At a Westminster event on Monday, Emily Thornberry spoke of her pride in Britain “always” realising the “importance of international law”. To this rage-bait statement she added: “But when it comes to our record on Palestine, I am afraid we have fallen well short and in doing so we have failed the Palestinian people.”
This is the same Thornberry who, while shadow attorney general, refused to say whether cutting off food, water and power to people in Gaza was against international law. Spoiler: it is. According to Thornberry, however, “Israel has a right to defend itself”.
Then, on Tuesday, former health secretary Wes Streeting told the Guardian he was “horrified by the war in Gaza”, claiming that he “did everything [he] could behind the scenes to get the government to act”, including sharing a dossier of eyewitness testimony from doctors on the ground with his cabinet colleagues.
While I really hate to sound cynical, I can’t help but wonder if there could possibly be some job openings at the very top of the party of government on the cards?
Remember that in 2023, Streeting rejected calls for a ceasefire and told those advocating for one that they needed to be “realistic”, while toeing the party line on pushing for the cowardly obfuscation of ‘humanitarian pauses’. Months later, he dubbed South Africa’s comprehensive genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) a “distraction”.
By July 2025, Streeting was privately recognising that “Israel is committing war crimes before our eyes”. But he never made a public statement, and didn’t resign his cabinet position over his government’s complicity in the genocide – in Israel’s unrelenting atrocities, the damage or destruction of every single hospital in Gaza, or the kids having their limbs amputated without anesthetic.
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South Africa’s application to the ICJ stated: “South Africa is also acutely aware of its own obligation – as a state party to the Genocide Convention – to prevent genocide.”
By contrast, the government and its senior cabinet ministers failed in every single legal obligation under treaty and international law. It has been complicit, and also – as Jeremy Corbyn’s Gaza tribunal found in March – an active participant in Israel’s live-streamed 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.Vote Labour for Genocide.
Labour leadership hopeful Andy Burnham has refused to call the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza a genocide.
Asked about the violence in an interview with the Guardian, he said: “I can’t judge things of that enormity from where I am as mayor of Greater Manchester.”
He added: “But I do have concerns about the disproportionate nature of what has happened in terms of the destruction, and there has to be a full process of investigation and accountability.”
The world-leading International Association of Genocide Scholars last year declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Israel has killed at least 72,000 Palestinians there since 7 October 2023 and experts quoted by the BMJ say the actual toll is far higher.
Burnham became a member of Labour Friends of Israel in 2015 and during a Labour leadership bid the same year described the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel as “spiteful”.
He also promised to make Israel his first state visit if he won – calling the country a “democracy that has a long history of protecting minorities and promoting civil rights”.
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.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (second from the podium) attended a D-Day anniversary event at Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, France on June 6, 2026. (Photo by Pete Hegseth/X)
“Apparently our nitwit secretary of war(drobe) thinks a D-Day commemoration is an appropriate time to push his far-right ideology in Europe,” said US Sen. Tim Kaine.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth came under fire from critics around the world this weekend after he turned his speech at a Saturday event marking the D-Day anniversary into a “racist rant” against migrants.
On June 6, 1944, Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy in France, which was occupied by Nazi Germany’s troops. Thousands were killed, but it is now widely seen as the beginning of the end of World War II. More than eight decades later, Hegseth traveled to the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer for the second straight year.
“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” President Donald Trump’s Pentagon chief said at the cemetery. “Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece, and Bulgaria—boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”
Hegseth: Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece, in Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? pic.twitter.com/kCAiTc2mVm
US Army veteran and progressive advocate Mike Lavigne denounced Hegseth as “a disgrace to his office and to the nation.”
Sharing a report about Hegseth’s remarks on social media, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) wrote, “Apparently our nitwit secretary of war(drobe) thinks a D-Day commemoration is an appropriate time to push his far-right ideology in Europe.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said: “Thousands of American heroes died on D-Day to defend freedom and defeat fascism. Pete Hegseth should honor and respect their memory. Not politicize their ultimate sacrifice. May God Bless the Greatest Generation on D-Day and every day.”
My great-uncle Herb Reichlin lost an eye fighting for this country in Europe and is buried in Arlington Cemetery.
I am confident that he would have been furious to hear the plight of refugees crossing the Mediterranean described as an invasion in comparison to D-Day. https://t.co/MmUETHSn8dpic.twitter.com/wOIl5Nu1Ur
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) June 6, 2026
After the speech, Hegseth “conspicuously skipped [the] afternoon’s main international ceremony marking the anniversary of the Allied landings,” France 24 reported. “His presence was not missed by some residents of the village hosting the ceremony, Langrune-sur-Mer, who said the US official was not welcome there.”
As the news network detailed:
“He has very warlike views and it seems to us that this man does not share our democratic values,” Sylvie Lamy Thepaut, a member of the municipal association Langrune en commun, told BFM TV.
A message on the association’s website called for Hegseth’s visit to be canceled on the grounds that the Pentagon chief “espouses values contrary to democracy, human rights and peace” and had made “numerous anti-European remarks,” “warlike statements,” and “American supremacist pronouncements.”
“The honor of Langrune, that of France, and the memory of the young Allied soldiers—American, British, Canadian—who died on our beaches in the name of democracy would dictate canceling this individual’s visit,” the statement concluded.
Hegseth’s comments notably came a just day after US Vice President JD Vanceclaimed on social media that Henry Nowak—an 18-year-old student fatally stabbed in the United Kingdom last year by a fellow Brit who has since been sentenced to life in prison—would still be alive “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.”
