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Jewish settlers, under the protection of Israeli forces, seize a house belonging to the Nasir al-Din family in the Old City of Hebron, West Bank on September 02, 2025. [Amer Shallodi – Anadolu Agency]
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned Thursday that Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are facing mass forced displacement at the hands of the Israeli occupation army and illegal settlers, amounting to an imminent risk of ethnic cleansing.
In its statement, MSF stressed that Israel’s annexation-driven policies in the occupied West Bank represent grave breaches of international humanitarian law and human rights law.
According to the organisation, in 2025 MSF teams witnessed policies and practices that are “blatantly designed to remove Palestinians from their land and prevent any possibility of return.”
MSF concluded that “ending the occupation remains the only way to alleviate the severe suffering facing Palestinians.” The group urged the United States, European Union member states, and the wider international community to apply real pressure to halt Israel’s practices of displacement and ensure an end to its illegal occupation.
The warning came a day after far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that Tel Aviv intends to annex 82 per cent of the occupied West Bank under Israeli sovereignty in order to block the establishment of a Palestinian state.
In preparation for annexation, Israel has intensified its crimes in the West Bank since launching its genocide in the besieged Gaza Strip in October 2023. These crimes include home demolitions, mass displacement of Palestinian civilians, widespread land confiscation, and the accelerated expansion of illegal settlements.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWREUK Labour Party Foreign Secretary David Lammy repeatedly heckled at a speech to the Fabian Society over his and the Labour Party’s support for and complicity in Israel’s genocide of Gaza.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at the party’s 2024 annual conference in Birmingham. Credit: Reform UK / YouTube
DeSmog and the New World have been blacklisted by Nigel Farage’s party.
A leading press freedom group has accused Reform UK of drawing from the “authoritarian playbook” by blocking media outlets from attending its annual conference this weekend.
The party informed DeSmog and the New World yesterday that its journalists would not be accredited for this year’s event. It did not offer an explanation.
The New World (formerly the New European) is a weekly newspaper with 35,000 subscribers whose contributors and editors include former New Labour communications chief Alastair Campbell, former global editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism James Ball, and former Spectator editor Matthew d’Ancona.
DeSmog is one of the UK’s leading climate investigations platforms. This year alone it has published stories in partnership with the likes of the BBC, The Guardian, the Financial Times, Private Eye, and The Mirror.
“It is shocking to see UK political parties seeking to pick and choose who can report on them,” said Fiona O’Brien, UK director of Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
“For democracy to work, journalists must be free to cover political events like party conferences and hold those in power to account, on behalf of the public.
“Reform UK’s actions in recent weeks – which include banning councillors from speaking to local journalists and falsely accusing journalists of activism – are straight out of the authoritarian playbook and should immediately be reversed.”
Reform’s leader of Nottinghamshire County Council, Mick Barton, has banned his councillors from speaking to local press outlet the Nottinghamshire Post and its online arm Nottinghamshire Live. The ban followed critical coverage of Reform by the publication, whose journalists were accused of acting “as activists” by the party’s deputy leader Richard Tice.
Reform’s leader Nigel Farage is paid more than £300,000 a year as a presenter on the anti-climate media outlet GB News, while Tice was formerly employed by GB News and its Murdoch-owned rival TalkTV.
Farage sported a GB News badge in Congress yesterday as he testified to U.S. lawmakers about supposed “free speech” issues in the UK.
The Reform leader used the session to compare Britain to North Korea, and to urge the U.S. to punish the UK for its alleged free speech infringements.
However, Farage was also held to account for his own questionable free speech record. Democrat Jamie Raskin asked the Reform leader: “Why do you ban journalists who oppose your views from coming to your events?”
“I don’t,” Farage responded. “I can’t think, if I go back over the past 25 years, of banning anybody.”
That statement is contradicted by Reform’s decision to ban DeSmog and the New World from this year’s conference.
Byline Times also announced today that it has been banned from attending this year’s Conservative Party conference. DeSmog and a number of other independent outlets were banned from last year’s Tory conference.
Reform Conference 2025
As reported by DeSmog yesterday, Reform’s conference in Birmingham will feature climate science deniers, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, and dark money campaign groups.
They include the Heartland Institute, a group close to Donald Trump’s administration that has called human-induced climate change a “delusion”, and Net Zero Watch – the campaign arm of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which has claimed that carbon dioxide has been “mercilessly demonised”.
By giving them a platform, Reform is “showing open contempt for the British public already living with the realities of climate breakdown,” said Tessa Khan, executive director of the research and campaign group Uplift.
A recent report by the New Economics Foundation found that Reform’s climate policies – which include scrapping clean energy investment and drilling for more fossil fuels – would cost more than 60,000 jobs and wipe £92 billion off the UK economy.
