News

Ken Livingstone has won the Labour nomination for Mayor of London and will go on to challenge Boris Johnson in 2012, it was announced today.

Livingstone beat rival, Oona King, with 68.6% of the votes.  The former MP for Bethnal Green and Bow and self-confessed Blairite polled 31.4% of the ballot.

Mr Livingstone was elected by a ballot of Labour's 33,000 members in the capital, along with members of organisations affiliated to the party, including the unions.

Earlier this week we were the first to report that Labour Party HQ had overturned the official result of the Tower Hamlets Mayoral selection won by Luftar Rahman.

The newly installed Labour candidate Helal Abbas, the current leader of Tower Hamlets Council came third in the original ballot.  What the second place Labour candidate John Biggs, who should have rightly claimed the place of the recently deposed Rahman, makes of this one can only guess.

Educationalist Dr Tony Sewell has courted controversy once again by stating that institutional racism in education plays no part in the educational failure of African Caribbean children in UK schools. In 2008, the Department for Education reported that only 27 per cent of black boys achieve five or more A*-C GCSE grades. African-Caribbean boys are also the group most likely to be excluded from school.

A prominent American columnist and former university professor has drawn strong criticism ahead of plans to honour him - by naming a social studies chair after him at Harvard.

Martin Peretz who is a also a former professor from Harvard, and who is well known for his regular columns in The New Republic, wrote earlier this month that Muslims in the U.S. should not be entitled to constitutional guarantees of free speech.

He wrote:

Camden’s CarAf centre celebrates the launch of the ‘Wealth of Africa’ galleries at the British Museum.

The galleries - a Black history educational resource for schools comes as the result of a partnership with the museum.

With the US mid term elections approaching Ewan MacAskill in today's Guardian writes from America about the shockwaves permeating through the US political establishment as voters in primary elections in Delaware, New York and New Hampshire choose to stump for the right wing tea party movement candidates over their moderate Republican counterparts.

Philip Woolas has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Oldham East and Saddleworth since 1997, and was the Minister of State for Borders and Immigration in the Home Office, as well as being the Minister of State for the Treasury.

Woolas a Labour MP and former immigration minister has been accused of inciting white people to vote against his opponent in the general election.

High Court judges began hearing the case yesterday, in the first attempt to overturn an election result for almost a century.

The European Union' has strongly condemned France's expulsions of Roma (Gypsies) ‘a disgrace’ and added that the deportations probably breach European Union law. EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said she was appalled by the expulsions.

I am personally convinced that the commission will have no choice but to initiate infringement procedures against France" for discriminatory policies,

she said.

While London ground to a halt on Tuesday 7th September 2010, aspiring disabled leaders from all over London gathered together in Islington for a City Bridge funded leadership event, hosted by RADAR. People used to overcoming obstacles in every day life planned alternative routes by bus, train, car and bicycle to get to the event.