Oh FFS. Here we go again with the rotten core of the British establishment brazenly shielding its own from the real horrors they’ve inflicted.

In capitalist Britain, power protects predators.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor — the nonce formerly known as “Prince” — gets hauled in on his 66th birthday for “misconduct in public office,” a typically slimy, bureaucratic catch-all that basically comes down to him leaking some trade secrets to his paedo pal Jeffrey Epstein back when he was playing trade envoy.

It’s a charge that might land him in a cushy cell for life in theory, but we all know it’ll end in a slap on the wrist, a quiet settlement, or some sausage-fingered royal intervention to make it vanish like those military titles did some years ago.

Call me a cynic, but this appears to be a deliberate sidestep by the police and the Crown to avoid the elephant in the room — sweaty Andrew’s well-documented alleged abuse of Epstein’s underage victims.

Think about it, the old bill has dusted off some ancient misconduct law about sharing memos with a dead sex trafficker, instead of charging him with the rape, exploitation, and paedophilic predation that’s staring them in the fucking face.

It’s class war, motherfuckers

From where I’m standing, this reeks of class warfare at its most disgustingly insidious. The ruling elite get to play by an entirely different set of rules. While poor and working class people rot in prison for something like petty theft, selling a bit of pot, or protesting against genocide, these billionaire parasites dodge accountability for systemic abuse.

At what point do we consider revolution to be a just and necessary course of action? Personally, I don’t think 99% of Britain has the balls for anything like that.

The French had the right idea, and I don’t mean tractor blockades but the guillotine blades dished up to their parasitic royals in the late 1700’s, shortly before Reform UK’s founding conference.

Okay, maybe we don’t need to see literal heads rolling into a crested wicker basket. There are still plenty of uninhabited islands where we can drop off the predatory elites, or better still, feed the Great White Shark population with some billionaire nonces.

See, I’d make a fucking great Secretary of State for Justice.

Nobody actually believes this is law enforcement, do they? Surely they also think it’s a grubby cover-up, a way to placate the public with a performative bust while ensuring the nonce never faces the full weight of his depravity?

My position on the British monarchy isn’t complicated and couldn’t be any clearer. Let’s get every single skeleton out of the closet, including the already-dead Duke of Kent, return the jewels, seize the estates and seek justice for the victims of the predatory elite. Let’s drag every single complicit aristocrat into court for their actual crimes against humanity, rather than tiptoe around naming the paedophiles and their enablers in statements, treating them like fragile glass instead of the filth that they are.

Meanwhile, let’s go after the Greens

I put the radio on in the car earlier, fully expecting to hear a heated debate between royalists and republicans. A former Prince being arrested is pretty big news, after all, even if it is no different to a serial killer being arrested for a minor assault.

Instead, they were discussing the Green Party’s position on the legalisation of drugs.

Funnily enough, I originally planned to write a thousand-word piece on why a Green victory in Gorton and Denton would be a victory for common decency, the British left, and bigger boobs for the many, but along came the misconduct distraction, and here I am, distracted.

Anyway, Gorton and Denton…

Be in no doubt, the Greens absolutely must crush it in the Gorton and Denton by-election on Thursday. This isn’t an ordinary by-election as the Green candidate, Hannah Spencer must not only smash the rotting facade of Starmer’s Labour betrayal, but also block the fascist-adjacent Reform UK from poisoning the well.

Labour and Reform must lose the Gorton and Denton by-election.

Hannah Spencer, a no-nonsense local plumber and councillor, is my kind of candidate. She’s not some polished elite, she’s from the trenches, pushing for public energy ownership to slash bills and reclaim profits from offshore fat cats.

A two-horse race

The Labour Party cannot win this election. Their best hope was with Andy Burnham, but they blocked him from standing, rigging their own NEC to protect Starmer’s cushy Westminster bubble, prioritising party machine hacks like Angeliki Stogia over actual fighters for the people.

