Politics
EU pulls procedural dodge to extend snooping on private messages
The European Union has pulled a procedural trick to ram through “Chat Control 1.0” (CC1). CC1 suspends normal EU privacy laws so that tech platforms can ‘mass-scan’ users’ private messages for government.
European Parliament members had already rejected the proposal twice because of the dangers it poses to privacy. The proposal is what MEPs term a “legislative zombie” – defeated repeatedly but resurrected over and over until it gets through.
So the EU tabled it again, but this time as an “urgent procedure”. Instead of the usual absolute majority (50% plus one of MEPs voting) required to pass or defeat it, this meant that blocking it required an absolute majority of all MEPs, whether or not they were present to vote.
Democracy bypassed
The proposal was again strongly rejected, by 314 votes to 276. However, many MEPs had already gone on holiday for the summer recess, or were otherwise unable to attend. This meant the opposition lacked the total required to defeat the proposal: 360 votes.
As a result, the ‘defeat’ didn’t count. The ‘majority of the total’ only applied in one direction – a vote to reject CC1. It wasn’t required in order for the measure to pass.
Fake ‘safeguard’
In order to con some MEPs into supporting the proposal or abstaining, the legislation was amended to exclude messages sent under supposed ‘end to end encryption’.
However, the EU council – dominated by government ministries to whom privacy is an unwanted inconvenience – is expected to remove the amendment before the legislation is enacted in its final form after the summer recess.
Assault on free expression
CC1 forms part of a wholesale assault by the EU – and the UK government – on freedom of speech, freedom of protest, and journalism they don’t like.
The EU has just passed a law making it a criminal offence to share any content – even entirely factual content – from Russian broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today), for example. But more than anything, CC1 is part of an assault on speech and protest defending the human rights of Palestinians and opposing Israel’s crimes.
The UK government has extended its anti-democratic war on protest by expanding the Terrorism Act to apply to any organisation the government decides to ‘designate’. The ‘designation’ makes it a criminal offence even to use information from a designated group, punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
Again, truth is no defence – and journalists have no exemption. Instead, they can try to defend themselves – in court – against charges under the legislation by claiming they had a “reasonable excuse” for journalistic purposes. They will still have to bear the cost and expense of legal defence against prosecution.
Cui bono
All of these anti-democratic, anti-freedom measures are intended to have two main beneficiaries: Israel, first and foremost; and Ukraine, or at least the Ukraine war.
By invading private discussions, governments can more easily disrupt and criminalise attempts to organise protests, information campaigns and direct action. These efforts aim to raise public awareness of Israel’s crimes and the realities of Nazi-riddled Ukraine. State-corporate media will either ignore these, or actively cover them up, so independent journalism has to be silenced.
By combining an assault on private speech with a war on public speech and journalism, those in power hope to protect criminal states and their ‘wars’ – and the elites that benefit from, or act for, them.
The UK is no longer a functional democracy, if it ever was. The EU is clearly doing its best to rush down the same path.
Featured image via the Canary
By Skwawkbox
Research has already shown that exercise can help us to live longer – and we’ve written before about the 14 hallmarks of ageing that regular exercise helps to slow down.
Now, a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has identified the biological “rewind button” that helps physical activity reverse or prevent age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia).
In this study, researchers found that exercise seems to restore a key balance in muscle cells that gets disrupted as we age.
Why does exercise help to reverse muscle ageing?
Healthy muscles rely on a growth pathway called mTORC1, which is in charge of protein production and tissue maintenance.
But when we age, this pathway becomes overactive, offering too many muscle-building new proteins without clearing away the old, damaged ones. We’ve known for a while that this buildup of damaged proteins leads to greater muscle weakness, but we weren’t sure why it happened.
This study showed that a gene called DEAF1 may be responsible.
When they artificially raised the levels of DEAF1 in mice and fruit flies, they found that the mTORC1 imbalance linked to greater muscle ageing kicked in.
Usually, DEAF1 is kept in check by regulatory proteins called FOXOs. These seem to decline over time, though exercise looks like it could rewind that process.
The study’s lead author, assistant professor Tang Hong-Wen, from the Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Programme at Duke-NUS, said: “Physical activity activates certain proteins which lower DEAF1 levels, bringing the growth pathway back into balance.
“This allows ageing muscles to clear out damaged proteins, rebuild themselves properly, and help them stay stronger and more resilient.”
There’s a caveat, however.
In some older muscles, DEAF1 levels are so high, and/or FOXO production is so impaired, that exercise alone can’t reverse the damage linked to ageing.
