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Zack Polanski, “I called this press conference.. Because of the shocking scenes of wildfires”

“3,000 people have died because of the extreme heat”

“I want to draw attention to do everything we can to push the prime minister Andy Burnham to take action on what is such a crucial… pic.twitter.com/pv5QtGfS9X

— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) August 6, 2026

Green Party leader Zack Polanski has delivered a ‘reality check’ to the Prime Minister over Britain’s climate emergencies. He ‘sounded the alarm’ about the horrific impacts of extreme heat and wildfires in the UK.

Speaking at the end of yet another heat health alert, Polanski accused new Prime Minister Andy Burnham of failing to act. He stated that extreme weather poses threats to safety, food and water supply, and our very way of life. Speaking with all necessary urgency, Polanski warned:

What we’re living through right now are likely some of the least extreme summer temperatures we’ll experience in our lifetimes.

The Green leader set out a series of measures he called on Burnham to take to keep people safe from extreme heat, including financial support to keep homes cool and cool spaces in every area. This is needed desperately after an estimated 3,000 people died as a result of dangerous temperatures in recent months.

Warning that the crisis risks food and water shortages, Polanski called on the government to bring water into full public ownership. He says that water companies have failed to secure our water supply, allowing billions of litres to be lost to leaky pipes while failing to build any new reservoirs. No new reservoirs have been built for over three decades. Meanwhile, an estimated 20% of treated water in England and Wales is lost — up to three billion litres per day.

Polanski also cited British farmers warning of the risk of empty shelves, after flooding followed by drought led to the UK facing its worst harvest on record. The Green leader also calls for record-profiteering fossil fuel giants to cover the costs of adapting to increasingly regular extreme weather events and fire risks.

Met Office study attributes 2,700 excess deaths to heatwaves in May and June

Polanski sounds the alarm

Polanski delivered the emergency press conference with all the needed gravity of a Johnson-era Covid announcement. He was joined at the press gathering by an ex-soldier, a GP and a firefighter.

They all described the consequences of extreme weather they’d seen in their work. Broadcaster Chris Packham attended, warning about the many present and future risks of the climate poly-crisis.

Highlighting the dangerous, wilful hyper-normalisation by the British establishment of climate breakdown, Polanski told the nation:

The scenes we have seen play out on our television screens are frankly apocalyptic. And yet the response from our government is to pretend none of this is happening. It’s an astonishing dereliction of duty from those whose first responsibility is to keep us safe.

And from the media — with some brilliant and notable exceptions — we’ve seen more clamouring for North Sea drilling in the last few weeks than raising the alarm on climate breakdown.

While our country has come together — to offer shelter to those who had to leave their homes due to wildfires, to check in with elderly neighbours, to care for those who are sick because of the heat — the government has been far, far too quiet.

Polanski went on to outline what urgent steps need taking:

In the immediate term, we need to keep people safe from extreme temperatures. That means a free, accessible cool space in every local area. And financial support for households to heatproof their home.

Second, we need a robust wildfire prevention strategy. A fire service with the resources it needs to tackle blazes when they come. That must include firefighting helicopters where needed, and not again seeing the shocking sight of requiring a charity to step in to contract a private firm to help fight the fires.

Right-wing press blame anything but human-made climate change for deadly wildfires

‘Complete strategic blindness’

The ‘Green Menace’ took aim at the corporate structures dragging the country to the point of peril. Polanski called out private profiteering at the public’s great expense:

And this should be funded by taxing the fossil fuel giants who are profiting from fuelling these infernos.

Finally, to secure our water supply, prevent droughts and protect our food system we need to bring water back into public hands. Right now, money is flowing out of our hands into the pockets of shareholders – just like water is flowing out of these companies’ leaky pipes in the middle of a drought.

Carl Benfield, a former soldier and engineer, spoke of his experiences alongside Polanski:

As a soldier and an engineer, I was used to conducting threat assessments and defensive plans. It is clear to me that climate change is the single greatest threat to human security we face. Removing climate resilience from our national defence priorities was an act of complete strategic blindness.

You cannot defend a nation if you refuse to acknowledge the very force that makes its infrastructure obsolete, burns its countryside, and threatens its food and water supply.

As Polanski and Benfield make clear, it’s time to acknowledge reality. It’s time to act — now.

Polanski slams climate inaction as heatwaves cost us billions

Featured image via the Canary

By Cameron Baillie

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Ecuador’s coast has become a crime scene, and Washington’s fingerprints are all over it.