This is a two-horse-race between the Greens and Reform UK. The Greens, under Zack Polanski, are surging as the true anti-Reform bulwark and the myth of Labour Party invincibility has been well and truly shattered.

While the emergence of the new Reform splinters such as Restore and Advance are likely to have damaging implications for the Farage party in the long term, here and now, the red part of Gorton and Denton need to do the right thing, and vote Green.

The choice really couldn’t be any clearer. Enable the far-right with a vote for a discredited, deceased Labour Party, or deliver a seismic, historic victory for the left.

Vote Green, please

On the off-chance of a Labour voter in Gorton and Denton reading this now, please, put party preference to one side and get behind the Green candidate. And if you don’t like her, you’ll have the chance to vote her out in three years.

Will you have that chance if your constituency becomes a solid base for Farage photo-ops for weeks to come? Do you really want to see that fucking horrible piece of shit in every supermarket, pub and petrol station forecourt while you’re just trying to get the school run done, just because there’s something you don’t quite like about Polanski?

If the people want to send a clear message to Keir Starmer, the only vote to consider is for Hannah Spencer and the Greens.

Any other vote is an endorsement of Reform UK and their super-rich string pullers, and that revolution I mentioned earlier — however it may look — will get buried under Reform’s boot and it will be full steam ahead for Farage’s hateful mob to metastasize nationwide, dragging us toward a dystopia of borders, bosses, and yet more bigotry.

Vote Green.

Featured image via the Canary

A police chief in charge of AI use has admitted that a new £115m national police data centre will produce biased and racist results. However, he also claims that police will try to mitigate that risk.

Which is all fine then, given that the police have done such a good job of combating their own racism so far.

Alex Murray – the National Crime Agency’s threat leadership director, and the national lead for AI – said:

Once you’ve recognised and minimised [bias], how do you train officers to deal with outputs to ensure that it is further minimised?

If you talk about live facial recognition or predictive policing, there will be bias, and you need to get in the data scientists and the data engineers to clean the data, to train the model appropriately, and then to test it.

Advertisement

There is no point releasing something to policing that has bias in it that’s not recognised, and everything should be done to minimise it to a level where it can be understood and mitigated.

AI use: ‘lack of meaningful oversight’

Labour have recently called for a massive expansion in the use of AI in policing. This has already been criticised in an early day motion tabled in parliament, with signatories including Labour MP Jon Trickett. The motion voices alarm at the creation of:

a surveillance framework resembling a panopticon, with asymmetric state power exercised over the population without adequate statutory safeguards or democratic consent; recognises widespread concern from civil liberties organisations regarding misidentification, algorithmic bias and lack of meaningful oversight; and calls on the Government to halt the rollout of live facial recognition and AI policing technologies

Part of the government’s initiative includes building a new national AI data centre, which will cost the public an eye-watering £115m. The centralised data centre would replace the current system, in which individual forces make their own decisions on AI in policing. Critics argue that this framework is slow and wasteful.

AI racism: they know, they’re doing it anyway

Alex Murray claimed that the centre would try to reduce bias, and to determine which private suppliers’ products work best. However, the police have form for neglecting to reduce or act on bias in their AI policing already. On the failure of a previous police venture in facial recognition technology, the Association for Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) stated that:

System failures have been known for some time, yet these were not shared with those communities affected, nor with leading sector stakeholders.

Furthermore, Murray also argued that a human police officer will always have to make any final decisions on what to do with an AI tool’s results.

This will, of course, come as absolutely no reassurance to anybody who knows that UK police forces have known about their own systematic racism and bias for decades and completely failed to address it.

Reproducing human bias

On the use of ‘machine learning’ in policing, I previously wrote that AI decision-making is sometimes perceived as unbiased and emotionless. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Rather, it simply hides the – very human – biases in its training dataset behind a veneer of cold ‘fairness’.

