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Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Imane Khelif scandal brings everlasting shame on the IOC
'I can sleep well tonight,' said Nicola Adams, the first British woman to win an Olympic boxing title, a few hours after Imane Khelif's test results were leaked into the public domain. She deserved to feel at peace. After all, she had been one of the highest-profile critics of the Algerian's involvement at the Paris Olympics last summer, writing: 'People not born as biological women should not be able to compete in women's sport.' For this she was pelted like some medieval miscreant in the stocks, accused by many of her former supporters of ignorance and misinformation. Except now, with the release of chromosome analysis from an Indian laboratory revealing that Khelif has 'male karyotype', it turns out Adams was right all along. The Khelif scandal should be ranked among the worst in Olympic history, a saga where the sport's most powerful administrators became so seduced by gender ideology, so in thrall to the lie that womanhood was reducible to some frivolous passport detail, that they were prepared to put the very lives of female boxers in peril. A woman could, as a direct consequence of a profoundly flawed official policy, have died in that Paris ring. That is the stark truth. The International Olympic Committee knew about Khelif. It had been told in 2023 about the test results in New Delhi indicating that Khelif was biologically male, with spokesman Mark Adams publicly admitting as much. But it did nothing, disdaining the tests – with no evidence – as 'ad hoc' and 'not legitimate'. Its spin was that it was all some Russian stitch-up. This version of events, after all, suited president Thomas Bach's personal squabbles with Umar Kremlev, Russian chief of the International Boxing Association. And it was swallowed by far too many credulous observers in Paris. When the IBA called a press conference, in the wake of Khelif's 46-second battering of Angela Carini, it was blocked by legal threats from revealing the boxer's test findings as it intended. As such, the occasion dissolved into a slanging match: at one point, apropos of nothing, a reporter demanded to know the salary of Chris Roberts, the IBA chief executive. It felt, then as now, like a huge exercise in misdirection. Yes, the IBA had questions to answer over its ethics and finances. But the core element of its case – that women's sport should only be for those with XX chromosomes, that male advantage was immutable – was sound. And now we see its argument that it disqualified Khelif from the 2023 World Championships for being XY – a verdict, crucially, against which the athlete did not appeal – substantiated in writing, with a report carrying the letterhead of Dr Lal Path Labs in New Delhi summarising the genetic testing in two telling words: 'abnormal' and 'male'. I spent much of Monday pursuing the IOC, asking firstly for a response to the document and secondly for a sign of whether it would be apologising to the women denied Olympic medals. Eventually, on Tuesday morning, the following word salad arrived from Lausanne: 'The IOC has always made it clear that eligibility criteria are the responsibility of the respective international federation. The factors that matter to performance are unique to each sport, discipline and/or event. We await the full details on how sex testing will be implemented in a safe, fair and legally enforceable way.' This statement, somehow managing to avoid either question posed, is risible in myriad ways. For a start, the attempt to pass the buck to the federations is directly contradicted by the IOC's actions at the Paris Games. It took over running Olympic boxing from the IBA, establishing the so-called 'Paris Boxing Unit' and applying its own fatuous logic that Khelif and Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting, who had also failed tests, could compete because of the 'F' in their passports. As for its comment about rules being different depending on the sport? Clearly, it still believes men can be women in certain circumstances. In boxing, though, there was only one by which it needed to abide: to ensure women would not be smashed in the head by biological males. And it failed to uphold even that most basic duty of care. It is a monumental dereliction, to which the only natural response is anger. The IOC has caused havoc with its ridiculous 2021 framework on 'fairness, inclusion and non-discrimination', stating that 'athletes should be allowed to compete in the category that best aligns with the self-determined gender identity'. In 2024, it decided to test this fallacy in boxing, the most lethal Olympic sport. Except boxers do not compete with their feelings, but with their fists. In its desperation to advertise supposedly progressive credentials, it placed women in mortal danger. Could there be a greater betrayal? Those who cheered this on in Paris, who painted anybody doubting Khelif's claims to be a woman as a bigot, should take some time to reflect. And that includes many journalists. On Sky Sports News on Friday, an Olympics reporter, reacting to news that World Boxing would compel Khelif to undergo further sex testing to compete in the