The Canary interviewed two local humanitarians, published under pseudonyms for their protection. They generously offered us first-hand knowledge of the repeat attacks inflicted upon Manabita communities.

On June 14, prosecutor Alexandra Bravo was gunned down outside a café in Manta by a hitman on a motorcycle. Her sister, who threw herself in front of her, died too. Five shell casings. No sign of the police detail supposedly guarding her.

Bravo was, shockingly, the twenty-sixth member of Ecuador’s justice system murdered since 2020. She was the second person investigating US-linked state crimes killed in that same week.

What was she investigating? Three fishing boats — the Fiorella, the Negra Francisca, the Don Maca — hit by drone strikes in the Ecuadorian Pacific this year. Survivors say they were dragged aboard a US-flagged patrol ship, hooded, beaten, and starved for eight days before being dumped in El Salvador as “shipwreck survivors.” Thirty-six came home. Eight are still missing.

Ecuadorian lawyer investigating US drone strikes assassinated

So, why did they sink?

Tommy, a humanitarian worker with decades of experience documenting abuses on Ecuador’s coast, asks:

So, why did they sink? Why were those vessels attacked? There is no explanation.

Not from the Ecuadorian navy, nor from the port captaincy that ignored distress calls. Certainly there’s no clarity coming from Washington. US State Department war footage shared online first claimed the boats were trafficking drugs. Sure enough, the department went silent the moment survivors started talking.

Meanwhile, the receipts keep piling up. Drop Site News obtained tracking data placing the US Coast Guard cutter Bertholf near the Negra Francisca at the exact hour it was bombed. This was before the ship went dark and resurfaced off Costa Rica. Then, on the same day, tortured fishermen were handed over to Salvadoran authorities. (El Salvador’s ruthless president Nayib Bukele has made the country a US prison colony.)

NASA thermal imaging confirms the boat fire. Eyewitnesses even filmed the cutter itself. Yet the Coast Guard’s answer came resoundingly with flat-out denial: it

does not disclose cutter movements during law enforcement missions.

This is Operation Southern Spear — Washington’s extrajudicial bombing campaign. It’s now claimed 221 lives across the region, under the banner of fighting “narco-terrorism.” It involves no courts, no evidence and no accountability. Ecuador, under Miami-born billionaire president Daniel Noboa, has become its testing ground.

Noboa recently tore up a constitutional ban on foreign military bases that 60% of Ecuadorians had voted in late 2025 to keep. He’s let the FBI set up a seemingly permanent shop. He handed US forces the diplomatic immunity that now shields the very personnel accused of torturing his own citizens. All this from a president whose own family shipping company has been caught trafficking cocaine to Europe.

This is not incidental violence. It’s policy for oligarchic and military capture of Ecuador’s state machinery.

Trump’s war in Ecuador is about elite control, not about drugs

Ecuador’s reign of state terror

Describing a wave of forced disappearances carried out by army patrols, Tommy explains:

Between the military or public forces in general and criminal gangs, there is no distance — it’s fused.

There are at least 51 documented cases, including four Black children abducted and murdered in late 2024. When public outrage forced a rare prosecution in that case, the pattern didn’t stop. Tommy says:

It transformed into another type of abuse, because they no longer took them and hid the bodies, but instead they left them… badly beaten at the foot of hospitals or riddled with bullets, extrajudicial executions.

Anyone who investigates any of this swiftly ends up in the ground or in a cell. Environmental defender Mónica Silva was murdered in Montañita. An activist was jailed for 30 days over a tweet. Bravo herself was quietly reassigned off the boat cases days before she was shot, her replacement barred from speaking to press. The Attorney General’s office calls the file sealed — done and dusted.

Behind the prosecutors and the activists, families are left with nothing. Ana, a humanitarian worker with experience coordinating aid for fishing families in San Mateo and Jaramijó, says:

The wives and the mothers… don’t have access to food, they don’t have access to a house.

Some have fled to other areas entirely — internal displacement, driven not by gangs but by the lack of men who vanished off their own boats. Ana describes a legal system in collapse: staff at the judicial system resigning under threat, judges terrified, silence descending over an entire coastline.

Trump’s American empire: US operations are firing up across the continent

‘Probably the US military’

Speaking of whom survivors blame, but who fear keeps from ever filing complaints about, Ana says that survivors and the communities affected believe:

It’s probably the US military. If it was the US military… they have no interest in people knowing that it was the US military that made them responsible for what they did. They just want to let the cases go.