The study authors think that adjusting DEAF1 levels in people with ageing muscles may help to mimic the effects of exercise, even among those with limited physical activity.
The change might act as a “rewind button”
The study’s first author, Priscillia Choy Sze Mun, said: “Exercise tells muscles to ‘clean up and reset.’
“Lowering DEAF1 helps older muscles regain strength and balance, almost like hitting the rewind button. With millions of older adults at risk of muscle decline, understanding DEAF1 could lead to new ways to protect muscles and improve quality of life.”
And Professor Patrick Tan, Senior Vice-Dean for Research at Duke-NUS (whose researchers were involved in the study) said: “This study helps explain, at a molecular level, why ageing muscles lose their ability to repair themselves and why exercise can restore that balance in some individuals.
“By identifying DEAF1 as a key regulator in this process, these findings may lead to new ways in which the benefits of exercise can be brought to societies with rapidly ageing populations.”
Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
Say what you like about the wealth tax advocate Gary Stevenson — and just about everyone has lately — but, at least, he’s been willing to face his adversaries.
He interviewed some of them in his Channel 4 documentary, How to Get Filthy Rich with Gary Stevenson. I wish certain other high profile “activists” were as upfront and open to scrutiny.
Nevertheless, it can’t be denied that Stevenson has come off worse from the experience. Naturally, his central argument — for a 2 per cent annual tax on assets totalling over £10 million — attracted criticism from the right. But more damaging was the reception from the left. Lucy Mangan of The Guardian gave Stevenson’s documentary a two-star review. It’s presenter was “left floundering” by the critics he interviewed, she said. Another critic, the tax expert and longtime Labour Party member, Dan Neidle, was also unimpressed. Here he is, in his interview with Stevenson, painfully exposing the basic flaws in his big idea.
Of course, one needn’t possess Neidle’s forensic knowledge of the tax system to understand why the proposal — or anything close to it — wouldn’t work.
In a global economy, capital doesn’t sit still. It moves to where it attracts the highest returns and/or is subject to the lowest taxes. No one with a good accountant is going to keep an asset in a country where the government simply confiscates 2 per cent of its value each and every year. At least, not unless the asset appreciates in value by a sufficient margin over the annual tax rate — which is likely to bias the deployment of capital towards short-term speculation instead of the long-term investment that our economy desperately needs.
The practical problems with the Stevenson tax don’t end there. But rather than shoot fish in a barrel, I’d like to tackle a more difficult — and fascinating — aspect of this debate. It’s articulated by the Blue Labour MP, Jonathan Hinder:
“The Right’s response to a wealth tax is always “but it won’t work!” What I find interesting is that there is rarely an attempt to argue against it on moral grounds…”
As it happens, James Cleverly responded to Hinder’s tweet, making the point that that “it won’t work” is a moral argument. One needn’t agree with Tony Blair’s claim that “what’s right is what works” to see that “what doesn’t work, isn’t right” — not when other people’s time and effort is at stake. But let’s steel man Hinder’s argument by assuming that a new wealth tax would work — by which I mean raise a significant amount of revenue for the public purse without killing the golden goose.
In such a scenario, is there still a moral problem with taxing wealth? Or to make the question even harder — isn’t it obviously better than, say, taxing earned income? Framed that way, wealth taxation doesn’t just find support on the left, but from many centrists too — and even a few right-wingers (I could name names, but won’t).
Before going on, let me clarify that I’m not just talking about wealth-taxing the super-rich. Stevenson’s proposal applies to asset totals exceeding £10 million, but you can bet that any serious shift towards wealth taxation would start hitting much lower thresholds. Andy Burnham’s people are already floating the idea of reducing the Mansion Tax threshold from £2 million to £1.5 million. We can see where this is heading. For his part, Jonathan Hinder wants a “a proportional property tax” — and I’ve little doubt that proportionality would mean punishing cash-poor pensioners for the crime of living in a nice-ish house in the South East.
It’s a fundamental principle of progressive taxation that the amount asked for should be related to the ability to pay. That’s why modern tax systems focus on income (and its close proxy, consumption) not wealth. Indeed, from a conservative point of view, the best argument against libertarian claims that tax-is-theft is that tax is a commission on everything that a well-governed country does to enable its inhabitants to earn money. By contrast, demanding money from someone merely on the basis that they own something (which they’ve paid for out of already-taxed income) isn’t a commission, it is confiscation.
