UK animal charity Open Cages has rebranded to Anima, reflecting its global identity as Anima International.

The change comes as Anima prepares to invest “more resources than ever” into its campaign to end the use of fast-growing “frankenchickens” in the UK.

The announcement follows major recent wins for the animal rights group. These include Poland’s fur farming ban and a world-first decision in Norway to phase out fast-growing chickens completely.

The UK is one of Europe’s largest chicken producers. And over 90% of UK chickens are bred to grow at unnaturally fast rates. This commonly leads to severe welfare problems, including chronic pain, lameness, and sometimes even heart attack. Anima International has identified the UK as a key strategic priority in its efforts to reduce animal suffering.

Commenting on the rebrand, Connor Jackson, CEO of Anima, said:

The breeding of fast-growing chickens represents one of the biggest sources of animal suffering in the world, and it’s a practice that is out of step with public sentiment. As a result, a transition is already happening in countries such as Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany.

Our mission to achieve this in the UK hasn’t changed; we’re preparing to devote more resources than ever to this fight. Our new identity reflects our increasing focus on Britain as a priority for our entire organisation, given the snail’s pace at which we are solving this animal welfare crisis.

Waitrose is the only major UK company to have totally phased out fast growing chickens, branding the practice an “animal welfare crisis”. M&S has done it for 30% of its products. KFC, Nando’s and several other restaurants recently abandoned their commitments to make the change. Whilst companies such as Pret and Greggs are yet to follow through on their commitments.

Anima International is a global animal advocacy organisation with six national groups. It has two decades of experience working to end animal suffering. Now operating as Anima in the UK, the organisation plans to launch its largest UK campaign yet, later this year.

Featured image via Anima International

The racist Labour government will stop issuing study visas to people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan. Additionally, it is stopping skilled work visas for people from Afghanistan.

The Home Office claims the changes are due to “widespread abuse” and will take effect this month.

Figures suggest that individuals from those four countries are most likely to come to the UK to study and then make an asylum claim.

War, oppression, genocide

But all four of those countries are experiencing various levels of oppression, war, and genocide.

Since US troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban has reigned over the nation. This has included public executions, amputations, and flogging. Of course, the UK played a huge role in destabilising the country. It was a key ally in the US-led invasion, the initial overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, and ultimately, it sparked a violent, long-term conflict against the resurgent Taliban.

In Cameroon, the government forces and armed separatists from the English-speaking minority have been fighting since 2016. It has killed over 6,500 people and displaced 584,000. It is reported that 1.8m people need humanitarian aid.

According to Oxford Law:

Since 2018, the UK government has supported the London-based firm, New Age, to win a contract to develop an offshore gas project in Cameroon estimated to be worth more than $250 million. This lucrative contract sees money going directly to the state-owned company SNH, which reportedly funds the elite armed forces of the Cameroon state.

Since 2017, the military in Myanmar has been committing genocide against the Muslim Rohingya population. The military frequently attacks schools, hospitals and civilian infrastructure, whilst throwing journalists in prison. Once again, the regime is backed by over 200 British companies.

In Sudan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are committing genocide in the pursuit of gold. The UK is a major supplier to the UAE, and British Military equipment often turns up in the hands of the RSF.

Fuck around and find out

Now, Shabana Mahmood, Home Secretary, has said she was:

taking the unprecedented decision to refuse visas for those nationals seeking to exploit our generosity.

And, according to the BBC:

The Home Office said a higher proportion of people than average from the four specified country cited destitution as part of their asylum claim, and there were 16,000 people from the four countries currently being supported.

About 95% of Afghans who arrived in the UK on a study visa then applied for asylum since 2021, while applications by students from Myanmar increased 16-fold and claims by students from Cameroon and Sudan more than quadrupled.

Advertisement

It’s such a coincidence that asylum claims are higher from the countries where there is ongoing genocide, armed conflict, and US and UK involvement.

Maybe if the UK stopped funding illegal wars, supplying arms to terrorist nations, and destabilising the Middle East, fewer people might need to escape war-torn countries.

