Gunman injures Indian student in attack on citizenship protest

Suspected Hindu nationalist went live on Facebook before firing on march against new law

A suspected Hindu nationalist went live on Facebook to warn he was taking his “final journey”, minutes before opening fire on university students protesting against India’s new citizenship law.

One student was reportedly shot in the hand before police arrested the alleged gunman, who timed his attack on Thursday to coincide with the anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 by a Hindu radical.

Related: Indian primary school faces sedition charge after play about citizenship law

The new citizenship law provides a path to citizenship for religious minorities who have immigrated into India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan before 31 December 2014. It explicitly lists Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians as being able to take advantage of the new provisions, excluding Muslims. 

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Rotherham Muslims launch ‘guardian’ group after far-right threats

More than 100 volunteer for community protection after Britain First targets mosques

Members of the Muslim community in Rotherham are launching a neighbourhood protection group with more than 100 volunteers after three mosques were targeted by the far-right.

The new body, which will be styled on the Shomrim group in Jewish communities, said it would aim to provide reassurance and possibly self-defence training for imams in light of the security concerns.

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Asia Bibi: Pakistani woman jailed for blasphemy releases photos in exile

Bibi, freed last year and now in Canada, will release her autobiography on Wednesday

Asia Bibi, the Christian woman who spent eight years on death row in Pakistan for blasphemy, has released two photographs taken in exile, as she prepares for the launch of her autobiography on Wednesday.

The former farm labourer, whose case became one of the most high-profile human rights campaigns in the world, was freed last year and flew to Canada, where she was reunited with her family. They are all believed to be living under assumed identities, at a secret location, as they still receive death threats from extremists.

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How the Middle East's water shortage drives demand for live animal imports

The increasingly dry region relies on imports of sheep and cows from as far as Brazil to satisfy the rapidly growing population

Cows are waiting in pens, on sweet-smelling fresh straw. They have come to Lebanon from Spain, from Romania. In the one end of the alley are two pens packed with enormous Brahman cattle, standing well over six feet with their distinctive humps, all the way from Brazil.

“They are the most aggressive,” says one of the slaughterhouse staff. “It’s just their personalities.”

This week the Guardian’s Animals Farmed series is focussing on the global live animal export trade, which, despite welfare and disease concerns, has quadrupled over the last fifty years.

Related: Two billion and rising: the global trade in live animals in eight charts

Related: Appetite for 'warm meat' drives risk of disease in Hong Kong and China

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Roger Scruton’s brand of conservatism became a licence for bigotry | Jonathan Portes

The thinker eulogised by the Conservative establishment did much to shape today’s anti-immigrant climate

Since Roger Scruton’s death on Sunday, virtually the entire Conservative establishment has united in eulogising him. The prime minister hailed him as “the greatest modern conservative thinker”; Daniel Hannan called him “the greatest conservative of our age”. But when it comes to politics, Scruton’s greatest contribution has been to help make a modernised version of Enoch Powell’s bigotry – the idea that it is impossible for immigrants to integrate successfully – part of the mainstream debate.

Writing in Powell’s defence, Scruton once attacked liberal politicians for believing “the proposition that pious Muslims from the hinterlands of Asia would produce children loyal to a secular European state”. He was clear that just being born and brought up here didn’t make someone “one of us”; indeed, for certain ethnic and religious categories, the very idea was laughable. His view that Christianity was an essential component of English identity, and that of other European countries, meant that Muslim immigrants could only be seen as a threat.

Related: Roger Scruton: a brilliant philosopher and self-conscious controversialist | Seamus Perry

Related: Roger Scruton is not the victim of a leftwing witch-hunt. Here’s why | Zoe Williams

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Jak Kilby obituary

My friend Jak Kilby, who has died aged 72, was a freelance photographer who documented the early years of the free jazz and free improvisation scene in London with great diligence and empathy. Following his mid-life conversion to the Muslim faith and his adoption of the name Muhsin, his camera was also trained on the Islamic world: its buildings, its people, its struggle.

