Climate campaigners say the Rosebank oil field will be a ‘defining test’ of the government’s credibility on climate change. (Lucy North/PA)
Equinor, which owns the majority of the oil field, stressed it was committed to advancing the ‘Rosebank project’
Climate campaigners have challenged the UK Government to “do the right thing” and turn down plans for drilling in the Rosebank oil field.
The group Uplift – which wants to see a “rapid and fair transition away from oil and gas production in the UK” – said whether the green light is granted for the development would be the “defining test of this Government’s credibility on climate change”.
It came as it was confirmed Equinor, which owns an 80% majority stake in the oil field, confirmed it has submitted a scope 3 assessment – setting out all associated greenhouse gas emissions for the project, in compliance with new guidelines from UK authorities.
And the company said it is “fully committed” to working with all relevant bodies to “advance the Rosebank project”.
The Rosebank field, which is located some 80 miles west of Shetland, is the UK’s largest untapped oil field and is estimated to contain up to 300 million barrels of oil.
…
Robin Wells, director of Fossil Free London, said: “In the face of this decision on the biggest undeveloped oil field in the North Sea, we must be crystal clear. Rosebank will be the defining test of this Government’s climate promise.”
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Residents and protesters clash with federal agents in the East Side neighborhood on October 14, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
A group of veteran Chicago activists said the latest immigration enforcement operations are “a brazen attempt to instill fear in and demand obedience of all Americans.”
Federal immigration enforcement officials have been ramping up operations in Chicago in recent days, including in a violent confrontation on Tuesday in a neighborhood in which agents deployed smoke grenades, pepper balls, and tear gas against local demonstrators.
As reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, the confrontation began when federal agents deliberately rammed into a car that they had been pursuing on the Southeast Side of Chicago.
The collision with the vehicle forced the car’s two occupants to exit the vehicle and flee from law enforcement officials on foot. Shortly after this, a crowd of local residents came out of their homes and began protesting against the actions of the immigration agents.
According to the Sun-Times, “a large number of armed Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents responded to the crowd by hurling smoke grenades, shooting pepper balls and deploying at least three rounds of tear gas over the area, even with children and seniors in the area.” By the end of the confrontation, four protesters were placed under arrest, as were the two men who were targeted for arrest by immigration enforcement officials.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker expressed outrage over the incident and demanded accountability from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over what he described in a social media post as “unchecked attacks on Chicago residents.”
“[Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is an out-of-control danger to our peaceful communities,” he added.
Andre Vasquez, a Chicago City Council member, toldThe New York Times in an interview that federal immigration officials are causing chaos throughout the city.
“Chicago’s been doing just fine, and then these guys showed up,” he said. “There is big concern about what these unidentified, masked men are doing in this city without accountability. Chicagoans are just trying to live their life. We’re not going to tolerate unconstitutional authoritarianism.”
As Common Dreams has reported, the Trump administration has deployed federal agents to several cities that it claims are overrun with crime—but statistics have shown violent crime on a significant decline in recent years in Chicago and other cities targeted by the president.
Oscar Sanchez, who volunteers for a local rapid response network that tracks immigration enforcement activities, told the Sun-Times that the latest actions by CBP agents mark a significant escalation in law enforcement aggression.
“When you’re using these tactics, you are asking people to be hospitalized,” he said. “You see elderly folks on the [ground], so you just ask yourself, what is this for? Why is the aggression needed? Why are these elevated tactics even being used?”
Sanchez’s words were echoed by six Chicago activists who took part in 1960s demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and who wrote an editorial for the Sun-Times in which they described the tactics being used by law enforcement as a “terrifying escalation” beyond anything used by law enforcement officials during the famous anti-war demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
After describing the actions taken by the Chicago Police Department and the Illinois National Guard during the 1968 protests—including “clubbing, corralling, gassing protesters, dragging many of us into patrol wagons”—they said that what the Trump administration is doing today is even worse.
“Flouting the Constitution, President Donald Trump has declared war on the very people he was elected to serve,” they wrote. “The Trump administration, weaponizing the Department of Homeland Security against ordinary Americans, is occupying Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Memphis, Chicago, and Portland, deploying military tactics to stifle free speech, staging performative raids under the pretext of pursuing dangerous criminals, and subverting democratic norms without accountability.”
