thecanary.co

We urgently need an arms embargo on Israel, and we need as many people as possible to get active in demanding one

Bromley’s groundbreaking queer venue AMBI has announced the launch of an exciting new Drag Race competition, further cementing its role as a bold and inclusive project at the heart of South London’s LGBTQ+ scene.

A blistering report from UN experts has determined that Israel is committing the crime against humanity of extermination.

This latest article is an inadvertent admission of what many of us already knew; that the BBC has known what's going on all along.

geteilt von: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35280731

Archived

On May 3rd, the world exchanges congratulations and statements to celebrate press freedom. Conferences are held, reports are published, and slogans are raised about “Preserving the Word” and “Protection of Journalists”. But behind this perfect scene, there is a place called Gaza, where the journalist pays his life for the truth, in the shadow of an international silence that applies to the camera as the siege on the city.

Now, thousands of protesters have been detained and government-owned media appears to be running a blackout on any coverage of the protests. A number of journalists have been arrested and a BBC reporter has even been deported after his reporting of demonstrations.

Meanwhile, in 2023, there was a massive jump in arms exports to Europe. Overall, the value of UK companies’ arms export contracts to Europe more than quadrupled between 2013–17 and 2019–23, reaching £16.15 billion in the latter period. This reflects a trend towards European rearmament that has been going on for many years, but which greatly accelerated with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Privatisation of essential utilities doesn’t just mean directly more expensive bills and transport for households. It also has a domino effect on the rest of the economy through higher industry costs for utilities like water and energy.

The University of Cambridge has lost its legal bid to stop pro-Palestine, anti-genocide protests on certain parts of its campus.

In the last five years, police forces in the UK have paid nearly £80m in compensation following claims against them. Figures obtained by Public Interest Lawyers found that 47,658 claims have been lodged against police forces since 2019.

Widespread protests erupted on Monday 3 March within the Kakuma refugee camp, located in north-western Kenya, as residents voiced their anger over alarming shortages of food and water.

Concerns about the potentially “catastrophic” introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into the nuclear weapons’ command, control and communication (N3) systems have been raised by the former First Sea Lord and former Security Minister Lord West of Spithead.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has sparked controversy as it faces allegations of blocking a whistleblower from providing evidence to an independent review concerning the much-criticised Carer’s Allowance scheme.

Palestine campaigners have welcomed an important victory in defence of their rights to protest. At short notice the University of Cambridge attempted to secure a draconian five year long injunction to prevent specifically Israel and Palestine-related protest at key sites on campus.

Declassified UK has revealed that several mainstream media editors in Britain met with Aviv Kohavi, who had recently stepped down as the top military officer in Israel, a month into the genocide in Gaza. Guardian editor Katherine Viner, BBC director of news content Richard Burgess, and Financial Times editor Roula Khalaf all met with Kohavi despite the atrocities Israeli occupation forces were committing at the time.

On the first day that international governments resume the COP16 biodiversity summit, a new report blows open the biodiversity scandal that is biomass energy.

Parliament is having the second reading of the Labour Party government’s latest answer to the “hostile environment” for so-called ‘illegal’ migration, the Border Security, Asylum, and Immigration Bill. So, a migrant rights group has called on MPs to ditch the racist piece of legislation.

As first reported in the Times, it seems that Keir Starmer is taking the fight right to Reform and Nigel Farage’s front door. Like some grim reality TV show, the government is planning to:

The NHS is still spectacularly failing to end its shameful institutionalisation of learning disabled and autistic people via the 1983 Mental Health Act (MHA). That is, nearly ten years on from its initial promises to vastly scale back the practice and shift to a model of supported living in the community, it’s still detaining learning disabled and autistic people at an appalling rate.

A shocking new film which claims attempts have been made to hide Israel’s genocide in Palestine gets its first screening in Bristol on Friday 21 February. Norman Thomas, producer of the film Censoring Palestine, said:

Fire Brigades Union (FBU) general secretary Steve Wright has pushed back against Labour Party real-terms cut to fire and rescue services across England, warning that “austerity under a Labour government is still austerity”.

