The leader of the UK’s top teachers’ union has ripped into the Government for its “absolute failure” to properly fund schools, following further revelations into the state of Britain’s crumbling classrooms.
Schools across the country have been struggling to cope with urgent building repairs and mounting maintenance costs, BBC Panorama has been exposing, with schools unable to claim extra money for repairs to tackle leaks and cold.
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Commenting on the latest investigation into the state of British school buildings, Daniel Kebede, who became General Secretary of the National Education Union last year, stressed that the failings lay firmly at the feet of the Government.
Kebede wrote on X: “Make no mistake this is absolute failure from government.
Make no mistake this is absolute failure from government. Their own "Office for Government Property" state it requires £7bn to maintain the school estate.
This government spends a 1/3 of that…
Our children absolutely deserve better than this. We need a government that views… https://t.co/y5xgVioMIq
Tens of thousands of people gather to join the Global Day of Action calling for a ceasefire and an end to the war on Gaza on the 13th of January 2024, Central London, United Kingdom. The march and rally coincided with marches all over the World. (Photo by Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images)
Coordinated actions from DC to London to Jakarta designed to “send a powerful message not just to the Israelis but to the Western powers who are backing them that the public say ‘not in our name.'”
Major coordinated demonstrations took place across the world on Saturday to mark the 100th day of Israel’s bombardment and military assault on the people of the Gaza Strip that have now claimed the lives of nearly 24,000 Palestinians, a large majority of them innocent men, women, and children who had nothing to do with the attacks orchestrated by Hamas on October 7 of last year.
In London, as many as 500,000 people marched on Parliament Square to demand an immediate cease-fire Gaza, condemn their own U.K. government’s support of Israel’s disproportionate and “genocidal” onslaught, and warn against a wider regional war that experts warn is creeping closer by the day.
‘Justice is lacking’: pro-Palestine demonstrators gather in London www.youtube.com
“This Global Day of Action, from Australia through to Asia, Europe and the Americas, is the first coordinated, international movement against the war being waged by Israel on the Palestinian people,” said Gaza Global Day of Action organizers ahead of the demonstration. “It will send a powerful message not just to the Israelis but to the Western powers who are backing them that the public say ‘not in our name.'”
In Dublin, organizers of a march that saw more than 100,000 march through city streets called it the largest rally for Palestinian rights in Irish history.
So proud of this today – one of biggest protests in Ireland in recent years Tens of thousands march in Massive solidarity protest today in Dublin with Gaza#CeasefireNOW#palestine🇵🇸 pic.twitter.com/rOusYmzsfR
The crowd was filled with Palestinian flags, posters calling for an “End to the Gaza genocide” as well as makeshift washing lines, with baby clothes hanging from it, representing the many young lives lost in the conflict.
At the front of the march, four people held mock corpses in bloody body bags to represent the growing number of civilian casualties.
In the United States, tens of thousands marched in Washington, D.C. to denounce the Israeli onslaught—which has claimed over 23,000 lives, including more than 10,000 children—as well as their own government’s complicity in the carnage. President Joe Biden was on the tip of many demonstrators’ tongues and polls in the U.S. have shown very little support across the political spectrum for how he is handling the situation.
Jake and Ida Braford, a young couple from Richmond, Virginia, who brought their two small children to the protest, told the Associated Press the situation in Gaza has made them unsure of their support for Biden come this year’s election.
“We’re pretty disheartened,” Ida told the news agency. “Seeing what is happening in Gaza, and the government’s actions makes me wonder what is our vote worth?”
Following the march, demonstrators left a pile of bloodied baby dolls, including severe parts, in a pile outside the White House as a message to Biden. “The blood of the over 10,000 murdered children in Gaza is on his hands,” said CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans.
Meanwhile, in Indonesia, thousands gathered outside the U.S. embassy in Jakarta to condemn the ongoing “genocide” in Gaza perpetrated by Israel with the backing of the U.S. government and other Western allies.
Global day of action: Demonstration at US embassy in Jakarta urges ceasefire in Gaza www.youtube.com
Large protests were also held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as well as in the South African cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg. On Thursday, a delegation from South Africa presented its case charging Israel with genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.
