Waste firm Veolia pays £27k after ‘Yes It’s A Genocide’ banner taken by Greater London Authority was destroyed
The banner was unflurled in Parliament Square in London in December 2024. Photograph: Haroon Siddique/Jiri Rezac/Led by Donkeys
The campaign group Led By Donkeys has received £27,000 in compensation after a giant banner it displayed in Parliament Square saying “Yes It’s A Genocide” was seized by Greater London Authority officials and destroyed.
Representatives of the GLA arrived on the scene in central London and confiscated the 40-metre by 40-metre banner after it was unfurled on 4 December 2024, just over a year after Israel began its assault on Gaza after the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas.
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Ben Stewart, a co-founder of Led By Donkeys, said: “The Parliament Square banner was in collaboration with one of the world’s leading genocide scholars, but still the authorities threw process out the window and simply seized and destroyed our property. Pursuing compensation was never about the money, it was about defending space to protest Israel’s war crimes.
“Palestine protests are treated differently in Britain to all other forms of activism. Direct action is regarded as terrorism and words on a placard are rendered illegal. Over the years we’ve delivered banners, put up billboards and done guerilla projections across the country, but the only time our equipment has been seized and destroyed was when it related to Palestine.”
The banner was videoed from the air and a film created that was posted on social media featuring a voiceover from the renowned Israeli scholar Prof Amos Goldberg, a historian of the Holocaust, who said: “This is exactly what a genocide looks like.”
Vote Labour for Genocide.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.Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it’s fun to kill everyone … unless he gets distracted or falls asleep.
A firefighter gestures next to burning trees as a wildfire rages near Marcheprime, outside, Bordeaux, France, July 26, 2026
FRANCE holds emergency meetings on the evacuation of Bordeaux, a city of a million, as wildfires sweep ever closer. In Spain families are fleeing the capital, Madrid.
The reality of the climate emergency has come to Europe. There were plenty of warning signs — more severe heatwaves by the year, droughts and floods devastating harvests — including in Britain, where three of the five worst harvests on record have been since 2020 — and worsening wildfires.
In Britain this summer fires have burnt swathes of the Cairngorms and Eryri (Snowdonia), as well as Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh for the second year running. As summer heatwaves grow longer and drier, we should not imagine our towns and cities are safe. As Fire Brigades Union leader Steve Wright told the Morning Star in May, “In London a suburban street burnt to the ground last year” (in Rainham) “and we had wildfires in Dorset and Wiltshire.”
Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, argues that addressing the climate crisis requires “World War II-scale mobilisation.”
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Addressing the climate crisis involves radical restructuring — one reason climate activists were, even before Palestine solidarity campaigners, the victims of repressive new anti-protest laws.
That, in turn, means getting real about the class power of the forces blocking change. Proposed mechanisms for delivering action like citizens’ assemblies are a response to the sluggishness of existing institutions, but do not address its cause — the power of the capitalist class.
Agreeing what we ought to do doesn’t guarantee that it will happen: the climate movement needs to be one with the labour and peace movements, and recognise that this is fundamentally a class struggle and a battle against capitalism itself.
That dividing line becomes ever clearer, domestically and internationally.
The far right are the climate deniers at home; globally the denier-in-chief is the main imperialist power, the United States, whose agenda is to stop the rise of China, the world leader in renewables and green tech. The only existential threat as grave as climate change is world war — and the push towards that is also the biggest obstacle to climate action.
The cry on climate demos — “system change, not climate change” — rings true. We need to follow through on the implications.
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.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.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Defendants were not told criminal damage case could carry a terrorism connection until after they were found guilty
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) wants to sentence five more Palestine activists as terrorists for committing criminal damage, it can be revealed.
Brendon O’Hagan, Amanda Kelly, Hmeera Atiqnisar, Mohammed Malik, and Alma Yaniv were convicted of criminal damage last month for a protest at a Barclays bank branch in Burnley in 2024.
It was carried out in the name of Palestine Action almost a year before the group was banned under terrorism laws.
In the agreed facts of the case, the prosecution’s lawyers acknowledged that Barclays provided investments and loans to Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms firm.
The court heard that the activists smashed windows and sprayed red paint over the building, with damage costs allegedly amounting to £212,805.
Court filings show that it was only after the trial concluded that the CPS decided to apply for a terrorism connection to be added to the case.
The move came after the judge overseeing the case requested submissions on whether the case should be designated as having a terrorism connection.
This means that neither the jury nor the defendants were aware that the case could carry a terrorism connection until after the guilty verdicts were delivered.
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The move suggests that a ruling last month against another four Palestine Action activists, who were sentenced as terrorists by Justice Jeremy Johnson, is already having far-reaching consequences for protest-related trials in Britain.