Of course, there’s the counter-argument that such taxpayers are nevertheless able to pay because assets can be sold to settle the bill. That may mean forcing people out of their homes, but to a certain kind of “rational” liberal, this is offset by the more efficient allocation of housing stock that supposedly results. On the other hand, to a conservative, it is a violation of the home and of family life — and, therefore, objectively evil.
Ah, but what about the aBaird increase in the value of these sacred suburban semis over the last fifty years? Why are the pensioners I want to protect from expropriation morally entitled to that?
Let me reply in three ways:
Firstly, property inflation in this country is indeed ridiculous, yet from the point of view of a long-term home owner it is still the same house. It’s paper value is, in most circumstances, notional and the lived experience of “wealth” unchanged. Secondly, many forms of wealth tax — like the Mansion Tax — take no account of the capital gain or loss: someone who bought a taxable property yesterday pays the same as someone who was lucky enough to buy an identical residence decades ago. And, thirdly, far from fixing the housing crisis, which is a crisis of affordability, a shift to taxing wealth would give politicians a perverse incentive to keep it going.
While we’re on the subject of perverse incentives, let’s look at another moral hazard that comes with wealth taxation:
By now, we’re all too familiar with the concept of public borrowing as a tax on future generations. It allows politicians today to buy votes with money that our children and grandchildren will have to pay back. No doubt you see the problem with that. Well, I’d argue that wealth taxation is its mirror image i.e. it is a tax on the past. I’ll explain:
“Wealth“, for most people, is literally what the taxman has previously allowed us to keep from our earnings minus what we had to (or chose to) consume. It therefore represents the willingness and ability of past governments to a) restrain their spending b) hold down the cost of living and c) encourage the citizenry to build-up capital. These, surely, are things that our leaders should be encouraged to strive for. In this regard, the trouble with wealth taxation is that it allows incumbent governments to leech off the responsibility of their predecessors. It’s the equivalent of raiding a sovereign wealth fund to bankroll profligate spending — only, in this case, the fund is owned individually by the people, not the state.
It’s another reason why a tax base consisting of current income and consumption is greatly to be preferred: because it directly incentivises serving governments to foster ongoing growth and prosperity instead of strip-mining past achievements. To put it another way, ministers should be farmers, not scavengers.
OK, that’s my argument against wealth taxation in general. But what about the billionaire problem? Is it fair that they should be able to get away with effective tax rates below those paid by the rest of us?
Absolutely not, but the solution isn’t crude wealth taxation — not least because the mega-wealthy are those best-placed to take their money elsewhere. Better then to recognise this reality and develop the capacity of government to do deals on a case-by-case basis
In this respect, HMG isn’t entirely without cards to play. Holders of great wealth, whether individuals or corporate entities, have a problem: their money doesn’t exist in the abstract, it has to go somewhere. In that respect, the UK is an attractive destination — not least because we’ve yet to indulge (much) in the self-cannibalisation that is taxing wealth.
Instead, we need to be bolder in the way we influence where global capital flows to in this country and the impact it has while it’s here. For instance, there’s a world of difference between investing in the UK-based industries of the future and outbidding first-time buyers for new housing stock. One creates the good jobs that Britain needs, the other a new class of serfs (not to mention, a generation of voters for the left).
These are qualitative — and, I would say, moral — distinctions that a wealth tax cannot capture.
If your family’s sleep routine has gone straight out of the window these past few weeks, welcome to the (very tired) club.
In fact, a new survey by vitamin brand CapyChews found almost half of parents (48%) said their child’s sleep worsens during hot weather, a figure which rises to a mammoth 71% when it comes to parents of four-year-olds.
I can attest: sleep has been especially hard to come by in my household of late – the week where we also experienced high humidity and red health alerts was particularly tricky, with the little ’uns not falling asleep until almost 10pm most nights. (As you can imagine, the following mornings were super fun!)
Why is it so hard to sleep in hot weather?
The ideal room temperature for the human body to sleep is around 18-20°C, according to the Sleep Foundation.
But the recent bout of hot weather has taken bedrooms way past that – and if our bodies can’t cool down, it’s a lot harder to drift off and stay asleep.
You might’ve been aiming to get the kids in bed earlier than normal owing to just how exhausting these heatwaves can be, but baby and child sleep consultant, Andrea Grace, suggested this is a common bedtime mistake parents make.
“While early bedtimes are usually recommended, a bedtime that comes before a child is genuinely ready for sleep can make falling asleep harder – and your child’s bed can become associated with wakefulness,” she explained.
“In these cases, a later bedtime for a few nights can help. Once your child is falling asleep easily, bedtime can be gradually moved earlier until you find their ideal sleep time.”