Born to Leslie Kilby, a bus driver who later worked as a manager in a TV company, and Dorothy (nee Gossett), John (Jak) was educated at Malory school in Lewisham, south London. By the late 1960s he was a familiar figure at the Little Theatre Club in Covent Garden and at other places, where young musicians were developing a new musical language.

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Trump condemned for retweeting fake Islamophobic image featuring Pelosi

Image retweeted of Democrats Chuck Schumer and Pelosi wearing traditional Islamic clothing standing before Iranian flag

Muslim groups in the US have condemned Donald Trump for retweeting a fake image showing leading Democrats Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi wearing an approximation of traditional Islamic clothing and standing in front of the Iranian flag.

Related: Justin Trudeau: US escalation partly to blame for Iran plane deaths

Related: Crisis for Iran may present an opportunity for Washington

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The attacks on two Delhi universities reveal Modi’s targets: Muslims and their allies | Mukul Kesavan

The BJP wants to suppress Indian Muslims and secularists who see them as equal citizens. But police violence has backfired

In the middle of December, Delhi police tried to shut down university protests against the religiously discriminatory Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) by caning Muslim students into submission. Police officers smashed their way into the library at Jamia Millia Islamia university (where I teach history), trashed bookcases and beat the students inside, badly damaging the eyesight of one in the process. They threw teargas grenades into the reading room to force students out. Their excuse was they were chasing violent demonstrators who had taken refuge in campus buildings.

Last week, Delhi police also assembled outside another educational establishment. This time the police remained decorously outside the gates of Jawaharlal Nehru University, India’s most well known, cordoning off the campus as masked goons armed with iron rods and improvised bludgeons ran riot inside. They broke into a hostel reserved for women students, inflicted head injuries on the president of JNU’s student union, who is a woman, and attacked faculty members who tried to protect them. Some 20 students and teachers were hospitalised. After three hours of thuggery the police entered the university at the vice-chancellor’s belated invitation but made no arrests because the criminals had mysteriously slipped away despite the police cordon.

The government was confident that making a violent example of a Muslim university would play well in public

Related: Students protest across India after attack at top Delhi university

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Trump's travel ban may hit new countries as election looms

White House insiders say it is not yet clear which additional countries could be affected amid renewed focus on immigration

The White House is considering expanding its much-litigated travel ban to additional countries amid a renewed election-year focus on immigration issues by Donald Trump, according to four people familiar with the deliberations.

A document outlining the plans has been circulating the White House, but the countries that would be affected are blacked out, according to two of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the measure has yet to be finalized.

Related: Three years of waiting: Trump travel ban bureaucracy keeps Iranian couple apart

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I’ve been cooking so many posts in my head. Things I think and stuff I need to talk about and then I remember it takes time to write. Time I need to scoop out of the day/week/month, time I take from something else, bit by bit until I have an hour or so to sit […]

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The ‘ex-closeted gay jihadist' bringing meditation to Jakarta

Once a campus fundamentalist who hid his sexuality, today Bagia Arif Saputra helps others find harmony in Indonesia’s capital

When Bagia Arif Saputra was growing up in a university town near Jakarta, becoming a jihadist seemed a natural choice for young men like him, who were steeped in the teachings of Islamic fundamentalism. Less easy was reconciling this identity with his sexuality.

“I was living a double life,” says Saputra. “I would go to the campus mosque, try to focus on my prayers … and find myself checking out a guy and thinking, ‘Nice ass’. And then immediately, ‘Astaghfirullah [God forgive me]!’ So then I would have to redo my prayers. It was a vicious cycle.”

