Zionist Keir ‘Kid Starver’ Starmer. Image thanks to The Skwawkbox.
It comes amid calls from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to scrap the two-child benefit limit
A new poll shows that voters support calls to scrap the two-child benefit limit, a policy which charities and think tanks say has pushed hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.
The poll, carried out by Opinium, for Save the Children and shared exclusively with i, suggests that this would be a politically popular move for Labour, ‘with 39 per cent of the public claiming it would make them more likely to vote for whichever party made the pledge’.
It comes amid calls from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to scrap the two-child benefit limit, with the archbishop calling it a cruel and immoral policy that plunges hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.
The two-child benefit cap prevents parents from claiming child tax credit or universal credit for any third or subsequent child born after April 2017. It was introduced by the former chancellor George Osborne in his austerity drive with the aim of encouraging parents of larger families to find a job or work more hours.
Shameful number of children getting to class too hungry to learn makes the case for universal free school meals
The ‘heartbreaking‘ rise of child poverty in the UK has been highlighted in a recent poll that revealed a shameful number of children going to school hungry in England.
Four in ten teachers said their students were showing up to class too hungry to learn, which rose to 63% in the poorest areas, a new poll by Teacher Tapp reported by the Mirror, found. For more than a fifth of teachers, the issue had become worse since September.
This has led to schools stepping in to address hunger where pupils don’t qualify for free school meals, with four in ten teachers saying their school is offering free school dinners to hungry children who don’t qualify. This rose to over half in the most deprived areas.
The poll has emphasised the argument made by campaigners that free school meals should be extended to all primary school pupils, as strict eligibility criteria means many children living in poverty miss out.
Just Stop Oil protesting in London 6 December 2022.
The Government’s ‘independent adviser’ on domestic extremism, Lord Walney aka former Labour Politician John Woodcock, has issued a report calling for organisations like Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil to be banned.
The report outlines that any group engaging in action where the maximum penalty is imprisonment should be restricted through sanctions, including removing the right to assemble and fundraise. The report also calls for new measures that would enable individuals to sue organisations like Just Stop Oil.
Last week, it emerged that far from being ‘independent’, Mr Woodcock serves vested corporate interests in the arms and fossil fuel industries, whose profits are being threatened by the groups he’s proposing to ban.
Amongst other roles, Woodcock chairs the Purpose Defence Coalition, whose members include Leonardo, one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers, with extensive links to the Israeli government. He is also a paid adviser to Rud Pederson, lobbyists, whose clients include the oil and gas giant, Glencore as well as Enwell Energy, which describes itself as ‘a highly focused oil and gas business’. He is also a paid adviser to the Purpose Business Coalition, whose members include BP.
Woodcock resigned from the Labour party in 2018 amid sexual assault allegations, and was subsequently granted a lifelong peerage by Boris Johnson after calling on the electorate to vote for the Conservatives.
The report has been laid before the House of Commons using the ‘motion for unopposed return’ procedure, which means there’s no scrutiny of it by Parliament, but it benefits from Parliamentary privilege, ie: Walney can’t be sued for defamation.
Shami Chakrabarti, a Labour peer and human rights advocate, said the government was hiding behind procedure.
“It is ironic that a government that consistently attacks protesters by press releases and reading the riot act to police chiefs now hides behind arcane procedure and abuse of parliamentary privilege,” she said.
The revelations echo a previous attempt by the so-called ‘think-tank’, Policy Exchange to brand climate defenders as ‘extremists’ in 2019. It later emerged that Policy Exchange was also being funded by Big Oil.
A Just Stop Oil Spokesperson said:
“Lord Walney is directly funded by oil and gas companies, as well as by the weapons manufacturers responsible for the deaths of countless innocent civilians in Gaza. His direct financial ties to the very companies whose profits are threatened by the groups he’s proposing to ban, means he is entirely compromised. It is yet another case of open corruption. As such, Just Stop Oil does not recognise the legitimacy of this report.
The governments’ climate strategy has been declared unlawful for the second time and their response has been to licence yet more oil, as our climate spins out of control. Who are we going to sue for the inconvenience of flooded fields, crop failure, spiralling food costs and empty shelves? Just this morning, the High Court has ruled that Suella Braverman acted unlawfully in making it easier for the police to criminalise peaceful direct action. History will come to regard the acts of this government and its cronies as the real criminals, which is why they will stop at nothing to silence those telling the truth and acting like we are in the emergency that we are in.”
Today’s report comes hours after the High Court ruled the Home Office’s threshold for “serious disruption” in the Public Order Act 2023 was unlawful.
dizzy: Looks like the title Whore would be more appropriate for Walney.
Protesters gathered outside the hotel in London where the Shell AGM was being held (Rebecca Speare-Cole/PA)
More than a fifth of shareholder votes were cast against Shell’s climate strategy at a tense annual general meeting.
The board faced heated exchanges with investors and protesters throughout the three-hour event at the InterContinental O2 in London on Tuesday.
A resolution to approve the current strategy saw 21.8% of shareholder votes going against management, Shell said.
Meanwhile, nearly a fifth of the votes (18.6%) backed a resolution from Dutch activist group Follow This, which called on the board to align decarbonisation targets with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
But despite a record 27 institutional investors co-filing the resolution, the result came as a drop from 20.2% in 2023.
The AGM was the first since Shell scaled back several short-term and medium-term climate targets last year.
…
As the meeting moved on to shareholder questions, Mark van Baal, founder of Follow This, challenged the board about its environmental impact.
He said: “Dear shareholders, get a load of this. The world has pledged to halve emissions by 2030 and your company has no plans to further reduce emissions this decade.”