Rosey Davidson, a sleep consultant and founder of Just Chill Mama, agreed that bringing bedtime earlier won’t necessarily have the intended outcome – even if your kids seem more tired during the day.
“If bedtime is consistently before a child is actually ready for sleep, it can lead to longer periods of lying awake, frustration, and bedtime becoming more of a battle,” she said.
Noting that the heat makes it harder to fall asleep, she added that it “won’t cause any harm” if kids have later nights when it’s really hot.
Other bedtime mistakes to avoid when it’s hot outside
1. Prioritising blackout over airflow
Davidson suggested that during a heatwave, “keeping the room as cool as possible is more important than making it completely dark”.
“If opening the curtains or blinds slightly overnight allows cooler air to circulate, I’d prioritise that,” she said.
“If your child tends to wake early with the light, you can always close the blackout blinds again when you wake early in the morning (for example, around 4-5am) if that helps them settle back to sleep.”
2. Overdressing children for sleep
You might worry your child will get cold overnight, but Davidson warns that overheating is far more likely in a heatwave.
“Keep clothing and bedding light, and follow safe sleep guidance for babies,” she added.
3. Changing the entire routine
If sleep’s gone AWOL, it can be tempting to overhaul the evening routine completely but Davidson warns this could backfire as “children generally cope better with familiar, predictable bedtimes”.
“Keep the routine as consistent as you can, even if sleep takes a little longer than usual,” she said.
“Also do not panic that sleep has hit the rocks! You can work on improving it when the temperature is cooler.”
4. Expecting sleep to look ‘normal’
The sleep expert added that a few disrupted nights during very hot weather are “completely normal and don’t usually mean you’ve created a long-term sleep problem”.
She urges parents to let kids sleep in the coolest room in the house during the hotter temperatures – even if it’s just for a few nights.
“If your baby’s nursery or your child’s bedroom is unbearably hot, there’s nothing wrong with having a family sleepover in a cooler room,” she said.
“For babies, a travel cot is a great option if that room is cooler and you’re following safe sleep guidance.”
Ultimately she wants parents to not panic: “Sleep often settles again once the weather cools. A few difficult nights won’t undo good sleep habits, so focus on keeping your child as cool and comfortable as possible rather than aiming for perfect sleep.”
President Donald Trump made a string of searing remarks about former President Barack Obama Monday on “Fox & Friends” while arguing that his presidential predecessors all “got tapped along” by Iran.
“If you look for 47 years, they’ve been tapping people along — every president got tapped along, didn’t do anything,” Trump said via phone. “And they became more and more powerful. This should have been done 47 years ago, shouldn’t have been allowed to start. But [former President Bill] Clinton let them go, and [former President George W.] Bush let them go.”
Trump then launched into an attack against Obama.
Calling Obama “the worst of all,” Trump accused him of having gone to Iran’s “side” with his nuclear deal in 2015.
“You know he’s a… well… let’s not say,” the president said, appearing to hold back a defamatory blow. “Let’s not say, let’s leave that for another time. He was terrible.”
Trump’s illusory restraint was short-lived as he quickly went on to criticise Obama further.
“He gave them $1.7 billion in cash, in green cash, put in satchels in an airplane and brought it to Iran,” he continued. “$1.7 billion. Do you know what that is? Did you ever see a million dollars in cash? This is $1.7 billion. It took up an entire Boeing 757, and they flew it to Tehran and they gave it to people that were waiting at a plane. Can you imagine these people? They never saw money, and now all of a sudden they’ve got $1.7 billion in cash. And he gave them hundreds of billions of dollars in cash and everything else, and he went to their side.”
Trump alleged that the Iranians “became much more powerful because of Obama.”
The president also blamed former President Joe Biden, who was Obama’s vice president during the Iran deal, adding that “he probably had nothing to say because he was such a stupid person.”
Trump has repeatedly, publicly insisted that his interim memorandum of understanding with Iran is superior to Obama’s agreement.
Iran received $1.7 billion in cash from the Obama administration, partly as leverage for the release of American prisoners, according to CNN, and also as reimbursement for military equipment Iran purchased from the U.S. in the late 1970s and apparently never received.
The Trump administration’s preliminary agreement with Tehran reportedly includes a $300 billion reconstruction fund, which vastly outweighs the $1.7 billion cash payment of 2015.
Watch Trump’s appearance on “Fox & Friends” below. Skip to the 8:57 mark to hear his comments.
