The Green Party’s revised transport policy, approved at its Autumn Conference, sets out a radical programme to transform transport in England & Wales. The proposed measures would aim to reduce carbon emissions by around 75% within a decade by reducing travel and expanding electrification of all modes. The party says the measures would also hugely reduce transport’s impacts on road danger and health while delivering a more equitable society.
Among a raft of ambitious initiatives, the policies include:
Transforming road and public transport – A step change away from car dependency, with major investment in better buses and rail. It aims for a 50% increase in rail travel and more frequent and reliable bus services, connecting homes with jobs, education, shops, healthcare. The policy also opposes almost all new road building.
Making Active Travel the natural choice – Safe, high-quality walking, wheeling and cycling networks, using road space reallocated from private motor vehicles. The policy aims for at least half of journeys in England’s towns and cities to be by active travel within five years, compared to a third in 2025.
Fairer and cleaner aviation – Reduce demand for passenger and freight flights, halt airport expansion, and ensure those who take the most polluting and unnecessary flights contribute the most. The policy specifically targets private jets, premium-class travel, and frequent flyers, while supporting cleaner alternatives and sustainable aviation.
Green Party parliamentary spokesperson on transport, Sian Berry MP, said:
“For too long transport policy has focused on moving vehicles rather than enabling people to get where they need to go. Our new policy is about giving everyone genuine choices – reliable and affordable public transport, safe walking, wheeling and cycling, and communities where owning a car isn’t a prerequisite for participating fully in society.
“We also need to tackle transport’s contribution to the climate crisis in an equitable and fair way. That means providing attractive alternatives to car and air travel, moving more freight onto rail and electrification. Those responsible for the most polluting and unnecessary journeys, including users of private jets and frequent flyers, will make the greatest contribution.”
Co-convenors of the policy, Jeremy Drew and Mark Strong, said:
“We have worked hard with an expert team of professionals and academics to revise our policy. It sets out measures to achieve a 75% reduction in transport carbon emissions within ten years, while making it easier for people and businesses to choose cleaner and healthier alternatives, which will improve not just transport but wider society.”
The dispute over whether Israel’s assault on Gaza amounts to genocide has largely been settled. Amnesty International, a UN commission of inquiry and the International Association of Genocide Scholars have all reached that conclusion, as have many leading scholars of genocide. The question that remains is how the greatest political crime of our time was allowed to happen. Adam H. Johnson’s How to Sell a Genocide goes a long way to explaining it.
Published by Pluto Press with a foreword by the Palestinian American human rights lawyer Noura Erakat, the book covers the crucial period from October 2023 to October 2024, when Western audiences were primed for genocide. Johnson shows that the mainstream American media did much of the priming. These outlets dehumanised Palestinians, treated the life of an Israeli as having more worth than the life of a Palestinian and supplied ready-made justifications for violence against the population of Gaza. Together, he argues, they formed a media ecosystem that was essential to Israel’s campaign to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza, in whole or in part.
None of this, in Johnson’s view, was inevitable. It took “deliberate choices by deliberate moral actors” – the editors, reporters, bookers, producers and TV presenters who decided in the first weeks that protecting the powerful mattered more than the truth. Rather than report honestly on Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza, they spun a comforting fiction for Western liberal audiences to justify the horror.
Setting out to prove, “beyond a reasonable doubt, that the genocide in Gaza was enabled, facilitated, and cheerled by establishment US media providing cover for months of a nihilistic campaign of starvation, bombing, arbitrary detention, shooting, and sexual violence,” Johnson cites hard data rather than relying on polemic or cherry-picked examples. The author draws on more than 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV clips from nine major outlets, testimony from journalists inside those newsrooms and comparisons with coverage of other recent conflicts.
Why leave out Fox News and the right-wing media? Because, says Johnson, outlets such as Fox, the Daily Wire and the Wall Street Journal are openly genocidal towards Palestinians and make no pretence otherwise; a book exposing them would be met by their own reporters and columnists with an “Okay, and?”
Instead, the author focuses on the outlets that Democrats read and watch. A Democratic president was in office when the genocide began, and support from Democrats in Congress, think tanks and the press was decisive in keeping it going. He concentrates on the first year, and above all the first few months, because that, he argues, is when the logic of the “war on Hamas” took hold, Americans grew used to mass death in Gaza and the genocide became a fait accompli.
With the destruction in Gaza too brutal and too visible to ignore, the media supplied excuses to ease the public conscience. Johnson calls these “Moats of Rationalization”: a scaffolding of deflection, double standards and orientalist tropes that allowed viewers and journalists alike to excuse the war crimes their own government was funding. The real job of the centre-left press, he argues, was not to convey reality but to “make their readers and viewers feel better” about their country, their leaders and themselves.
