a disaster of the president's own design. The lawmakers' visit comes as Congress reconvenes next week, with border security a major sticking point in talks over government funding. Politics editor Scott Malone is in Washington, D.C. What's complicated here is that a lot of issues are getting caught up in these talks. The White House wants additional money for Ukraine and for Israel, as well as additional money for border enforcement.

Republicans have become increasingly opposed to the idea of additional money for Ukraine, and all of that's making a deal harder to reach. The one thing that is upping pressure on lawmakers is a deadline. There's nothing that motivates Congress like a real deadline, and they face one on January 19th when the government would start to shut down if they're not able to reach deal. Did we learn anything new from the GOP visit to the border, or was it more of the same? One of the interesting things on Wednesday was hearing Mike Johnson and say that, you know, he didn't think that Biden needed to have Congress act to stiffen border enforcement. He was saying that Biden could act through executive order, which is an unusual

argument for a House Republican to be making with a Democrat in the White House, but pointed to, one, you know, his view of the urgency of the problem and two, just the difficulty of passing legislation right now. That's it for today's episode of Reuters World News. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show. To make sure you know what's going on in the world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your favourite podcast player or download the Reuters app.