Politics
Gardeners Should Check Their Leaves In The Morning This Summer
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As we head into summer, your garden might start to suffer from a lack of sweet H2O.
There are some tests you can run to make sure your grass is getting all it needs, though. Placing a pan of water on your lawn will tell you how much has evaporated from your soil, while footprints that stay imprinted on your garden long after you’ve strolled over it might mean it’s on the verge of drying out.
Additionally, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) said that looking at your leaves in the morning could help gardeners evaluate their hydration situation.
Why should I look at my leaves in the morning?
The RHS stressed that “Established trees, shrubs and herbaceous perennials in beds and borders will only need watering in extreme drought,” adding you should only water the most stressed plants in these cases.
And one of the signs of that dehydration-related stress shows in their leaves, they added.
“Drooping leaves, especially in the early morning, often indicate drought,” they advised.
The Duchy of Cornwall Nursery said that often, established and slightly dehydrated plants “perk up” at night.
But the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources added “Wilting or drooping leaves that do not return to normal (without additional water) by
morning” are a sign of drought-related plant stress.
What should I do if I suspect drought?
Try to water slowly and evenly, so that the soil is hydrated 15cm or so beneath the surface, the RHS said.
Rainwater is better for plants than tap water. And it’s generally best to water in the morning – this both helps to repel hungry slugs at night and gives grass more of a chance to absorb the liquid.
If you’re watering garden plants, try to point the nozzle of your watering can right at their base, so that you hit the roots instead of the leaves (watering leaves on a sunny day can sometimes scald them).
And potted plants sometimes benefit from a jacuzzi: if dehydrated, sit them in a sink or bath of water and let them drink for a while.
Related…
Going out to eat should be a treat, but we never know how clean the restaurant’s ice dispenser is or if the person preparing our food has washed their hands recently – and that can mean trouble.
Even though germs are everywhere and most of them are harmless, some of them can make us sick. So if there are simple strategies to stay safer when we’re dining out, why not use them?
That’s why Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, hosts of HuffPost’s Am I Doing It Wrong? podcast, asked microbiologist Jason Tetro, aka The Germ Guy, to brief us on what might be lurking at our tables and in the kitchens of even the fanciest restaurants.
During our chat, we learned what to avoid when we’re ordering from the bar, the dirty truth about the “five-second rule” and the number one germiest part of the restaurant.
A few years ago, “I was going around to different places in the city, and I was looking for the germiest items, and when I would go into restaurants, it was always the menus,” Tetro told us.
“The reason for that… was that the menus themselves were not so dirty, it was the cloth that they used to clean the menus,” he said.
Too often menus are cleaned using dirty cloths, which spread the germs from one item to the next, or the cleaning products don’t have time to be effective.
“You can use a detergent, you can use a disinfectant, and that’s great, right? But if you spray it into the cloth, well, you’ve just disinfected your cloth, and, yeah, you’ve maybe disinfected a small area of the cloth while the rest of it is still germy,” Tetro, the author of The Germ Files and The Germ Code, explained. “What you really need to be doing is you need to be taking that disinfectant and putting that onto the menu itself and then letting it sit.”
The sitting is incredibly important.
“We never talk about [this] in the media when we’re talking about hygiene, which is something called ‘contact time,’” he said. “When you spray a disinfectant onto a surface, it has to sit there, and it will say so on the label.”
The contact time to fully disinfect a surface can be anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes, and if the product isn’t left to sit for the prescribed amount of time, it may not work correctly.
“We did this study, and it’s not with restaurants, but it was actually with gyms. … You looked at the disinfectant and it said ‘leave on for 10 minutes,’” Tetro told us.
“And then we went to the patrons and were like, ‘So, how long do you keep the disinfectant on for?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, we spray it and wipe it. Why?’ [And we told them] ‘Well, it says here in the label, 10 minutes.’ And they’re just like, ‘Oh, my God.’”
Thankfully companies are now making faster-acting disinfectants, and many of them are more natural.
“We’ve got things that are made of hydrogen peroxide and citric acid, as opposed to some of the names that you can’t pronounce,” Tetro noted.
But the high volume of people handling menus combined with the user errors by the folks cleaning them means we could very likely come in contact with a big helping of germs whenever we’re choosing what to order.
“When you’re wiping down a menu, you’ve got to make sure that there’s that contact time, and, of course, [using] a disinfectant wipe for 30 seconds is your best option,” Tetro said. “Unless you’re doing that sort of continually after each and every time someone is touching it, the menus are going to continue being the germiest place in a restaurant.”
