الكاتب: kafej

A former Catalan political leader has been shot in the face in Madrid.

Alejandro Vidal-Quadras, who co-founded the far-right party Vox, was shot in the affluent Salamanca area at about 1.30pm on Thursday.

The 78-year-old was conscious when he was taken to hospital, a police spokesman said.

Mr Vidal-Quadras, who also used to lead Spain’s centre-right People’s Party in Catalonia, is expected to survive the attack.

Police are still searching for the gunman.

Santiago Abascal, president of the Vox party, said it is too early to speculate why Mr Vidal-Quadras was targeted.

“Thank god it seems that Alejandro Vidal-Quadras is out of danger,” he said.

The veteran former politician was walking down the street alone and about to get into his car, according to Spanish media, when he was shot by someone who had just got off a black Yamaha motorcycle.

Medical sources told El Mundo that the wound “crossed his jaw from one end to the other”.

The gunman and another person reportedly fled the scene on the motorcycle, driving the wrong way down a one-way street, before Mr Vidal-Quadras was taken in a serious condition to the Gregorio Maranon Hospital.

He is stable and conscious, El Mundo reports, citing medical sources, and his life is not in danger.

Police later confirmed they were still searching for two men who were on a motorbike, with the gunman said to be wearing a helmet.

The weapon is reported to be a 9mm parabellum calibre pistol.

No arrests have been made yet, and police have cordoned off the area where the shooting happened.

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Spain’s acting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on social media he wants to convey his “solidarity and wishes for a speedy recovery” to Mr Vidal-Quadras.

Popular Party President Alberto Nunez Feijoo deplored the shooting and wished for his recovery.

Mr Vidal-Quadras became a member of the European Parliament before breaking away to co-found the Vox party, which he left shortly after a failed attempt to win a seat in 2014.

He hasn’t been active in politics for several years but has maintained a public role as a media commentator.

He served as a vice president for the European Parliament and took an interest in foreign affairs, participating in the legislature’s delegations to the former Soviet republics Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

She was just going for a run.

A phrase, and then a hashtag, that was forced into the Irish national lexicon in January 2022 with the murder of yet another bright young woman.

The savage killing in broad daylight of effervescent teacher Ashling Murphy, as she jogged along the Grand Canal in Tullamore, Co Offaly, led to a period of national soul-searching that echoed the fallout from Sarah Everard’s murder in the UK a year earlier. Ms Everard had just been walking home.

The parallels were clear. People took to the streets, social media was dominated for days by the story. Male violence against women “had to stop”, but no one seemed sure how to arrive at that outcome. Anger tinged with helplessness.

Hundreds of people attended a vigil in Camden, north London to pay tribute to Ms Murphy, who was killed just three months after Wayne Couzens was jailed for life for the rape, kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard.

Across Ireland, thousands turned out at rallies and vigils.

Traditional Irish music played softly at a tearful candlelit vigil in Tullamore. Ms Murphy had been a talented fiddle player.

Her father Ray played her favourite song When You Were Sweet Sixteen on the banjo.

“She was just the sweetest girl,” he said. “A little angel… a brilliant girl in every sense of the word.”

His little angel was stabbed 11 times in the neck in broad daylight in her hometown. Nobody will ever really know why.

Ms Murphy’s voicebox was severed. Her long blonde hair was soaked in her blood – twigs and brambles entangled within.

The Gardai, Ireland’s police service, vowed to “leave no stone unturned” in bringing the killer to justice.

Today’s conviction of 33-year-old Slovakian man Jozef Puska fulfils that vow and brings some closure to the homicide of Ms Murphy.

It will do little to make women across Ireland feel any safer.

“Male violence against women and girls needs to stop now,” declared Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill in the wake of Ms Murphy’s death.

That was a futile wish.

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The women killed since Ms Murphy’s death

Some 18 women have been killed violently in Ireland since Ms Murphy’s death, according to the Femicide Watch run by the charity Women’s Aid.

They are not nameless statistics.

Sandra Boyd, Mary (Maura) Bergin, Ruth Lohse, Louise Mucknell, Lisa Thompson, Larisa Serban, Miriam Burns, Lisa Cash, Ioana Mihaela Pacala, Emma McCrory, Sharon Crean, Bruna Fonseca, Maud Coffey, Geila Ibram, Catherine Henry, Anna Mooney, Deepa Dinamani and Lorna Woodnutt Kearney.

All dead. All were killed violently.

It’s a grim irony that Lorna Kearney – the latest addition to the list – was also killed in Tullamore, like Ms Murphy.

That was in September. A teenage boy was charged with her murder last month.