“We are here today to be part of the global day of action that will see demonstrations planned in more than 66 cities and at least 36 countries,” said a statement released by the organizers in Cape Town. “Today’s rally will be part of a united front of global voices, calling unconditionally for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.”
Cities in Israel were not among those holding large-scale demonstrations against the government’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. One application by Israelis for a rally in Haifa to denounce the onslaught was rejected.
As Haaretzreported: “The commander of the police’s Coastal District, Maj. Gen. Daniel Levy, explained that the refusal to grant the permit was over “real concerns about a serious disruption to public order,” adding that there was a high likelihood that violence would break out between demonstrators and people opposing the demonstration.”
Palestinians mourn loved ones killed by an Israeli airstrike on December 24, 2023 in Khan Younis, Gaza. (Photo: Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)
The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times have regularly “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians.”
An analysis published Tuesday shows that three of the most influential newspapers in the United States—The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times—have reliably shown a bias against Palestinians in their coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza and its reverberating consequences.
Writer Adam Johnson and researcher Othman Ali examined the three outlets’ coverage of Israel-Gaza between October 7—the day of the deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel—and November 24, which marked the start of a negotiated pause that ended just a week later. The Israeli bombardment has continued relentlessly since.
The pair’s analysis, published in The Intercept, found that across more than 1,000 articles, the three newspapers showed a “consistent bias” against Palestinians. Specifically, the outlets “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7.”
As the Gaza death toll surged during the first month and a half of Israel’s assault, the three newspapers’ mentions of Palestinians in their coverage declined, Johnson and Ali found.
In the period between October 7 and November 24, the outlets used the words “slaughter” and “massacre” a combined 180 times when describing the toll of the Hamas-led attack on Israel. The newspapers used those terms just five times when describing Gazans killed by the Israeli military.
“The Washington Post employed ‘massacre‘ several times in its reporting to describe October 7,” Johnson and Ali wrote. “‘President Biden faces growing pressure from lawmakers in both parties to punish Iran after Hamas’ massacre,’ one report from the Post says. A November 13 story from the paper about how Israel’s siege and bombing had killed 1 in 200 Palestinians does not use the word ‘massacre’ or ‘slaughter’ once. The Palestinian dead have simply been ‘killed’ or ‘died’—often in the passive voice.”
Johnson and Ali previously found similar bias against Palestinians in the coverage of CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.
Among the findings in Ali’s research is the selective use of emotive terms to describe killing—something reserved almost exclusively for Israeli deaths. It’s a sort of reverse humanization, horror only goes in one direction. The killing of Palestinians is seen as sterile/clinical https://t.co/TFvczDwTlIpic.twitter.com/oaMsObTFnK
The analysis also shows that the newspapers’ coverage of the Israeli assault’s impact on children and journalists has been relatively sparse given the unparalleled impact the war has had on kids and members of the media.
In the three weeks after October 7, Israeli forces killed more children in Gaza than were killed in all of the world’s armed conflict zones since 2019, according to Save the Children. The Committee to Protect Journalists said last month that more reporters were killed during the first 10 weeks of the war “than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.”
Johnson and Ali wrote Tuesday that “the lack of coverage for the unprecedented killing of children and journalists, groups that typically elicit sympathy from Western media, is conspicuous.”
“By way of comparison, more Palestinian children died in the first week of the Gaza bombing than during the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, yet The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Timesranmultiplepersonal, sympatheticstorieshighlightingtheplightofchildren during the first six weeks of the Ukraine war.”
The analysis comes days after The Intercept highlighted a longstanding CNN policy under which the outlet runs its Israel-Palestine coverage through its Jerusalem bureau, which must abide by the rules of the Israeli military’s censor.
The Western media’s slanted coverage of Israel’s devastating war on Gaza has drawn outrage from individual journalists, including some who work at The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.
“We are renewing the call for journalists to tell the full truth without fear or favor,” reads an open letter signed by hundreds of journalists in November. “To use precise terms that are well-defined by international human rights organizations, including ‘apartheid,’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and ‘genocide.’ To recognize that contorting our words to hide evidence of war crimes or Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is journalistic malpractice and an abdication of moral clarity.”
After the letter was released, dozens of signatories—including journalists from The Associated Press and Washington Post—asked that their signatures be removed, fearing retaliation from their employers.
