On September 11, 2001, I was on a flight out of Srinagar, the capital of what was then the state of Jammu and Kashmir, to New Delhi, the capital of India.
Back then, the airport was like a fortress. I was a young officer having my last thrill by riding around on the machine gun nests of military trucks and walking to posts on the Line of Control between India and Pakistan. Some of the fighters we had been facing were battle-hardened Pashtuns who would come swinging down from Afghanistan, which was then (as now) ruled by the Taliban.
After my flight reached its destination, I went to my parents’ home and unpacked my uniform. In a few days, I would leave for Oxford to read for a Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree that would change my life. My parents and I were having a late dinner when a fellow officer, now in India’s Intelligence Bureau, called on our landline. (In those days, we did not yet have mobile phones.) He told me that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York were crumbling after a spectacular terrorist attack.
The following is a piece about the man who engineered those attacks and changed the world as we knew it that day.
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A story of a chap named Osama
Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden, better known as Osama bin Laden, was the one of more than 50 children of Muhammad bin Laden, a self-made billionaire who made his fortune executing construction projects for the Saudi royal family. Osama’s mother, Hamida al-Attas, was Syrian whom good old Muhammad divorced promptly after the child’s birth. Muhammad recommended Hamida to an associate, Muhammad al-Attas, with whom she had four more children. Of his father’s $5 billion, Osama inherited $25–30 million.
Osama reportedly liked reading the works of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and French President and General Charles de Gaulle. Osama also played football — soccer for our American friends — as a center forward. He was an Arsenal fan.
For all his wealth and Western interests, Osama was discontented with the state of the world. As a devout Sunni Muslim, his main interests were the Quran and jihad. In 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Osama left for Pakistan and used his own money to fund the mujahideen fighting the Soviets. Soon, he was in bed with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who were fighting Charlie Wilson’s War to give the Soviets a bloody nose.
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The carousing and cavorting Congressman Wilson funded the mujahideen lavishly. Yet this did not endear Wilson’s beloved homeland to Osama. This pious Muslim (who left behind 20–26 children and probably had more sex than the playboy Wilson) founded al-Qaeda in 1988. As per the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the goal of this organization was a worldwide jihad. Osama was virulently opposed to American presence on Muslim lands, especially his native Saudi Arabia.
Osama began training young men in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan to unleash a campaign of terror against the US. On February 26, 1993, two al-Qaeda operatives drove a van packed with explosives into the public parking garage beneath the World Trade Center and set off a big blast. Six people, including a pregnant woman, died, and over a thousand were injured. The FBI arrested five of the seven plotters promptly and found the mastermind Ramzi Yousef later in Pakistan.
Yousef’s plan was to topple North Tower with his bomb, and the collapsing debris of this tower was to knock down South Tower. This cunning plan failed, but his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, succeeded in knocking the towers down more than eight years later.
The 9/11 attacks (known this way because unlike the British or the Europeans, Americans put the month before the day) involved 19 of Osama’s boys four hijacking planes and flying them to kamikaze-style suicide attacks on chosen targets. A third plane struck the Pentagon, and a fourth, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was apparently meant to hit the White House. Osama’s Pakistani henchman had pulled off a huge massacre on a shoestring budget, killing 2,997 people and injuring an estimated 25,000. Now, Osama had worldwide attention for his global jihad.
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The US tilts at windmills
The 9/11 attacks led to mourning and shock in the US. Even the Japanese had only struck Pearl Harbor in distant Hawaii, which was not even a state yet. Osama had managed to strike the mainland US itself. This was a really big deal.
Later, the 9-11 Commission Reportconcluded that Osama’s al-Qaeda was “sophisticated, patient, disciplined, and lethal.” Osama had issued two fatwas, one in August 1996 and in February 1998, calling for a jihad against the US. He declared that it was more important for Muslims to kill Americans than to kill other infidels. This charming chap was inspired by Egyptian Islamist author Sayyid Qutb and rationalized “unprovoked mass murder as righteous defense of an embattled faith.”