In her report on AI biases in policing, the UN’s Ashwini K.P. – special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism – also called out predictive policing. Back in 2024, Ashwini explained that:

Predictive policing can exacerbate the historical over policing of communities along racial and ethnic lines. Because law enforcement officials have historically focused their attention on such neighbourhoods, members of communities in those neighbourhoods are overrepresented in police records. This, in turn, has an impact on where algorithms predict that future crime will occur, leading to increased police deployment in the areas in question. […]

When officers in overpoliced neighbourhoods record new offences, a feedback loop is created, whereby the algorithm generates increasingly biased predictions targeting these neighbourhoods. In short, bias from the past leads to bias in the future.

Similarly, AI algorithms have also shown deep racial bias in its ability to recognise human faces. A study by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) on the use of facial recognition technology in the national police database turned up more incorrect matches for Black and Asian people than white people.

Darryl Preston – the APCC’s forensic science lead – said:

The discovery of an in-built bias in the police national database’s retrospective facial recognition system, even if only in limited circumstances, demonstrates the need for independent oversight of these powerful tools.

It is not acceptable for technology to be used unless and until it has been thoroughly tested to eliminate bias. That clearly was not the case in this instance.

Advertisement

Both Labour and the police themselves know – and have been reminded repeatedly – that AI policing produces discriminatory results. The problem is that they just don’t care.

They’ll continue pressing forward, with weak promises to ‘mitigate’ the bias. Then, when AI policing inevitably reproduces human bigotry against real people, we’ll get the same playbook we’ve seen before. A decade-late half-apology, sworn promises to reform and do better, and then more of the same old bigotry.

Featured image via the Canary

Former Labour staffer and former Stevenage councillor Conor McGrath has been charged with “taking or making indecent images of a child”. McGrath, who used to work for Israel-funded MP Kevin Bonavia, was arrested after a ten-month probe by Herts Police.

McGrath appears to have been publicly quiet about Israel. But it’s unthinkable that Bonavia would have employed an anti-Zionist staffer. He therefore becomes the latest in a seemingly endless string of right-wing Labour figures linked to Israel who have been convicted or accused of child sex offences.

Starmer’s record as Labour leader is an appalling continuation of the impunity of celebrity paedophiles when he ran the CPS. He was hit in early February 2025 by a scandal over his peerage for former adviser Matthew Doyle despite knowing Doyle had campaigned for the election of a Scottish Labour paedophile. This in turn followed the scandal of the various appointments given to the disgraced Peter Mandelson despite his ardent fandom toward serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein — to whom he also leaked confidential state and financial information.

The iceberg

But those cases are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Starmer’s right-wing, pro-Israel faction is riddled with paedophiles:

• ‘Friend of Israel’ Liron Velleman was convicted of repeated sex crimes against a 13-year-old girl.
• In January 2025, former Blair minister Ivor Caplin was arrested in a sting operation as he allegedly attempted to meet a 15-year-old boy for sex. Local police went after local left-winger Greg Hadfield for exposing the explicit content Caplin posted on his X feed — Hadfield defeated the ‘vexatious’ charge in November 2025. However, no charges have yet been brought against Caplin and a court did not impose bail conditions after his initial bail expired.
• Hackney councillor Tom Dewey, an organiser in pro-Israel group ‘Labour First’, admitted possession of the most serious category of child rape images in 2023. The party knew of his arrest when it allowed him to stand for election. After his conviction, it blocked local women members from its systems to prevent them discussing the case.
• In March 2025 Sam Gould, another JLM activist who worked for Starmer’s health secretary Wes Streeting, quit as a Redbridge councillor after being convicted on two separate counts of indecent exposure to a 13-year-old girl.
•  The following month Dan Norris MP, an ally of Keir Starmer, was arrested over allegations of rape, child sex offences and child abduction.  Avon and Somerset Police says its investigation is still ongoing.
•  The same Dan Norris was arrested again for allegations of rape and sexual assault.

This issue is so endemic to the Zionist Labour right that it almost looks like a factional entry requirement to the party’s friends of genocide club.