Tribune, long the publication of the Labour left, is launching its summer issue with a talk entitled, ‘What now for the left?’. Featuring Oliver Eagleton, Grace Blakeley, Barnaby Raine and Matt Kennard, the discussion line-up tells us almost everything we need to know before they’ve even opened their mouths. These are not people drawn from the ordinary working-class life that the left once claimed to represent. They are privileged, highly educated, well-connected, culturally confident and, in several cases, come from the protected world of the upper-middle-class left intelligentsia. What possible answer to the question of ‘What now for the left?’ can emerge from such a narrow and resource-rich corner of society? Champagne, caviar and ponies from Daddy, perhaps?
There has always been a bourgeois left in British politics. Tribune itself was founded in 1937 by wealthy Labour MPs Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss. And it has long been torn between the views of middle-class socialist intellectuals and the working-class people whose lives form the substance of socialist politics. Old Etonian George Orwell, the great class traitor in the best sense of the phrase, wrote for Tribune. He understood better than most how the English upper-middle class thought about the working class. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell was brutal about the comfortable socialist who liked the idea of the working class more than the reality of working-class people. His advice to the working class was that when the bourgeois communist asks the working class what he can do for it, the answer should be to commit suicide.
The bourgeois left always poses a threat to working-class movements. It doesn’t just join them – too often it takes them over. It arrives with an inherited confidence that comes from an expensive education, professional networks and the time to write, organise, speak and be heard. It then places itself at the front of the movement and slowly replaces class politics with single-issue campaigns, personal grievances and a moralistic, scolding vocabulary that makes the working class feel like an embarrassment in its own house. Why would a class built on undeserved privilege want a politics that exposes undeserved privilege? Better to talk endlessly about everything except class. Better to perform radicalism while leaving the social order intact.
This is a long way from the British left I knew and grew up with in Nottinghamshire. My mum was a trade-union representative in a factory. Her fellow workers’ struggle was also her own. And my dad was a striking miner who knew, instinctively, on day one of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, that the Welsh miners, their families and their communities were his people, too. That was class politics. Not a clever panel of the already connected claiming to speak for the left. Not a performance of outrage. It was a lived practice of solidarity.
We watched out for neighbours. We took bags of coal to elderly people on the estate when their bunkers had nothing but dust in them. We left children’s clothes anonymously on doorsteps so hard-up families were not embarrassed. Call it mutual aid, call it working-class solidarity, call it ordinary decency – it happened without fanfare, without a summer magazine issue launch. The left-wing politics of the working class did not come from philosophy seminars. It came from experience. That is the very thing the bourgeois left does not have and cannot fake.
The aims of the working-class left were simple and profound: emancipation from drudgery and poverty. It was concerned with housing, jobs, wages, healthcare, education and the cost of living – the material reality of people’s lives. Working-class politics is steeped in the history of class struggle and class consciousness. EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class remains one of the great accounts of how class is made through struggle, organisation and antagonism. If Thompson were looking at Tribune in 2026, perhaps he would be tempted to write a new chapter entitled, ‘The Exclusion of the English Working Class’.
The new ownership of Tribune sharpens the problem rather than resolves it. In June 2025, the magazine was acquired by E Media Group and placed under the newly formed Tribune Media Group. E Media Group operates Muslim-focussed and independent media brands, including the Islam Channel, an English-language television network launched in 2004 that serves Muslim audiences internationally. Critics have described the Islam Channel’s editorial and religious outlook as leaning toward conservative Islam. Some have accused it of giving prominence to a narrow Wahhabi-Salafi perspective, which leaves limited space for Shia, Sufi, Ahmadi, secular or liberal Muslim voices.
The symbolism of E Media Group’s takeover is difficult to ignore: a historic socialist publication rooted in labour-movement arguments about class now sits inside a media group whose best-known outlet is shaped by a very different set of priorities.
That context matters. The Islam Channel has faced regulatory action from Ofcom, including a £40,000 fine in 2023 after broadcasting The Andinia Plan, a documentary Ofcom found guilty of anti-Semitic hate speech. Earlier Ofcom rulings also criticised the channel for breaches relating to political impartiality and harmful or offensive social commentary.
This is not a small footnote when we are talking about a publication like Tribune. The question is not whether Muslims, religious broadcasters or minority media should own publications. Of course they should. The question is what happens when a magazine that once claimed to be part of a democratic socialist and class-based tradition is absorbed into a media environment where class politics appears, once again, to be pushed aside.