Original article by BRETT WILKINS republiahed from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan delivers an address before Venezuela’s National Assembly in Caracas on April 22, 2024. (Photo: Pedro Rances Mattey/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Biden will feel he must attack the ICC because it directly implicates his own decision-making to repeatedly defend atrocities and their authors,” said one critic.
Human rights defenders around the world on Monday accused U.S. President Joe Biden of double standards and worse after he condemned a decision by the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor to pursue arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders for alleged crimes committed during the October 7 attacks and subsequent obliteration of Gaza.
Karim Khan, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, said the court has formally applied for arrest warrants targeting two Israeli and three Palestinian officials. Khan is seeking to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged “crimes of causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, [and] deliberately targeting civilians in conflict.”
Khan said charges against Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammed Deif include “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape, and sexual assault in detention.”
A panel of ICC judges will determine whether to issue arrest warrants for any of the suspects.
Note language Biden uses to dismiss ICC action, referring to "this prosecutor," attributing the decision to one man, when in fact there was unanimous support for this action by the ICC's panel of experts; and "this prosecutor" was Israel's preferred candidate for the position. https://t.co/7EeuSxQ9iO
Biden blasted the effort to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant as “outrageous.”
“Let me be clear: Whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas,” the president said in a statement. “We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned what he called the ICC’s “shameful… equivalence of Israel with Hamas.”
Critics were quick to pounce on what some called Biden’s hypocritically disparate responses to the ICC’s pursuit of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders and for Russian President Vladmir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine.
“What’s outrageous is Biden’s utter disregard for victims of war crimes,” said Mark Kersten, an assistant professor of international law at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia. “But let’s be clear: Biden will feel he must attack the ICC because it directly implicates his own decision-making to repeatedly defend atrocities and their authors.”
Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, said that “there’s certainly no quantitative equivalence between Hamas and Israeli officials in terms of the sheer number of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including humans murdered, homes demolished, hospitals bombarded, journalists executed, aid workers snuffed, land stolen, children starved, men tortured… I could go on and on.”
Furthermore, “‘equivalence’ between two actors has zero bearing on who should be arrested and prosecuted,” Whitson added. “The ICC has prosecuted individuals for a single offense irrespective of how it compares to other crimes committed by other actors at the same time.”
This is the same childish logic as "Gaza can't be a genocide bc genocide=Holocaust."
The ICC is not asserting equivalence. It's charging a slate of crimes.
Imagine someone gets shot, and the police say "The only murder I ever saw was a stabbing, so this can't be murder, sorry"
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis—who heads the leftist Democracy in Europe Movement 2025—said on social media that “Biden just declared the International Criminal Court null and void because it dared pursue Israel’s war crimes which Biden is actively and enthusiastically enabling.”
“In the tradition of George W. Bush, the U.S. president has declared the U.S. a rogue state,” he added.
According to Israeli officials, 1,139 Israeli soldiers and civilians and foreign nationals were killed during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7. An unknown number of the victims were killed by so-called “friendly fire.”
Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza—which is the subject of a genocide case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—has killed at least 35,562 Palestinians, mostly women and children, while wounding nearly 80,000 others, according to Palestinian and international officials. At least 11,000 other Palestinians are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of damaged or destroyed homes and other buildings.
Approximately 2 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced and at least hundreds of thousands of others are facing growing famine in the northern strip and widespread starvation throughout the besieged coastal enclave as Israeli soldiers and settlers continue to block aid shipments and attack both humanitarian workers and Palestinians desperately trying to receive food, water, medicine, and other necessities. Nearly 1 million Palestinians have fled Rafah as Israeli forces invade and bombard Gaza’s southernmost city.
Mary Robinson, Chair of The Elders, welcomes the decision by @IntlCrimCourt Prosecutor @KarimKhanQC to apply for arrest warrants against Hamas leaders and Israel's Prime Minister and Defence Minister.
“The decision by ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan to apply for arrest warrants… https://t.co/lYRoOQcPBg
The United States—which provides Israel with billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover—had reportedly been working with Israel on how to thwart the ICC’s effort to arrest Israeli leaders. Meanwhile, a dozen Republican U.S. senators earlier this month threatened retaliation against the tribunal if it issued arrest warrants for Israelis.
“Target Israel and we will target you,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter that drew rebuke from Khan’s office.
Under the American Service Members’ Protection Act—also known as the Hague Invasion Act—the president is authorized to use “all means necessary and appropriate” including military intervention to secure the release of American or allied personnel held by or on behalf of the ICC.
U.S. and Israeli officials often note that neither country is party to the Rome Treaty that established the ICC. However, the court “has jurisdiction in relation to crimes committed on the territory of Palestine, including Gaza,” as well as “over crimes committed by Palestinian nationals inside or outside Palestinian territory.”
Wow, watch StateSpox on ICC and where Palestinians can seek justice for war crimes
Lee: Who has jurisdiction here
Miller: Israel
Lee: So if Palestinians have complaints they have to go to Israeli courts
Under then-Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, the ICC in 2021 launched a formal investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes and apartheid in the illegally occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.
Israeli and Hamas officials reacted angrily on Monday to Khan’s move, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling the application “absurd” and the “new antisemitism” and Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri lamenting that it equates “the victim with the executioner.”
South Africa—which filed the ICJ case now joined by over 30 nations—welcomed Khan’s announcement, with President Cyril Ramaphosa asserting that “the law must be applied equally to all in order to uphold the international rule of law, ensure accountability for those that commit heinous crimes, and protect the rights of victims.”
Original article by BRETT WILKINS republiahed from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