The murderous ideology that had inflicted such spectacular 9/11 attacks was bound to provoke a response. Under George W. Bush, who was not as bright as his father George H. W. Bush, this came in the form of the War on Terror, later jargonized as the Global War on Terror (GWOT). The US rushed into Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban and succeeded speedily. Then, they engaged in a quixotic endeavor to build democracy in this famously fractious, mountainous land.
The US installed one notoriously corrupt leader after another into office. These men stole hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars. In the end, US darlings Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani became lackeys of the Taliban, who are now back in power despite the blood and treasure successive US administrations poured into Afghanistan.
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More importantly, the GWOT morphed into an invasion of Iraq in 2003. This was both unwise and unnecessary. Certainly, Saddam Hussein was no lovey dovey cuddly teddy bear. He was a murderer fond of chemical weapons and had gassed both Shia Arabs and ethnic minority Kurds.
Hussein had invaded Iran (in 1980) and Kuwait (in 1990) as well. The latter provoked the 1990–1991 Gulf War, where US troops annihilated Iraqi forces spectacularly. By 2003, Hussein’s Iraq was a shell of its former self. Besides, Hussein was a Baathist — a political philosophy that advocates a single Arab socialist nation — and no friend to al-Qaeda. Yet deranged American neoconservatives — many of whom were the children of Trotskyites — argued that Hussein would collaborate with Osama to unleash weapons of mass destruction on the US. This argument was bunkum but, just like their fathers, neoconservatives did not let reality get in the way of ideology. As a result, more American blood and treasure were lost.
The Iraq War destroyed the goodwill the US had attracted after the 9/11 attacks. Few people around the world bought the neoconservative bullshit. Even old allies like France and Germany refused to go along. Tony Blair valiantly sided with Bush Junior but lost his reputation at home for doing so.
Worse, the US under Bush Junior justified torture. My co-author Glenn Carle, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) with nine ancestors on the Mayflower, resigned from the CIA and wrote The Interrogator, a riveting read that captures the madness of this era. Needless to say, this US recourse to torture damaged its reputation globally and caused a crisis of confidence in the idea of America at home.
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The US takes its eye off the ball
Arguably, the US has been the greatest superpower in history. The 9/11 attacks were spectacular, but they were perpetrated by little men in the shadows. Crazy ideologies always come up from time to time, and Islamist fanaticism is not new. Muslim countries tend to have very few minorities for a reason. After all, believers have a religious duty to convert everyone to Islam. Fanatical Muslims have resorted to torture and murder in their aim to convert pagans and dissenters from truth with a capital T. The medieval Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and the more modern Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini are just two examples from a long line of crazy nutters.
If the neoconservatives had read some history, they would have realized that the War on Terror was a bloody stupid idea. You can go to war against a state, but not against an idea, especially not if this idea has been around for a long time and just refuses to die. Plenty of disgruntled young men and even others need a villain whom they can blame for everything. When an ideology offers 72 virgins in heaven, it is an attractive proposition to many testosterone-filled fanatics.
The US got distracted by the War on Terror and ignored other key developments. Few remember that 2001 is not only the year of the 9/11 attacks but also the year in which China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO). Enter the Dragon was the blockbuster movie Americans somehow missed. The 2016 paper “The China Shock” explains how the entry of China into the global market deindustrialized many economies and depressed worker wages as well. The Rust Belt, where much of Donald Trump’s core support base lives, is a classic example of this shock.
Anyway, fast forward to today and a new Cold War, which includes a full-blown trade war, has broken out between the US and China. If the US had woken up to the Chinese challenge earlier, this would have been entirely avoidable.
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There is also an argument to be made that the US was blind to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tightening grip on power. For years, the US and its allies, especially the UK, were happy to enjoy Russian cash pilfered from oligarchs from Mother Russia. They never really used their leverage against Putin to contain him or, earlier, to help build a Russian economy that was less extractive or exploitative.