Award–winning former Declassified UK journalist Matt Kennard has called for a public inquiry into the US government’s funding of the ‘BBC Media Action’ charity. This comes as Donald Trump’s second administration has taken aim at the controversial USAID (which Kennard says is often just “a CIA front”). BBC Media Action says the cut to USAID has “affected” its operations, as the organisation’s support “amounts to about 8% of our income in 2023-24”.

University of Glasgow: complicit in Israel’s genocide

A clear majority of UN member states – 125 out of 193 – support the tax reform plan which seeks to deal with global tax avoidance. Rich Anglosphere settler-colonial states, however, are at the forefront of opposing the measures. In November, for example, only nine nations voted against adopting “the terms of reference for the UN Tax convention negotiations”, according to Byline Times. These were the UK, USA, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, alongside Israel, Japan, South Korea, and Argentina.

Al Green stressed that “ethnic cleansing has always been a crime against humanity”. Then, he quoted Martin Luther King, asserting that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.

Archive link: https://archive.is/NjIkK

Well, Donald Trump’s inauguration speech was a shit show wasn’t it?

The UK’s Stop Trump Coalition has released a statement on the day of Donald Trump’s second inauguration – 20 January – pledging to “mobilise in our thousands and our millions”. It has been signed by more than a thousand grassroots campaigners, trade unionists, climate activists and others.

It’s little over five months since the Labour Party won the election. Yet a majority of the UK public are now opting for Keir Starmer to resign as prime minister, according to YouGov. 40% of respondents think he should resign, while 36% think he should remain and 24% don’t know.

Two Just Stop Oil supporters who sprayed Heathrow departure boards with orange paint during the Oil Kills, international uprising to end fossil fuels last July have won a temporary reprieve as their jury failed to reach a majority decision.

In a joint statement as part of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC), the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) strongly condemns US actions to impose sanctions related to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and calls on the US to adhere and respect the international legal system and its institutions.

Activists from Shut The System sabotaged telecommunications cables leading to far-right lobbyists’ headquarters at 55 Tufton Street on Saturday 4 January.

Israel has unleashed a massive military attack to neutralise Syria with hundreds of airstrikes. A senior Israeli source has called this “the largest air operation carried out by its Air Force in its history”, according to Al Jazeera. Despite saying its airstrikes would ‘continue for days’, Israel has stressed that it is ‘not intervening’.

Amnesty International released a “landmark new report” on Thursday 5 December. It concluded that Israel “has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip”. But nine hours later, BBC News was still nowhere to be found. The UK’s state broadcaster apparently had nothing to say about “the world’s best known human rights organisation” judging a close British ally to be guilty of genocide.

Jihadist forces have invaded the Syrian city of Aleppo (Heleb) as part of a new escalation in the country’s ongoing proxy war. But the Kurdish-majority neighbourhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud (Şêxmeqsûd) and Ashrafiyeh have been resisting the invading extremists.

Today, however, I write to you with grave concerns about the integrity of the 2024 presidential election and the urgent need for a forensic audit to restore trust in our democracy.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/48375341

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/48375341

Elbit Systems UK has lost its largest-ever British arms contract, worth over £2.1bn, after the Ministry of Defence (MoD) scrapped its Watchkeeper drone programme with Elbit subsidiary UAV Tactical Systems (U-TacS). It comes after Palestine Action sustained years of direct action against the company – which had already resulted in it losing several other contracts.

National animal welfare charity the League Against Cruel Sports has welcomed the ban on snares which comes into force in Scotland on Monday 25 November. It called on the UK government to deliver on its manifesto commitment and ban these barbaric traps in England as well.

You know we’re in very deep shit when an oil giant warns about the climate crisis; you know – the one it helped create, and then tried to cover up?

Carbon capture and storage project will generate FIVE times more emissions than admitted