Writing in The Times, Paul Ovenden, who quit as Keir Starmer's director of political strategy last September after offensive messages he had sent in 2017 surfaced, said the British state had got "bigger and bigger while simultaneously and systematically emasculating itself".
Abd el-Fattah, who landed in London from Egypt on Boxing Day, has been at the centre of a political storm over social media posts he published more than a decade ago, including tweets in which he called for Zionists to be killed. Keir Starmer said he was delighted by Abd el-Fattah's arrival on Friday after the British government helped secure the activist's release from years in an Egyptian jail. However, the prime minister has since condemned the tweets and said he was unaware of them.
In a lengthy apology posted online, the writer and blogger who returned to Britain this week after 12 years of imprisonment in Egypt said the tweets were shocking and hurtful, but added that some had been completely twisted. The tweets were expressions of a young man's anger and frustrations in a time of regional crises, including the wars on Iraq and Gaza, and a pervasive culture of online insult battles, Abd El-Fattah wrote. Still, I should have known better, he said.
Successive UK governments are facing questions over their decision to campaign for the release and return of British-Egyptian democracy activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah after past violent and offensive social media posts came to light. The dissident's historical remarks in which he appeared to call for violence towards Zionists and the police have prompted a widespread backlash since his return from detention in Egypt on Friday.
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Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has taken tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. War crimes researchers at Yale University have described it as "the single largest kidnapping of children during wartime since World War II." Also, the world's largest storm this year to date, Super Typhoon Ragasa, is moving its way toward China after making landfall yesterday in the northern island of the Philippines, causing major flooding and the evacuation of thousands.
He was arrested in September 2019 and later sentenced in 2021 to five years in jail for spreading false news. The Egyptian-British human rights activist and writer Alaa Abd el-Fattah has been pardoned after almost six years in jail and hunger strikes by Abd el-Fattah and his mother. The announcement was made on Monday in Egypt's official gazette and came following an appeal from the National Council for Human Rights, Al Qahera news reported.