So let us not pretend that the Tribune panel is merely naïve, self-centred or trapped in a bubble of London bourgeois mediocrity, although all of that may be true. What it represents is more serious: it is another small victory for a class that has organised the institutions, language and capital of left politics around itself. The working class has been removed physically, culturally and intellectually from the places where left politics is now performed. Class politics has been displaced by single issues and identity grievances. Those most likely to challenge inherited authority are no longer in the room, and those who remain get to present their own class interests as the universal interests of the left.
What now for the left? Start by asking who is missing. Start with the people who clean, care, build, drive, stack, mine, serve and survive. Start with wages, rent, housing, food, work, heat and power. Start outside the launch party. The left will either return to class politics or become a lifestyle brand for the children of the professional managerial classes. That is the choice. And if Tribune really wants to know ‘what now for the left?’, it should begin not by looking at who is on the stage, but at who has been kept out of the room.
Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.
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Darline Graham Nordone, Lindsey Graham’s younger sister and close confidant, will serve the remainder of the late senator’s term in Washington.
“It’s my honor to ask his little sister Darline Graham to finish his work for him now,” South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said Monday, formally appointing Nordone after recounting stories of Graham’s legacy.
President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune both publicly expressed support for McMaster choosing Nordone as a tribute to Graham.
Her appointment as an interim caretaker triggers a wide-open race ahead of the Aug. 11 primary. Several Republicans are already weighing bids to take over Graham’s place as the GOP Senate nominee.
A video of a Muslim woman, Nora Mubarak, capturing a seagull in a white sheet in Grimsby has gone viral for the wrong reasons.
One of Britain’s self-styled “patriots” shared the video, with many claiming the woman was catching the bird to eat it — parroting the same racist theories that falsely accused immigrants in the US of eating pets.
However, Mubarak was actually doing a good deed in rescuing the seagull that had fallen from a roof. More footage shows her working with other locals — white locals, for the record — to reunite the gull with its mother.
Nevertheless, despite it being a load of nonsense pushed out to stir up racial hatred, the misinformation has reached far further than the truth.
This comes as another reminder that X has far too much power to shape perspectives and far too little regulation or accountability. A Brown woman’s safety was needlessly put at risk, without any reprisal, because of dangerous misinformation.
The first video posted by Active Patriot on X, with 5.2m views, is below.
At this rate we won't have any wildlife left — Active Patriot (@ActivePatriotUK) July 8, 2026
This has happened in my town Grimsby on the corner of Lord Street 
Poor Stephen 
pic.twitter.com/ydx7utmH0x
Muslims are too often victims of the ‘Robinson’ effect
Active Patriot’s misleading video, as has become pretty typical, was reshared by Tommy Robinson. As a result of the ‘Robinson effect’ and the size of these two bad actors’ followings, 8.1 million people saw the video and likely believed the nefarious suggestions made. They also received 69,000 likes with nearly 19,000 reposts.
Robinson made a disgusting suggestion that the video showed:
Invaders catching and killing gulls in broad daylight in “Modern England”.
Get these backwards people out!
In fairness to Active Patriot, he subsequently posted that he was mistaken. Tommy Robinson, of course, hasn’t felt inclined to do so because truth has never been very important to that weasel.
A video I shared yesterday of a woman catching a seagull in a blanket, was Not what it looked like, the woman in question was actually concerned for the small seagull after it has fell off the roof previously, as you can see in… https://t.co/X4ae0MxvCR pic.twitter.com/36ONNaUHu6
— Active Patriot (@ActivePatriotUK) July 9, 2026
WOMAN WAS RESCUING SEAGULL, NOT STEALING IT
X user admits he was ‘quick to judge’
The correction read:
WOMAN WAS RESCUING SEAGULL, NOT STEALING IT
A video I shared yesterday of a woman catching a seagull in a blanket, was Not what it looked like, the woman in question was actually concerned for the small seagull after it has fell off the roof previously, as you can see in this video that the woman in question shares with the seagull society on Facebook, she asked locals to help her it on to a flat roof so it could be back with its mother.
Like many people yesterday I saw the video shared round of her catching it and jumped to conclusions, for that I apologize and hold my hands up I was quick to judge.
But the post rectifying the misinformation didn’t reach nearly as far, receiving only a million views, 3,200 likes and 741 reposts.
We are living in dangerous times where bad actors can put people’s safety at risk by posting misinformation and lies. While they whip up racialised hate towards marginalised groups in a press of a button, social media platforms aren’t prioritising sanctions and regulations for this behaviour.
Anti-Muslim rhetoric called out by the Canary
We know the woman in this video (who was rescuing the seagull). So we'd recommend you remove this post and apologise for your anti-Muslim, racist tirade.
