Rock band Muse postpone Istanbul show over promoter comments about anti-government protests
The British group, fronted by singer Matt Bellamy, said on Wednesday (2 April) that they had pushed the gig – originally scheduled to take place on 11 June – back to 2026 in order to find a new promoter.
'After careful consideration and hearing the feedback from our fans whilst fully respecting their concerns, our show in Istanbul will now be postponed until 2026 so we can ensure DBL Entertainment will not be involved,' their statement said.
Turkish fans had urged the band to scrap the gig after DBL's head, Abdulkadir Ozkan, criticised the actions of people taking part in nationwide protests against the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu.
"Plain and simple, this is hostility towards the capital. Act of treason," Abdulkadir Ozkan wrote on X/Twitter. He later posted another message, explaining his comments were not aimed at the 'constitutional right to protests'.
Imamoglu was elected mayor of Turkey's largest city in March 2019, in a major blow to president Recep Rayyup Erdogan and the president's governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), which had controlled Istanbul for a quarter of a century.
Erdogan's party pushed to void the municipal election results in the city of 16 million, alleging irregularities. The challenge resulted in a repeat of the election a few months later, which Imamoglu also won.
He was jailed on suspicion of running a criminal organisation, accepting bribes, extortion, illegally recording personal data, and bid-rigging. A request for him to be imprisoned on terror-related charges was denied.
The mayor has labelled all the claims 'unimaginable accusations and slanders', according to Sky News.
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Reuters reports that Ozkan later said his comment had been misinterpreted and taken out of context, adding that DBL was withdrawing from all projects. He expressed regret for any 'misunderstanding'.
Turkish journalists told The Independent last week that the crackdown on protests has been the worst they have ever seen, as tens of thousands faced tear gas, batons and rubber bullets as they marched through Istanbul.
More than 1,400 people were taken into custody over seven days of demonstrations against Erdogan.
'He wanted to be another Putin, but the country is not ready to be another Russia,' journalist Can Dundar told The Independent. 'So now the people are resisting, and Erdogan is pushing.'
Muse, who formed in Devon 1994, are known for songs that incorporate themes of government oppression and civil uprising, particularly in their 2009 album The Resistance and in 2022's Will of the People.
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Daily Mirror
16 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
'I was born through rape in a war-zone - when I met my mother I saw my face in hers'
Sexual violence is a terrible inevitability of any war-zone. Lejla Damon was born of rape during the Bosnian war. She speaks to the Mirror about finding her birth mother and discovering her roots Smuggled across a border at just nine days old, Lejla Damon knew little of her birth mother. But as she grew up, she discovered that her beginnings were rooted in conflict. Speaking to exclusively to The Mirror, Lejla tells me she is a child of sexual violence carried out during the Bosnian war. We spoke about the first time she met her birth mother and returning to Bosnia, where staff at the maternity unit knew her story before she did. Lejla was born on Christmas Day 1992 in war-torn Bosnia. Her mother had endured an horrendous ordeal. Lejla's birth mother, who we will not be identifying here to ensure her privacy, was held for seven months in a school at the beginning of the conflict. It was during this time that she was repeatedly raped and tortured. She said: 'The premise of it was to impregnate and hold on to the women for as long as possible knowing that they wouldn't be able to get an abortion and then let them go when they were too heavily pregnant.' She explains that the aim of this was 'to change the genetic makeup of a society.' So when the two journalists who would go on to become Lejla's parents met her birth mother, she was in a state of extreme suffering. Dan and Sian Damon were in Bosnia to report on the conflict for a British news broadcaster, when they interviewed Lejla's birth mother. In that video interview, Lejla tells me that, her mother said: 'I would become like the men that raped her and that if she held me that she would strangle me.' Talking to me now, she says she has enormous sympathy for her mother. She explains: 'It takes courage to give your child up for adoption no matter what you went through… she allowed me to have an incredible life full of extreme privilege.' Growing up in the UK, Lejla said she felt, like all kids, the intense urge to fit in with her peers. But when in primary school, her class were tasked with creating an 'About Me' Powerpoint slide, she came to know more about her roots. Lejla was able to research the day she was born, but when she asked her mother about the time, she was told about being adopted from Bosnia during the conflict. Later, before she went off to university, her parents told her that she was a child born of rape. Return to Bosnia At university, she met a documentary student, and travelled to Bosnia in search of her birth mother. This set off an incredible chain of events. Lejla visited the new maternity hospital, where a nurse recognised her. 