DeSmog previously revealed that Reform is offering access to Farage during the conference in exchange for hefty donations. A sum of £250,000 buys 10 seats at a champagne breakfast with the Reform leader during the two-day event, as well as “chauffeur-driven travel”, a personal assistant, and the sponsor’s logo on the main conference stage and battle bus.
DeSmog asked Reform to explain why it had been banned from the event, but did not receive a response.
Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.
A “rogue” government could seize sensitive information on UK residents, data privacy experts fear.
Labour’s new data access law would allow the UK government to replicate an Elon Musk-style DOGE data-grab, experts and campaigners have warned.
They believe the new law is “ripe for abuse” and could be weaponised by a future Reform UK administration to further its anti-climate, anti-asylum, anti-government agenda.
The Data (Use and Access) Act, which will come into effect next year, empowers ministers to use ‘Henry VIII powers’ – named after the instruments the medieval King used in 1539 to bypass Parliament and rule by decree – to legally access massive quantities of government data with little parliamentary scrutiny.
“The bill has provided any government from this time onward with powers which are ripe for abuse. It gives any future government a blank cheque they can use to legalise the use, sharing and reuse of personal data for whatever purpose they see fit,” Mariano delli Santi, legal and policy officer at the data privacy campaign Open Rights Group, told DeSmog.
The passing of the act comes amid a flurry of concern over Labour’s growing ties to big tech companies, including recent deals with OpenAI and Google to provide artificial intelligence support for UK government initiatives.
“The Labour government has purposefully chosen to ignore risks and prioritise the commercial interests of U.S. and Chinese tech giants over the protection of UK residents’ data and their rights,” said delli Santi.
Technology Secretary Peter Kyle says the new law will “finally unleash” a “goldmine of data” to “help families juggle food costs, slash tedious life admin, and make our NHS and police work smarter”. The government claims it will “inject” the economy with £10 billion in the next 10 years.
The U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), originally led by tech mogul Elon Musk and established by President Donald Trump, has sent teams of engineers into federal government departments to access vast amounts of highly sensitive personal data on U.S. residents in what has been widely dubbed a “digital coup”.
U.S. DOGE is now using those datasets, which include information on immigration status, healthcare, and social services, to collate a “master database” to surveil and track immigrants. The department has also overseen extreme cuts to vital, life-saving services, with a recent study by the Lancet medical journal estimating that Musk’s cuts to the U.S. international aid budget could lead to 14 million deaths by 2030.
Critics fear that Labour’s new data bill will make this sort of data-gathering legal in the UK.
Imitating Trump’s administration, Reform leader Nigel Farage has already established a secretive ‘UK DOGE’ unit intent on gaining access to council data in Reform-led areas.
Reform’s DOGE unit is led by former party chairman Zia Yusuf, a multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur who has not been shy about his desire to emulate Musk’s ideas in the UK.
The party is currently polling to win the next UK general election with 28 percent of the vote – seven points ahead of Labour.
If Reform gains power in 2029, campaigners say it could use Labour’s data access law to carry out its policies, which include a crackdown on immigration, the radical downsizing of the civil service, eliminating “government waste”, and decimating the UK’s net zero projects.
“Labour is handing over the means for a future Reform government to legalise DOGE-style data grabs. In as little as 28 days, a future Reform government could make it legal for a local council or any other public body to share personal data about you with their DOGE consultants,” delli Santi told DeSmog.
A Data Grab?
The Data (Use and Access) Act, which amends existing General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws, expands the government’s ability to use personal data.
Currently, the UK’s GDPR laws require a risk assessment to establish a “balance” between the value of accessing data against the rights of those whose data is accessed.
However, under the new law, the secretary of state can dodge this process by declaring that the data is needed for a “recognised legitimate interest”, which the law says can include “crime prevention”, “safeguarding vulnerable people”, “responding to emergencies”, and “safeguarding national security”.
The categories are vague, and they could feasibly include controlling immigration or making cuts to the administrative state.
Data privacy experts have also expressed concerns – disputed by the government – that the new law provides a loophole allowing ministers to water down protection for “special categories” of data, which are designed to guard against intrusion in relation to the likes of religious beliefs, political opinions, and sexual orientation.
“Ultimately I remain worried that a bad faith actor could come in and abuse the Henry VIII powers – which were intended to make it easier to add protections to GDPR – to undermine the special category data protections,” Duncan McCann, the technology and data lead at the Good Law Project campaign group, told DeSmog. “The importance of special category data means that it should only be amended by Parliament”.
