LONDON: Police warned Sunday that efforts to deal with the violence that has erupted across towns and cities in recent days in the wake of a stabbing rampage at a dance class that left three girls dead and several wounded means that other crimes may not be investigated fully.
The warning comes a day after dozens of people were arrested as far-right activists faced off with anti-racism protesters across the UK, with violent scenes played out in many locations across the UK, from the Northern Ireland capital, Belfast, to Liverpool in the northwest of England and Bristol in the west. Further arrests are likely as police scour CCTV, social media and body-worn camera footage.
In just one incident on Saturday, Merseyside Police said about 300 people were involved in violent disorder in Liverpool, which saw a community facility being set on fire. The Spellow Lane Library Hub, which was opened last year to provide support for one of the most deprived communities in the country, suffered severe damage to the ground floor. Police said rioters tried to prevent firefighters from accessing the fire, throwing a missile at the fire engine and breaking the rear window of the cab.
Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram said the attack was not just on the building but “on our very community” and “an insult to those families still grieving and survivors still struggling to make sense of Monday’s attack.”
Further gatherings are scheduled Sunday and police will continue to mount a significant security operation, deploying thousands more officers onto the streets, many in riot gear. Police have also made more prison cells available and are using surveillance and facial recognition technology.
“We’re seeing officers that are being pulled from day-to-day policing,” Tiffany Lynch from the Police Federation of England and Wales told the BBC. “But while that’s happening, the communities that are out there that are having incidents against them — victims of crime — unfortunately, their crimes are not being investigated.”
The violence erupted earlier this week, ostensibly in protest of Monday’s stabbing attack in Southport. A 17-year-old male has been arrested.
False rumors spread online that the young man was a Muslim and an immigrant, fueling anger among far-right supporters. Suspects under 18 are usually not named in the UK, but Judge Andrew Menary ordered Axel Rudakubana, born in Wales to Rwandan parents, to be identified, in part to stop the spread of misinformation.
Police said many of the actions are being organized online by shadowy far-right groups, who are mobilizing support online with phrases like “enough is enough,” “save our kids” and “stop the boats.” Counter-protests are also anticipated with the organization Stand Up To Racism.
Calls for protests have come from a diffuse group of social media accounts, but a key player in amplifying them is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a longtime far-right agitator who uses the name Tommy Robinson. He led the English Defense League, which Merseyside Police has linked to the violent protest in Southport on Tuesday, a day after the stabbing attack. The group first appeared around 2009, leading a series of protests against what it described as militant Islam that often devolved into violence.
The group’s membership and impact declined after a few years, and Yaxley-Lennon, 41, has faced myriad legal issues. He has been jailed for assault, contempt of court and mortgage fraud and currently faces an arrest warrant after leaving the UK last week before a scheduled hearing in contempt-of-court proceedings against him.
Nigel Farage, who was elected to parliament in July for the first time as leader of Reform UK, has also been blamed by many for encouraging — indirectly — the anti-immigration sentiment that has been evident over the past few days. While condemning the violence, he has criticized the government for blaming it on “a few far right thugs” and saying “the far right is a reaction to fear … shared by tens of millions of people.”
Far-right demonstrators have held several violent gatherings since the stabbing attack, clashing with police Tuesday outside a mosque in Southport — near the scene of the horrific stabbing — and hurling beer cans, bottles and flares near the prime minister’s office in London the next day. Many in Southport have expressed their anger at the organized acts of violence in the wake of the tragedy.
The attack Monday on children at a Taylor Swift-themed summer dance class shocked a country where knife crime is a long-standing and vexing problem, though mass stabbings are rare.
Rudakubana has been charged with murder over the attack that killed Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Bebe King, 6. He has also been charged with 10 counts of attempted murder for the eight children and two adults who were wounded.
Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, has blamed the violence on “far-right hatred” and vowed to end the mayhem. He said police across the UK would be given more resources to stop “a breakdown in law and order on our streets.”
Policing minister Diana Johnson told the BBC that there is “no need” to bring in the army to help police in their efforts to confront the violence.
