Just absorb this for a moment.
The social media post of Israel's National Security Minister is so genocidal that it violates the rules of X.
Yes, that's right, even in the cesspit of Elon Musk's X.
Yet this remains a state armed by and allied to the West!
A small step, the smallest step, but it's a beginning.
Norway still has to answer this: how can a country that champions human rights, allow its vast sovereign wealth fund, one of the largest in the world, to invest in entities linked to an occupation the ICJ has found illegal?
Authoritarian state capture.
A dangerous Bill.
'The Bill gives the Home Secretary nearly untrammelled power to designate any "group" working to advance a "foreign state threat." They are a "threat" if they pursue any objective that is inimical to the "interests" of the UK...'
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I've now had a chance to read this Bill. It is a genuinely alarming piece of legislation and typical of the draconian, authoritarian politics of the Labour Together Project, in which Mahmood has been a key player.
The Bill gives the Home Secretary nearly untrammelled power to designate any "group" working to advance a "foreign state threat." They are a "threat" if they pursue any objective that is inimical to the "interests" of the UK. Anyone who "supports" a designated group, like endorsing it or sharing its messages online, faces 14 years in prison.
This is so broadly written that it invites - almost guarantees - abuse. In the context of a potential far-right government, it is madness to put such draconian legislation on the books.
We already have two examples of how the state or political actors have effectively fabricated foreign state connections.
First, in manufacturing consent towards the proscription of Palestine Action, it was leaked to the press that there were links between the direct action group and Iran. But this was entirely false, as the government's Counter-Extremism advisor sheepishly admitted months later to Channel Four.
Second, I have personal experience of this. We now know that in response to my investigations into the unlawful conduct of Labour Together and Morgan McSweeney, Labour Together hired APCO Worldwide to investigate me, my colleagues and associates. The end result was a mad dossier alleging that I was a catspaw of foreign intelligence services, working to disrupt British democracy. I've now seen some of the "raw intelligence" on which this was based: literally everything I have seen was fabricated out of whole cloth, the thumb-suck of some swivel-eyed "intelligence" source. We now know that the most senior people in the Labour Party knew about this and didn't seem to bat an eye. Some of them even seemed to believe this web of absurd idiocy.
Anybody who has spent time at the coalface of investigating powerful people or standing up to militarism and forever-wars knows how legislation like this works. Secret intelligence is used to designate groups and people. That intelligence is classified, so the accused can't even see what they're accused of. Judges are given secret briefings where intelligence officials deliver doom-laden analysis, but they can't be cross-examined by the lawyers of the accused. Whispers and innuendo, the lubricant of the sort of "intelligence" that led to war in Iraq, are spun into concrete facts and grave national security threats.
This is not hyperbole - it is literally what has happened when campaigners have tried to challenge the sale of arms to Israel and Saudi Arabia, where campaigners themselves were not able to see, hear or test the evidence of the state at trial. In every instance, judges have then decided that they have no power to gainsay the State.
As this government collapses under the weight of unpopularity and scandal, it is now delivering for the reactionary forces that helped to put it in place through systematic and pre-meditated dishonesty. The result is a lattice-work of legislation and practice designed to criminalise and constrain dissent in the face of genocide, war, environmental degradation and the sort of corruption that turns state murder into money and misconduct into power.
There is every chance that within a week, Andy Burnham will be challenging Starmer for power. It is plausible Burnham could be Prime Minister by September.
His task, amongst many, will be to seek accommodation with progressive voters and movements that have abandoned the Labour Party. There will be plenty of discussion about the wisdom of that move from both sides. But it is likely to fail unless a Burnham government reverses course on the Starmer project's assaults on protest, jury trials, dissent, free speech and basic civil liberties.
And none of that is plausible as long as Mahmood, or any other Labour Together alumni, remains in post.
Absolutely the bottom of the barrel @BBC
Why @BBC is this acceptable, a vile misogynist appearing on the BBC, or on any msm platform for that matter?
Who scrutinised, checked, vetted the character of this sorry individual?
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A @BBC presenter lauded by the corporation for his appeal to young male audiences has a history of making abusive and misogynistic remarks about women, whom he has variously called “slags”, “sluts”, “psychos” and “bitches”, the Guardian can reveal.
Ashley Cain is the presenter of the BBC Three documentary series Ashley Cain: Into the Danger Zone, which was filmed on location earlier this year after the BBC commissioned a second series.
A former footballer turned reality TV star, Cain travels to the world’s most dangerous places, interviewing young men who live on the fringes of society.
Before Cain began working with the BBC, he was a prolific user of @X, which was then known as Twitter. He frequently referred to women in tweets using abusive terms, making jokes about hitting women and degrading sexual practices.
He also sent female users of the social media platform abusive messages with offensive sexualised language. In 2014, in response to a since-deleted tweet he perceived to be homophobic, Cain tweeted that one female user should “go and choke on a cock you slut”.
