Staff working at Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land (RBSL) in Telford, Shropshire, March 24, 2025
LABOUR faced calls to focus its efforts on peace-building today after it emerged Britain is set to ramp up weapons production.
British war profiteer BAE Systems is erecting shipping container units across the country to produce RDX explosives, used in 155mm artillery rounds.
The rounds are among the ammunition that Britain has supplied to Ukraine.Each shipping container will produce up to 100 tonnes each year, according to a Times report.BAE Systems’ Maritime and Land Defence Solutions business development director Steve Cardew told the paper: “The whole challenge for our industry is around production scale-up and creating enough industrial capacity to effectively match Russia and other hostile nations.”According to the report, BAE’s production of 155mm rounds will have increased 16-fold over the last two years once its explosives filling facility at Glascoed becomes operational this summer.
YOUTH DEMAND swarmed London on Saturday to demand a trade embargo on Israel and taxes on the super-rich to pay climate reparations.
Sixty-three activists split into two groups and disrupted traffic across the capital including at Aldgate East station, High Holborn, London Bridge and Oxford Circus.
Both teams then converged on Waterloo Bridge where they remained for half an hour, before two supporters were arrested under breach of Section 7 of the Public Order Act.A Youth Demand spokesperson said: “Since October 7 2023, more than 10 children in Gaza have lost one or both of their legs each day since Israel began indiscriminately murdering civilians. “The operations to save these children’s lives are often carried out without anaesthetic due to the ongoing blockade of food and medical supplies being prevented from entering Gaza. “The UK is providing the weapons and logistical support that are being used to blow these children’s limbs off. “What sort of ‘decent’ and ‘respectable’ society allows this to happen in 2025?? We need a total trade embargo with Israel right now!”
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/QILgUHrdWRE
In a letter to Keir Starmer, Child Poverty Action Group estimated that the number of children in poverty would rise to 4.8 million by 2029 unless action was taken. Photograph: Adam Angelides/Getty Images
Sources says government is ‘not going to find a way’ to ditch cap despite predictions that child poverty levels will soar
Ministers are privately ruling out scrapping the two-child benefit cap despite warnings from charities that a failure to do so could result in the highest levels of child poverty since records began.
Government sources said charities and Labour MPs who were concerned that wider benefit cuts would push more families into poverty should “read the tea leaves” over Labour’s plans.
“If they still think we’re going to scrap the cap then they’re listening to the wrong people. We’re simply not going to find a way to do that. The cap is popular with key voters, who see it as a matter of fairness,” one source said.
In a letter to Keir Starmer on Tuesday, groups including Barnardo’s, Save the Children UK and Citizens Advice said scrapping the two-child benefit limit would be the most cost-effective way to reduce child poverty.
…
In their letter to Starmer, they said: “Scrapping the two-child limit is by far the most cost-effective way to reduce child poverty. It would lift 350,000 children out of poverty overnight and result in 700,000 children living in less deep poverty.
“If it is not scrapped, the stark reality is that child poverty will be significantly higher at the end of this parliament than when the government took office, making this the first time a Labour government would leave such a legacy.”
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.Zionist Keir ‘Kid Starver’ Starmer. Image thanks to The Skwawkbox.
Members of the Palestine Red Crescent and other emergency services pray by the bodies of fellow rescuers killed a week earlier by Israeli forces, during a funeral procession at Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on March 31, 2025. (Photo: Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images)
“This report doesn’t even attempt to engage with the truth,” said the Israeli group Breaking the Silence.
The Israel Defense Forces’ report on the killing of 15 paramedics in Gaza last month was “sure to lead to increased demands for an independent investigation,” said one journalist for Sky News, which recently released an extensive account of the incident that experts and advocates have called a potential war crime.
The IDF said it had found “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident” that took place on March 23, when Israeli troops opened fire on a convoy of vehicles that included ambulances, killing the 15 rescue workers.
But officials claimed that there was “no attempt to conceal the event” and the report suggested the firing of a deputy commander for providing an “inaccurate report” and the reprimanding of a commanding officer should satisfy the international outcry over the incident, after which United Nations and Palestinian Red Crescent officials discovered the medics’ bodies and their crushed rescue vehicles had been buried in a shallow mass grave.
An Israeli probe into Israel's killing of 15 Palestinian medical and rescue workers in Gaza finds no cover-up even though Israeli forces lied about their vehicles not having had their lights on and Israel continues to detain the sole survivor. https://t.co/p7Xi4DA2rV
“Is this meant to be a joke?” said Palestinian writer and poet Mosab Abu Toha after the IDF announced the commanders would be fired and reprimanded. “How is this supposed to help the children and families of these medics? …These war criminals should be arrested and handed over to the [International Criminal Court] for due legal processing.”
