The coast guard in Cuba have exchanged fire with what they say was a US infiltration force on 25 February. The shoot-out off the island’s north coast killed four and wounded six aboard the US-linked vessel. Survivors were arrested.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, an avid Cuba hawk, has been cautious in his comments so far. And the Cuban authorities maintain those on the speedboat fired first. Now the Cubans said those aboard planned:

an infiltration with terrorist aims.

A coast guard commander was also wounded. The BBC reported:

The Cuban authorities said they had established that all 10 of those on board the speedboat were Cuban nationals residing in the US.

They also identified an 11th person they said had been arrested and had confessed to being part of the alleged plot.

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The Cuban authorities claims those captured had:

prior records involving criminal and violent activity.

The BBC said:

Handguns, assault rifles and improvised explosive devices were recovered from the speedboat, along with other tactical gear, according to the statement.

BBC Verify said it had been unable to pinpoint the ownership of the boat.

Cuba: Bay of Pigs 2.0?

The incident will recall the failed 1961 US invasion attempt in the Bay of Pigs. The US is currently sanctioning Cuba even more aggressively than usual in a bid to unseat the government. The situation is so dire that Mexico is shipping humanitarian aid into the island nation.

President Donald Trump is determined to reshape the hemisphere, by force where necessary. Case in point, the US attack of Venezuela in January, and subsequent kidnapping its president.

Marco Rubio, the hard-right scion of Cuban migrants, is know for his rabid views on the Cuban regime. But he seemed reserved in his public comments. Rubio, who is in the Caribbean for international talks, said he was waiting for verifications:

Rubio was less reserved in the hours after the 3 January bombing and special forces raid on Venezuela.

He told reporters then that Cuba was:

run by incompetent, senile men, and in some cases not seen now, but incompetent nonetheless.

Rubio said:

In some cases, one of the biggest problems Venezuelans have is they have to declare independence from Cuba.

Adding:

They tried to basically colonize it from a security standpoint. So, yeah, look, if I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned at least a little bit.

There is no doubt the US wants Cuba – once part of the US empire – back under its control. And American covert actions are hardly a rarity in Latin America. A similar-sounding operation was mounted against Venezuela in 2020. It also failed. Two former US special operations soldiers were among those jailed. Details are hazy, but the playbook seems eerily familiar.

Featured image via the Canary

A group in Kettering has sent an invoice to North Northants council for £18,000. This is in respect of the removal of over 500 illegally displayed flags on lampposts, which the council itself declined to remove.

As the invoice shows, they’re charging £36 a pop:

As the invoice also shows, they’re probably not 100% serious. Unless those actually are their real bank details.

The war of the flags

For anyone who’s already forgotten, the summer of 2025 saw a new sport break out across the UK. Rival teams of DIY enthusiasts took it in turns to shin up lampposts and either attach or remove flags.

Generally the flaggers claimed they were expressing patriotism. Although their activities often centred on areas close to hotels where asylum seekers lived. And sometimes they defaced the flags with slogans such as “Stop The Boats”.

Those removing the flags occasionally pointed to the alleged illegality of hanging them on street furniture. Some felt they made the area look shabby, often being hung with no regard for formality or aesthetic impact. One council had a bit of a dilemma over whether to prioritise the flags or Christmas decorations.

Jamie Driscoll made the point in the Canary that flags, in themselves, are largely a tool of tribalism. This can be a relatively harmless phenomenon. But in the case of the flag wars it became damagingly divisive.

The Kettering Flagdowners say:

Flags for Kettering are hiding their nasty and divisive right wing agenda behind a cynical veneer of ‘patriotism’.

They add that many other local authorities across the country have been routinely removing such items. And in some cases those responsible for putting them up have themselves received invoices for the cost of removal.

The Flagdowners call upon North Northants council to take down all illegally displayed flags on street lights and to invoice Flags for Kettering (who have illegally been putting them up) for the costs of removal.

Featured image via the Canary

Pentagon-funded think tank RAND says ‘seeming victory’ could become a ‘decisive defeat’ in Gaza when global ‘public opinion’ finally catches up to Israel.

Of course, the military think tank never actually calls what is happening in Gaza a genocide, or that Israel is committing war crime after war crime. The concern it has is with the bad PR Israel’s “kinetic operations” are generating and their “strategic” impact on Israel.

Kinetic warfare is defined as the deliberate use of — or credible threat to use — physical violence and/or physically disruptive actions to undermine security, damage confidence in democratic governance, and/or destabilise democratic society.