“Each time a life like his is lost, the proper response—the only response—is righteous anger,” Vance added. “One of the most important things the Trump administration has proven to the world is that stopping the flow of mass migration and defending national sovereignty is a matter of political will and leadership. Anything else is an excuse.”
In response, a spokesperson for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that “in recent days we have seen people trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets. The Nowak family are grieving after Henry’s horrific murder. They have said they don’t want his death to be used to create further division, hatred, or tension. We should be respecting their wishes. Our politics should bring people together even in the most terrible of circumstances. That is who we are as a country.”
The recent remarks from Vance and Hegseth align with the Trump administration’s official National Security Strategy, which was released in December and is full of rhetoric often used by white nationalists. The document accuses the European Union of enacting “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife,” claims that “should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less,” and stresses that US policy is to help “Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”
Earlier this week, the 27-nation EU moved forward with an overhaul of its migration policy, which has led some human rights advocates to draw comparisons to Trump’s use of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to crack down on people in the United States.
“Across the Atlantic, we see the violence and fear created by ICE’s brutal immigration enforcement,” Silvia Carter, a spokesperson for the Brussels-based Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants, told The Associated Press. “Europe should be learning from the harms of that model, not building its own version of it.”
Already, many migrants die while trying to reach Europe. The International Organization for Migration announced in February that at least 7,667 people died or went missing on migration routes worldwide last year—including at least 2,185 who died or went missing in the Mediterranean Sea, and another 1,214 on the Western Africa/Atlantic route toward the Canary Islands—but “the real toll is likely higher.”
A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data collecting buoy is moored in the Indian Ocean. (Photo by David Zimmerman/ NOAA)
At a time when ocean heat, the slowing of the Gulf Stream, and other major changes are sending shock waves through scientific and decision-making circles, we need greater understanding of what we’re facing, not self-imposed blind spots.
It’s easy for us land dwellers to forget that we live on a water planet, more than 70% of it covered by a vast ocean. But we are entering an age—or more accurately, have created an age—when that fact will be impossible to ignore. With global climate change, the seas are rising, yes, but they are also warming, slowly but steadily, and that warmth is now reaching levels that can drive profound changes here on land. Many of those changes have begun, many are on display this year, and some will have seismic consequences going forward.
Most recently, the administration ordered the “descoping” of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observing Infrastructure Project, a system of sensing and data gathering infrastructure distributed in the North Atlantic and Pacific. Information is still sparse about this dismantling; the process is not transparent. What’s clear is that, at a time when ocean heat, theslowing of the Gulf Stream, and other major changes are sending shock waves through scientific and decision-making circles, we need greater understanding of what we’re facing, not self-imposed blind spots. Sending taxpayer-funded ships on taxpayer-funded missions to essentially unplug functional taxpayer-funded ocean monitoring systems is baffling. Given the fossil fuel industry’s influence on the Trump agenda, it could look like a massive attempted cover up, except that the crime—warming the planet—is ongoing, and there’s really no covering up the changing climate, because we live here.
The ocean has become easy for the wealthier people of the world to ignore: a place to extract resources and dump waste. But this titan is now rumbling into a new kind of activation, more central character than backdrop. It’s hard to think of a more monumental failure than overheating an ocean planet and handing it off to younger generations. History won’t look kindly on the leaders of this time who ignore the science and the obvious signals. May it reflect that they were forced by their people, in time frames that made a difference, to phase out fossil fuels and invest in a safe and just climate future for all on this rare water planet. invest in a safe and just climate future for all on this rare water planet.
Edited since this article is not published under a CC licence
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.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 discuss rotting brain, front Orca says disinhibition and swearing are typical and common symptoms
Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as people try to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brent Stirton/Getty Images)
Among other things, the pardoned rioters have faced charges related to grand larceny, fraud, child sexual abuse, and plots to assassinate law enforcement officials and politicians.
On the first day of his second term last year, President Donald Trump delivered a mass pardon to more than 1,500 people who were charged with crimes related to the violent riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
An analysis published Thursday by Lawfare associate editor Katherine Pompilio finds that at least 97 of these pardoned Trump supporters have been charged with other crimes, including serious alleged offenses such as grand larceny, fraud, and plots to assassinate law enforcement officials and politicians.
The analysis also documents 14 instances of pardoned Capitol rioters being “charged with sex crimes or crimes related to child sexual abuse material (CSAM),” while “at least six” have been charged with domestic violence.
Some of the pardoned rioters have been charged with more minor offenses, including public intoxication, possession of drug paraphernalia, and property damage.
The most notable finding is that at least five of the repeat offenders committed crimes after being freed from prison as a result of Trump’s actions, suggesting that his pardon “may have actively facilitated criminal conduct.”
The most infamous case involves Andrew Paul Johnson, a Capitol rioter who was freed from prison after receiving the Trump pardon and has since been sentenced to life in prison on charges related to child molestation.
“The criminal conduct for which he was convicted took place both before and after his pardon,” the analysis notes.
Other repeat offenders who committed crimes after being freed by Trump were Zachary Alam, who was convicted of felony and grand larceny months after being pardoned, and Ryan Nichols, who was arrest last month for allegedly “threatening a person with a gun in a church parking lot,” the analysis finds.
According to a Thursday report from The New York Times, the Lawfare analysis more than doubles the number of documented instances of pardoned rioters who have been charged with crimes beyond January 6-related offenses.
“A previous study of January 6 recidivism found that at least 40 defendants faced other criminal charges, with 12 taking place after Trump’s clemency order,” reported the Times. “The Lawfare study found 19 criminal cases that occurred after the clemency.”
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.Donald Trump urges you to be a typical and common symptoms like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Orcas discuss rotting brain, front Orca says disinhibition and swearing are typical and common symptoms