That is the entire strategy, laid bare: bomb first, deny always, and disappear anyone who asks questions. Then, let a client government in Quito do the dirty work of burying the file.

Ecuador’s November elections won’t touch any of it. As Tommy bluntly puts it, whoever wins

will have to subordinate themselves to that criminal and mafia dynamic.

The violence, the corruption, the impunity: they’re already “installed… in coexistence.”

Alexandra Bravo tried to pull one thread. She’s now dead for it. Somewhere off the coast of Manabí, eight fishermen are still missing. The empire that killed them isn’t even bothering to lie convincingly anymore.

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Ecuador — ‘Pain stopping time in a woman’s eyes’

Reporting after meeting the ‘Women of the Fiorella’, local journalist Ana Maria Islas wrote online:

It’s been a long time since I felt so much pain gathered in one place. Locked up, suffocating and filling the silence that leaves the disappearance of a family member. Pain stopping time in a woman’s eyes. …

Pain that does not know how to name itself, a pain that is a suffocated scream in the throat waiting to come out but that is held back because, again, hope says they will return.

The shroud of state silence chokes the women’s search for their fathers, husbands and sons. It likewise throttles their hopes for something approaching justice. Speaking of the vessels, Islas continues:

The two who returned are the only ones who have been able to give clues of what happened with their eight companions, clues that the State has wanted to silence in many ways.

From [the] Fiorella nothing but spinel was found, … and a column of smoke, an image that for six months has plagued the hearts of these women.

Islas underlines how the desperation surrounding the Fiorella occurs amid a growing US military presence in Caribbean and Latin American waters and airspaces. US military operation ‘Southern Spear’ terrorises Caribbean and Pacific fishermen and boat workers for almost a year, murdering hundreds. Islas calls it:

A presence that has killed and disappeared human beings and sunk boats at will. …

A presence supported by an Ecuadorian state that has handed over with full hands the sovereignty of its people, its sea and its land to the United States in exchange for belonging to a privilege club that promises “peace and security”.

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The eight Fiorella fishermen who have not returned are: Gabriel Aladino Mero Delgado, Jefferson Ariel Mero Cueva, Bryan Alfredo Arcentales Mero, Juan Alfredo Arcentales Anchundia, Joel Steven Valencia Mero, José Norberto Mero Quijije, Juan Carlos Valencia Mero and Carlos Adrián Mendoza Macias.

Featured image via Ana Maria Islas 

By Cameron Baillie

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Trump’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has set up a new Cuba task force. Its aim, it seems probable, is the overthrow of the ‘communist’ state just 90 miles of the Florida coast. The New York Times claims to have spoken to unnamed insiders with knowledge of the unit.

First, a caveat: intelligence sources brief the press for their own reasons. The US clearly wants regime change in Cuba, this is clear. We don’t know whether the briefing itself is meant to influence the relevant parties — part of an information war — or is a genuine leak.

The NYT reported on 5 August:

The C.I.A. has secretly established a Cuba task force, setting in motion plans for a more concerted campaign to pressure the Cuban government to make the economic, political and leadership changes demanded by President Trump, according to people briefed on the action.

The creation of the task force will allow the agency to quickly direct more financial, human and technical resources at Cuba, they said.

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The force includes all the people you would expect it to:

Case officers who recruit and manage spies, intelligence analysts, officers who conduct cyberoperations and officers who specialize in covert influence operations.

Control of the hemisphere is a core part of US president Donald Trump’s foreign policy. The Canary has written about this plan extensively. There’s a good starting point here. Our readers can catch up on US designs on Cuba here.

Needless to say, the intelligence agency and the island nation have a lot of history. Cuban officials said this kind of thing was typical of the CIA.

Cuban deputy foreign minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío told the NYT:

The intentions here are no surprise, since Cuba has long been the target of the C.I.A.’s efforts at espionage, subversion and destabilization, including terrorism.

And yet the State Department has the audacity to call Cuba a threat for exercising its right to legitimate self-defense.

Let’s take a look at the continental context.

Trump wants a fascist Latin America

Trump is backing leaders who align with his worldview. A new piece published by Canadian socialist author Naomi Klein, but written by regional experts Verónica Gago and William Callison, does a good job of describing this process.

They asked:

What might an increasingly far-right hemisphere look like?

Their answer?

Modeled on Argentine President Javier Milei and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, and unfolding in the shadow of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, it appears violent, chaotic, and yet also coordinated.

