Politics

Princess Arinola Adegbite or “P. A. Bitez” is a songwriter, filmmaker, and performer based in Manchester. Her poem was inspired by Article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which codifies the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Princess said:“I know many people that have been destroyed by people’s perception of them. Article 11 – innocent until proven guilty is important to me because assumptions ruin lives, they get people killed, imprisoned and exiled. Everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt until evidence that contradicts that innocence is presented. In the past people were lynched, burned at the stake and punished purely due to stereotypes. I want to encourage people to use their discernment and not initial judgments.” The Ripples of Hope Festival at HOME in September was held by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights UK charity. The Naked Eye Innocence cannot be recognised by the naked eye, Just ask the Birmingham Six or the...

JERUSALEM - Israel has offered security and intelligence support to the United Arab Emirates against further drone attacks after a deadly strike by Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthi group, according to a letter released on Tuesday by Israel's leader. Three people were killed and six wounded on Monday when three tanker trucks exploded in Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital. A Houthi military spokesman said the group fired "a large number" of drones and five ballistic missiles in the attack. On Twitter, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett condemned what he described as a "terrorist drone attack". His spokesman attached a copy of a condolence letter he sent on Monday to the UAE's de facto leader, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. "We stand ready to offer you security and intelligence support in order to help you protect your citizens from similar attacks," Bennett wrote. "I have ordered the Israeli security establishment to provide their counterparts in the UAE with any ass...

WARSAW - Poland's President Andrzej Duda will attend the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and meet Chinese President Xi Jinping, a top aide told Polish state news agency PAP on Tuesday, as a number of Western countries call for a diplomatic boycott of the Games. A U.S. boycott to protest against China's human rights record has been joined by Australia, Britain, Canada and Japan. "Unless the epidemic or the security situation changes at our borders, the president plans to take part in the opening of the Olympic Games in China and support Poland's athletes in this way," the president's foreign affairs advisor Jakub Kumoch told PAP. Officials have told that, as Poland's relationship with the United States has worsened under President Joe Biden's administration, it's no longer in Poland's interests to continue criticising China simply to please the Americans. The Polish president's relationship with China has been positive recently, with him making a surprise appearance at the 17+1 summit wit...

- Media entrepreneur Byron Allen's Allen Media Group (AMG) struck a multi-year deal with Google Cloud on Tuesday, through which the Alphabet Inc-owned company will provide cloud services to the entertainment firm. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Media companies are increasingly signing up cloud partners for hosting content and analytics to get a bird's-eye view of content metrics across platforms. Google Cloud provides services to a host of media clients, including Comcast Corp-owned media group Sky and Major League Baseball. Through the deal, AMG said it would double down on its streaming service offerings to audiences worldwide and push its content on YouTube TV. AMG runs ten cable TV networks such as The Weather Channel and Entertainment Studios, its movie production unit. Meanwhile, the company's top boss Byron Allen is currently pursuing a bid to acquire U.S. regional TV operator Tegna Inc.   (Reporting by Yuvraj Malik in Bengaluru; Editing by Amy Caren Daniel...

By Natalia Zinets KYIV - Ukraine's central bank will likely raise its key interest rate from 9% this week to tackle worsening inflation expectations and a weakening hryvnia due to fears of a Russian military offensive, a poll of analysts showed on Tuesday. Eight out of the 14 Ukrainian analysts expected the rate to be raised to 9.5% and the two more expected a hike to 10.0% at the central bank's monetary meeting on Jan. 20. The other four contributors believed the rate would remain unchanged. "Rising military tensions with Russia are having a negative impact on inflation and exchange rate expectations, which has already affected the hryvnia's significant devaluation," said Kostiantyn Khvedchuk from Bank Pivdenny. Western countries fear Russia, which has massed troops near the Ukrainian border, is preparing a pretext for a new assault on Ukraine, which it invaded in 2014. Moscow denies plans for an attack, but said it could take unspecified military action unless the West agrees to a l...

DUBAI - An Iranian ethnic Arab separatist leader went on trial in Iran on Tuesday on charges of involvement in an attack on a 2018 military parade that killed 25 people and several bombings, state media reported. Iran said in 2020 that its security forces arrested Habib Farajollah Chaab, a dissident Swedish-Iranian dual national, without saying where or how he was captured. Neighbouring Turkey later detained 11 people, accusing them of involvement in Chaab's abduction and smuggling to Iran. During Tuesday's trial, Chaab was charged with leading the separatist Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz, which seeks a separate state in the oil-rich Khuzestan province in southwestern Iran, and plotting and carrying out "numerous bombings and terrorist operations" including the attack on the military parade, the state news agency IRNA reported. Another separatist group, also seeking independence for Khuzestan, claimed responsibility for the parade attack that killed 12 members of...

