The Department for Work and Pensions’ offices in central London. The review will look in part at why the DWP allowed carers to unknowingly accrue overpayments of thousands of pounds. Photograph: Benjamin John/Alamy
Staffer told by official it would be inappropriate for him to give evidence to review of scandal-hit benefit
The Department for Work and Pensions has been accused of blocking a whistleblower who repeatedly raised the alarm about carer’s allowance from giving evidence to an independent review of the scandal-hit benefit.
The DWP staffer was told by a senior official it was inappropriate to share with the review their knowledge of the inner workings of a system that has become notorious for its often cruel treatment of unpaid carers.
The review will examine how hundreds of thousands of unpaid carers ended up with huge debts and in some cases a criminal record for mostly minor and accidental breaches of carer’s allowance benefit earnings rules.
Approached by the Guardian last month with evidence that officials had rejected requests from individual staff members to make submissions to the review, the DWP said there was “no blanket ban” and it wanted “everyone” to contribute.
However, when the whistleblower, Enrico La Rocca, subsequently reapplied for permission he was told by the DWP’s personnel department that it would not be appropriate for him to give evidence.
Ministers announced the review in October after a Guardian investigation that revealed DWP officials and Conservative ministers had allowed flaws in the system to continue for years, despite promises to fix the problems.
With only a few weeks until Germany’s election, Elon Musk has unambiguously thrown his support behind the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. In a video address to a party rally last week, he appeared to urge Germans to “move on” from any “past guilt” related to the Holocaust.
It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.
Troublingly, the AfD is now firmly entrenched as Germany’s second-most popular political party, behind the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Like all parties in German elections, however, it cannot win an outright majority. It is also unlikely to be invited to join any ruling coalition that emerges from the February 23 election.
But the AfD’s anti-migrant, anti-government sloganeering has already seriously distorted Germany’s public debate and democratic culture, leaving many to ask whether it even needs to win elections to see its policies implemented.
This was evident following a dramatic week in Germany’s Bundestag.
First, in a radical break with Germany’s political norms, opposition leader Friedrich Merz deliberately drew on the votes of the AfD on Wednesday to ram a radical anti-asylum seeker motion through the parliament.
It was the first time in the history of the Bundestag that a parliamentary majority was reached with the help of the far right. Merz’s action was widely condemned as a “taboo-breaking” step towards legitimising the AfD.
The so-called ‘firewall’ was broken this week between mainstream German political parties and the far right. Clemens Bilan/EPA
Merz tried to take this a step further with a far-reaching bill to tighten immigration controls on Friday. Although the bill narrowly failed, all of the AfD voted with Merz. Twelve members of his own CDU party refused to back him.
Merz’s courting of the far right is widely seen as politically unnecessary, given his conservative CDU is already leading the national polls, making him the favourite to succeed the Social Democratic Party (SDP)‘s Olaf Scholz as chancellor.
This raises a couple crucial questions heading into the election. Is it insiders or outsiders that are playing the biggest role in bringing the far right into the mainstream? And just how big a role will the AfD play after the election?
The Musk effect
Musk’s embrace of the AfD should come as no surprise, given the integral part he played in Donald Trump’s election victory in the United States. In the German context, however, his behaviour and statements have taken on darker hues.
Germans know only too well what is at stake when democracy is eroded by those who abuse its freedoms to attack it. Had Musk’s now notorious Nazi salutes following Trump’s inauguration been performed in Berlin, for example, he might have faced up to three years in prison.
The catchphrase “never again” has underpinned German politics since the second world war. Yet, the response to Musk’s recent provocations was oddly muted in some sections of the German media.
With a few notable exceptions, it was left to activists to remind Germans of the severity of this gesture – projecting an image of Musk’s salute on a German Tesla plant, alongside the word “heil”.
Given the seriousness with which Germany patrols representations of its Nazi past, it was surprising just how few journalists were prepared to state without equivocation that “a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute”.
Merz’s embrace of the far right
Initially, there were some signs Germany’s main political leaders would decry Musk’s attempts to normalise far-right politics in the country.
Scholz has continued to label Musk’s blatant attempts to influence German politics as “unacceptable” and “disgusting”.
Merz claims to be keeping his distance from Musk. But it appears his strategy for winning the election is not far from what Musk is suggesting – mimicking AfD policies and collaborating with the party on anti-immigration votes.
In his most radical break with the centrism that characterised the CDU under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, Merz cracked the “firewall” against working with the far-right this week. Knowing just what it meant, he used the AfD’s support to pass the starkly worded nationalist border protection motion in the Bundestag.