Featured image via the Canary

The Royal Navy’s spokesperson has refused to confirm whether UK sailors are aboard American ships bound for Iran. This is despite one ship in the USS Gerald R. Ford’s carrier group always having a British navigator, according to the Royal Navy’s own website.

The denials persist despite previous confirmations by the Defence Secretary himself – albeit to a much more pliable media outlet than the Canary: Murdoch’s Sky News.

The USS Gerald Ford Carrier group is Iran-bound in the Mediterranean. The supercarrier and its accompanying destroyers are headed for the Suez canal. The group will join with other US warships in the Gulf as the US threatens to attack Iran.

British navigator

The Ford has been in the Caribbean for several months. The carrier took part in the kidnap of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.

Star and Stripes broke down the carrier group’s composition:

The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and presumably its escorts, the destroyers USS Winston S. Churchill, USS Bainbridge and USS Mahan, transited the Strait of Gibraltar on Friday, photographs posted by local ship watchers show.

As the Royal Navy’s own website bragged in September 2025:

USS Winston S Churchill is always deployed with a British navigator as a nod to the destroyer’s name but also to the close bond between the United States and the UK.

Note: “always”.

UK personnel may have been involved in the Venezuela raid in larger numbers. We asked the Ministry of Defence (MoD) about Venezuela operations in November 2025. We couldn’t get a straight answer then either.

Multiple UK personnel aboard

In November 2025, Sky News reported:

A small number of British military personnel – single digits – are understood to be deployed on USS Gerald R Ford, a giant US aircraft carrier, and other warships that form part of the carrier strike group that has been sent towards Venezuela.

The Murdoch-owned outlet said:

The defence secretary was asked whether these British personnel would be allowed to take part in any US attack on the country.

Healy replied:

We will make sure as we always do that our British military are consistent with international humanitarian law.

In terms of military and intelligence operations and sharing with the US, they are out closest security defence and intelligence partner and they will remain so.

Advertisement

Iran armada

The Canary asked the MoD if this was still the case on 23 February:

Can I confirm it is still practice/policy to have a British navigator on the USS Winston Churchill? And that there is one aboard currently?

I can only point you in the direction of a recent PQ [parliamentary question] on this topic, which is below.

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, whether UK armed forces personnel are embedded in the US Gerald Ford carrier strike group in the Caribbean.

Defence minister Al Carns replied on 12 January:

Featured image via the Canary

Global Justice Now director Nick Dearden has called for the annulment of any trade deals arranged by disgraced Starmer adviser Peter Mandelson. The call comes after Mandelson’s arrest on suspicion of leaking UK secrets to serial child-rapist Jeffrey Epstein.

Mandelson’s known closeness to Epstein did not prevent Starmer appointing him as a top Downing Street adviser, and as UK ambassador to the US. That closeness – ardour is more accurate – saw Mandelson sending Epstein hugely lucrative ‘insider trading’ information in emails exposed by the latest Epstein files release.

In an ‘X’ post linking to coverage of Mandelson’s arrest yesterday, Dearden wrote:

This guy has crafted some incredibly damaging trade and investment deals in the last 12 months, opening Britain to greater domination by Big Tech and Big Pharma. Those deals now must be reopened & rescinded.

https://t.co/nzMZyQmurG

Advertisement

— Nick Dearden (@nickdearden75) February 23, 2026

Mandelson had a wide reach

Dearden did not elaborate on what mechanisms could be used to rescind the deals, but he has advocated for US companies to be barred completely from European and UK contracts to rein in Trump’s global trade war. In the same article, he also correctly points out that trade has always been a weapon for the rich to use against poor people:

Trade has always been a weapon used by the rich to disadvantage the poor, and free market rules are always waived when the interests of the rich are at stake. There has never really been a distinction between geopolitics and the international economy.