female category again, said flatly: 'There were no tests. There were no test results.' And yet there were. We knew of their existence in Paris nine months ago, and now we have seen them with our own eyes. In a curious way, there is some comfort in this. When people accuse anybody disagreeing with them on this subject of 'hate', it is a sure sign that they have lost the plot. And those insisting that Khelif's mental health matters more than the physical well-being of women have emphatically lost any moral argument. Think of it this way: in men's sport, people devote inordinate amounts of time to railing against the tiniest example of unfairness, to decrying the entire VAR system if Erling Haaland's toe happens to be offside. How can the same judges make their peace with women being denied the right to safety, the most basic fairness of all? 'Non è giusto', Carini kept saying to her corner in Paris after the Khelif bout, weeping that she had never been punched so hard in her life. 'It's not fair.' Let that plaintive cry stand as a monument to the IOC's everlasting shame. 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The Hill
30-04-2025
- Business
- The Hill
5 ways Trump has changed the economy in his first 100 days
Economic policy during President Trump's first hundred days in office has been anything but business as usual. Trump's tariffs have reset global trade relations and put businesses and investors in thrall to the administration's every move. Trump has blitzed regulatory agencies and ordered wide-ranging government layoffs, taking the 'move fast and break things' mantra espoused by his supporters in the tech world to new extremes. The whirlwind cadence of orders and reversals has left U.S. economic allies and adversaries alike trying to figure out where Trump's policies are going to land. Even U.S. financial assets — traditional safe havens in times of economic distress from recessions to wars — have shown signs of weakness. Here's a look at the effect Trump's policies have had on the economy during his first hundred days. Century-high tariff rates The overall U.S. tariff rate stands above 25 percent, the highest level in more than a century, according to an analysis by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Major components of the overall tariff rate include a 145 percent tariff on China, a 10 percent general tariff, and targeted tariffs on lumber, automobiles, metals and other goods. Monetary authorities have painted a stagflationary picture of the import taxes, with groups from the IMF to the Federal Reserve saying they expect higher prices and lower economic growth as a result. '[The tariff level] on its own is a major negative shock to growth,' IMF economists wrote in an April economic outlook. Trump has delivered his tariffs in fits and starts, issuing orders followed by quick reversals on multiple occasions. Cancellations include 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the end of the de minimis exemption on shipments from China worth less than $800, and the pause of country-specific tariffs of various rates on dozens of U.S. trading partners. The Commerce Department on Tuesday also scaled back its tariff on auto parts scheduled for May 3. 'This is intended to keep [trading partners] off-balance,' Bill Reinsch, chair of international business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Hill. 'It allows the U.S. to take a maximalist position and then to fall back from that, which is Trump's normal style.' Wall Street investors have blasted the tariffs. Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman said Trump's country-specific tariffs were based on 'bad math' and that it was 'taking the global economy down' before praising his eventual loosening of tariffs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average of major U.S. stocks has lost about 8.4 percent of its value since Trump has taken office, and the S&P 500 has lost about 8.7 percent. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite has lost more than 12 percent of its value. Resetting trade, shaking up international relations Trump's tariffs have taken aim at U.S. economic rivals and allies alike, deepening tensions with adversarial countries like China and creating new ones with longstanding partners like Canada, Mexico and the European Union. China has vowed to fight the trade war 'to the end' and is saying it's up to the U.S. to make the first move. 'This tariff war is launched by the U.S. If a negotiated solution is truly what the U.S. wants, it should stop threatening and exerting pressure, and seek dialogue with China,' Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said Tuesday. Experts say that delegations meeting with Trump don't understand what he's actually seeking from the trade war. 'I had some conversations with foreign parties this morning and last week,' Reinsch told The Hill. 'They're saying, 'he didn't bring up X, he didn't bring up Y, which we'd expected him to bring up — so what's going on?'' Production and supply chain experts say they're seeing new foundations for a multipolar global trading system being laid, as distinct from the monistic trade arrangement embodied by the World Trade Organization (WTO) that was the culmination of post-war U.S. trade policy. 