Here in Britain, members of Parliament have voted to renew the country's aging nuclear deterrent trident. The governing Conservative Party wants to build 4 new nuclear submarines at a cost of around 41 billion dollars. 472 MPs voted in favor of renewing trident, 117 against including the opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Our London correspondent is Rob Watson.
Absolutely overwhelming support for the renewal of the nuclear deterrent from Conservative MPs, but of course what is really striking is just the astonishing divisions within the ranks of the opposition Labour Party. So you had one fraction led by the Party's leader on the very much the left of the Party Jeremy Corbyn voting against the renewal, quite a lot of abstentions, but an awful lot of Labour MPs voting with the government and against their leader.
So what does that say about the state of the Labour Party?
Well, I think it's just another very powerful reminder of the extraordinary divisions within the Labour Party. I mean we've talked about this a lot on the newsroom programme whether it's on this issue or others. But you really do see a stark divide between those on the left of the Party, the activists out in the field and Jeremy
Corbyn and then vast chunks of the parliamentary Labour Party and MPs saying "oh my goodness, we never gonna get anywhere with this man as leader." And this is just another example of that division, which I think is worth pointing out. It's not just sort of quiet, academic, sort of peaceful division. I mean it's real. It's emotional. It's raw. It's really the guts of politics and indeed they are very, sort of future of the Labour Party.
So it's looking pretty bad for Labour.
Interestingly, the opinion polls, I mean, they suggest that the British people are rather divided on the issue of whether Britain should renew its nuclear deterrent, but what they are certainly not divided on is which leader that they think would make Britain safer and they overwhelmingly think that that would be Theresa May and not Jeremy Corbyn.
Rob Watson.
An international AIDS conference in South Africa is looking at ways to speed up efforts to eradicate the disease. More than 34 million people have died from AIDS related illnesses since the virus was identified in the early 1980s. Global infection rates have declined but a recent UN report warned that in some areas HIV AIDS is again on the rise. One of the scientists who discovered HIV, Nobel laureate Francoise Barre-Sinoussi told the BBC that she's optimistic that a way of driving a virus into remission will be found.