There’s a thought for you, Shabana.

Featured image via GBNews/ YouTube

The majority of Western leaders have shown that when shit hits the fan, and civilian lives are at stake, they will side with genocidal maniacs (Trump) instead of doing the right thing.

Except Spain, of course, which condemned:

unilateral military action by the US and Israel.

It also banned the US from using Spanish military bases to attack Iran.

BREAKING: 🇪🇸 Spain’s PM says his country rejects the ‘unilateral military action by the US and Israel’

Spain is consistently based 👏🏼 pic.twitter.com/EmFfzpZdzg

Advertisement

— ADAM (@AdameMedia) February 28, 2026

BREAKING: 🇪🇸🇺🇸 Spain BAN the United States from using Spanish military bases for attacks on Iran.

Viva Espagne 👏🏼 https://t.co/r1yNi14a5X pic.twitter.com/piHQPmMWag

— ADAM (@AdameMedia) March 2, 2026

Trump’s lap dogs

Other Western leaders have shown their true colours: Trump’s lapdogs, which is even worse when you consider that Trump is only bombing Iran to distract us from the fact that he is a massive nonce.

100%. These pedophiles thought if they start wars, they will not be prosecuted as they have more urgent matters on hand. https://t.co/r0D6kLIW25

— WeirdUniverse (@QqReviews) March 4, 2026

He is mentioned in the Epstein files thousands of times – and he thinks carpet bombing Iran is going to make us forget.

Before the US and Israel launched their war on Iran five days ago, fallout from the newly released Jeffrey Epstein files was spreading globally https://t.co/Qr4hvpbfNt pic.twitter.com/rv4aegIC2U

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) March 4, 2026

In the UK, Keir Starmer initially told Trump he couldn’t use military bases to attack Iran.

But of course, once the US and Israel bombed a little girl’s school, he changed his mind.

It seems that even a former Director of Prosecutions can be bought by Israel and Trump.

Starmer initially denied Trump use of UK bases for his attack on Iran

Trump says Starmer was “worried about the legality”

Trump then bombed a girls school, massacring dozens of kids

Advertisement

Next day, Starmer changed his mind and made Britain a belligerent

We are ruled by psychopaths pic.twitter.com/PLwcx9ipl4

— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) March 2, 2026

The West bangs on about freeing Iranian women, but the reality is that they’re ok with rich white men (ahem, Trump), both murdering and raping little girls.

The back-and-forth is theatre.

It creates the illusion of legal caution before landing exactly where the establishment always lands.

Outcomes don’t shift, they’re managed. The Epstein class sits above the choreography.

We are indeed ruled by satanic psychopaths. https://t.co/yb1gARheoO

— Nayab Chaudhry (@Nayab_AC) March 2, 2026

Advertisement

Talk about hypocrisy.

Stiff competition

Now, Starmer, along with Germany and France, has said they are willing to assist “in some capacity” with the US and Israeli action against the regime.

Specifically, they said:

potentially through enabling necessary and proportionate defensive action to destroy Iran’s capability to fire missiles and drones at their source.

Similarly, the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, claims he is ok with the US embargoing Spain.

Merz is giving Starmer stiff competition for Best in Show as Donald Trump’s poodle. https://t.co/vle5nDADwL

— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) March 3, 2026

For the third time in history, Germany is on the wrong side of a world war.

Prime Minister Rob Jetten of the Netherlands said that “Iran’s attacks must stop”. Again, no mention of the US and Israel’s indiscriminate and unprovoked attacks on Iran.

In Poland, President Karol Nawrocki said he had advance knowledge of the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran. Which is worrying, given one of the first targets was a school full of little girls.

Other Western leaders who have condemned Iran’s attacks include Austria, Belgium, Malta and Portugal,

The Portuguese Government has been following with great concern, from the very first moment, the evolution of the situation in the Middle East, in close coordination with our European partners, partners in the region, and NATO allies.