But the rescinding should not just be of trade deals between states. Mandelson’s client Palantir, the US spy-software company, was awarded a massive contract to handle NHS data. The Green party has demanded an investigation into that same contract. Palantir was also awarded a £240m Ministry of Defence contract – without any competitive process. In fact, Epstein had invested in the company.

But this should not just apply to deals brokered by Mandelson. The former prince Andrew, whose appointment as trade envoy Mandelson pushed has also been arrested for leaking similar information to Epstein. Anything touched by either man is irrevocably tainted and must be undone.

Featured image via the Canary

Speaking to Zack Polanski, Green candidate Hannah Spencer has explained what’s motivating her to run in Gorton & Denton:

Green Party candidate for Gorton and Denton Hannah Spencer,

“It’s a really natural thing for anyone to assume that, oh I could never do that, I could never be a politician, I don’t know about politics, I don’t have this background”

“But all the skills you get in life, are the… pic.twitter.com/1uX9hW2HI7

— Farrukh (@implausibleblog) February 24, 2026

Advertisement

Spencer also noted that the “shit about me online” comes from a vocal minority.

Hannah Spencer: “I’ve got to find a way to do this”

Explaining how she motivates herself, Spencer explained:

This is kind of what life is. A lot of us that do jobs where you’re often kind of in the unknown and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever done before but I think a lot of us have more skills than we realise for doing stuff like this.

And I think it’s a really natural thing for anyone to assume that I could never do that. I could never be a politician. I don’t know about politics. I don’t have this background. It’s like, but all the skills that you get in life are the exact skills that you need from doing this.

This is a leap into the unknown. But so was me training to be a plumber. So was when I trained to be a gas engineer. So is every time I go to a boiler that I’ve never seen before in my life. You just see what’s in front of you and you think I’ve got to find a way to do this.

Advertisement

Polanski cut in to ask:

Wait, so you’re actually a plumber?

Spencer responded:

I’m going to set the record straight here and say, yes, I am a plumber.

Polanski later said:

There’s an Instagram post of where you went into the plastering college, and what had your… colleagues done for you?

Spencer explained:

Yeah, so I’d had the day off really kindly from my college tutor and they’d made a sign out of a scrap of plasterboard, and it said ‘Ministry of Plumbing and Plastering Hannah Spencer MP’. And they were all so proud of it, and I had a big picture next to me, and I was just smiling in such a cheesy way, and it’s really nice because there is a lot of shit about me online.

A lot of it’s very misogynistic, very sexist, like the idea that a woman couldn’t possibly do a job like this is still commonly held by some people, not the majority of people, but a very vocal minority. And so to go into this group of men who are really similar to me, like from a similar background, and just be accepted by them and not only accepted, but encouraged as well. And for them just to be like, you’ve got this, you’re absolutely going to smash it. Just, yeah, it just made my heart burst. I love that.

Featured image via Zack Polanski

A Liverpool player shared an exceptional experience during the holy month of Ramadan. Reds’ left back Milos Kerkez fasted for a full day for the first time alongside his Egyptian teammate Mohamed Salah, a move that garnered widespread attention on social media.

Hungarian player Kerkez posted a picture on his Instagram story, indicating that he was fasting for the first time ever. He captioned the post, “My first day of Ramadan,” adding a humorous emoji. Salah then shared the post, documenting his teammate’s participation in this special moment.

Liverpool’s squad includes several Muslim players, among them French defender Ibrahima Konaté and striker Hugo Ekitike, who recently stated that he observes Ramadan, considering it an opportunity to strengthen his spiritual connection and reinforce his personal discipline:

Kerkez’ experience comes within a broader context, as the English Premier League has adopted a special protocol during Ramadan, allowing matches to be temporarily paused to give Muslim players the opportunity to break their fast at sunset, a move that has been widely praised. In contrast, other European leagues have taken different stances, most notably the French Ligue 1, which has not adopted a similar protocol, sparking debate about the situation of Muslim players during the holy month.

