Saturday, October 29, 2011
Tony Blair has defended Labour’s controversial mass immigration policy by claiming that Britain cannot succeed unless it opens its borders to more people from different backgrounds.
The former prime minister said it was 'right’ that the country was made up of different cultures and faiths mixing together.
Mr Blair added that migrants had made Britain 'stronger’ and said those calling for greater curbs on foreigners entering the country were wrong.
His comments come just days after official figures revealed that the population is expected to soar by the equivalent of a city the size of Leeds every year for the next decade.
A defiant Mr Blair insisted his party’s policy on immigration was the right one. He said: 'It’s been a very positive thing and there is no way for a country like Britain to succeed in the future unless it is open to people of different colours, faiths and cultures.’ Read on and comment » | Kirsty Walker | Saturday, October 29, 2011
My comment:
That man is arrogant! He's full of his own importance, and wrong! He should hang his head in shame because of the wrongs he has done to this country. He deliberately set out to make the country multi-cultural against the people's wishes. He should be hanged, drawn, and quartered for the destruction he has wrought. The man is a disgrace! And stupid, to boot! – © Mark
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The last engagement in the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh's tour of Australia was a traditional barbecue, where the Prince even flipped a steak.
The Duke of Edinburgh entered into the spirit of the occasion and flipped a steak sizzling on a grill as he joined cooks attempting to hold a record-breaking barbecue.
The event was the last engagement in the Queen and Duke's 11-day tour of Australia, and the monarch told the crowds: "We have been overwhelmed by your kindness and support.
"Once again we will return to the United Kingdom with fond memories of our time here and the warm Australian welcome we have received on our 16th visit to this beautiful country."
The Queen has received a rapturous welcome during her tour, and Perth residents followed the national mood and turned out in their tens of thousands for a final glimpse of the Royal couple. » | Saturday, October 29, 2011
LOS ANGELES TIMES: President Obama congratulated King Abdullah and the people of Saudi Arabia on Friday on the selection of Prince Nayif ibn Abdulaziz as the heir to the Saudi throne, and expressed his intent to continue America's partnership with Nayif as the two countries strengthen their "deep and long-standing friendship." » | Ann M. Simmons in Los Angeles | Friday, October 28, 2011
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: A Russian woman dubbed 'satan in a skirt' has confessed to murdering seventeen female pensioners for cash in a brutal eight-year murder spree.
Irina Gaidamachuk, a 40-year-old mother of two, said she had murdered the female OAPs in the Sverdlov region south-east of Moscow for money, robbing them of sums as little as the equivalent of £20.
"The detainee has confessed to the murders," Alexander Shulga, a spokesman for the investigators working on the case told the daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper. » | Andrew Osborn, Moscow | Saturday, October 29, 2011
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: A suicide car bomber has killed at least 13 American troops in the Afghan capital Kabul on Saturday in the deadliest single ground attack on foreign troops in 10 years of war in Afghanistan.
"We can confirm that 13 International Security Assistance Force members have died," said a spokesman for the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
A US official confirmed that all 13 Nato service members were American troops.
Excluding helicopter crashes, it was the deadliest single incident for foreign troops since the war began in 2001.
It is the largest single-day US loss in Afghanistan since the August crash in Wardak province that killed 38 people, including 22 Navy Seals. » | Saturday, October 29, 2011
The book also brought into the open a steamy affair with Camilla Henemark, a Swedish-Nigerian pop singer, who the King was involved with for a year in the late 1990s, with the full knowledge of Queen Silvia, who was powerless to stop it.
"The King sometimes looked like a love-crazed schoolboy, and on one occasion they talked about running away together to an isolated exotic island," Thomas Sjöberg wrote in his book.
Then, on November 24, a documentary aired on Swedish television that claimed that Walter Sommerlath, the German father of Queen Silvia had grown rich on returning to Germany in 1939 by producing armaments in a factory stolen from the Jews, and that he had joined the Nazi Party in the 1930s when the family still lived in Brazil.
These claims conflicted with the account given by Queen Silvia in another documentary, aired at the start of the year. She had claimed that he had not been "politically active", that the factory he owned had produced mainly trains and hair dryers, and that he had joined the Nazi party to save his career. » | Richard Orange | Saturday, October 29, 2011
Related »
The data stick, which contains material stolen from the hard drive of Nuri Kino, an investigative journalist, was mailed on Monday to Anders Lettström, a childhood friend of the king, with a message saying it came from "some friends", according to Sweden's Expressen newspaper.
