The former Tory Foreign Office minister Sayeeda Warsi has expressed exasperation at Zac Goldsmith’s increasingly strident tone as he seeks to make up ground before Thursday’s vote for London mayor.
Goldsmith, who is as much as 20 percentage points behind Labour’s Sadiq Khan, again sought to tar his rival with the brush of extremism in a piece in the Mail on Sunday.
The comment piece was illustrated with a picture of the bus destroyed by a suicide bomber in the 2005 terrorist attacks in London. Lady Warsi, who resigned from the government in protest against its policy on Gaza, tweeted her disappointment, if not at Goldsmith himself then at his campaign’s scare tactics.
In his comment piece, Goldsmith wrote: “The number one job of any mayor of London is to keep our city safe. Yet if Labour wins on Thursday, we will have handed control of the Met, and with it control over national counter-terrorism policy, to a party whose candidate and current leadership have, whether intentionally or not, repeatedly legitimised those with extremist views.”
Apart from attempts to portray his rival as soft on extremists, the Goldsmith campaign has been criticised for using divisive tactics by specifically targeting minority ethnic voters with a warning that a vote for Khan would put their family heirlooms at risk.
Goldsmith’s attempt to court the Indian vote took a farcical turn, however, when when the self-proclaimed Bollywood enthusiast could not name a single Bollywood film or actor while being questioned on camera.
“Let me think … No I’m not going to give you one. I can’t think of a favourite,” he said. “I can’t think of a favourite. I love almost everything about Bollywood. I love the atmosphere, the colour and I love the excitement. I want as much Bollywood as possible here in London as possible.”
Although the frontrunner, Khan has acknowledged that the antisemitism row engulfing his party after the suspension of Naz Shah, the Bradford West MP, and the remarks by the former London mayor, Ken Livingstone, on Hitler and zionism, could harm his chance of becoming the first Muslim to occupy the post.
In an interview with the Observer, Khan, the son of a bus driver, said he would not be thrown off course by the controversy, but conceded there could be electoral fallout that would damage him and his party.
“I accept that the comments that Ken Livingstone has made make it more difficult for Londoners of Jewish faith to feel that the Labour party is a place for them, and so I will carry on doing what I have always been doing, which is to speak for everyone. If I should have the privilege to be the mayor I will show Londoners the sort of mayor I can be.” Thanks for reading.
2face FINALLY Speaks Up On Tiwa, Teebillz Saga!
Veteran musician, 2Baba has finally spoken about the Tiwa & TeeBillz marriage turbulence but only to slam Nigerians who have been making distasteful comments about the embattled couple. 2Baba, who was also among celebrities TeeBillz accused of having affairs with his wife, chose to say nothing about the allegations but to bare his mind on the treatment of the couple’s predicament by Nigerians. People who had thought that 2face would go hard at TeeBillz, were left disappointed when the ‘African Queen’ crooner chose instead to slam mockers for making jest of people’s heartbreaking predicament. He tweeted his position on his Twitter handle. “I am disgusted about some people that have been making distasteful jokes abot people’s real life heartbreaking predicament. God forgive u,” 2face and Annie Idibia are really close friends with Tiwa Savage and her estranged husband, Teebillz Tunji Balogun. TeeBillz even thanked Annie and his neighbour for sending him homemade meals in his Instagram outburst.
Man United Star, Memphis Depay CUTS Ties With Club
Following recent revelation that he will be leaving the club after he failed to impress at the club, Manchester United winger, Memphis Depay has begun to cut links with the Old Trafford club, according to reports from the UK.
The Sun UK reports that the Dutch international has now deleted all his Instagram pictures depicting his time at the club and also unfollowed all his teammates in an apparent attempt to rid himself of memories of his stay at the Old Trafford.
The Dutchman has been a major disappointment since moving to Old Trafford for £25million last summer, scoring just twice in the league despite firing home 22 goals the year before at PSV Eindhoven.
Depay held crunch talks with Louis van Gaal over his future at the club last week as the Red Devils line up a whopping £65m move for Atletico Madrid ace, Antoine Griezmann.
The tabloid quotes further reports as suggesting that United has grown tired with the 22-year-old’s playboy lifestyle and is ready to boot him out of the club.
Depay has since been linked with a shock move to Southampton, and the £90,000-a-week flop has now fuelled speculation that he’s heading for the exit after unfollowing all of his United teammates on social media site Instagram.
Depay has also deleted all of his pictures except for one which shows him with his partner embracing in front of the Eiffel Tower.
Former Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho is still being tipped to take over from Van Gaal this summer, and the Special One has shown in the past that he will not tolerate perceived slackers in his side.
Juan Mata and Kevin De Bruyne were just two of the big names to depart Stamford Bridge for failing to put in the hard work, and Depay is unlikely to make the cut at United if he shows an unwillingness to comply with Mourinho’s strict demands.
