Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
The suspect’s live broadcast of the New Zealand killings reveals such acts are always as much about instilling fear as inflicting violence
Terrorism is effective because it always seems near. It always seems new. And it always seems personal. Ever since the first wave of terrorist violence broke across the newly industrialised cities of the west in the late 19th century this has been true.
It feels personal because, although statistics may show we are many times more likely to die in a banal domestic accident, we instinctively conclude from an attack on the other side of the street, the city or, in the case of New Zealand, the other side of the world, we might be next.
This ugly form of racism shapes the way Muslims are perceived and treated
On Friday morning, as the news from Christchurch was still rolling across radio bulletins, Sir Mark Rowley, the former head of counter-terrorism at the Met, was commenting on the horror on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Fifty Muslims had been brutally murdered, and 48 seriously injured. For 17 horrifying minutes, a white supremacist terrorist unloaded round after round of bullets into men, women and children.
Islamophobia was undoubtedly real and on the rise and being propagated online, said Rowley. But, he went on to quibble, Islamophobia wasn’t racism. To conflate the two was, he claimed, “clumsy thinking”.
Christchurch has turned everyone’s attention to the phenomenon of extreme rightwing terrorism. But it is an alarm bell that authorities in the UK have been ringing for some time, having seen an ascendant extreme-right threat. Our collective attention, when thinking about terrorism, may be dominated by Isis, but given the rich vein of references to the UK in Brenton Tarrant’s screed, there are clearly other concerns to which we should pay attention.
Around the turn of the century and during the early noughties, the extreme-right threat in the UK tended to consist of a ragbag of isolated loners. For the most part middle-aged white men, they tended to be discovered by chance – violent characters with spotty employment histories, a few of them picked up as a result of investigations into online paedophilia. Some particularly shambolic cases, such as that of Neil Lewington, were uncovered by accident. Lewington was arrested by British Transport police after urinating on a train platform in 2008. Subsequent investigations uncovered an aspirant one-man terror campaign, planning pipe-bomb attacks and gathering Nazi memorabilia.
Leak shows Brussels planning for PM’s defeat and making efforts to prevent her deal being unpicked
The EU is war-gaming for the fall of Theresa May amid a complete collapse in confidence in the prime minister after a week of chaos over Brexit, a leaked document seen by the Observer reveals.
In the run-up to a crucial summit of EU leaders where May will ask for a delay to Brexit, Brussels fears there is little hope that she will succeed in passing her deal this week and is preparing itself for a change of the guard in Downing Street.
Andrew Graystone responds to Christchurch massacre with message ‘I will keep watch while you pray’
A Mancunian whose message of solidarity with a local mosque after the Christchurch massacre went viral has said the overwhelming response shows “the power of choosing friendship over fear”.
Party’s leader in European parliament says it must be prepared to field candidates
The Conservative party has contacted all its MEPs to ask them to consider running for election in May if the prime minister’s Brexit deal is defeated on Tuesday.
Ashley Fox, the party’s leader in the European parliament, contacted MEPs to ask them to think about their options in the event that Theresa May’s deal fails again.
The Christchurch mosque attacks have challenged the complacency of the ‘Kiwi way’
New Zealand has never been the perfect country you might imagine from afar, from the quirky stories about lovelorn gannets and avocado heists, but it is generally safe, and stable, apart from the earthquakes. In these times, that makes it an idyll. It is telling that three days ago, the greatest threat in the island nation – the headline news – was an outbreak of measles.
Then, in a matter of hours on Friday, 49 people were shot dead in attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, the largest city in the South Island, their deaths livestreamed on Facebook. Explosive devices were found attached to cars, and the city was put on lockdown. There was no creeping threat, no public debate: New Zealand’s terror-risk level went from a perceived zero to an unequivocal high.
The Democratic Unionist party is to continue intensive talks to try to reach an agreement to allow it to back Theresa May’s Brexit deal, with discussions focusing on domestic legal guarantees that Northern Ireland will have no regulatory divergence with the rest of the UK.
Downing Street is hopeful that the support of the DUP is key to unlocking the backing of many Conservative Brexiters when May brings her deal to the House of Commons for the third time.
School and university students continue Friday protests to call for political action on crisis
From Australia to America, children put down their books on Friday to march for change in the first global climate strike.
The event was embraced in the developing nations of India and Uganda and in the Philippines and Nepal – countries acutely impacted by climate change - as tens of thousands of schoolchildren and students in more than 100 countries went on “strike”, demanding the political elite urgently address what they say is a climate emergency.
The Irish premier, Leo Varadkar, has said London needs to tell the EU about what purpose an extension would serve and how long it would last.