Mr Lettström handed the material to Swedish Police on Wednesday.
The 65-year-old King Carl Gustav's reputation was shattered last year following the publication of The Reluctant Monarch, a biography by Swedish journalist Thomas Sjöberg, which alleged that the King had attended sex parties hosted by Serbian gangster Mille Markovic at his underground club in Stockholm almost 40 years ago[.[
The King has never fully denied all of the allegations. » | Richard Orange, Malmö | Saturday, October 29, 2011
Related »
REUTERS DEUTSCHLAND: Sarajevo - Ein mit einem Schnellfeuergewehr bewaffneter Mann hat am Freitag die US-Botschaft in Sarajevo beschossen und mindestens einen Wachmann verletzt. » | Reuters | Freitag 28. Oktober 2011
REUTERS DEUTSCHLAND: Tunis - Wenige Stunden nach Bekanntgabe des Wahlergebnisses ist es in der Geburtsstadt der tunesischen Revolution zu Ausschreitungen gekommen.
Wahlsieger Rachid Ghannouchi von der der gemäßigt-islamistischen Ennahda machte für die Krawalle in Sidi Bouzid Parteigänger des im Januar gestürzten Präsidenten Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali verantwortlich. Anhänger einer nachträglich von der Wahl ausgeschlossenen Partei hatten Augenzeugen zufolge versucht, den Sitz der Regionalregierung zu stürmen. Ghannouchi bemühte sich am Freitag, die Wogen zu glätten und versprach, die Rechte der Frauen zu achten.
Ennahda-Chef Ghannouchi erklärte, seine Partei werde die Frauen nicht verpflichten, einen Schleier zu tragen. Solche Versuche seien in anderen arabischen Ländern gescheitert. In der von der Ennahda geführten Regierung könnten Frauen Posten übernehmen, ob sie nun eine Schleier trügen oder nicht, sagte Ghannouchi. Das starke Abschneiden seiner Partei hat die Sorge geweckt, die Bevölkerung in dem vergleichsweise offenen Land könne strengeren islamischen Regeln unterworfen werden. Ghannouchi hat dies wiederholt zurückgewiesen. Er orientiert sich an der gemäßigt-religiösen Politik des türkischen Ministerpräsidenten Tayyip Erdogan. » | Reuters | Freitag 28. Oktober 2011
REUTERS – FRANCE: LE CAIRE - Les ministres de la Ligue arabe ont adressé vendredi soir un message urgent au président syrien Bachar al Assad pour lui demander de mettre fin à sept mois de violences dans son pays.
Cet appel fait suite à la mort de 40 manifestants en faveur de la démocratie, abattus par les forces syriennes de sécurité. » | Marwa Awad; Pierre Sérisier pour le service français | samedi 29 octobre 2011
REUTERS – FRANCE: SALE, Maroc - Un juge marocain a condamné vendredi à la peine de mort Adel Osmani pour avoir organisé et perpétré un attentat à bombe qui avait fait 17 morts, dont huit Français, le 28 avril dernier dans un café de Marrakech.
Cette action était la plus meurtrière commise au Maroc depuis les attentats suicides coordonnés qu'avaient perpétrés des extrémistes islamistes en 2003 à Casablanca.
A l'énoncé du verdict, des parentes d'Osmani et de ceux qui ont été reconnus coupables de complicité avec lui se sont mises à crier et à éclater en sanglots, a rapporté un journaliste de Reuters présent dans la salle d'audience.
L'accusation avait réclamé la peine "la plus sévère possible" contre Osmani et huit hommes accusés d'être ses complices. La peine capitale, autorisée par le code pénal marocain, n'a cependant pas été appliquée depuis 1992. » | par Souhail Karam | vendredi 28 octobre 2011
The ICC has warned the 39-year-old, apparently anxious not to be captured by Libyan interim government forces in whose hands his father Muammar Gaddafi was killed last week, that it could order a mid-air interception if he tried to flee by plane from his Sahara desert hideout for a safe haven. » | Aaron Gray-Block | THE HAGUE | Saturday, October 29, 2011
THE GUARDIAN: Gaddafi's son says he is innocent: Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has told the International Criminal Court he is innocent of alleged crimes against humanity » | Reuters | Saturday, October 29, 2011
Friday, October 28, 2011
Helmut Kohl once patronised her as “mein Mädchen” (“my girl”); Nicolas Sarkozy sneers at her privately as “la Boche” (the French equivalent of “Jerry” or “Kraut”); Silvio Berlusconi makes obscene remarks about her to his editors. This week, however, it wasn’t the Continental chauvinists who had the last laugh: it was Angela Merkel.
