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Iran postpones Khamenei funeral as US-Israeli bombardment continues
Authorities in Iran have postponed the funeral ceremony for the late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as US and Israeli forces continue intense strikes across the country.
An official said there had been many requests from people wanting to attend the three-day event at a Tehran prayer complex and that infrastructure needed to be prepared. It had been due to begin on Wednesday night.
A member of the Assembly of Experts meanwhile said the clerical body was “close” to choosing a successor to Khamenei, who was killed in a strike at the start of the US and Israeli assault on Saturday.
Iran has responded by launching missiles and drones at Israel and Gulf states with US bases.
Kuwait’s health ministry said overnight that a girl had been killed by shrapnel that fell on a residential area during an Iranian attack.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth said a US submarine sank anIranian navy frigate in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sri Lanka.
“The warship thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death,” he told reporters.
Sri Lanka’s Defence Secretary Air Vice Marshal Sampath Thuyyakontha said the bodies of 80 people on board the Iris Dena had been recovered.
Another 32 people have been rescued, while dozens more are missing.
Hegseth also said that US and Israeli forces would have total aerial superiority over Iran within days and would “soon” control the country.
“This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down,” he declared.
The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, said US President Donald Trump had “dragged the American people into an unjust war”.
Khamenei – who was Iran’s spiritual leader and its highest authority – was killed at his compound in Tehran in the first wave of US and Israeli strikes, along with his wife, one of their adult sons, and several top officials.
The three-day funeral ceremony for the 86-year-old cleric had been due to start at 22:00 local time (18:30 GMT) on Wednesday, with mourners invited to pay their respects as he lay in state at the capital’s Grand Mosalla prayer complex.
But on Wednesday morning, the head of the Islamic Propaganda Co-ordination Council of Tehran province told the hardline Tasnim news agency that it had been decided to postpone the ceremony until “a more appropriate time”.
Seyyed Mohsen Mahmoudi said this was because of “the high volume of requests to attend this ceremony and the need to provide appropriate facilities to host the people”.
Following Khamenei’s assassination, state media showed crowds of the Islamic Republic’s supporters protesting in Tehran against the US and Israeli attacks. But social media videos also showed opponents celebrating on the streets in the capital and other cities.
Khamenei became supreme leader in 1989 after the death of the Islamic Republic’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He maintained a firm grip on Iran’s politics and its armed forces, and suppressed challenges to the ruling system, sometimes violently.
Many people called for his overthrow or his death during nationwide protests in late December and early January. Security forces under his command crushed the uprising with unprecedented force, killing at least 6,480 people, according to human rights groups.
Iran’s new supreme leader is supposed to be chosen by the Assembly of Experts. The clerical body’s 88 members are elected by Iranians every eight years, but Khamenei ensured they were conservatives who would follow his guidance on picking a successor.
One member, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, told state TV that the candidates had already been identified but did not name them.
“The supreme leader will be identified in the closest opportunity, we are close to a conclusion. However, the situation in the country is a war situation,” he said.
Two Iranian sources told news agency Reuters that another of Khamenei’s sons, Mojtaba, was considered the front-runner to succeed him.
Mojtaba, a 56-year-old cleric, is a shadowy figure said to have amassed significant power and wealth under his father’s rule. He is close to conservatives and the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is tasked with defending the country’s Islamic system.
Israel’s defence minister said any successor who continued to threaten Israel and the US would be “an unequivocal target for elimination”.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) meanwhile announced that its had carried out several waves of strikes across Iran on Wednesday.
A military official said more than 100 Israeli fighter jets had dropped about 250 munitions on a military compound containing multiple command centres in eastern Tehran.
The IDF also said it had struck ballistic missile arrays and air defence systems, as well as a missile storage and production facility, and “defence and detection systems” at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport.
It added that an Israeli F-35 fighter jet shot down an Iranian Yak-130 over Tehran, describing it as “the first shoot down in history of a manned fighter aircraft by an F-35”.
There was no immediate comment from Iranian authorities.
On Tuesday night, the head of the US military’s Central Command, Adm Brad Cooper, said the US-Israeli campaign was “ahead of our game plan”.