The IDF report found that six out of 15 Palestinians killed “were identified in a retrospective examination as Hamas terrorists,” but did not produce evidence to support the claim; Sky News, which released its investigation on on Friday, also did not find evidence.
The report also claimed that the army decided to “gather and cover the bodies to prevent further harm and clear the vehicles from the route in preparation for civilian evacuation”—an explanation for the buried bodies and ambulances.
As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, the IDF’s claim that soldiers “did not randomly attack” the convoy but rather fired on suspected “terrorists” in “suspicious vehicles” was refuted by video evidence from the phone of one of the medics who was found in the mass grave—believed to be Refaat Radwan.
The video showed a convoy of clearly marked ambulances and fire truck, with headlights and flashing lights on—contradicting the IDF’s claim that the vehicles were driving with their lights off.
Despite the video evidence, the IDF report said there was “no evidence to support claims of execution” and accused those who have made such accusations of “blood libels.”
The Sky News report released Friday found that Israel’s claim that the medics were not fired at from a close distance was false and that expert analysis of Radwan’s cellphone video determined shots had been fired from as close as 12 meters away
Palestinian-American policy analyst Yousef Munayyer said that in the case of the medics’ killing, “video evidence exposed [the IDF’s] lies forcing this flimsy effort mascarading as accountability so they can sweep it under the rug.”
Israel is able to repeatedly attack civilians and aid workers and claim that their deaths were accidental, Munayyer suggested, because “western media is willing to believe as fact initial Israeli narratives around atrocities.”
Given how frequently this happens, there is simply no other plausible explanation for the failure of western media to adjust by treating the Israeli military a source of information without credibility than this: they want to support their atrocities.
The Israeli probe found “professional failures,” said former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, but the IDF “doesn’t seem to have examined the rules of engagement, approved by senior officials, that permit killing before clear identification of a combatant.”
The killing of the paramedics underscored the “atmosphere of impunity” in Gaza, said one Israeli policy analyst.
“What we know is that we cannot trust the Israeli [military]. Unless The New York Times would have gotten hold of that video clip, I don’t think that we would know the truth,” Akiva Eldar told Al Jazeera. “It would be another cover-up.”
Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Nice told Al Jazeera that the IDF report “invites many questions that it will be difficult, I suspect, for the [Israeli military] to answer.”
“For example, [there is] the proposition that six of these people were Hamas, presumably members of Hamas on active [military] service, not people who might have been associated with Hamas in some way. No documentary evidence at all is identified [for that],” he told the outlet.
Breaking the Silence, a group made up of Israeli veterans of the IDF who speak out against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, said the report was “riddled with contradictions, vague phrasing, and selective details.”
“We all remember when the IDF claimed that the ambulances emergency lights weren’t on—and then we saw the footage proving otherwise. Not every lie has a video to expose it, but this report doesn’t even attempt to engage with the truth,” said the group.
“Another day, another cover-up,” Breaking the Silence added. “More innocent lives taken, with no accountability.”
Hugh Kirsch, 66, with his sister Oona Herzberg. Hundreds of contract disputes have erupted between cash-strapped councils and financially struggling care providers. Photograph: Oona Kirsch
Hugh Kirsch’s case one of wave of evictions of vulnerable residents caused by crisis in adult social care funding
A pensioner with severe learning disabilities who was a victim of one of the most notorious care home abuse scandals of recent years has been told he faces eviction over a dispute about who pays for the costs of his state-funded care.
The family of Hugh Kirsch, 66, said they had been warned he would have to leave his supported home because the council that funds his care refused to increase fees in line with costs and his care provider could no longer afford to subsidise the price.
The case is one of a growing wave of evictions of vulnerable residents caused by the crisis in adult social care funding in which hundreds of contract disputes erupt between cash-strapped councils and financially struggling care providers.
Kirsch’s sister Oona Herzberg said he was “trapped in the crosshairs of funding issues that have nothing to do with him”, and urged his funder, Haringey council, to fulfil its responsibilities to meet his care needs.
She told the Guardian: “It would be cruel and inhuman to evict Hughie. He would be traumatised after what he has been though, and so would we. He would be totally bewildered and upset, and would withdraw inside himself.”
Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves wear the uniform of the rich and powerful. They have all had clothes bought for them by multi-millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. CORRECTION: It appears that Rachel Reeves clothing was provided by Juliet Rosenfeld.Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.
Staff working at Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land (RBSL) in Telford, Shropshire, March 24, 2025