The German chancellor dominated the European stage as no woman has done since Margaret Thatcher. The two could hardly differ more, either in personality or politics. Indeed, Merkel reminds me of a different Mrs T: she is a Teutonic Mrs Tiggywinkle, who kindly takes in the eurozone’s dirty linen but whose homely figure conceals her hedgehog’s prickles. In the perpetual negotiation machine that is the European Union, Merkel excels at getting her way while treating the male egos around her as gently as possible. She does not relish humiliating her more improvident relations, but she is determined not to be the rich aunt left with the bill at the end of the meal.
David Cameron gets on better with Merkel than some of his hand-kissing counterparts, who bow and scrape to her face, while sniping behind her back. The German chancellor and the British Prime Minister have come a long way since their first encounters, which were reportedly frosty. She took him for a typical Tory Eurosceptic; he underestimated her. But she has come to appreciate him since he took office, especially his determination to make Britain live within its means, which mirrors her own approach to the crisis.
For his part, Cameron has grown to admire Merkel as the high mistress of austerity. She is delighted that he is content to leave her a free hand within the eurozone to pursue closer fiscal and political unity, as long as Britain is equally free to stay out. She is sympathetic to the PM’s difficulty in reconciling his party’s instincts on Europe with those of his coalition partners. Merkel has comparable problems in holding together her own conservative-liberal coalition, which is deeply divided on the issue of bailing out Greece and the other bankrupt economies.
Merkel has learnt much from the experience of living under Communism for her first 35 years, and also from what happened to her native East Germany after reunification, when it was given the benefit of the Deutschmark years before the experiment of currency union was tried on a European scale. The Federal Republic has been bailing out its own eastern provinces for over two decades. Anyone who doubts that Angela Merkel is in earnest when she tells her parliament that Europe faces “its gravest crisis since the Second World War” should remember how the Germans have honoured that commitment to their own people. How committed, though, are they to doing the same for other nations in the eurozone with whom they may feel they have rather less in common, and whose ingratitude is palpable? » | Daniel Johnson | Friday, October 28, 2011
Une foule souriante attend Mitt Romney devant l'immeuble de brique du Parti républicain de Fairfax, dans le nord de la Virginie. Une semaine après le passage de Barack Obama dans cet État crucial, qui avait voté démocrate en 2008 mais a ensuite élu le gouverneur conservateur Robert McDonnell, «Mitt» est venu soutenir les candidats républicains aux élections locales de novembre 2012.
En bras de chemise, silhouette élégante, cheveux bruns en arrière, sourire poli aux lèvres, Mitt Romney a l'allure du fils de famille qu'il est indéniablement. Son père était gouverneur du Michigan. Lui a fait carrière dans les affaires avant de remettre d'aplomb le Comité d'organisation des Jeux olympiques d'hiver de Salt Lake City, puis d'être élu gouverneur du Massachusetts de 2003 à 2007 -une performance dans le fief démocrate des Kennedy. Toute sa campagne consiste à mettre en avant son expérience de gestionnaire avisé. Ses débats télévisés, où il est apparu compétent, ont partiellement effacé l'image de «girouette» qui lui collait à la peau depuis la campagne de 2008. Tous les jours, son équipe, très rodée, publie en ligne des attaques précises contre ses adversaires.
Cette stratégie commence à payer. Mitt Romney est en tête des intentions de vote dans le New Hampshire et la Floride, et au coude-à-coude avec l'homme d'affaires afro-américain Herman Cain dans l'Iowa et la Caroline du Sud, des États clés qui tiendront leurs primaires très tôt. «Il va gagner la nomination, c'est sûr», affirme Bart Marcois, un ancien diplomate, volontaire à Fairfax. C'est «le seul capable de battre Barack Obama». » | Par Laure Mandeville | vendredi 28 octobre 2011
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