LONDON: Far-right protesters clashed with British police during tense rallies on Saturday as unrest linked to misinformation about a mass stabbing that killed three young girls spread across the UK.
The violence, which has seen scores of arrests across England and put Britain’s Muslim community on edge, presents the biggest challenge yet of Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s month-old premiership.
It has also put hard-right agitators linked to football hooliganism in the spotlight at a time when anti-immigration elements are enjoying some electoral success in British politics.
Demonstrators threw chairs, flares and bricks at officers in the northwestern English city of Liverpool, while scuffles between police and protesters broke out in nearby Manchester.
Merseyside Police said “a number of officers have been injured as they deal with serious disorder” in Liverpool city center.
According to the BBC, protesters smashed the windows of a hotel which has been used to house migrants in the northeastern city of Hull, where police said three officers had been injured and four people arrested.
In Belfast, Northern Ireland, fireworks were thrown amid tense exchanges between an anti-Islam group and an anti-racism rally.
In Leeds, around 150 people carrying English flags chanted, “You’re not English any more” while counter-protesters shouted “Nazi scum off our streets.” Opposing groups of protesters also faced off in the central city of Nottingham.
The skirmishes marked the fourth day of unrest in several towns and cities in the wake of Monday’s frenzied knife attack in Southport, near Liverpool on England’s northwest coast.
They were fueled by false rumors on social media about the background of British-born 17-year-old suspect Axel Rudakubana, charged with several counts of murder and attempted murder over the attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party.
Rudakubana is accused of killing Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, and injuring another 10 people.
Starmer has accused “thugs” of “hijacking” the nation’s grief to “sow hatred” and pledged that anyone carrying out violent acts would “face the full force of the law.”
Violence first rocked Southport late on Tuesday, where a mob threw bricks at a mosque, prompting hundreds of Muslim places of worship across the country to step up security amid fears of more anti-Islamic demonstrations.
Police blamed supporters and associated organizations of the disbanded English Defense League, an anti-Islam organization founded 15 years ago whose supporters have been linked to football hooliganism.
Unrest then rocked the northern cities of Hartlepool and Manchester as well as London 24 hours later, where 111 people were arrested outside Starmer’s Downing Street residence.
On Friday, 10 people were arrested and four officers required hospital treatment following a riot in the northeastern English city of Sunderland in which at least one car was set on fire and a shop looted.
A mob also torched a police station and attacked a mosque.
“This was not a protest, this was unforgivable violence and disorder,” Northumbria Police Chief Superintendent Mark Hall told reporters Saturday.
Anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate identified more than 30 events planned for Saturday and Sunday.
Many of them were advertised on far-right social media channels as “enough is enough” anti-immigrant rallies, while anti-fascism groups stage numerous counter-protests.
In London, demonstrators attending a regular pro-Palestinian march appeared undeterred by a separate anti-immigration protest.
“My parents told me not to come today but I am from here. The UK is my home,” 24-year-old student Meraaj Harun told AFP.
British media reported that government ministers were due to meet later Saturday to discuss the potential for further widespread disorder.
Starmer has announced new measures that will allow the sharing of intelligence, wider deployment of facial-recognition technology and criminal behavior orders to restrict troublemakers from traveling.
Labour politicians have accused Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage of stoking the trouble.
At last month’s election, his anti-immigrant Reform UK party captured 14 percent of the vote — one of the largest vote shares for a far-right British party.
Far-right protesters clash with police as UK unrest spreads
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Far-right protesters clash with police as UK unrest spreads
- The violence has put Britain’s Muslim community on edge and presents the biggest challenge yet of Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s month-old premiership
Sweden faces call to halt international adoptions after inquiry finds abuses and fraud
Sweden is the latest country to examine its international adoption policies after allegations of unethical practices, particularly in South Korea,
The commission was formed in 2021 following a report by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter detailing the Scandinavian country’s problematic international adoption system. Monday’s recommendations were sent to Minister of Social Services Camilla Waltersson Grönvall.
“The assignment was to investigate whether there had been irregularities that the Swedish actors knew about, could have done and actually did,” Anna Singer, a legal expert and the head of the commission, told a press conference. “And actors include everyone who has had anything to do with international adoption activities.
“It includes the government, the supervisory authority, organization, municipalities and courts. The conclusion is that there have been irregularities in the international adoptions to Sweden.”
The commission called on the government to formally apologize to adoptees and their families. Investigators found confirmed cases of child trafficking in every decade from the 1970s to the 2000s, including from Sri Lanka, Colombia, Poland and China.
Singer said a public apology, besides being important for those who are personally affected, can help raise awareness about the violations because there is a tendency to download the existence and significance of the abuses.
An Associated Press investigation, also documented by Frontline (PBS), last year reported dubious child-gathering practices and fraudulent paperwork involving South Korea’s foreign adoption program, which peaked in the 1970s and `80s amid huge Western demands for babies.
The AP and Frontline spoke with more than 80 adoptees in the US, Australia and Europe and examined thousands of pages of documents to reveal evidence of kidnapped or missing children ending up abroad, fabricated child origins, babies switched with one another and parents told their newborns were gravely sick or dead, only to discover decades later they’d been sent to new parents overseas.