To this day, Russians blame Bush Junior for unilaterally pulling out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that prohibited both countries from “deploying nationwide defenses against strategic ballistic missiles.” Putin had promised the US full support after 9/11, and Russians still view the US abandonment of ABM as a stab in the back. Fueled by irrational fears post-9/11, it was entirely unnecessary and extremely unwise.
A weaker, more divided post-9/11 US
I am convinced that many neoconservatives were well-meaning. I met some of them during my time at Oxford. Some of them were Rhodes Scholars and were convinced that an American invasion would lead to democracy. By their logic, there would be rivers of milk and honey in the region, and everyone would sing kumbaya. This is exactly what many Bolsheviks believed in 1917. Yet what they got was lovely Joseph Stalin’s paranoid mass killings and secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria’s rampant raping.
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Naive neoconservatives forgot that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. The invasion of Iraq was followed by the rise of the Islamic State and a savage civil war that spilled out into Syria, where the Russians got involved. A former commandant of Sandhurst (the legendary British military academy) who came from a gloriously imperial family remarked to me in 2003 that the borders in the Middle East were all in the wrong place. Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot had not quite got everything right. Yet the trouble is, where do you draw new lines in this famously volatile region? Neoconservatives shook the hornet’s nest, and the results will remain with us for decades to come.
Japan and Germany after World War II were relatively homogenous industrial societies. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq was one. Both are multiethnic concoctions where the idea of a Westphalian state is still an alien import. The likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Bremer were infernally arrogant and criminally ignorant in their policy prescriptions. De-Baathification in Iraq led to the disbanding of the military, the police, the firefighters, the teachers, the doctors and other employees of Hussein’s state. To survive, not just thrive, everyone joined the Baathist Party. Instead of creating a thriving democracy, neoconservatives unleashed chaos and civil war. We are still reaping the bitter harvests of the toxic seeds they sowed.
Like the War on Drugs and the War on Crime, the War on Terror failed. Simplistic solutions to complex problems always fail, even when they may seem successful for decades. Neither Nazi Germany nor Soviet Russia were able to create the utopias they promised. Instead, both led to nightmares. So did the War on Terror.
Osama’s aim was to weaken the US. He succeeded. Trump won the presidency first by defenestrating Jeb Bush from the Republican Party and then by beating Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. The reality television star blamed both of them for the Iraq War. The neoconservatives’ chest-thumping form of American nationalism had paved the way for him. Trump offered a rawer version of patriotism to those on the Right who feared that America had become weak. To them, “Make America Great Again” proved to be an irresistible offer.
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At the same time, the Left lost faith in the idea of America. American campuses started viewing the CIA and the FBI as sinister organizations. Many young Americans see their country as an unjust superpower dominated by the military-industrial complex. Osama had blamed the Great Satan — the term used in many Muslim countries for the US — for the sad plight of Palestine and Lebanon. Thousands of students camping in campuses seem to agree.
The Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan. Terrorism still persists even though we have avoided a repeat of 9/11-style spectacular attacks. Airport security is a pain in the wrong part of the anatomy because no one wants to be on a plane headed into a monument. No one trusts President Joe Biden’s democracy agenda because they have seen this American movie before. The soft power that Harvard Kennedy School’s Joseph Nye speaks of stands greatly damaged. Worst of all, a coarsened, far more divided US seems ill-prepared to lead a more fractious world.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
Tidal action on the underside of the Thwaites Glacier in the Antarctic will “inexorably” accelerate melting this century, according to new research by British and American scientists. The researchers warn the faster melting could destabilize the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, leading to its eventual collapse.
The massive glacier—which is roughly the size of Florida—is of particular interest to scientists because of the rapid speed at which it is changing and the impact its loss would have on sea levels (the reason for its “Doomsday” moniker). It also acts as an anchor holding back the West Antarctic ice sheet.
Yasin Demirci—Anadolu/Getty Images
More than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) thick in places, Thwaites has been likened to a cork in a bottle. Were it to collapse, sea levels would rise by 65 centimeters (26 inches). That’s already a significant amount, given oceans are currently rising 4.6 millimeters a year. But if it led to the eventual loss of the entire ice sheet, sea levels would rise 3.3 meters.