Because it’s hard to know exactly how our menu was cleaned (if it was at all), our best bet to stay as germ-free as possible is to wash our hands or use hand sanitiser after we use a menu or, if there’s a menu QR code on the table, use that instead.
And, of course, the same cleaning practices should be used in our homes too. When you’re using disinfectants, make sure you’re reading the labels and if they require prolonged contact time, make sure you’re waiting to wipe until the cleaners have had time to properly and fully do what they’re intended to do.
For more tips on staying safe while dining out, listen to the full episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more from Jason Tetro, visit his website here.
Need some help with something you’ve been doing wrong? Email us at AmIDoingItWrong@HuffPost.com, and we might investigate the topic in an upcoming episode.
Andy Burnham leaving his home before going to Wembley to watch the FA Cup Final.Former Labour members are returning to the party to help Andy Burnham win win the crunch Makerfield by-election, HuffPost UK has been told.
Supporters who quit in protest at the direction of the party under Keir Starmer’s leadership are signing up to help the Greater Manchester mayor defeat Reform UK, it is claimed.
“They are all offering to help Andy win the by-election,” a senior Labour source said. “He is attracting support from long-standing members who left over the last two years.”
A pro-Burnham MP confirmed that ex-Labour members have returned to back his bid to return to parliament after nine years.
Burnham has said he wants to become an MP again to “save” the Labour Party, but stopped short of confirming he wants to replace Starmer as leader.
He told the BBC: “We’ve got to see this as a moment to reclaim the Labour Party, to save it from where it’s been. We can’t just carry on as we are.”
Burnham has yet to be confirmed as Labour’s by-election candidate, although the party’s ruling national executive committee (NEC) has said it will not block him, as they did when he tried to stand in Gorton and Denton earlier this year.
Josh Simons won the seat for Labour at the last election with a majority of 5,399 from Reform.
Simons announced on Thursday that he was standing down to make way for Burnham, who is expected to challenge Starmer if he wins the by-election, which takes place on June 18.
On BBC 1′s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg, Simons said he had done it in the “best interests” of his party, community and country.
He said: “I think doing things for your community and your country that are very much not in your own personal reasons is the kind of thing we should do in politics sometimes.
“This has been a really tough decision for me and my family. I have very young kids, I’ve got a three-week-old baby.
“This was not an easy thing to do, and I wouldn’t have done it unless I really, really believed, at the end of the day, that this was in the best interests of the Labour Party, my community, and most importantly, the country.”
It was revealed last week that 1,600 new members had joined Labour in the wake of the party’s drubbing in the elections on May 7.
Party sources claimed the vast majority had done so to support the prime minister.
Subscribe to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
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Donald Trump has issued a fresh genocidal threat to Iran if the country’s regime does not agree to a peace deal to permanently end the war.
The US president said “there won’t be anything left of them” in a post on Truth Social.
Although a ceasefire remains in place in the conflict, the Strait – which used to carry one-fifth of the global oil supply – remains closed to maritime traffic.
Trump said: “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!”
Despite Trump’s repeated threats – and erroneous claims that America has won the war – no peace deal has yet been agreed to end the war.
The president sparked a furious backlash when he threatened to end Iranian civilisation.
Keir Starmer told MPs: “In relation to the language about destroying a civilisation, can I really be clear with this house – that was wrong.
“A threat to Iranian civilians in that way is wrong. These are civilians, let’s remember, who’ve suffered immeasurable harm by the regime in Iran for many, many long years, and that’s why they are words and phrases that I would never use on behalf of this government, which are guided by our principles and our values throughout all of this.”
Subscribe to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
We warned them. Zia Yusuf warned them. Anyone with a functioning understanding of how corporate compliance works in the face of punitive state regulation warned them. And now here we are.
TikTok has removed a video posted by Reform UK’s home-affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, in which he set out the party’s new immigration policy. It is an entirely legal, mainstream argument about the consequences of mass migration and the failure of successive governments to control it. The platform’s justification for blocking the video was ‘hate speech’ and ‘hateful behaviour’. The removal was triggered by a report made under the Online Safety Act.
Let that settle for a moment. A senior British politician, who is effectively shadow home secretary of the unofficial opposition, has had his political speech – policy announcement, not abuse or incitement – deleted from a major platform under legislation this government told us was about protecting children from pornography. Yusuf was also warned that further violations could result in his removal from TikTok altogether.