These contrasting initiatives reflect the different European approaches to dealing with religious sensitivities within stadiums, between those striving to provide a more inclusive environment and those adhering to traditional procedures that do not take such considerations into account.

Featured image via Instagram

It’s been revealed that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) gave civil servants over £12.7 million in bonuses in the tax year 2024-2025.

The Telegraph revealed that the Department gave 86,757 junior members of staff an extra £141.10, totalling £12.7 million. This surpasses last year’s bonuses – totalling £11.2m paid for 82,526 members of staff.

Staggering DWP staff bonuses

To add to this, almost 200 senior civil servants received an average bonus of £2,122.35. However, some got even more than this. The permanent secretary, Peter Schofield, and other executives, Amanda Reynolds and Catherine Vaughan, all got somewhere between £10,000 and £15,000 extra last year.

Schofield is one of the people responsible for many DWP failures, including the constant mishandling of the carers scandal. In January he was forced to answer to the Work and Pensions committee for the department’s part in demonising carers.

Chair of the committee Debbie Abrahams asked him how the DWP could justify not making any changes and the department’s attitude towards carers. Steve Darling MP accused him of talking “blancmange”.

To this, Schofield gave a ridiculous soundbite

We care, we deliver we adapt. We work together, we value everybody

Schofield resigned recently, but this was claimed to be for personal reasons, not, of course, him taking responsibility.

DWP defends itself, naturally

On top of these cash bonuses, 57,785 junior civil servants were given reward vouchers of around £39.44. This added up to an extra £4.4 million.

The DWP have, of course, defended this. A spokesperson said:

The DWP is the largest government department with over 90,000 employees who work to deliver vital services to millions of people, including benefits, pensions and employment support.

It is important the Civil Service is able to remunerate its staff in line with the private sector to attract and retain the best talent, as it delivers on the Government’s priorities to create opportunity and reform the welfare system.

It is important that people are paid for their work. But Peter Schofield’s salary last year was between £205,000 and £210,000. This rose from between £195,000 and £200,000 the year before. That’s more than enough “remuneration” without an extra 10k on top.

Staff bonuses whilst disabled people are penalised

It’s disgusting that so many people whose jobs are to make disabled and poor people’s lives hell are then being rewarded for that. It’s like saying “well done on kicking that sick scrounger off the benefits they need to stay alive!”

But it’s especially vile when you consider that the narrative being pushed by the department is that their expenditure is so high due to benefit fraud. £12.7 million is no drop in the ocean, especially from a department that claims the only way to save money is to cut benefits.

From April, new, disabled Universal Credit claimants who can’t work will receive half as much as current claimants. This means that instead of £429.80 a month, new claimants will get just £217.26. That’s a loss of £212.54 a month and £2550.48 a year. But hey at least they can afford to give their staff a nice cushy bonus.

If the DWP were so desperate to save money, staff bonuses would surely be the way to go. However, if you’re gonna do a job that vile, you’re not gonna do it without a decent financial incentive.

It just proves how fucking awful the DWP is that the only way they can keep staff is essentially through bribing them to stay.

Featured image via the Canary

A murder victim’s disability received fleeting mentions in court when it emerged Zahwa Mukhtar’s hearing aid was found by police, where she died outside a Romford care home.

Giving evidence from behind a screen, witness Abigail Winter said the 27-year-old was “acting crazy”, “screaming”, and “shouting” along the road when she encountered her in Hackney.

During cross-examination, defence barrister, Michael Borrelli KC, asked if Abigail appreciated Zahwa had “serious hearing problems”. 

“No,” she stated. “I just thought she was very loud.”

Zahwa Mukhtar trial: ‘it happened so quickly’

At age three, Zahwa contracted meningitis, which left her deaf in one ear. 

A hearing aid, recovered from her ear, was one of several of Zahwa’s items retrieved from outside Chadwell House care home where she died in the early hours of Saturday 16 August. Her shoes, an earring, a fake eyelash and a brown and leopard print crossbody handbag were also recovered.