'Most people I talk to think we're heading toward a bipolar trade system,' Tom Derry, CEO of the Institute for Supply Management, told The Hill in an interview. 'It's not a WTO-centered, single, consensus-driven set of rules around trade, but rather a Western-centered, maybe U.S.-led trade bloc and an Eastern-centered, China-led trade bloc.' A flight from U.S. financial assets Perhaps the surest sign that Trump is making big changes to the global economy has been the simultaneous drop in the value of the U.S. dollar relative to other currencies and the sell-off in the market for Treasuries. Usually, investors run to U.S. assets in times of economic uncertainty, a tendency that has withstood shocks from the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to the Great Recession. But the benchmark U.S. dollar index has fallen consistently since Trump took office and has experienced notable drops immediately following tariff announcements on April 2 and April 9. Bonds also sold off immediately after Trump's April 2 'Liberation Day' tariff announcement, spurring the administration to declare a 90-day pause on the country-specific tariffs on the same day they went into effect. The gap in yields between U.S. Treasuries and German Bunds increased as the euro rose against the dollar — an unusual pattern that economists immediately picked up on. 'The euro rose sharply against the dollar even as the yield spread between the two-year Treasury note and two-year German bund rose above 200 basis points, indicating a break in usual market dynamics and suggesting acapital flight away from the U.S. and towards Europe,' University of Tampa economist Vivekanand Jayakumar wrote in an opinion piece this week. Migration patterns and the labor market Trump has also worked to stop migration flows with amped enforcement along the southern U.S. border, which the United Nations describes as the world's 'deadliest migration land route.' There were 1.3 million border encounters at this point in fiscal 2024, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, along with 1.2 million in 2023. This year, there have been 381,000. Migrants have been a significant factor in U.S. labor force dynamics in recent years, affecting growth forecasts and even price levels, as well. Fed Chair Jerome Powell noted last year that differences in immigration measurements may have been the reason that the 2024 economy significantly outperformed expectations when many were expecting a recession. 'That actually explains what we've been asking ourselves, which is how can the economy have grown over 3 percent in a year when almost every outside economist was forecasting a recession?' Powell said last April, referring to migration. Less migration could mean a more restricted labor force in the long term and along with dampened growth — costs that conservatives say are worth paying in the interest of American workers. 'If you give companies the ability to hire illegal workers, which is to say, workers that they can break labor laws on and not have to pay full tax burdens on, then it's effectively a government subsidy to hire those illegal workers,' Richard Stern, director of the Heritage Foundation's budget center, told The Hill. Asked about administration initiatives that were spelled out in the programmatic Project 2025 document that the Heritage Foundation had a significant role in writing, Stern said things were 'on track.' 'When you look at the first 100 days, looking at the parts of the project that are easily doable by the administration, we're definitely on track with a lot of the major parts of that,' he said. Gutting the IRS ahead of tax cuts Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — the cost-cutting panel led by Elon Musk — have made cuts to federal agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education. Some conservatives have dismissed the DOGE efforts as political theater. Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the fiscally conservative Manhattan Institute, told Reuters that 'DOGE is not a serious exercise' while predicting it will end up costing more than it saves. But DOGE staffing cuts at the IRS, which number more than 12,000 and could eventually take away between a quarter and 40 percent of the agency's workforce, could have a real effect on government revenues and where exactly they come from. This is especially in light of the massive operational refurbishment that the IRS had started under the Biden administration and that the Trump administration has entirely reversed. 'They've fired thousands of people and thousands more have quit. The damage it's going to do to the income tax system is incalculable — literally, because we don't know what they're doing,' Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told The Hill. The IRS has had five commissioners since Trump took office again in January, a rate of turnover Gleckman described as 'remarkable.' The hollowing out of the IRS comes as Republicans in Congress work to extend their 2017 tax cuts and add new and untested cuts to the mix, which Trump promised on the campaign trail. The final package could add trillions to the deficit — with an additional $4.6 trillion deficit expansion that looks set to be ignored in the official accounting.
