World

Sri Lanka closed schools and halted all non-essential government services on Monday, beginning a two-week shutdown to conserve fast-depleting fuel reserves as the International Monetary Fund opened talks with Colombo on a possible bailout.

The country of 22 million people is in the grip of its worst economic crisis after running out of dollars to finance even the most essential imports, including fuel.

On Monday schools were shut and state offices worked with skeleton staff as part of government plans to reduce commuting and save precious petrol and diesel. Hospitals and the main seaport in Colombo were still operating. 

Hundreds of thousands of motorists remained in miles-long queues for petrol and diesel even though the energy ministry announced they will not have fresh stocks of fuel for at least three more days.

The country defaulted on its $51 billion foreign debt in April and went cap-in-hand to the IMF.

The first in-person talks with the IMF on Sri Lanka’s bailout request commenced in Colombo on Monday and will continue for 10 days, the lender and the government said in brief statements.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was also due to meet visiting Australian Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil to “deepen cooperation and assist Sri Lanka as the country faces very difficult economic times,” Canberra said in a statement.

It said O’Neil will also discuss strengthening engagement on transnational crime, including people-smuggling following a surge in would-be illegal immigrants by boat in the past month.

Sri Lanka is facing record-high inflation and lengthy power blackouts, all of which have contributed to months of protests — sometimes violent — calling on President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to step down. 

Police arrested 21 student activists who blocked all gates to the presidential secretariat building after declaring Monday, Rajapaksa’s 73rd birthday, a “day of mourning”.

The shutdown order came last week as the United Nations launched its emergency response to feed thousands of pregnant women who were facing food shortages.

Four out of five people in Sri Lanka have started skipping meals as they cannot afford to eat, the UN has said, warning of a looming “dire humanitarian crisis” with millions in need of aid.

Australia’s prime minister said Monday he will engage “diplomatically” over the US prosecution of Julian Assange, but he is standing by earlier remarks questioning the purpose of further legal action.

As domestic pressure mounted on him to intervene in the WikiLeaks founder’s case, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he is sticking to comments he made while in opposition last year that “enough is enough”.

“I do not see what purpose is served by the ongoing pursuit of Mr Assange,” Albanese said at the time.

But the Australian leader took a swipe at “people who think that if you put things in capital letters on Twitter and put an exclamation mark, then that somehow makes it more important”.

Instead, he said: “I intend to lead a government that engages diplomatically and appropriately with our partners.”

Assange’s wife Stella Assange told ABC radio Monday that she understood the Albanese government was raising her husband’s case with US President Joe Biden’s administration.

“That is extremely welcome news,” she said, adding that she had not been able to see Assange since a British court last week cleared the path for his extradition to the United States.

“When I heard the news I just wanted to give him a hug,” she said.

Assange’s long-running legal saga began in 2010 after WikiLeaks published more than 500,000 classified US documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has been held on remand at a top-security jail in southeast London since 2019 for jumping bail in a previous case accusing him of sexual assault in Sweden.

That case was dropped but he was not released on grounds he was a flight risk in the US extradition case.

As Assange’s potential US extradition looms, several high profile Australians, including former foreign minister Bob Carr, have called on Albanese to demand the US drop the prosecution.

“If Albanese asks, my guess is America will agree,” Carr wrote Monday in an op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Carr argued Assange’s prosecution stood in sharp contrast to the US pardoning former military intelligence officer Chelsea Manning, who had leaked the secret files to WikiLeaks. 

“Our new prime minister can say: ‘We’re not fans of the guy either, Mr President, but it’s gone on long enough. We’re good allies. Let this one drop’.”

While campaigning for May elections that swept his Labor Party to power, Albanese said that Assange had “paid a big price for the publication of that information already”.

Carr was serving as foreign minister in 2012 when Assange, who was facing sexual assault allegations, sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

For much of the past decade, Australia’s previous conservative government did not publicly advocate for Assange’s release.

Iran on Monday hanged a Sunni extremist who was sentenced to death for killing two Shiite clerics and wounding another in early April, the judiciary said.

A 21-year-old national of Uzbek origin carried out the April 5 stabbing attack at the Imam Reza shrine which honours one of the most revered figures in Shiite Islam.

The killings happened during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan when large crowds of worshippers had gathered at the shrine, in Iran’s second-largest city Mashhad.

“The death sentence against Abdolatif Moradi was carried out by hanging this morning, in the presence of a group of citizens and officials in Vakilabad prison in Mashhad,” said provincial judiciary chief Gholamali Sadeghi, quoted by the judiciary’s website Mizan Online.

The assailant “was accused of moharebeh (‘war against God’, in Persian) using a weapon to terrorise the population in the shrine and even outside it,” Sadeghi added.

The assailant stabbed one of the victims 20 times, Tasnim news agency reported earlier.

On June 7, the judiciary announced Moradi’s death sentence, adding that his lawyer had appealed to the Supreme Court.

According to local media, Moradi entered Iran illegally a year earlier from Pakistan and settled in Mashhad, the country’s main holy city.

Iranian leaders blamed “takfiri elements” for the attack. The term takfiri in Iran and in several other countries refers to radical Sunni Islamist groups.

One of the clerics, Mohammad Aslani, died immediately while the death of the second, Sadegh Darai, was announced two days later.

The attack came days after two Sunni clerics were shot dead outside a seminary in the northern Iranian town of Gonbad-e Kavus.