However, even if a government was successful in watering down special category protections, campaigners have warned that diverging from the status quo would seriously compromise the UK’s ability to transfer data with other countries, including the EU, and would have negative economic consequences.
McCann believes this would stop most governments from taking action. “This cost has ensured that governments don’t drastically alter the fundamentals of data protection legislation,” he said.
Despite this, McCann added that “a potential Reform government may be less interested or susceptible to rational economic arguments, making radical divergence from GDPR, if they won, more likely”.
Moreover, even if a Reform government maintained protections against sharing special category data, personal information including tax details, criminal convictions, and immigration status data are not protected in the same way and could be harvested by a Farage government.
Reform’s Council Crusade
Battles have ensued since Reform won control of 10 councils in May’s local elections, with Farage’s party attempting to wrest control of potentially sensitive data for its DOGE operation.
Kent County Council, the first to receive a visit from Yusuf’s unit and a letter from Reform demanding “all council-held documents, reports, and records”, has so far resisted the efforts, hiring external lawyers to challenge the plan.
West Northamptonshire Council agreed in July to allow Yusuf’s largely anonymous team of analysts to access council data and ostensibly reduce local “fraud and waste” – a move that has been labelled an “assault on local democracy” by critics.
Reform claims that it has already saved £100 million since May, although many of the projects cut by the party would have involved introducing clean heating technology that would have saved councils money.
Reform UK chair Zia Yusuf and leader Nigel Farage. Credit: Imageplotter / Alamy Stock Photo
‘Project Chainsaw’
Labour has also used utopian language about the benefits of deploying data analysis and artificial intelligence to cut the size of the state.
“If we push forward with digital reform of government – and we are going to do that, we can make massive savings, £45 billion savings in efficiency. AI is a golden opportunity,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in March.
Starmer promised to “send teams into every government department with a clear mission from me to make the state more innovative and efficient”.
The initiative – which The Guardian reported was at one time referred to as “Project Chainsaw” – was seemingly influenced by a proposal from the Labour Together think tank. The name references Javier Milei, the President of Argentina, who gifted Elon Musk a chainsaw as a symbol for dismantling the U.S. state.
Milei has cut 50,000 public sector jobs and slashed Argentina’s health care budget by 48 percent in real terms since he took office in December 2023.
Labour Together told The Guardian that its initiative would have “’Milei’s energy but with a radical centre-left purpose”.
Data privacy experts have also cautioned that the data access law could “threaten democracy” by potentially compromising the integrity of elections. Campaigners warn the act will allow governments, including the current Labour government, to alter rules about how a political party can use data in the months leading up to an election, which could be used in a ruling party’s favour.
The government told DeSmog that “the Data (Use and Access) Act will not only allow us to harness the power of data to improve public services as part of our Plan for Change, but to do so in a way which also maintains our world-leading data protection standards.”
Despite these reassurances, delli Santi of Open Rights Group remains concerned. This law, he said, “lacks meaningful safeguards that would prevent it being used to enable disproportionate surveillance, discrimination, and creepy invasions into our private life”.
Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, U.S. President Donald Trump, and French President Emmanuel Macron. DeSmog collage. Credit: Faces of the World / Flickr (Macron), Steffen Prößdorf (Merz), Gage Skidmore / Flickr (Trump)
European leaders are bending to the demands of U.S. climate science deniers.
“The CSDDD is the greatest threat to America’s sovereignty since the fall of the Soviet Union,” the Heartland Institute, a pro-Trump U.S. think tank, tweeted on 31 March.
The Heartland Institute is one of the world’s leading climate science denial groups. It has helped to draft Donald Trump’s anti-climate policies, which have seen the president pledge to “drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels and once again pull the U.S. out of the flagship 2015 Paris Agreement.
Over recent months – along with a host of other Trump allies – the Heartland Institute has set its sights on a new target: the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).
This vague acronym belies the potentially transformative impact of the new law. In its original form, the CSDDD sought to require large companies – and those in “high risk” sectors – trading in the EU to address human rights and environmental issues in their own operations and in their supply chains. High turnover companies would also have been forced to adopt a plan to align with the Paris Agreement, including setting emissions reduction targets.
The Heartland Institute and its anti-climate, anti-regulation peers are vocal opponents of the law – and launched an aggressive campaign to water it down, or even to see it scrapped entirely.
These groups, which are all part of the ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) ecosystem, view the CSDDD as symbolic of the way in which “woke” governments are attempting to force citizens and global corporations to conform to a pro-diversity, pro-environment agenda.
Following Trump’s election in November, these MAGA groups wasted no time in formulating their plans to oppose this perceived agenda.
They focused in particular on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which attempt to create workplaces free from bias – and environmental, social and governance (ESG) schemes, which try to ensure that organisations are guided by responsible and sustainable practices, not just profit.