German far-right party calls for ban on minarets and burqa
Delegates from Germany’s anti-immigration party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) backed an election manifesto on Sunday that says Islam is not compatible with the country’s constitution and calls for a ban on minarets and the burqa.
The AfD was set up three years ago and has been buoyed by Europe’s migration crisis and the arrival of more than a million mostly Muslim migrants in Germany last year. The party has no presence in the federal parliament in Berlin but has members in half of Germany’s 16 regional state assemblies.
Opinion polls give AfD support of up to 14%, presenting a serious challenge to Angela Merkel’s conservatives and other established parties in the run-up to the 2017 federal election. Other parties have ruled out a coalition with the AfD.
In a raucous and highly emotional debate on the second day of a party congress, many of the 2,000 delegates cheered calls from the podium for measures against “Islamic symbols of power” and jeered a plea for dialogue with Germany’s Muslims.
“Islam is foreign to us and for that reason it cannot invoke the principle of religious freedom to the same degree as Christianity,”Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, an AfD politician from the state of Saxony-Anhalt, said to loud applause.
Merkel has said on many occasions that freedom of religion is guaranteed by Germany’s constitution and that Islam is welcome in the country.
As many as 2,000 leftwing demonstrators clashed with police on Saturday as they tried to disrupt the AfD conference. About 500 people were briefly detained and 10 police officers were slightly injured, a police spokesman said.
The chapter of the AfD manifesto concerning Muslims is titled “Islam is not a part of Germany”.
In Sunday’s debate, one delegate’s call for greater understanding drew jeers and loud whistles.
“I call for a differentiation and urge everybody to visit their local Muslim communities and initiate a dialogue,” said Ernst-August Roettger, a delegate from the northern city of Lüneburg.
He was speaking in support of an amendment that called for acceptance of everybody’s religious freedom and for the party not to regard all Muslims as extremists. Delegates rejected the amendment.
Germany is home to nearly four million Muslims, who make up about 5% of the population. Many of the longer established communities came from Turkey to find work, but those who have arrived over the past year have mostly been fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last month the head of Germany’s Central Council of Muslims likened the AfD’s attitude towards his community to that of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis towards the Jews. Thanks for reading.
North Korea rocket launch will have 'serious consequences', US forecasts
The US vowed “serious consequences” for North Korea’s rocket launch with ballistic missile technology on Sunday, as secretary of state John Kerry called foreign ministers in South Korea and Japan to discuss actions against the pariah state.
The State Department said in a statement that Kerry reassured both foreign ministers that the US has an “ironclad commitment to the security and defense” of its allies. He told them the rocket launch, ostensibly to send a satellite into orbit, “threatened international peace and security”, according to the statement.
Earlier on Sunday, the 15 representatives of the United Nations security council held an emergency meeting to discuss the launch, and unanimously condemned North Korea for defying sanctions against it.
Standing alongside her counterparts from South Korea and Japan, American ambassador Samantha Power told reporters: “We will ensure that the security council imposes serious consequences. DPRK’s latest transgressions require our response to be even firmer.”
“The members of the security council strongly condemned this launch,” said Rafael Dario Ramírez Carreño, the Venezuelan ambassador and president of the council this month. He told reporters the launch was “a serious violation”.
Ramírez Carreño said the council “restated their intent to develop significant measures” against North Korea, as a consequence of a nuclear test in January and Sunday’s rocket launch.
Power said she hoped the council would vote on a draft resolution to expand existing UN sanctions on North Korea “as quickly as possible”.
“It is urgent and overdue,” she said, adding that she hoped China would put pressure on the isolated country.
“We are hopeful that China, like all council members, will see the grave threat to regional, international peace and security, see the importance of adopting tough, unprecedented measures, breaking new ground,” Power said.
Diplomats said Washington is closely consulting with Japan, South Korea, Britain and France on its discussions with China, while Beijing is keeping in close contact with Russia, another nation with veto powers over resolutions.
Kerry and Ramírez Carreño also stressed the importance of a united international response.
Japan’s ambassador, Motohide Yoshikawa, said the draft under discussion would have “much more strengthened measures” against Pyongyang.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one senior western diplomat said he hoped the council would be able to vote on a new sanctions resolution this month.
He said the Americans have been pushing for tough new measures that went beyond targeting North Korea’s atomic weapons and missile programs, while China wanted any future steps to focus on the question of nonproliferation.
One diplomat said that Washington hopes to tighten international restrictions on North Korea’s banking system, but that Beijing is reluctant to support the measure for fear of worsening conditions in its neighbor and provoking a refugee crisis across its borders. China is responsible for about 70% of North Korea’s trade volume, according to Seoul.
