Protesters sit with handwritten signs outside Woolwich Crown Court, 24 April 2026. Credit: Defend Our Juries
‘An absolute right to acquit according to conscience.’
Nine people have been arrested for breaching a Section 14 order while holding signs communicating the principle of jury equity outside a court where Palestine Action activists are being retried.
Their signs read: “Jurors have an absolute right to acquit according to their conscience” and “Jurors deserve to hear the whole truth”. The latter sign appears to reference a court order, which prohibits British media outlets from reporting on certain aspects of some proceedings.
The nine people arrested were holding handwritten signs outside Woolwich crown court on Friday 24 April, where six Filton24 defendants are currently being retried on charges of criminal damage in connection with a Palestine Action raid on an Elbit Systems factory in Filton, South Gloucestershire, in August 2024.
A Section 14 order was implemented on both Thursday and Friday to prevent any demonstrations near the court outside of a designated area. A DOJ spokesperson told Novara Media that the area where protest was permitted by the Metropolitan police is a mile away from the court, which defeats the purpose of the protest.
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The principle of jury equity is the common law principle that juries have the power to acquit according to their conscience. Its origins can be found in Bushell’s Case of 1670, which established the right of a jury to find facts and apply the law to those facts according to its conscience – without fear of judicial reprisal.
A plaque in the Old Bailey, visible to any serving juror or court user passing through the Grand Hall, includes a reference to this same principle.
DOJ has called today’s arrests on the basis of the Public Order Act a “cynical attempt” to bypass the high court judge’s 2024 ruling on the Warner case.
In the Commons last week, Zarah Sultana used parliamentary privilege to expose a court order that restricts reporting on certain aspects of a live criminal case, withholding important information from both jurors and the British public. But neither Novara Media nor any other British media outlet can safely report or play the contents of what she said.
On Wednesday night’s Novara Live, the Your Party MP joined host Steven Methven to discuss what she described as an “insane” attack “on all of our civil liberties”.
“The fact that only Parliament TV, only Hansard, can report on it tells you what the British state is all about – and it is about curtailing our rights to organise, to resist, to challenge when the state overreaches,” she said. “I think it is scary.”
Parliamentary privilege protects Sultana from prosecution for what she said in the chamber, but breaching the order outside of the House of Commons could be considered contempt of court, carrying a maximum two-year prison sentence.
“I was surprised to learn that the British media has no absolute right to report on what MPs say in our own parliament,” Methven said on the show.
“I’m scared that a lot of people don’t even know what’s happening,” Sultana replied. “The fact that American organisations and non-UK organisations are the only ones reporting on this is scary. How do we organise against this? And how do we fight back?”
While he did not reveal the contents of Sultana’s 14 April speech, which can be viewed online in the Parliament TV archive, Methven said that her statement was connected to very general issues relating to jury trials and the government’s current attack on them, as well as counter-terror law.
By extending the ceasefire, Trump admits Iran has a strong negotiating hand. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
By extending the pause in fighting, Donald Trump admits that Iran is in a strong bargaining position – so what next?
The US-Israeli war on Iran has reached an unexpected pause. An easing of tensions between Washington and Tehran now extends to Donald Trump changing his mind yet again and extending the informal ceasefire deadline. His motive is allegedly to allow the Iranian government more time to agree to a proposal that meets US requirements, but it is also an admission that Iran is in a strong bargaining position.
There are complications, though. One is that while the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) maintain control of the Strait of Hormuz, US armed forces are blockading Iranian ports to stop commercial shipping. The aim is to put such pressure on Iran’s weakened economy that the leadership in Tehran will quickly accept US terms. That’s unlikely.
While a few days ago, Iranian sources were suggesting that they might loosen their control of the Strait of Hormuz, any progress in that direction has now been halted until the US maritime blockade is lifted. Only then might Iran participate in negotiations on a settlement.
Furthermore, while Israel is also participating in the pause in bombing, it is very much a separate actor. It has plenty of influence in Washington and is led by Binyamin Netanyahu, who wants nothing less than total victory over Iran.
All this is overshadowed by the current state of the conflict. In essence, the war failed to meet US or Israeli expectations almost from the start. Most of Iran’s theocratic and political leaders were assassinated by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in the first week but were rapidly replaced, and the country held together. Then, not only did the powerful IRGC survive an intensive combined air assault by US and Israeli forces, it even went on the offensive, concentrating on targets such as radar, satellite communications, aerial refuelling and intelligence gathering.