“The police have made it very clear that they have all the resources they need at the moment,” she said.
UK police warn far-right fueled street violence affects resources needed to investigate other crimes
https://arab.news/c34da
UK police warn far-right fueled street violence affects resources needed to investigate other crimes
Billionaire tech leaders’ move toward Trump has created a split with workers in Silicon Valley
- Trump has filled a number of his administration’s posts with billionaires and his support from wealthy tech leaders led Democratic President Joe Biden to warn that the US risked becoming an oligarchy ruled by elite
SAN JOSE, California: Like many in the tech industry, Jeremy Lyons used to think of himself as a relatively apolitical guy.
The only time he had participated in a demonstration before now was in the opening days of Donald Trump’s first presidential term, when he joined fellow Google workers walking out of the company’s Silicon Valley campus to protest immigration restrictions. Google’s co-founder and its chief executive officer joined them.
Last weekend was Lyons’ second, also against Trump, but it had a very different feel.
The man directing thousands of marchers with a bullhorn in downtown San Jose on April 5 was another tech worker who would not give his full name for fear of being identified by Trump backers. Marchers were urged not to harass drivers of Tesla vehicles, which have gone from a symbol of Silicon Valley’s environmental futurism to a pro-Trump icon. And no tech executives were anywhere to be seen, only months after several had joined Trump at his January inauguration.
To Lyons, 54, the change says as much about what’s happened to Silicon Valley over the past quarter-century as it does about the atmosphere of fear surrounding many Trump critics nowadays.
“One of the things I’ve seen over that time is a shift from a nerdy utopia to a money first, move fast and break things,” Lyons said.
Political gap seen between tech leaders and their workforce
The tech industry’s political allegiances remain divided. But as some in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley began shifting to the right politically, many of the tech industry’s everyday workers have remained liberal — but also increasingly nervous and disillusioned. Their mood is in stark contrast to the prominent tech leaders who have embraced a conservative populist ideology.
“I think you’re seeing a real gap between the leadership elite here in Silicon Valley and their workforce,” said Ann Skeet, who helps run a center at Santa Clara University studying the ethics of the tech industry.
“The shift hasn’t been for a lot of people,” said Lenny Siegel, a former mayor of Mountain View and longtime liberal activist in the valley. “It’s a handful of people who’ve gotten the attention.”
The biggest example of that is Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and CEO of the world’s best-known electric car company who has taken on a prominent role slashing federal agencies in Trump’s administration. Musk has been joined by several tech billionaires, including investor David Sacks, who helped fundraise for Trump’s campaign and became the White House’s artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar, and venture capitalist Marc Andreesen. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also attended Trump’s inauguration in Washington.
Zuckerberg began praising Trump after the then-candidate, angered over money Zuckerberg steered toward local election offices in some states in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, threatened last summer to imprison him. Zuckerberg also donated $1 million to the president’s inauguration fund and co-hosted an inauguration reception for billionaire Republican donors.
Trump has filled a number of his administration’s posts with billionaires and his support from wealthy tech leaders led Democratic President Joe Biden to warn that the United States risked becoming an oligarchy ruled by elites. During Trump’s first term, the valley and its leaders were a bulwark of resistance to the Republican, especially over immigration, given that the industry draws its workforce from around the globe.
It’s against that backdrop that thousands of people attended the recent rally at a downtown San Jose park to protest the actions of Trump and Musk.
Even as tech industry has changed, Silicon Valley has leaned Democratic
Santa Clara County, which comprises most of Silicon Valley, swung 8 percentage points toward Trump in November election against Democrat Kamala Harris, matching the shift across California. Even with that swing, the county voted 68 percent to 28 percent for the then-vice president and remains a Democratic stronghold.
“We’re still in the belly of the beast,” said Dave Johnson, the new executive director of the Santa Clara GOP, who said the party has gained some new members in the county but few from the tech industry. “If the lake was frozen, there’s a little glimmer on top. I would not say there are cracks in the ice.”
The valley has long leaned Democratic, but with an unusual political mix: a general dislike of getting too involved in Washington’s business coupled with an at-times contradictory mix of libertarian individualism, Bay Area activism and belief in the ability of science to solve the world’s problems.
