People take part in the National march for Palestine in central London organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, August 3, 2024
TRADE unionists across Britain are to take part in a TUC-backed workplace day of action for Palestine next Thursday.
Workers are calling on the government to ban all arms exports, immediately recognise the state of Palestine, ban the trade in goods from illegal Israeli settlements and ensure Palestinians can access humanitarian aid.
After thousands of people took part in workplace days of action last year, workers are again being encouraged to organise acts of solidarity, which could include a two-minute silence, a stall outside their workplace, a bake sale or simply wearing the colours of the Palestinian flag.
Peter Mandelson told the FT ‘I regret ever meeting him’. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
Peter Mandelson told a reporter to “fuck off” when asked about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
He was questioned about his links with the billionaire paedophile in an interview with the Financial Times as he prepares to become Britain’s ambassador to Washington. However, he told the reporter in no uncertain terms that he did not want to discuss it.
Lord Mandelson said: “I regret ever meeting him or being introduced to him by his partner Ghislaine Maxwell.
“I regret even more the hurt he caused to many young women.
“I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?”
The pair’s connections have raised questions since a 2019 internal report on Epstein by JP Morgan bank was filed to a New York court.
It found Ubercnut Epstein appeared to “maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew, the Duke of York and Ubercnut Peter Mandelson, a senior member of British government”.
Four UN Special Rapporteurs have written jointly to the UK government demanding explanation of its inappropriate persecution of journalists and political activists under the Terrorism Act. They state that those persecuted:
appear to have no credible connection to “terrorist” or “hostile” activity
The cases taken up by the United Nations are those of Johanna Ross (Ganyukova), John Laughland, Kit Klarenberg, Craig Murray (yes, me), Richard Barnard and Richard Medhurst. The UN letter is signed by:
Ben Saul Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism
Irene Khan Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression
Gina Romero Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association
Ana Brian Nougrères Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy
Under this UN special procedure, the letter is sent to the government in question which has sixty days to respond. This letter was sent by the UN to Starmer’s government on 4 December. No reply having been received, it has now been published.
It is worth noting that even with the UN letter on its desk and ignored, Starmer’s government in fact stepped up the use of the Terrorism Act against pro-Palestinian journalists and activists in this period. The cases of Asa Winstanley, Sarah Wilkinson and Tony Greenstein, among others, happened after the letter was drafted.
I should be clear that I was, working with Justice for All International (for which we had a crowdfunder last year in relation to the Assange case at the UN), heavily involved in assisting with preparation of this initiative, and made three visits to the UN in Geneva on the subject together with Sharof Azizov, and on one occasion Richard Medhurst. Your subscriptions and donations to this blog are the only funding I have to make such activity possible, so thank you.
…
There is no sign the UN has given the Starmer government pause; human rights are extremely low on their agenda. Support for Israel and the crushing of pro-Palestinian sentiment, or of any criticism of western foreign policy, is extremely high on their agenda.
UK 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/QILgUHrdWREGenocide 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/O74hZCKKdpA
Last month’s Los Angeles fires were one of the costliest disasters in US history
Last month was the world’s warmest January on record raising further questions about the pace of climate change, scientists say.
January 2025 had been expected to be slightly cooler than January 2024 because of a shift away from a natural weather pattern in the Pacific known as El Niño.
But instead, last month broke the January 2024 record by nearly 0.1C, according to the European Copernicus climate service.
The world’s warming is due to emissions of planet-heating gases from human activities – mainly the burning of fossil fuels – but scientists say they cannot fully explain why last month was particularly hot.
It continues a series of surprisingly large temperature records since mid-2023, with temperatures around 0.2C above what had been expected.
“The basic reason we’re having records being broken, and we’ve had this decades-long warming trend, is because we’re increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told BBC News.
Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts
and reality then.
Displaced Palestinians make their way through the Nuseirat Refugee Camp on February 5, 2025. (Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The expulsion of the Palestinian civilian population from Gaza would not only be unacceptable and contrary to international law,” said Germany’s foreign minister. “It would also lead to new suffering and new hatred.”
U.S. President Donald Trump’s call on Tuesday for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with American military force drew near-universal condemnation from the international community, with political leaders, United Nations officials, and human rights groups denouncing the outrageous proposal as inhumane and blatantly unlawful.
“Any forcible transfer in or deportation of people from occupied territory is strictly prohibited,” Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement following Trump’s remarks alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant after presiding over a 15-month-long, U.S.-backed decimation of the Gaza Strip.
U.S. allies and adversaries, including in the Middle East, swiftly rejected Trump’s call for American ownership of Gaza and the total removal of the Palestinian population. Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Palestine’s envoy to the U.N., Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and ordinary Palestinians in Gaza were among those who dismissed the U.S. president’s proposal as unconscionable.
“These calls represent a serious violation of international law,” said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. “Peace and stability will not be achieved in the region without establishing a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital on the borders of 1967, based on the two-state solution.”
European nations also sharply criticized Trump’s proposal, with France’s foreign ministry expressing “opposition to any forced displacement of Gaza’s Palestinian population, which would constitute a serious violation of international law, an attack on the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians, and also a major obstacle to the two-state solution and a factor of major destabilization for our close partners, Egypt and Jordan, and the whole region.”
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that “the expulsion of the Palestinian civilian population from Gaza would not only be unacceptable and contrary to international law.”
“It would also lead to new suffering and new hatred,” she warned.
“Once again, the man who claimed to be the peace candidate is showing himself to be nothing more than the War Profiteer President.”
Trump’s call for a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip came days after the president said he wants to “just clean out” the Palestinian enclave by forcibly displacing the territory’s population, which is living under a fragile cease-fire agreement and in the process of returning to homes left in utter ruins by Israeli and American bombs.
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, said at a press conference on Tuesday that Trump’s proposal is “completely irresponsible.” Even the act of floating ethnic cleansing in Gaza amounts to “incitement to commit forced displacement, which is an international crime,” said Albanese.
“The international community is made up of 193 states,” she added, “and this is the time to give the U.S. what it has been looking for: isolation.”
U.S. human rights and anti-war organizations joined the chorus slamming Trump’s proposal, with Amnesty International USA executive director Paul O’Brien writing on social media that “removing all Palestinians from Gaza is tantamount to destroying them as a people.”
Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of Win Without War, said in a statement late Tuesday that “forcibly removing Palestinians from Gaza is ethnic cleansing.”
“It is obviously illegal, deeply morally wrong, and incredibly dangerous,” said Haghdoosti. “People in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, and beyond need a real end to the war, not permanent forced displacement. Instead, tonight President Trump proposed to send U.S. armed forces to Gaza to kick Palestinians out and act as security guards for [Jared] Kushner and friends as they cash in on what Trump called ‘the Riviera of the Middle East.'”
“Once again,” Haghdoosti added, “the man who claimed to be the peace candidate is showing himself to be nothing more than the War Profiteer President.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts
and reality then.Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