As illustrated by Rubio’s recent initiatives around the so-called Resurgence of Political Terrorism and the Shield of the Americas, the far right increasingly operates as a sort of “internationalist” project.

Rubio, a Cuban-American obsessed with the threat of leftism, is seen as a driving force here. The Canary recently reported on his ridiculous ‘left-wing terror’ conference.

As Klein and co point out, the US right is having some success in reversing an earlier trend which saw the continent move politically leftwards:

Around the turn of the century, the “pink tide” ushered in leftist governments and a “green tide” of feminist movements advanced abortion rights.

Recently, however, the tides have shifted: twelve of the last fifteen presidential elections have been won by right-wing candidates. Clearly, the regional canvas is being repainted.

They describe the region as no longer American empire’s ‘back yard’, but the ‘front yard’ for a new program of domination. A program meant to remake the region and  driven by:

techno-financial (especially crypto and AI), extractivist (critical minerals and fossil fuels to power them) and militaristic expansionism.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The full analysis can be read here. The failed war on Iran is still taking up a lot of US attention and military capability for now. But the Americas are still a primary concern. If and when Trump manages to disengage from Iran, we are likely to see a return to intense operations across the continent.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

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The Donald Trump regime was already getting its way in oil-rich Venezuela after illegally abducting its president in January. But two devastating earthquakes on 24 June gave Trump and his allies a chance to further solidify their colonial stranglehold. And interim Venezuelan president Delcy Rodríguez has seemed all too willing to help.

Rodríguez had already been seeking to please Trump since she took charge at the start of the year. But since June’s horrific natural disaster killed over 6,000 people, her subservience to US interests has been even clearer. For example, she has:

1. Withdrawn from the International Criminal Court (ICC) just as Trump has stepped up his attacks on the institution to defend genocidal Israeli war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. Academic Francisco Rodríguez called this “part of a bargain with Washington” that proves “Venezuela is a protectorate in all but name” and “is not conducting a foreign policy of its own”.
2. Signed into law sweeping changes to the energy industry which give Venezuela less control and private corporations more profit.
3. Allowed the US to take over Venezuela’s main airport and seaport, with around 2,000 US marines entering the country and US aircraft essentially controlling the skies and coastline. Former government official Elías Jaua called this “another escalation in the military occupation” of Venezuela.
4. Been cosying up even further with Benjamin Netanyahu’s settler-colonial apartheid state and its cheerleaders in the US Congress.
5. Given the green light for Elon Musk’s Starlink to operate in Venezuela.

Corporate vultures circle Venezuela’s devastation, with Rodríguez’s permission

At a London event on 30 July, an energy investment executive shared his thoughts on how things are looking for corporate interests in Venezuela under Delcy Rodríguez, especially in the wake of the 24 June disasters. He insisted:

The time is now… There is a window opening. There is an opportunity right now, and we can’t afford to miss that.

Many years of murderous US sanctions have helped to lay waste to Venezuela’s oil industry. But with the Trump regime now ‘administering’ Venezuela’s massive oil sales with Rodríguez’s compliance, corporations may be more willing to take the risk and get on board with Trump’s shameless neocolonial plan.

As author Naomi Klein has described, moments of national trauma can make people more vulnerable to political manipulation. Time after time, unscrupulous politicians have used tragic events like earthquakes to push through pro-corporate measures such as privatisation or deregulation. And Venezuela seems to be no different.

Elías Jaua, for example, warned that the area the earthquakes hit the hardest (La Guaira):

is set to undergo a process of gentrification and displacement of the local population, so that the Trump family, their associates, and business partners can secure the best plots of land to develop a real estate enclave linked to port, airport, and tourism services.

He said this following Rodríguez’s decision to allow real estate developers from the US to visit La Guaira after the natural disasters.

Local social activist José Félix Valera, meanwhile, told Truthdig about mainly US contractors clearing land despite ongoing recovery efforts. And this is prime land for development. Because as he added, the demolitions are taking place on:

the largest flat plots [of land] facing the Caribbean Sea in the region, and that has a lot of implications from a geopolitical standpoint but also for tourism.

Israel wants a piece of the action too

As the Canary reported previously, Rodríguez has also allowed Israeli figures into the country despite her predecessors’ longstanding (if sometimes inconsistent) opposition to the apartheid state’s crimes in Palestine. Talking about Israel’s post-disaster involvement, Venezuelanalysis explained that:

Tel Aviv is poised to play an important role alongside Washington in post-earthquake reconstruction planning, while the formal reestablishment of diplomatic relations appears imminent.

