Britons have vented their anger after a clip, taken from a Sky News broadcast, went viral in which a British Muslim claimed homosexuality is “heinous” and that “women were created for man’s pleasure.”
A ten-second clip from a Sky News broadcast has been widely shared across the UK as the country celebrates Gay Pride month. In the video in question, a Muslim man, being interviewed by the news channel, tells the reporter that “homosexuality is heinous” and that “women were created for man’s pleasure.”
Muslims giving their verdict on Pride and the role of women to Sky News.
Double bigotry in one sentence. pic.twitter.com/GC9BG03FUP
The video has engendered a severe backlash on social media with many Britons describing the comments as “disgusting” and asking how on earth the man could get away with making such comments without any punishment.
“If this man was white, you would see enragement, calls for police involvement! Treat everybody the same!” one person tweeted, adding that this is where the UK is severely failing. Another person concurred, claiming that a Christian could never make such comments without repercussions.
Many called on the government to take notice while highlighting the “silence” and the lack of “condemnation from any politician, the woke lobby, the feminists, the permanently offended by anything nutters."
Some people took aim at the “liberal left elite” for aligning themselves with conservative Muslim views despite it contrasting so sharply with their own opinions. One person highlighted openly-gay Guardian editor Owen Jones, who frequently speaks out in favour of Britain’s cultural plurality.
“I suspect all the woke lefties will not utter a single word of disagreement with this prejudice mid evil attitude,” another wrote.
Another jibed at the UK’s Labour Party, stating that clearly they cannot support both camps.
Other Twitter users adopted a more radical approach, calling on people with the views shared in the video to move back to a Muslim country and noting that “this is what happens when Enoch Powell is ignored,” referencing the infamous politician and his “Rivers of Blood” speech.
Wednesday marks the final day of Gay Pride month, when the LGBTQ+ community and others celebrate people coming together in love and friendship. While many of the usual marches and celebrations have been cancelled due to social distancing, rights groups have called for it to stand as a reminder of the harmful impacts of homophobia.
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June 30, 2021 at 01:59AM
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President Vladimir Putin has slammed the violation of Russian territorial waters by the British warship HMS ‘Defender’ as a “provocation.” He also claimed that London’s US allies had a hand in last week’s incident near Crimea.
However, apparently casting doubt on NATO’s Article V collective defense pact, the Russian leader claimed that even if Moscow had sunk the vessel, it wouldn’t have led to World War III.
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June 30, 2021 at 01:55AM
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Newly-appointed Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti faces around $1.6 million being seized from his salary by tax authorities over alleged crimes relating to his first spell in charge of the club, according to reports in Spain.
The Special Delegation of Finance in Madrid contacted Real Madrid within 48 hours of the former Everton manager being reappointed as head coach at the Bernabeu, a report that has shown purported documents from the case has said.
Revered Italian Ancelotti, who won the Champions League with the club in 2014 and had lifted the title twice previously with Milan, will have to testify on tax offenses on July 23, according to El Mundo.
That could see the 62-year-old follow in the footsteps of stars including Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Diego Costa by appearing in court on tax charges, with his debt said to relate to a failure to correctly declare income from Madrid and his image rights when he lived in Spain between 2013 and 2015.
Ancelotti reportedly created an English company during his previous role in charge at Chelsea that allowed him to channel his earnings, paying 10 per cent tax rather than the 45 per cent required under Spanish tax regulations.
The Public Ministry is said to be arguing that Ancelotti acted "with the intention of unjustifiably evading his obligations to the public treasury."
The well-traveled former Juventus, Bayern Munich and Napoli boss has the option to pay the tax debt and a corresponding fine or make a counter challenge through a court trial, which can risk a custodial sentence in the most extreme of cases.
The outlet said that the treasury has demanded that all of Ancelotti's income should be made available to settle the issue.
“It is an ongoing dispute," Ancelotti said in a press conference while he was leading the Toffees in the Premier League last year, adding that he was "not so worried".
"A lot of players and a lot of managers have had the same problem in Spain. I leave it in hands of my lawyers. They are the experts."
Ancelotti's abrupt restoration as Madrid boss earlier this month, replacing Zinedine Zidane, was widely seen as a surprise after he guided Everton to a tenth-placed finish in the English top flight in his first season in charge.
President Vladimir Putin has revealed that he continues to oppose compulsory vaccination against Covid-19, despite the country’s ever-worsening case numbers. He did, however, encourage all citizens to get inoculated.