To be clear, this was not TikTok acting on its own instincts. Failing to comply with the Online Safety Act’s requirements can incur fines of up to £18million or 10 per cent of a firm’s global annual turnover, whichever is greater. When the penalty for inaction is that large, corporations do not sit and deliberate the merits of each complaint. They reach for delete. They err, always, on the side of caution – which is to say, on the side of whoever filed the report. GB News presenter Tom Harwood put it simply and correctly: regulation of this kind has a deadening effect on liberties, not because it commands censorship directly, but because it creates an incentive for corporations to censor first and think later. Companies do not need to knock on the door when it has already made the cost of opening it prohibitive.
Yusuf had predicted precisely this. Speaking last year, he pointed to section 179 of the Online Safety Act, which makes it illegal to say something false that causes ‘non-trivial psychological harm’, and warned that this would force social-media companies to ‘proactively censor’ speech. ‘It’s going to create an incentive structure for social-media companies to over-censor’, he said, ‘because that’s the rational thing to do’. He was right. He is now the living proof.
There is a rich and nauseating irony here that should be stated plainly. Yusuf noted that TikTok, which has just removed his immigration-policy video on the grounds that it is hate speech, happily hosts videos calling for the assassination of Nigel Farage. Fayaz Khan, an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan who threatened Farage’s life, stood before a camera in October 2024 and announced his murderous intentions on TikTok. While that video remained up (although Khan was jailed for five years in October for the threat), a video on Reform’s migration policy was taken down. You could not construct a clearer demonstration of where the algorithm’s political sympathies lie – or rather, where its risk calculations land.
Then there is the parallel case of Katie Lam. Last year, shortly after the Online Safety Act came into force, the Tory MP gave a speech in the House of Commons criticising Labour’s response to the grooming-gang crisis. While not removed altogether, the speech was age-restricted on X under the same legislation. Words spoken under the protection of parliamentary privilege, in the mother of all parliaments, were deemed unsuitable for general viewing. We have arrived somewhere genuinely dystopian.
Yusuf told me: ‘This is exactly what we said would happen as the law targets social-media companies in a punitive fashion.’ He is right. And the political class that passed this legislation in 2023 – with cross-party support, let it be remembered, the Conservatives as guilty as Labour – knew or should have known what its results would be. Section 44 allows the culture secretary to unilaterally force Ofcom to change the rules about what social-media companies must censor without an act of parliament, without a vote. A single minister, in private, can redraw the boundaries of acceptable political speech. That is not about ‘safety’ online. That is power without accountability, dressed in the language of child protection.
This is the precautionary principle in its most corrosive form, our worst European inheritance, transplanted into British law and handed to Whitehall to enforce. In medicine, in environmental regulation, in financial compliance, we have watched this principle devour common sense for 30 years. When in doubt, prohibit. When the cost of action is lower than the cost of inaction, act. The corporations have done their maths. They will keep doing it.
The Online Safety Act must be repealed. Not reformed, not adjusted at the margins, not reviewed after a suitable period. Repealed. What was sold as a shield for children has become a sword in the hands of whoever holds office. That was always the risk. It has now become the reality.
We said so. Now you have seen it.
Gawain Towler is a commentator and an elected board member of Reform UK.
A longtime Donald Trump supporter called in to C-SPAN on Saturday to lay out his buyer’s remorse over the president.
“Now I understand how somebody like Adolf Hitler was able to brainwash millions of people,” the caller told host Taylor Popielarz on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.”
“I never I thought I’d see that again in my lifetime. But it’s happened, right? I thought we got past that, but we don’t learn from history.” (Check out his call in the clip below.)
The caller — who was identified as a three-time Trump voter named “Thomas” from Hawaii — began his message with, “It’s hard for me to say this, but I think if I can open up about it in public that it might help others.”
He said he wanted to believe Trump was “the real deal” although he had doubts as he “knew enough about his business history to think otherwise.”
“But now I regret my support for him, and I should’ve known better,” Thomas explained.
“He’s making it plain as day. He’s a con man, a liar, doesn’t keep his promises. He’s in office all for himself, and he doesn’t even try to hide his corruption anymore.”
He continued: “So unless you get all your information from what I call the ‘right-wing propaganda-for-profit, disinformation media industrial complex,’ he’s the worst president we’ve ever had, and he’s the most corrupt president we’ve ever had.”
Thomas said it was “hard” and took him “a while” to express such a sentiment, suggesting it was difficult due to his commitment to believing Trump.
He explained he considered third-party candidates and voting for a Democrat before sticking with Trump in the end.