“There will eventually be a sanctions resolution,” the diplomat said. “China wants any steps to be measured but it wants the council to send a clear message to DPRK that it must comply with council resolutions.”
China expressed regret and concern over Sunday’s rocket launch, which employed ballistic missile technology. China is North Korea’s main ally but, like most of other nations, disapproves of its nuclear weapons program.
Speaking to reporters ahead of the closed-door session, France’s UN ambassador, François Delattre, described North Korea’s launch as an “outrageous provocation”.
British foreign secretary Philip Hammond said on Sunday he had spoken with his Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida, and they had agreed the council should take strong action.
On Saturday, North Korea abruptly changed its launch window for an attempted satellite launch, and did not inform international organizations of any other changes of its plan, said South Korean defense ministry spokesman Moon Sang Gyun.
The launch came just weeks after North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test. Outside experts and officials say that each nuclear test and long-range missile launch brings the North closer to creating a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on an intercontinental missile capable of reaching targets as far as the US west coast.
Following the announcement that the launch window had been moved, Japan set up an emergency response desk to monitor the launch. Japan had already deployed Patriot missile batteries in Tokyo and on the southern island of Okinawa to shoot down any debris from the rocket that might threaten to fall on its territory.
Seoul’s defense ministry said that South Korea and the United States, which stations more than 28,000 troops in the South as a buttress against any North Korean aggression, are deploying Aegis-equipped destroyers and radar spy planes to track the North Korean rocket after its launch.
The South is also prepared to shoot down any rocket or debris that infringes on its territory, the defense ministry said, although security experts believe the country’s Patriot missiles, with an interception range of about nine miles, would be ill-equipped for the job. Thanks for reading.
‘We’ve had massacres all week’: Aleppo on fire again as Assad consigns ceasefire to history
The president of Aleppo city council, Brita Haji Hasan, had a picture on his phone. It showed the corpse of Hasan Amory, 29, a father of two and council engineer who that morning had been killed by a Syrian air force missile as he headed into work in the opposition stronghold.
“We have had massacres on a daily basis for six or seven days,” Haji Hasan told the Observer, during an interview in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, 30 miles from the Syrian border.
“They are destroying schools and civilian targets using barrel bombs, airstrikes and machine guns. Another colleague of mine was killed yesterday while I spoke to him on Skype.”
As the most senior civic leader in Aleppo, Haji Hasan has been trying to make life livable in the most impossible and dangerous of circumstances. “It is a terrible situation,” he said. “But we are trying to live.”
Syria’s largest city is once again under bombardment: its residents are, once again, exposed to pitiless, wanton attack as the world looks on. The ferocity and cruelty of the bombing of Aleppo by Bashar al-Assad’s air force has shocked even those familiar with the worst of this conflict.
Since breaking its ceasefire eight days ago, the regime has launched more than 260 airstrikes, 110 artillery strikes and 18 missiles, and has dropped 68 bombs, according to the civil defence organisation in opposition-controlled Syria known as the White Helmets.
Aleppo has been excluded from a partial ceasefire agreed elsewhere in the country late on Friday evening. On Saturday the regime’s airstrikes began at around 10am with a volley of seven missiles hitting civilian areas in the space of half an hour, killing at least six people and injuring 20. That came after attacks on Friday left at least eight people dead and destroyed a medical facility and a water pump, threatening the city’s vital supplies, according to reports.
On Thursday, bombs destroyed a hospital backed by Médecins Sans Frontières and the International Committee of the Red Cross, killing the city’s last remaining paediatrician, along with 26 other people, including three children.
Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy for Syria, declared the cessation of hostilities agreement brokered by the US and Russia as “barely alive” as a result.
The UK’s special representative for Syria, Gareth Bayley, tweeted: “#Russia needs to get control over the #Assad regime’s attacks on civilians.”
US secretary of state John Kerry meanwhile urged a return to the nationwide ceasefire in Syria and said attacks on Aleppo must stop immediately.
“The secretary expressed his deep concern about the deteriorating situation in Aleppo, where the ... regime (of President Bashar al-Assad) continues to escalate the conflict by predominantly targeting innocent civilians and parties to the cessation of hostilities,” his spokesman John Kirby said.
Kirby said work was taking place to defuse tensions and the hope was that “tangible progress” would be made soon.
Such is the onslaught that the Observer understands humanitarian organisations are considering pulling out of Syria’s biggest city. A draft statement being circulated among NGOs warns of a “complete absence of the fundamentals of safe humanitarian intervention, and the absence of a clear mechanism to monitor and document violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law”.
It further claims that there is “growing, recurrent targeting of humanitarian organisations, teams, and the vital centres that provide services to civilians in the province, by the Syrian regime and its allies”.
It goes on: “The most recent assaults included the shelling of Syrian civil defence centres, al-Quds children’s hospital, NGOs’ ambulance systems, and a number of administrative offices of the NGOs operating in the province.”
