British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Wednesday there was no equivalence between fascists and those who opposed them, a rare rebuke of U.S. President Donald Trump by one of his closest foreign allies.

Trump inflamed tensions after a deadly rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, by insisting that counter-protesters were also to blame, drawing condemnation from some Republican leaders and praise from white far-right groups.

“There’s no equivalence, I see no equivalence between those who propound fascist views and those who oppose them and I think it is important for all those in positions of responsibility to condemn far-right views wherever we hear them,” May told reporters when asked to comment on Trump’s stance.

On Monday, May’s spokesman had said that while Britain condemned racism, what the U.S. president said was “a matter for him”.

May has been widely criticized by domestic political opponents for her efforts to cultivate close ties with Trump, who she visited at the White House days after his inauguration and invited for a state visit to Britain.

Her openly critical comment on Wednesday was an unexpected shift from May, who is keen to cement what she and many other Britons see as a “special relationship” between London and Washington as Britain prepares to leave the European Union.

The invitation to Trump to make a state visit to Britain sparked immediate controversy in Britain when the U.S. head of state announced his widely-criticized ban on travel from Muslim-majority countries just hours after May left the White House.

Trump’s stance on the Charlottesville violence drew renewed calls for Trump’s state visit, which would be hosted by Queen Elizabeth and involve lavish pageantry, to be cancelled. May had rejected similar calls after previous Trump-related controversies.

“Donald Trump has shown he is unable to detach himself from the extreme-right and racial supremacists,” said Vince Cable, leader of the opposition Liberal Democrats. “It would be completely wrong to have this man visit the UK on a State Visit.”

No date has been announced for the visit.

 
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Leaders of a New York Episcopal diocese say they’ll remove two plaques honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a church property in Brooklyn.

Bishop Lawrence Provenzano, leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, told Newsday the two plaques outside St. John’s Episcopal Church are being removed Wednesday.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy markers commemorate the spot where Lee is said to have planted a tree while serving in the U.S. Army at Fort Hamilton in New York in the 1840s. Two decades later, he became commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

The removal comes in the wake of last weekend’s deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists protested plans to remove a Lee statue from a public park.
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Confederate monuments have been removed overnight in Baltimore.

Local news outlets report that workers hauled the monuments away early Wednesday, days after a white nationalist rally in Virginia turned deadly.

WBAL-TV reports that a crane removed a monument to Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson” from its pedestal around 3 a.m. and placed it on a flatbed truck 45 minutes later.

Photos taken by The Baltimore Sun shows workers taking away a monument dedicated to the Confederate Women of Maryland.

Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh told the newspaper that crews began removing the city’s four Confederate monuments late Tuesday and finished around 5:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Pugh said the monuments “needed to come down.” The mayor watched as workers removed the statues in the dark.
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President Donald Trump is renewing his attacks on e-commerce giant Amazon, and he says the company is “doing great damage to tax paying retailers.”

Trump tweets that “towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt — many jobs being lost!”

The president has often criticized the company and CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.

Many traditional retailers are closing stores and blaming Amazon for a shift to buying goods online. But the company has been hiring thousands of warehouse workers on the spot at job fairs across the country. Amazon has announced goal of adding 100,000 full-time workers by the middle of next year.

 
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Sandy Cook, a 70-year-old former schoolteacher, bent low in front of the slate “Freedom of Speech Wall” outside Charlottesville City Hall on Monday and wrote a message: “Resist with courage, dignity and purpose.”

Her plea was one of dozens etched in chalk on the 16.5 meter (54-foot) wall following this weekend’s violent clashes in the Virginia city.

“This city is not racist” and “Unity over evil,” read two other messages.

As Charlottesville reeled from the killing of a woman during a white-nationalist rally, well-wishers left flowers at a makeshift shrine nearby in the heart of downtown.

Many of the city’s 47,000 residents blamed white supremacists for bringing violence to their normally sedate city, the home of the University of Virginia’s main campus.

“Charlottesville is a very tolerant place, which is why it’s so sad to see this happen here,” said Cook, who now works as a tour guide at Monticello, the former home of Thomas Jefferson, the United States’ third president and the city’s founder.

“I am hoping that more people will come down here and will show that we are not going to let these people take over our town,” Cook said as she gazed at the wall, which bears a carving of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech for all Americans.

On Saturday, violence broke out ahead of a “Unite the Right” rally called by white supremacists to protest the planned removal of a statue of a leader of the pro-slavery Confederate army, a symbol considered an affront to African-Americans.

After the melee, as counter-protesters were dispersing, a 20-year-old man who friends say admired Adolf Hitler smashed his car into the crowd, killing a 32-year-old woman.

False pretext for rally alleged

Mario Jones, the 42-year-old owner of a cab company, said he had been shocked by Saturday’s event, largely because he has rarely encountered racist behavior in the city, which is 70 percent white and 19 percent black.

He said protest organizer Jason Kessler misled city officials by saying the rally was focused on the statue of General Robert E. Lee in a state that has long had mixed feelings about its slaveholding past.

