Sophie Cooke

Poet, Novelist, Short Story Writer, Lecturer, Tutor.

[Haaretz.com @haaretzcom]

Qusai Tariq Abu Tebah, a 24-year-old student from Khan Yunis, documented his family's survival through 12 displacements, the loss of two siblings and the destruction of his home. He tells Haaretz: 'I wanted the book to be the witness that does not die' | Nagham Zbeedat

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Editing: Tal Elkayam

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of Palantir, called Pope Leo “a Chinese communist agent” for writing that AI must be used to “truly benefit the common good, and is not just used to accumulate wealth and power in the hands of a few.”

Who do you trust? Pope Leo or Mr. Thiel?

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

I heard this story once about a teacher who took a fish out of its bowl and left a classroom of children as it flopped around.. telling them that if anyone left their seat, they would be expelled. All of the children sat and watched as this fish flopped gasping for air, not wanting to get up in order to avoid getting in trouble. Finally, a girl sprang up from her seat and ran to the fish, placing it back in the bowl. Ultimately, she was the only one who refused to watch the fish die.

When the teacher returned he told the class that this was a lesson. That the fear of getting in trouble should never stop you from doing what's right. That sometimes.. you may have to oppose authority and group think, simply because it's the right thing to do.

I think of this often about Palestine and Lebanon.

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

A common sentiment at the funeral for Khamenei was incandescent rage at the American leadership that authorized his assassination, but a refusal to hold average Americans collectively responsible for the crime

[Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) @PHRIsrael]

Yesterday, we took part in a demonstration calling for the release of the 14 doctors from Gaza who are being held by Israel without charge and under inhumane conditions.

At the demonstration, PHRI volunteers and staff members called for the immediate transfer of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya from the Rakefet detention facility and for an urgent visit by an independent body to assess his condition firsthand—before it is too late.

We cannot allow this issue to fade from public attention. We all have a responsibility to keep speaking out, sharing the information, and reaching those with the power to change the situation.

Photo credit: Fang Gleizes for PHRI

[Haaretz.com @haaretzcom]

Hundreds rally in Tel Aviv calling for release of Gaza doctor Abu Safiya held without trial https://t.co/84wPCRh3yI

[Breaking the Silence @BtSIsrael]

"The settlers are above the law and above the decisions of the High Court of Justice. Today, there is no difference between the army and the settlers. Everyone is committing crimes against Palestinians and carrying out ethnic cleansing in the West Bank."

https://t.co/IdLS26lc0z

[Sophie Cooke @CookeWrite]

Obviously it was wrong to offer vaccines with no long-term safety data to anyone who didn't (a) stand to benefit ie were at high risk of complications from Covid, and (b) understood the risk of taking a product with no long-term safety data. Children were at zero risk of complications from Covid, and should not have been offered the mRNA vaccine. It's arguable that absolutely no-one was made aware of the risks of taking the vaccine, given the government and public health bodies consistently described it as 'safe'.

[Mike Fairclough @1MikeFairclough]

"The Covid Inquiry has been accused of suppressing evidence that called into question the ethics of the vaccine rollout (to children) during the pandemic....

Doctors and medical professionals had told the inquiry that there was 'never any justification for authorising or recommending the use in healthy children of novel technology gene-based vaccines with no long-term safety data'.

However, these statements were not included in the Module 4 report into vaccines....

Doctor Ros Jones....wrote in her witness statement...
'To give such vaccines to children for the possible protection of vulnerable adults is a clear breach of our ethical duty'.....

The Covid Inquiry published its Module 4 report into vaccines and therapeutics earlier this year.....the report noted that some people who experienced vaccine-related injuries and attempted to share their experiences online had their 'concerns labelled as misinformation'....." The Telegraph

https://t.co/ehT9BoqVR2

[Dr Clare Craig @ClareCraigPath]

Lots of comments from people thinking dosage in the food supply is negligible.

It is not.

It is absolutely in the biologically active range and can tip over into doses above safe levels.

There is a legal minimum but no legal maximum.
No one will know what dose they have had.

[LustraSkye @LustraSkye]

‼️The @Guardian’s Lanarkshire AI datacentre investigation out today confirms what FOI research has been showing for months: residents told one story, planning documents show another.

‼️This isn’t isolated to Lanarkshire.

‼️Guardian: DataVita/CoreWeave’s own submitted plans admit they intend to use “adjacent land” for renewable energy parks to power the site while telling residents the datacentre “itself is not much.”

