US president Donald Trump has appeared to confirm – presumably unintentionally – that Israel has been targeting and killing Iranian figures who are, or could be, discussing potential peace deals with the US.

Trump claimed that the US is talking to a ‘most respected’ Iranian leader, but said that he couldn’t name him because “I don’t want him to be killed”. And as if further confirmation was needed, he slipped and said:

They’ve wiped out – we’ve wiped out – we’ve wiped out everybody.

Of course, Iran denies even having any such conversations and says it will continue the war the US and Israel started until its own war aims are achieved. So Trump may well be making up his claim – but the Freudian slip of his excuse for not naming a name still speaks volumes.

Featured image via the Canary

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is rolling out a UK-wide training programme to support project professionals in the nuclear industry.

The One NDA Project Academy is an expansion of a programme initially launched at Sellafield in 2016.

It will support employees at the NDA’s 17 sites in England, Scotland and Wales.

The news comes as the University of Cumbria was confirmed as the academy’s operator, continuing a relationship that began when the initiative started 10 years ago.

Previously known as the Project Academy for Sellafield, it has helped more than 7,000 people advance their careers through the academy’s programmes.

Primarily for Sellafield Ltd employees, the academy also took leaners from large and small businesses in Cumbria.

It offers more than 60 courses across a range of disciples, including:

• project management
• quality
• health and safety
• risk
• stakeholder management
• project controls

From short courses to degree programmes, all are designed to meet the evolving demands of infrastructure delivery.

Jacq Longrigg, NDA group people development director, said:

“The project academy has pioneered a fresh approach to professional development in programme and project delivery, setting new standards for the UK skills agenda.

Now, the academy will move onto the next phase and provide development opportunities for all our project and programme community across the NDA group.

We’re proud to invest in our people, our communities, and in the successful delivery of our mission.”

Under its new contract the University of Cumbria will lead the academy for 6 years, with the option to extend for a further 3.

Kate Dixon, director of the Institute of Engineering at University of Cumbria, said:

“We are delighted to continue our collaboration with Sellafield Ltd and the NDA Group.

The academy has become an important part of our identity, benefiting thousands of people and many businesses across the region. Its success has inspired similar programmes with BAE Systems, the BBC, and the NHS — and it all began at Sellafield.”

Andy Sharples, project director for Sellafield Ltd, said:

“I’ve seen first-hand the impact of the Project Academy has had on people, who are now helping us to deliver infrastructure projects at one of the UK’s most complex sites.

We’re excited to help create a sustainable pipeline of talent to support not only Sellafield, but any infrastructure programme in the UK.”

Greater Manchester Police are refusing to class repeated white supremacist attacks on Manchester mosques as hate crimes.

The Muslim Social Justice Initiative (MSJI) said that the attackers had desecrated Qurans and caused £30,000 in damage to Stockport’s Elaf mosque. The thugs had also attempted to rig a boiler to explode. MSJI also noted that police keep refusing to classify attacks on mosques in the area as racially motivated, despite four other attacks on the same mosque in the past year:

The Elaf mosque is not the only one to be targeted. In February 2026 a man armed with an axe, knife and hammer entered Manchester Central Mosque. Mosque officials said that the attack was part of a:

notable rise in threats and hostility over recent years [and an] increase in Islamophobic incidents.

The BBC, along with local press, did report the attack on its news website, but the BBC’s national coverage was limited to a single online article. This is a stark contrast to the attention given to an arson attack on ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity.

Israeli torture of Palestinians is a core state policy, a new United Nations (UN) report led by Francesca Albanese warns. The UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine found that various forms of torture have become tools of the genocide. And she warned that the practice extends far beyond prison walls:

In Gaza, #WestBank & East Jerusalem, Palestinians are subjected to a continuum of suffering – @FranceskAlbs denounces torture of Palestinians, says it extends beyond Israeli prison walls. “There is no refuge. No safe place to exist.” @UN_HRC #HRC61https://t.co/9IBBWMCF9C pic.twitter.com/QRRsh53y6j

— UN Special Procedures (@UN_SPExperts) March 23, 2026

Albanese said:

Since the onset of the genocide, the Israeli prison system has degenerated into a laboratory of calculated cruelty.

What once operated in the shadows is now practiced openly: a regime of organised humiliation, pain and degradation, sanctioned at the highest political levels.

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Albanese named Israel’s far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, among others, as having:

institutionalised torture, collective punishment and manifestly dehumanising conditions of detention.

Those responsible, she said:

 must face investigation and justice, including before the International Criminal Court.