RAND, which works directly for the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Department of Homeland Security, in its commentary seemingly condemns Israel’s lack of engagement with counterinsurgency models that the US used in the Malayan Emergency, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It says:

Unlike their U.S. counterparts, the Israeli security establishment never embraced the population-centric counterinsurgency model. Indeed, some Israeli analysts were openly disdainful of it, partly because they believed that trying to win hearts and minds among the Palestinian population was impossible.

Oct. 7 only reinforced this long-standing belief. Polls taken a couple months after the terrorist attack showed that more than seven in 10 Palestinians surveyed supported the Hamas attack. And so Israel tried a different, far more kinetic, method in Gaza.

In RAND’s words, could the IDF have “stemmed some of the loss of international support” by embracing the “‘hearts and minds’ side of counterinsurgency”

Here is what RAND never says: maybe Palestinians don’t want their “hearts and minds” won by a settler colony. People will always oppose colonialism. Colonialism cannot be wished away with military jargon like “mow the lawn” or managed with counterinsurgency manuals. People want their freedom. Full stop.

Before October 2023, Israel Called It ‘Mowing the Lawn’

“Mowing the Lawn” or “Mowing the Grass” emerged in Israeli political culture around the turn of the century, according to a study, as the military-political strategy defined as regularly targeting Palestinian leadership, facilities, and infrastructure to control their growth like a lawnmower controls grass growth.

Even the New York Times (more aptly, the New York Crimes) pointed out in 2014 that “critics say the use of such terminology is dehumanizing to Palestinians and tends to minimize the toll on civilians as well as militants,” as Israeli officials were open about their aims with such tactics.

Yoav Galant said in a radio interview in 2014:

This sort of maintenance needs to be carried out from time to time, perhaps even more often

In RAND’s analysis, October 7 proved that “mowing the grass” never worked as Hamas couldn’t be “deterred, nor contained, nor appeased.” Hence, came Israel’s carpet bombing and bulldozers.

Not featured in RAND’s analysis: the barbarity, illegality, and utter lack of morality baked into the “mowing the grass” approach from the start. RAND is worried about whether the strategy worked or not.

Normalising Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency theory, or COIN in Pentagon-speak, is the military doctrine of fighting insurgency by winning over the population with ” a series of economic and political inducements.”

It assumes the problem is insurgency against the occupation, not the occupation. Further, it assumes that this problem can be solved by “economic and political inducements,” i.e., corruption, bribery, and propaganda.

Of course, the USA has a rich history of COIN. It has practiced this theory against Americans themselves, too.

J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI called it COINTELPRO. In 1967, the FBI quietly unleashed the covert surveillance operation targeting “subversive” civil rights groups and Black leaders. The objective, according to an FBI memo: to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralise” the Black freedom movement.

The UK has its own practitioners. Morgan McSweeney, until recently a key figure in Keir Starmer’s inner circle, learned the playbook well.

As Paul Holden’s The Fraud, serialised by the Canary, reveals, McSweeney used Labour Together funding to infiltrate Corbyn-supporting Facebook groups, trawling for posts to weaponise. He then fed the most damaging examples to friendly journalists at the Sunday Times.

Morgan McSweeney also told his fellow saboteurs, “kill the Canary before the Canary kills us“.

This is the awful truth about RAND’s commentary: it normalises colonialism in sterile military jargon, reducing questions of life, death, and freedom to matters of tactical efficiency. It treats Palestinians as “the population” to be managed, not a people demanding liberation.

Featured image via Aljazeera

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Ukraine has opened its first drone factory in the UK. The facility, near a US military base in Suffolk, will mass produce unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for the war with Russia. Arm firm Ukrspecsystems will fulfill the  contract.

UK’s Minister for Defence Readiness Luke Pollard attended the opening. He told those assembled:

We’ve been supporting Ukraine with training of military personnel for quite a few years now, but for Ukraine to stay in the fight having more assured and resilient industrial production is essential.

That’s what this factory provides, so it is a really important step in the UK-Ukraine partnership, making sure we can keep Ukraine in the fight for longer as we get towards what I hope will be peace.

The UK is also building an arms manufacturing hub in Ukraine.

Ukraine arms base

The British government has said that a three-year fully funded deal has been struck between Ukraine and the UK.

Defence secretary John Healey said on 16 January:

An Armed Forces is only as strong as the industry that stands behind them.

Healy said the new deal ensured even small UK arms firms could get involved. This was all framed as “supporting Ukraine” “and securing peace”:

This new centre will supercharge that effort and ensure British companies, no matter how small, can support Ukraine in the fight today and help secure the peace we hope to see tomorrow.