Democratic party leaders, meanwhile, registered their shock and dismay. Merkel herself spoke out against Merz, saying it was “wrong” to “knowingly” work with the AfD.
Her intervention appears to have been critical to the immigration bill failing on Friday, with many of her former supporters in the CDU withholding their votes.
A defaced election poster for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) showing leader Friedrich Merz smeared with a Hitler moustache. Martin Meissner/AP
What AfD’s rise could mean
Given the two votes in the past week and Musk’s high-profile intervention, many in Germany now fear a CDU victory in the election could signal more collaboration with the AfD.
The Greens’ Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice chancellor, has said Merz’s nationalist coalition would “destroy Europe”. He has also warned Musk to keep his “hands off our democracy”, prompting Musk to label Habeck “a traitor to the German people”.
People attend the election campaign launch of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on Jan. 25. Hannibal Hanschke/EPA
Musk is by no means the cause of the AfD’s popularity, but his embrace of the extremist party has given it a global profile and credibility in circles that might not have otherwise considered supporting it.
As some commentators have suggested, it is probably not coincidental the AfD’s plans for the German economy would benefit Musk’s business interests. Economic self-interest alone seems insufficient, however, to explain why Musk has gravitated to the extreme right.
The same might be said of Merz. Electoral calculations alone cannot explain his risky courting of the far right. He has long been the frontrunner to win the next election. Cosying up to the AfD will only make it harder to form a coalition with either Scholz’s Social Democratic Party or the Greens.
If these two parties refuse to deal with Merz, the only other bloc large enough to deliver his party control of the government would be the AfD. Would he go so far?
Whether it is formally part of the next government or not, the AfD and its camp followers (such as Musk) could be set to have a much bigger influence on German politics. How this will change Germany in the long term remains to be seen.
“How can the government decide what words a journal can use to describe a scientific reality? That reality needs to be named,” one journal editor said.
Employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been ordered to pull any articles under consideration for publication in medical or scientific journals so that they can be checked for certain “forbidden terms” including gender, transgender, and LGBT.
The order was sent in an email to CDC division heads on Friday by the agency’s chief science officer, a federal official told Reuters on Sunday. Inside Medicine broke the news on Saturday and provided a screenshot of the full list of terms that needed to be scrubbed.
“It sounds incredible that this is compatible with the First Amendment. A constitutional right has been canceled,” Dr. Alfredo Morabia, editor in chief of the American Journal of Public Health, told Reuters. “How can the government decide what words a journal can use to describe a scientific reality? That reality needs to be named.”
“We can’t just erase or ignore certain populations when it comes to preventing, treating, or researching infectious diseases such as HIV.”
The order is an attempt to ensure that CDC is in compliance with U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order mandating that the U.S. government only recognize two sexes: male and female. The papers will be withdrawn so that a Trump appointee can review them.
The “forbidden terms” CDC employees are supposed to avoid are, in full: Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, and biologically female, according to Inside Medicine.
[In the spirit of the new authoritarian censorship] Sorry, this content could not be embedded. X
The order covers both papers under considerations and ones that have been accepted but not published. If a CDC employee worked on a paper with nongovernmental scientists but did not initiate it, they have been asked to remove their names, according to Reuters.
The new order is separate from a demand two days into the administration that government health agencies including CDC freeze all communications with the public. It follows reports on Friday that CDC webpages and datasets involving HIV, the LGBTQ community, youth health, and other topics were no longer accessible as the agency attempts to comply with the Trump executive order on transgender identity and another on banning government Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.
“It is Orwellian, it really is,” Steven Woolf, director emeritus and senior adviser at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center on Society and Health, told The Washington Post of the website purges. “The fact that so many websites are being scrubbed, it is an alarming development and endangers public policy and makes it difficult for decision-makers around the country, including doctors like myself, to make informed choices.”
[In the spirit of the new authoritarian censorship] Sorry, this content could not be embedded. X
In response to the purges, scientists, science journalists, and public health advocates have worked to preserve the datasets, with everything on the CDC website as of January 27, 2024 preserved at ACASignups.net and downloaded data sets also available on Jessica Valenti’s Substack Abortion, Every Day.
“Censoring data on ideological grounds is wrong. It is unscientific, and it is designed to eliminate opposition and erase dissidents,” virologist Angela Rasmussen, who was involved with the data preservation efforts, wrote on social media.