“In simple terms, we’re focused on shooting things that can shoot us,” he added.
Iran’s state news agency Irna reported on Wednesday that US and Israeli strikes had killed 1,045 military personnel and civilians since the start of the conflict.
It was not immediately possible to verify the figures, but the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRNA) said overnight that the number of reported civilian deaths had reached 1,097, including 181 children under the age of 10.
Iran’s armed forces have responded to the strikes by launching hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel and neighbouring Arab states that host US military installations.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told neighbouring states that the US-Israeli attack had “left us no choice but to defend ourselves” after diplomacy had failed.
“We respect your sovereignty and believe the region’s security and stability has to be achieved through the collective efforts of its states.”
It came after Qatar’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani, told Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in a phone call that Iran was seeking to harm its neighbours and draw them into a war “that is not theirs”, according to the Qatari government.
Thani also “categorically rejected” Araghchi’s assertion that the missiles were directed solely at US interests, citing the strikes on civilian infrastructure and residential areas.
Early on Wednesday, Kuwait’s health ministry said an 11-year-old girl, who was a resident of the country, had died after being hit by falling shrapnel.
Nine other people – six US service personnel, two Kuwaiti army soldiers, and one other civilian – have been killed in Kuwait since the start of the conflict.
Authorities in Saudi Arabia said there had been an attempted drone attack on its largest oil refinery, Ras Tanura, on the Gulf coast. No damage or disruption had been reported, it added.
On Monday, the refinery was forced to halt some operations after a drone attack caused a fire.
Turkey’s defence ministry also said an Iranian missile heading towards its airspace had been intercepted by Nato air and missile defence systems in the Eastern Mediterranean.
And in Qatar, the State Security Service announced the arrest of 10 members of two cells allegedly linked to the IRGC, which it said had been tasked with spying on infrastructure and carrying out “sabotage operations”.
The IDF also said its defence systems had operated to intercept more salvos of Iranian missiles. There were no immediate reports of any casualties.
A total of 10 people have been killed in missile strikes in Israel over the past five days.
[BBC]
Latest News
Maldivian President plants a sapling to mark 60 years of Sri Lanka–Maldives Diplomatic Relations
President of the Maldives, Dr Mohamed Muizzu, who is on a State Visit to Sri Lanka at the invitation of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, planted a sapling this afternoon (04) at Viharamahadevi Park in Colombo to commemorate 60 years of diplomatic relations between Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Upon arrival at the Viharamahadevi Park in Colombo, President Dr Mohamed Muizzu was warmly received by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Children lined both sides of the pathway holding the national flags of the two countries and paid tribute to the visiting Maldivian President.
Among those present at the occasion were Deputy Speaker Rizvi Salih, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Employment and Tourism, Vijitha Herath and the Mayor of Colombo, Vraie Cally Balthazaar, along with several other dignitaries.
[President’s Media Division (PMD)]
For years, India’s West Bengal state was the great exception to Narendra Modi’s political advance.
His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had swept through India’s Hindi-speaking heartland, expanded into the west and north-east, and overwhelmed once-formidable regional rivals. Yet Bengal – argumentative and steeped in a self-image of cultural exceptionalism – remained stubbornly resistant.
That made this state election unusually consequential. With more than 100 million people, West Bengal’s electorate is larger than Germany’s, turning its election into something closer to a nation choosing a government than a routine Indian state poll.
Monday’s BJP victory there would rank among the most significant breakthroughs of Modi’s 12-year reign. It is not merely the defeat of a three-term incumbent, but the completion of the party’s long march into eastern India.
“Winning Bengal is a big victory for the BJP – a land of promise that has long eluded its grasp,” says author and journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
Monday produced an extrodinary political churn across India’s south as well.
In Tamil Nadu, MK Stalin’s DMK government was swept aside by actor-turned-politician Vijay and his fledgling TVK party, marking the dramatic return of film-star politics to the state.
In Kerala, the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) defeated the Left Democratic Front (LDF) after two consecutive terms, ending the last remaining Communist-led state government in India. Only in Assam did the BJP buck the broader anti-incumbent tide and retain power, while the party and its allies also held on to the federal territory of Puducherry.