Israeli occupation forces obstructing the work of ambulances in Jenin. (Photo: Mohammad Mansour/WAFA)
Over 500 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2023. Under its undeclared policy of collective punishment, Israel also destroyed a significant amount of civilian infrastructure such as roads, residential buildings, and hospitals in West Bank since October 7
Israel’s war on Gaza has entered its fourth month. It has killed over 23,000 Palestinians in the besieged enclave and injured around 60,000. Nearly 80% of all Gazans have been displaced due to the constant bombings. The amount of destruction and killing in Gaza is horrendous. The offensive has also extended to the West Bank where Palestinians have been facing a form of undeclared collective punishment both before and since the war in Gaza.
Though the West Bank has always faced violent attacks from Israeli occupation, those attacks have increased manifold since the beginning of the war in Gaza. Despite the fact that Hamas does not rule the territory, Israel used the excuse of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood to justify its unprecedented attacks on civilians and their infrastructure there.
Between October 7 and December 31, last year more than 340 Palestinians, including a large number of children, were killed in attacks carried out by both the Israeli forces and illegal settlers.
The Israeli attacks targeted Palestinian civilians, including artists from the famous Freedom Theater, while homes were demolished, hospitals and medical facilities targeted, and roads and other civilian infrastructure uprooted.
At least three Palestinian men were shot and killed by the occupying Israeli forces during the intervening period of Monday evening and Tuesday night in Tulkarm. Video footage of these attacks showed Israeli forces first shooting and killing the men and then running over the bodies of one of them with their military vehicle.
A terrifying scene of an Israeli Jeep running over a young man after shooting him along with two other young men in Tulkarm in the West Bank.
Israeli soldiers prevented paramedics from reaching the young men leaving them to bleed until they died. pic.twitter.com/Udm539Ho0D
Israeli forces reportedly conducted similar night raids in Qalqilya, Nablus, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, among several other places on Tuesday night, arresting scores of people and destroying civic infrastructure.
Israeli occupation is targeting the Palestinians in the West Bank economically as well by refusing to transfer millions of dollars in tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority, leaving it with no money to pay the salaries to its over 140,000 employees. It has also refused to allow around 150,000 workers from the territory to return to their jobs in Israel since October 7.
Deadliest Year since 2005
Israeli forces similarly attacked the Jenin refugee camp a couple of days ago and killed at least 7 Palestinians. They have targeted the camp repeatedly since October 7, killing over 60 Palestinians there and deliberately destroying most of the roads and other civil infrastructure. According to Al-Jazeera, Tulkarm too has been a center of Israeli attacks with at least 60 Palestinians killed since October 7.
In August, the UN had already declared 2023 to be the deadliest year for the West Bank as the number of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks had crossed 200, more than the previous high of 167 in 2022.
According to the latest data, the total number of Palestinians killed in 2023 has crossed 500 with over 13,000 more injured in the attacks carried out by both illegal settlers as well as Israeli soldiers.
More than 70 of the Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks were children. This is the highest number of the Palestinian children ever killed in the occupied West Bank in a year. Some sources say the death toll among children is even higher.
Settler Violence
According to Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, 2023 was also the most violent year for the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in terms of the number of attacks carried out by the illegal settlers. According to it, at least 10 Palestinians were killed in 2023 just in those attacks.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), at least 1,225 cases of settler violence were recorded in 2023.
The figure presented by the Palestinian officials for the same is almost double at 2,410. It also claims that the number of Palestinians killed in settler violence in 2023 was 22.
There are around 500,000 Israeli settlers living illegally inside the occupied West Bank. Most of these illegal settlers participate in attacks on nearby Palestinian villages under security cover provided by the Israeli occupation forces.
The settlers attack the villages, burn Palestinian houses, their farms and other properties, and attack people trying to prevent those attacks with the objective of terrorizing people to leave their villages and farms.
Record number of Palestinians detained
More than 11,000 Palestinians were also arrested or detained by Israel in the last year in the occupied West Bank alone, which is almost three times higher than the total number of Palestinians inside Israeli prisons before the beginning of the year.
Some of them were later released after a brief period of detention. Some others were released as part of the prisoner exchange deal between Hamas and Israel. Still the number of Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli jails has jumped from around 4,500 before the beginning of the year to over 7,000 at the end of it.