Under the coordination of the Ministry of…

— Luís Montenegro (@LMontenegro_PT) February 28, 2026

Time after time, Western leaders have come out to condemn Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Of course, they fail to mention why they are retaliating, the thousands of people Israel has murdered, or the fact that Israel is the only Middle Eastern country that actually has nuclear weapons.

Trump is nothing but a bully. He even claimed he might have forced Israel’s hand in attacking Iran. But Western leaders are enabling his bullshit – along with Netanyahu’s. One day we will see them all in the Hague – and then they will have been against this all along.

Featured image via Associated Press/YouTube

Loss of An Ally

A Boost For Resources

A Trump Distraction

Exposes Europe’s Vulnerabilities

What Will This Mean For Ukraine?

What Happens Next?

Mitchell Palmer is an economist at the Adam Smith Institute.

The British housing market is broken, especially in the South East of England. In London, the average private renter spends more than 40 per cent of their income on rent, while more than 15 per cent of private rentals are not deemed ‘decent’ for human habitation. At the same time, first-home buyers struggle to accumulate a deposit. This creates misery, as well as unmeetable demand for social housing.

But the consequences are even more dire than they first appear. Since the Global Financial Crisis, Britain’s economic output per capita has remained basically static. As new research from the Adam Smith Institute shows, housing is to blame for much of this stagnation. Of the 10–20 per cent of additional growth we identified as available, fixing our planning system alone accounts for around 7 percentage points. It is the largest single pro-growth move we could make.

The reason is simple. When homes are scarce and expensive, everything else suffers. Workers can’t relocate to better opportunities. Businesses struggle to recruit. Families spend more of their income on subpar housing and less on everything else. Productivity falls, wages stagnate, and growth slows.

Despite this obvious catastrophe, Britain has made it harder and harder to build. Our planning system gives councils wide discretion to delay or block development, even in places crying out for homes. Layers of regulation add years of uncertainty and cost, especially for small and medium-sized builders who once delivered much of the country’s housing.

The result is a supply crunch that never seems to ease. Even when demand softens, the underlying shortage remains. That’s why prices rebound so quickly, and why rents barely ever fall.

Everyone knows the conventional solutions offered to this problem. The left proposes more social housing. Both sides demand tougher rules on private landlords. On a good day, politicians even propose loosening rules that restrict the supply of high-density housing in town centres or near railway stations. These three proposals are not equal, but all are insufficient. They do not solve the monopoly problem at the heart of the housing crisis.

What we need are competitive urban land markets.

Landowners must feel a rush to build for fear of a missed opportunity and someone else satisfying demand. To make this threat real, governments must enable development on a wide variety of different plots, both inside and outside the city limits, and at a scale much larger than anticipated housing demand. Much of this housing will never be built; it simply needs to be threatened.

This is the concept at the heart of New Zealand’s successful housing reforms. As the Kiwi housing minister Chris Bishop recently put it, ‘abundant development opportunities [will] drive down land prices and create housing choice’. The reforms are still in progress, but they are already paying dividends. Auckland – a city of 1.5 million – is now building three times as many dwellings as London – a city of 9 million. Unsurprisingly, rents are now 19 per cent more affordable, relative to incomes, than they were in 2015.

To create competitive urban land markets in this country, we will need to throw out the discretionary planning system entirely. It should be replaced with a transparent framework of pre-determined, liberal development rights, so landowners know that building is not a special favour granted by the state but a normal economic activity. Crucially, these rights should respond to market signals: If land prices surge in a city, more land should automatically be released for development.

At the same time, councils should abandon the idea of merely meeting minimum housing targets, which entrenches scarcity and monopoly power, and instead enable housing wherever it can reasonably be accommodated, letting the market choose between abundant sites.

Finally, Britain must relax green belt constraints and invest in transport to cut commuting times. Done properly, this growth can pay for itself through land value uplift, just as the Metropolitan Railway once did and Japan’s railways still do today.

Politicians talk a lot about ‘boosting growth’. Unfortunately, a few new towns or tower blocks won’t solve Britain’s housing crisis. De facto rent controls and higher social housing obligations certainly won’t. If the government is serious about making it easier to build homes they need to commit to reshaping our broken urban land market. Until we fix that, Britain’s housing crisis will keep doing what it’s done for years: quietly making us all poorer.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been forced to backtrack. The hapless Rubio told reporters ahead of a classified briefing to Congress members that Israel made US join the attack on Iran.