Varadkar said he welcomed Westminster’s vote to extend Article 50 as it reduces the likelihood of a cliff edge, no-deal Brexit at the end of the month.
There seems to be two emerging options – ratification of the withdrawal agreement followed by a short extension into the summer, or a much longer extension that would give the UK time and space to decide what they want to do, including considering options that had been taken off the table like participation in the customs union and single market.
I think we need to be open to any request they make, listen attentively and be generous in our response. This matter will be now discussed further at next week’s European Council meeting and hopefully we will have more clarity from London in the meantime about their intentions.
Why EUCO should allow an extension, if the UK gov and her majority in the House of Commons are not ready for a cross-party approach to break the current deadlock ? https://t.co/lj1Tm4kmIg
Cable has now released a statement on his impending departure:
I indicated last year that, once the Brexit story had moved on and we had fought this year’s crucial local elections in 9,000 seats across England, it would be time for me to make way for a new generation. I set considerable store by having an orderly, business-like, succession unlike the power struggles in the other parties.
So I wanted you, our members, to know that, assuming Parliament does not collapse into an early general election, I will ask the party to begin a leadership contest in May.
Patricia Robertshaw used false sick notes to get time off from Yorkshire Cancer Research to apply for other jobs
A woman who feigned having cancer in order to help defraud the charity she worked for out of more than £85,000 has been jailed by a judge who told her she had shown no shame.
Patricia Robertshaw, 42, was jailed for more than four years after she pretended that she was having radiotherapy to earn three months’ sick pay from Yorkshire Cancer Research in Harrogate, where she worked as an events manager.
Movement inspired by Greta Thunberg has snowballed, as Belgian workers join strike
Hundreds of thousands of children are expected to walk out of their classrooms on Friday for a global climate strike amid growing anger at the failure of politicians to tackle the escalating ecological crisis.
Children at tens of thousands of schools in more than 100 countries are due to take part in the walkouts which began last year when one teenager – Greta Thunberg – held a solo protest outside the Swedish parliament.
‘Soldier F’ to be prosecuted for murder and attempted murder over 1972 killings in Derry
Only one former British paratrooper is to be charged in connection with the killings of civil rights demonstrators on Bloody Sunday, drawing dismay and calls for accountability from the families who lost loved ones more than 40 years ago.
Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service (PPS) announced the decision after relatives of the 13 people who died on one of the darkest days of the Troubles in January 1972 marched together through the streets of Derry where the victims fell as a symbol of their demand for justice.
Britain has gone through the looking glass and the artist’s new show follows it into the abyss. He talks about the upsurge in racism, fighting for Shamima Begum – and his clash with France’s president
At 7.30 on the morning after Britain voted to leave the European Union, Anish Kapoor left his London flat for an appointment with his analyst. On the street, he heard two men talking. “Bet he doesn’t even speak English,” said one. “I turned around and they were talking about me. I was so furious.”
Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor, CBE, RA, the 65-year-old, Turner prize-winning, Mumbai-born British-Indian artist, who has lived in London since the early 1970s and (though this is hardly the point) speaks better English than most of his countrymen, had woken up in a new land. “Since then permission has been given for difference, rather than being celebrated, to be undermined.”
Belief in two-state solution crumbles as up to 600,000 Israeli settlers remain on occupied land
Maybe it wasn’t the wisest choice for a Palestinian activist living under the close watch of Israeli security. But Fadi Quran was obsessed and determined: he would study nuclear physics at Stanford University.
“I got stopped at the border a lot,” he joked years later of the times he passed through Israeli passport control after graduating. “To be honest, when I first started I just wanted to win a Nobel prize in physics. I was 18 years old. I loved the stuff.”
Folks, it’s time to wrap up the blog for the night.
I’ll be back in a few hours to launch a new Politics live blog, bringing you all of Thursday’s Brexit and other political news. A reminder of what’s on the agenda for Thursday:
There have been some remarkable turns of phrase from commentators and politicians in their attempts to capture just what exactly has gone on in British politics in the last few days.
This is a turd of a deal, which has now been taken away and polished, and is now a polished turd. But it might be the best turd that we’ve got.
The House of Commons was a Benny Hill chase on acid, running through a Salvador Dali painting in a spaceship on its way to infinity.
A vague, and vain attempt to make sense of the great mad nights in British political history.
Lifeboat rescues fishermen as storm hits rail and road links across Britain
Six crew members from a stricken fishing vessel have been rescued amid 20ft waves while rail and road links across Britain have been hit by storm-force winds.
Winds hit 60 miles per hour for a second day across coasts as Storm Gareth continued to move across the UK on Wednesday.