Blow to Rishi Sunak as ex-candidate backs rival Liz Truss for UK PM

News Network
July 30, 2022

London, July 30: Rishi Sunak’s campaign to be elected the Conservative Party leader and the next British Prime Minister suffered a blow on Saturday as a former candidate endorsed his rival Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.

Tom Tugendhat, the Tory backbencher and chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee who was in the initial shortlist before being knocked out of the race earlier this month, said he preferred Truss’ campaign pitch with its promise of immediate tax cuts.

The former soldier in the British Army said that after watching the candidates go head-to-head in live TV debates, "only one has convinced me she's ready".

 “Liz has always stood up for British values at home, and abroad. With her at the helm, I have no doubt that we will move with determination to make this country safer and more secure,” he writes in The Times newspaper.

He said both contenders have "huge qualities and many talents" but Truss has an advantage on the world stage because of her Cabinet position.

“As foreign secretary, Liz is starting with a huge advantage. She can make our voice count,” he writes.

It follows the endorsement of another Tory heavyweight Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who also threw his support behind Truss — describing her as "authentic, honest and experienced".

Sunak was initially the frontrunner in the race in the ballots of his party colleagues, winning the most support from MPs in the first few rounds of voting. But since then, polling among the Tory membership that will vote for the winner has shown Truss is more popular.

According to another report in The Times, even Sunak’s former boss is feeling sorry for him.

He told friends he did not think that Sunak, the man he blames for his downfall, was going to make it.

“He almost feels sorry for him,” a friend of Johnson’s was quoted as saying.

“[Rishi] got in with a crowd of malcontents who used him as part of their vendetta against Boris. What future is there for him now?” it said.

The two finalists are next scheduled to go head-to-head in the TV debate on Thursday, when the first postal ballot papers will start landing at Tory members’ addresses.

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News Network
November 18,2024

Advisors to US President-elect Donald Trump have instructed his allies and associates to refrain from using the inflammatory language they previously employed when discussing issues related to migrants and the deportation of asylum seekers, in a bid to avoid “looking like Nazis.”

US media reports said that Trump’s associates had been asked to stop using the word “camps” to describe potential facilities that would be used to accommodate migrants rounded up in deportation operations across the country.

The reports said the US president-elect’s allies had been ordered to stave off such charged terms as they would bring to mind “Nazis,” and be used against Trump.

“I have received some guidance to avoid terms, like ‘camps,’ that can be twisted and used against the president, yes,” one Trump ally told American monthly magazine Rolling Stone.

“Apparently, some people think it makes us look like Nazis.”

The presidential advisers also cautioned surrogates and allies to keep racist terms, which have dogged Trump’s campaign, out of their remarks.

They said with Trump’s heated rhetoric that used to compare undocumented immigrants to “animals” and his slight that they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” detractors did not need to reach too far to find parallels to Nazi Germany.

Stephen Miller, who Trump tapped to be his deputy chief of staff of policy, specifically used the word “camps” to describe holding facilities that he hoped the military could put together for immigrants.

Tom Homan, who served as the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and is chosen by Trump to be in charge of the US borders, was no stranger to such language.

“It’s not gonna be a mass sweep of neighborhoods,” he said in an interview earlier this week. “It’s not gonna be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous.”

Becoming a little more forthright about the new government’s aggressive deportation plans, Homan likened the early days of the Trump administration to the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“I got three words for them – shock and awe,” he said. “You’re going to see us take this country back.”

Trump made immigration a central element of his 2024 presidential campaign but unlike his first run, which was mainly focused on building a border wall, he has shifted his attention to interior enforcement and the removal of undocumented immigrants already in the United States.

People close to the US president and his aides are laying the groundwork for expanding detention facilities to fulfill his mass deportation campaign promise.

The businessman-turned-politician deported more than 1.5 million people during his first term.

The figure do not include the millions of people turned away at the border under a Covid-era policy enacted by Trump and used during most of Biden’s term.

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News Network
November 21,2024

palestainetragedy.jpg

Hamas says the Israeli regime’s sole objective lies in “erasing” the entirety of the Palestinian population from across the Palestinian territories.

Khalil al-Hayya, a ranking official with the Gaza Strip-based Palestinian resistance movement, made the remarks to the Palestinian al-Aqsa TV on Wednesday.

“The occupation targets everyone—it strikes hospitals, civil defense, women, children, and the elderly,” he said, adding that the regime sought to “empty Gaza of its residents, and displace the Palestinian people to fulfill its dreams of building a Zionist Jewish state across all of Palestine.”

The remarks came amid the regime’s October 2023-present war of genocide on the coastal sliver that has so far claimed the lives of nearly 44,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.

“This unprecedented aggression in modern times evokes scenes from the dark ages of human history, having crossed all red lines and exceeded every expectation of brutality in the modern era,” the Palestinian official lamented.

He also regretted that the regime had added “systematic and dangerous starvation to its aggression, falsely claiming before the world that it allows 250 [aid] trucks into Gaza daily. In reality, the number of trucks is far fewer.”

Hayya, meanwhile, regretted that “scenes of children torn apart, women screaming over their children, and heart-wrenching destruction have failed to stir enough humanity to stop these crimes.”

He decried the United States for vetoing the United Nations Security Council’s resolutions that are aimed at bringing about a potential ceasefire in the war, saying this indicated Washington’s “partnership in the aggression” and a simultaneous siege that the Israeli regime has been enforcing on Gaza.

Addressing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the official asserted that, despite what the Israeli official is after, Hamas would not hand over the regime’s captives “without [the regime’s] stopping the war.”

He called Netanyahu “the main obstacle” in the way of cessation of the aggression, saying the Israeli premier “blocks any progress for political reasons,” and citing his preventing conclusion of a ceasefire agreement in July.

Hayya also warned that the regime sought to expand the war beyond Gaza, but asserted that its goals are “impossible and will never happen.”

“Today, the enemy exposes its true intentions of extermination and displacement, but it will fail,” he stressed.

“The Palestinian people are resilient and will not surrender, as they believe in their humanitarian and political cause. The enemy and its allies will not succeed in achieving their goals. This steadfast people will endure, and the occupation will not prevail against them.”

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