Speaking at his annual ‘Direct Line’ call-in show on Wednesday, Putin noted that mass vaccine uptake is the only way to halt the further spread of Covid-19, but said he would not force any Russians to take the jab.
“I once said, as you may recall, that I do not support compulsory vaccination. And I continue to hold the same point of view,” he explained.
Last month, Putin revealed his view that inoculation should not be forced on the population, but each person should choose to get it voluntarily after realizing its importance.
The president’s comments come as many Russian regions have introduced compulsory jabs for workers in certain sectors. In Moscow, Mayor Sergey Sobyanin signed a decree making vaccination mandatory for employees in a range of public-facing industries, including catering, transport, and museums. Those who refuse to be injected will not be sacked but may face suspension without pay until the pandemic has subsided.
Putin did, however, note that he supports the legal rights of local government to impose compulsory vaccinations, even if he does not agree with creating a mandatory program at federal level. Critics have argued that's a way of shifting responsibility away from the Kremlin.
The president also revealed that 23 million Russians have been vaccinated against the virus, and encouraged more citizens to join those who have been jabbed. Thus far, the country has approved four domestic Covid-19 vaccines, with Sputnik V being most well-known. On ‘Direct Line,’ Putin revealed this was the shot he'd received in March.
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June 30, 2021 at 01:49AM
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Kim Jong-un has revealed that North Korea is facing a “great crisis,” as he dismisses party officials for neglect of duty over their failure to implement measures to protect citizens from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The North Korean leader held a meeting with members of the workers’ party to chastise officials for failing to protect citizens by implementing measures to tackle the pandemic, dismissing some senior figures for neglecting their duty, according to a report by North Korea’s state news agency, KCNA, on Wednesday.
While KCNA did not provide specific details about the situation, it described Kim Jong-un as declaring that the country was suffering from a “great crisis” that was caused by officials having “neglected the implementation of the important decisions” that would ensure “the security of the state and safety of the people.”
The dismissals come despite North Korea not confirming that it has had any Covid-19 cases, even as South Korea and US officials suggest otherwise. However, the Asian nation has implemented stringent measures, such as border closures and travel restrictions, to prevent the import of new strains of the virus.
Responding to the North Korean leader’s actions, South Korea’s vice foreign minister, Choi Jong-kun, said Seoul had nothing further to add, other than reiterating that it had expressed a “willingness to help” Pyongyang fight the pandemic, offering “whatever you can imagine.”
In July last year, North Korea announced it had declared a state of emergency, locking down a border town over concerns that a defector had illegally returned across the border from South Korea with symptoms of Covid-19. However, it did not provide further information about the individual’s condition, whether they had been tested for coronavirus, or how extensive its subsequent spread might have been.
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June 30, 2021 at 01:35AM
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The reported death of 41-year-old Romanian bitcoin billionaire Mircea Popescu has raised a lot of questions about what happens to his vast crypto fortune.
If the billionaire had not established a prior arrangement for others to access his wallets, those tokens may end up being lost forever.
RT’s Boom Bust talks with author of 'Liberty or Lockdown' Jeffrey Tucker, to get his take on the issue.
A Russian space freighter taking fuel, water, food, and oxygen to the International Space Station was launched from a Soyuz carrier rocket early on Wednesday morning, blasting off from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan.
The vessel, named Progress MS-17, is now en route to the Space Station, where it will dock and provide supplies for the crew of Expedition 65. The trip will take two days, and Progress MS will remain attached to the artificial satellite for a few months.
The spacecraft entered orbit approximately nine minutes after the launch, when it separated from the Soyuz-2.1a rocket. Baikonur is a cosmodrome in Kazakhstan that is leased by Russia.
The cargo carried by the freighter includes 470 kg of fuel, 420 liters of drinking water, and 40 kg of air and oxygen, as well as 1,509 kg of equipment and materials, including maintenance kits, medical supplies, clothes, and food rations.
The Progress MS vehicle is an improvement of the Soviet Progress freighter from 1978. The newest version, first launched in December 2015, has regularly been sent to deliver supplies to astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station.
Earlier this month, Russian space agency chief Dmitry Rogozin revealed that Moscow would withdraw from the International Space Station if Washington continues to impose sanctions against the country’s space sector. As things stand, US measures against Russia are causing severe problems for the space program.
