Bernie Sanders promises to fight back against attacks from Hillary Clinton

Attacks have heated up in the Democratice presidential race.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, gestures to supporters during a campaign rally in Laramie. Sanders won the Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin

A riled up Bernie Sanders served notice yesterday that he will not be turning any cheeks as his battle for the Democratic presidential nomination with Hillary Clinton enters a new, red-hot phase, declaring: “I’m not going to get beaten up, I’m not getting lied about. We will fight back.”

Under intense pressure to sustain momentum after a recent string of victories including in Wisconsin this week, Mr Sanders bared his claws after the Clinton camp said on Wednesday that it would seek to “disqualify’ him in the eyes of voters in New York, the next big state to vote.

Mr Sanders took that to mean that his credentials to serve in the White House were being brought into question and hit right back suggesting it was Ms Clinton’s qualifications that should be examined, citing her record of voting for the Iraq war and taking money from Wall Street.

“Are you qualified to be president of the United States when you're raising millions of dollars from Wall Street, an entity whose greed, recklessness and illegal behavior helped destroy our economy?” the Senator from Vermont asked yesterday at a news conference in Philadelphia.

For her part, Ms Clinton stood among a throng of reporters outside Yankee Stadium in New York and attempted to cool the campaign coals. “I will take Bernie Sanders over Donald Trump or Ted Cruz any time, so let's keep our eye over what's at stake in this election,” she said.

The former first lady, who represented New York in the US Senate for eight years and cannot afford to lose it to Mr Sanders when it votes on 19 April, then plunged into a nearby subway station to take a train south to Manhattan, a stunt clearly aimed at reminding voters of a recent Sanders gaffe when he said tokens are used to pay for rides, which hasn’t been true for years.

The tone-change in Mr Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, may stem from his circle of aides who have long worried that he has been insufficiently tough with Ms Clinton. He has still, for instance, to make any attempt to use the ongoing FBI investigation into her use of a private email server while Secretary of State as an issue against her on the campaign trail.

“This is not the type of politics that I wanna get in,” Mr Sanders conceded to reporters. But he swiftly shed all reluctance, claiming that Ms Clinton had started it all by coming after him “in some kind of really, uncalled-for way.” He added: “If Secretary Clinton thinks that I just come from a small state of Vermont and we're not used to this, well, we will get used to it fast.”

The candidate also took a beating meanwhile from Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, one of America’s largest and most recognised companies, who lambasted him in an article in the Washington Post for allegedly linking his company with so-called “corporate greed”.

“It's easy to make hollow campaign promises and take cheap shots in speeches and during editorial board sessions, but US companies have to deliver for their employees, customers and shareholders every day,“ Mr Immelt wrote, before adding sardonically that his 124-year-old company “has never been a big hit with socialists”.

While Ms Clinton still has a wide lead in pledged delegates over Mr Sanders, she also knows that a failure to win New York in two weeks could seriously hobble her campaign