It also listed some of the key Israeli individuals and groups that entered Venezuela, which included:

• Occupation enforcers Brigadier General Elad Edri and reservist Brigadier General Yossi Pinto (who has a “documented record of war crimes and human rights violations”).
• Veteran occupation propagandists like Roni Kaplan and Yosef Garmon.
• Incoming Israeli ambassador to Mexico Yoed Magen — “an unapologetic proponent of US-Israeli genocide” who “has endorsed collective punishment” and endorsed both US-Israeli wars against Iran.
• Disinformation vehicle ZAKA, soft power whitewasher IsraAID, and occupation collaborators SmartAID and Magen.

A US takeover that was long in the making

Ever since the US lost its influential position in Venezuela following Hugo Chávez’s 1998 election win, the Western billionaire class has invested much time and energy into regaining control of the country.

In the early 21st century, the US couldn’t be as blatant with its terror campaign in Latin America as it was during the Cold War. So it tried numerous strategies to retake Venezuela. And Donald Trump’s first administration stepped up the hostility with brutal sanctions that hit ordinary people the hardest.

From 2017 to 2018, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) estimated that over 40,000 extra people died in Venezuela as a result of Trump’s sanctions regime. Amid this economic warfare, millions of people left the country. But the ultimate US goal of getting rid of the government still failed.

Venezuelanalysis‘s Ricardo Vaz told us in 2024 that, in all the Western news about Venezuela:

the main aspect that is either ignored or whitewashed are sanctions.

Ending the sanctions would help Venezuela recover. But that’s not Trump’s priority.

Following the 2026 earthquakes, sanctions are unlikely to end completely despite them impeding a proper recovery in the country. Because as Venezuelan political scientist William Serafino told Truthdig:

The sanctions are what guarantees U.S. appropriation of Venezuelan resources at a clear disadvantage to Venezuela.

The UN’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has said full reconstruction following the disasters would cost $37bn. And this is something that gives the US empire massive leverage. Because sanctions have helped to freeze over $22bn of Venezuelan assets in the international financial system, with London freezing a further $4.2bn in gold.

On top of that, the US has apparently collected over $13bn since January alone as a result of its mafia-style control of Venezuelan oil sales. The Trump regime will keep this money indefinitely (possibly until it’s absolutely clear that Venezuela’s government is under its thumb) despite the country’s urgent need for it.

In short, all of the resources the US and its allies have stolen from Venezuela could immediately cover the full reconstruction costs. But the Trump regime won’t give away its political and economic leverage that easily. So it has promised a pitiful $386m for Venezuela’s recovery, while exploiting the disasters to further its occupation.

Rodríguez, meanwhile, has no excuse

It’s absolutely true that a combination of illegal US military action and the ongoing sanctions regime have put Venezuela in a difficult position. But there is little in Delcy Rodríguez’s response in recent months to suggest she’s someone with any real interest in resisting Donald Trump’s neocolonial assault.

Other countries in the world have shown that even in the toughest positions you can hold your head up high and refuse to surrender.

Rodríguez, however, has chosen another path. By welcoming the US military, representatives of a genocidal apartheid regime, and unscrupulous corporations into Venezuela, she has willingly become yet another puppet for US interests. And there is no excuse for that.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

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In India, debates over the use of pellet guns on protesters have opened space for Kashmiris who have endured wounds from them since 2010.

Scroll India wrote that Kashmiri survivors of pellet gun violence are still awaiting compensation from the state even a decade later, and the current debate “gives them a chance to voice their grievances after a prolonged silence.”

Many survivors say the current debate over the use of pellet guns in Delhi protests gives them a chance to voice their grievances after a prolonged silence, @safwatzgr reports https://t.co/iwonZK0YvI

— Rokibuz Zaman (@ZamanRokibuz_) August 6, 2026

Scroll wrote that efforts by pellet gun victims to mobilise themselves and demand compensation died out in 2019, when the Modi government scrapped the special status of Jammu and Kashmir and turned it into a Union territory.

Now that pellet gun use has been in the news, this is a chance for them to make their voices heard again.

India — Pellet guns used in Delhi

On July 20, India’s Rapid Action Force (RAF) used tear gas, lathi charge, and firearms against protesters at Jantar Mantar who were demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged irregularities in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) examination. The Bihar youth movement was even fired at with an AK-47.

