Tag: united kingdom

British PM Confirms Suspects It Released on Bail Were ‘Highly Likely’ Tied to Iran Terror Plot

Britain’s prime minister has delivered a stunning assessment of the suspected terrorist plot targeting RAF Fairford, the British airbase used by American bombers during operations against Iran.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham told Parliament Monday that British intelligence believes the September incident was orchestrated by Tehran, with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) almost certainly directing the operation. 

And yet all seven men arrested in connection with the investigation were released on bail. Explain that one.

Speaking before the House of Commons, Burnham said: “I can confirm our assessment that it is highly likely to have been coordinated in Iran, almost certainly directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.”

He continued: “We will not tolerate these threats on our soil. We will crack down on Iran’s use of criminal networks using our full range of powers to target them and their funding streams.”

Burnham was lit up by critics on social media.

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What’s a 100,000 Dead Yemenis When War Is Profitable?

Based on his actions and words, Yemeni life matters little to Mark Carney. He supports monarchist/Zionist/US domination of the region.

Late Saturday evening the prime minister posted, “The Houthi attacks on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in particular the strike on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, are abhorrent.

There can be no justification for attacks on civilian infrastructure… Canada condemns these reckless acts of violence in the strongest possible terms.”

Carney was responding to Ansar Allah strikes on Riyadh’s airport that reportedly killed a dozen and injured many more. It’s reasonable to criticize the substantial loss of life. But Carney hasn’t said a word about hundreds of Saudi strikes on Yemen, which have killed far more civilians.

Two days earlier, Antiwar.com’s Dave DeCamp reported, “Saudi airstrikes hit a passenger vehicle in Yemen’s southwestern Taiz province on Thursday, killing at least two civilians and wounding six others, as civilian casualties continue to mount in the US-supported bombing campaign.” The Yemeni Health Ministry reported that a pregnant woman also lost her baby and two girls were injured in the attack.

Two days before, 14-year-old Athir al-Amri was killed by shrapnel when the Saudis hit next to her school bus in eastern Sana’a. Two classmates were also wounded, including one gravely.

According to a Drop Site News article quoting a spokesperson for the health ministry, Al-Amri was the 83rd civilian killed in Ansar Allah-controlled areas since the escalation began in September. The worst incident took place on September 7 when 35 civilians, including a child, were reportedly killed by a Saudi strike on a prison in the northern al-Jawf province.

Over the past six weeks, the Saudi-led coalition has reportedly launched 2,000 airstrikes on its southern neighbor. On October 5 the media reported that 100 Saudi fighter jets carried out over 150 strikes across Yemen while on Sunday Ansar Allah said the kingdom “launched 124 airstrikes in the past 24 hours.”

Montreal-based flight simulator company CAE has trained Saudi pilots in numerous locales. It trained them at a facility in Abu Dhabi and a US base in Pensacola, Florida. Saudi pilots have also trained at NATO’s Flying Training in Canada, which was run by CAE and the Canadian Forces in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Millions of dollars in Canadian-made rifles and billions of dollars in Canadian built armored vehicles have been shipped to the monarchy as the Saudis killed tens of thousands of Yemenis between 2015-2022. (The United Nations Development Program put the Yemeni death toll at 377,000 due to direct and indirect consequences of the war as well as the Saudi blockade.)

While it has received far less attention in recent years, arms shipments continue to the kingdom. The largest non-US recipient of Canadian arms, $1.3 billion was sold to the Saudis in 2024 and another $400 million in 2025.

On Friday the Globe and Mail published a guide for capitalists looking to profit from the violence headlined “Bet on These Defense ETFs Amid Escalating Yemen War”. The Report on Business article noted, “The conflict in Yemen has spilled across Saudi Arabia’s borders once again. Houthi rebels recently struck two airports inside the Kingdom, including an attack on the airport serving the Saudi capital that witnesses described as triggering an evacuation.

“Riyadh’s air defenses were tested in real time, underscoring a longstanding challenge for defense planners: the drone and missile threat from Yemen remains persistent, increasingly sophisticated and far from resolved.

“For investors, this is a relevant signal. Escalating attacks of this kind tend to accelerate demand for weapons systems like interceptors, precision-guided munitions, radar, and integrated air and missile defense architectures, designed to stop them.

“Naturally, defense majors that already hold direct weapons agreements with Saudi Arabia stand to see order growth, expanded backlogs, and stronger revenue visibility as the Kingdom is likely to replenish and upgrade its defensive stockpile. Against this backdrop, defense-focused exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which provide exposure to multiple prime contractors, offer a diversified way to capitalize on rising demand without betting on a single name.”