Iran may have had thousands of people killed and billions of dollars of damage done to its economy, but it has not been defeated and is not ready to cede to the US’s demands. Moreover, one of the impacts of the losses among the theocratic, political and IRGC leaderships is that there has been a radicalisation as a new generation takes shape.
This is reflected particularly in the hard-line position of the powerful IRGC leader, Major General Ahmad Vahidi, who is prepared to withdraw from negotiations, at least for now. This contrasts with two political leaders, the speaker of the Majlis (parliament), Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who seem to favour a more nuanced approach.
Compromise may be possible within Iran, but it is unlikely that it will be enough for the United States, where most of the key people around Trump have been appointed because they toe the line. Those who appear to disagree with the president have been sacked or have left, the latest being navy secretary John Phelan after barely a year in post, although he was reportedly ousted over a dispute about shipbuilding, rather than Iran.
Meanwhile, the IRGC’s control of the Strait of Hormuz has already had a long-term impact, according to a classified Pentagon briefing to Congress reported on by the Washington Post. Even if an end to the fighting was negotiated, post-war necessities such as clearing Hormuz of Iranian-laid mines could affect oil and gas prices for six months, right up to the Congressional mid-term elections.
More immediately, IRGC units have fired on some commercial ships, forcing them to abide by Iranian controls. The US Navy has done the same to enforce its blockade, with one case from last weekend having a political significance that has been largely missed in the Western media and that goes some way to explaining Iran’s response to intense US and Israeli military pressure.
The US destroyer USS Spruance attempted to board an Iranian cargo ship, Touska, in the Arabian Sea to force it to stop. The Iranian ship’s crew refused to do so for six hours until the US destroyer ordered the crew to evacuate its engine room. This they did, and the engine was then put out of action by the Spruance firing several rounds of its main armament, a 5-inch Mk 45 gun. The Touska was then boarded and taken into US Navy custody.
There is an important historical context to this. The Spruance’s firing of its main artillery armament in anger was the first time a US Navy warship had done so in nearly 40 years. Highly relevant is that the last time also came amid a conflict with Iran.
In the final months of Iraq’s eight-year-long war against Iran, in which the US had sided with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a US destroyer was damaged by an Iranian mine. Days later, on 18 April 1988, the US Navy mounted ‘Operation Praying Mantis’ in the Gulf, which involved an attack on an Iranian frigate, IRIS Joshan, by a formidable US Navy task force of a guided missile cruiser, a destroyer and a frigate. The Joshan was sunk with heavy loss of life, 45 crew killed, and the US operation continued to destroy two Iranian surveillance platforms and two other naval vessels.
Thirty-eight years ago, Operation Praying Mantis was seen as a great success by the Pentagon, but it was a wake-up call for the Iranians, and especially the IRGC. In recent years, the IRGC has built a fleet of around a thousand fast attack craft suited to swarm attacks on much larger warships, has a stockpile of around two thousand mines, shore-based anti-ship missiles and drone swarms.
As a result of that instance nearly four decades ago, Iran’s military resilience improved. Today, that’s resulting in two of the world’s most powerful states, the United States and Israel, being unable to win their war.
For the US, in particular, Iran now joins Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya in a line of failed wars over the past quarter century. Whether that lesson will be learned by a Pentagon led by Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump is doubtful.
Donald Trump explains why he established his Bored of PeaceDonald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Strait of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.
‘Trump’s imperialism and militarism is spreading racism, it’s spreading far right politics and we need to oppose it’
Warplanes roared overhead as hundreds of people marched to RAF Fairford airbase on Saturday.
The base in Gloucestershire is one of 12 US bases in Britain. It is home to the huge B52 and B1 bombers used by the US to spread murder and destruction in Iran.
A group of Iranians displayed photos of all the children killed in a school in Minab, southern Iran, on the first day of the assault. And protesters lined up in a chain along the barbed wire fence of the base.
Marzi, an Iranian living in London, told Socialist Worker, “I’m here to oppose the war in Iran. There’s a ceasefire but it’s quite fragile and we don’t know what will happen tomorrow. We oppose bombing in Iran and everywhere around the world.”
Protester Andrew pointed to Britain’s complicity in the war. He told Socialist Worker, “I don’t think we should be involved in it in any way, including our bases being used. It’s not ‘our war’ but we are involved. By letting the US use these airbases, we are involved.”
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CND general secretary Sophie Bolt told the marchers, “There is a fragile ceasefire. But Donald Trump is again threatening to commit war crimes in Iran. He is talking about bombing bridges and power stations.
