For over twenty years 'trail hunting' has been used a smokescreen for hunts to terrorise and kill foxes. The law is not fit for purpose. The loopholes and exemptions within the current Hunting Act are being exploited and our wildlife is still being persecuted.
All they want is to live and you can give them that by having your say and completing the consultation. There are two weeks left to complete the consultation and the HSA have provided guidelines to help you, which can be found in the comments.
Use your voice, save their lives.
If only someone in the media would expose Farage's incitement yesterday via performative utterance in the same way that Jonathan Miller humiliated Enoch Powell and his grubby little racism.
"My personal pride and joy." That's how Peter Mandelson described the Palantir deal he brokered.
The whole thing stinks. Kick Palantir out of our NHS, now.
“They🇮🇱 forced us to keep our heads down, our knees on the ground, on hard surfaces or in dirty water. They stuffed us into unventilated containers for hours at a time. They literally flooded our sleeping space with seawater in the middle of the night.They physically beat anyone”
⚡️BREAKING:
The New York Times obtained autopsy reports for 14 of the 15 people killed in the March 23 Israeli attack on an ambulance and fire truck in Gaza.
The reports show that most victims—paramedics and rescue workers—were killed by gunshots to the head, chest, or back. Four were shot directly in the head [executed]. Others had shrapnel wounds. Despite wearing medical uniforms and traveling in marked vehicles with sirens, they were shot multiple times at close range.
Israel initially lied about the crime committed then later took responsibility once the lies were exposed. The 15 victims included 14 rescue workers and a UN employee. Israeli soldiers buried the bodies in a mass grave and crushed and buried the ambulances, fire truck, and UN vehicle.
This week, the ICC requested an arrest warrant against Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
In response, he ordered the forcible evacuation and demolition of Khan al-Ahmar in the occupied West Bank.
This is ethnic cleansing. When will our government end its complicity?
It’s deeply concerning that over 4 million British Muslims, who contribute more than £70 billion to the UK economy and enrich every part of our society, continue to face overt Islamophobic rhetoric that fuels division, hatred, and horrific crimes.
Can we maintain a sense of purpose, hope and sanity in our troubled world? There are groups who strive to create a better world and show the value of community and cooperation.
@convivir@marlytyz118355@CreateSocialism
https://t.co/J63T06jznQ
Israeli soldiers caught on vid raping Palestinian
Victim suffered ruptured intestine, severe injury to anus, lungs & broken ribs
Israelis rioted for right to rape, ministers defended rapist, 1 rapist became celebrity
All charges dropped
This isn't just Ben Gvir this is Israel
What will happen in the coming weeks? Latest developments in the Labour Party have been extraordinary. In all the manoeuvering that is taking place who is the best bet to save us from a Reform government? @convivir@marlytyz118355@CreateSocialism
https://t.co/2qzKEvibsS
I have written to Mark Rowley, the Met Police Commissioner, urging him to retract his baseless claims about our demonstrations for Palestine.
Our marches are made of people of all faiths and none — and we will never stop campaigning until Palestine is free.
IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE
There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"
Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?
Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!
And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.
Francesca Albanese is that someone.
She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."
Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.
And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.
Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.
There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.
There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."
There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”
Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.
She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".
Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.
What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.
These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.
Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.
We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."
Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.
So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.
A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.
Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.
Let us stand with her.
Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.
[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]
A very happy 100th birthday to David Attenborough.
The whole world owes an enormous debt to David Attenborough for passionately defending the natural world and how we relate to it.
Let us heed his lesson of living with nature, not on top of nature.