Ireland’s ‘vanishing triangle’

It’s another widely-publicised irony that Ms Murphy was killed on a stretch of the Grand Canal which is named Fiona’s Way after another local woman, Fiona Pender, who went missing in 1996.

Six women have disappeared in five years from an area known as Ireland’s “vanishing triangle” – and none have ever been found.

It’s almost as if the femicides are piling up, overlapping each other in Venn diagrams of devastation and misery.

Every single woman can be prey

The angst at Ms Murphy’s death evolved into a national reckoning over the violence perpetrated against women, and became especially fiery on social media forums.

Amid the anger, a narrative pitted men against women.

“Not all men” was the retort from outraged social media users who have never had to clutch keys between their fingers or share a live location for a short walk home in the dark.

The simple truth is that of course not all men are evil predators. But every single woman can be prey.

And the almost intangible threat of violence influences daily decisions that women take, and can be reflected in the most mundane of ways.

Like many runners, Ms Murphy wore a Fitbit. It showed her exercise starting at 2.51pm that day along the canal.

By 3.21pm, the watch was showing “erratic, violent movements”.

At 3.31pm, the FitBit was no longer recording any heartbeat for Ms Murphy.

Femicide caught on Fitbit.

She was just going for a run. She didn’t even last an hour.

A world football boss has broken rank to claim FIFA is awarding World Cups – including to Saudi Arabia – without a transparent process.

Lise Klaveness is the first football federation chief to go public with concerns about the rapid, short-circuit process that effectively decided the 2030 and 2034 hosts in secret meetings led by FIFA President Gianni Infantino.

“It has not been a transparent process,” Ms Klaveness, the Norwegian football federation president, told Sky News.

“We have to expect good governance,” she added. “We had big, big, huge reforms in FIFA several years ago, which were good on paper, but it needs to be implemented and I cannot see how that has happened.”

Ms Klaveness also said she was “very concerned” that FIFA is not taking women’s football seriously enough, given a World Cup host for 2027 is yet to be confirmed.

The overall process appears at odds with the transformation of world football’s decision-making promised by Mr Infantino after replacing the discredited Sepp Blatter in 2016.

The 211 football nations should have had the final say on World Cup hosts – but last month, the closed FIFA Council suddenly produced an unprecedented plan to combine rival bids for a 2030 tournament in six countries on three continents.

And they formed a curtailed, favourable process that blocked most of the world from bidding – paving the way for the Saudi Arabia to be unchallenged for 2034.

“When decisions are made in closed rooms, it’s the opposite of what the reforms were promising us,” Ms Klaveness said.

The decision came after Mr Infantino prioritised trips to Saudi Arabia over most other nations in the last three years – regularly meeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and even appearing in a government promotional video advertising the virtues of the oil-rich nation.

Ms Klaveness said: “When we give away power … and money and influence to nations and hosts without knowing that FIFA has had enough objectivity and arm’s length distance and no conflict of interest in it, then we have a problem. So then the question needs to be asked.”

She hopes for transparency on Mr Infantino’s dealings with the Saudis while being focused on the process rather than the country itself.

She asked: “How have you [Mr Infantino] worked to keep an objectivity to business and knowing the fact that this is a lot of power? How has the power been separated between different bodies and persons so that you don’t get conflicts of interest?”

FIFA has not explained why it only allowed countries in Asia and Oceania to bid for 2034 when North and Central American nations should have been permitted under the rotation system in the statutes.

Only weeks were given to form a bid that was too challenging for a democratic nation like Australia, which needs government agreements.

FIFA has sought to portray the selection of the 2030 and 2034 World Cup hosts as still being in play, with assessments of the countries to be conducted.

But Mr Infantino’s own comments on Instagram last week were taken as confirmation when he said the 2030 and 2034 tournaments were “set to be hosted” by the announced nations without any caveats mentioning an ongoing process.

A key part of that process should be human rights assessments, which FIFA has not fully committed to being published when pressed by Sky News.

Under FIFA regulations, a plan to mitigate risks should be presented to address anti-LGBTQ+ laws and the lack of equal rights for women.

But with the hosts already lined up, the importance of the bidding evaluations – a key reform from the start of the Infantino presidency – has been reduced.

Ms Klaveness said: “We don’t know if that’s a breach of a code of conduct or if there are good reasons to do so.”

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What about the Women’s World Cup?

FIFA has not explained why the 2027 Women’s World Cup host will not be selected until next year – with four rivals.

“Everyone should be very concerned with those symbolic signals you’re sending because we are in desperate need to have a balance that the women’s side is lifted at least at the same acknowledgement level as the men’s side,” Ms Klaveness said.

“And when you have those awards for three [men’s] World Cups and the next is not awarded for women, it might be a danger that people will view this as not taken as seriously.”

FIFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Zurich-based governing body has recently insisted it operates with the “highest ethical and governance standards” while pointing to the US Department of Justice being willing to award it compensation following past bribery scandals.

In 2018, Mr Infantino did oversee an unprecedented open vote for the 2026 World Cup with the combined United States-Canada-Mexico plan beating Morocco and the votes of the FIFA Congress made public.

But it was the ruling council of 37 members that decided to combine the interest from Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay to create a vast 2030 World Cup – without putting the plan to the congress of every football nation.

The father of Liverpool footballer Luis Diaz has been freed by his captors in Colombia – almost two weeks after being kidnapped.

Luis Manuel Diaz was released by guerrillas from the National Liberation Army (ELN), according to the Colombian FA.

Local TV channels showed him at an airstrip after landing in a helicopter – and images of his family members crying with happiness.

Diaz’s parents were abducted by armed men on motorcycles at a petrol station in the town of Barrancas, near Colombia’s border with Venezuela on 28 October.

The 26-year-old footballer’s mother, Cilenis Marulanda, was rescued within hours by police after roadblocks were set up.

Special forces were deployed to search for Mr Diaz – with air and land patrols trawling a mountain range that straddles both Colombia and Venezuela.

Officials said they could not rule out the possibility that he had been smuggled over the border – meaning he would have been out of reach of Colombian police.

A reward of $48,000 (£39,000) had been offered for information leading police to the hostage.

The Liverpool winger had pleaded with his father’s captors to release him – and said he and his brothers were in a “desperate” situation.

The ELN had given hope to the footballer, his family and those connected to Liverpool FC after they said the kidnapping was a mistake and had ordered his release.

On Sunday, the guerrilla group said these plans had been stifled by military deployments in the north of Colombia, and it could not guarantee his safety in those conditions.

A day later, the Colombian military said that it was shifting its positions to facilitate a release.

Kidnapping ‘should never have happened’

Those negotiating peace talks with the ELN celebrated Mr Diaz’s freedom – but made it clear the kidnapping “should never have happened”.

All people being held by the ELN must be liberated, the statement added, though it did not give a figure for the remaining hostages.

The Colombian FA thanked the government, the military, authorities and everyone involved in securing Mr Diaz’s release, adding: “Behind a ball, the dreams and illusions of boys and girls, young people, women, men and adult soccer players, their loved ones and an entire country roll.

“Football is passion in peace. Let no one ever think of attacking that reality again.”

Colombian President Gustavo Petro added: “Long live freedom and peace.”

Diaz came off the bench to save Liverpool from a shock defeat at Luton on Sunday, claiming a stoppage-time equaliser to snatch a 1-1 draw.

He lifted his shirt in celebration to reveal a message on a white T-shirt that read “libertad para papa” or “freedom for my father”.

The kidnapping of Diaz’s father disrupted the Colombian government’s peace talks with the ELN, which restarted last year in hopes of ending a 60-year conflict that has killed at least 450,000 people.

Comments by Suella Braverman show the UK government is “at sea and ignorant” on Irish affairs and the Middle East, Sinn Fein’s president has said.

Mary Lou McDonald has accused the Tories of “gratuitous insult” after the home secretary said pro-Palestinian “hate marches” were of the type “we are more used to seeing in Northern Ireland”.

The woman hoping to be the next Taoiseach – Ireland’s prime minister – was speaking exclusively to Sky News on the eve of her party’s annual conference.

Ms McDonald said: “I think it demonstrates the extent to which the Tory government, and she perhaps in particular, are at sea and ignorant of Irish affairs and also … the distance between the Tory government and such a huge number of people in England and right across Britain.

“They were extraordinary, they were to say the least unhelpful, in as much as in the end they are a distraction from a situation that could not be more serious.

“I think it would suit her better and the government better to join with others and call for a ceasefire.

“It strikes me that the government in London is really at this stage a bit of a past master at gratuitous insult.

“If the idea is simply to create division or arouse controversy, well then she has achieved those objectives.”

Ms McDonald said Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was “wrong on both questions” of a ceasefire in the Middle East and the timing of a referendum on Irish unity.

Drawing comparisons between Ireland and Palestine, Ms McDonald said the Irish people had a deep and widespread affiliation with Palestinians for historical and contemporary reasons.

She said: “Ireland is non-aligned and militarily neutral, but we are not neutral when it comes to the issue of international law and we’re not neutral when it comes to the right of Palestinian people to self-determination.

“We’re not neutral when we say that Israel must be held to account for decades, generations of human rights violations.

“We also recognise that to get to a place of peace and settlement, you do have to have an inclusive process. We’ve learned that in Ireland, haven’t we?

“That’s the only thing that works.”