When Saudi Arabia’s ban on women driving ended on Sunday the 24th of June 2018, fashion designer Eman Joharjy and her friends drove to Jeddah’s seafront where they exchanged their car for bicycles. The colourful, embroidered jumpsuit abayas they donned stood out among the sea of women wearing similar loose-fitting full-length robes but in the […]
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Women will hit the roads in Saudi Arabia on Sunday with the lifting of the world’s last ban on female drivers, long seen as an emblem of women’s repression in the conservative kingdom. The move, ordered last September by King Salman, is part of sweeping reforms pushed by his powerful young son Crown Prince Mohammed […]
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British singer and actor Sting called world leaders “half men and cowards” on Saturday for their inability to solve the refugee crisis. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already played down expectations of a breakthrough at hastily-arranged talks among EU leaders on Sunday on the migration dispute dividing Europe and threatening her own government. Austrian Vice […]
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The European Court of Human Rights rejected on Thursday an appeal by Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik who says his near-isolation in prison amounts to inhuman and degrading treatment. Breivik, who has legally changed his name to Fjotolf Hansen, killed 77 people in a car bombing in central Oslo and shooting spree on Utoeya […]
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Italy’s new government plans to carry out a census of the Roma community with an eye to kicking out anyone staying in the country illegally, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said on Monday. “Unfortunately we will have to keep the Italian Roma because we can’t expel them,” Salvini, who is head of the far-right League, told […]
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Senior British political figures joined faith and community leaders on Tuesday to commemorate the anniversary of an attack by a far-right extremist who drove a van into Muslim worshippers leaving a London mosque. Darren Osborne, 48, ploughed his rental van into a crowd leaving Ramadan prayers in Finsbury Park, north London, in the early hours […]
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Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of France’s far right National Front party, has been hospitalised for exhaustion ahead of a trial in which he stands accused of inciting homophobia, a source to him said on Wednesday. The politician – father of Marine Le Pen, who later took up his mantle at the head of […]
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A petition calling on a Polish ‘book fair’ to remove a controversial historian with links to the extreme-right has gained hundreds of signatures from Poles in Britain. The petition, created by Ewa Matusiak, argues: “We, the Polish immigrants, would kindly ask the Mayor to stop upcoming Hate Preachers’ conference, called misleadingly ‘Family Book Fair’.” The […]
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Christian convert Loubna and her husband Kamal marry in a small ceremony in a meeting room of a human rights group in the Moroccan capital, ignoring threats from people in their conservative hometown in the north of the Muslim kingdom. The couple are part of a tiny minority who have converted to Christianity and are […]
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Denmark has banned the wearing of face veils in public, joining France and other European countries in outlawing the burqa and the niqab worn by some Muslim women to uphold what some politicians say are secular and democratic values. Parliament voted on Thursday for the ban proposed by the centre-right government, which says veils are […]
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