Throughout the 2010s Saudi war on Yemen the Canadian Embassy’s website claimed, “the Saudi government plays an important role in promoting regional peace and stability.” It’s been updated. Now the section on bilateral relations starts off noting, “Canada and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have enjoyed positive relations for over 50 years, grounded in shared interests in achieving economic growth, diversifying their economies, enhancing regional and international security, and establishing the foundations for global peace.”

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What the UK Terror Law Really Protects

That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know;
Those past, her nature and name is chang’d; to be
Then humble to her is idolatry.
~ John Donne, Satire III

Seven activists smashed their way into an engineering plant at Sandwich, Kent, before dawn on 17 June 2024. Instro Precision, the firm there, manufactures targeting gear for drones. It is a subsidiary of the better-known Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. The prosecution alleges that, once inside, the defendants threw stock to the floor, smashing computers with a crowbar – and puts the damage done inside the factory that morning at more than £1 million. Two days later, a British export licence (Instro Precision Ltd) to Israel was stopped. No one was injured in the raid.

The trial of those seven, plus two more (ten in total were originally charged), is now under way at the Old Bailey. The youngest of the nine is twenty-one, while the oldest is fifty-two, and they are: Nasser Akhtar, Elliot Wilson, Maximillian Dixon, Nirad Abrol, Seirol Davies, Xavi Davies, Eoin O’Meara, Hannah Davidson and Julija Brigadirova. The Crown has charged them with criminal damage, burglary and violent disorder, and the hearing will run for eight weeks. Prosecutors dropped aggravated burglary – the one charge based on intent to injure – before the case reached court. Indeed, over five years and hundreds of actions, Palestine Action has injured no one; MI5’s own Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre found that the group “does not advocate for violence against persons”.

In a report on this on October 1, The Grayzone discussed a secret meeting between the Crown Prosecution Service and senior UK counter-terrorism officers which took place just ten days following the Instro raid. Those heavily redacted documents showed the existence of a so-called “threat matrix” and how authorities are categorising political activity in the UK. For example, “high level aggravated activism” is defined as involving “unlawful behaviour that has… a significant negative impact on UK businesses”. Declassified UK separately reported that when the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre recommended Palestine Action’s proscription in March 2025, it turned its case on a mere three incidents, each said to have caused damage “in excess of £1m”, and actually presented that figure to ministers as evidence of “terrorism”. No mention of violence against a person there.

Instro Precision’s CEO is Dagan Yogev, and he served as a major in the 2006 Israeli assault on Lebanon, after which he held senior posts at Elbit’s headquarters before being appointed head of its Sandwich plant. Palestine Action raided Sandwich because it manufactures the targeting units fitted to drones used in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza as well as its illegal incursions into southern Lebanon.

Palestine Action’s offensive against Elbit has paid off since it closed an Elbit factory at Oldham for good in the years before any terror charge. The same campaign saw the firm retreat from its London headquarters. The state noticed this was biting in 2022, after some £280 million in Ministry of Defence contracts with Elbit had gone up in smoke, and domestic and European suppliers had begun to pull out. Come the Sandwich raid, Elbit was reeling – its factories closing and contracts lost to a movement that the courts had so far been unable to restrain.

The gravest part of all of this is that – as in the earlier Elbit trial – the British press cannot tell you the most sensitive bits, since a reporting restriction has been imposed on the trial, preventing the newspapers – and the jury deciding the case – from knowing that a conviction on any charge could lead to a terrorism sentence. The jurors decide on damage to property, and yet the matter that will determine the nine’s punishment is kept from them. So the UK media are covering the trial this week, but not one of them can report, under the restriction, what a conviction could mean for the defendants.

If section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 defines “serious (damage to property)” as terrorism – then on that one word hinges a world of nuance. Section 69 of the Sentencing Act 2020 is the mechanism that enables a judge to attach such a “terrorist connection”. So is a broken window just minor criminal damage and a matter for a magistrates’ court, or does it become a “serious” matter and possibly an act of terror to be tried at Crown Court? We have seen this playbook before, in the Filton case, in June of this year. The machinery ran all the way to sentence when a Woolwich jury convicted four Palestine Action activists of criminal damage for the raid on Elbit’s Bristol factory, and Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson then ruled under section 69 that the damage carried that “terrorist connection” – making legal history as the first occasion on which such a finding has been attached to the breaking of property.