“The airbase at RAF Fairford will be used by the US to do that. It’s absolutely central to Trump’s illegal war in Iran.”
She added, “Starmer is lying to the British public when he says Britain’s base at Fairford will only be used defensively. He has no say in how these bombers are deployed. It is not going to make us more safe. We have been dragged into this war and that makes us all a target.”
But Bolt also pointed out the unpopularity of Trump’s wars, explaining that US veterans and their families had joined protests against the war last week. “Trump’s catastrophic war is leaving him more and more isolated, both internationally and in the US”, she said.
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Nigel Farage objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
“Look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece,” writes Hartmann and you will realize our worst nightmares are coming true. (Credit: Armyinform.com.ua, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones. Don’t believe me? Keep reading.
Ever think a drone could chase you down the street or fire a bullet through your living room window because you pissed off Trump, Miller, or their ICE thugs? If the answer is “that’s science fiction,” please read on: that reality may be only a few months away, and every single part of the spying and death-dealing infrastructure needed to make it happen has been quietly assembled by the Trump regime over the last fourteen months.
This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.
That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.
USSOCOM “[P]rovides elite, combat-ready forces… Their responsibilities include counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, and psychological operations.”
The very next day, U.S. Southern Command announced its own Autonomous Warfare Command focused on the Caribbean and Central America, where Trump and Hegseth have already been criminally blowing up small boats without warrants, trials, or congressional authorization in defiance of both US and international law.
Read those two announcements side by side and you’ve discovered the operating manual for what comes next. To understand why that concerns every American who ever thought about protesting against Trump’s GOP and their ICE Frankenstein’s Monster in person or on social media — and not just the Venezuelan fishermen drifting dead off Curaçao — we’ll first have to travel back three months to a tree-lined street in south Minneapolis, and the morning Renee Nicole Good dropped off her six-year-old son at school.
She was 37 years old, a published poet who’d earned her English degree from Old Dominion, the mother of three, and wife of Becca Good. A few blocks from the school, she came across an ICE operation in her own neighborhood, complete with unmarked vehicles, masked agents, and the shrill whistles that Minneapolis neighbors had been blowing for six weeks every time the masked thugs showed up.
Renee stopped her SUV sideways in the street and pulled out her phone; a few minutes later, ICE goon Jonathan Ross fired three shots through her windshield and window, killing her about a mile from where George Floyd had died five years earlier. Her wife, who’d been standing behind the vehicle questioning the agents, was filmed by bystanders running down the snowy street and staggering back, crying and covered in her wife’s blood.
I’m starting with Renee because she’s the human face of where this country already is under the police state Trump and Miller are assembling, not where we’re headed. By the time she was shot, ICE agents had opened fire on nine people in five states and Washington, D.C., since September. None have been criminally charged.
Just a few days after her killing, federal agents in Minneapolis were reportedly telling bystanders and legal observers “that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” and in Portland, Maine, an ICE thug was caught on video telling a woman who’d been filming him, “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”
That’s the culture Trump, Miller, and the GOP have built using human agents with automatic weapons, masks, and fake license plates, while smashing car windows, kicking in front doors, beating and killing with impunity, and now “detaining” some 70,000 people without the due process the Constitution requires.
What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones.
To understand what’s coming unless Congress steps in to stop it now, you must first know about what’s already been built in Gaza that’s the template for the Trump regime. An Israeli intelligence whistleblower told the Israeli magazine +972 in April 2024 about an AI system called Lavender that ranked the entire population of Gaza by “probability of militant affiliation.”
Lavender then automatically generated a “kill list” of roughly thirty-seven thousand people living in Gaza, based on things like intercepted cell phone metadata and social media activity. It fed that list to human officers who spent an average of twenty seconds rubber-stamping each name before the Israeli Air Force bombed each target’s home, killing those “militants” and their families.
The system had a reported error rate of about ten percent, which, in a population of two million Gazans, translates to thousands of civilians killed because the AI computer was mistaken or drew the wrong conclusions from their social media, phone, or travel activity.
Even more brutal, a companion Israeli system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked those flagged men so they could be bombed when they were home with their wives and kids, because, as one officer told the reporters, it was “much easier” to bomb a family’s home than to try to target a military or business site.
And what about the families of these “militants”? Israeli command approved up to twenty civilian deaths — men, women, children — per low-ranking “militant” killed, and more than a hundred dead when bombing to take out a “senior commander.”
This is how automated killing at industrial scale actually works in real time, how it works right now as you’re reading these words, and it is not science fiction.
Now look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece, based on the Lavender Israeli model and lessons learned from their experience.
