This weeks snapshot of interesting news stories, presented in a short catch-up style format in order to save time and to help bring our readers up to speed on the most talked about topics this week. All sources are included for those who like to dig a little deeper.
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1) Hancock didn’t just have an affair with an aid who, by the way, gets paid tax payer money, he also awarded NHS contracts to her brothers private health care company.
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2) Four activists who blockaded the London arms fair in 2017 have had their convictions quashed by the Supreme Court. Although initially cleared by a district judge in February 2018, the director of public prosecutions re-tried them at the High Court in January 2019, where they were convicted and given conditional discharges of 12 months. However they were then granted permission to appeal to the Supreme Court in December 2019 who subsequently delivered a majority judgment to dismiss the charges. Lord Hamblen and Lord Stephens said: “There should be a certain degree of tolerance to disruption to ordinary life, including disruption of traffic, caused by the exercise of the right to freedom of expression or freedom of peaceful assembly … Political views, unlike ‘vapid tittle-tattle’ are particularly worthy of protection”
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3) Patsy Stevenson, the 28yr old physics student, who was pinned down by two male Metropolitan police officers during a vigil in March, is threatening to take the Met to court after they sent her a fixed penalty notice. The vigil on Clapham Common was for Sarah Everard, the 33-year-old marketing executive who had been kidnapped and murdered by Wayne Couzens, a serving Metropolitan Police officer who worked with the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection unit.
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4) Drug companies bribing groups of MPs and peers through “hidden” funding to encourage them to campaign in their favour on health issues. They’ve targeted dozens of all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) at Westminster. In fact, the Guardian reports that fifty-eight APPGs received just under £2.2m in 468 direct and indirect funding payments from pharmaceutical firms between 2012 and 2018
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5) High court declines to strike out a case of family exploitation and child labour in Malawi against two big UK tobacco companies. Lawyers for the families argue that work conditions breach Malawian law but they also breach “the UK Modern Slavery Act, article 14 of the European convention on human rights, and the International Labour Organization definition of forced labour.” Families are trafficked to tobacco-growing regions in north Malawi, where they first have to build their own homes from branches and then they are forced to work, out in the fields, seven days a week and have to live on meagre portions of maize each day
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6) Chris Williamson’s RESIST Movement have been out in force in Batley & Spen campaigning for George Galloway. It’s pissed off the Labour Party so much that they’re expelling any Labour members who dare to even express their admiration – including the founder of the left wing news platform ‘Labour Heartlands’.
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7) Trumps lawyer Rudy Giuliani has had his license to practice law in New York suspended for making false statements in support of a conspiracy designed to delegitimise the 2020 presidential election.
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8) Krishnan Guru-Murthy interrogates the media minister John Whittingdale over why the government is even considering selling off Channel 4 – a perfectly viable TV channel with healthy profits, large audiences, award winning programming and a company that, uniquely, supports literally hundreds of small businesses, up and down the country, who provide content & services to the broadcaster – businesses that would otherwise go to the wall if it wasn’t for C4. Whittingdale struggles to offer an explanation that holds water and Krishnan does a brilliant job of exposing the weaknesses in his argument over how competitive C4 would be against streaming platforms in the future, despite the fact that C4 more than holds its ground at the moment. He also points out the govt has been trying to take down C4 for decades. It’s becoming pretty obvious that the real reason they’re going after C4 is because it’s one of the few platforms that offers any real political scrutiny of the government.
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9) New blood test detects 50 types of cancer before any visible signs appear. It can detect difficult to diagnose forms of head, neck, ovarian, pancreatic, oesophageal and blood cancers. NHS England is currently piloting the test on high risk groups, including the over-50s.
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10) US punished for it’s past decisions to deny and ignore climate change, as sea levels continue to rise around Florida Keys.