Thomas, when asked whether there was a “straw that broke the camel’s back,” said it wasn’t just one thing that caused him to split with the president.
“It has been a cumulative process, and it’s gotten so blatant now,” he explained.
“He [said he was] going to lower prices on day one, he was going to do this on day one, only he could fix all this stuff.”
Thomas emphasised that Americans ought to slow down Trump by holding him accountable and voting for “as many Democrats, whether you like ’em or not, just to get some balance back into our system of checks and balances.”
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Not to sound dramatic, but the bane of my existence is my expensive pans constantly getting scratched, and thus everything I cook sticking to them.
And before you ask – no, I don’t use metal tools on them, or put them in the dishwasher. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but it’s something.
Understandably (I hope) that means when the time comes to buy a new pan, I’m always on the look out for one that won’t leave me screaming silently into my sink as I try to scrub scraps of egg away.
As an avid cook, I use a pan every day; sometimes multiple times a day – meaning I’m after a pan that won’t scratch, works on an induction hob, and is easy to clean.
Trust me, I’ve been through so many, I’ve earned the title of pan slut. But, ladies and gentlemen, I’m thrilled to say I have finally found a pan that won’t fail me.
Co-owned by Gordon Ramsay, Hexclad is designed by chefs for chefs. Using some kind of magic beyond my scientific understanding, each of its many varieties of pans uses a hybrid of stainless steel and non-stick technology.
I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve never checked out so quickly. Its 30cm Hybrid Pan (with a lid) was really calling to me, not least because it’s an ideal size for everything from cooking eggs, to a perfectly golden fillet of fish, or even a tangy Thai curry.
When it finally arrived on my doorstep, it didn’t disappoint. Thanks to those laser-etched hexagons on the base, the pan has a perfectly smooth bottom that heats up completely evenly.
The result is an even surface that browns, sears, and (joy of joys) releases in equal measures.
And, because Hexclad knows how to check all my boxes, it’s also induction hob and oven friendly (up to 480 celsius), can be chucked in the dishwasher when you’re done with it, and is chemical-free.
You might be thinking, okay, stop with all the pan PDA. Sorry, not sorry. I simply don’t care, because any true home chef will know that the right cookware makes the difference between an excellent meal and a flop on a plate.
It’s not just a plain old frying pan, either. Hexclad has saucepans, frying pans, and roasting tins for every eventuality; it even has a pizza steel and the smartest chopping board I’ve ever seen.
Okay, enough of my waxing lyrical. If you, too are looking for The Pan that will upgrade your cooking game from 0 to 100, here’s my round up of the best on Hexclad right now.
A baby version of my go-to, which is a great size for eggs, or a meal for one.
If you can’t summon up the smell of burnt milk in your mind at a moment’s notice, congrats: you’re winning at life. No prizes for guessing that it’s awful. But this pan wouldn’t do that to you! It’s non-stick, and just the right size for heating milk or making a hot choccy.
If you’re never sure whether to go for your wok or frying pan, allow me (or Hexclad) to introduce a hybrief pan – what a concept!
Wed to a wok? Don’t worry, Hexclad has you covered. You can even choose to get it with a lid, or not. Pretty sweet.
Allora, we all know the struggle of choosing the right sized pan for pasta. We see this coming in handy for your next alla Norma, or even for simmering a chilli con carne.
Who doesn’t want a pan that can do it all? Roast a chicken, check. Make a soup? Check. We could keep going…
If you’re more bound to your oven than your hob, you’ll be pleased to know HexClad also layers its technology into this frankly huge roasting pan.
Don’t think one will be enough? Go for a bundle, like this set that saves £70 on two sizes of its signature pan.
As a pancake pro, I can reassure you that a griddle is truly the best implement to get a good flip going. This one will also be great for fajita night, or your next cheese toastie (elite, IMO).
Hosting season is nigh, so you better brush up on your pizza-making skills. This steel will help you get the base of dreams, while remaining plenty light, so you don’t strain your wrists.
The moment you get excited about a chopping board is when you realise you’re truly an adult. Seriously, though, how cool is this? On one side, it’s a carving board for meat, but flip it around and you’ve got a practical smooth surface and stainless steel tray for all your offcuts. I’m fangirling so hard right now.
Just as important as a good pan is an excellent knife. I can’t think of a day when I haven’t used a paring knife, and this one made from Japanese steel is truly the best of the best.
