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Palestine Action ban will be overturned, group’s co-founder vows

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/16/palestine-action-ban-will-be-overturned-groups-co-founder-vows

Huda Ammori: ‘I‘m certain that legally we are correct that this ban is disproportionate to free speech and the right to protest.’ Photograph: Abdullah Bailey/Alamy

Speaking after appeal court ruled ban lawful, Huda Ammori says fight will be won in the courts or ‘on the streets’

The co-founder of Palestine Action has said the battle to overturn the terrorism ban on the direct action group will be won – in the courts or “on the streets”.

On Monday, five court of appeal judges ruled that a ban on the organisation was lawful, reversing the high court’s February judgment, which they said had wrongly limited the home secretary’s discretion on national security.

Huda Ammori, who as a founder of Palestine Action – the first direct action protest group to be banned under the Terrorism Act – brought the legal challenge, said she was disappointed but remained confident of victory.

“I‘m certain that legally we are correct that this ban is disproportionate to free speech and the right to protest. I think that’s really clear,” she said. “We just need to get to the right court that’s going to recognise that and we’ll take it all the way up to the European court of human rights, if needs be.”

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As an illustration of what she termed the politicisation of the case, Ammori highlighted the court of appeal judges’ assertion that “Palestine Action has little or nothing in common with the suffragettes”.

The suffragettes carried out a nationwide bombing campaign while Emily Davison, who is commemorated by two statues, attacked a clergyman with a horse whip after mistaking him for the then chancellor, David Lloyd George. Ammori said of the judges’ comparison: “It just is completely inaccurate and quite crazy that they even felt like they needed to make that comparison.”

Monday’s judgment was the second blow for Palestine Action after Friday’s sentencing of four activists involved in a 2024 raid on an Israeli manufacturer’s arms factory near Bristol.

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Article continues at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/16/palestine-action-ban-will-be-overturned-groups-co-founder-vows

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.
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.
Palestine Action dismantle Elbit equipment, 6 August 2024. (Photo: Handout)
Palestine Action dismantle Elbit equipment, 6 August 2024. (Photo: Handout)
Palestine Action joke that appeared in the UK satirical magazine 'Private Eye'.
Palestine Action joke that appeared in the UK satirical magazine ‘Private Eye’.
Continue ReadingPalestine Action ban will be overturned, group’s co-founder vows

Dramatic climate action needed to curtail ‘crazy’ extreme weather

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/28/dramatic-climate-action-needed-curtail-extreme-weather

Heatwaves, wildfires and floods are just the ‘tip of the iceberg’, leading climate scientists say

‘Crazy off-the-charts records’: has humanity finally broken the climate?

Canadian wildfire 2023
‘Crazy off-the-charts records’: has humanity finally broken the climate?Canadian wildfire 2023

The “crazy” extreme weather rampaging around the globe in 2023 will become the norm within a decade without dramatic climate action, the world’s leading climate scientists have said.

The heatwaves, wildfires and floods experienced today were just the “tip of the iceberg” compared with even worse effects to come, they said, with limitations in climate models leaving the world “flying partially blind” into the future.

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“We need to stop burning fossil fuels,” said Dr Friederike Otto at Imperial College London. “Now. Not some time when we’ve allowed companies to make all the money they possibly can.”

Prof Emily Shuckburgh at the University of Cambridge in the UK said: “Anyone in any way perpetuating the fossil fuel era is firmly on the wrong side of history.”

“Knowing that we will look back on today’s extreme events as mild relative to what lies in our future is truly mind-boggling,” said Prof Andrea Dutton at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US. “The speed at which we make this transition will define the future that we get.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/28/dramatic-climate-action-needed-curtail-extreme-weather

Continue ReadingDramatic climate action needed to curtail ‘crazy’ extreme weather

The Nonsense of Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing

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Dr. Ian Fairlie

The Nonsense of Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing

Many readers will have seen the interesting Panorama programme on the poor safety
record at Sellafield broadcast on BBC 1 on September 5
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07v80s4/panorama-sellafields-nuclear-safety-
The BBC press release stated this was a “special investigation into the shocking state of
Britain’s most hazardous nuclear plant…” and it certainly was. Perhaps the most important
of several whistleblower revelations was that the previous US managers had been shocked
at the state of the plant when they took over its running in 2008.
Although the programme producers are to be congratulated for tackling the subject, it was
only 30 minutes long and tells only a small part of the whole sorry story.
This article tries to give more background information, and importantly, more analysis and
explanation. The full story would require several books and would be painful reading.

What is reprocessing?

Reprocessing is the name given to the physico-chemical treatment of spent nuclear fuel
carried on at Sellafield in Cumbria since the 1950s. This involves the stripping of metal
cladding from spent nuclear fuel assemblies, dissolving the inner uranium fuel in boiling
concentrated nitric acid, chemically separating out the uranium and plutonium isotopes and
storing the remaining dissolved fission products in large storage tanks.
It is a dirty, dangerous, unhealthy, polluting, expensive process which results high radiation
doses to the ~9,000 workers employed at Sellafield.

Environmental consequences

The Sellafield plant is host to several hundred radioactive waste streams and processes
which result in large discharges of radioactive liquids to sea and emissions of radioactive
gases and aerosols to the atmosphere. Raised levels of childhood leukemias in some villages
nearby are considered to be linked to the inhalation and ingestion of these radionuclides.
Sellafield, and a similar plant in La Hague France, continue to be, by some margin, the
largest sources of radioactive pollution in the world. For example, the Irish Sea is the most
radioactively polluted sea in the world with about half a tonne of plutonium sitting on its
seabed from reprocessing.
The collective doses to the world’s population from the long-lived gaseous nuclides C-14,
and I-129, and from medium-lived Kr-85 and H-3 (tritium) emitted at Sellafield are huge and
are estimated by radiation biologists to cause tens of thousands of early deaths throughout
the world.
Another result is the 140 tonnes of unneeded, highly radiotoxic, plutonium (Pu) stored on
site at a cost of £50 million a year. Pu is fissile and, in the wrong hands, this amount could
be made into ~20,000 warheads, ie it is a serious nuclear proliferation danger.

The Liquid Waste Tanks

Shitty open-air pond at Sellafield nuclear waste dump containing spent nuclear fuel rods.
Shitty open-air pond at Sellafield nuclear waste dump containing spent nuclear fuel rods.

Not discussed in the BBC programme, but perhaps most serious of all, are the ~20 large
holding tanks at Sellafield containing thousands of litres of extremely radiotoxic fission
products, including long-lived Cs-137and Sr-90. Discussing these tanks, the previous
management consortium Nuclear Management Partners stated in 2012 “there is a mass of
very hazardous (nuclear) waste onsite in storage conditions that are extraordinarily
vulnerable, and in facilities that are well past their designated life”.
The National Audit Office (NAO) stated these tanks pose “significant risks to people and the
environment”. One official review concluded that, at worst, an explosive release from the
tanks could kill two million Britons and require the evacuation of an area reaching from
Glasgow to Liverpool. These dangerous tanks have also been the subject of complaints from
Ireland and Norway who fear their countries could be contaminated if explosions or fires
were to occur.

…

 

Let’s not mince words, the practice of reprocessing at Sellafield has been and remains a
monumental national disgrace.
…

Another seabird in one of Sellafield nuclear dump's open-air ponds.
Another seabird in one of Sellafield nuclear dump’s open-air ponds.

The shocking state of the Sellafield nuclear shitehole

Continue ReadingThe Nonsense of Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing