Activists pour blood-red dye into US Embassy pond in protest against arms sales to Israel Photo: Greenpeace
SIX Greenpeace activists were arrested today following a demonstration outside the US embassy in London against the continued sale of arms to Israel.
Protesters tipped 300 litres of non-toxic, biodegradable blood-red dye from containers with the words “Stop Arming Israel” written on into a large pond in front of the embassy building.
The containers were delivered to the embassy on bicycles disguised as delivery couriers.
Among those arrested was Greenpeace UK co-executive director Will McCallum, on suspicion of conspiracy to cause criminal damage, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Official data shows that since taking office in January, US President Donald Trump has approved nearly $12 billion (£9.3bn) in military sales to Israel.
The group is urging the British and US governments to announce a total arms embargo on Israel to stop its genocide in Gaza.
9.35 ed: A video of the Greenpeace genocide protest at US Embassy, London.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks alongside coal and energy workers during an executive order signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House on April 8, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“Coal is a disaster for our health, our wallets, and the planet,” said one environmental lawyer.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed multiple executive orders that aim to boost the coal industry, a move that critics denounced as “reckless” and “breathlessly stupid” even before the orders were officially unveiled.
Among the orders signed Tuesday, Trump directed U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to acknowledge the end of a moratorium that had halted new coal leasing on public lands and to prioritize coal leasing and related activities, and also directed U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright to determine whether coal used in steel production can be considered a “critical material.” According to Reuters, permitting this classification would pave the way for the administration to use emergency powers to boost production.
Trump also paused environmental regulation imposed under former President Joe Biden that applied to certain coal-burning power plants thereby purportedly “safeguarding the nation’s energy grid and security, and saving coal plants from closure.”
Additionally, one order directed the “Energy Department to develop a process for using emergency powers to prevent unprofitable coal plants from shutting down in order to avert power outages,” according to The New York Times, a move that may face court challenges.
Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at the green group Earthjustice, said Tuesday: “Coal is a disaster for our health, our wallets, and the planet. President Trump’s efforts to rescue failing coal plants and open our lands to destructive mining is another in a series of actions that sacrifices American lives for fossil fuel industry profit. Instead of investing in pollution, we should be leading the way on clean energy.”
“The only way to prop up coal is to deny reality, and the reality is that people no longer rely on coal because it’s expensive, unreliable, and devastating to public health,” said Julie McNamara, an associate policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement on Tuesday.
“Instead of supporting the economy-boosting clean energy transition that maintains widespread public support across the country, President Trump is relentlessly attempting to tear it down.”
Trump has vowed to support what he calls “beautiful, clean coal,” though the industry has been in decline for years. Coal-fired electricity generation has dropped from 38.5% of the country’s generation mix in 2014 to 14.7% in 2024, according to a 2025 factbook from BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. Coal is also the dirtiest fossil fuel.
The executive order builds on previous moves by the Trump administration. Last month, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced an effort to rollback a host of EPA regulations, including some that will impact coal producers.
On the first day of his second term, Trump declared a “national energy emergency” intended to help deliver on his campaign pledge to “drill, baby, drill.” That emergency defined energy to include oil, natural gas, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal, flowing water, and critical minerals—but it omitted solar and wind.
Reporting earlier Tuesday indicated that Trump would sign an order invoking presidential emergency authority to force coal-fired power plants to stay open.
In a statement released in response to that reporting, Tyson Slocum, energy program director at the watchdog Public Citizen, said: “Reviving or extending coal to power data centers would force working families to subsidize polluting coal on behalf of Big Tech billionaires and despoil our nation’s public lands.”
“Coal kills. In the last two decades, nearly half a million Americans have died from exposure to coal pollution,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the environmental organization the Sierra Club in a statement on earlier on Tuesday, also in response to reports that executive orders were forthcoming.
In another move that generated swift criticism, Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate state policies that are aimed at confronting the climate crisis and to take action to stop enforcement of those laws.
According to The Washington Post, it is unclear what authority would the agency would rely on. The order specifically calls out state climate superfund laws in New York and Vermont.
“President Trump’s executive order weaponizes the Justice Department against states that dare to make polluters pay for climate damage,” said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of Make Polluters Pay—a campaign to build public support for climate litigation—in a statement on Wednesday.
“This is the fossil fuel industry’s desperation on full display—they’re so afraid of facing evidence of their deception in court that they’ve convinced the president to launch a federal assault on state sovereignty. We are watching corporate capture of government unfold in real time,” DiPaola added.
Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Donald Trump is repeating the same mistakes of short-lived former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss. It’s not a few uber-rich individuals that maintain economic health, concentrating wealth is unhealthy. The rich wouldn’t be rich if they were willing to spend their money. It is the poor that are forced to spend to survive, they have no choice. Making the poor poorer to make a tiny minority richer is counter-productive as markets globally are showing.
Additionally, Trump is a sullen, arrogant bigot unwilling to recognise the overwhelming urgency of climate action. Even marine mammals recognise this.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
People carry signs during a “Hands Off!” protest against US President Donald Trump on April 5, 2025, in New York
DEMONSTRATIONS across the United States over the weekend give the lie to claims that all is lost in the struggle for people’s rights and social justice against the conservative right and its far-right allies.
Of course, there are always the defeatists — notably the “centre-left” intellectuals — who insist that the working classes on both sides of the Atlantic are too stupid, lazy, selfish and racist to resist injustice.
In the words of Private Frazer: “We’re all doomed!” Fascism is inevitable.
Meanwhile, millions of protesters of all colours, creeds and political affiliations, from the centre-right to the real left, from Los Angeles to Washington DC, marched in defence of jobs, women’s rights, the US constitution, the young, the elderly, the sick, black communities, the world’s poor and the Palestinians against the Trumpian onslaught.
They face a deeply reactionary Republican administration backed by a sizeable section of ruthless monopoly capital and a powerful state apparatus. The US working class, the labour and progressive movements and the people will need all the unity they can muster to block the advance of the resurgent right and its proto-fascist elements.
But as the worldwide pushback grows against Donald Trump’s global trade war, cracks will open up within the ruling Republicans, the monopoly capitalist class and even within and between the agencies of the state. Provided the insurgents put not their trust in Democratic Party politicians on the big-business payroll, they can generate their own vision, strategies and leadership to turn back the Maga maniacs.
In Britain, too, the “centre left” must not be allowed to divert or demoralise the emerging opposition to Keir Starmer’s treacherous regime and its pro-City, pro-Nato policies.
In many local communities, people are beginning to mobilise to defend their public services, their social facilities and their rights. Never have such policies as a wealth tax, public-sector housebuilding and public ownership of energy and public transport been so popular. The Alternative Economic Strategy is making a welcome comeback.
Protesters march every week against the British government’s sickening silence about — and complicity in — the Israeli genocide. Britain’s armed forces can blast the Houthis and defend Israel against incoming rockets, can bomb and invade Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen — yet not a finger can be lifted to protect defenceless Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Public cynicism about the West’s real motives for pouring yet more weapons into the Ukraine war cauldron instead of genuinely seeking the end to a conflict that did not begin with Russia’s brutal incursion three years ago.
In Britain, we can build a people’s mass movement around these burning issues and, in the process, expose the anti-working-class politics of Reform UK, whose four top officers made their millions in banking, property development or the City.
Again, though, we need unity to be built on solid foundations.
These cannot include demands for Britain to align itself with the EU in a trade war against the US and even China. Nor should there be illusions that deep-seated problems which festered during decades of EU membership can somehow be more readily resolved by rejoining the big-business club or its capital and labour markets.
Nato rearmament must be opposed. The US-led cold war anti-socialist alliance has now outlived the Warsaw Pact by more than 30 years.
Clasping these two serpents to its bosom would spell suicide for any people’s movement that stands for public services, social justice, peace and solidarity.
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Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during morning trading on April 3, 2025 in New York City. (Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Instead of strategically imposing tariffs, Trump has chosen to “give the country the most massive tax increase in its history, possibly exceeding $1 trillion on an annual basis.”
As stocks “nosedived” on Thursday, economists, policymakers, and campaigners around the world continued to warn about the impacts of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war, which includes a 10% universal tariff for imports and steeper duties—that he claims are “reciprocal”—for dozens of countries, set to take effect over the next week.
“This is how you sabotage the world’s economic engine while claiming to supercharge it,” wrote Nigel Green, CEO of the international financial consultancy deVere Group. “Trump is blowing up the post-war system that made the U.S. and the world more prosperous, and he’s doing it with reckless confidence.”
As Bloomberg detailed after the president’s “Liberation Day” remarks from the White House Rose Garden:
China’s cumulative tariff rate of 54% includes both the 20% duty already charged earlier this year, added to the 34% levy calculated as part of Trump’s so-called reciprocal plan, according to people familiar with the matter. The European Union’s rate is 20% and Vietnam’s is 46%, White House documents showed. Other nations slapped with larger tariffs include Japan with 24%, South Korea with 25%, India with 26%, Cambodia with 49%, and Taiwan with 32%.
In Europe on Thursday, “the regional Stoxx 600 index provisionally ended down around 2.7%,” while “the U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 1.6%, with France’s CAC 40 and Germany’s DAX posting deeper losses of 3.3% and 3.1%, respectively,” according to CNBC.