Sound familiar? Auchtertool (Fife, 26/01243/PPP) shows the same pattern.

APRScot’s own FOI work is quoted directly in the piece: the government’s 3,400-jobs figure for Lanarkshire was extrapolated from industry estimates for a different site (Cambois, Northumberland) and scaled up.

This matches the renewables math failing everywhere we’ve looked. Guardian’s figure: DataVita needs ~44 sq km for its claimed 1GW, holds under a tenth of that today.

Auchtertool’s own filing shows a similar gap between claimed capacity and secured land/grid.

‼️And still no finalised Scottish energy strategy since 2017.

‼️The Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan was “ready to come to Cabinet” in May 2024 (JP Marks letter, 28 May 2024) deferred for purdah, never published since.

‼️Several years on, no criteria, no coordination, no plan.

‼️FM Swinney told FMQs he’s “giving active consideration” to national planning guidance on data centres.

‼️Active consideration is not a moratorium.

Auchtertool’s objection deadline passed 2 July.

‼️Decisions are being made site-by-site, without the strategy that should govern them.

‼️North Lanarkshire, Fife, wherever next: same script.

‼️Door-knocking with unenforceable “sweeteners.”

‼️Jobs numbers that don’t survive an FOI request.

‼️Renewables claims disconnected from actual land or grid capacity.

‼️This is a pattern, not a series of unfortunate local disputes.

‼️Scotland doesn’t need to choose between AI investment and honest planning.

‼️It needs a moratorium until NPF4’s undefined “green” criteria are fixed, and a published national energy strategy that isn’t seven years overdue.

@ScotGov @Ross_Greer @markruskell
When?

[Dr Clare Craig @ClareCraigPath]

For anyone not on these medicines...

you might need them in future.

What then?

Mass medication of our food crossed a line and we must stop it.

[Damian Shields @DamianShields1]

Stac Pollaidh from Feur-Loch, Assynt #Scotland #Assynt #Highlands https://t.co/ERVTYHnQjn

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🚨 UPDATE | Israel’s Supreme Court has ordered the state to respond by Tuesday, July 7, to a petition seeking the release of 14 Palestinian doctors from Gaza held without charge, and to specifically address the condition of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, following new allegations that he faces an immediate risk to his life.

The petition was filed by Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) on April 30, but the state has repeatedly received court-approved extensions to respond. After the state sought another delay, PHRI objected, citing new information from Dr. Abu Safiya’s lawyer, Nasser Odeh, who said his client had been subjected to repeated severe beatings, suffered visible injuries, and had deteriorated to the point that he was difficult to recognize.

PHRI has also asked a Supreme Court justice to urgently visit Dr. Abu Safiya in prison and said it will seek an independent cardiologist’s examination and additional lawyer visits amid growing concerns over his health.

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“Since I started filming in the 1950s, on average, wild animal populations have more than halved. I look at these images now and I realise that, although as a young man I felt I was out there in the wild experiencing the untouched natural world, it was an illusion. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying.”

— Sir David Attenborough

[Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil @ivan_8848]

"We remember Volyn and the Ukrainian victims."

A march in memory of the victims of the Volyn massacre is taking place in Warsaw. Other protests against Kyiv's glorification of Nazi criminals are planned for the coming days in various regions of Poland.

[WRN Scotland @WRNScotland]

She has arrived!
The Lost Women banner by @SelkieStitching in her final resting place for this trip!
@WomensRightsNet
#WRNconf26

[Paul Holden @pauleholden]

This a deeply disappointing, borderline irresponsible interview of Morgan McSweeney from @bbcnickrobinson. It looks like impunity in action. Has the media not learnt any lessons from Mandelson and of the need to properly scrutinise political actors?

It is the BBC's job to hold political actors to account, to pose them real questions, and to get them to put a proper version of events on the record.

That is all the more important for a figure like McSweeney, who has wielded extraordinary power and has led or participated in attacks on legitimate, factual journalism, but who has never spoken about his role in these scandals on the record.

The interview doesn't touch, once, on the rock-solid evidence of McSweeney's serious unlawful misconduct or the Labour Together/APCO scandal. This stuff is widely available and easy to verify.

Here is a reminder of what we know about McSweeney, about which he wasn't asked a single thing:

1. McSweeney was Company Secretary of Labour Together from July 2017 to April 2020. During this period he failed to report over £700,000 in donations to the Electoral Commission. This was plainly unlawful. LT was found guilty and fined for this offence, but said in public it was an 'administrative oversight.'