The three suspects in that case, also Sunnis, were arrested in late April but were said to have “no connection with terrorist groups”, state media reported at the time.

Sunnis make up between five and 10 percent of Shiite-majority Iran’s population of 83 million people.

Iran last year recorded its highest annual execution total in four years, rights group Amnesty International said last month.

In an annual report it said Iran executed at least 314 people in 2021, up from 246 in 2020, largely because of drug-related cases. 

Swimming will set up an ‘open category’ to allow transgender athletes to compete as part of a new policy which will effectively ban them from women’s races.

“I do not want any athlete to be told they cannot compete at the highest level,” Husain Al-Musallam, president of governing body FINA, told an extraordinary congress of his organisation.  

“I understand why transgender athletes want to compete in the gender of their choice…but we should not favour one athlete over another.”

“I will set up a working group that will establish an open category at some of out biggest events. We will be the first international federation to start this work.” 

He was speaking as FINA unveiled a policy on inclusivity which was then approved by the members. 

The policy received a cautious welcome from American swimmer Alex Walsh after she won the women’s 200m medley at the world championships later Sunday evening.

“I’m happy that FINA are… re-evaluating the rules,” she said.

“I am not really sure what the answer is to keep things fair but obviously I hope that everyone is able to compete and as long as they are finding a way to do that then I am happy.”

Brent Nowicki, FINA’s CEO, said the organisation was determined “to maintain the separation of aquatic sports into men’s and women’s categories.”

– ‘Principals of fairness’ –

He added that “FINA recognises that … this policy means certain individuals may not be able to compete in the category that best aligns with their legal gender, gender identity or gender expression.”

“All of us… must always, within the principals of fairness, must ensure the inclusion of all individuals irrespective of their gender orientation.” 

Under the rules, he said, male competition would effectively be open to all.

But “male-to-female transgender athletes… can only compete as female athletes in FINA competition, and set a world records in the female category, if they can establish they have not experienced any part of male puberty.” 

In the debate that followed, the policy drew criticism from members of the FINA medical committee Christer Magnusson, of Sweden, and David Gerrard from New Zealand.

“To ask or expect an 11, 12 year old boy to make a decision that will effect the rest of his life is a big ask,” said Gerrard.

Last year, the International Olympic Committee announced guidelines but asked federations to produce their own ‘sport-specific’ rule. 

FINA set up three expert committees, one medical, one legal and one of athletes, to look at the issue.   

The medical committee found that men who transitioned to woman retained advantages. 

“Some of the advantages males acquire in puberty are structural and are not lost with hormone suppression,” said Dr Sandra Hunter of the Marquette University in Milwaukee. 

“These include larger lungs and hearts, longer bones, bigger feet and hands.” 

The legal experts concluded that the policy of excluding most transgender swimmers would be legal. 

They were “necessary and proportionate to achieve a legitimate objective,” said London-based barrister James Drake. 

For the swimmers, Cate Campbell, an Australian four-time Olympic gold medallist said: “My role is to stand here today and tell trans people we want you to be part of the broader swimming community … but also to stand here and say… ‘listen to the science’.” 

In the United States, swimming has moved to the centre of the debate over transgender women competing against natal women, as Lia Thomas has become the face of the issue.  

Thomas, a freestyle specialist, competed for the University of Pennsylvania, men’s team from 2017-19. 

After transitioning and undergoing required hormone therapy, she raced on the women’s team this season. 

Thomas became the first known transgender athlete to win an elite US collegiate title when she edged Olympic medley silver medallist Emma Weyant in the 500m freestyle in Atlanta in March. 

At a workshop in Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine, mechanics are hard at work turning rally cars into vehicles that can be used to fight Russian troops on the frontline.

They change mufflers, remove sports tuning and change the interiors to create pared-down vehicles — all under the supervision of businessman Volodymyr Tarkhov.

Before the Russian invasion, the 32-year-old produced fibreglass catamarans and kayaks.

Since the start of the war, Tarkhov said he and his friends have converted around 30 ordinary passenger cars for the military.

Now they are completing work on a “combat buggy” with the engine from a Russian Lada model used by Ukrainian rally drivers — their second such conversion.

They took out doors, made it quieter and added a large hole at the front through which to shoot with a machine gun.

Welder Maxym Sendukov, 33, said the new muffler will make the car almost completely inaudible to the enemy.

“The goal is to make the car a little quieter to be able to pass by and stay invisible,” he said.

– ‘Comfortable for soldiers’ –

In the early days of the Russian invasion, the mechanics were busy building anti-tank obstacles and installing concrete blocks to protect the entry points to the city.

Their car conversion is sponsored by local businessmen who buy metal and car parts.

“In general we are just making the car comfortable for soldiers to sit in it or get out,” said Yevgen, 45, whose role is to strip out the car to prepare it for welding.

He said the soldiers who have been using the other buggy the team produced have said it is “very fast and easily manoeuvrable”.

“It is very useful in intelligence and military missions,” he said.

One of the soldiers who had come to inspect the car, a 50-year-old with the callsign “Mamai”, said there were not enough cars for soldiers operating on the frontline.

He said many vehicles brought to the frontline were being sourced by volunteers.

“Jeeps and minibuses are needed at the frontline to move lots of people”.

For “Mamai”, the advantage of the “combat buggy” was that all the passengers could shoot on all sides of the car.

“We will take the car today and take it to our positions,” he said.