The first chapter shows how this worked by tracing how Israel weaponised the false claim that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies. The claim, which originated with Israeli military personnel and ZAKA, an organisation Johnson describes as far-right, spread from Israeli officials through CNN and other outlets to President Joe Biden within a day. It was part of an early push by media executives and pro-Israel groups to “ISIS-ify” Palestinian militants. Israel promoted the hashtag #HamasisISIS, and US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin called the attack “worse than ISIS”. Johnson’s analysis found that in the first month, seven major print and online outlets equated Hamas with ISIS 149 times. On air, CNN did so 350 times and MSNBC 369 times.
The media also abandoned one of its most basic duties: explaining why the attack happened. Providing context for 7 October was actively discouraged. When MSNBC’s Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin explained the history behind it on the day, Johnson’s sources say Comcast, the network’s owner, intervened; one summed up the editorial line as “We don’t want context.”
Strict gatekeeping of what can and cannot be reported also helped to sell the genocide. CNN ordered that all its reporting on Israel and Palestine be “approved in advance by the Jerusalem bureau”, which operates under Israel’s military censor. A source told The Intercept that lines were routinely edited to favour Israeli narratives. Yet lurid, unsourced claims about Palestinians were aired unchallenged, while allegations against Israelis, Johnson argues, had to be “triple vetted”.
The same double standard shaped coverage of sexual violence. Within days of 7 October, the Israeli claim that systematic rape was part of Hamas’s “terror strategy” was being repeated by liberal media outlets before Israel had offered any evidence for it. Like the “beheaded babies” story, Johnson argues, it cast Hamas as an organisation “for which any political settlement or ceasefire is not only impossible but morally objectionable”.
The flawed sourcing of the New York Times report “Screams Without Words”, Johnson says, pointed to “an ideological motivation at work” and to lower standards for stories that served Israel’s agenda. Israel’s sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, meanwhile, barely registered. In the first three months of the genocide and three months in late summer 2024, CNN and MSNBC made 502 on-air mentions of Palestinians committing mass rape and just two of Israelis raping Palestinians. The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico and Axios did the same in print: 128 mentions against nine.
An important part of selling the genocide relied on creating a two-tier moral system. In the chapter “Who is allowed to be human?”, Johnson shows how, within hours of 7 October, pundits and reporters began ranking violence and its victims on what he calls a “moral tier system”. Palestinian violence was treated as uniquely evil, driven by hatred, while Israeli violence was treated as regrettable but necessary.
Illustrating the impact of such framing, Johnson’s figures show that in the first 100 days, seven print and online outlets used “massacre” 344 times in their own reporting to describe Palestinians killing Israelis, and not once for Israelis killing Palestinians. Over the first year, the claim that Palestinians used “human shields” was aired 888 times on CNN and MSNBC, although Human Rights Watch has long rejected such a broad use of the term. Documented cases of Israeli forces using Palestinians as human shields went unmentioned. Israel’s “right to defend itself” was asserted 755 times on the two networks; Palestinians were granted the same right eight times.
Later chapters examine how US media helped the Biden administration “distance itself from the horrors of Gaza”; how it narrowed the debate to “how many Palestinians should die”; and how it covered “war crimes like earthquakes”, reporting the carnage as if it were a natural disaster and obscuring or leaving out Israel’s role entirely.
The chapter on campus protests, which Johnson calls “‘Antisemitism’ show trials”, contains the starkest comparison in the book. In the month after Harvard president Claudine Gay testified to Congress on campus antisemitism, six major print and online outlets ran 207 stories about her. In the month after six-year-old Hind Rajab was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, along with six relatives and the two paramedics sent to rescue her, the same outlets ran five. On air, the gap was wider still: CNN mentioned Gay 409 times and Hind 29; MSNBC mentioned Gay 210 times and Hind not once.
Johnson sees his job as that of a “prosecutor”, and the book reads like a case for the prosecution. It is packed with figures, which some readers may find heavy going, but the sheer weight of them makes the pattern of bias very hard to deny.
A book such as this asks us to consider what history has already taught us about the role of propaganda in mass atrocity. At Nuremberg, the Allies put on trial not only those who carried out mass murder but also the propagandists who primed the public to accept it. The lesson was that genocide does not begin with killing; it begins with words that teach people to see others as less than human. Johnson shows how US media treated Palestinian lives as worth less than Israeli ones, stripped Palestinians of their history and presented violence against them as necessary.
American newsrooms have yet to answer the questions this book raises about their coverage of Gaza. They reported the deaths, but they also offered endless excuses for them. Johnson has documented the choices that shaped that coverage. It is now for editors and journalists to explain why they so often showed more understanding for those doing the killing than for those being killed.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.