Once that unprecedented, some would say authoritarian ruling stood, the sentences rose as high as eight years, with fifteen-year notification requirements imposed. The nine Instro defendants are currently facing that same finding, despite it having been declined in an earlier case by a judge who found the circumstances of a wrecked Barclays branch in Burnley “significant” but short of “serious”; though crucially the principle itself survived his decision.

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UK Airports Begin Replacing Passport Checks With Facial Recognition

In the UK, the government is now selling a switch to contactless facial recognition at airports as a time-saving measure for travelers.

And a major time-saving it is not – five seconds shaved off the previous 20 to 25 seconds it took to use an eGate.

The process of scanning your face instead of your passport is now in place at East Midlands Airport, and will be expanded to 13 airports by early 2027, the Home Office has announced.

The way it works is that your face is photographed as you approach the gate, and this is then compared to a gallery of passport photographs that the airlines have sent to border control.

But don’t think you can leave your passport at home – the government has made sure to inform citizens that they should keep it with them at all times.

This new “convenience” is available to British citizens first, with other nationalities to be onboarded in the coming months.

And what a win it is – for the government, that is. “This is a win for travelers coming to our brilliant country,” said Phil Douglas, Director General of Border Force.

He added, “Our digital transformation also builds on our work this summer to extend eGates to children aged eight and above, making life a little easier for families.”

The eGates are now available to children as young as eight, provided they are at least 120cm tall, and are traveling with an adult who is using the automated gates.

The government’s announcement was met with enthusiasm by the airports, with East Midlands Airport Managing Director Steve Griffiths declaring his facility to be “delighted” to be the first to introduce contactless eGates.

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British Raven System Burned by Ukrainian Defector Intel

The British public is still being told that every new shipment of weapons to Kiev is a righteous investment in democracy. The reality on the ground in the Sumy direction is simpler and far uglier. A Raven air defence system, one of the specialised short-range launchers London rushed into service for Ukraine, has been destroyed by a Russian Lancet. The strike did not come from routine reconnaissance. It came from coordinates provided by a Ukrainian soldier who had had enough.

That soldier was not a high-ranking defector or a carefully cultivated agent. He was a man inside the system who decided the beatings, the corruption, and the forced service were no longer worth enduring. He contacted Russian intelligence, gave the precise location, and the Lancet did the rest. The Raven, estimated at six to eight million pounds, is gone. Each of its ASRAAM missiles costs roughly a quarter of a million pounds. British money, British engineering, British political capital — all of it converted into scrap by a single tip from the other side’s own ranks.

The Raven itself is a classic example of the improvised Western approach. Engineers took surplus ASRAAM missiles, mounted them on Supacat trucks using launch rails stripped from retired RAF aircraft, and shipped the result to Ukraine in record time. Thirteen systems were delivered. Official claims spoke of hundreds of engagements and high success rates against drones and cruise missiles. Those claims now sit alongside the wreckage near Sumy. Mobility and “shoot-and-scoot” tactics were supposed to keep these systems alive. They did not survive the moment a Ukrainian soldier decided his own command was the greater threat.

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Outrage As Police ATTACK Teenage Girls

A video of South Yorkshire Police officers using aggressive force against a group of teenage girls on a Rotherham street has triggered widespread outrage. 

The footage shows shoves, a baton drawn and swung, girls knocked to the ground, a punch, and Tasers pointed at the group. 

What began as a dispersal order for breach of the peace escalated rapidly into scenes that many viewers describe as excessive and unnecessary.

The short clip, shared widely over the weekend, captures an officer telling the girls: “You are being dispersed for a breach of the peace.” Moments later, physical confrontations erupt. 

One officer shoves the girls forcefully. Another draws his baton and launches it toward the group. Two of the girls attempt to wrestle it away; one falls onto the road. 

A second officer punches a girl who had pushed him, sending her backward to the ground. Additional officers then arrive and point Tasers while ordering people back.

South Yorkshire Police issued a statement acknowledging the public reaction. “The short clip on social media of the police response to an incident in Rotherham over the weekend appears nothing short of shocking,” the force said. 

Their Professional Standards Department is reviewing all available footage, including body-worn video, from the full response to a 999 call. The assessment will determine next steps. The force added that officers are expected to act in a “lawful, proportionate, and fair” manner.