If Russia leaves the ISS, it will create its own orbital space station called ROSS. Earlier this year, President Vladimir Putin signed off on plans to build the Russian project, which will consist of three to seven modules and will be able to carry up to four people.
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June 30, 2021 at 12:44AM
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Despite initially refusing to say which of two domestic coronavirus vaccines he received in March, Russia's President Vladimir Putin announced on Wednesday that he was given two doses of the country's pioneering Sputnik V formula.
DETAILS TO FOLLOW
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June 30, 2021 at 12:40AM
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France’s President of the Scientific Council Jean-François Delfraissy has warned of a potential fourth wave of Covid-19 that will hit the country in autumn, based on trends from last year and the presence of the Delta variant.
In an interview with France Inter on Wednesday, Delfraissy raised the possibility of a fourth wave in France. Even though cases appear to be decreasing domestically, another surge cannot be ruled out, he claimed.
“There is this contrast between the extremely low-incidence figures in France, which are falsely reassuring in some respects. Because we’re going to have a summer where each of us – me, the first – we’ll relax, we want to live, I understand it perfectly. We have the notion that there is vaccination. And we must remember last summer. We were at roughly comparable figures at the end of June 2020, and we saw the second wave arrive from September,” Delfraissy explained.
While general trends show that France’s case rates and hospitalizations continue to decrease, he implored the population to “be realistic and conscious” about the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic.
On Tuesday, French Minister for Health Olivier Veran shared details showing that the Delta variant now accounts for one in five cases in the country.
However, Delfraissy offered some positive news suggesting that, due to increased vaccination, the fourth wave would be different to the previous three as inoculations offer more protection. Some 21.7 million people in France have been fully vaccinated as of June 28.
France is not alone in predicting a potentially bad winter ahead, as a top UK Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) member, Professor Andrew Hayward, said that a fourth wave wasn’t just possible, but likely.
France’s daily average of cases stands at around 1,815. In comparison to last autumn, the country recorded a staggering 58,665 cases in a single day after infections began to creep up in September, but skyrocketed in November. Deaths have continued to fall since April, and the country reported 33 mortalities on Tuesday. The average daily rate of new hospitalizations is around 127 people, down 22.1% since last week.
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June 30, 2021 at 12:35AM
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The Iranian armed forces have launched a large-scale military exercise in an area of the Caspian Sea of around 77,000 square kilometers (48,000 square miles), testing naval and airborne units as well as electronic warfare systems.
On Wednesday morning, the naval and airborne units of the Iranian armed forces began their Amaniyat-e Paydar (Sustainable Security) 1400 naval drill, which saw the participation of several units, including fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and naval drones.
According to local media, the exercises test the interoperability of Iranian hardware and the use of missile launchers and electronic warfare systems in simulated wargames.
The armed forces will simulate both offensive and defensive scenarios, testing their capacity to protect the country’s territorial waters and maintain transportation lines.
۱/۲🔻 رزمایش امنیت پایدار در دریای خزر آغاز شد
🔹رزمایش دریایی امنیت پایدار ۱۴۰۰ نیروی دریایی ارتش جمهوری اسلامی ایران و با ارسال پیام صلح و دوستی در آب ها خرز آغاز شد.خبرگزاری مهر، تمرین دریایی امنیت پایدار ۱۴۰۰، با شرکت انواع یگان های سطحی و پروازی نیروی دریایی ارتش اعم از pic.twitter.com/RKHfOwCq5c
تمرین دریایی امنیت پایدار ۱۴۰۰ نیروی دریایی ارتش با رمز مقدس یا حسین علیه السلام و با ارسال پیام صلح و دوستی از صبح امروز در آبهای دریای خزر آغاز شد. pic.twitter.com/QF4oXVY11y
Iran occupies approximately 20% of the Caspian Sea, which it shares with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan. It has carried out several drills, some of them naval, over the past year, both putting new defense technologies to the test and showing the world its military might.
In January, it undertook a two-day naval drill, known as Eghtedar (Authority) 99, to test its ability to “react in a timely and effective manner” against enemy threats, according to the navy’s deputy commander for coordination, Rear Admiral Hamzeh Ali Kaviani.
Iran has attempted to bolster its naval capacity amid increased animosity with the US and its Western allies, launching the indigenously developed Makran forward base ship and more than 300 armed speedboats.