ICE has signed contracts worth more than $60 million with Peter Thiel’s Palantir to build something called ImmigrationOS and a targeting app called ELITE, which stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement.
ELITE pulls data from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, DMV records, Medicaid files, utility bills, license-plate readers, and commercial data brokers (which typically include social media posts and often even emails when they come from “free” email providers), then populates a map with dossiers and assigns a “confidence score” to each person’s current address. If you update your address to get medical care, for example, that updates your score. Or post something on social media.
Stephen Miller, the architect of this dystopian enforcement regime, reportedly holds a six-figure financial stake in Palantir, which, as far as I can tell, nobody in Congress has yet demanded answers about.
Meanwhile, ICE has been buying and using Skydio drones for protest monitoring, Customs and Border Protection has been flying MQ-9 Predator drones (the same platform that killed people in Yemen and Pakistan) over anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles, and the FAA quietly issued a nationwide notice in January creating 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every DHS and ICE vehicle, so that citizens and journalists can’t film federal immigration operations from the air.
That last piece is the the most alarming tell of all: you don’t close the sky above an enforcement agency unless you’re planning to do things there you don’t want photographed.
And it’s not just the feds flying this stuff. Four days ago, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used its “Drone as First Responder” fleet, a program it first sold to the public as an “emergency public-safety tool,” to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” rally in downtown LA, and then last month’s “No Kings” demonstration.
The drones are Skydio X10s, which the manufacturer advertises are capable of spotting a person from more than a mile away (8,000 feet), facially identifying an individual from a half-mile, and reading a license plate from 800 feet. Two officers can run eight of these drones at the same time, each automatically tailing “people of interest.”
This is how mission creep happens. A tool sold for saving lives ends up spying on us at a peaceful protest, logging our faces, our license plates, and the people we marched with. And once that data is collected, it flows — as all law enforcement data in America now flows — into the same Palantir-built federal databases that ELITE and ImmigrationOS are drawing data from right now.
Then there’s the Pentagon. That $54.6 billion Defense Autonomous Warfare Group request I mentioned is buried inside a $1.5 trillion budget big enough to hide almost anything. Southern Command’s new Autonomous Warfare Command is already using drones to blow up small boats in the Caribbean that the Trump regime claims are trafficking narcotics, without anything resembling due process or congressional authorization.
Ken Klippenstein reported this week that the same budget zeroes out funding for “civilian harm mitigation” — avoiding unnecessary civilian deaths — inside Pentagon operations. In other words, we’re building, out in the open, the infrastructure that produced Lavender and kills people in an automated fashion, and we’re doing it with no public debate and no discernible push-back from anybody in Congress.
We’ve been here before, albeit on a much smaller scale and overseas. Between 1967 and 1972, the CIA ran a program in South Vietnam called Phoenix that generated intelligence-scored capture-or-kill lists of suspected Viet Cong and eventually killed somewhere between twenty-six- and forty-thousand people, many of them innocent Vietnamese civilians mistakenly flagged by informants and unreliable data.
If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.
Phoenix was rubber-stamped up the chain of command and produced the same “responsibility gap” that Lavender’s defenders hide behind now in Israel, where nobody in particular is accountable because the list came from “the system.”
The lesson of Phoenix is that we must build friction, oversight, and human accountability into the machinery of state violence. But now we’re about to remove all of that, and Trump wants to use the system against people he’s already labeled “domestic terrorists” for filming an arrest, posting online, dissing Christianity or “traditional American views on morality,” or attending a protest.
With Renee Good, the decision to kill her was made by a human being who was operating inside a system that had already decided her neighborhood, her opposition to ICE, and her observer status made her a legitimate target. What happens when that decision is made in twenty seconds by a machine down in Florida, and executed by a hovering armed drone as the FAA has cleared the civilian sky so nobody is watching?
If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.
The time to demand transparency on Palantir’s confidence scores is before ELITE is fully deployed, not after.
And the time to call your senators and your House member at 202-224-3121 is this week, to tell them you want hearings on the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a moratorium on armed drones for ICE and CBP to use inside the United States, an audit of ImmigrationOS, and an investigation into Stephen Miller’s financial interests in the contractor building the machine.
If you aren’t yet registered to vote in 2026, do that today. And if you want to help local and state officials push back against federal overreach, openstates.org will connect you to your legislators.
Renee Good deserved to go home to her son that morning. The next Renee Good deserves a country that decided, in time, not to let a cold, soulless machine make that call.
Nigel Farage objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
