Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Critics say female Muslim travellers have been targeted. An out-of-court settlement suggests they are right
Police have admitted that forcing Muslim women to remove their headscarves at UK airports could be unlawful, a practice likened by one victim to being made “to remove her top”.
In an out-of-court settlement, the Metropolitan Police has conceded that when it coerced a woman to take off her hijab so officers could photograph her, it was a breach of her human rights and violated the woman’s right to religious observance.
Here are the main points from the press conference held by Boris Johnson. He was joined by Prof Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical adviser, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser.
We are now very close to the time, probably within the next 10 to 14 days, when the modelling would imply we should move to a situation where everybody with even minor respiratory tract infections or a fever should be self-isolating for a period of seven days.
It is absolutely critical in managing the spread of this virus that we take the right decisions at the right time based on the latest and the best evidence, so we mustn’t do things which have no or limited medical benefit, nor things which could turn out actually to be counter-productive.
We were all given an instruction not to shake hands and there’s a good reason for not shaking hands, which is that the behavioural psychologists say that if you don’t shake somebody’s hand then that sends an important message to them about the importance of washing your hands.
So there’s a subliminal cue there to everybody to wash your hands, which is, I think I’m right in saying ... far more important.
What you can’t do is suppress this thing completely, and what you shouldn’t do is suppress it completely because all that happens then is it pops up again later in the year when the NHS is at a more vulnerable stage in the winter and you end up with another problem.
This is what Boris Johnson said at the start of his press conference.
I want to stress the following things. First, we are doing everything we can to combat this outbreak based on the latest scientific and medical advice.
Second, we have a truly brilliant NHS where staff have responded with all the determination, compassion and skill that makes their service so revered across the world and they will continue to have this government’s full support, my support, in tackling this virus on the front line.
Boris Johnson has claimed that all-out strikes on public transport will be made illegal under a new Conservative administration following major disruption on UK train routes.
On a day when the prime minister also apologised “for any offence caused” by his comments about Muslim women and refused to concede it could take more than a year to agree a trade deal with the EU, he said it was “absurd” that rail workers could bring the system to a halt.
Dossier by Cage attacks ‘suspicionless stops’ under anti-terror laws and highlights minuscule rate of convictions
Muslims are being detained at ports and airports for up to six hours by law enforcement using controversial counter-terrorism powers so disproportionately that the practice has become Islamophobic, according to human rights group Cage.
The organisation added there is growing anecdotal evidence that Muslim women are being forced to remove their headscarves when stopped, even though the rate that such stops lead to a conviction is 0.007%, according to Cage’s analysis of 420,000 incidences.
Several more Democratic presidential candidates have issues statements condemning Israel’s decision to block Omar and Tlaib’s planned trip.
I don't believe any nation should deny entry to elected Members of Congress, period. It’s an affront to the United States. Open and engaged foreign relations are critical to advancing U.S. interests. Trump is playing politics as he weakens our global leadership. https://t.co/UnMt9Tsd7Q
It’s appalling that President Trump continues to attack two sitting Congresswomen and encouraged another country to deny U.S. officials entry. Trump's behavior is unacceptable, dangerous, and un-American. Israel's decision should be reversed immediately. https://t.co/jHd0VYVJ1u
Nancy Pelosi has put out a statement saying she is “deeply saddened” by Israel’s decision to block Omar and Tlaib’s trip.
“As one who loves Israel, I am deeply saddened by the news that Israel has decided to prevent Members of Congress from entering the country,” the House speaker said.
Critics say the effort to dump King glosses over Trump’s conduct and fails to tackle a problem more pervasive than the GOP admits
Republican leaders piled on quickly following the latest outrageous remarks by Steve King, the longtime Iowa congressman and perceived bigot whom the party has been trying, unsuccessfully, to shake off its pant leg for months.
On Wednesday, King offered a defense of sorts of rape and incest, questioning whether, without the historical persistence of those two crimes, “would there be any population of the world left?”