Telegraph
25-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The woke institutions backpedalling on trans ideology owe the public a huge apology
Elton John once sang that 'sorry seems to be the hardest word': he was referring to a love affair gone wrong, but those words seem apt when we now see all the backpedalling going on around trans rights. It is obvious that certain trans activists, and those who have trans-ed their own children, will never back down from their cult-like beliefs that a mystical 'gender identity' is always more important than biological sex. But now that this belief lies in tatters in mainstream thinking, we are now in the era of those who promoted trans ideology, stepping back from it in awkward regret, trying to rewrite their history. For years we've had to contend with years of woe-fully inaccurate news reporting when it comes to trans-related crimes. In a story about a registered sex offender who was born a man being jailed for recording hundreds of men using the toilet in Aldi, the BBC, Metro and the local press all referred to the perpetrator in their headlines as a woman, or she, alongside a picture of a man. It was enough to make you roll your eyes. Even in court, this person was referred to as 'she'. A lot has been said about media distrust. But this constant reporting of the crimes of men, but attributed to women, is but one of the issues that the public has finally become alert to. The unfairness of male-born trans competitors in women's sport is another. That so many of our public institutions have gone along with this nonsense is evidence of the power of lobby groups. It is also an indication of how poorly valued women's rights are. None of the institutions that have now retreated from the vice-like grip of these campaigning organisations (Stonewall, Mermaids), have apologised for being in thrall to this dangerous ideology. In employment tribunal after tribunal, women who have refused to say that men are women have been bullied out of their jobs but won their cases. Who has said sorry to them? Meanwhile those interested in reality have been proved right by the Cass Review. Guess what? Puberty blockers that inevitably lead to cross-sex hormones are not the best way to treat psychologically distressed kids. Now we have the Sullivan Review, which emphasises the importance of recording biological sex and gender as two different things. This matters for health and criminal records. To muddle them does no favours to trans people. A trans man still needs cervical smears, a trans woman prostate checks, and no Alphabetti Spaghetti lanyard changes that reality. Coming up are a spate of books that try to pretend that somehow the woke have actually 'woken up'. They range from Ash Sarkar's Minority Rule (the identity politics Ash pushed so hard were unappealing to many) to Deborah Francis-White's Six Conversations We Are Afraid to Have (hint: she is still afraid). Yet both show they cannot detach themselves from trans ideology because it is still their core belief. One can see the same kind of pathetic denial in the Democrat party. It was always bizarre to be lectured by American feminists on how trans rights were exactly the same as reproductive rights when here we have abortion rights and trans healthcare on the NHS, while they were losing abortion rights and don't even have maternity leave. The Democrat position is finally being questioned by brave detransitioners and by those looking at the actual medical evidence, which has made so many European countries pull back from medicalising children. In truth, this 'movement' was always a forced coalition between male fetishists and distressed teenage girls. If gender identity was someone's true identity suppressed for years, why do we find it mostly in middle-aged men who finally get to wear frilly knickers? Was this absurdity not obvious? We do not suddenly have a generation of middle-aged women declaring themselves to be men. The best we can manage is some attention-seeking actresses having a haircut and declaring themselves 'non-binary'. To mistake a fetish for a civil rights movement was a gross error. The much-discussed scene in the new White Lotus series, when a character realises that what he desires ultimately is to have sex with himself, but as a woman, makes this clear. The term for this is autogynephilia, and it is all over social media. Half these men don't even want to be women. They want to be 'little girls'. Sadly, actual girls who fear becoming adult women in our pornified culture often turn out to be simply gay. The blatant homophobia of the whole trans rights movement is astonishing. The radical position would be to extend our definitions of masculinity and femininity, not push people into these awful pinks and blue boxes. The infantile pink and blue trans flag says it all. These beliefs have been deeply embedded into academia, the Civil Service, the NHS, the arts: so many of our institutions have abandoned critical thinking in favour of fashion. Yet most of the public never really have bought into this ideology. Most of us have wanted the gender dysphoric to get the help they need, but want women to retain their own rights, spaces and language. There is now a long walk back from this idiocy. The public are not fools. No, female medics should not have to get undressed in front of biological males. No, women should not get punched in the face by those who refuse to take a simple sex test. No, a nurse dealing with a huge paedophile should not be racially abused and reported because she wouldn't use the 'right' pronouns. I don't expect any apologies for losing work and 'friendships' for arguing that biology is real. But there are many, many good folks who refuse to be airbrushed out of history. They stood up when it mattered. And you may not believe me but when I see what is going on in America, one of the saddest aspects of all this is that those most harmed by ramming trans ideology down everyone's throat have been trans people themselves. The backlash they now face is the result of the liberal failure to think for itself. For that, someone really does need to say sorry.