I dare you to tell me this chef’s knife isn’t a thing of beauty. Right, you can’t, because it’s forged by a mind-blowing 67 layers of steel, and reinforced by that gorgeous forest green handle. Delightful.
The sticky-fingered Brits have actually returned stolen colonial artefacts pilfered during one of its African wars. The Ethiopian heirlooms had been held in a British Army regimental museum. And, like countless other stolen artefacts, they’d been floating around British heritage sites since being pinched in 1868. The news has reignited the debate surrounding colonial artefacts unjustifiably held in British institutions.
The repatriation of colonial artefacts
A slightly miffed Daily Telegraph reported that:
Emperor Tewodros II died in a battle with British forces in 1868, after which soldiers under Gen Sir Robert Napier looted sacred and secular treasures from the hilltop fortress of Magdala, in what was then Abyssinia.
They further explained that:
To avoid capture, the emperor took his own life with his pistol, a weapon said to have been given to him by Queen Victoria. Soldiers of the now-defunct King’s Own Royal Regiment took as trophies a braid of his hair and a scrap of shirt stained with his blood.
Commenting on the repatriation of these items, the head of the Ethiopia Heritage Authority Abebaw Ayalew Gella said:
We hope that this generous example will inspire other museums to follow suit in the near future, and that further repatriation and collaboration can be negotiated with other museums in the United Kingdom.
Sure, we agree, but we’re not holding our breath about seeing many more colonial artefacts returned anytime soon.
The Telegraph also reported that:
Among the loot were royal artefacts, which have a spiritual significance given the close connections between Ethiopia’s former Christian royalty and the Orthodox Church, and sacred tablets known as “tabots”.
The paper said that the Royal Engineers Museum, the Royal Artillery Museum, and Royal Scots Dragoon Guards all continue to hold colonial artefacts, which were pilfered during the same war.
Colonial reckoning long overdue
Another British Army regiment is under pressure to give back items it stole from what is modern-day Ghana. As the Canary reported on 25 February, the Royal Artillery has various items from its sackings (yes, they did it twice) of the kingdom of the Asante capital, Kumasi, including significant colonial artefacts.
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum agreed to repatriate colonial artefacts it held in 2024. But the Royal Artillery are still holding out on a golden ram’s head looted during a colonial butcher-and-bolt mission. This is just one example of numerous colonial artefacts still awaiting restitution.
Author Barnaby Phillips told the Guardian that he believed:
the Royal Artillery may be “embarrassed” by a stand that was commissioned for the ram’s head in 1875, as it depicts three black boys in loincloths, as if holding the object aloft, while its base is engraved with words commemorating the battles and capture of the city.
Bizarrely, the army blocked him on “security grounds.” Phillips said:
It’s an army institution holding the spoils of war, but they say it’s not safe to show it to me. That’s somewhat ironic.
He explained the regimental secretary’s rejection letter was “curt and categorical”:
The regiment was ‘unable to agree’ to my request to see its Asante gold ram’s head, held in the officers’ mess room at their barracks in Larkhill … ‘It has long been our policy, primarily on security grounds, not to allow public access to items held in the regiment’s private collection,’ wrote the secretary. He clarified that it was for insurance reasons.”
Empire was a criminal heist
Ghana is currently pushing to have the head returned. Hopefully, some movement on the Ethiopian artefacts will help that case progress. But even these are just a drop in the pond, considering the thousands of colonial artefacts spread across our museums. A 2025 Oxfam report calculated that between 1765 and 1900 the empire stole USD 64.82 trillion worth of wealth from India alone.
Arguably, this stands out as one of the most audacious heists in modern history — the plundering of colonial artefacts was central to wealth extraction by the British empire.
As the National reported at the time: This included extensive lists of colonial artefacts dispersed throughout British collections.
a significant number of the richest people in the UK can trace their family wealth back to slavery and colonialism, specifically the compensation paid to rich enslavers when slavery was abolished.
Oxfam also emphasised that:
This must be reversed. Reparations must be made to those who were brutally enslaved and colonised. Our modern-day colonial economic system must be made radically more equal to end poverty. The cost should be borne by the richest people who benefit the most.
There is a good history lesson in this all for flag-waving empire nostalgists who thronged London’s streets this weekend at fascist Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite The Kingdom’ march.
The fact remains — Britain still needs a full reckoning with its colonial history if it’s ever going to get over itself. That includes a proper accounting of the vast crimes of empire and the colonial artefacts still held by Britain.