The findings are challenging the international adoption industry, which was built on the model created in South Korea.
The Netherlands last year announced it would no longer allow its citizens to adopt from abroad. Denmark’s only international adoption agency said it was shutting down and Switzerland apologized for failing to prevent illegal adoptions. France released a scathing assessment of its own culpability.
South Korea sent around 200,000 children to the West for adoptions in the past six decades, with more than half of them placed in the US Along with France and Denmark, Sweden was a major European destination of South Korean children, adopting nearly 10,000 of them since the 1960s.
Tunisian national shot dead by neighbor in the south of France
The victim, who was said to be “possibly 35,” but has not been officially identified, was killed late on Saturday night in the town of Puget-sur-Argens. A 25-year-old Turkish national was also shot in the hand by the man and taken to hospital.
The incident comes one month after the fatal stabbing of Aboubakar Cisse, a 22-year-old man from Mali, in a mosque in the southern town of La Grand-Combe, amid rising racism in France.
Last year French police recorded an 11 percent rise in racist, xenophobic or anti-religious crimes, according to official data published in March.
In a statement released late on Sunday, the prosecutor said the suspect in the weekend shooting was a 53-year-old who practices sports shooting. He had published hateful and racist content on his social media account before and after killing his neighbor, the prosecutor added.
France has the largest Muslim population in Europe, numbering more than 6 million and making up about 10 percent of the country’s population.
Politicians across the political spectrum, including President Emmanuel Macron, have attacked what they describe as Islamist separatism in a way that rights groups have said stigmatizes Muslims and amounts to discrimination.
UK PM Starmer says situation in Gaza ‘getting worse by the day’
- “The situation is intolerable in Gaza, and getting worse by the day,” Starmer told reporters in Scotland, when asked whether the UK would take any action over the issue
LONDON: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Monday that the situation in Gaza was getting “worse by the day” and that it was important to ensure the Palestinian enclave receives more humanitarian aid urgently.
“The situation is intolerable in Gaza, and getting worse by the day,” Starmer told reporters in Scotland, when asked whether the UK would take any action over the issue.
“Which is why we are working with allies ... to be absolutely clear that humanitarian aid needs to get in at speed and at volumes that it is not getting in at the moment, causing absolute devastation,” he added.
Pakistan’s anti-polio drive suffers a blow after a northern enclave reports first case in 7 years
PESHAWAR: Pakistan efforts to eliminate polio suffered another blow on Monday after a northern enclave reported its first case in seven years. Overall, it was the country’s 11th case since January, despite the launch of several immunization drives.
The virus was detected in a child from the district of Diamer in the Gilgit-Baltistan region, according to the country’s polio eradication program.
Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only two countries where the spread of the wild polio virus has not been stopped, according to the World Health Organization. There are ongoing outbreaks of polio linked to the oral vaccine in 10 other countries, mostly in Africa.
The new case was reported after Pakistan on Sunday wrapped up its third nationwide polio vaccination drive of the year, aiming to immunize 45 million children.
Mohammad Iqbal, a director at the polio program in the northwest, said local health officials were still trying to determine how the poliovirus that was found in the southern port city of Karachi had infected the child in Diamer.
During the summer season, thousands of tourists from Karachi and elsewhere visit tourist resorts in Gilgit-Baltistan.
Pakistan’s polio eradication program has been running anti-polio campaigns for years, though health workers and the police assigned to protect them are often targeted by militants who falsely claim the vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.
Since the 1990s, attacks on polio vaccination teams have killed more than 200 workers and security personnel.
Zelensky arrives in Vilnius for Nato eastern flank summit
- The summit brings together the Bucharest Nine, the alliance’s members across eastern and central Europe — with its Nordic members, Zelensky and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte
VILNIUS: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived Monday in Vilnius for a summit with the leaders of NATO’s eastern and Nordic members, who are some of Kyiv’s staunchest backers amid the Russian invasion.
The military alliance has bolstered its eastern defenses since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, with Finland and Sweden also overhauling decades of security policy to join the alliance.
The summit brings together the Bucharest Nine — the alliance’s members across eastern and central Europe — with its Nordic members, Zelensky and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
Zelensky’s spokesman said he would hold “bilateral meetings” on the sidelines of the summit in the Lithuanian capital.
It comes ahead of a full NATO summit later in June in The Hague to which Zelensky has demanded he be invited to.
“If Ukraine is not present at the NATO summit, it will be a victory for Putin, but not over Ukraine, but over NATO,” he said last week.
Zelensky wants NATO to offer security guarantees to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire or peace deal with Russia — something Moscow has called “unacceptable.”
NATO’s eastern members have been some of the strongest backers of Ukraine since Russia invaded and have repeatedly warned about the prospect of Moscow stepping up its aggression.
Baltic states Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia are former Soviet republics, now EU members, that fear they are in Moscow’s crosshairs.
US President Donald Trump has heaped pressure on NATO’s European members to increase their defense spending, sparking fears about the US commitment to protect the continent.