While some computer models suggest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions under the 2015 Paris Agreement may mitigate the glacier’s retreat, the outlook for the glacier remains “grim,” according to a report by the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), a project that includes researchers from the British Antarctic Survey, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.K.’s Natural Environment Research Council.
Thwaites has been retreating for more than 80 years but that process has accelerated in the past 30, Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist who contributed to the research, said in a news release. “Our findings indicate it is set to retreat further and faster.” Other dynamics that aren’t currently incorporated into large-scale models could speed up its demise, the new research shows.
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Using a torpedo-shaped robot, scientists determined that the underside of Thwaites is insulated by a thin layer of cold water. However, in areas where the parts of the glacier lift off the seabed and the ice begins to float, tidal action is pumping warmer sea water, at high pressure, as far as 10 kilometers under the ice. The process is disrupting that insulating layer and will likely significantly speed up how fast the grounding zone—the area where the glacier sits on the seabed—retreats.
A similar process has been observed on glaciers in Greenland.
The group also flagged a worst-case scenario in which 100-meter-or-higher ice cliffs at the front of Thwaites are formed and then rapidly calve off icebergs, causing runaway glacial retreat that could raise sea levels by tens of centimeters in this century. However, the researchers said it’s too early to know if such scenarios are likely.
A key unanswered question is whether the loss of Thwaites Glacier is already irreversible. Heavy snowfalls, for example, regularly occur in the Antarctic and help replenish ice loss, Michelle Maclennan, a climate scientist with the University of Colorado at Boulder, explained during a news briefing. “The problem though is that we have this imbalance: There is more ice loss occurring than snowfall can compensate for,” she said.
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Increased moisture in the planet’s atmosphere, caused by global warming evaporating ocean waters, could result in more Antarctic snow—at least for a while. At a certain point, though, that’s expected to switch over to rain and surface melting on the ice, creating a situation where the glacier is melting from above and below. How fast that happens depends in part on nations’ progress to slow climate change.
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Britain’s foreign secretary David Lammy is pushing for an emergency top-up to development spending as ballooning costs of supporting asylum seekers threaten to drain overseas aid to its lowest level since 2007.
The UK government spent £4.3bn hosting asylum seekers and refugees in Britain in the last financial year, more than a quarter of its £15.4bn overseas aid budget, according to official data. This more than consumed the £2.5bn increases in the aid budget scheduled between 2022 and 2024 by former Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt.
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People familiar with Lammy’s thinking say he fears that if Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, resists calls to at least match Hunt’s offer, the aid budget will be further eviscerated, undermining the government’s ambitions on the global stage.
Currently, the housing of asylum seekers in hotels is controlled by the Home Office but largely paid for out of the aid budget, a set-up introduced in 2010 when spending on the programme was relatively modest.
In the longer term, development agencies and some Foreign Office officials want the costs capped or paid for by the Home Office itself.
However, such a move would be politically fraught, the people said, as it would require billions of pounds of extra funding for the Home Office at a time the government is preparing widespread cuts across departments.
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Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, is due to attend a string of upcoming international events, starting with the UN general assembly this month, then a Commonwealth summit in Samoa, a G20 meeting in Brazil, and COP-29 climate talks in Azerbaijan later this autumn.
International partners will be looking at these meetings for signs that the change of government in the UK marks a change in direction on development.
Britain’s leading role was eroded by Rishi Sunak after he cut the previously ringfenced spending from 0.7 per cent of gross national income to 0.5 per cent when he was chancellor in 2020.
“When he turns up at the UN next week and the G20 and COP a few weeks later, the PM has a unique opportunity to reintroduce the UK under Labour as a trustworthy partner that sees the opportunity of rebooting and reinvesting in a reformed fairer international financial system,” said Jamie Drummond, co-founder of aid advocacy group One.
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“But to be that trusted partner you need to be an intentional investor — not an accidental cutter.”