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11) Tories accepted over £419k in donations (bribes) from oil and gas companies between July 2020 to March 2021, at a time when the government were considering issuing new licenses to explore potential new fossil fuel sites in the North Sea. The total amount donated could be higher as the latest figures don’t include any payments after March. In March, to literally no ones surprise, the government announced they would be issuing a new round of licensing for oil and gas wells and a £16bn in joint investment project between the government and the private sector. That the UK should be the hosts for Cop26 this year is just the most ridiculous irony, as is the govt’s push to get UK citizens to buy and drive electric or hybrid cars, even to the extent that they’ve set up clean air exclusion zones in various cities and plan to fine anyone who hasn’t moved over to less polluting vehicles. Of course the obvious question is why are the govt issuing licenses for fossil fuel exploration if they don’t want UK citizens to buy and drive cars that run on fossil fuels?
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12) Post-Brexit disaster unfolding for British farmers as European pickers turned away, despite no alternative arrangements. Brits won’t take the jobs and there’s no harvesting equipment that can do the job at the moment. The situation is so bad it’s threatening the future of small British farms and the government has no solution.
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13) No wonder Germany wants Europe to quarantine Brits. You can’t argue with data like this..
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14) Brexit did not give us ‘freeports’. Channel 4 fact checker reports Boris Johnson’s been lying again!
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15) Racist Education Select Committee claims that white pupils on free school meals underachieve compared with pupils on free meals from other ethnic groups and argue that it’s wrong to use the term “white privilege” and, not surprisingly, the BBC does a piss poor job of challenging it. First of all White Privilege has sod all relevance to this report. White Privilege benefits white people over non-white people in society and that can be in various ways, including access to jobs or promotions, equal pay, better housing etc. This committee are literally attempting to suggest that equally underprivileged ethnic students have some sort of unfair advantage that allows them to perform better, which is utterly ridiculous. Perhaps, just perhaps, the reason why ethnic group students might be out performing their white counterparts is the same reason why women, given the opportunity, tend to out perform their male counterparts – women who work twice as hard because they know that’s what they have to do in order to get the same level of recognition, respect and access to opportunities as men and even when they do they usually get paid a lot less than men (might explain why the BBC didn’t want to open that door). The real test of white privilege is not how well someone performs in education, it’s how many doors open up for them as a result of that performance and, on that, all I have to say is, just take a look at how many ethnic groups are represented in senior positions, in board rooms or in the mainstream media and, while you’re at it, compare their salaries to that of their white colleagues.
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16) What’s worse than bombing defenseless Palestinians, including women and children? On 9th June, Israeli army forces raided the HQ of the Palestinian Union of Health Workers Committee (UHWC), without warning, confiscated computers and memory drives (essential to run its services) and ordered to close for six months. The UHWC runs all the hospitals and health clinics in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. According to Amnesty International, shutting down the UHWC will have catastrophic consequences for the health needs of Palestinians across the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Doing this during a global pandemic, while at the same time limiting the supply of the Covid vaccine to Palestinians under their occupation, it’s clear the Israeli govt are continuing with their murderous intent. Perhaps they imagine people wont notice, like they notice visible things like airstrikes and crumbling buildings and babies bodies buried under buildings or blown to pieces. Now they can just kill Palestinians en masse and blame it all on Covid.
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17) Outgoing head of Mossad admits to multiple accounts of recent Israeli state approved acts of terrorism in Iran, including stealing Iran’s nuclear archive in 2018, the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz in 2020 (a uranium enrichment site), and the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, later the same year. The timing of these revelations, which are understood to have been approved for release by the state, is interesting as talks are about to resume with the US over Iran’s return to the nuclear deal.
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18) Iran foils plot to sabotage the Karaj Nuclear Centre for Medicine and Agriculture, a civilian nuclear facility near Tehran. The Karaj Centre uses nuclear technology to improve “quality of soil, water, agricultural and livestock production”. It’s approximately 25 miles from Tehran (Iran’s capital) and close to a number of industrial sites, including the pharmaceutical manufacturer responsible for supplying Iran’s domestic coronavirus vaccine. Notably, Israel has recently been boasting about it’s prowess when it comes to sabotaging Iranian Nuclear facilities and killing Iran’s top Nuclear scientists. In fact, between 2007 & 2020, the Israeli’s murdered 6 Iranian nuclear scientists but efforts to damage Iran’s Nuclear capabilities have certainly been stepped since the world powers have been making progress in their discussions to resurrect Tehran’s 2015 Nuclear deal.