The National Armaments Director Group will manage the centre. The current director is Rupert Pearce, appointed in October 2025.

The BBC said the new drone factory in Suffolk:

It is also close to Elmsett Airfield, near Ipswich, which will be used to train drone pilots and test out the machines before they are deployed to soldiers on the frontline.

The factory will make up to eight types of UAV to send on to Ukraine. Militarisation is accelerating across Europe. President Donald Trump’s demands that European nations stop relying on the US have compounded this. In the clamour to rearm, there is very little space to discuss what a more just and less war-like economy might look like.

Featured image via the Canary

Three Offline Resets To Try Today

On BBC, Victoria Derbyshire interviewed a university graduate who shared his experience with lofty student finance repayments. Pointing out how much he has paid in ‘a few years’ of working, Derbyshire asked if comfort is found in the knowledge that the public fleecing ends after 30 years.

The privileged elder misses the point that 30 years of accumulating interest will drive repayments far beyond the original loan, generating a significant profit for the state.

This incident exposes how the establishment is perfectly willing to squeeze more money out of young people to boost public coffers, all while claiming that there are ‘too many options’ available to prospective students. At the same time, they refuse to consider measures like a wealth tax, arguing that the richest would simply leave.

When quality education leads to better jobs, stronger economic growth, and ultimately higher tax revenues, the double standard becomes clear. The state targets those trapped within the system for profit, while avoiding any serious effort to make the rich and powerful contribute more.

A country that does this to its smart, ambitious young people deserves to fail. It’s no deeper than that.

The grim truth is large parts of the political and media class have hated young people for a long time now. Generation PAYE-pig.

pic.twitter.com/FWKTDmgb4c

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) February 25, 2026

Captive students: Low-hanging fruit

Recently on Good Morning Britain, Martin Lewis successfully challenged Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch on her attempt to revise student loan repayment Plan 2 as a solution to the student debt crisis. The money-saving expert rightfully pointed out it would be easing things slightly for one group, whilst ignoring all others. This prompted widespread debate with graduates across the country supporting Lewis’ calls to wipe student debt that is creating a deadweight effect on workers in the economy.

A highly lucrative deadweight that was clearly pointed out by Max in the interview, which went as follows:

Victoria Derbyshire: Let me ask you then, Max, how much did you borrow in total?

Max: So, I borrowed £84,000 in total, and that’s about half tuition fee, and the rest maintenance loans that you need to live on and pay your rent whilst you’re there and so on.

Derbyshire: And how much have you paid back so far?

Max: I’ve paid back about £8,000 over the past few years that I’ve been working.

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Derbyshire: And how much do you owe now?

Max: £110,000.

Derbyshire: Oh, my God.

Max: Yeah.

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Derbyshire: What does that feel like?

Max: Well, I mean, it feels ridiculous because I know I’m never going to be able to pay that back. So for me, this is no longer a student loan. It’s a lifelong graduate tax.

Derbyshire: Right. Do you take any comfort in the fact that after 30 years, if you haven’t paid it back, it’s wiped out?

Max: Well, I feel like that’s a bit of a misconception because the fact that people end up not clearing their debt within 30 years actually means they end up paying for longer because the interest rates are so high and they’re often going to end up paying more than they actually borrowed. So you’re trapped.

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Derbyshire: Right. That’s how it feels.

Max: Yeah.

Derbyshire appears to ignore the fact that if Max continues at his current repayment rate, without any future pay rises increasing his contributions, his repayment would be at least £88k. This shows he will still repay the full cost of his original loans and then some over 30 years. Therefore, the expiration date of this unavoidable “student tax” offers no comfort when it only signals the conclusion of exploitative interest charges.

After all, education is an investment in the future of the economy. Seeing it as a source of profit instead is counterproductive and just works to undervalue graduates.

Our youth are not the ‘magic money tree’

Since Lewis’ principled and informed intervention, others with specialised insight into university education have spoken out. Historian and former university head Sir Anthony Seldon even argued that Lewis should take on a four-week role to fix the mess former Labour and Conservative governments created.

We wrote:

Contrary to the Conservatives’ policy being dangled like a carrot to voters, historian Anthony Seldon has called for all student debt to be wiped. He went further, urging the government to accept that it must stop treating students as a source of profit. Instead, Seldon argued that they already contribute to the economy through the skills and expertise they develop at university.

Furthermore, Seldon emphasised that higher education is about far more than achieving high grades or obtaining a certificate. After all, it is a formative experience where young people develop vital life and social skills. Also, it’s essential for improving critical analysis skills with young people engaging in progressive, informed debate.