The UN high commissioner for human rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, on Saturday condemned the “monstrous disregard for civilian lives” by all parties to the conflict and called for urgent de-escalation.
Analysis Aleppo is a such a prize for both sides that its suffering just goes on
The west’s lack of appetite for military intervention has left Syria’s rebels feeling they have nothing left to lose
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group, puts the civilian death toll in government and rebel bombardments of districts in Aleppo since 22 April at nearly 250.
This figure includes around 140 people killed by government-aligned forces in airstrikes and shellings of rebel-held areas, 19 of them children, it said. Insurgent shelling of government-held areas was said to have killed 96 people, including 21 children, according to a report from Reuters.
Al Hussein also made reference to widespread rumours that new Russian artillery sites were being established on the outskirts of Aleppo. “The violence is soaring back to the levels we saw prior to the cessation of hostilities,” he said. “There are deeply disturbing reports of military build-ups indicating preparations for a lethal escalation.”
In his interview with the Observer, Haji Hasan confirmed that Aleppo was under partial siege, and that the last remaining road had been under almost constant attack since the two-month ceasefire between opposition and regime forces was broken by Assad. He said that he had heard about the Russian build-up on the periphery of the city but that he could not confirm this presence.
“In 2013 there were two million people in and around the city,” he said. “There are 400,000 right now. Some people just fled, but these 400,000 won’t leave – even though they know that at any time they could be bombed or killed. It is semi-siege right now. The only road connecting Aleppo is always targeted by airstrikes, the Castello road. This road is targeted by airstrikes and snipers, too. It is a dangerous road, but we have to use it, there is no other. If that goes, we will be besieged. It will be a disaster.”
Late last week, in another illustration of just how dangerously fraught the politics of the city are becoming, Haji Hasan was seized by Kurdish secret police at his home at 9am on Thursday after having made the 10-hour trip back through the badlands of northern Syria.
He was subsequently detained in the police station before being taken to the Kurdish city of Afrin, in north-west Syria. His whereabouts on Saturday were unknown.
Sources close to Haji Hasan, who has sought to build a consensual council for the crisis-stricken city, said it was unclear why the Kurdish forces would interfere in the civilian government. The vice-president of Aleppo’s city council, Zacharia Amino, condemned Haji Hasan’s detention as a violation of human rights. The father of eight, who had been keeping services running in the city, had been taken from the citizens when they needed him most, said friends. A statement on Saturday said: “We firmly condemn this violation and we demand the democratic council to release immediately the president of the local council of the city of Aleppo and to explain this precedent and to offer official excuses.”
A temporary “regime of calm” announced by the Syrian army late on Friday appeared to have taken hold in two other areas blighted by recent fighting: in the north-western coastal province of Latakia and on the outskirts of the capital, Damascus. The Syrian government said the “regime of calm” – from which a military source said Aleppo was excluded – was an attempt to salvage a wider ceasefire deal reached in February.
Aleppo has been divided for years between rebel and government zones. Full control would be the most important prize for Assad. He claims the fighters in the city are al-Qaida extremists.
The UN has called on Moscow and Washington to help restore a comprehensive ceasefire to prevent a collapse of talks aimed at ending a conflict in which more than 250,000 people have been killed and millions displaced. In Aleppo they will not be holding their breath. Thanks for reading.
Van Gaal VERY Confident Of Keeping Man United Job
Manchester United manager, Louis van Gaal has again reiterated how confident he is about retaining his job after telling a press conference on Saturday that he will still be at the club next season, no matter what happens at the end of the season.
The Dutchman has revealed he had wanted only a two-year deal but was persuaded by the suits at Old Trafford to stay on board for three years.
“I knew it would be like this. That’s why they hired me and we spoke about it,” he told reporters.
“We always knew that the process would take three years. I wanted to sign only for two years.
“The club wanted me to sign for three years, not me. I signed for three years – so next year you will see me again.
“Every week for six months I have been sacked – and yet I am still here. But this has happened to me at every club I have been at.
“I am doing the same job at United that I was hired to do at every club.
“People should assess the squad that I took over and make a comparison to the players we have now in terms of age.
“There is a big difference between what the people in the street think and the media. A big difference. I can only tell you my experiences and I don’t have to defend myself. I am a realistic man and so I only speak about facts.”
“The fact is that we finished fourth last year. At the moment we are fifth, but we are still able to finish third. On May 15 we will know for sure,” he added.
“The fact is that we are in the FA Cup Final. The fact is that we were in the Champions League. We didn’t do that last year.
“The fact is that we went further in the Capital One Cup. So there are a lot of pluses. Yes, we are in fifth and we are fighting for the one position that is the most important.
“We also have the best home record in the league, but we are one of the lousiest away teams of the top clubs and that is something we need to improve.”