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June 30, 2021 at 12:25AM
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When it comes to politics, nothing is sacred – not even the past. World War II is no exception, and the inconvenient truths about how Nazi Germany was crushed have been a frequent target for those who seek to rewrite history.
A recent example has been a Twitter controversy caused by Professor Asatar Bair who has tried to make the case for, in his words, Stalin’s “successes as a leader,” in particular with respect to the Soviet-German war of 1941-1945.
Here’s why that’s completely mistaken. As in upside-down wrong. And how that’s an error with a long, dark history that needs to end already.
First, it is important to make a clear distinction: the question of Stalin’s contribution (or not) to the victory over fascism in World War II is not at all the same as that of which country made the single greatest contribution to this outcome. That question has long had a very clear answer: it is impossible to dispute that it was the Soviet Union which ripped the heart out of fascism’s mid-20th century efforts to form a brutal Eurasian empire. Both in terms of the sacrifices its people made and the scale of German military losses its armies inflicted, the USSR was crucial to smashing the Third Reich.
That Soviet victory was all the more striking given that, in the first months of the invasion – codenamed Operation Barbarossa – things went very badly for the Soviet side. And yet, between the Battle of Moscow in the winter of 1941 and the Battle of Kursk, two years later, everything had changed.
Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, by 1945, the Red Army was hoisting the hammer and sickle over Berlin. Adolf Hitler’s forces, who had fought with tremendous cruelty to establish an ethnically cleansed slave empire in what the Germans then termed“the East,” were not only defeated but wiped off the map.
However, in the Cold War-era West, historical memory stopped short of fully acknowledging the USSR’s role in this victory. It was inconvenient in more than one way. Did it mean that the Soviet system and its values, even in its Stalinist form, could triumph over a capitalist economy like the Third Reich’s? Did the grim determination of the country to win the war despite all odds show that its economy, wasteful as it was, could be a formidable force when mobilized for war? And was the Soviet Union still a force to be reckoned with were a putative war to break out with the West?
Western bias led to absurd stereotypes, still often regurgitated, featuring “primitive” Soviet soldiers dragooned into battle at every step, against their will, by machine-gun-toting NKVD troops. In more than one Western account of the Battle of Stalingrad, where the Soviets turned the tide of the war and struck a blow for the Allies on all fronts, more empathy has been lavished on the Germans than the Soviets.
In mainstream popular culture, a mix of denial and amnesia mostly prevailed. During the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, it was Hollywood that made some of the most disingenuous pro-Stalinist propaganda movies of all times – such as 1943’s ‘The North Star’ and ‘Mission to Moscow’. But by 1962, a big-budget, all-star feature like ‘The Longest Day’ was focusing on the Western front instead. By exclusively elevating the 1944 D-Day landings in France, the film left a strong – and historically misleading – impression that they had been the real turning-point of the war, more than two years after the decisive Battle of Stalingrad. It was produced with massive support from several NATO states and their militaries.
Yet Western Cold War warriors were not the only ones who rewrote history. So did Stalin and his sympathizers, including some Western communists. In essence, their story was simple: the victory over Nazi Germany – the greatest and most life-or-death triumph not only in Soviet but Russian history – was Stalin’s work.
His genius, so this great-man-makes-history-on-steroids tale goes, saved the homeland, defeated fascism, and secured unprecedented international power for the Soviet Union. The contribution of normal people who suffered in factories and on the front line was greatly downplayed, most egregiously by massively deflating the number of Soviet casualties.
The communist leader, in reality, did what he could – which was a lot – to steal a personal victory from the Soviet Union’s population. When the war was finally over, a combined total of about 27 million civilians and soldiers lay dead, and that was only a part of the general devastation. They faced a government that became one horrendous disappointment. Instead of continuing the (relative) liberalization measures of wartime, the authorities tightened the screws again. Instead of truly honoring the dead and those whose bodies and souls were scarred forever by horror and loss, it told the survivors to fawn over Stalin’s wise strategies.
This lie did not survive for long after Stalin’s death. In his very public “Secret Speech” of 1956, Khrushchev attacked not only some of his predecessor’s domestic repressions, but also his record as a war leader. As with Khrushchev’s approach to revising the former leader’s reputation in general, the criticism was incomplete and contradictory. But the gist was clear – Stalin was dethroned as military genius and even blamed for the abysmal cost of the victory.