Speaking on Tuesday in a speech outlining UK ambitions to regain a leading role in the global response to climate change, Lammy said the government wanted to get back to spending 0.7 per cent of GNI on overseas aid but that it could not be done overnight.
“Part of the reason the funding has not been there is because climate has driven a migration crisis,” he said. “We have ended up in this place where we made a choice to spend development aid on housing people across the country and having a huge accommodation and hotel bill as a consequence,” he said.
Under OECD rules, some money spent in-country on support for refugees and asylum seekers can be classified as aid because it constitutes a form of humanitarian assistance.
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But the amount the UK has been spending on refugees from its aid budget has shot up from an average of £20mn a year between 2009-2013 to £4.3bn last year, far more than any other OECD donor country, according to Bond, the network of NGOs working in international development.
Spending per refugee from the aid budget has also risen from an average of £1,000 a year in 2009-2013 to around £21,500 in 2021, largely as a result of the use of hotels to accommodate asylum seekers.
The Independent Commission for Aid Impact watchdog argues that the Home Office has had little incentive to manage the funds carefully because they come from a different department’s budget.
In her July 29 speech outlining the dire fiscal straits that Labour inherited from the previous Conservative government, Reeves projected the cost of the asylum system would rise to £6.4bn this year.
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Labour was hoping to cut this by at least £800mn, she said, by ending plans to deport migrants to Rwanda. A Home Office official said the government was also ensuring that asylum claims were dealt with faster and those ineligible deported quickly.
But the Foreign Office projects that on current trends, overseas aid as a proportion of UK income (when asylum costs are factored in) will drop to 0.35 per cent of national income by 2028.
Without emergency funding to plug the immediate cost of housing tens of thousands of migrants in hotels, that will happen as soon as this year, according to Bond, bringing overseas aid levels to their lowest as a proportion of national income, since 2007.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: “The UK’s future [official development assistance] budget will be announced at the Budget. We would not comment on speculation.”
Preview of The Economist’s Espresso app and Ludwig Siegele, The Economist’s senior editor, AI initiatives. Pictures: The Economist
The Economist has deployed AI-translated content on its budget-friendly “snack-sized” app Espresso after deciding the technology had reached the “good enough” mark.
Ludwig Siegele, senior editor for AI initiatives at The Economist, told Press Gazette that AI translation will never be a “solved problem”, especially in journalism because it is difficult to translate well due to its cultural specificities.
Espresso has also just been made free to high school and university students aged 16 and older globally as part of a project by The Economist to make its journalism more accessible to audiences around the world.
Siegele said that amid “lots of hype” about AI, the questions to ask are: “What is it good for? Does it work? And does it work with what we’re trying to do?”
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He added that the project to make The Economist’s content “more accessible to more people” via Espresso was a “good point to start”.
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“The big challenge of AI is the technology, at least for us, is not good enough,” he continued. “It’s interesting, but to really develop a product, I think in many cases, it’s not good enough yet. But in that case, it worked.
“I wouldn’t say that translation is a solved problem, it is never going to be a solved problem, especially in journalism, because journalism is really difficult to translate. But it’s good enough for that type of content.”
The Economist is using AI translation tool DeepL alongside its own tech on the backend.
“It’s quite complicated,” Siegele said. “The translation is the least of it at this point. The translation isn’t perfect. If you look at it closely it has its quirks, but it’s pretty good. And we’re working on a kind of second workflow which makes it even better.”
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The AI-translated text is not edited by humans because, Siegele said, the “workflow is so tight” on Espresso which updates around 20 times a day.
“There is no natural thing where we can say ‘okay, now everything is done. Let’s translate, and let’s look at the translations and make sure they’re perfect’. That doesn’t work… The only thing we can do is, if it’s really embarrassing, we’ll take it down and the next version in 20 minutes will be better.”
One embarrassing example, Siegele admitted, is that the tool turned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz into a woman.
But Siegele said a French reader has already got in touch to say: “I don’t read English. This is great. Finally, I can read The Economist without having to put it into Google Translate and get bad translations.”
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The Economist’s AI-translated social videos
The Economist simultaneously launched AI-translated videos on its social platforms in the same four languages.