Former President Barack Obama walks off stage at the dedication ceremony for the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in John Lewis Plaza on June 18, 2026 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
“The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president.”
ormer President Barack Obama on Sunday spoke out against the Trump administration’s plot to strip Rep. Ilhan Omar of her US citizenship and remove her from the country.
In a lengthy social media post, Obama said the administration’s attack on Omar (D-Minn.) violates “a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say.”
Obama’s post came nearly one week after agents at the US Department of Homeland Security conducted a raid of Omar’s home. Days after the raid, the Wall Street Journal reported that the raid on Omar was part of an effort to build “a case to strip her of her US citizenship and ultimately deport her.”
“To understand why this is so appalling, it’s important to know the facts,” Obama wrote. “Congresswoman Omar came to this country with her father when she was 12 years old. Five years later, her father became a naturalized citizen. If Ilhan had been 18 at the time, she would have had to apply for citizenship separately. But because she was 17, she became a naturalized citizen automatically.”
Obama noted that President Donald Trump has repeatedly targeted Omar “as someone who he believes does not belong in this country,” and accused the president of seizing upon an “unsubstantiated theory that she was actually 18 when her father was naturalized” to carry out his deportation plot.
“The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president,” Obama wrote. “And it’s not the first time this has happened. Under President Trump, the Justice Department has repeatedly gone after those he considers his political enemies—from the Attorney General of New York, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve.”
Obama concluded by warning that letting Trump’s actions go unchallenged would set a terrible precedent that even the president’s allies could one day live to regret.
“If this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with [Omar],” Obama wrote, “or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.”
Trump rose to political prominence last decade by spreading a racist conspiracy theory falsely claiming that Obama was born in Kenya, and thus ineligible to be president.
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.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
US President Donald Trump (R) greets Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on September 29, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“Under Donald Trump, there’s a two-tiered justice system,” said one watchdog leader. “Big Tech plays by a different set of rules because they bought their way in.”
A newly revealed list of companies and billionaire CEOs who donated millions of dollars to President Donald Trump’s ballroom construction project shows that Big Tech, according to one government watchdog, “bankrolled it fully expecting a return on their investment.”
The list, first reported by The Washington Post, doesn’t just show the $25 million donations from tech giant Apple, the pro-Israel Adelson Family Foundation, and microchip firm Nvidia—the latter of which requested anonymity.
It also reveals previously undisclosed donors who have benefited from a presidential pardon as well as government contracts and at least one closed federal investigation.
This is what corruption is all about:
Last year Trump gave $1 trillion in tax breaks to the top 1%.
Now his billionaire pals are returning the favor by giving him $330 million for his fancy ballroom.
We don’t want a government of, by and for the billionaire class. FIGHT BACK.
The 57 donors whose names were published by the Post had committed to contributing at least $100,000 to the ballroom construction project, which is proceeding for now following a Supreme Court ruling in August.
The list shows a total of $333 million contributed from private donors, but does not include Trump’s name, though the president has said the demolition of the White House’s East Wing and the construction of the ballroom would be “paid for a hundred percent by me and some friends of mine.”
It also falls short of the $600 million projected price tag; according to the Post, taxpayer funds have been used to partially fund the project, along with donations from companies with business before the government.
Nvidia’s $25 million donation came three months after the company reached a deal with the Trump administration to sell advanced microchips to China.
A $25 million donation from Charles Ergen, co-founder and chairman of the telecommunications company Dish Network, came shortly after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) dropped an investigation into the failure of EchoStar, which owns Dish Network, to upgrade its cellphone network.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had threatened last May to revoke government licenses from EchoStar, and a month later, Ergen met with Carr and Trump in a closed-door meeting where his political donations were discussed, Bloomberg reported.
Ergen then negotiated a deal to sell some of the licenses to AT&T. Carr dropped the investigation the following month, and months later, with the sale pending, the executive donated $12.5 million to Trump’s ballroom construction. A second $12.5 million contribution came soon after, according to the list published by the Post.
“Big Tech giants didn’t just chip in for Trump’s ballroom,” said Sacha Haworth of the Tech Oversight Project, a watchdog group. “The same companies funding Trump’s vanity project lined up for tax breaks, chip deals, federal contracts, and a blind eye to lawbreaking. Under Donald Trump, there’s a two-tiered justice system. Big Tech plays by a different set of rules because they bought their way in.”
The Post also detailed a $2.5 million contribution from Isabela Herrera, the daughter of international banker Julio Herrera Velutini, whom the US Department of Justice indicted on bribery charges in 2022.