'There was a nurse there that knew who I was, who knew who my adoptive Dad was,' she says. 'He was like, 'I can't believe you've come back'... This is a person that knew what had happened before. There's things about my story that I don't remember,' she adds. For more stories like this subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Weekly Gulp, for a curated roundup of trending stories, poignant interviews, and viral lifestyle picks from The Mirror's Audience U35 team delivered straight to your inbox. But it wasn't until later that same year when she made contact with her birth mother. Lejla was able to track her mother down through the Bosnian Embassy in the UK. After finding her birth mother, the embassy connected the pair. When Lejla heard the news that her mother was found, was alive, and wanted to be put in contact with her, she said it felt 'really intense and it was amazing.' But then the practicalities of contact crept in, she said she then thought: 'I don't speak Bosnian. I wasn't just going to call'. So instead, they opted to write letters to each other, to allow one another to digest their feelings and take the time they needed to respond. The Bosnian Embassy in the UK translated these letters on behalf of the mother and daughter. They then agreed to meet in person, so Lejla flew out with her parents to Bosnia to meet her birth mother. She tells me about the strangeness in entering the room, about the tears shed upon seeing her mother, whose facial features resembled her own, their cheek-bone structure echoing the others. All these new emotions - of who this new person is - was heightened as her parents had already met her birth mother, during that fateful interview in 1992. Her birth grandmother forbade them to meet, but had passed away by the time the mother and daughter made contact. Lejla said that having a baby born of sexual violence, 'there's stigma attached to that going back to the family. There was great stigma in my story… There is a huge amount of shame connected towards it.' Ongoing wars Lejla now works with War Child, where she has built connections with other children who were conceived in this way. When the news of the Ukrainian war hit headlines, Lejla says she couldn't help but think of the terrible inevitability of sexual violence. She said: 'A conflict without sexual violence isn't a thing, so there will be many different children born out sexual violence whether it's Ukraine [or] any of the conflicts that are going on [in] Sudan [and] Gaza.' There is 'no real deterrent' for sexual violence committed during war-time, Lejla says, as many perpetrators are never brought to justice. She describes how in Bosnia many victims live in the same villages as those who raped them during the war, who carry on living their lives unheeded. In this context, Lejla explains that 'justice and accountability is a real challenge' as by coming forward, victims are giving up their right to anonymity. She adds: 'Nothing really happened to the perpetrators that committed these crimes. Where is the deterrent of doing it in future conflicts?' Working with the charity Remembering Srebrenica, Lejla is an advocate for learning from the past to ensure that genocides never happen again. We discuss the on-going genocide in Gaza. There are similarities between the atrocities of the past in Bosnia and the atrocities of the present in Palestine. Lejla says: 'It's blatant annihilation, this isn't a small thing: food, withholding aid, bombing hospitals … The conflict [in Palestine] is playing out in the same way [as] the Bosnian war was not that long ago.' She adds: 'It's like we've not ever learned from what's happened previously, all the atrocities that have happened before [and] all the genocides.' Lejla says that, 'across the world there is a lot of lack of empathy.' She adds: 'Ultimately we need to do more within policy to actually take action against the countries that are committing genocide.' If you have been affected by this story, contact Rape Crisis England & Wales for free confidential support and information on 08088029999 or their website or 08088010302 if you're calling from Scotland. You can contact the Domestic and Sexual Abuse helpline on 0808 802 1414 if you are in Ireland.
