Police and Heathrow airport security were on high alert after Just Stop Oil protesters were arrested at the airport’s perimeter fence. Photograph: Kristian Buus/In Pictures/Getty Images
Ten activists arrested at Heathrow, over 30 flights cancelled at Cologne-Bonn, and planes delayed or diverted
Climate activists acting under the banner “oil kills” have glued themselves to the tarmac and grounded flights across Europe as holidaymakers attempt to make summer getaways.
In a wave of protests at airports from Oslo to Barcelona, activists disrupted flights and demanded that rich and polluting countries phase out fossil fuels by 2030. The protests, which the activists said had led to several arrests, came a day after climate scientists logged the world’s hottest day on record.
An activist taking part in the protest at Cologne-Bonn airport holds her hand glued to the runway. Photograph: Letzte Generation Handout/EPA
“Ordinary people are taking matters into their own hands today to do what our criminal governments have failed to do,” the campaign said in a statement. “We are putting our bodies on the wheels of the machine of the global fossil economy and saying ‘oil kills’.”
In Germany, protesters from the climate group Letzte Generation (Last Generation) briefly stopped flights on Wednesday morning after they cut a chain-linked fence and glued themselves to the tarmac at Cologne-Bonn airport. The airport said that 31 flights had been cancelled and six diverted.
In Austria, activists delayed a flight by refusing to sit down before takeoff while others spilled orange paint in the terminal at Vienna airport. In Switzerland, they blocked roads leading to Zürich and Geneva airports.
Scientists compiling the annual State of the UK Climate report say they have have started to pay more attention to extremes. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
The water near the UK’s coasts was hotter in 2023 than scientists have ever before recorded, a report has found, with children today experiencing a hotter and wetter climate than that in which their parents and grandparents grew up.
The sea surface temperature near coasts was 0.9C hotter and winter rainfall across the country was 24% greater over the last decade than the average from 1961 to 1990, according to the State of the UK Climate 2023 report. It found the number of “hot” (28C) days has more than doubled over that period, and the number of “very hot” (30C) and “extremely hot” (32C) days has more than tripled.
Since the UK hit 40C heat for the first time in 2022 – “absolutely smashing records” – the scientists behind the annual report started to pay more attention to extremes, said Mike Kendon, a climate scientist at the Met Office who was the lead author of the report.
The scientists found the number of “very wet” days was 20% greater in the last decade than in the 1961-1990 period.
The mass burning of coal, oil and gas since the 1850s – together with the boom in livestock farming and heavy industry – has heated the planet by 1.3C and upended weather patterns that used to vary only naturally. The report found human activity had made the UK’s unusually high average temperature last year 150 times more likely.
Still, projections show that “2023 will be a fairly average year by the middle of the century and a fairly cool year by the end of the century,” said Kendon. “It’s a really dramatic indicator that our climate will be pushed out of the envelope of the historical range.”
The UK, which has pumped more planet-heating gas into the atmosphere than all but a handful of countries, according to an analysis from Carbon Brief – is already suffering from increasingly violent weather that scientists have traced back to the breakdown of a stable climate. An analysis in May found that a spell of “never-ending” rain in the UK and Ireland last autumn and winter was made 10 times more likely and 20% wetter by global heating.
Union leaders condemn the Prime Minister’s ‘disgraceful’ decision
SIR KEIR STARMER has been condemned by union leaders for suspending seven Labour MPs for voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap, as independents including Jeremy Corbyn vowed to work with them to offer a “real alternative.”
Leaders of fire, education, civil service, bakeries and mail unions hit out at the Prime Minister’s “disgraceful” and “completely wrong” decision as they joined thousands backing a grassroots petition calling for their reinstatement.
Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, ex-shadow business secretary Rebecca Long Bailey, Apsana Begum, Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, Zarah Sultana and Imran Hussain were kicked out of the Parliamentary Labour Party for six months for backing an SNP amendment calling for the cap to be scrapped on Tuesday night.
Ms Sultana, MP for Coventry South, suggested she was the victim of a “macho virility test” today.
“This isn’t a game … this is about people’s lives,” she added.
“I slept well knowing that I took a stand against child poverty that is affecting 4.3 million people in this country and it is the right thing to do and I am glad I did it.”
MP for Poplar and Limehouse Ms Begum said: “Labour’s own 11 affiliated unions support the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap; there’s popular support among the Labour Party membership to see the cap lifted.”
Labour will say this is just a matter of party discipline, but it is a clear demonstration of the government’s priorities
The Labour leadership has told you who it is, over and over again: it is time to believe it. Keir Starmer has suspended seven Labour MPs because they voted to overturn a Tory policy which imposes poverty on children. Sure, another tale will be spun: that by voting for the Scottish National party’s amendment to abolish the two-child benefit cap, the seven undermined the unity of the parliamentary Labour party and were duly disciplined. But that is nonsense.
Such parliamentary rebellions are scattered through our democratic history, and are accepted almost as a convention of government. Boris Johnson suspended multiple Brexit rebels in 2019 and it was rightly seen as an aberration. He did not, for example, exact the same punishment when five Tory MPs backed a Labour motion extending free school meals in 2020. When it comes to Labour history, even Tony Blair never resorted to such petty authoritarianism. Forty-seven Labour MPs rebelled over a cut to the lone parent benefit in 1997 – none had the whip removed.