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UK’s Online Safety Act has silenced, punished free speech in ways that pose as warning to Americans

It’s a focal point of national discussion: online hate, misinformation and what constitutes each. While many Americans still consider the First Amendment a near-absolute for free speech, Britain has taken a starkly different approach. 

The country’s Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, was billed as protection for kids. But it’s unleashed what many consider disturbing policing of online speech. And it comes with a warning for people in the U.S. 

In Southport, England, in 2024, the British-born son of Rwandan immigrants stabbed to death three little girls and injured 12 others, slashing one six-year-old 122 times and trying to cut off her head. The horrific murders sparked riots and a free speech crackdown.

Jamie Michael, a former Royal Marine and father of two young daughters, took to Facebook with a call to action.

“I posted a 12-minute video asking, calling on the community to come together and have a meeting so that we can discuss safety measures for the schools and parks,” Michael told Full Measure in an interview in London.

Police soon showed up at his workplace in Wales – and arrested him.

“The words they said: that could be “indecent racial hatred,” Michael said. “They actually said that I’d had terrorist intentions, that’s what was on the police report.”

While he was in jail, Michael says, officials altered a transcript of his Facebook video – to make it look like he’d admitted to starting a riot. Yet he’d said no such thing.

“So I put my hand up in the court to say, you know, ‘Things are wrong.’ [I] wanted to say, ‘That’s wrong, and this is wrong,’ and the judge literally shouted me down, said, ‘Sit down.’ He said, ‘This isn’t a place for you to speak.’ And I was like, ‘Wow.’”

Businesswoman Bernie Spofforth was also arrested for her social media post after the Southport murders.

“I was taken to the police station and held for 36 hours like a terrorist. Held for 36 hours,” she says.

Her offense? She had shared the identity circulating online of a supposed suspect: asylum seeker Ali Al-Shakati. 

Spofforth didn’t know it, but someone had made up the name. She deleted the post when she couldn’t confirm the name. But days later, police came for her, too.

“What were they trying to prove?” Full Measure asked her.

“Malicious communications and making up communications in a racist way,” Spofforth responded. “ They thought I’d made the name up in order to create hate and to incite violence, which, of course, I didn’t do.”

It’s a 2023 British law that’s largely responsible: the Online Safety Act. The government framed it as vital to protecting children. But Claire Fox says shocking provisions in the fine print outlaw speech that “harms.” 

Fox is a member of the British House of Lords in Parliament and founder of the Academy of Ideas, which advocates for free speech.

She was one of the only legislators who opposed the British bill because of broad generalizations as to what it criminalized.

“In this particular bill, the Online Safety Act, they then stressed, ‘Well, no, when we say ‘harm,’ we don’t mean physical harm, we mean psychological harm.’ Psychological harm is an elastic term that’s become inflated beyond any recognition, which basically says, you know, anything can be harmful,” Fox told Full Measure.

“You hurt my feelings?” Full Measure asked.

“You hurt my feelings,” Fox confirmed. “And that’s what happened through the online safety bill. And that became institutionalized in law.”

Police in England and Wales arrested more than 12,000 people in 2023 alone for violating communications law: not only for obvious incitement to violence but also for private messages and chats deemed to persistently cause “annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety.”

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British chemical warfare commentator’s MI6 ties exposed in leaked emails

Private messages show show Hamish De Bretton-Gordon, a top British pundit on the Salisbury poisoning incident, was a close associate of the MI6 officer who handled the Russian intelligence defector at the center of the scandal — and reaped considerable benefits from his proximity to the case.

This September, a former British Army officer named Hamish De Bretton-Gordon filed a column with the UK Telegraph complaining that “Russian bots” had “tried to make out that I’m part of a security service conspiracy.” Having shot to prominence as a media commentator on chemical and biological weapons after the alleged poisoning of turncoat Russian spy Sergei Skripal, De Bretton-Gordon dismissed accusations that he collaborated with UK intelligence as the product of the “Kremlin’s malign tactics.”

Despite his fervent denials, leaked emails reviewed by The Grayzone indicate that De Bretton-Gordon has spent years privately coordinating his public statements with senior British military and intelligence figures. The correspondences show him training operatives in Turkey and instructing Israeli military figures on Syria’s still-elusive stockpile of chemical weapons, “and a bit of Novichok,” referring to the Russian toxin supposedly used to poison Skripal.

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The Lancet Jumps the Shark

The Lancet’s latest review of mRNA vaccines, by Blakney and colleagues, presents itself as an authoritative synthesis of the evidence.