The aspiring accountant fell backwards from standing after a punch to the neck by the defendant — Duane Owusu, of Althorne Way, Dagenham — who denies murder and manslaughter. She suffered a fractured skull and fatal brain injury.

After watching distressing footage of the incident, tearfully Abigail said: “It happened so quickly. It was a blur. When he pushed me away, I didn’t see him hit her.”

Everyone was “screaming and shouting” to return to Zahwa, but Owusu said no, Abigail told the court. 

Nonetheless, the driver drove back towards Zahwa on two occasions — the second U-turn is what led to the car being stopped by police nearby on suspicion of drugs. 

The police stop had finished by about 5.20am and Zahwa was eventually found unresponsive by an officer at 5.31am after being alerted to her laying motionless on the ground by two separate passersby.

Evidence continues

When asked by prosecutor, Henrietta Paget KC, why she didn’t tell police about Zahwa, Abigail replied: “In my head, at first, I thought she was just going to get up and walk down while we were there, but I didn’t want to stand in front of them and say what had happened because I didn’t want them to think I was crossing everyone.”

“You didn’t want anyone to think you were a grass?” Judge Richard Marks KC interjected. Abigail agreed.

Footage from a Ring video doorbell footage captured Abigail and Paige talking while walking away. In it Abigail can be heard saying, “See, someone like that, she’ll fuck you and cry rape,” referring to Zahwa.

Mr Borrelli, defending, questioned what she meant. “That she was acting crazy and when I said about her being in the car and she kept saying she didn’t say what she said. She was crazy. She was acting mad.”

“Would you have made a comment like that about somebody you knew had been seriously hurt?” Mr Borrelli enquired. 

“No, definitely not,” she answered.

When she later learned Zahwa had died, Abigail remembered her and Paige “crying for hours”. 

“We were being sick. We were just really stressing.”

Events that night

Zahwa had travelled in a silver Mercedes with Abigail, Owusu, 36, and others, towards Dagenham after encountering the group for the first time in Hackney.

She had “just appeared in the group”, Abigail said, and later began getting involved in arguments between Owusu, known as “Nasty”, and the other men. Abigail didn’t believe the arguments were “serious” but told Zahwa to stay out of them.

She told jurors that Zahwa was “making a rubbing motion” and threatening to stab (“nank”) people in the car.

She added: “Her hands were down. It looked like she was sharpening something.” 

There has been no evidence to suggest Zahwa was in possession of a weapon.

It was agreed everyone, including Zahwa and the defendant, had taken nitrous oxide using balloons. At the house rave Abigail and the others had been at, she had taken up to two pills and several “small bumps” of cocaine. 

The plan was to go home after being in and around Stoke Newington Road, but Zahwa remained with them. 

“She was alright at first,” Abigail explained, but then she began arguing with Paige. “I’m not sure what it started over, but I remember them shouting at each other.”

“[Zahwa] went for Paige in the car and they had a little scuffle in the back. She grabbed her hair and started pulling it.”

The car pulled over, but Abigail was unsuccessful stopping the altercation. However, Zahwa apologised and was initially calm for a short time before “going mad”, Abigail alleged. 

“She was biting her nails and spitting them at us and kept saying, ‘White bitches’, ‘White trash’.” 

Her nails were aimed towards the floor of the car at Abigail’s legs, she clarified.

“The next thing I remember is she went to take a video of us.” 

Video evidence given

The seconds-long clip, a short pan of the car filmed from the back of the Mercedes at 4.33am, had previously been shown at The Old Bailey. On Tuesday, the prosecution drew attention to an “annoyed female voice that says, ‘Ah, please stop it’,” before the video cuts off. 

The video was recovered from Zahwa’s iPhone alongside photos of her leaving home at 7pm on Friday 15 August, another in Palatine Road shortly after 11pm and inside the pub shortly after midnight on Saturday 16 August.

Abigail continued: “Nasty said pull over the car and get her out because she was causing too much trouble in the car. I think he just said, ‘Pull over’.” 

