Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan suggested Emmanuel Macron, his French counterpart needed mental health treatment, the latest sign of a growing backlash in the Islamic world sparked by Macron’s claim that Islam is in crisis.
Ankara has been particularly incensed by a campaign championed by Macron to protect France’s secular values against radical Islam, a debate given fresh impetus by the murder of a teacher who showed his class a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad
Continue reading...Wavel Ramkalawan wins presidency ousting incumbent United Seychelles party leader
An Anglican priest won the Seychelles presidential election on Sunday, marking the first opposition victory since the Indian Ocean archipelago’s independence from Britain more than four decades ago.
Wavel Ramkalawan won enough votes in the first round to clinch the presidency on his sixth attempt and called for unity after his victory.
Continue reading...Sanctions punished the Sudanese people, not their rulers. The US extracting compensation is one more hypocritical act
Few countries in the world have been subjected to as many punitive sanctions as Sudan. After the deposed president Omar al-Bashir came to power in a military coup in 1989, the country was gradually cut off from the rest of the world, with the upholding of human rights the rationale. Economic sanctions were followed by a spot on the state sponsors of terrorism list, and then by the indictment of Bashir by the international criminal court. At some point it became hard to keep up with all the legislation, punishment for the reckless harbouring of terrorists in the 1990s, and the brutal slaughter of marginalised ethnic groups in areas such as Darfur. There were sanctions on individuals, a US travel ban on all Sudanese-born people, acts of Congress and lawsuits by members 9/11 victims’ families.
The country became a sort of human rights cause celebre, attracting Hollywood stars and a vast network of lobbyists in Washington who, whenever it seemed like there might be a relaxation of sanctions, campaigned fiercely to keep them going. Bashir was a president over whom it was easy to reach consensus. Here was an African brute in the classic mould, a military man who turned on his own people, and a sharia-wielding terror sponsor to boot.
Continue reading...The Lincoln Project “will not be intimidated by empty bluster”, a lawyer for the group wrote late on Saturday, in response to a threat from an attorney for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner over two billboards put up in Times Square.
Related: 'On the brink': US coronavirus cases surge in final days before election
Continue reading...Soviet Union’s collapse may be responsible for exodus from eastern Europe
Europe has lost almost 60% of its Jewish population over the past 50 years, mainly as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union after which many Jews left eastern Europe as borders opened, a study shows.
Only about 9% of the global Jewish population now lives in Europe, compared with nearly 90% in the late 19th century – but similar to the proportion 1,000 years ago.
Continue reading...The authors of recent exposés, including Mary Trump and Anthony Scaramucci, on the president, his time in office – and what they expect to happen at the polls
Bob Woodward is associate editor of the Washington Post and the author of 20 books on American politics. In 50 years as a journalist he has covered nine presidents. His reporting on the Watergate break-in and cover-up with his colleague Carl Bernstein helped bring down Richard Nixon and won the Post a Pulitzer prize. His latest book about Donald Trump, Rage, is based on 10 hours of interviews, spread over 19 taped phone calls, often initiated by the president himself, in which Trump proved “only too willing to blow the whistle on himself”, as the Observer’s review noted.
Continue reading...The country seems to have rebounded, but some analysts believe that at the very least, there is sleight of hand at work
Beijing prompted envy, admiration and not a little resentment when it released data last week confirming that it was the first major economy to start growing again after the devastation caused by Covid-19 in the first half of the year.
China appeared to have achieved the V-shaped recovery being chased by finance ministers around the world, after pioneering mass lockdowns to contain the virus that had taken hold in Wuhan, then shutting its borders to stop it filtering back in from abroad.
Continue reading...Thirteen Australians reportedly among women taken off flight at Doha and subjected to medical examination after newborn found abandoned in airport
The Australian government has registered “serious concerns” with Qatari authorities after women on a flight from Doha to Sydney were ordered to disembark the plane and subjected to a strip search and a medical examination.
Flight QR908 to Sydney was due to leave Hamad International airport at Doha at 8.30 on Friday 2 October, but was delayed for four hours, apparently after a newborn infant was found dead in the airport.
Continue reading...Activists in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand have formed a novel international alliance to defy authoritarian rule
The language, the demands and the backdrop were different, but the protests across central Bangkok last week would have looked familiar to anyone who followed the mass demonstrations that roiled Hong Kong for a year from June 2019.