2. McSweeney failed to report donations after he had unsuccessfully attempted to convince the Electoral Commission he didn't need to report them in late 2017.

3. McSweeney failed to report donations after the Electoral Commission told him, explicitly, that Labour Together had a legal duty to report donations.

4. McSweeney engaged in a two-month correspondence with the Electoral Commission in early 2018, in which it was clear he knew he had to report donations. Yet he failed to do so for over two years thereafter.

5. McSweeney failed to report donations even though he was telling MPs he was reporting donations, and even though Labour Together's website also stated that it was declaring donations to the Electoral Commission.

6. McSweeney failed to report donations even after Shabana Mahmood, on Labour Together's behalf, wrote an article for LabourList in February 2020 stating that Labour Together was reporting its donations. At the very time Mahmood wrote the donations, LT was taking in donations it was failing to declare.

7. McSweeney used this undeclared money, to fight an undeclared, covert war on the Labour Party leadership between 2017 and 2020. He also used it to pay for polling which was then fed into Starmer's leadership bid. Materials produced by McSweeney during his time at LT was fed, word-for-word, into Starmer's campaigning material. According to Rachel Wearmouth, McSweeney spent 'every spare moment' during the last six weeks of 2019 to prepare Starmer's leadership bid, during which time McSweeney was drawing a salary from LT.

8. When Labour Together was put under investigation by the Electoral Commission for McSweeney's failure to report donations, McSweeney was consulted by LT's lawyer Gerald Shamash. The email recording this consultation and its contents were published by the Tory Chairman Kevin Hollinrake and have been available in public for a year. The email raises serious questions about whether LT was candid in its responses to the Electoral Commission and, in particular, McSweeney's correspondence with the Commission in 2017/2018 that shows he was aware of the need to report donations. Early correspondence between LT and the Electoral Commission shows that, despite being asked to provide all information of relevance to the Commission's inquiries, LT failed to even mention McSweeney's name, let alone the phone call.

9. In early 2019 McSweeney launched an astroturf campaign called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) , with his friend and factional ally Imran Ahmed. It was supported by @SteveReedMP and operated out of the same office as Labour Together. SFFN purposefully set out to 'eviscerate' the economic viability of @TheCanaryUK and to destroy the livelihoods of its journalists, many of whom were long-time members of the National Union of Journalists.

At no stage in its first year operation did SFFN declare its controlling minds. Instead it presented itself as a 'grassroots' campaign of well-meaning activists.

McSweeney and Ahmed tried to take out proper journalism because they saw it as a threat to their political objectives. "Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us," is what McSweeney told Labour Together insiders according to Anushka Asthana.

SFFN made promiscuous allegations of antisemitism against The Canary - the antisemitism that McSweeney claims is what drove his factional war on the left - which were found to have no substance when reviewed by a panel of media lawyers and practitioners at media regulator Impress. SFFN repeatedly inferred that The Canary was antisemitic because it run articles quoting left-wing and anti-Zionist Jews disturbed by aspects of the "antisemitism crisis."

10. SFFN also targeted well-known US media sites, which led to McSweeney being directly called out by the US State Department. His colleague, Imran Ahmed, is now sanctioned by the US because the US accuses the company he and McSweeney set up, CCDH, of being part of a global censorship complex.

11. When I started reporting on McSweeney's undeclared money and his secret campaigns, including by taking damning primary documents to the Sunday Times, Labour Together appointed APCO Worldwide to produce a 'package' that would 'proactively undermine' my factually accurate, public interest reporting.

To be clear: APCO were hired to 'proactively undermine' my reporting on McSweeney and his role in Starmer's rise. The intention, as shown in internal docs, was to protect both Starmer and McSweeney's reputations ahead of an imminent general election, while I was trying to warn people about the true nature of this project and it's unlawful origins.

12. APCO produced an insane, ludicrous, highly defamatory report that accused me, my family and my colleagues of being part of a pro-Kremlin network of journalists and speculating that I received hacked documents from Russia. APCO also investigated @Gabriel_Pogrund, with whom I'd collaborated with on the Sunday Times story, making a series of offensive comments about him and his ethnicity. APCO identified a range of other journalists in the UK and US as "persons of interest" to be investigated.

This highly invasive, despicable investigation targeted my work colleagues and my family, including by finding my home address and mapping my personal relationships. Labour Together and its Managing Director, Josh Simons, reported me to the National Cyber Security Centre on the basis of this mad, insane report.