Titled “Safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines: a mechanistic and public health perspective,” it promises to examine the mRNA platform from mechanistic, preclinical, clinical, and public health perspectives.

Instead, it delivers a remarkably confident account that gives little attention to many of the scientific and regulatory questions that have shaped debate over the past five years.

What makes the review effective as messaging is not that it ignores controversy, but that it appears to engage with it.

It names difficult issues — residual DNA, biodistribution, frameshifting, and IgG4 class switching — only to swiftly minimise them with reassuring language.

The effect is to create the appearance of critical scrutiny while reassuring readers that these concerns are either resolved or insignificant.

The review describes mRNA vaccines as a “transformative advance” characterised by “rapid clearance,” “lack of genomic integration,” and a “favourable safety profile.” It concludes that the accumulated evidence “affirms” the platform as safe, effective, and adaptable.

Ironically, the review sits behind a paywall. Most journalists will never read it, many doctors will see only the abstract, and policymakers are likely to rely on its conclusions without examining the evidence in detail.

Having spent more than five years examining regulatory decisions, FOI documents, advisory committee meetings, and independent laboratory findings on mRNA vaccines, I expected the review to grapple with the questions that repeatedly emerged during those investigations. But it didn’t.

The authors note that after injection, mRNA lipid nanoparticles “remain largely localised to the injection site” with “limited distribution” to secondary organs. The review also notes that vaccine mRNA has been detected in human plasma for up to 14 days in some recipients, and that mRNA and spike antigen have been found in draining lymph nodes for up to 60 days.

But these findings are quickly reframed as evidence of “rapid clearance” and “short-lived antigen expression” — a conclusion presented with far greater confidence than the underlying evidence appears to warrant.

Only last year, members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee questioned the manufacturers after discovering that biodistribution studies had never been conducted using the commercial vaccine administered to millions of people.

When asked directly whether those studies had been performed, company representatives struggled to answer, exposing important gaps in the evidence base. Yet those gaps receive little attention in the review.

Residual DNA is treated similarly.

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UK Police Arrest 15-Year-Old Over Posts Mocking Politician

Good news for those in the UK who were worried that their country’s police might have been getting a little too comfortable with the idea of going after people for what they say online.

No such luck.

We now learn that four officers, from the West Midlands force, were dispatched to the home of a 15-year-old, to arrest him. And this was no dawn raid to take in some dangerous terrorist suspect – it was a 15-year-old boy who had been making fun of a local councillor’s attire.

And the police seized his phone and laptop.

The whole thing started when the teenager, a Reform UK party activist, posted on Facebook about Conservative councillor Simon Bennett’s conduct and dress at council meetings in Wolverhampton.

Bennett reported the teenager to the police, saying that the posts were “quite personal about my appearance.”

One of the posts compared Bennett’s appearance to that of a “rent boy.” Another one said, “Why do some councillors rock up at a scrutiny committee in shorts and t-shirt in trainers? So unprofessional.”

And then there was one where the teenager Photoshopped rabbit ears onto a picture of Bennett, with the comment, “Nibble… nibble… crunch… crunch Can you hear it? That’s the sound of a rabbit devouring the last remaining shreds of Wolverhampton Conservatives’ credibility.”

Half asleep when the police came for him, the boy recalls the officers telling him that the arrest was for harassment, malicious communications, or a hate crime – or some mix of these. One officer said it was “to do with social media.”

The teenager, who has only been identified as Fraser, was taken in for questioning, and after that, he was bailed and banned from attending council meetings in Wolverhampton.

The police have not explained why four officers were needed to make the arrest.

“The police have not arrested for no reason,” he said. “There were a number of posts that targeted me…It was unpleasant and I was targeted by a child I had no way of dealing with.”

And the councillor also revealed that he had asked the council for advice on what to do, “and they thought it best to report it to the police.”

The police, in turn, “thought it merited arresting him,” Bennett said.

The Free Speech Union has taken up the case and intends to sue the police for “wrongful arrest” and “false imprisonment.”

Meanwhile, the group’s lawyers have written to the police to say that “plainly there has been no offence and the arrest and investigation represent an egregious interference with his rights.”

Fraser, who says he was more active online in criticizing the local Labour Party (which runs the council) than the Conservatives, is still waiting to learn if he will be charged.

This latest incident may just take the cake. Four officers, a laptop seized, and a teenager hauled off – for making fun of a councillor’s outfit. And the police wonder why they are losing the trust of the public.

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