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Keir Starmer has announced his resignation as the United Kingdom's prime minister and leader of the Labour Party following growing pressure from within his own party to step down. During his time in office, Starmer faced mounting opposition over his embrace of austerity measures amid a cost-of-living crisis in Britain, as well as his brutal crackdown on Palestine solidarity protesters. Former Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is widely expected to become the next prime minister. Some leaders of the British left have warned Burnham may do little to shift from Starmer's policies, including his position on Israel.
Starmer "really lost support in the party because he was perceived as too right-wing for it and because he was too boring. He lacked charisma," explains our guest, the Australian British human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson.
Robertson also discusses Britain's Court of Appeal's ruling that the government's proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization is lawful, making it a criminal offense to belong to or support the organization. Four Palestine Action activists were recently sentenced as terrorists over their involvement in a 2024 raid on a British factory operated by one of Israel's largest arms manufacturers, Elbit Systems.
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The Justice Department has reportedly launched a criminal investigation into the writer E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued Donald Trump twice, for sexual abuse and defamation. According to CNN, The New York Times and other outlets, the investigation is focused on whether Carroll committed perjury in a deposition, even though a federal appeals court upheld the rulings in 2024.
In 2019, Carroll published a memoir describing an encounter in the 1990s when she says Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store. When Trump denied the account, Carroll sued him and won $5 million in damages, with a unanimous New York jury finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. After Trump made disparaging remarks about Carroll, she sued him again and won a second defamation judgment for over $83 million. (She has yet to collect any money pending appeals by Trump.)
"The use of the Justice Department to go after E. Jean Carroll in this way is completely unprecedented," says law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer, who says the probe is part of an obvious "vendetta" by Trump. "It's frankly galling."
See our interview with director Ivy Meeropol about her documentary Ask E. Jean.
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 Jim Watson/AFP via GettySpaceX is suing regulators in California, alleging that officials rejected a request to carry out more rocket launches due to bias against the political views of CEO Elon Musk.
The suit against the California Coastal Commission, filed Tuesday, comes after the state agency declined a request last Thursday from the U.S. Space Force to allow SpaceX to launch up to 50 rockets annually from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
"The Commissioners expressly stated that this decision was not based on concerns about impacts to coastal resources, but instead on the political views held by SpaceX's largest shareholder and CEO, Elon Musk," the lawsuit claims, adding that the "public hearing record indisputably shows overt, and shocking, political bias."
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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The president reacted after Arizona's Supreme Court ruled that a 160-year-old law criminalizing most abortions could be reinstated.
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