The report said that in the aftermath of 7 October, torture became an “integral” component of:

the domination of and punishment inflicted on men, women and children, both through custodial abuse and through a relentless campaign of forced displacement, mass killings, deprivation and destruction of all means of life to inflict long-term collective pain and suffering.

Francesca Albanese centres settler colonialism

Settler-colonialism is central to Albanese’s analysis. And torture is a core tactic in the Israeli process of land theft and violent displacement. She accused Israel of carrying out:

A continuous, territorially pervasive regime of psychological terror…designed to break bodies, deprive a people of their dignity and force them from their land.

And Albanese said there was nothing random about Israel’s use of torture:

This is not incidental violence. It is the architecture of settler-colonialism, built on a foundation of dehumanization and maintained by a policy of cruelty and collective torture.

The Canary has reported on Israeli torture of Palestinian detainees, doctors, activists and children. One far-right pundit even called for the torture of climate and Palestine solidarity activist Greta Thunberg. You can read our reporting on the issue here.

A group of Israeli soldiers raped a Palestinian prisoner in one of the most high-profile recent cases. Footage of the rape was leaked, leading to a trial. Shockingly – and despite video evidence – all of the accused were acquitted on 12 March:

They raped a man.
They gang-raped him.
They raped him so brutally that he had to be hospitalized.
Doctors documented the injuries.
The video of the assault was leaked.

Now the rapists are free.

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This is not just unlawful and immoral. It is sick!#ThisIsIsrael https://t.co/8eSc7RNsJb

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) March 13, 2026

Israel enjoys impunity in its violence, whether in the jails or abroad in military assaults on Iran and Lebanon. At the heart is Zionist ideology is a chilling indifference to the pain of the occupied and any who oppose Israel’s expansionist plans. And Israel’s allies, the UK included, are clearly content to support Israel despite its use of torture as a state policy.

Featured image via the Canary

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Oliver Dean is a political commentator with Young Voices UK. He studies History and Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where he is the President of the LSE Hayek Society

There was once a time wherein a university education was the best investment a young person could make. That time has since passed. Tuition fees have soared, graduate debt has ballooned to an average of £53,000, and courses that offer neither serious career prospects nor meaningful wage returns continue to attract thousands of applicants annually. This could be fixed if the government released the necessary data to transform higher education – yet it refuses to do it.

University used to be a rite of passage.

One would leave home, perhaps freckle-faced and optimistic about their life chances, and have their ideas and opinions challenged by world-renowned professors. They would emerge from university, equipped with the skills and ideas needed for a career. Yet this is no longer the case. Graduates now become ensnared in a student debt trap, trying to put a dent in the balance which just keeps rising. Indeed, higher education has stopped being about intellectual transformation and started being about financial survival.

Such a shift is worrying for the state of tertiary education in Britain, yet there is a way in which the government can begin fixing such an issue. However, since 2015, they have refused to do it.

The government holds a centralised database of Longitudinal Education Outcome (LEO) data. Simply put, it is a breakdown of what graduates actually earn, by university, by course and by year, grounded in tax receipt data. It is exactly the information a would-be student needs before committing to a £50,000 decision. And yet it remains locked away, accessible only to a handful of approved researchers. Everyone else is left to piece together a picture from a patchwork of university brochures and a select through higher education-focused websites.

The consequences of keeping such information under lock and key are predictable. Without reliable data, students make choices based on university marketing and vibes rather than market reality. The explosion of so-called “Mickey Mouse degrees,” courses that leave graduates worse off financially than had they never enrolled, is not an accident. More than 27,000 young people have been funnelled into qualifications that don’t deliver since 2022. And in return, they have been gifted a lifetime of debt and little in the way of career prospects.

Some will argue that the data is already available and, technically, this is true. But scattering figures across dozens of competing websites, presented in incompatible formats, is not the same as making information available. It is bureaucratic cover for the status quo. If the government genuinely believed in informed choice, it would provide a single, accessible platform where students, parents and teachers could compare outcomes clearly and honestly. In the current system, the only groups that benefit are the universities that are pulling the wool over students’ eyes.

By publishing the data, universities that do not offer value for money would face accountability. Students would punish them by going elsewhere, or opting not to go to university whatsoever – instead focusing on building real-world skills in an apprenticeship or full-time employment. The degrees and institutions which provide real value would be allowed to thrive, and those that don’t would be phased out. This would not only ease the strain on British universities, but it would prevent the rise of credential inflation and save thousands of young people from becoming entangled in a lifetime of debt.

The government spends billions subsidising student loans it knows will never be repaid. The least it can do is give students the information to make better decisions in the first place. Releasing the LEO data won’t solve the higher education crisis overnight. But it would be the first honest thing done about it in years, and could be the first major step to fixing the higher education crisis.