The videos are all a maximum of 90 seconds meaning it is not too much work to check them – crucial as, unlike the Espresso article translations, they are edited by humans (native language speakers working for The Economist) taking about 15 minutes per video.
For the videos The Economist is using AI video tool Hey Gen. Siegele said: “The way that works is you give them the original video and they do a provisional translation and then you can proofread the translation. So whereas the translations for the app are basically automatic – I mean, we can take them down and we will be able to change them, but at this point, they’re completely automatic – videos are proofread, and so in this way we can make sure that the translations are really good.”
In addition they are using “voice clones” which means journalists who speak in a video have some snippets of themselves given to Hey Gen to build and that is used to create the finished product.
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The voice clones are not essential, Siegele explained, as translations can be done automatically regardless. Journalists can opt out of having their voices used in this way, and any data stored will be deleted if the employee leaves The Economist. But the clones do mean the quality is “much better”.
They have a labelling system for the app articles and videos that can show they are “AI translated” or “AI transformed”. But, Siegele said, they are “not going to have a long list of AI things we may have used to build this article for brainstorming or fact checking or whatever, because in the end it’s like a tool, it’s like Google search. We are still responsible, and there’s almost always a human except for edge cases like the Espresso translations or with podcast transcripts…”
Economist ‘will be strategic’ when choosing how to roll out AI
Asked whether the text translation could be rolled out to more Economist products, Siegele said: “That’s of course a goal but it remains to be seen.”
He said that although translation for Espresso is automated, it would not be the goal to do the same throughout The Economist.
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He also said they still have to find out if people are “actually interested” and if they can “develop a translation engine that is good enough”.
“But I don’t think we will become a multi-linguistic, multi-language publication anytime soon. We will be much more strategic with what we what we translate… But I think there is globally a lot of demand for good journalism, and if the technology makes it possible, why not expand the access to our content?
“If it’s not too expensive – and it was too expensive before. It’s no longer.”
Other ways The Economist is experimenting with AI, although they have not yet been implemented, include a style bot and fact-checking.
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Expect to see “some kind of summarisation” of articles, Siegele continued, “which probably will go beyond the five bullet points or three bullet points you increasingly see, because that’s kind of table stakes. People expect that. But there are other ways of doing it”.
He also suggested some kind of chatbot but “not an Economist GPT – that’s difficult and people are not that interested in that. Perhaps more narrow chatbots”. And said versioning, or repurposing articles for different audiences or different languages, could also follow.
“The usual stuff,” Siegele said. “There’s only so many good ideas out there. We’re working on all of them.” But he said he wants colleagues to come up with solutions to their problems rather than him as “the AI guy” imposing things.
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A Kentucky sheriff has been arrested after fatally shooting a judge in his chambers, police say.
District Judge Kevin Mullins died at the scene after being shot multiple times in the Letcher County Courthouse, Kentucky State Police said.
Letcher County Sheriff Shawn Stines, 43, has been charged with one count of first-degree murder.
The shooting happened on Thursday after an argument inside the court, police said, but they have not yet revealed a motive.
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Officials said Mullins, 54, was shot multiple times at around 14:00 local time on Thursday at the court in Whitesburg, Kentucky, a small rural town about 150 miles (240km) south-east of Lexington.
Sheriff Stines was arrested at the scene without incident, Kentucky State Police said. They did not reveal the nature of the argument before the shooting.
According to local newspaper the Mountain Eagle, Sheriff Stines walked into the judge’s outer office and told court employees that he needed to speak alone with Mullins.
The two entered the judge’s chambers, closing the door behind them. Those outside heard gun shots, the newspaper reported.
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Sheriff Stines reportedly walked out with his hands up and surrendered to police. He was handcuffed in the courthouse foyer.
The state attorney general, Russell Coleman, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that his office “will fully investigate and pursue justice”.
Kentucky State Police spokesman Matt Gayheart told a news conference that the town was shocked by the incident
“This community is small in nature, and we’re all shook,” he said.