That has persisted even as the tech industry has changed.
The tech boom was fueled by scrappy startups that catered to their workers’ dreams of changing the world for the better. Google’s motto was “don’t be evil,” a phrase it removed from its code of conduct by 2018, when it and other companies such as Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, had grown into multinational behemoths. The companies have had layoffs in recent years, a shock to an industry that not long ago seemed poised for unlimited growth.
Entrepreneurs once dreamed of building startups that would change the world, said Jan English-Lueck, a San Jose State University professor who has been studying Silicon Valley culture for more than 20 years.
“Now,” she said, “if you’re part of a startup, you’re hoping you’ll be absorbed in a way that’s profitable.”
Discontent among some in the tech industry about where it’s headed
Even before some prominent tech leaders shifted toward Trump, there was mounting discontent among some in the industry over its direction. IdaRose Sylvester runs a business promoting a Silicon Valley-style approach to entrepreneurs in other countries.
“I feel sick to my stomach now,” she said.
Sylvester was already disenchanted with the growing inequality in the valley and the environmental cost of all the energy needed to power crypto, AI and data centers. She took part in protests against Trump in 2017, but felt that energy fade once he lost the 2020 election to Biden.
“I saw a lot of people get out of politics once Biden won. There was a feeling it was all OK,” Sylvester said. “It was not all OK.”
It is worse now, she said. She helped organize one of several demonstrations across the valley last weekend during a national day of protests against the new administration.
At first glance, the one in downtown San Jose could have been a typical anti-Trump protest anywhere. A large crowd of largely middle-age and older people carried signs against the president and Musk while chanting against oligarchs.
But it was clearly a Silicon Valley crowd, one still reeling not only from Trump’s challenges to the country’s system of checks and balances but also from the actions of the valley’s top executives.
“The money is all shifting to the wealthiest, and that terrifies me,” said Dianne Wood, who works at a startup. “Unfortunately, you’ve got the Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks of the world who are taking that over.”
“Just coming here, everyone’s saying turn off the facial recognition on your phone,” Wood added. “We’re all scared.”
Kamal Ali, who works in AI, said he felt betrayed by that shift.
“The trust is broken. A lot of employees are very upset by what’s going on,” he said. “It’s going to be different forever.”
Trump says Russian strike on Ukraine ‘a horrible thing’
- “They made a mistake... you’re gonna ask them,” Trump told reporters without specifying who or what he meant
- The Sumy strike came two days after US envoy Witkoff traveled to Russia to meet Putin and push Trump’s efforts to end the war
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Sunday said a Russian strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy that killed at least 34 people was “a horrible thing.”
“I think it was terrible. And I was told they made a mistake. But I think it’s a horrible thing. I think the whole war is a horrible thing,” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One while headed back to Washington.
Asked to clarify what he meant by a “mistake,” Trump said that “they made a mistake... you’re gonna ask them” — without specifying who or what he meant.
The American leader’s National Security Council (NSC) had earlier Sunday called the Russian strike “a clear and stark reminder of why President Donald Trump’s efforts to try and end this terrible war comes at a crucial time.”
Neither Trump nor the White House named Moscow as the perpetrator of the attack, though Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier offered condolences to the “victims of today’s horrifying Russian missile attack on Sumy.”
The Sumy strike came two days after US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff traveled to Russia to meet President Vladimir Putin and push Trump’s efforts to end the war.
Zelensky on Sunday urged the US president to visit his country to better understand the devastation wrought by Russia’s invasion.
“Please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead,” the Ukrainian leader said in an interview broadcast on US network CBS.
Amnesty urges halt to Ethiopia evictions for urban development
- PM Abiy Ahmed's “corridor project”, which aims to renovate and widen streets, has seen homes, shops, and offices razed in Addis Ababa and at least 58 other cities since its launch in December 2022
ADDIS ABABA: Ethiopia is conducting forced evictions on an “unprecedented” scale, Amnesty International said on Monday, urging authorities to “immediately pause” urban renewal projects.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, in power since 2018, is spearheading a “corridor project” in which streets in the capital and in cities across the country have been renovated and widened.