In December, barely a month after Trump’s victory, the Heritage Foundation – the group that wrote the key ‘Project 2025’ blueprint for the president’s second term – published a report entitled: “ESG, DEI, and What to Do About Them”.
In the report, the Heritage Foundation described ESG and DEI as “pernicious”, and called the CSDDD “a serious problem”.
Two months later, the State Financial Officers Foundation – an influential network of Republican finance officials – wrote an open letter calling on the new administration to “investigate” the CSDDD, claiming that the EU’s directives are based on “unscientific assumptions about the nature of climate change impacts” and “will force companies to incriminate themselves”.
This quickly filtered through to Trump’s Cabinet. On 12 February, Howard Lutnick, the president’s pick for commerce secretary, told a Senate committee that the CSDDD threatened to place “significant burdens” on U.S. companies, and that the Trump administration was exploring the use of “commercial tools” to mount a counter-attack against the EU’s environmental regulations.
Soon this rhetoric made its way to the White House. In March, as part of the worldwide tariffs implemented by the Trump administration, the president called the EU “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the world”.
But the EU hasn’t stood firm in the face of Trump’s war of words.
The EU has already announced that it will be scaling back the CSDDD and delaying its implementation. The number of companies within scope has been reduced by 80 percent. The firms in question will only be required to file due diligence reports every five years, and won’t be required to investigate the ESG operations of their indirect business partners. The implementation of the law has also been postponed until 2028.
But Trump’s MAGA hardliners are still not satisfied. In April, the Heartland Institute released an open letter signed by 31 other groups, calling for Congress and the Trump administration to “take immediate steps to counter the CSDDD’s implementation”, including “if necessary, imposing retaliatory trade policies that punish EU nations for eroding America’s sovereignty, freedoms, and prosperity.”
This backlash is now influencing European leaders. In late May, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called for the CSDDD to be scrapped entirely. They claim it must be abandoned in order to defend the “competitiveness” of European corporations, with Macron stating that Europe must “synchronise with the U.S. and the rest of the world.”
This judgement signifies the appeasement of anti-climate pressure groups that are ideologically opposed to clean energy and climate science.
The Heartland Institute has denied that humans are driving climate change, which it has called a “delusion”, while the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document urged Trump to “dismantle the administrative state”, reverse policies on climate action, slash restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrap state investment in renewable energy, and gut the Environmental Protection Agency.
If the EU waters down its climate policies in response to Trump’s pressure, it will have helped to send Project 2025 global.
The ‘Climate Cartel’
It’s unclear whether these MAGA groups – and the Trump administration – will ease up on the EU if the CSDDD is ditched entirely. They may simply use it as evidence that European lawmakers will buckle under enough pressure.
Indeed, MAGA’s opposition to the CSDDD is part of a multi-pronged campaign that seeks to dismantle global climate initiatives pioneered by both governments and corporations.
Much of the original groundwork for this campaign was undertaken by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and its chair Jim Jordan, a leading Trump supporter.
Last year, Jordan’s committee produced reports – and demanded evidence from major corporations – on a supposed “climate cartel” of “left-wing activists and major financial institutions”.
The committee alleged that some of the world’s biggest asset managers – that have questionable climate commitments – are conspiring to force American companies to decarbonise against their wishes.
As part of its “investigation”, the committee demanded information from more than 130 U.S.-based companies, retirement and pension programmes, as well as 60 U.S.-based asset managers.
In November, 11 Republican-led states sued BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street – three of the world’s biggest asset managers – over their ESG policies. In West Virginia and Oklahoma, nearly two dozen banks have been barred from public contracts for trying to divest from fossil fuels.
These actions, along with the anti-climate rhetoric of Donald Trump, have had a chilling effect. In February last year, BlackRock, State Street, and JP Morgan Asset Management withdrew from Climate Action 100+, an investor-led initiative that works to ensure the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters take action on climate change.
Fast forward a year, and a growing list of major U.S. corporations are either cancelling or delaying their sustainability reports – designed to show how they are meeting their climate commitments.
And a new story from the investigative outlet CORRECTIV today reports that German insurance giants and investment firms are withdrawing from climate agreements, while companies are quietly shelving their sustainability policies, amid the anti-ESG backlash orchestrated by Trump and his acolytes.
As one sustainability expert at a financial firm told CORRECTIV: “We have to be careful not to harm the cause by sticking our necks out and becoming a target in the U.S.”
This article was produced with support from the European Media and Information Fund, managed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The sole responsibility for any content supported by the European Media and Information Fund lies with the author(s) and it may not necessarily reflect the positions of the EMIF and the Fund Partners, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European University Institute.