This episode tells us many things. Firstly, it completely undermines Starmer’s slogan of choice: “country before party”. Starmer knows a policy devised by George Osborne to prevent parents from claiming benefits for a third or fourth child is cruel and fails on its own terms. When Starmer stood for leader, he promised to scrap the limit. After all, it imposes poverty on 300,000 kids, and drives another 700,000 further into hardship. Fifty-nine per cent of families affected have at least one parent in work – like the care workers, supermarket workers and cleaners applauded by politicians on porches and balconies during the pandemic. Research has found that it does not increase employment levels, and may actually make it harder to find work, while having no impact on family size. Charities have identified it as one of the single biggest generators of poverty in Britain.
It is hard to imagine Starmer is unaware of the fact that Osborne devised the policy to stoke public hostility towards and create a Victorian caricature of the undeserving, overbreeding poor. No decent society punishes children for choices they have not made and parents should not be punished for having more children. In Britain in 2024, kids turn up to schools with bowed legs and heart murmurs because of malnourishment, but a vast cost is also imposed on society as the scarring effect of poverty produces lasting lower productivity and employment levels.
Starmer knew this when he told the BBC almost exactly a year ago that he would retain this wicked Tory policy. He made the commitment to sound tough. Contrast with how he genuflects before powerful interests such as the Murdoch empire. By endorsing the two-child benefit cap, Starmer decided to gain partisan advantage, rather than fix an injustice afflicting his country. Party first, country second. Or rather, to be specific: playing politics with the lives of our most vulnerable children.
There isn’t the money available, we are told. The price tag is £1.7bn, a pittance given annual government expenditure is £1.2tr. According to the Sunday Times rich list, the 350 wealthiest British households have a combined fortune of £795bn: is leaving their taxes at the same level more important than parents skipping hot meals to feed their little ones? When Starmer told Volodymyr Zelenskiy that the UK would give Ukraine £3bn a year “for as long as it takes”, he acknowledged there is money available for what the government considers a priority. This Labour government simply does not regard child poverty as a priority.
Palestinians walk through dust by the rubble of houses, destroyed by Israeli strikes in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, July 22, 2024
AN INTERNATIONAL human rights group issued a fresh warning on Tuesday over the complicity of the United States in alleged Israeli war crimes.
The warning from Amnesty International came as protests mounted over the visit of Israel’s far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Amnesty demanded a “comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.”
The rights group said the embargo should remain in place “until there is no longer a substantial risk that arms could be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international human rights or humanitarian law.”
Amnesty International US executive director Paul O’Brien said: “Enough is enough. The US government has been presented with ample evidence from experts around the world that US-origin arms have been used in war crimes and unlawful killings by the Israeli government.
A Palestinian girl reacts as a child is carried from the rubble of a building after an airstrike in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, October 21, 2023
RAMZY BAROUD exposes the systematic targeting of UN facilities in Gaza, explaining how this is part of a broader strategy of erasing Palestinian refugee rights and history while blocking international aid
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Israel does not attempt to mask or justify its attacks on the organisation as it did during previous Gaza wars. This time around, the Israeli war was accompanied, from the very start, with the outlandish accusation that UNRWA members had participated in the October 7 assault by Hamas and other Palestinian groups.
Without providing any evidence, Tel Aviv launched an international campaign of vilification against the UN organisation which has, for decades, provided educational, medical and humanitarian services to millions of Palestinian refugees.
Sadly, and tellingly, some Western, and even non-Western governments, answered the Israeli call of punishing UNRWA by withholding badly needed funds, the urgency of which did not only stem from the direct impact of the Israeli war, but the acute famine resulting from the war, as well.
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Jared Kushner, Trump’s former adviser on the Middle East, said in January 2018 that it was “important to have an honest and sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA.” For him, the dismantlement of the organisation meant the dismissal of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
Indeed, the issue is not just about UNRWA, but rather the historic role the organisation has served as a reminder of the plight of millions of Palestinian refugees in occupied Palestine, the Middle East and across the world.
UNRWA was established through general assembly resolution 302 (IV) of December 8 1949. The founding of UNRWA came one year after the passing of UN resolution 194, which granted Palestinian refugees the right to “return to their homes.”
Although UNRWA’s mission has turned into a permanent mandate, since Palestinian refugees were not granted their right of return, the role of the organisation remained as critical as it was decades ago.
Since Kushner and others have failed to dismantle UNRWA, the Israeli government has taken advantage of its war on Gaza to achieve the exact purpose. In Israeli thinking, without UNRWA, the issue of Palestinian refugees would lose its main legal platform and would ultimately disappear.
This would give Israel the space and leverage to “resolve” the problem of the refugees in any way it finds fit, especially if it has the full backing of Washington.
Israel must not be allowed to dismantle UNRWA or to dismiss the generational struggle of Palestinian refugees, which is the core of the Palestinian fight for justice and freedom.
The international community must challenge Israel’s vilification of UNRWA and insist on the centrality of the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Without it, no real peace is possible.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the editor of the Palestine Chronicle (www.palestinechronicle.com).