Launched in December 2022, the project has seen homes, shops, and offices razed in Addis Ababa and at least 58 other cities, leaving parts of the capital resembling a giant building site.
Ethiopian authorities have “failed to adequately consult with affected communities, provided insufficient notice, and none of the people reported receiving compensation,” Amnesty said in their report.
The international NGO urged a pause in evictions and suspension of the project “until a human rights impact assessment is conducted.”
Authorities did not respond to AFP’s requests for comment.
The scale of the evictions is “unprecedented in Ethiopia,” the report said, describing a climate of fear among residents, who are “uncertain if they will be the next to be displaced.”
The NGO interviewed 47 families who were evicted in Addis Ababa between January and February of this year. All requested anonymity, citing security reasons.
Family members told Amnesty that only a week after a public meeting, local officials came to their doors, “asking them to leave their homes within three days and warning them that their homes would be demolished.”
“The 47 respondents stated that their homes were demolished within 24 to 72 hours after officials delivered the door-to-door notice,” Amnesty said, with families forced into rental properties on the city’s outskirts.
“My child is suffering because his school is now too far,” said one parent, saying they were grappling with mental health issues as their social lives had been “ruined.”
“Life has also gotten expensive due to additional transport and house rent costs,” another said.
Two journalists contacted by Amnesty also said they were “victims of harassment” when they attempted to report on the corridor work. They did not provide further details.
International partners “should engage Ethiopian authorities to end forced eviction with no further delay,” Amnesty researcher Haimanot Ashenafi told AFP.
Authorities in Ethiopia, home to some 130 million people, are regularly criticized by global organizations and NGOs for human rights abuses and the repression of dissenting voices.
Indian shrimp industry sails in troubled waters after Trump tariffs
- Farmers are seeing demand dry up amid the uncertainty as exporters have cut offer prices by a tenth since the tariffs
GANAPAVARAM, India/GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador: Turbulence unleashed by President Donald Trump’s tariffs could rock global shipments of shrimp to the United States, with exporters in biggest supplier India saying they endanger 2,000 containers packed with the frozen delicacy.
But Ecuador, thousands of kilometers nearer to the United States faces a lower tariff rate and stands to benefit, the exporters say, as shrimp is its most important export after oil.
India’s shrimp industry is staring at a tariff of 26 percent under Trump’s July plan, which threatens a thriving $7-billion seafood export market heavily reliant on US supermarket chains such as Walmart and Kroger as buyers look to renegotiate rates.
Farmers are seeing demand dry up amid the uncertainty as exporters have cut offer prices by a tenth since the tariffs.
“We are suffering huge losses,” said S.V.L. Pathi Raju, 63, standing by the aquaculture pond where he feeds and grows shrimp in India’s southern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh.
“We don’t know who can resolve our price issues,” added Raju, one of several families in the state’s remote village of Ganapavaram grappling with dwindling sales to exporters.
Many also face high payments for shrimp feed and rentals for the land where the saline ponds have been set up.
“I am not sure how I will sustain prices,” said another farmer, 60-year-old Uppalapati Nagaraju, adding that he had been entirely unaware of the concept of tariffs.
“Had I known, I would not have started my cultivation.”
In the face of erratic demand from exporters, he now regrets having begun shrimp cultivation just 15 days before the tariff news. Although Trump has delayed the 26 percent rate until July, even the current rate of 10 percent has made exporters skittish.
The United States and China are among India’s major markets for seafood exports that touched $7.3 billion last year, on a volume of 1.8 million metric tons that was an all-time high.
Shrimp formed the major component, with the 300,000 farmers of Andhra Pradesh contributing the most to industry supplies, accounting for 92 percent of India’s seafood exports of $2.5 billion last year to its biggest market, the United States.
Industry representatives have joined a state government panel weighing the impact of tariffs and looking for ways to boost exports to other countries, such as China.