Featured image via Leon Neal/Getty Images
By Joe Glenton
As thousands of Tommy Robinson fans gathered in central London on Saturday 16 May, Red Letter Christians, Better Story and Christians Against The Far Right set up a ‘listening table’ to speak to marchers leaving central London following the Unite The Kingdom rally.
There were two ‘listening stations’. One for those who attended the Unite the Kingdom rally and the other for those who may have felt unsafe as a result of the march.
The Baptist ministers and Anglican priests in attendance, who are against the co-option of Christianity by the Far Right, say more polarisation isn’t the answer. Instead, they say, we need to listen and understand before we can share our different perspectives.
Bishop Anderson Jeremiah said:
One of the major concerns of people participating in this rally is that they are not being listened to. I feel that both as a priest and as a bishop, the most important thing I have to do is to listen and to hear their pain.
As a church we have a duty of care to pay attention and be present in the community rather than waiting in our churches.
Tommy Sharpe, co-founder of Better Story, said:
Across the country, we’ve got far more that unites us than divides us. We all want billionaires to be made to contribute more to our communities. We’re all angry about the way big business rips us off.
We set up listening stations today to try and find those areas of common ground that unite us.
Rev Sally Mann, Baptist minister and co-director of Red Letter Christians, said:
We are here listening today because we believe that London needs peace envoys. We are creating a listening space for those who took part in the protest, and those who got caught up in it today.
We are praying for the peace of our city. And we’re confident witnesses to the Way of Jesus – a way of love and welcome, not division and fear.
East London priest Rev Rachel Summers said:
As Christians we are all on a journey of faith, to discover more what it means to love God and to love one another. Today we are here to be with those who have taken part in the protest, and to listen to them, and to be with those who’ve been caught up in it.
We are here as Christians to remind one another of our walk in faith of love, a perfect love that casts out fear.
Featured image via Better Story
By The Canary
The US and UK have gradually hollowed out any commitment to preventing or recording civilian casualties in their wars. In the latest sign of imperial decay, the Pentagon has quietly shut down a program meant to prevent civilian deaths. The UK, as ever, are following suit.
The Guardian reported on 15 May:
A report released by the department’s inspector general concluded the US military no longer has the people, tools or infrastructure needed to comply with two federal statutes requiring it to maintain a functioning civilian casualty policy, and operate a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (CP CoE).
The full report can be read in full here.
A similar process has been underway in the UK. As the Canary reported on 6 May:
The UK military has no way of detecting civilian casualties in war, a new study shows. And even processes developed during the failed occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan have now been virtually abandoned.
War casualties further abandoned
The NGO Ceasefire said the UK military’s own internal review:
reveals that adequate systems to track, investigate and respond to civilian harm either do not currently exist in the UK, have fallen into disuse, are not built for modern warfare, and/or are not scalable for future wars.
This revelation comes shortly after it was announced that the UK’s Conflict and Security Monitoring Project for tracking civilian casualties in Gaza had been shuttered.
Hard-right US war secretary Pete Hegseth has made it clear he thinks the laws of war and rules of engagement are ‘woke’.
As Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported:
[Hegseth] commented at a news conference on March 2, 2026, about “stupid rules of engagement,” suggesting that they may interfere with “fight[ing] to win.”
Drift into open barbarism
The Intercept’s Nick Turse has reported that in Iran, Yemen, Africa, and the Caribbean there have already been serious issues with casualty reporting. This appears to be due to severe cuts to the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, or CHMR‑AP.
As the Pentagon has starved the CHMR enterprise, the U.S. has killed more than 2,000 civilians across the world — from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East — during Trump’s second term.
UK NGO Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) said on 16 May:
For years, Britain and America have claimed that their militaries wage war ethically and with accuracy. Words like precision weapons, legal oversight and sophisticated targeting procedures were bandied around and, to be frank, they were done so with a sense of exceptionalism.
Adding:
They were meant to be the waging of ‘civilised war’ and they distinguished Western democracies from the indiscriminate violence they condemn in others. But two recent developments suggest that such a moral high-ground – for all of its fragility and questionable claim – is no longer being so brazenly claimed.
Needless to say ‘civilised war’ has still proven to have plenty of scope for massive violence and large-scale civilian deaths. The US and UK way of war – and the ‘liberal’ pretensions which ride with it – is shifting. From the war on terror, through Gaza, and now in Iran and elsewhere, accelerating imperial decay has pulled the humanitarian mask off – likely for good.
Featured image via Getty Images/Tim Boyle
By Joe Glenton
The post Should it be a crime to mock the burqa? appeared first on spiked.
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