And rightly so. Stalin’s mistakes before and during the war against Nazi Germany were terrible and too numerous to be fully spelled out. Perhaps the single most bizarre instance was his initial disbelief towards the scores of credible warnings of the German attack. But there was more: Stalin decimated the Soviet officer corps in his prewar purges, thereby psychologically hobbling those who were left. He meddled in military questions he did not understand, such as how best to deploy tanks. In international politics, he bizarrely misinterpreted the Spanish Civil War as, most of all, yet another place to fight the shadow of Trotskyism. And, moreover, he was decisive in the insane Comintern policy of targeting other socialists as “social fascists,” thereby sabotaging broad anti-fascist coalitions until it was too late.
During the first trying days of collapse and rout that followed the start of Nazi Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union, Stalin almost gave up. He retreated to one of his dachas and, apparently, expected his inner circle to remove, punish, and quite likely kill him. Yet, instead, they asked him to return to the helm, which he did. After that though, he continued to meddle in military decisions, creating more costly mistakes.
But, over time, he also seems to have done one thing that his chief opponent Hitler signally failed to do. Stalin came to tacitly accept the expertise of generals who knew better than he did, as long as they were politically submissive and provided he could claim the laurels of victory. That is very little to say in his defense, and there really isn’t much else to add to his credit – even if some historians, both in the West and the former Soviet Union, have said otherwise. They risk committing the fallacy of mistaking archival evidence supporting the fact Stalin was there to lead for proof that he was “indispensable” to the war effort. Remaining at the helm and steering the ship in the right direction are two very different skills.
Unfortunately, more than half a century after Khrushchev’s “Secret” Speech, some have still not caught up with historical reality, in Russia and elsewhere. No, Stalin cannot be redeemed by the claim that he made an important contribution to the victory over fascism. The Soviet people did that, as the greatest novelist of the war, Vasily Grossman, stressed.
The communist leader, if anything, made it only harder and costlier. And on top of all that, he then tried to deprive them of the memory of their enormous sacrifice and their historic achievement. If you still want to credit Stalin for winning the war, you perpetuate his lie.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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June 30, 2021 at 12:22AM
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An investigation is underway into the suspected hacking of South Korea’s defense aviation producer Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI), with one lawmaker pointing the finger at North Korea as the likely culprit.
KAI is a major aircraft manufacturer with close ties to the South Korean military, which is currently developing the KF-21 Boramae, a 4.5-generation fighter jet. On Tuesday, local media revealed that the company’s servers may recently have been hacked. KAI responded with a short statement, confirming that, on Monday, it had contacted law enforcement about an alleged breach of its security and had offered investigators its full cooperation.
According to news agency Yonhap’s sources, the company’s systems had been penetrated at least twice this year, with the perpetrators gaining access to several sensitive projects and likely stealing “a large quantity of documents.”
In addition to working on the KF-21, KAI manufactures T-50 Golden Eagle supersonic trainer/light fighter jets, RQ-101 Songgolmae multipurpose drones and KSLV-II space launch rockets. It has also been involved in several joint projects with international defense contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Opposition lawmaker Ha Tae-keung, who sits on the South Korean parliament’s intelligence committee, said the defense procurement agency had informed him and other committee members about the suspected hacking last month, but was not forthcoming with any further details about the incidents. He suggested the hackers had been working for North Korea and were the same team that had previously allegedly attacked Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME), another major defense manufacturer.
DSME is one of South Korea’s three big shipbuilders, and is currently producing advanced Dosan Ahn Changho-class attack submarines for the navy. The alleged theft of classified documents from the company by unidentified hackers was reported earlier this month.
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June 30, 2021 at 12:19AM
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Russian President Vladimir Putin is holding his traditional live Questions & Answers session on Tuesday afternoon. The event comes as Russia is struggling to cope with a new wave of Covid-19 infection, driven by the Delta Variant.
This year marks the eighteenth edition of Putin’s long-format conversation with the country. He has now taken part in sixteen of them as president, and four as prime-minister.
Some of the previous sessions were over four hours long, with dozens of questions posed by both the journalistic corps and ordinary people to the Russian leader.
The event usually focuses on domestic affairs, with the threat of Covid-19 pandemic currently being among the most pressing issues in the country. However, foreign journalists regularly ask Putin about Russia’s position on the global stage, so comments on international relations can often also make the headlines.
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June 30, 2021 at 12:07AM
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