Danes follow Nordic trend away from populism but leader Mette Frederiksen could struggle to form coalition
Voters appear to have returned the third left-leaning government in a year to the Nordic region as Denmark’s Social Democrats claimed victory in parliamentary elections with 25.9% of the vote.
The centre-left party finished clear of the centre-right Liberals of outgoing prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who improved on their 2015 score to reach 23.4%, and the populist, far-right Danish People’s party (DPP), which plunged to 8.7% – less than half its tally in the last election.
In 2017, I started getting regular messages from an anonymous Twitter user telling me my religion was ‘evil’. Eventually I responded – and he agreed to meet face to face. By Hussein Kesvani
In 2017, I started to receive messages from a Twitter user who called themself True Brit, telling me that my religion was “Satanic”, “barbaric” and “evil”. Bearing a profile image of the St George’s cross and a biography that simply read “Anti-Islam, stop Islamic immigration now”, True Brit often spammed me with pictures taken from anti-Muslim websites, blogs and Facebook groups. Sometimes they would be cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad as a sexual deviant. Other times, I would be sent memes I had seen circulating in rightwing communities online, depicting groups of south Asian men who had been arrested for child sexual grooming, or alleged Syrian refugees who were, supposedly, secret members of Isis. One meme showed a man with a long beard, in battle camouflage, brandishing a pistol in one hand and holding the hand of a woman wearing niqab. In bold white writing below the image were the words “EUROPE IN 2020”.
True Brit never said anything directly to me to begin with. I had seen social media profiles like this one, and much worse, for years. Like those accounts, True Brit had few followers – 65 in total. Their activity on Twitter predominantly consisted of retweets from rightwing news sites such as Breitbart and Fox News. They frequently posted videos of online celebrities who were popular on anti-Muslim forums and Facebook groups, including Milo Yiannopoulos, a rightwing “provocateur” who has referred to Islam as “the real rape culture”, and Paul Joseph Watson, a UK-based YouTuber and editor of the conspiracy-theory website Infowars.com, who produces weekly videos about the “dangers of Islam” in the west, with titles such as The Truth About Islamophobia and Dear Gays: The Left Betrayed You For Islam. True Brit was also a fan of the British rightwing commentator Katie Hopkins, who in 2015 likened Syrian refugees to cockroaches, and who until recently produced anti-Islam videos for Canadian far-right outlet The Rebel Media.
Ocasio-Cortez also makes direct link between controversial remarks by Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro and threat against Omar
Donald Trump and Fox News are coming under fire for contributing to a climate of Islamophobia, following the arrest of a supporter of the president who threatened to kill Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota who was one of the first Muslim women elected to the US Congress.
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.
Residents of the city where the alleged Christchurch killer Brenton Tarrant grew up are uneasy with the global attention
At the Boundary Store, a corner shop at the northern end of Grafton, they remember the quiet boy who lived nearby. “He was a bit of a loner, but he was sweet.”
In the centre of the New South Wales city, at the newsagent’s, his face is on the front page of every Saturday paper. A woman comes in and habitually picks up the Grafton Daily Examiner. “Why do they have to go and put that on the front?” she grumbles. “That’s all we’ll ever be known for again.”
How is it right that in our parliament it is OK to call Islam a ‘disease’, it is OK to refer to a ‘final solution’, it is OK to ridicule our religious attire?
I am an Australian Muslim woman. I am highly educated and hold a professional job. In fact, I spend a great deal of my working life with the Australian legal system. I am a wife. I am a mother. And tonight I am frightened, anxious and so very sad.
The tragedy that has occurred in Christchurch has pierced a hole in my heart that I cannot actually close. The grief is deep – these innocent people were simply praying when massacred by a man who had a deep disdain and hatred for them, not because they said or did anything but simply because they were Muslim.
Watching the images and hearing the eyewitness accounts is beyond traumatic. We have shed tears and expressed our hurt, but most of us have something in common – as hard as it is to say this, we are not surprised or shocked.
Why? Because we have lived with this fear for a long time now. Genuine fear that our lives are at risk simply because we are Muslim.