The journal article retraction order has created uncertainty and confusion at the agency, Inside Medicine reported:
How many manuscripts are affected is unclear, but it could be many. Most manuscripts include simple demographic information about the populations or patients studied, which typically includes gender (and which is frequently used interchangeably with sex). That means just about any major study would fall under the censorship regime of the new policy, including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else, let alone anything that the administration considers to be “woke ideology.”
Meanwhile, chaos and fear are already guiding decisions. While the policy is only meant to apply to work that might be seen as conflicting with President Trump’s executive orders, CDC experts don’t know how to interpret that. Do papers that describe disparities in health outcomes fall into “woke ideology” or not? Nobody knows, and everyone is scared that they’ll be fired. This is leading to what Germans call “vorauseilender Gehorsam,” or “preemptive obedience,” as one non-CDC scientist commented.
There are also concerns that censoring such a broad list of terms would have unintended consequences for public health.
“We can’t just erase or ignore certain populations when it comes to preventing, treating, or researching infectious diseases such as HIV. I certainly hope this is not the intent of these orders,” Carl Schmid, the executive director of the HIV+ Hepatitis Policy Institute, told Reuters.
Donald Trump decrees forbidden terms denying sexual diversityElon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Nine countries including South Africa, Namibia, and Chile formed the Hague Group to hold Israel accountable for its crimes
On Friday, January 31, nine nations took coordinated action to form the Hague Group to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law in Palestine. Representatives from the governments of Belize, Bolivia, South Africa, Namibia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, and Senegal gathered in The Hague, in the Netherlands, to inaugurate the collective action.
Today, nine nations — collectively known as The Hague Group — gathered in The Hague to coordinate legal, diplomatic and economic measures against Israel’s violations of international law. pic.twitter.com/uP1UCMAr4x
Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, also joined the representatives at the Hague. “One year after the [International Court of Justice] heard the South African application on the issue of genocide by Israel against the people of Palestine, [nine nations] have declared their support for the outcomes of that legal process,” Corbyn said. These nine nations “are determined to hold Israel to account, and all those nations that are continuing to supply weapons to Israel that are being used in the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
Together, the nine nations intend to uphold international law in the face of Israel’s crimes. This is in relation to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and the the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice, issued on January 26, March 28, and May 24 of last year. The Hague Group also declared its intention to prevent the transfer of arms to the Zionist state “in all cases where there is a clear risk that such arms and related items might be used to commit or facilitate violations of humanitarian law” and also prevent the docking of vessels “in all cases where there is a clear risk of the vessel being used to carry military fuel and weaponry to Israel, which might be used to commit or facilitate violations of humanitarian law, of international human rights law, and of the prohibition on genocide in Palestine.” The nations referenced international action to implement an arms embargo against apartheid South Africa.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn explains why he’s at The Hague today as nine nations take co-ordinated action against Israel. pic.twitter.com/8lnOcRTXTw
“We will take further effective measures to end Israeli occupation of the State of Palestine and remove obstacles to the realisation of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including the right to their independent State of Palestine,” read a joint statement issued by the representatives inaugurating the Hague Group. The representatives issued a call for other nations to join the Group “in the solemn commitment to an international order based on the rule of law and international law, which, together with the principles of justice, is essential for peaceful coexistence and cooperation among States.”
Donald Trump signs executive orders at the White House on Thursday. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, announces tit-for-tat 25% tariffs and warns of impeded access to ‘vital goods critical to US security’
The leaders of Canada and Mexico have hit back after Donald Trump signed an order authorizing drastic tariffs of up to 25% on their exports to the US, while China said it would complain to the World Trade Organization after it was also targeted by the president.
Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, on Saturday night made a televised address announcing concrete measures including a tit-for-tat 25% tariff phased in across C$155bn ($107bn) worth of American products. Trudeau said Trump had put at risk US consumers’ and industries’ access to much-needed Canadian critical minerals and resources including oil, energy and timber. The prime minister promised to work with Canada’s provinces to review dealings with the United States.
Addressing Americans, Trudeau said: “Tariffs against Canada will put your jobs at risk, potentially shutting down American auto assembly plants and other manufacturing facilities. They will raise costs for you including food at the grocery store and gas at the pump. They will impede your access to an affordable supply of vital goods crucial for US security such as nickel, potash, uranium, steel and aluminum.”
Trudeau added: “They will violate the free trade agreement that the president and I along with our Mexican partner negotiated and signed a few years ago” – referring to the United States Mexico Canada agreement (USMCA) that was drawn up largely at Trump’s behest after he tore up the previous North America free trade agreement (Nafta) during his first term as US president.
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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.