Rubio had previously said that:

a plan from Israel to attack Iran spurred the Trump administration to take pre-emptive strikes.

His statement was then contradicted by US President Donald Trump who said on 3 March:

If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.

Rubio then told reporters by way of backtracking (and without reference to his original statement):

I told you, this had to happen anyway, the president made a decision, and the decision he made was that Iran was not going to be allowed to hide behind its ballistic missile program

Once the president made a decision that negotiations were not going to work … the decision was made to strike.

Adding:

The bottom line is this. We, the president, determined we were not going to get hit first.

Democrats go anti-war

US Democrats received a classified briefing from Rubio, defence secretary Pete Hegseth and other senior officials on 3 March. There are limits on what those briefed can disclose to the public.

Senator Elizabeth Warren posted on X on 3 March:

It is so much worse than you thought.

You are right to be worried. The Trump administration has no plan in Iran. This illegal war is based on lies, and it was launched without any imminent threat to our nation.

I just left a classified briefing with the Trump Administration about the war in Iran.

I was worried before, but I’m more worried now. pic.twitter.com/HoSWLVWrR8

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) March 3, 2026

The death toll in the war has risen rapidly to over 1000 as of 4 March:

🚨At least 1,097 civilians have been killed in U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran since Feb. 28, including 181 children under 10, according to monitor HRANA.

In the past 24 hours, the group recorded 104 attacks across 19 provinces, with strikes hitting military bases, medical… https://t.co/dBi6DraVkL

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) March 4, 2026

The US-Israel attack on Iran is now pulling in European countries like France, Greece and the UK. Israel has begun a ground invasion of Lebanon. In Washington DC, the heart of US empire, they’re debating matters of procedure.

Featured image via the Canary

German chancellor Friedrich Merz said of last year’s illegal US-Israeli attacks on Iran that “Israel is doing the dirty work for us all”. Now he has said that the protections of international law shouldn’t apply to Iran. Because rogue states ignore international law.

Except that when he says ‘rogue states’, he doesn’t mean Israel and the US, which just ditched international law to murder Iranian schoolgirls, assassinate Iran’s leader and blow up around twenty Iranian hospitals. He doesn’t mean their enablers – like the German and UK governments – who ignored international law to support the Epstein class’s genocide and now to abet its latest illegal war.

He means Iran.

German double standards

Merz said that “now is not the time” (we’ve heard that before) to “lecture” the US and Israel about their lawbreaking. But apparently now is the time to lecture the victims and tell them international law doesn’t protect them because that doesn’t suit Trump or Netanyahu.

Because Iran hasn’t done the ‘right’ thing and surrendered completely to US and Israel’s demands and the amplification of their European cheerleaders, as he made clear:

Appeals from Europe, including from Germany, and condemnations of Iranian violations of international law, and even extensive sanctions, have achieved little over the years and decades…international legal assessments will have relatively little effect. This is all the more true if they remain largely without consequence… therefore, now is not the time to lecture our partners and allies.

What international law?

Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Wolfgang Janitsch described the comments as “a long farewell to international law”.

Even in Germany, which has a genocide-long record of brutal repression of protests against Israel’s crimes, Merz’s comments caused outrage. So his spokesperson tried to backtrack without backtracking, insisting both that Germany respects international law and doesn’t at the same time:

Germany does not question international law. I want to make that absolutely clear. But there is also a security interest that is not addressed by international law.

Responsible Statecraft summed up the situation succinctly:

Craven Europeans give US and Israel a blank check for illegal war. They frame the crisis not as an act of war against a UN member state, but as a natural consequence of Tehran’s failure to capitulate unconditionally.

Perhaps it’s Merz, like Starmer and his fellow criminals, who needs the protection of international law – but only of his right to a fair trial in the Hague before going down for crimes against humanity.

Featured image via the Canary