Johnson treated the four protesters as terrorists even though they were only convicted of criminal damage at an Elbit Systems factory in the Filton area of Bristol.
Atiqnisar, one of the defendants in the Barclays case, told Declassified: “You go through a two-week trial only to be told after it’s over that you were on trial for terrorism.
“Johnson’s judgment has opened up the floodgates for potentially hundreds of activists to be sentenced as terrorists for taking direct action against genocide.
“It’s a few broken windows and red paint that they’re now saying is terrorism. It shows you the lengths the state is willing to go to in order to protect the Israeli weapons trade
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.Vote Labour for Genocide.
Union del Barrio volunteer Lupe Carrasco Cardona drives while monitoring US Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles on September 24, 2025. (Photo by Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)
“The federal government cannot build secret dossiers on people because they exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully observe, document, or criticize its actions,” said the head of Democracy Forward.
“The federal government cannot build secret dossiers on people because they exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully observe, document, or criticize its actions,” said the head of Democracy Forward.
The plaintiffs—the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and legal observers Nicole Cleland, Jacquelyn Ivey, and Anna Walker—argued that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other federal agencies created and maintained databases of people who observed, documented, or protested immigration enforcement activities without providing notification or safeguards, as required under the Privacy Act of 1974.
That law was passed after the exposure of illegal government surveillance, including longtime former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous COINTELPRO program, under which the FBI, in addition to conducting unlawful spying, funded and armed murderous far-right militants to terrorize anti-Vietnam War protesters, anti-nuclear weapons activists, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leftists.
“The federal government cannot build secret dossiers on people because they exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully observe, document, or criticize its actions,” Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “That is exactly the kind of government surveillance Congress sought to prevent when it enacted the Privacy Act after some of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history.”
The lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of collecting the names, photographs, vehicle information and license plate numbers, social media accounts, and other identifying information about legal observers, volunteers, journalists, clergy, and community members engaged in First Amendment-protected activities during the government’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.
“When the Department of Homeland Security dramatically ratcheted up its immigration enforcement, people across the country—of all ages and backgrounds—did what anyone is supposed to do when they disagree with government action: They exercised their First Amendment rights,” the suit states. “They peacefully protested. And, as matters here, they observed and recorded how law enforcement agents acted in public.”
DHS is using facial recognition technology, body cameras, license plates, mobile devices, and other surveillance tools to identify, track, and punish people who legally observe immigration enforcement in public. This is a clear violation of the Privacy Act. We’ll see them in court.
“In response, DHS decided to record the Americans who were peacefully observing its agents, adopting a secret Protester Surveillance Policy enabling its agents to first collect records on Americans engaging in First Amendment exercise and then maintain them in DHS systems, where they can be used to retaliate against those Americans,” the complaint continues.
“Beginning sometime in 2025, DHS deployed a dragnet of drones, bodycams, face-scanning apps, license plate scanners, and camera phones to, as one memo instructed, ‘capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form,’” the document notes.
“DHS agents have not been shy about gathering this information or its purpose,” the plaintiffs contended. “In Maine, DHS agents told multiple observers that they were being added to a database of ‘domestic terrorists.’ In Chicago, agents routinely used facial irecognition scans on members of the public.”
“In Minneapolis, observers simply watching agents on public streets have been led by those agents to their own houses, despite never having interacted with an agent—a practice so common that it has been named ‘being driven home by ICE,’” the suit says. “And across the country, DHS agents have approached observers and addressed them by their full names, even though those observers never identified themselves to the agents or showed them any form of identification.”
“As a result of its Protester Surveillance Policy, DHS has recorded and retaliated against each individual plaintiff,” the filing alleges. “It’s bad enough that DHS publicly collected information on Americans engaged in lawful First Amendment exercise. But worse, DHS also decided to maintain the information in one or more of its systems, enabling it to later retaliate against observers and protestors—including by canceling Trusted Traveler status,” which includes Transportation Security Administration Pre-Check and Global Entry.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the DHS surveillance policy unlawful, end it, and ban the agency from continuing to collect and keep records of individuals’ protected First Amendment activities.
“Now more than ever, those of us who have the privilege to speak out have a responsibility to defend the rights of everyone in our communities,” Walker said in a statement. “When people are punished for exercising their First Amendment rights, we begin losing the democratic principles that protect all of us. Every American should be alarmed by retaliatory action against one’s free speech.”
Cleland said: “I believe government accountability starts with transparency. People should be free to peacefully observe and document what their government does in public without worrying they’ll be tracked or retaliated against. This case is about protecting that right for everyone.”
EPIC deputy director John Davisson warned, “When our government compiles secret dossiers on everyday people for exercising their constitutional rights, it sends a chilling message: If you speak up, watch your back.”