* tirade means angry verbal outburst if your followers were wondering https://t.co/dEjOsMhqkT — Canary (@TheCanaryUK) July 10, 2026
Mubarak says she will hold liars accountable
Mubarak spoke to ITV following these dangerous allegations, saying she was helping a number of other locals to assist the distressed bird. She added:
They have an agenda to divide us, and we should not let them do so.
I hope Nora sues people like Tommy Robinson, who lied about her when she was just trying to help rescue the seagull. pic.twitter.com/7LihuGnIDH
— Mukhtar (@I_amMukhtar) July 11, 2026
The leader of Northeast Lincolnshire Council, Oliver Freeston, who represents Reform, joined the bandwagon in assuming the woman had bad intentions. Needless to say, he has failed to apologise for demonising her.
As a council leader, he has a responsibility to all his constituents, including those who are Muslim, so how does he justify such behaviour?
Those who come out to defend truth never seem to even come close to the astronomical reach of those pushing ridiculous, sensationalist lies. In fact, the government minister responsible for regulating social media platforms, Lisa Nandy, has instead walked away from the platform taking her whole department with her.
Clearly, she recognises it is a cesspit of disinformation and abuse, as she stated in her ‘Goodbye X’ post. But she has notably held back from doing anything about it, other than turning the other cheek as if a statement will suddenly make Elon Musk change his ways.
The far right will abandon all truth and reason
One thing is abundantly clear: truth does not matter to the far-right. All that matters is their explicit intention to convince British people that immigrants and asylum seekers are the reason why living standards, opportunities, local investment and social cohesion are declining. Anyone who is not white is a threat according to them.
However, they miss the point repeatedly. It’s the super-rich, who have spent decades playing politicians like instruments in an orchestra with compliant leaders happily dancing to their tune, that is the real problem.
The result? Politicians have demonised and scapegoated harmless people — and even the premise that humans have basic needs — while handing the richest in society ever more tax breaks, lucrative contracts and generous subsidies.
There is a pretty easy, and perfectly doable, way of fixing this corrosive issue in our society and political discourse. Regulate social media and make lies and misinformation expensive for those capitalising off of it.
After all, we all know rich people do not like to put their hands in their own pockets, instead they want to fleece ours.
Featured image via ITV
US president Donald Trump wants to create an automatic retaliation policy if Iran manages to assassinate him. The erratic US leader’s idea emerged as Iran and the US returned to open hostilities around a month into the Oman-brokered negotiating period to end the war.
Associated Press (AP) reported on 13 July:
President Donald Trump is suggesting he has left standing orders for the U.S. military to destroy Iran “ at levels they’ve never seen before” if Tehran follows through on its long-standing threats to kill him.
The news agency added that:
the U.S. government has no way to create an automatic, preauthorized “dead man’s switch” that would prompt immediate retaliation.
In the vanishingly unlikely event that Trump were killed by Iran — or died for any other reason — vice-president JD Vance would become president. In such a scenario:
Vance could do exactly what Trump called for, though there also is a chance he could decide not to follow his predecessor’s orders — or offer a direct response in a different way.
AP said:
Trump nonetheless posted on his social media website Saturday that Iran had made threats “to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate” him and he said 1,000 “missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat.”
Rumours of an assassination attempt emerged on 9 July. The Wall Street Journal said that new intelligence:
indicated a fresh Iranian plan to kill President Trump, people familiar with the matter said, a finding that would mark an escalation in the war between Washington and Iran.
Trump said at the time:
They want to take out the U.S. leader—me. I’m on every list. I saw this morning, I’m on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I’ve been a little bit lucky, but that maybe doesn’t last very long.
The intelligence reportedly originated from Israel. No evidence that the claim is true has been produced. No source was named and the Israelis have not given any further comment.
Flailing Trump still can’t escape Iran mire
The bizarre ‘kill-switch’ plan came as the US-Iran peace process, such as it was, seemed to be falling apart fully. The two countries have exchanged missiles in recent days and Trump posted on social media:
We are reinstating the THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE. All other countries will have fair and open use of the Strait.
The US and Israel attacked Iran first on 28 February without provocation. Iran was offering unprecedented concessions in negotiations at the time. The Pentagon has since stated there was no imminent threat from Iran. And the UN’s atomic watchdog, the IAEA, has said there is no evidence Iran was developing a nuclear weapon.