A joint statement issued by Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs Commission, the Palestinian Prisoners Society, Addameer, and others stated that 1,085 of those detained by the Israeli occupation forces from the West Bank in 2023 were children.
As per reports, scores of Palestinian prisoners have been killed inside Israeli jails with large number of them reporting torture and abuse by the prisoner authorities.
Children in California are suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (Photo: Our Children’s Trust)
“We’re challenging the EPA’s failure to protect us. The air we breathe has become a casualty of their opposition.”
As the United Nations climate talks cast a spotlight on the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, the U.S. law firm Our Children’s Trust on Sunday launched a constitutional lawsuit against the Biden administration on behalf of 18 California children “growing up with polluted air and a government-imposed and -sanctioned climate crisis.”
Filed in the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, the complaint takes aim at the federal government, the Environmental Protection Agency, and its administrator, Michael Regan, arguing that the “EPA’s conduct in controlling the pollution that enters the nation’s air actively discriminates against children, and these plaintiffs, knowingly causing them disproportionate harm compared to similarly situated adults and burdening them with a lifetime of hardship.”
Avroh, a 14-year-old plaintiff, said in a statement Monday that “we are experiencing what no one should have to experience. We’re facing constitutional negligence. We’re challenging the EPA’s failure to protect us. The air we breathe has become a casualty of their opposition.”
Another plaintiff, 8-year-old Neela, said that “I believe kids can make a difference and the Earth needs our help. I want to help protect the people and places I love. I’m excited to be a part of this case and be a voice for all kids who deserve a healthy environment.”
“We feel a constant worry about the future, and all around us no one is moving fast enough.”
Catherine Smith, of counsel to Our Children’s Trust—which secured a landmark victory while representing Montana youth in state court earlier this year—argued that “in times like this, when the legislative and executive branches have breached their obligation to young people by intentionally allowing climate pollution and explicitly discounting children’s lives in some political or economic calculus fully aware of its consequences to youth, courts must serve as a constitutional backstop to end it.”
The plaintiffs—who are ages 8-17—are seeking “a declaratory judgment that as children they are entitled to a heightened level of judicial review over government conduct that burdens them with lifetimes of hardship, that they are members of a constitutionally protected class, and that defendants have violated their constitutional rights,” according to the complaint.
“They also seek declaratory relief that defendants have infringed their fundamental rights to life, including their personal security and happiness, and in so doing have also acted outside the scope of their delegated authority,” the filing adds. “Plaintiffs seek further relief as deemed necessary and proper to enforce a declaratory judgment after the facts are found and the legal conclusions of the district court are rendered on a full evidentiary record.”
Noah, a 15-year-old plaintiff, warned that “time is slipping away, and the impact of the climate crisis is already hitting us directly. We are running from wildfires, being displaced by floods, panicking in hot classrooms during another heatwave.”
“We feel a constant worry about the future, and all around us no one is moving fast enough,” Noah noted. “The Constitution guarantees every American the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness including and especially children.”
Our Children’s Trust chief legal counsel Julia Olson declared that “these children are rising up from fire, smoke, heat, and flood to share their stories of physical harm and despair, along with their clarion call to adults—’our equal rights to life matter as much as yours.'”
“There is one federal agency explicitly tasked with keeping the air clean and controlling pollution to protect the health of every child and the welfare of a nation—the EPA,” she continued. “The agency has done the opposite when it comes to climate pollution and it’s time the EPA is held accountable by our courts for violating the U.S. Constitution and misappropriating its congressionally delegated authority.”
In addition to representing youth plaintiffs in Held v. State of Montana—which the state is now appealing—Our Children’s Trust is the group behind Juliana v. United States, the constitutional climate lawsuit first filed on behalf of 21 young people in 2015. While a June ruling put Juliana on track to proceed to trial, the Biden administration continues its battle to quash the case.
E&E News reported Monday that “while Juliana targets a swath of government agencies,” the new case, Genesis B. v. EPA, singles out one agency. Our Children’s Trust senior staff attorney Andrea Rodgers explained that the firm hopes the focus will mean that the EPA “won’t fight this case” in the way that the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have targeted Juliana.