But the exporters fear Ecuador’s competitive edge from Trump’s planned lower tariff rate of 10 percent for the South American nation, particularly since it is much closer to the United States, its second biggest market for shrimp.
Yet Ecuadorean producers, with $1.55 billion in shipments in 2024, are less optimistic.
Although US consumers have fueled growth in the area of processed shrimp, Ecuador has yet to attain the capacity to replace India’s production, said Jose Antonio Camposano, president of its National Chamber of Aquaculture.
India “will be obliged to look for other markets where Ecuador is selling, like China and the European Union, so we’ll have more pressure in other markets,” Camposano added.
JOURNEY OF 40 DAYS
Reuters visited one Indian factory where shrimp was washed and machine sorted automatically by size before a manual quality check by workers in masks and gloves. Then a conveyor belt whisked the seafood away to be quick-frozen.
Thousands of tons of frozen shrimp leave Andhra Pradesh each year on a voyage that usually takes 40 days to arrive at ports in New York, Houston and Miami, en route to restaurants and the shelves of retailers such as Safeway and Costco.
The chief of India’s seafood exporters group, G. Pawan Kumar, said he was worried about shipping containers already packed with frozen produce at previously agreed rates now set to be renegotiated by US buyers following the tariffs.
“Ten percent is high, we exporters operate on a 3 percent to 4 percent margin,” said Kumar, president of the Seafood Exporters Association of India, which is pushing the government to win the industry exemptions in trade talks with the United States.
“It’s game over” for the Indian industry if the tariff rate of 26 percent takes effect in July, said one shrimp exporter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
He was in talks with US clients who did not want to fully absorb the 10 percent tariff, he said, pointing to the risk of earning no profit if he had to sell 130 shipping containers already packed.
In Texas, the seafood section at a Walmart supermarket was piled high with packs of frozen shrimp, among them a “jumbo” variant labelled a product of India and priced at $7.92, under Walmart’s own “Great Value” brand.
“We have built long-lasting and deep relations with suppliers over the years,” said Latriece Watkins, the chief merchandising officer for Walmart in the United States. “We expect that to continue, going forward.”
Xi warns protectionism ‘leads nowhere’ as starts SE Asia tour
- Beijing is trying to present itself as a stable alternative to an erratic Trump
BEIJING: Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned Monday that protectionism “leads nowhere” and that a trade war would have “no winners,” state media said, as he was due to kick off a tour of Southeast Asia with a visit to Vietnam.
Xi’s first overseas trip of the year will see him visit Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia as Beijing seeks to tighten regional trade ties and offset the impact of huge tariffs unleashed by his US counterpart Donald Trump.
He will meet his three Southeast Asian counterparts on a tour that “bears major importance” for the broader region, Beijing has said.
Writing in an article published Monday in Vietnam’s major Nhan Dan newspaper, Xi urged the two countries to “resolutely safeguard the multilateral trading system, stable global industrial and supply chains, and open and cooperative international environment,” Beijing’s Xinhua News Agency said.
He also reiterated Beijing’s line that a “trade war and tariff war will produce no winner, and protectionism will lead nowhere,” the agency added.
Beijing is trying to present itself as a stable alternative to an erratic Trump, who announced — and then mostly reversed — sweeping tariffs this month that sent global markets into a tailspin.
Vietnam was Southeast Asia’s biggest buyer of Chinese goods, with a bill of $161.9 billion, followed by Malaysia, which imported $101.5 billion worth in 2024.
Xi will be in Vietnam on Monday and Tuesday, his first trip there since December 2023.
Vietnam has long pursued a “bamboo diplomacy” approach, striving to stay on good terms with both China and the United States.
The two countries have close economic ties, but Hanoi shares US concerns about Beijing’s increasing assertiveness in the contested South China Sea.
China claims almost all of the South China Sea as its own, but this is disputed by the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Brunei.
The Chinese leader in his Monday article insisted Beijing and Hanoi could resolve those disputes through dialogue.
“We should properly manage differences and safeguard peace and stability in our region,” Xi wrote, according to Xinhua.
“With vision, we are fully capable of properly settling maritime issues through consultation and negotiation.”