Herrera Velutini’s charges were reduced to a misdemeanor months after his daughter donated millions of dollars to Trump’s MAGA Inc. political action committee, and a month later, she committed to a $2.5 million donation for the ballroom. Soon after, Herrera Velutini was pardoned.
The transactions detailed by the Post amount to “blatant corruption,” said progressive news outlet The Tennessee Holler.
Companies with massive stakes in decisions before President Trump and his administration gave many millions to the White House ballroom project, which the President has made clear is important to him. So are you confident he'll make those decisions based only on what's good for the American people?
Cryptocurrency investors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss donated more than $5 million in bitcoin—a portion of the more than $18 million the industry contributed to the ballroom. Trump has pushed for loose regulations for the industry.
Other top donors include Google, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, and Palantir.
Government watchdog Public Citizensaid a new tax filing from the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit charity that manages the donations for the ballroom, shows that $169.7 million came from just 10 big donors.
“One year after the people’s house was abruptly bulldozed for a gold-plated ballroom that most Americans will never be allowed inside, we are uncovering who paid the most to fund it,” said Jon Golinger, democracy advocate for Public Citizen. “The question these ballroom megadonors all now need to answer is—why?”
Haworth said that “when Democrats take back gavels in January, they need to investigate Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and others for potentially breaking the law to buy get-out-of-jail-free passes and sweetheart deals in exchange for their donation.”
Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it’s fun to kill everyone … unless he gets distracted or falls asleep. He says it’s the biggest bestyest ballroom.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.
Israeli soldiers block the road to prevent Palestinian farmers from reaching their land during the olive harvest on October 17, 2026 in Abu Falah, West Bank. (Photo by Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Getty Images)
“European diplomats got a glimpse of everyday life for Palestinians in the West Bank.”
The Israeli military reportedly ignored repeated distress calls before masked settlers attacked a group of European diplomats with metal bars during a visit to the illegally occupied West Bank this past weekend, sparking international outrage.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that “despite the warnings, security forces were not sent to the area to prevent the attack or intervene as it unfolded.” The outlet noted that “an activist who was in the area following reports of attacks on Palestinian olive pickers sent a report of the settlers’ attack to a phone in the brigade’s operations room used to receive messages from settlement security coordinators. The soldiers in the operations room did not recognize the sender’s number, so they ignored the message and did not relay it to forces in the field.”
In the Saturday attack, settlers targeted diplomats from France, Belgium, and Poland, as well as Catholic representatives. Israeli authorities said Monday that they had arrested 10 suspects as part of an investigation into the incident, but critics expressed doubt that the Israeli government would hold the perpetrators to account given the general pattern of impunity for violent settlers.
“It was clear to me this had to come for Israel to save face,” Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel at the International Crisis Group, wrote in response to the arrests. “They probably will be released shortly.”
The attack on diplomats came a day after Israeli settlers in the West Bank brutally attacked 63-year-old Heidi Levine, a photojournalist with The Washington Post and a US citizen. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuissued a statement casting doubt on Levine’s account and news reports, and said the incident was under investigation.
Netanyahu’s office took a similar line following the Saturday attack on European diplomats, saying in a statement, “The more serious the accusation, the greater the demand for compelling evidence.”
Video of masked Israeli settlers striking European diplomats and elected officials near Taybeh, a Christian village in Palestine. The 78-year-old French mayor Bernard Baudoux was thrown to the ground and beaten with iron bars.
France’s foreign affairs ministry denounced the attacks on diplomats as “acts of terror” and called on Israeli authorities to “arrest the perpetrators of this extremely serious assault and bring them to justice.” Bernard Baudoux, a French mayor who was attacked, said he was “struck with metal bars and kicked before being thrown to the ground.”
“We were finally able to get back to our vehicles,” Baudoux added.
Breaking the Silence, an Israeli anti-occupation group, said in a statement on Sunday that “European diplomats got a glimpse of everyday life for Palestinians in the West Bank.”
The group added that the IDF “will always have a bureaucratic excuse” for not acting to prevent such attacks, “but the real reason is that backing settler terrorists is its policy.”
“This horrifying routine serves a purpose,” the group said. “Through daily terror and economic strangulation, it aims to drive Palestinians off their land. The ultimate goals: ethnic cleansing and annexation.”
The attacks also drew condemnation from lawmakers in the US, where Republicans and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman recently blocked legislation aimed at shining light on Israeli abuses in the West Bank.
“I condemn the brutal settler attacks on American photojournalist Heidi Levine, European diplomats, and Palestinian olive harvesters in the West Bank,” US Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement on Sunday. “Prime Minister Netanyahu must act now to stop settler violence, protect civilians, and ensure those responsible are brought to justice. The impunity must end.”
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.Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