Yet nowhere were the results more politically significant than in Bengal.
The state has seen only one change of government in nearly half a century: the Communist Left Front ruled for 34 years before the Trinamool Congress (TMC), led by the firebrand populist Mamata Banerjee, dominated the next 15 years until now. Political scientists have long described Bengal as a system that favours “hegemonic” parties.
Analysts see the outcome not as a sudden upheaval but as the culmination of a decade-long political project. Unlike the BJP’s rapid rise in Tripura or its earlier breakthrough in Assam, Bengal was never a lightning conquest.
“The BJP has been a major force in Bengal for three successive elections, consistently polling around 39% of the popular vote,” says Rahul Verma, who is a fellow at the Centre for Policy Research.
Once it established itself near the 39-40% mark, he argues, “the party really needed only another 5-6% to cross the line”. Voting trends show the BJP mopping up more than 44% of the vote this time.
What makes the result particularly striking is that the BJP achieved this despite still lacking the kind of deep organisational machinery that regional parties historically required to win Bengal.
The Trinamool Congress retained a denser grassroots network and the charismatic dominance of Banerjee. Yet the BJP repeatedly sustained a commanding vote share despite allegations of rival political intimidation and the challenge of taking on one of India’s most entrenched regional parties.
“That suggests,” Verma says, “the party’s support now extends beyond the limits of its relatively thin organisational structure.”
So what shifted the election so sharply towards the BJP?
For years, Banerjee’s party forged a formidable social coalition: women, Muslims and large sections of the Hindu vote across both rural and urban Bengal.
Women, in particular, formed the backbone of the party’s welfare-driven politics. The Lokniti-CSDS post-poll survey in 2021 found the TMC’s support among women touching 50% – four percentage points higher than among men – reflecting the impact of years of female-focused welfare schemes and Banerjee’s efforts to expand women’s political representation.
This time, however, the BJP sought to directly challenge that advantage by promising larger cash transfers and expanded welfare benefits of its own.
“Banerjee’s long electoral success rested on a delicate equilibrium between welfare and organisation. But the very organisation that sustained her for 15 years also became her Achilles’ heel,” says political scientist Bhanu Joshi.
“That balance broke down as the party machinery weakened and welfare politics appeared to reach its limits – voters began to see benefits as routine rather than transformative.
“The BJP’s opening was to translate this anti-TMC fatigue into a sharper language of Hindu consolidation. So this is not simply a story of welfare failing; it is a story of welfare and organisation no longer being strong enough to contain polarisation,” says Joshi.
The election also once again highlighted the centrality of Muslim voters to Bengal’s political arithmetic, even if the precise contours of voting patterns remain unclear.
Muslims make up roughly 27% of the population, and nearly a third of the state’s seats have substantial Muslim populations.
In 2021, the TMC swept 84 of 88 Muslim-dominated seats, reflecting a broad consolidation behind Banerjee. While early indications suggest the party retained significant Muslim support this time too, the BJP has increasingly sought to offset that advantage through wider Hindu consolidation and competing welfare promises.
“The BJP combined an aggressive welfare pitch with sharper polarisation. It promised to double cash benefits, while visible communalisation consolidated sections of the Bengali Hindu vote behind the party,” says Maidul Islam, a political scientist at Kolkata’s Centre for Studies in Social Sciences.
BJP leaders, however, framed the result less as ideological consolidation than as a rejection of the Trinamool Congress itself.
The TMC created a “crisis of leadership for itself,” BJP leader Dharmendra Pradhan told one news network. He accused the party of “arrogance” and claimed that “voters, particularly women angered by atrocities and law-and-order failures, had decisively rejected the Trinamool Congress”.
The other elephant in the room was the fiercely contested revision of Bengal’s electoral rolls.
The Election Commission said the exercise, known as the special intensive revision, was intended to clean up voter lists by removing duplicate or ineligible names.
But with nearly three million voters still awaiting tribunal decisions before polling, Banerjee along with activists and civil society groups alleged that Bengal had effectively gone into the election after a “mass disenfranchisement exercise”. This, they said, had disproportionately affecting poor and minority voters, especially Muslims and migrant communities in border districts.