Crowds of young protesters, dressed in black and wearing hard hats, poured through the streets to locations announced at the last minute on social media. As the police closed in and the protesters prepared for confrontation, hand gestures and human chains ensured supplies including protective masks and water reached the front lines.
Continue reading...Different approaches are having notably different outcomes
A second coronavirus wave is sweeping continental Europe, with new infection records broken daily in many countries. There are wide variations, but almost no country has been left untouched – even those that fared well in the first wave.
Across the 31 countries from which the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control collects national data, the average 14-day case incidence rate per 100,000 inhabitants has multiplied from just 13 in mid-July to almost 250 last week.
Continue reading...Confirmation of a sixth conservative on the nine-member court is due on Monday, the result of ruthless Republican politics
The almost certain confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court on Monday represents a “power grab” by Republicans facing possible wipeout at the ballot box, activists and analysts say.
Related: Revealed: ex-members of Amy Coney Barrett faith group tell of trauma and sexual abuse
Continue reading...The challenger aims to fix the foreign policy upheaval of the Trump years but such an agenda presents many challenges
By any measure, Joe Biden is old in the ways of the world. As Barack Obama’s vice-president, he met all the big international actors. As chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, he helped direct US foreign policy.
After four years of Donald Trump’s manic leadership, the Democrat offers a steady, dependable hand on the tiller. Biden’s grand aim: a glorious American restoration, at home and abroad.
Continue reading...Nine days out from election day, polling shows the Democratic nominee with big leads in key demographics
Joe Biden’s hopes of reaching the White House could rest on two crucial demographic groups that appear to be deserting Donald Trump: elderly people and suburban women.
Related: Trump assaulted American democracy – here's how Democrats can save it
Continue reading...Macron’s office says ‘rudeness is not a method’ after Turkish president calls for counterpart to have ‘mental checks’
France said it would recall its envoy to Turkey for consultations following “unacceptable” comments by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, that suggested his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, needed a mental health check-up.
In the highly unusual move, a French presidential official said the French ambassador to Turkey was being recalled from Ankara for consultations and would meet Macron to discuss the situation after Erdoğan’s outburst.
Continue reading...Transformative leader who took over from father made Samsung a global name with turnover worth a fifth of South Korea’s GDP
The Samsung Electronics chairman, Lee Kun-hee, who made the South Korean company a global name, has died at the age of 78.
Under Lee’s leadership Samsung rose to become the world’s largest producer of smartphones and memory chips, with overall turnover equivalent to a fifth of South Korea’s GDP.
Continue reading...With a 50th nation ratifying it, the treaty outlawing nuclear weapons for all countries will come into force in 90 days
Nuclear weapons will soon be illegal. Just over 75 years since their devastation was first unleashed on the world, the global community has rallied to bring into force a ban through the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Late on Saturday night in New York, the 50th country – the central American nation of Honduras – ratified the treaty.
Continue reading...
It’s been a lively day on the election trail. We’re closing this blog now but will be back with all the developments in US political news, as it happens, tomorrow.
Here are the main events of the day:
Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris is calling for an administration that is frank about racist police brutality in America.
“There isn’t a Black man I know, be it a relative or friend, who has not had some sort of experience with police that’s been about an unreasonable stop, some sort of profiling or excessive force,” she said.
We can’t just speak the truth about police brutality in our nation—we must act to change our systems of justice and demand accountability. pic.twitter.com/arSdFLi7Wj
Continue reading...Singer-songwriter Tio Massing writes songs from a sprawling banyan tree, and says ‘I have to do something for this earth, and the next generation’
Vanuatu singer-songwriter Tio Bang Massing writes from a place that few still remember.
He tries to live there too, with an almost Buddha-like simplicity, in a makeshift home tucked among the roots of a sprawling banyan tree.
Continue reading...Attackers fired indiscriminately at schoolchildren in area where separatist insurgents are active
Gunmen stormed a school in Cameroon on Saturday and opened fire indiscriminately, killing at least six children and wounding about eight more in a region where separatist insurgents operate, officials and parents said.
Arriving on motorbikes and in civilian clothes, the attackers hit the school around midday in the city of Kumba in the Southwest Region, according to the accounts, including from one parent outside the school at the time.
Continue reading...Angry over a newly imposed 11pm to 5am regional curfew, demonstrators in the southern Italian city of Naples threw stones and bottles at police on Friday evening. The authorities responded with teargas. The stricter measures are an attempt to curb the spread of coronavirus, which has killed more than 37,000 people in Italy since the start of the pandemic
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