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Mr Gayheart said that 50 employees were inside the court building when the shooting occurred.
No-one else was hurt. A school in the area was briefly placed on lockdown.
Kentucky Supreme Court Chief Justice Laurance B VanMeter said he was “shocked by this act of violence”.
Announcing Judge Mullins’ death on social media, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said: “There is far too much violence in this world, and I pray there is a path to a better tomorrow.”
Electric-vehicle makers boosted Hong Kong stocks on Friday, as major indices rose across the board in the wake of the US Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut.
The Hang Seng index rose 1.8 per cent, with Chinese EV companies Xpeng and Geely Auto adding 9 per cent and 4.8 per cent, respectively.
Japan’s Topix rose 1.5 per cent, while South Korea’s Kospi added 1 per cent.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.4 per cent, led by clinical trial groups Euren Pharmaceuticals and Telix Pharmaceuticals, which gained as much as 6.7 per cent and 4.9 per cent, respectively.
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On Thursday, the S&P 500 gained 1.7 per cent, hitting a new record after the Fed’s half-point rate cut announcement on Wednesday.
A picture of Scarlett Johansson features on the front of Daily Telegraph as she attends the London premiere of film Transformers One which she stars in. The paper leads on Sir Keir Starmer denying he has lost control of Downing Street “despite civil war breaking out at the centre of his government”. It adds tensions in No 10 and questions over chief of staff Sue Gray’s £170,000 salary threaten to overshadow the Labour Party conference.
A funeral in Lebanon is the main picture on the front of the i newspaper. It reports the Middle East is “steps closer to regional war” as Israel bombs southern Lebanon. Armed group Hezbollah was targeted with pager and walkie-talkie attacks. Elsewhere, it says there is a frantic hunt for the mole who leaked Sue Gray’s salary to the BBC.
The Guardian leads with Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah threatening Israel with “tough retribution and just punishment” in a speech on Thursday. He also threatened to strike Israel “where it expects and where it does not”. Hot To Go! singer Chappel Roan also features on the page, telling the paper: “My whole life has changed”.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been provided with a £10bn budget boost by the Bank of England which is increasing pressure on her to ease spending cuts and tax rises, the Times writes. The paper says Labour MPs are calling for the cash to be used to delay scrapping some pensioners’ winter fuel payments.
“Al Fayed ‘a serial rapist’” headlines the Metro as it reports on the BBC investigation into late billionaire and Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed. The papers reports the BBC’s investigation found more than 20 female ex-employees say Mr Al Fayed sexually assaulted or raped them. The Metro writes the tycoon who was “portrayed as the gregarious father” of Diana’s lover Dodi in Netflix’s The Crown “was a monster”.
“Shop of horrors” headlines the Mirror as it picks up the BBC’s story on Mr Al Fayed. The Mirror says at least 100 women are feared to have been sexually abused by the tycoon. It quotes Gemma, his former personal assistant. Speaking to the BBC about Mr Al Fayed, who she accuses of raping her, she said: “He felt like such a powerful man with so much money.”
The Daily Express pictures RAF veteran Jack Barlow who says he survived atomic bomb tests but now asks if he will survive the winter due to his winter fuel payment being “snatched away”.
The Financial Times says consumer confidence in the UK fell sharply in September, wiping out progress made so far this year. The paper observes it comes despite consumers benefiting from cheaper loans, rising real wages and a decrease in inflation. Elsewhere, it pictures people in Lebanon watching the leader of Hezbollah give a speech in which he vowed revenge on Israel.
Tory leadership contender Robert Jenrick has written in the Daily Mail that mass immigration and woke culture have put England’s national identity at risk. He says the ties which bind the nation together are beginning to “fray”. Elsewhere, it reports Mr Starmer is “on the rack” over Ms Gray’s salary and freebies.
The Sun reports Snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan has split from fiancee actress Laila Rouass.
The Daily Star asks “what planet are they on?” It says minister defends “cadger PM’s £100k of freebies” as some pensioners lose the winter fuel payment.
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