The end goal of these operations, the activists warned, is “a brazen attempt to instill fear in and demand obedience of all Americans.”
Federal agents, including members of the Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol, and the police, attempt to keep protesters back outside a downtown US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility on October 5, 2025, in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The incident comes as immigrants’ rights advocates warn ICE’s tactics in US cities are growing increasingly violent.
Amid report after report of increasingly aggressive tactics used by federal immigration enforcement, a pair of Portland medical workers say that an agent threatened to shoot them as they tried to transport an injured protester last week.
According to publicly archived dispatch records reported by Willamette Week, an ambulance crew was attempting to transport a protester with a broken or dislocated collarbone from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in southern Portland on October 5.
The facility has been a flashpoint in recent weeks as the site of several small but persistent protests, which the Trump administration has attempted to characterize as violent provocations by “antifa” in order to justify its deployment of military troops.
After entering through the facility’s front gate around 9:19, the two medics were able to load the patient into the ambulance without issue. But at 9:40, the driver reported to dispatch that “we are still not being allowed to leave by ICE officers.”
ICE agents deployed to Portland, Oregon, apparently blocked EMS from leaving and then threatened to shoot the ambulance driver… https://t.co/DkDWL9nVoV
Confidential incident reports filed by each of the two medics, and obtained by WW, describe in more detail what was happening at the scene.
Each of the drivers’ separate reports says the agents had demanded to ride along in the ambulance en route to the hospital. The driver replied that without arrest paperwork, they were not permitted to ride along. Agents continued to insist that the vehicle would not be allowed to leave until an officer was permitted to accompany them.
“I repeated again,” the driver said in their report, “that no officer is permitted to ride in the ambulance and that they can meet us at the hospital and that we needed to be let out of the facility. Officers then began walking away from me whenever I spoke. At that point, a group of 5-8 civilian-dressed men walked into the garage and just stared at me. No identification on any of them. I walked back to the ambulance and got into the driver’s seat. I flipped the emergency lights on and put the car into drive. I inched forward slowly out of the garage.”
A man described as being in civilian clothes and a neck-wrap then stepped in front of the vehicle and ordered the ambulance not to leave, according to the report. As more agents amassed about 15 feet in front of the vehicle, the driver assumed they were preparing to escort the ambulance off the property and continued to slowly inch the vehicle forward. But agents continued to obstruct the ambulance’s path. As of 9:39, a dispatch report said there were “50-60 fed agents completely blocking the road.”
At this point, the crew member in the passenger’s seat exited the vehicle to attempt to reason with the officers. After putting the vehicle into park, the driver began to exit as well. They said that as they opened the side door, “I looked up and suddenly the entire group of officers… were crowded around the open car door, some of them leaning forward towards me, inches from my face.”
The driver recalls that an agent “pointed his finger at me in a threatening manner and began viciously yelling in my face, stating, ‘DON’T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN, I WILL SHOOT YOU, I WILL ARREST YOU RIGHT NOW.” The vehicle had rolled forward slightly after the driver put it in park, apparently leading the agents to believe the medics were attempting to hit them.
“I was still in such shock,” the driver later wrote, “that they were not only accusing me of such a thing, but crowding and cornering me in the seat, pointing and screaming at me, threatening to shoot and arrest me, and not allowing the ambulance to leave the scene. This was no longer a safe scene, and in that moment, I realized that the scene had not actually been safe the entire time that they were blocking us from exiting, and that we were essentially trapped.”
The ambulance was finally allowed to leave after being delayed for more than 20 minutes. An unmarked vehicle followed the ambulance to the hospital, where several men in civilian dress exited and walked in.
The incident reports provide the latest account of what Portland city officials described to WW as a pattern in which “federal agents have in several cases needlessly intensified situations that might have easily remained far more calm.”