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19) Just as Unesco declares the Great Barrier Reef is ‘in danger’ because the Australian govt. are failing to reach targets set to reduce water contamination, we learn that BP is now planning to drill for gas on edge of the world’s largest cold-water coral reef (off the West Coast of Africa).
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20) No 10 under Boris Johnson is “just a branch of the entertainment industry”, says Dominic Cummings. Apparently, there’s no serious policy focus, Johnson is media obsessed and he’s totally unfit for the job of PM. Dominic further adds “When you watch the apex of power you feel like, ‘If this were broadcast, everyone would sell everything and head for the bunker in the hills. It’s impossible to describe how horrific decision-making is at the apex of power and how few people watching it have any clue how bad it is or any sense of how to do it better, it’s generally the blind leading the blind with a few non-blind desperately shoving fingers in dykes and clutching their heads”.
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21) “Uh oh, iceberg ahead!”…
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22) BLM unabashed in their support for Palestinian liberation. The Guardian reports that BLM is firmly allying with the movement to liberate Palestine and is very vocal about it’s supports for BDS. It explains that both movements represent a fight against the oppression of marginalized people and are united in their struggle against racism, apartheid and colonialism.
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23) 31% of Covid patients slapped with DNACPR (do not attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation) notices during the first wave, either before or on the day of their hospitalisation. Sounds like an institutional problem, perhaps guided by some secret govt policy or, more likely, as a result of the system being so overwhelmed at the time?
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24) Major brands pulled advertising from GB News within first 48hrs of launch over politically biased content and hate speech.
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25) “There are some people in the government who feel like the right way to win [elections] is to pick a fight on the culture war and to exploit division… I worry about that. It seems like people have very short memories, and they’ve already forgotten Jo Cox.” says Samuel Kasumu, ex-Tory race advisor who resigned 2 months ago following the furore over the Tory racial disparity report.
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26) Murdoch appears to have written off the Sun newspaper after it suffered £200m losses from a drop in sales and advertising revenue, resulting from Covid-19, and various legal charges related to their part in the phone hacking scandal. Not quite sure what this means for it’s future?
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27) Hancock’s bullshitting again, says Welsh First Minister, Mark Drakeford. Talking on Newsnight, Drakeford called Hancock out over his claim that the Welsh govt was doing so brilliantly with its vaccine roll-out because it had access to an “English buffer” and explained that there is no such thing as an extra supply of vaccines from the UK government.
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28) BBC attacks Lawyer who won a case against the Government, after he showed that they had broken the law when they handed a contract to a firm whose bosses were friends of Dominic Cummings. Jo Maugham tweeted that he’s had a “Curious interview with BBC World At One. A judge has just found Govt’s conduct unlawful and characterised by the appearance of favouritism to friends: a striking thing. But the interviewer gave me little space to explain the implications and argued Govt’s case against me… It’s progress of a sort, I suppose. They never even had me on when I was winning all the Brexit cases. But I continue to think the BBC reveals itself in these interviews: as a defender of power rather than as interested in the accountability of power… But it’s, y’know, not really journalism. It’s the buttressing of, not the scrutiny of, power.”
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29) Palestinian activists beaten and tortured inside Israeli police stations.
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30) Palestinian journalist haunted by children crying for their mothers being held in Israeli prisons.
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31) Horrific attack on female Al Jazeera journalist, Givara Budeiri, by Israeli soldiers. According to Givara, she was deliberately targeted and told that she was being taught a lesson so other journalists would now think twice about reporting on IDF human rights abuses.
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