“If every protest, every recording, every act of dissent opens us up to surveillance and retribution, privacy and free speech are at risk of collapse,” he added. “But the laws of this nation don’t permit that, and we won’t either.”
María Mero, 42, holds a photograph of her husband, Gabriel Aladono Mero Delgado, 43, who disappeared as part of the crew aboard the fishing vessel Fiorella, on June 7, 2026 in Jaramijó, Ecuador. (Photo by Johanna Alarcón/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
“How far does the ‘war on drugs’ go?” said a former Ecuadorian official. “Who is held accountable for the lives of Ecuadorian fishermen?”
The recently reported killing of the Ecuadorian prosecutor who had been investigating allegations that three boats from the country had been struck by the US and that dozens of survivors had been abducted and tortured by American forces, was “not a coincidence,” said one congressman Friday as he called for a probe into the bombings.
“For almost a year, the US government has been illegally bombing fishing boats and killing people without evidence of wrongdoing,” said Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.). “And last month, Alexandra Bravo, the Ecuadorian prosecutor investigating boats that were attacked or disappeared, was murdered… There must be an independent investigation.”
García’s demand came a day after Drop Site News reported on Bravo’s killing in the city of Manta on June 14.
Police say a hitman on a black motorcycle opened fire on Bravo and her sister at 11:00 am as they were leaving a cafe. Both women were killed and the prosecutor’s driver was injured. There was “no sign of the police detail that had been assigned” to protect Bravo, leading the Police Directorate, which operates under the executive branch of President Daniel Noboa, a close ally of President Donald Trump, to investigate whether there had been an “internal security breach.”
Bravo had been investigating the cases of three fishing boats—the Fiorella, the Negra Francisca, and the Don Maca—which were reportedly struck by drones in January and March.
The 36 surviving crew members of the latter two vessels reported that they were captured by US forces and subjected to torture before eventually being returned to Ecuador.
Eight fishermen went missing from the Fiorella, and their family members have reported that Ecuadorian authorities have provided little help to them as they look for answers, with the daughter of one missing fisherman saying an official had suggested the crew was involved in drug trafficking.
The three boats were hit with explosives as the Trump administration carried out “Operation Southern Spear,” its campaign of boat bombings in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. The White House has insisted that the at least 66 strikes that have been carried out by US forces since last September were on boats that were carrying drugs, and the 221 people on board were involved in drug trafficking. Trump has claimed the US is in an armed conflict with Latin American drug cartels, but Congress has not authorized military force in the region.
Legal experts have said that even if the bombed vessels were ferrying illicit substances to the US, military attacks against civilians for their alleged involvement in drug trafficking is against international law.
According toAmnesty International, the Ecuadorian public prosecutor’s office has not submitted a formal request to the US for help with investigating the disappearance of the Fiorella and its crew.
Sources at the police department in Manta and at Human Rights Watch told Drop Site that Bravo had reported facing pressure from the attorney general’s office regarding her investigation, with her superiors telling her to treat the alleged attacks on the boats only as “cases of disappearance” and to “close all lines of inquiry” after the 36 survivors of the Negra Francisca and the Don Maca returned, even though they showed signs of torture.
Meanwhile, as the US maintains it had nothing to do with bombing the three vessels, Drop Site reported that a US Coast Guard boat was detected near the Negra Francisca around the time of the bombing before the Coast Guard boat turned off its signal.
The prosecutor investigating US boat strikes and torture allegations in Ecuador was assassinated.
We uncovered NASA images and videos of the US Coast Guard that corroborates the victims’ testimonies. Then, the prosecutor working the case was shot and killed in broad daylight. https://t.co/BAnc5SiRfupic.twitter.com/xdSn1CI6PA
— Camila Lourdes Galarza (@sovietwithsazon) July 23, 2026
Two survivors of the Fiorella bombing, Christian Flores and Dimas Ignacio Álvarez, “corroborated seeing the Fiorella engulfed in smoke and surrounded by American assets.”
“In their police statements, Flores and Álvarez described two US aircraft flying over the Fiorella on January 18; multiple grey American drones and a US-flagged patrol ship circling the vessel on January 19; and, on January 20—the day their crewmates disappeared—the large US-flagged patrol ship near the smoke,” wrote Camila Lourdes Galarza at Drop Site.
Former Ecuadorian Minister of Foreign Affairs Guillaume Long said Thursday that US military presence in Ecuador as the two countries deepen their military partnership is “a clear violation of our people’s sovereignty and popular will.”
“Meanwhile, the families of Manta and Jaramijó wait for answers,” said Long. “Eight families deserve truth and justice. How far does the ‘war on drugs’ go? Who is held accountable for the lives of Ecuadorian fishermen?”
A firefighter gestures next to burning trees as a wildfire rages near Marcheprime, outside, Bordeaux, France, July 26, 2026