“He started with a focus on the statue and a focus on preserving history, and then when he had the platform, he flipped it to white supremacy,” said Jones, who is black, as he stood outside the courthouse where the driver in Saturday’s incident was ordered held without bail.

Russ Naranjo, 45, stopped to write “Kessler did this!!” on the wall, replacing each “s” in the name with the emblem of the Nazi SS secret police.

“He is a Nazi and he brought this here and then he got in over his head and ran away,” said Naranjo, who works in security.

Kessler was punched on Sunday when he attempted to hold a press conference and was ushered away by police.

On Monday he blamed the police for the violence, saying they allowed the event to get out of control. A spokeswoman for the Virginia State Police, Corinne Geller, denied that claim.

Naranjo said the hundreds of so-called “alt-right” white supremacists who attended Saturday’s rally had been emboldened by Republican U.S. President Donald Trump.

“The alt-right has sprung up because of Donald Trump and he needs to do more to denounce them,” Naranjo said.

After being criticized by Republicans and Democrats alike for failing to respond forcefully to Saturday’s violence, Trump on Monday denounced white supremacists.

While many residents and city leaders blamed the violence on white supremacists, some said both sides were at fault.

“Both sides came to fight,” said Mason Pickett, 64, the retired owner of a moving and storage company. “I think if the people on the left would have stood there calmly, the people on the right would not have kicked ass.”
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The United States accused Islamic State insurgents on Tuesday of carrying out a reign of violence targeting religious minorities and opposition ethnic groups, even as they have been losing control of large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Islamic State “is clearly responsible for genocide … and crimes against humanity.”

Tillerson, speaking as he released the State Department’s annual report on religious freedom in 199 countries and territories around the globe, said, “Religious persecution and intolerance remains far too prevalent.”

The top U.S. diplomat said that “almost 80 percent of the global population live with restrictions on or hostilities to limit their freedom of religion.  Where religious freedom is not protected we know that instability, human rights abuses and violent extremism have a greater opportunity to take root.  We cannot ignore these conditions.”

Seven countries

Tillerson singled out seven countries for an array of abuses in the way their governments treat the faithful: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bahrain, China, Pakistan and Sudan. Tillerson said that in various ways these nations intimidate believers practicing their faiths through harassment, imprisonment and executions.

“No one should have to live in fear, worship in secret, or face discrimination because of his or her beliefs,” he said.

But he laid out his most detailed indictment against Islamic State.

“As we make progress in defeating ISIS and denying them their caliphate, their terrorist members have and continue to target multiple religions and ethnic groups for rape, kidnapping enslavement and even death,” he said.

“To remove any ambiguity from previous statements or reports by the State Department,” Tillerson said, “the crime of genocide requires three elements: specific acts with specific intent to destroy and hold or impart specific people.  Members of national, ethnic, racial or religious groups.  Specific act-specific intent-specific people. Application of the law to the facts at hand leads to the conclusion ISIS is clearly responsible for genocide against Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims in areas it controls or has controlled.”

US priority

Tillerson said the protection of religious minorities “and others who are targets of violent extremism – remains a human rights priority” for President Donald Trump’s administration.

The report said that in Iraq, where Baghdad’s forces have reclaimed the northern city of Mosul from Islamic State control, the insurgents “pursued a campaign of violence against members of all faiths, but against non-Sunnis in particular.”

The State Department said, “In areas under its control, ISIS continued to commit individual and mass killings, and to engage in rape, kidnapping, random detentions and mass abductions, torture, abduction and forced conversion of non-Muslim male children, and the enslavement and sex trafficking of women and girls from minority religious communities.”

It said Islamic State “continued to engage in harassment, intimidation, robbery, and the destruction of personal property and religious sites. In areas not under ISIS control, it continued suicide bombings and vehicle-borne improvised explosive device attacks against all segments of society.”

In Syria, the report said that “nonstate actors, including a number of groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United States and other governments, such as ISIS and … al-Nusra Front, targeted Shia, Alawites, Christians, and other religious minorities, as well as other Sunnis, with indiscriminate attacks, as well as killings, kidnappings, physical mistreatment, and arrests in the areas of the country under their control.

“ISIS killed dozens through public executions, crucifixions, and beheadings of men, women, and children on charges of apostasy, blasphemy, homosexuality, and cursing God,” the report said, “In Raqqa [Islamic State’s self-declared capital] and elsewhere in Syria, ISIS continued to hold thousands of enslaved Yazidi women and girls kidnapped in Iraq and trafficked to Syria to be sold or distributed to ISIS members as ‘spoils of war’ because of their religious beliefs.”

China

The report singled out China for what it said were the government’s abuse, detention, arrests and torture of adherents of various faiths.

“The government cited concerns over the ‘three evils’ of ‘ethnic separatism, religious extremism, and violent terrorism’ as grounds to enact and enforce restrictions on religious practices of Uighur Muslims,” the report said.  “The government sought the forcible repatriation of Uighur Muslims from foreign countries, many of whom sought asylum in those countries on the grounds of religious persecution.”
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