Telegraph
25 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Sir Keir should not emulate Hugh Grant
His feet had barely touched British soil before Donald Trump started swinging his big stick. 'You better get your act together or you're not going to have Europe anymore,' he lambasted his Western allies after arriving in Scotland to visit his golf courses (not for the 47th president, concerns about second jobs). 'You've got to stop this horrible invasion that is happening to Europe, many countries in Europe… this immigration is killing Europe.' Setting aside the rights and wrongs of British immigration policy, our beleaguered Prime Minister would be forgiven for feeling a little peeved. What other American president would have presumed to blend personal and state business so brazenly and deliver such insulting rhetoric into the bargain? Amid social unrest in Epping, Reform on the march and small boats arrivals up by a staggering 50 per cent, immigration is Sir Keir's Achilles' heel. With his approval ratings at rock bottom, the last thing he needed was a punishment beating from Trump. Certainly, Sir Keir's backbenchers will be begging him to stand up to the Donald, if only to appease their voters in places like Ashton-under-Lyne, where many may be tempted by the Corbyn-Sultana cult or a Gaza Independent at the next election. Did Sir Sadiq Khan recommend that the Prime Minister reprise the 20ft Trump 'baby blimp' that he authorised to be flown above Parliament during the presidential visit of 2018? I wouldn't be surprised. And he wouldn't have been the only one. In the Left-wing mind, the 2003 romantic comedy Love Actually looms disproportionately large. This is for the sake of one scene alone. In it, Hugh Grant – whom most progressives, particularly those of a Liberal Democrat persuasion, wish was the prime minister in real life – upbraids the American president at a press conference. 'I fear that this has become a bad relationship; a relationship based on the president taking exactly what he wants and casually ignoring all those things that really matter to Britain,' Grant lectures his opposite number, played by Billy Bob Thornton. 'We may be a small country, but we're a great one, too… and a friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the president should be prepared for that.' Forgive me for quoting that Richard Curtis idiocy at such length. But that is precisely what Guardianista-in-chief Polly Toynbee did in a petulant little column before Sir Keir's visit to the White House in February, under the screaming headline: 'Starmer has the backing of Britons to stand up to Trumpism.' I rest my case. But does he? When it comes to immigration, the opposite would appear to be the case. Although 55 per cent of Labour voters want the numbers to stay the same or go up, polls show that most of the population wishes them very much reduced, with 32 per cent viewing immigration as a 'bad' or 'very bad' thing. Small boats get people's backs up even more. For all his braggadocio and swagger, the sorry truth is that on this issue, Donald Trump speaks for a greater number of Britons than our own prime minister. For this reason, Sir Keir would be best advised to tell his backbenchers to pipe down. Trump's big stick has caused the PM enough pain already. Tweaking the orange tail might play well to certain parts of the gallery but after a year of economic mismanagement, we are hardly able to withstand the tariffs with which Trump would surely retaliate. Whatever Hugh Grant may think.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis
Migrant hotel protests are erupting across the country, as 'tinderbox' Britain catches fire. What began with a series of protests in Epping, Essex, over the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl by a recently arrived Ethiopian migrant, has now spread, as Brits air long-standing grievances about asylum seekers they have been forced to host in their own communities. A powerful tendency now exists in the British state towards displacement activity Demonstrations have so far been reported in Bournemouth, Southampton and Portsmouth, Norwich, Leeds and Wolverhampton, Sutton-in-Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, Altrincham and even at Canary Wharf in London. With years of unaddressed anger rapidly making themselves felt, the police, pulled in all directions, are struggling to keep up. 