Analysts say the exercise is now likely to come under even sharper scrutiny in closely fought seats where victory margins are much narrower than the number of deleted voters. “The revision of polls will come into play [once the results are in],” politician and activist Yogendra Yadav told NDTV news network.
But the electoral-roll controversy alone cannot explain the scale of the BJP’s surge, many believe.
What also worked in the party’s favour was a tightly focused campaign centred on alleged corruption and governance failures within the Trinamool Congress, hammering scandals such as a trachers’ recruitment scam rather than relying primarily on personal attacks against Banerjee.
With the BJP firmly on course for victory, the implications will extend far beyond Bengal.
Unlike in neighbouring Bihar, where the party governs through alliances, or even Odisha, where its 2024 breakthrough came against a weakened regional incumbent, a victory in Bengal would represent a standalone conquest of one of India’s most politically formidable states.
“It would strengthen Modi enormously,” says Mukhopadhyay.
“More than Odisha, this would be seen as a personal political victory not only for Narendra Modi, but also for Home Minister Amit Shah, who effectively ran the campaign.”
Within the BJP, Shah would almost certainly emerge as the informal ‘man of the match’ – echoing the way Modi elevated him after the party’s landmark victory in Uttar Pradesh in 2014.
A Bengal breakthrough could also reshape the BJP’s succession politics, says Mukhopadhyay.
It would reinforce Shah’s standing as Modi’s most likely heir, potentially placing him ahead of rivals such as Yogi Adityanath, Nitin Gadkari and Rajnath Singh in the party’s next-generation power hierarchy.
That would make Bengal’s verdict consequential far beyond the state itself.
For decades, Bengal prided itself on resisting the political currents reshaping the rest of India.
Now that the BJP has finally breached one of India’s most enduring regional strongholds, it may mark not just the end of an era in Bengal, but the beginning of a new phase in the Modi project itself.
[BBC]
The top half of the IPL 2026 points table is an utter logjam.Punjab Kings (PBKS), unbeaten through their first seven games, have now lost two in a row. And the team that beat them on Sunday night, Gujarat Titans (GT) have won three in a row. All around the IPL, teams that had led secure lives in the top four have endured setbacks over the last few days.
And so the big squeeze. PBKS remain at No. 1, but they’re only one point above GT at No. 5.
GT, however, are the only team in the top five with a negative net run rate (NRR). This may have something to do with their style of play: they rely on their bowlers to ensure their batters don’t have to score at the frenetic rates of some other teams, but that means their margins of victory tend to be less emphatic.
On Sunday, their margin was wafer-thin – one ball remaining – despite the fact that they dominated virtually from start to finish. Their Test-match pace trio of Mohammed Siraj, Kagiso Rabada amd Jason Holder bowled hard lengths on a pitch that offered steep bounce and plentiful seam movement from those lengths, and reduced PBKS to 47 for 5. Suryansh Shedge and Marcus Stoinis ensured that PBKS recovered to post 163 for 9, but this was still very much a GT kind of target, perfect for their style of top-order play.
A measured half-century from B Sai Sudarsan laid the perfect platform, but GT’s scoring rate remained somewhere in the region of their original required rate right through their chase. And suddenly, they ended up needing 11 off the final over. Washington Sundar sealed victory with a penultimate-ball six, but on another day, this could have so easily been the story of GT sleepwalking to defeat.
But the major story was this: for the third match in a row, GT pulled off the trademark GT victory. Straightjacketing their oppositions with the ball, and chasing down sub-170 targets with significant contributions from one or two of their top three.
This was a black-soil pitch with a healthy covering of grass, and it was evident from ball one that it would reward bowlers who hammered away on hard lengths. Ball one from Siraj almost produced a chance, with extra bounce leading to a miscued pull from Priyansh Arya that fell just out of reach of Jos Buttler, who had chased from his spot behind the stumps to the edge of the 30-yard circle at backward square leg. Ball two produced the first wicket: a bit of width for Arya to free his arms, but extra bounce once more to take away his control and bring about a slice to deep third.
Siraj struck again with his next ball, going slightly fuller, getting a bit of swing into the left-handed Cooper Connolly to produce an inside-edge to the wicketkeeper.