“In what tone?” Ms Paget quizzed, but Abigail couldn’t remember.

She said: “He tried to tell her to get out the car, she wouldn’t get out. He threw her phone on the grass and said, ‘Go and get your phone’. Then he was trying to push her and she was hanging on to him.”

Zahwa Mukhtar trial continues

She added: “I just remember him getting out the car and I got out and ran round. [Zahwa] was out of the car and [Owusu] was out of the car. I ran round and he was shouting. 

“I didn’t want him to do anything or her to do anything, so I grabbed him to say ‘Stop! What are you doing?’ and he pushed me away. The next thing I see, she’s on the floor.”

The defence claimed that Owusu tried to get out of the car and stand up, so Zahwa, who had been sitting on his lap, “tips out backwards”. 

Mr Borrelli added: “He continued to get out of the car and then stumbles and trips over her.”

The trial continues. 

Featured image via the Canary

Presidential election failure Kamala Harris was trounced by Donald Trump in 2024. Barring a handful of deluded centrist melts, most of us could see it coming. Her insipid campaign inspired few and delivered even less.

Many suspected her silence on Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians was also a factor in the loss. Now there seems to be solid evidence that this was indeed the case. The DNC has refused to release the report, bizarrely arguing that publishing an analysis of why it lost an election would distract it from the business of winning elections.

But parts of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) secret 2024 election autopsy report have leaked. These sections say the Biden administration’s position on Israel-Palestine did real damage – culminating in a Trump win.

US news site Axios got the scoop:

Top Democratic officials who worked on the party’s still-secret autopsy of the 2024 election concluded that Kamala Harris lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza.

The report found a split between the left and right of the party (progressive vs moderate in the clunky US terminology):

Progressive and moderate Democrats are particularly divided over Israel, with the left more critical of that nation’s actions against Palestinians in Gaza and many questioning the U.S.’s unwavering support for Israel.

Go figure…

The report claims – rather weakly to be frank – that Harris “sought to strike a balance”

showing strong support for Israel while calling for a ceasefire and expressing sympathy for Palestinians under attack in Gaza as well as the hostages being held by Hamas.

If that sounds anything like a ‘balance’ then American ‘moderates’ need remedial English lessons – but that’s hardly new. Pfft.

A net negative

The IMEU Policy Project gave particularly damning feedback to DNC staffers compiling the report:

The IMEU:

works to educate elected officials, policy-makers, and voters and advocate in Congress and the Executive Branch for US policies that advance Palestinian rights and freedom.

Axios reported:

Activists from the IMEU Policy Project told the DNC that the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel was a factor in the party’s losses because it drained support from some young people and progressives.

And Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson for the IMEU Policy Project, said:

that during the meeting “the DNC shared with us that their own data also found that policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election.” Two other senior aides at the pro-Palestinian organization also said the DNC had drawn that conclusion.

They also underlined that:

Axios independently verified that Democratic officials conducting the autopsy believed the issue harmed the party’s standing with some voters.

Something of a ‘no shit, Sherlock’ moment then…

The full DNC report remains secret. The IMEU has claimed this is because of these findings:

The IMEU Policy Project is now accusing the DNC of withholding its report in part because of its findings on Israel.

The DNC has denied this. One Harris aide said the failed candidate has admitted the Democrats should have been better on Palestine:

Harris wrote that she privately “pleaded” with Biden to show more empathy for civilians in Gaza. But during her campaign, she declined to publicly break with him over Israel.

That may be the case. Or it may not. But the fact is that Harris didn’t break with Biden over Israel. Trump is now a year into his second term. And what a bloody year it has been.

The truth is if Harris was elected her government would still have been composed of pro-Israel imperialists. And they still would have groveled at the shrine of empire and private capital. The fact remains that but for an ounce of moral courage among a handful of comfortable, elite US liberals, the world could look quite different today.

Featured image via the Canary