The neoliberal state will likely continue to insist there is ‘no magic money tree’ to address the scale of underfunding across society. Yet at the same time, the wealth of the richest has soared at record-breaking rates. Therefore, those who once benefited from free education now resist asking the wealthiest to contribute their fair share in taxes. Instead, they continue to target the easy pickings — students striving for opportunity and a better life.

The government have stated they will ‘look at ways to make it fairer’. Easy. Deploy wealth taxes to ease the burdens facing graduates and students across the country.

Featured image via Green Country

On Wednesday, one fan asked the Oasis frontman whether he’d be putting in an appearance at the Brits this weekend, to which he responded: “I’m not.”

Candid as ever, the singer remarked: “I can’t be around those ITV cunts.”

In more X posts, Liam claimed that he was “just not feeling this [Rock And Roll] hall of fame thing”, but conceded he would attend the ceremony all the same, mainly to “collect it”, “tell the panel of judges how lovely they all look”, “thank all the fans that voted for us” and then “wreck the gaff”.

In 2010, he even got on the wrong side of Peter Kay, when he accepted the award for Best British Album Of The Last 30 Years, completely snubbed his brother in his speech, then tossed his award into the crowd.

“What a knobhead,” the comedian – who was hosting the Brits that year – remarked.

Oasis certainly saw a chart resurgence in 2025 thanks to their much-hyped reunion, but Noel’s award has proved to be a controversial one given that he didn’t actually release any new music at any point in the last year.

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Oliver Dean is the digital editor of Mace Magazine and a political commentator with Young Voices. He studies History and Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Recently the Liberal Democrat economic spokesperson, Daisy Cooper, set out her party’s economic framework.

She did so at a press conference hosted by UK Finance, and the announcement marked the first major policy proposal the party has put forward since the 2024 election. But, whilst many Liberal Democrats were likely overjoyed by their party’s announcement, Cooper’s words left many scratching their heads and wondering how anyone could take her party seriously.

Perhaps the most peculiar announcement Cooper put forth was her idea to scrap the Treasury and, in its place, create a new Department for Growth. Her defence of such a radical idea came from the fact that, “in other countries” the bodies that cover “fiscal policy, economic policy and controlling government spending” are “split up.”

It may sound like a good idea on paper. After all, if other countries are doing it, why should Britain not join them?

But joking aside, such an idea is a prime example of a sweet nothing.

The evidence for this is overwhelming. For one, they would move this new Department to Birmingham. The reasoning behind this move is to reduce the inequality gap between London and the rest of the country. However, what no one seems to have told the Liberal Democrats is that simply moving a government building to a different city is not a means to produce economic growth. It is not as though the Treasury is some major economic force that drives up the country’s GDP. Moving this supposed ‘Department for Growth’ outside of London will not solve the countries’ economic issues in the way Cooper expects it to.

What is most telling, however, was the Party’s insistence that they “do not anticipate any cuts” to come with these new policies. True, the Liberal Democrat ethos appears to be spend, spend and spend some more and just hope that something works. At current rates, for instance, the government is expecting the welfare bill to rise by £20 billion more per year until the end of the Parliament. How, then, can the Liberal Democrats sit there with a straight face and not consider cutting any level of public spending? Total public spending is ballooning out of proportion, and yet Daisy Cooper and her allies appear to be blind to this economic reality. The truth is that if they are not to cut spending, they are left with just two options.

Either they would be forced to increase borrowing. Or, if they wished to take the other route, they would need to raise taxes. Both of these options would hinder the opportunities of future generations. The crux of the matter is that the Liberal Democrats are in a position to say such niceties – that cuts are not necessary, that they will mend the country’s woes – because they are, thankfully, never going to be near a position of power.

They can promise voters the world, and never be forced to deliver. They push policies in an attempt to grab headlines, and whilst it may work for a day or two, the votes they bleed as a result will far outweigh any positive media reception they may receive.

Indeed, such fiscally irresponsible nonsense comes at a time when their party leader is viewed by many as a joke. If he is not falling off a kayak, or partaking in some type of cringe-inducing photo opportunity, he is likely running his party’s credibility into the ground.

Daisy Cooper’s announcement has thus reinforced what many have known for a long time. That the Liberal Democrats are not a serious contender for government, and should not be allowed anywhere near the reins of power. The idea is radical, and unrealistic, but that is exactly what the Liberal Democrats can offer voters. They will never be held accountable for their undeliverable promises, and so do not care as to whether their plans are possible or not.

Perhaps we should all be thanking Daisy Cooper, for shining a light on the real Liberal Democrats.