13. Less than a month ago, it was revealed that McSweeney and his buddy Paul Ovenden (later Chief of Strategy at Number 10, who would resign following revelations from my book) were copied into emails about the investigation. McSweeney plainly knew about APCO's investigation. Simons, in one mail, wrote to set up a meeting with McSweeney, Ovenden and APCO's Tom Harper in 'HQ' to discuss the 'Paul Holden report.'

Three days after this meeting I was reported to the NCSC, along with my colleagues and family members. Emails show Simons was coached in how to make a 'crime report' about me to the NCSC.

14. The APCO/Labour Together scandal was so ugly and so damning that Labour Together has been forced to change its name. It also led to the resignation of Josh Simons as a Junior Minister. The Speaker of the House has supported calls for a Parliamentary inquiry into Labour Together.

15. Josh Simons thereafter stepped aside as the MP for Makerfield in order to make way for Andy Burnham, the incoming PM who has displaced McSweeney's man, Starmer. There is a straight and clear line between attempts to protect McSweeney from scrutiny in 2024 and Starmer's resignation in 2026.

So, to make this clear: there was a massive scandal because plans were put in motion to stop questions being asked about McSweeney's unlawful failure to declare money... and now the public broadcaster is failing to ask McSweeney questions about the money. Has the media learnt nothing from the Mandelson scandal about what happens when you don't properly scrutinise political actors?

And here's some things McSweeney and Robinson did talk about, but which doesn't bear scrutiny:

1. Starmer didn't just take some suits and glasses as 'freebies' during the election campaign. He took over £100k in freebies between 2021 and 2024, more than every Labour leader since Tony Blair combined. In addition to free clothes, Starmer took football tickets, tickets to watch the horse racing, and free holiday accommodation for his family from a billionaire. One of his football freebies was donated by a company that had only just been forced to pay a £11m settlement because the installed faulty and potentially flammable cladding on tower blocks in Gosport. Taking these donations means that Starmer had conflicted himself on key areas of policy even before he was elected.

2. Both McSweeney and Robinson quickly collude in claiming that Sir Keir Starmer didn't say that Israel 'has that right' to shut off water, fuel, food and electricity to Gaza. But we've all seen the video, where what Starmer has said is utterly plain. Multiple Ministers went on air to defend the statement thereafter. Does the BBC really think that huge numbers of Muslim councillors immediately left the Party by mistake, because they can't understand plain English?

3. McSweeney has said that Labour Together was 'neutral' during the 2020 leadership election. But Labour Together, and its key associates, have said repeatedly since 2022/2023 that LT backed Starmer's leadership bid. You can find these comments on the Wayback Machine in about two minutes.

4. McSweeney says he never intended to rid the Party of Corbynism. There are now multiple accounts, including from the country's leading political editors and journalists, about how McSweeney crafted and distributed strategy documents, including a plan called 'Operation Red Shield' and a 2017 SWOT analysis, that set out plans to undermine Corbyn's leadership and install a new leader who would 'renew' the Party.

5. This is not the first time that McSweeney has spoken to the media. Instead, it is the first time he has let his comments be attributed to him in public. Multiple journalists have spoken about how he was the source of stories damaging to his opponents. While he was Chief of Staff at Number 10, he was meeting with the editors of the major UK newspapers more regularly than Number 10's own head of comms. We know this because transparency regulations means that these meetings are recorded and can easily found on the gov website. This man has shaped our media discourse, and our political epistemology, in profound and disturbing ways. It is utterly disingenuous to claim that this is the first time he's spoken to the media.

[MK Aida Touma-Sliman @AidaTuma]

“This is the last time you will see me. They brought me here to kill me. I don’t see myself leaving here alive.”~ These are the last reported words of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya.

If these words do not compel the international community to act, what will?

Every government that claims to stand for human rights, every international institution, and every medical body has a duty to intervene before another crime is committed under the cover of silence.

Don’t let Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya become another number in the horrifying statistics of lives lost to impunity.

[Robin Morrison @robinmmorrison]

Very lucky yesterday evening when I came across a small clover field that had eight Hares in it. Normally, I only see one or two in this area but I think that most were young ones, as they were not too bothered by me, so it looks like the Hares are having a great year.

[Sophie Cooke @CookeWrite]

@afneil Maybe it was a planned bribe. In that case who knows why it was not given to its intended recipient.