'Local commanders are once again being forced to choose between keeping the peace at home or plugging national gaps', admits the head of the Police Federation. Still, it seems there is one thing the government is more than happy to devote resources to: trawling the internet for anti-migrant sentiment. The Telegraph reports that an elite team of police officers convened by the Home Office is set to monitor social media to flag up early signs of unrest. Working out of the National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) in Westminster the new National Internet Intelligence Investigations team will 'maximise social media intelligence' gathering in order to 'help local forces manage public safety threats and risks'. If this new division was just about intelligence-gathering that would be one thing. It's true that social media is in invaluable resource for following events on the ground at such gatherings, while local Facebook groups are often where grassroots protests are organised. Yet we know that when it comes to the British state and social media, censorship and punishment for online speech is never far behind. Ever since Sir Keir Starmer repeatedly linked the Southport unrest last year with social media, the idea has firmly taken root in Whitehall that the best way to stop unrest is to aggressively police the internet. Ofcom, the broadcast regulator, already takes this view, and the link has even been drawn in Department for Education guidance on how to talk to schoolchildren about the Southport disorder. In a recent report, the police inspectorate said that that forces must be 'better prepared and resourced to monitor, analyse, use and respond to online content', which it argues was a risk to public safety. This general zeal for social-media policing is why Big Brother Watch believes the new unit is very likely to infringe on free speech. The investigations team is 'Orwellian' and 'disturbing', says interim director Rebecca Vincent, creating the possibility that it 'will attempt to interfere with online content' as other government bodies are known to have done during Covid. As if there weren't enough threats to free speech already. This week age verification provisions in the latest stage of the Online Safety Act (OSA) kicked in, meaning that some footage of protests is now inaccessible on social media for many users. Not even parliamentary privilege is safe from the censorship regime. Katie Lam's searing April speech on the rape gangs, in which she quoted court transcripts and survivors, could not be watched on X without age verification. We are beginning to look like North Korea with rainbow flags: for the public's 'safety', footage exposing grievous failures of the British state now cannot be viewed in the UK. Little wonder, given the OSA explicitly earmarks content relating to 'child sexual abuse' and 'illegal immigration and people smuggling' as the 'kinds of illegal content and activity that platforms need to protect users from'. The Conservatives, who bequeathed us this blank cheque for digital authoritarianism, certainly need to take a long, hard look at themselves. The claims that the OSA is merely about restricting access to pornography has been exposed as a mere fig leaf. And still things could still get worse. As the Free Speech Union has noted, shortly after last year's riots, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a pro-censorship lobby group with ties to Morgan McSweeney, 'hosted a closed-door meeting under the Chatham House rule to discuss the role of social media in civil unrest'. In attendance were officials from the Home Office, the Department of Science, Information and Technology, Ofcom and other organisations. The CCDH proposals that emerged included amending the OSA to 'grant Ofcom additional 'emergency response' powers to fight 'misinformation' that poses a 'threat' to 'national security' and 'the health or safety of the public''. This would give Secretary of State Peter Kyle the ability to directly flag unapproved content to be taken down at a time of 'crisis'. Should the unrest continue this could well be coming down the track. What all this illustrates is just how ill-equipped the people in charge are to deal with Britain's problems, as The Spectator's Madeline Grant noted earlier this week. A powerful tendency now exists in the British state towards displacement activity. Spin doctors 'manage' the news. Police surveil social media. The government shuffles asylum seekers from hotel to hotel, or to HMOs, or even to privately rented accommodation (which it uses your own taxes to outbid you for). For his part, the prime minister has been tweeting about the women's football. As the unrest grows, leading politicians continue doggedly insist that Britain remains a 'a successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country'. In reality, there are answers to the asylum hotels crisis, it's just that the government simply lacks the will to act. Large numbers of illegal migrants need to be deported, while those that are here should be placed in a secure holding facility somewhere remote. What is surely obvious by now where they should not be: in hotels, in an Essex market town 500 yards from a school; on the Bournemouth beachfront; in the London's financial district; in a Leeds suburb right next to a shopping centre. As it is, however, it seems the regime will try anything and everything before addressing people's real concerns.