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Here's what could be lost if Trump bombs Iran's cultural treasures | Sergio Beltrán-García

The US president has warned Iran he will obliterate its cultural sites. Here is our guide to the nation’s jewels, from hilltop citadels to a disco-ball mausoleum

If carried out, Donald Trump’s threat to target “cultural sites” in Iran would put him into an axis of architectural evil alongside the Taliban and Isis, both of which have wreaked similar forms of destruction this century. The Taliban dynamited Afghanistan’s sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001; Isis has destroyed mosques, shrines and other structures across Iraq and Syria since 2014, some in the ancient city of Palmyra. Not, you might have thought, company the US president would prefer to be associated with.

Does Trump know what would be lost? Probably not – but he’s hardly the only one. The fact that the country is rarely visited by western tourists is not due to a lack of attractions. With a civilisation dating back 5,000 years, and over 20 Unesco world heritage sites, Iran’s cultural heritage is rich and unique, especially its religious architecture, which displays a mastery of geometry, abstract design and pre-industrial engineering practically unparalleled in civilisation. This is is not just Iran’s cultural heritage, it is humanity’s.

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Under Boris Johnson, Islamophobia will take on a sinister new level | Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

With the government’s plans – from immigration to counter-extremism – pandering to prejudice, Muslims will be unsafe

Boris Johnson is one of the most openly racist and Islamophobic politicians in recent British history. His own abhorrent statements aside, Johnson leads a party where multiple members have been excluded for Islamophobia, with a number subsequently readmitted. He has also U-turned on the promise to conduct an inquiry into the issue, instead now running a broader inquiry into “discrimination” which displaces the specific concerns Muslims have with the party – not to mention the lack of confidence many have with the chairman of the inquiry. Notorious Islamophobes such as Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins and Nick Griffin all praised his win. If this election was the “second Brexit referendum”, this should come as no surprise. The first was won by stoking the same racism and Islamophobia.

Islamophobia has now become part and parcel of mainstream political credibility. Johnson can say “Islam is the problem” and make comparisons between niqab-wearing women and letterboxes, and face scant political repercussions. Meanwhile Muslims experience surges in verbal and physical abuse in public spaces. Stories of violent attacks on hijab-wearing Muslim women abound – attackers have used Johnson’s rhetoric; I have personally observed increased aggression and physical intimidation in public, for instance, being followed on to empty tube platforms by men making threatening remarks. Public vitriol for Muslims has been bolstered and normalised.

Related: It’s shameful that Johnson has reneged on the inquiry into Tory Islamophobia | Samira Shackle

Related: Denial, obfuscation, apathy: why it’s so hard to get Islamophobia on the political agenda | Miqdaad Versi

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India citizenship law: 100,0000 attend Hyderabad protest

Demonstration was organised by umbrella group of Muslim and civil society organisations

More than 100,000 protesters have taken part in a peaceful march in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, chanting slogans against Narendra Modi’s new citizenship law.

The protest, labelled the Million March, was organised by an umbrella group of Muslim and civil society organisations. More than 40% of Hyderabad’s estimated population of nearly 7 million people are Muslims.

Related: India protests: students condemn 'barbaric' police

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'We are not safe': India's Muslims tell of wave of police brutality

Police in Uttar Pradesh state have embarked on ‘reign of terror’ against Muslims in wake of new citizenship law

It was midnight at a police barracks in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and in a freezing windowless room about 150 Muslim men and boys sat huddled, bloodied and bruised. Some of the shivering prisoners had raw gashes across their hands and faces, others had broken limbs splayed out at awkward angles. The beatings from police came frequently, according to multiple corresponding accounts; to those who asked for water or closed their eyes in drowsiness or simply did nothing at all. Over and over, metal rods and bamboo canes hit soft human skin. Some had been stripped of their clothes. The youngest among them was just 12 years old, said witnesses.

How hundreds of innocent Muslim residents of the city of Muzaffarnagar came to be rounded up on 20 December, before being tortured in police detention, is part of what Indian activist and academic Yogendra Yadav described as an unprecedented and ruthless “reign of terror” imposed upon the country’s most populous state over the past two weeks.

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