In the United States, CNBC reported, “the broad market index dropped 4%, putting it on track for its worst day since September 2022. The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 1,200 points, or 3%, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 5%. The slide across equities was broad, with decliners at the New York Stock Exchange outnumbering advancers by 6-to-1.”
However, as Economic Policy Institute (EPI) chief economist Josh Bivens noted last week, “because most households depend overwhelmingly on wages from work as their primary source of income and not returns from wealth-holding, the stock market tells us nothing about these households’ economic situations.”
And Trump’s tariffs are expected to hit U.S. households hard, as the cost of his taxes on imports are passed on to consumers.
“Tariffs can be a legitimate and useful tool in industrial policy for well-defined strategic goals, but broad-based tariffs that significantly raise the average effective tariff rate in the United States are unwise,” Bivens and EPI senior economist Adam Hersh stressed in a Thursday statement—which also called out Trump for mischaracterizing one of the think tank’s 2022 analyses.
“Further, the second Trump administration’s rationale, parameters, and timeline for tariffs have been ever-shifting,” Bivens and Hersh continued. “As the original post cited by the administration argues, tariffs should not be a goal unto themselves, but a strategic tool to pair with other efforts to restore American competitiveness in narrowly targeted industrial sectors.”
Instead of strategically imposing tariffs, Trump has chosen to “give the country the most massive tax increase in its history, possibly exceeding $1 trillion on an annual basis, which comes to $7,000 per household,” warned Center for Economic and Policy Research co-founder and senior economist Dean Baker. “And this tax hike will primarily hit moderate and middle-income families. Trump’s taxes go easy on the rich, who spend a smaller share of their income on imported goods.”
Baker—like various other economists and journalists—also took aim at Trump’s claims that the tariffs are reciprocal, explaining:
Trump’s team calculated our trade deficit with each country and divided it by their exports to the United States. Trump decided that this figure was equal to that country’s tariff on goods imported from the U.S.
Trump’s method of calculating tariffs is comparable to the doctor who assesses your proper weight by dividing your height by your birthday. Any doctor who did this is clearly batshit crazy, and unfortunately so is our president. And apparently none of his economic advisers has the courage and integrity to set him straight or to resign.
However, outside Trump’s administration, the intense criticism continued to mount, including from groups focused on combating the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, which also endangers the global economy.
Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and Campaigns at 350.org, said Thursday that “Trump’s tariffs won’t slow the global energy transition—they’ll only hurt ordinary people, particularly Americans.”
“Despite his claims he ‘gets’ economic policy, his record tells a different story: Tariffs are tanking U.S. stocks and fueling inflation,” Sieber added. “The transition to renewables is unstoppable, with or without him. His latest move does little to impact the booming clean energy market but will isolate the U.S. and drive up costs for American consumers.”
Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. campaign manager at Oil Change International, similarly emphasized that “Trump’s tariffs will hurt working families first and foremost, raising costs for essentials we depend on and threatening to plunge the U.S. economy into a recession. Though Trump pretends to care about the cost of living for ordinary people, his real loyalties lie with his fossil fuel industry donors.”
“If he actually cared about energy affordability, he would stop bullying other countries into buying more U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG), which boosts the fossil fuel industry’s profits, but results in increased prices for domestic consumers and pushes us further toward climate catastrophe,” she asserted. “The one step countries can take to hit Trump where it hurts most is wean off their dependency on fossil fuels from the United States.”
The impact of Trump’s new levies won’t be limited to working-class people in the United States. Nick Dearden, director of U.K.-based Global Justice Now, pointed out that “Trump has set light to the global economy and unleashed a world of pain, not least on a group of developing countries that will suffer tremendous impoverishment as a result of his punitive tariffs.”
“All those affected must come together and stand up to this bully by building a very different international economy that promotes the interests of ordinary people rather than the oligarchs standing behind Trump,” he argued. “For all its scraping and crawling, the U.K. got no special treatment here, and the government should learn this lesson fast: They need to stop giving away our rights and protections in a futile effort to appease Donald Trump.”
Leaders in the United States are also encouraging resistance to Trump. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Wednesday that “this week you will read many confused economists and political pundits who won’t understand how the tariffs make economic sense. That’s because they don’t. They aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.”
Murphy made the case that “the tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship. Why? So that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears.”
“But as long as we see this clearly, we can stop him. Public mobilization is working. Today, a few Republicans joined Democrats to vote against one set of tariffs,” he added, referring to a resolution that would undo levies on Canadian imports. “The people still have the power.”
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.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.