The Hostile Environment for Rough Sleepers is Costing Lives In November 2020, Priti Patel made rough sleeping grounds for deportation. Samir Jeraj spent a year with the Museum of Homelessness as part of a project to push-back against the policy ShareEmailTwitterFacebook Like many migrants, Adam came to the UK to support his family – his wife, son and parents – who stayed behind in Poland. He had been working as a chef for three years when his world ended. His family, all of them, died in a car crash. Nine years on, Adam still lives with the trauma and depression from those tragic events – but that was just the start.  “Within a few months of their deaths, I had lost everything,” he told Byline Times. Adam’s job, money and flat evaporated in quick succession, and he started using drugs and staying on the street. “I spent my first nights on the street in Shoreditch,” he recalled. “It was absolutely horrible.” The years after were a precarious mix o...

Boris Johnson has Exposed a Void at the Heart of Conservatism There is a growing consensus that the Prime Minister’s days are numbered – but his party has few ideas about how to renew itself or the country, reports Adam Bienkov ShareEmailTwitterFacebook “Boris is toast.” That was the verdict of one of the Prime Minister’s former senior officials and allies, who Byline Times spoke to this week. This view, which is now a majority one in Westminster, may be proven wrong. Some Conservative MPs believe that there is still a chance the Prime Minister could ultimately recover. However, the majority consensus among both Conservative supporters and opponents of Boris Johnson is that he will not lead them into the next election. “No one, apart from maybe Nadine Dorries or Jacob Rees-Mogg, now thinks that this is a salvageable position,” the former official said. “It’s just a question of when he goes, not if.” With most people now assuming that Johnson is...

LONDON - British finance minister Rishi Sunak said he believed Prime Minister Boris Johnson's explanation over a drinks party in the gardens of Downing Street. Asked if he believed Johnson's account to parliament of the event, Sunak said: "Of course I do - the Prime Minister set out his understanding of this matter in Parliament last week."   (Reporting by William James; editing by Guy Faulconbridge)...

A Guide to the Radicalisation of the Conservative Party Sam Bright digs into the recent history of Boris Johnson’s party, to explain why its centre of gravity has shifted markedly to the right ShareEmailTwitterFacebook Deploying the military against migrants; criminalising protests; disenfranchising the marginalised; waging war against the BBC – Boris Johnson has drafted a mini-manifesto to fortify his unstable position in the Conservative Party, one that has seemingly been lifted directly from the populist-authoritarian playbook. Indeed, Johnson’s latest strain of radicalism is not borne from deeply-held convictions – the Prime Minister is famously unmoored from any ideological or moral creed aside from his own self-interest – but it has rather been guided by the Conservative Party’s centre of gravity, which has lurched rightwards in recent years. Likewise, the battle for succession, when Johnson finally departs, will hinge on the ability of one candidate to encapsu...

Paolo Gerbaudo is a political sociologist and the director of the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London. He is the author of Tweets and the Streets (2012), The Mask and the Flag (2017), and The Great Recoil (2021). HELP ME CROWDFUND MY GAMESTOP BOOK. Go to https://wen-moon.com to join the crowdfunding......

LONDON (Bywire News) - The government has successfully managed to overturn a court ruling, that stated the way in which it awarded a COVID-19 contract to a public relations company run by associates of Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser to Boris Johnson, was illegal. On Tuesday, a Court of Appeal ruling reversed the original decision made back in June, which stated the government showed "apparent bias" by giving over £560,000 to Pubic First, a PR company to help determine public opinion on government response to COVID-19. The ruling by the appeal court stated that an observer who is fair and well informed wouldn't have decided that failure to carry out comparison exercises when giving away contracts was a reason to call the government biased. According to the ruling, an observer would have come to the conclusion that in the emergency circumstances imposed by COVID-19, excluding any formal decision-making process was indicative of apparent bias. James Frayne and Rachel Wolf run...

By Bate Felix DAKAR - The European Union and partners do not intend to isolate Mali and its military-led government, the EU's special envoy to the Sahel said, calling for talks despite a plan to severely sanction the country for failing to organize elections. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) hit Mali with tough sanctions earlier this month after the junta that seized power in 2020 dropped a proposed February election and said it would stay in office for another four years. The EU has said it will impose its own restrictions in line with ECOWAS, likely later in January. However, Emanuela Del Re, EU's Special Representative to the Sahel, said the door remained open for dialogue. "The position of the European Union is to be firm on certain principles without closing doors completely," Del Re told in an interview late on Monday. "We must continue to dialogue with Mali because we don't want to isolate Mali, we want a Mali that is capable of overcoming this crisis," De...

JERUSALEM - Around half of global cyber defence investment in past few years has been in Israel, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Tuesday. Speaking by video to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bennett said that as more work is done remotely, companies will be increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks. "This means we need good cyber defence and Israel has massively invested in cyber defence technologies," Bennett said. "I believe roughly half or almost half of the global investments in cyber companies over the past few years has been in Israel. So Israel has become a powerhouse in cyber defence. I see a bunch of opportunities and we intend to seize them."   (Reporting by Steven Scheer and Dan Williams, Editing by Louise Heavens)...

LONDON - Britain's finance ministry said on Monday it will crack down on "misleading" advertisements for crypto assets that can harm consumers. The finance ministry set out findings from a public consultation on promotions for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. "The government will therefore act to ensure the appropriate regulation of cryptoasset promotions through secondary legislation, broadly in line with the proposals set out in the consultation," the ministry said.   (Reporting by Huw Jones; Editing by Catherine Evans)...

LONDON - A BBC funded purely by commercial means would fail to serve a universal British audience in the way it does now, its boss warned on Tuesday, after the government questioned whether its public funding model should continue in future. Formed in 1922 to educate, inform and entertain, the BBC creates global, national and local radio, online content and television for mass audiences while also catering to those users who fail to have their interests served by commercial outlets. It is funded by a licence fee paid by all television-owning households that is supposed to guarantee its editorial independence. In reality that forces the corporation to agree a funding round with ministers, often leading to tension. On Monday Culture Minister Nadine Dorries, who has previously accused the BBC of metropolitan group-think, said the licence fee cost would be frozen for the next two years, and would rise in line with inflation for four years after that. She added that a debate was needed on...

Liz TrussThe Tufton Street Candidate Sam Bright unravels the ties between Conservative leadership hopeful Liz Truss and Westminster’s network of opaque libertarian think tanks ShareEmailTwitterFacebook Boris Johnson’s premiership of the Conservative Party is dying. It is currently unclear how slowly or quickly the rot is taking hold, but there is little doubt that his political career is on a steep, downward trajectory. His Downing Street team held multiple parties in breach of lockdown rules both this year and last, some of which were attended by the Prime Minister. The public backlash has been fierce, with focus groups telling former Downing Street pollster James Johnson that the Prime Minister is a “coward”. “There was something about him that made him a bit more personable to me,” one voter in the focus group said, who backed the Conservatives for the first time in 2019. “It’s gone now, because we’ve lost that trust in him. Now he’s just a buffoon… He can’t...

MOSCOW - Joint military drills involving Russian and Belarusian forces in ex-Soviet Belarus will run from Feb. 10-20, the Belarusian Defence Ministry said on Tuesday. Minsk said on Monday that Russian military forces and hardware had begun arriving in Belarus for joint drills amid soaring tensions between East and West over Ukraine.   (Reporting by Maxim Rodionov and Vladimir Soldatkin; Writing by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Editing by Catherine Evans)...

A New Era of Austerity Beckons For the past 12 years, the Conservative Party’s response to high public spending has always been the same: impose the burden on lower income families, says Maheen Behrana ShareEmailTwitterFacebook Few people could have failed to be amused by the news that Michael Gove got stuck in a lift at BBC Broadcasting House prior to an appearance on Radio 4’s Today programme last week. Less amusing, however, was Gove’s quip that the security team had “levelled him up” after more than half an hour of being trapped in the glass box. ‘Levelling up’ is no longer a winning slogan for the Conservatives. As warnings of higher energy bills become more urgent and the Mirror launches a new ‘Levelling Up Watch’ series to chronicle the Government’s broken promises, it is clear that squeezed family finances will imminently violate the party’s promises to the electorate in 2019. Attitudes towards public spending across society are often...

Nearly 100,000 anti-radiation pills have been handed out to residents at three English ports in case nuclear submarines go into meltdown.