Over the same weekend, peaceful demonstrators and journalists were ambushed with pepper spray, flash-bang grenades, and rubber bullets without clear provocation. In one viral incident earlier that week, a demonstrator who danced at protests in an inflatable frog costume had pepper spray shot directly into his air intake vent by an officer as he attempted to help a fellow protester who was injured.
The reports come as experts say ICE has been intensifying its tactics around the country, which have been captured in several videos taken by bystanders.
One video in Hyattsville, Maryland, shows an officer who dropped his gun while pinning a man to the ground, before picking it up and pointing it towards onlookers.
In another video from Alamosa, Colorado, agents were filmed hopping out of a car and immediately pointing their weapons at a young couple whom they’d boxed in at an intersection. As the woman in the car shouted that the driver’s 1-month-old baby was riding in the back seat, an officer in a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) hat used his baton to smash open the car’s driver’s side window, spilling glass into the vehicle.
ICE stops family at gunpoint—smash car window on top of newborn baby.
"I was screaming that there was a baby. But they didn’t care," cried mother.
“I covered my baby with my body—I was so scared he was going to be hurt because glass was landing on him."
Another video from the Chicago area, where President Donald Trump has surged ICE as part of “Operation Midway Blitz,” shows agents firing pepper spray upon a pastor who was speaking outside a facility.
And a recent photo shows a masked agent in the passenger’s seat of an unmarked van pointing a weapon at a woman who was attempting to film him from the neighboring car.
On October 4, CBP agents in Chicago shot a woman, 30-year-old Marimar Martinez, whom they similarly claimed had provoked them by ramming them with her car. Body camera footage would not only contradict this claim, but show that the agents had in fact plowed into Martinez’s vehicle after one of them shouted “Do something, bitch.”
Prosecutors said Martinez had a licensed gun in her car. But her attorneys say she did not brandish the weapon, and she was not charged with any weapons-related offense. She was the second person shot by immigration agents in the area in less than a month—the other was also unarmed.
In the meantime, the Trump administration has attempted to describe peaceful demonstrations against ICE’s behavior as acts of “terrorism,” with deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller calling those in Portland “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers.”
Fred Tsao, senior policy counsel at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, told NPRthat the latest spate of attacks by federal agents “are just the tip of the iceberg.”
“This administration,” he said, “overall seems more interested in heightening the tensions instead of trying to ramp them down.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
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US President Donald Trump (C) is welcomed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Ben Gurion International Airport on October 13, 2025 in Tel Aviv, Israel. [Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]
A single, candid statement by US President Donald Trump during a Fox News interview on 9 October may illuminate the true calculus behind Israel’s decision for a ceasefire in Gaza, following a relentless, two-year genocidal campaign that has tragically killed and wounded nearly a quarter of a million Palestinians.
“Israel cannot fight the world, Bibi,” Trump declared during the interview, a direct warning he said to have previously delivered to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The stark reality is that very few people around the globe currently support Netanyahu. Crucially, a significant segment of his own populace has already held him in contempt, a resentment that predates the war on Gaza — a war which he treated as a desperate, personal quest for renewed domestic popularity.
Yet, his delusion persists. Even as millions globally protest his systematic extermination of innocent Palestinians, Netanyahu has seemingly convinced himself that world opinion is miraculously shifting in his favour — a shift that would require the world to have liked him in the first place.
But what precisely did Trump mean by, “You cannot fight the world”?
The term ‘fight’ here clearly transcends physical combat. Gaza, besieged, starved, and devastated, was the entity enduring the physical confrontation. Trump’s reference is unambiguously to the combative surge of anti-Israel sentiment worldwide: the official sanctions imposed by nations like Spain, the critical legal proceedings initiated at the world’s highest courts, the widespread demands for boycott, the organising of freedom flotillas, and more.
It is profoundly significant that, in the minds of both Washington and Tel Aviv, these global events have registered as a serious strategic concern. Future historians will likely designate this moment as the definitive turning point in global attitudes toward the Israeli occupation of Palestine. If deliberately and strategically fostered by Palestinians, this burgeoning solidarity movement holds the potential to fully isolate Israel, compelling it to finally relent and free the Palestinian people from its enduring system of colonialism and apartheid.