By The Canary

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In the latest twist in Trump’s defamation case against the BBC, the president’s legal team has filed an emergency motion to block the BBC from accessing his financial records, arguing the subpoena is a “disproportionate” and a “shockingly broad” fishing expedition.

According to the filing, made in the Southern District of Florida on August 5, 2026, the BBC’s subpoena for tax returns, asset histories, and business records from the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, the legal entity that holds the president’s business assets across approximately 400 affiliated entities, should be quashed. Or, at minimum, impose strict limits on what the BBC can access.

According to The Hill:

If the emergency motion is not approved, the BBC would be granted insight on Trump’s crypto and stock profit, as well as business transactions from at least 400 entities and companies tied to his personal assets managed by family.

The BBC also fired back on 5 August 2026. In its own filing in the Southern District of Florida, the broadcaster accused Trump and his trust of a ‘transparent effort to evade’ the court’s order. It pointed out that Trump has produced just 735 pages of documents in response to discovery — ‘consisting mostly of publicly accessible news reports and social media’ — while the BBC has already produced 88,855 pages.

The defamation suit Trump is pursuing against the BBC alleges the BBC “intentionally, maliciously, and deceptively doctored” a speech in a Panorama documentary to make it appear that he encouraged people to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. BBC apologised for the edit.

Irony of “shockingly broad”

The irony is hard to miss. Trump’s legal team is now calling the BBC’s subpoena a “shockingly broad” fishing expedition, complaining that the broadcaster wants to poke through his financial records across 400 entities in the very same defamation case where Trump is demanding $10 billion over a documentary edit.

Apparently, asking for $10 billion is perfectly narrow and reasonable, but asking to see the financial records that would actually prove or disprove that claim is just too much.

The emergency motion filed by Trump’s lawyers specifically calls out the BBC’s “tactic,” arguing that the timing of the subpoena, served just 25 days after similar requests were made to the president and before his responses were even due, suggests that the BBC is not genuinely seeking relevant evidence.

Instead, the filing suggests, the BBC is using the subpoena to pressure and dig through Trump’s entire financial universe for “political” reasons, rather than for legitimate discovery tied to the actual defamation claim.

By The Canary

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Pro-Palestine activist Paula Akpan has been cleared of criminal damage after a two-year trial. She had been charged with criminal damage after her role in a 2024 protest outside a genocide-linked bank. The financial services company Scotiabank, was one of many which held Israeli investments.

On 6 July, the Good Law Project said the woman had:

attended a protest outside Scotiabank on 17 June 2024, along with nine others. At the time, the bank was the largest foreign shareholder in Elbit Systems – holding a massive $500m stake in Israel’s leading weapons manufacturer, whose military hardware is directly used to target Palestinian civilians.

To highlight the bank’s complicity in the ongoing genocide, some of the protesters sprayed blood-red paint across the entrances, while Paula locked on to a fellow protester outside the building.

The organisation added:

The police hit all ten protesters with a group charge for criminal damage. Now, more than two years on, Paula’s name has been cleared, and seven of her co-defendants have also been acquitted.

Paula Akpan said of her acquittal:

I feel like I can breathe again. This process is designed to make you feel like the weight of the state is against you, simply for protesting Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people and highlighting the complicity of the UK state and financial institutions based right here under our noses.

She said the long wait for a trial was extremely difficult:

The last two years have been mentally gruelling for me and my loved ones

But it’s one of the honours of my life to have played a part in the international pressure on Scotiabank, leading to their full divestment in Elbit Systems last year.

Good Law Project’s lead lawyer on the case was Cat Knight. Knight said:

This is a great result for Paula, but it should never have gotten this far. The police’s response was entirely disproportionate, and it reflects a sinister crackdown on our right to protest.

As the Canadian Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) campaigners have pointed out:

This divestment does not exonerate Scotiabank, which maintains investments in arms and extractive capital. Its CEO Scott Thomson has been a loud advocate for the American “Trump doctrine” of foreign military interventions, as well as the “Global Defense Bank,” a proposed hub for military financing.

That said, activists like Paula Akpan have clearly put a big dent in the Israeli war machine, narrowing the space in which it can operate. Her acquittal is a victory for those fighting for universal human rights and justice. Those who fought for it are a credit to themselves and the broader movement.

The fight continues, not least in the UK where state repression of campaigners has escalated rapidly. But we can all take succour from Paula Akpan’s courage.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

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