Landmark London locations like St Paul’s Cathedral should be no place for protest camps, British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Tuesday, condemning anti-capitalist demonstrators who have pitched their tents there.
There are about 200 tents on the cobbled stones close to St Paul’s, the 17th century church at the heart of London’s financial center. The protesters were blocked from the nearby London Stock Exchange last month.
‘NOT CONSTRUCTIVE’
“The idea of establishing tents in the middle of a city I don’t feel is particularly constructive,” Cameron said.
“I don’t think it’s particularly constructive in Parliament Square and I don’t think it’s particularly constructive in St Paul’s,” Cameron told a parliamentary committee.
Legislators asked Cameron if the protesters, who have set up a makeshift library, tea bar and lecture room in the shadow of the cathedral, were an example of his “Big Society” in action.
NO COMMON CAUSE
Cameron, a Conservative who took office in May last year, has spoken frequently of his desire for communities to take on more responsibility as his coalition rolls back the state, but declined the invitation to make common cause with protesters inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US.
“Protest is, to me, a separate issue,” Cameron said.
“It is certainly a right that people have, but I have got this rather quaint view that you shouldn’t be able to erect tents all over the place,” he said.
“I think protesting is something you, on the whole, should do on two feet rather than lying down — in some cases in a fairly comatose state,” Cameron added.
LONG FIGHT
The British authorities have fought a decade-long battle to try to force anti-war protesters to leave Parliament Square.
They have largely succeeded, but a handful of tents remain on the pavement opposite parliament.
CHURCH QUANDARY
The protests have put the Church of England in a quandary as to how to respond and two senior members of the clergy have resigned from the hierarchy at St Paul’s over their handling of the issue.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England, last week backed Vatican calls for sweeping reforms of the world economic system.
About 4,000 police were expected to be on duty yesterday when students were set to take to the streets close to the cathedral to protest against state spending cuts and higher university fees.
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
RSS