However, ‘Bibi’ is not merely losing the world; he is fundamentally losing America itself. For decades, the United States has operated as Israel’s indispensable benefactor, underwriting every war, financing every illegal settlement, justifying every act of violence, and consistently blocking any international attempt to hold Israel accountable.
The reasons for America’s decades-long, unwavering commitment to sustaining Israel are profoundly complex. While the overwhelming influence of the powerful pro-Israel lobby in D.C. and Israel’s disproportionate sway over major media are correctly cited as factors, the dynamic is far deeper. The prevailing, mutually reinforced narrative in both nations has consistently framed Israel not merely as an ally, but as a crucial, essential extension of America’s political identity and core values.
Yet, cracks in this political edifice began to appear with unmistakable clarity. What were once marginalised dissenting voices, often labeled as ‘radicals’ within the American left, gradually solidified into mainstream dissent, particularly within the Democratic Party. Poll after poll demonstrated a mass shift, with the majority of Democrats turning against Israeli policy and lending their support, instead, to the Palestinian people and their rightful struggle for freedom. One of the most telling polls was conducted by Gallup in March 2025. It found that 59 percent of Democratic voters say they sympathize more with Palestinians, while only 21 per cent say they sympathise more with Israelis.
The Israeli genocide in Gaza catalysed more than just dissent within one of America’s two major political parties. Outright opposition to Israel has rapidly become mainstream, transcending traditional political lines — a rupture that has profoundly alarmed those determined to maintain the illusion that Israel can act with impunity, free from American objection.
The pro-Israel media apparatus in the US fought a shameful war to obscure the extent of the Israeli genocide. It consistently sought to blame Palestinians for Israel’s actions and brazenly promoted the insidious notion that the war against Gaza’s innocents was a necessary component of the ever-elusive ‘war on terror.’
But it was ordinary people, powerfully amplified by countless social media platforms, who collectively fought back. They successfully defeated a mainstream propaganda machine that had, for decades, served as the primary defense line for Israel.
A particularly troubling fact for Israel was the erosion of its newly established base of support: the Evangelicals and the broader Republican party. Polling indicated a significant exodus, especially among young Republican voters. A survey conducted by the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll in August 2025 found that only 24 per cent of Republican voters aged 18–34 said they sympathise more with Israelis than with Palestinians.
According to Politico, Israel even attempted to manipulate social media by paying influencers significant sums of money to circulate Israeli fabrications and deception. That campaign employed roughly 600 fake profiles posting over 2,000 coordinated comments per week, targeting more than 120 US lawmakers.
But can Israel possibly swing the narrative back in its favor? While vast sums of money will, undoubtedly, be committed to launching sophisticated campaigns aimed at polishing Israel’s severely tarnished image, the efforts will prove futile. The once-marginalised Palestinian narrative has surged, becoming a powerful, compelling moral authority worldwide. The strong, unyielding, and dignified resilience of the Palestinian people has garnered global sympathy and galvanised support in ways unprecedented in history.
This new reality may very well represent hasbara’s final stand, as truly no amount of money, newspaper coverage, or Netflix specials can ever successfully polish the image of a state that has so openly committed a genocide, one of the most thoroughly documented in recorded history.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
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Keir Starmer 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.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/O74hZCKKdpAGenocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends his trial on corruption charges at the district court in Tel Aviv, on April 21, 2025. [MOTI KIMCHI/POOL/AFP via Getty Images]
Israeli Channel 12 reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to appear before court on Wednesday to face corruption charges, a day after former US President Donald Trump called on Israeli President Isaac Herzog to grant him a pardon.
Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, are accused of receiving luxury gifts worth more than 700,000 shekels ($210,000) — including “premium cigars, jewellery, and bottles of champagne” — from wealthy businessmen in exchange for political favours.
The prime minister is also facing two additional cases involving allegations that he sought to influence media coverage in his favour through two Israeli media outlets.
On Monday, Trump renewed his call to “forgive Netanyahu”, saying that it is time to close the chapter on these cases that have been pursuing him for years.
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Keir Starmer 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.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/O74hZCKKdpAGenocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