To another female user in 2015 he wrote: “The only thing that’s desperate around here is your pictures with your shit tits. Now suck a dick, and fuck off.”
These and dozens of other similar posts, all of which were publicly available, raise questions for the BBC about what, if any, vetting was conducted before his appointment. Late on Wednesday, Cain’s X account appeared to have been removed from the platform.
https://t.co/uhm5Nz2asb
Heartbreaking.
Tears doesn't stop the inhumanity, the ethnic cleansing.
A sick govt has failed and made UK folk complicit in pedicide, genocide.
The cruelty inflicted on children by those who readily dehumanise, seek to eradicate Palestinian folk.
It will never be forgotten.
How will you go on with your day when you hear about a father in Gaza, trapped beneath the rubble, begging rescuers not to save him?
Not because he had lost hope in life, but because he could hear the final breaths of his daughters beneath the debris. Their tiny hands were still holding his in the darkness, as if calling for him one last time. He was the father who had always been their safe haven, yet this time he was powerless to pull them from the dust and shattered concrete.
Only his head was visible above the ruins. He looked into the eyes of the rescuers with a gaze exhausted by fear and helplessness and said:
"Leave me... my daughters are here... I do not want to come out alone."
What heart can endure such a scene? What language can possibly describe the pain of a father who realizes he is losing his daughters one by one, while holding their hands until they grow cold, unable to offer rescue, comfort, or even one final embrace?
How will your day continue after hearing this story? How will you sit peacefully at your table, or smile at something trivial, knowing that somewhere there is a father whose last wish was not to survive alone?
And the question that continues to haunt the conscience of humanity remains:
How much pain must the world witness before it hears the cry of a single father in Gaza?
#SaveHumanity
#ChildrenOfWar
#HumanConscience
#Gaza
I think this sums up the perfectly the direction of travel our country is heading 😭 or should I say we've already arrived . 😭 #authoritarianregime@BBCNews@SkyNews@itvnews@Channel4News any MSM reporting on the threats to our democracy? That would be a No then?
Israel is dropping toxic chemicals on farmland in South Lebanon
We’re talking about catastrophic levels of glyphosate, a chemical linked to cancer
11,000 times above safe levels
This is a deliberate war crime aimed at making life impossible and forcing people out of their land
‘Inadequate measures’: Green Party MP Ellie Chowns pressed Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper why she did nothing to prevent an Israeli property event from taking place in London – one that included selling developments on illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Rights groups such as Amnesty International and Palestine Solidarity Campaign had warned the government about the event in the weeks leading up to it.
Chowns asked how the government failed to even prevent marketing of the expo, let alone stopping it altogether.
Head over to https://t.co/M5fFLgtdTv for more
You can’t always pierce into the future 2026 – 29,7 x 21cm, pencil pastel on paper
Above, clarity. A white form, simple, legible against the dark, the visible part, the part that gets shown.
Below, everything else. The actual mechanics, tangled past reading, colour without order, lines that cross and recross until the eye gives up trying to follow any single one to its source. This is where the real determination happens, in the noise, in the interference, in what refuses to resolve into a system you could diagram or explain.
You can’t always see through it. Not because the future is hidden on purpose, but because some things are too entangled, too overlapping, too many competing currents running through the same narrow channel, for any one act of looking to pierce all the way down.
The flower doesn’t know what feeds it. Neither do we, most days. We just see the white shape against the dark and call that knowing.
Anyone with a moral compass, seeing a human being in this state of extreme malnourishedment & distress, would be overwhelmed with horror & compassion.
Those who justify, willfully ignore, deny, excuse the atrocity of ethnic cleansing will continue to dehumanise.
Truly sickening.
Palestinian prisoner Ayman al-Fakhouri has been released from Israeli prison today after 26 months behind bars without charge or trial, Quds News reported, sharing before-and-after images showing his severe physical deterioration in detention.
Israel’s widespread use of administrative detention allows Palestinians to be held indefinitely on secret evidence for renewable periods, without being told the accusations against them or facing trial. Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups, along with released detainees, have documented systematic torture, rape, starvation, beatings, and medical neglect across Israeli prisons since October 2023, conditions that have left many prisoners emaciated and that have killed scores in custody.
Al-Fakhouri’s gaunt appearance on release echoes that of other freed detainees, including journalist Ali al-Samoudi, who reportedly lost some 60 kilograms during his imprisonment.
'1.5 million people with learning disabilities were not being provided with their legal right to equitable access to health and care services.'
Strip public services, onerous University fees; two party state way to ease in more private support/healthcare by making it unworkable.
“The expertise of learning-disability nurses has been poorly understood, inconsistently recognised, and insufficiently protected within health and care systems. Their contribution is repeatedly undermined and ignored in wide workforce planning and service delivery.”
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"Where someone has committed criminal damage, that can be dealt with using ordinary criminal law -
Rather than using broad and poorly defined anti terrorism powers."