Rabada matched Siraj’s excellence from the other end, as the two bowled three overs each in the powerplay, beating the bat multiple times as Prabhsimran Singh and Shreyas Iyer struggled to match their usual rates of scoring. Then, Rabada bowled an outstanding sixth over, which included the wicket of Prabhsimran with a 152kph length ball that cramped him for room on the on-the-up punch, and four straight dots to Nehal Wadhera, including one that zipped past the edge and a bouncer that zipped past the helmet. A wicket maiden completed PBKS’ least productive powerplay since the start of IPL 2025: 35 for 3.
There’s no better resource on a trampoline pitch than a towering fast bowler. Holder is four inches taller than the 6’3″ Rabada, and he immediately got in the act in the seventh over, finding Wadhera’s edge with a hard-length ball slanted across him. And when he nipped a back-of-a-length ball back into Shreyas and bowled him off the inside edge in the ninth over, PBKS were five down and in all kinds of strife.
In GT’s previous game against Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB), the left-arm spinner Manav Suthar didn’t bowl a ball. Given the help the quicks were getting on Sunday, GT may have felt inclined to repeat this, but a wayward 13th over from the left-arm seamer Arshad Khan, which went for 16, may have prompted them to bring on Suthar for the 14th.
And Suthar bowled one of the more forgettable overs of the season. Bowlers often get taken to the cleaners in the IPL even when they bowl reasonably good balls, but this was just an old-fashioned bad over: after starting with a single, he sent down two slot balls, a wide full-toss, a wide long-hop, and another full-toss. Shedge took ruthless toll, going 6, 6, 4, 4, 6. Twenty-seven off that over, and PBKS were suddenly looking at a decent total.
That over was the centrepiece of a 79-run partnership between Shedge and Stoinis. Shedge, who was at one stage batting on 13 off 14 balls, rushed to a 24-ball half-century. He then flicked Rabada for a nonchalant six in the 16th over before falling to Rabada’s extra bounce, caught behind for 57 off 29.
Stoinis held the key to a big finish for PBKS, but Holder forced a miscue out of him with an into-the-pitch cutter from around the wicket in the 18th over. When he followed up with an inducker to bowl Xavier Bartlett comprehensively, PBKS were eight down with 13 balls remaining.
Marco Jansen hit Rashid Khan for a six and four in the final over to haul PBKS past 160, but it wasn’t quite the magnitude of finish they may have hoped for. Only 45 came off their last five overs.
This was an innings of many delectable shots: the high-elbow drive through the covers off Bartlett in the first over, the hooked six over fine leg off Jansen in the sixth, and expert riding of the bounce to cut and carve the ball behind point. But there wasn’t a whole lot of intent to force the pace off balls that weren’t in his hitting zones.
And all of GT’s batters played pretty much this way, with the caveat that this was still an awkward pitch to bat on. Jos Buttler picked off a trademark scooped six over short fine leg, but his 26 consumed 22 balls. Nishant Sindhu, making his IPL debut, fell for 15 off 11. Washington scored 16 off his first 14 balls.
And so, it came to a situation where, after Sai Sudharsan and Impact Player Rahul Tewatia fell in the 15th and 17th overs, GT suddenly came under a bit of pressure.
But with 11 to get off the final over, they found a way to push through. Arshad flicked an almost-perfect Stoinis yorker for four, and then, with three to get off two balls, Washington coolly stepped across his stumps and scooped a full-toss over the fine leg boundary to take GT over the line.
Brief scores:
Gujarat Titans 167 for 6 in 19.5 overs (Sai Sudharsan 57, Jos Buttler 26, Nishant Sindhu 15, Washington Sundar 40*; Arshdeep Singh 2-24, Marco Jansen 1-33, Vyjayakumar Vyshak 2-31, Marcus Stoinis 1-26) beat Punjab Kings 163 for 9 in 20 overs (Prabhsimran Singh 15, Shreyas Iyer 19, Suryansh Shedge 57, Marcus Stoinis 40, Marco Jansen 20; Mohammed Siraj 2-28, Kagiso Rabada 2-22, Jason Holder 4-24, Rashid Khan 1-32) by four wickets
[Cricinfo]
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