The US has achieved none of its original war aims. Iran predictably closed the Straits of Hormuz, a vital oil channel, once attacked — creating a global energy crisis. Far from being defeated, Iran has made clear the war will continue until “the enemy’s inevitable and permanent humiliation, disgrace, regret, and surrender”. Trump came to power on an anti-war ‘America First’ ticket. He now faces worldwide humiliation as the front man for US imperial decline.
Featured image via the Canary
By Joe Glenton
With Britain sweating through its third consecutive heatwave, the Green Party has moved to introduce a maximum workplace temperature bill:
"From bus and train drivers sweltering in their cabins to bakers working in over 40 degrees, and builders whose workplaces offer no respite from the heat – the government has a duty to protect all of us."
Today Hannah Spencer is tabling a maximum workplace temperature bill. pic.twitter.com/0ofCXCDx4M
— The Green Party (@TheGreenParty) July 13, 2026
“Absurd”
Speaking to the Guardian, Hannah Spencer said:
This is something workers and trade unions have been raising the alarm about for many years. It shouldn’t have taken this long to act, but the unsafe temperatures we’re seeing now should be a huge wake-up call.
We’ve seen absolute chaos as a result of these recent temperatures, and such a massive human cost, yet we haven’t heard a peep from government about how they plan to protect us all.
Spencer branded the situation “absurd”. She also said:
From bus and train drivers sweltering in cabins that are hotter than the soaring temperatures outside and bakers working in temperatures of over 40°C, to builders whose workplaces offer no respite from the heat, the government has a duty to protect all of us.
I had one constituent contact me about the appalling conditions he faced laying Tarmac on roads in Gorton and Denton in temperatures he called unbearable.
Spencer used Spain as an example of what can be done. As she noted, workers there are given the ability to adjust their hours to avoid the hottest hours of the day. This allows work to continue without putting workers at risk. And the risk is real too. We experienced 2,700 excess deaths during the first two heatwaves this year; we’re now in the middle of the third. This problem won’t go away in our lifetimes either.
This affects all of us
We reported on this issue before — namely when Zack Polanski made the following intervention:
Climate justice is social justice. https://t.co/b2I31KSLWf
— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) May 26, 2026
As we noted at the time, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) were among those calling for maximum workplace temperatures. A report from the CCC said:
Maximum working temperature regulations would address the increasing risks that high temperatures pose to workers’ safety and incentivise the deployment of the necessary cooling. Businesses are largely responsible for investing in their own adaptations but must ensure that workplaces and working practices are safe for employees, including for those working outside.
The TUC, meanwhile, flagged the negative health impacts that can result from extreme heat:
- Dizziness.
- Delirium.
- Fatigue.
- Rashes.
- Collapse.
- Cramps.
- Exhaustion.
- Stroke.
- Death.
The Greens’ bill is expected to enjoy cross-party support. As the Guardian reported:
Her bill is expected to receive cross-party support and will be backed by the leftwing Labour MPs Rebecca Long-Bailey, Alex Sobel and Nadia Whittome as well as Graham Leadbitter from the Scottish National party, Liz Saville Roberts from Plaid Cymru and the independent MP Jeremy Corbyn.
Still, not everyone is happy about the idea of making things moderately better for workers:
#GMB discusses a maximum temperature limit in workplaces.
Alex Mansuroglu says yes & talks about tradespeople having to work in 38 degrees. Daisy McAndrew says they'd lose money. Ranvir Singh responds, maybe there should be statutory pay. Watch the look on Ed Balls face! pic.twitter.com/D4CV2a7p0L
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) June 24, 2026
Progress
While this bill is certainly a progressive measure, it’s happening because progress on climate action did not come fast enough. And the reason we failed is because hostile oil barons hid the truth from us for as long as they could — later promoting denialism and misinformation.
As journalist Benjamin Franta reported in 2021, we should have been acting decades earlier than we were:
At an old gunpowder factory in Delaware – now a museum and archive – I found a transcript of a petroleum conference from 1959 called the “Energy and Man” symposium, held at Columbia University in New York. As I flipped through, I saw a speech from a famous scientist, Edward Teller (who helped invent the hydrogen bomb), warning the industry executives and others assembled of global warming.
“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,” Teller explained, “you create carbon dioxide. … Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.” If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, “all the coastal cities would be covered,” he warned.
1959 was before the moon landing, before the Beatles’ first single, before Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, before the first modern aluminum can was ever made. It was decades before I was born.
This climate catastrophe we’re living through is happening because of wealthy interests. And if people have a problem with workers needing some degree of flexibility, they should take it up with the oil industry.
Featured image via the Canary
By Willem Moore
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