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Last Notes

2026-09-05 18:42:03 UTC

Roughly one fifth of the NHS workforce is made up of non-British nationals.
https://novaramedia.com/2026/08/12/nhs-staff-called-dirty-foreigners-amid-rise-in-racist-abuse-by-patients/

2026-09-01 12:21:06 UTC

Keir Starmer is resigning as an MP to focus on “international affairs” and “protecting women and girls”.
The former prime minister, who supported Israel as it killed at least 38,000 women and girls in Gaza, will stand down from his seat in Holborn and St Pancras in London, triggering a byelection.
"I will now focus on other things and that will be international affairs including defence, security, trade and technology in a fast-changing world,” he told the Camden New Journal newspaper.
"I will also continue, as I have done for a long time now with others, to work on combating violence against women and girls; that is an issue that matters to me hugely. It’s work I started before I became an MP and it’s work I’m keen to continue after I’m an MP.”
Starmer is reportedly interested in becoming secretary general of Nato, a role that is set to fall vacant in 2028.
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2026-08-21 07:49:03 UTC

Israel is planting sanitised PR stories online in an apparent attempt to influence how ChatGPT and other LLMs answer questions about the genocide in Gaza, the IDF and Zionism.
More than 100 anonymous articles on Israel and Palestine were posted online within a week earlier this month by a new think tank connected to the Israeli government’s favoured PR firm in the US.
The articles are framed as questions that might be asked of a search engine or LLM, such as ‘Who Is the Aggressor in the Israel-Palestine Conflict?’ and ‘Does Hamas Account for Deaths Caused by Hamas Itself?’
The ‘data reports’ appeared on the website of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, a body created by a boutique ad agency called Piro as part of its work for Havas Media, the French PR company that handles most of Israel’s foreign influence work in the US, Politico reports.
Other LLM-friendly articles published on the Hanover website are titled ‘Is There a Policy of Starvation in Gaza?’ and ‘Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?’ None of the AI-optimised articles have bylines, and no researchers are named on the website.
In public US records filed in August, the articles were described as being part of a $100,000 campaign aimed at “the creation and dissemination of factual, source-supported informational materials intended to educate the US public regarding Israel”.
Piro co-founder Daniel Rosenberg confirmed to Politico that his ad agency was retained by the Israeli state “to put accurate, sourced facts into the public record and to counter misinformation about Israel with verifiable information.” Havas Media and the Hanover Institute did not respond to Politico’s request for comment.
According to tests run by Piro, LLMs including ChatGPT were found to be drawing on articles published by the Hanover Institute when responding to questions about Gaza, the IDF, anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
When Novara Media ran similar tests on ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, none used Hanover as a source when asked similar questions. However, reporters at the Jerusalem Post found that Perplexity, an AI aggregator, did rely heavily on Hanover when asked ‘Is the IDF the most moral army?’
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2026-08-15 14:18:51 UTC

His victory is the latest in a series of progressive wins in the US.
https://novaramedia.com/2026/08/05/lobbyists-spent-70m-to-defeat-a-pro-palestine-candidate-he-still-won/

2026-07-28 12:17:18 UTC

“Violence against women and girls isn’t an immigration problem.”
Green party deputy leader Rachel Millward takes on LBC’s Iain Dale and his concerns around migrants.
https://static.mastox.eu/media_attachments/files/116/997/556/395/257/782/original/e8e3b948d1207218.mp4

2026-07-23 16:20:23 UTC

Who is Count Binface?
Here's what you need to know about the "intergalactic space warrior" taking on Nigel Farage in Clacton – and the novelty characters in British politics that have come before him.
https://static.mastox.eu/media_attachments/files/116/970/200/570/335/454/original/30989ff1b121a036.mp4

2026-07-08 12:01:27 UTC

Israel killed a senior leader of a group organising World Cup screenings in Gaza shortly before Egypt’s match against Argentina on Tuesday – in an attack that also left two children and one other person dead.
Mohamed Fawaz al-Wahidi, the public relations director of the Egyptian Relief Committee in Gaza, died in a drone strike on a civilian vehicle in the Sabra neighbourhood of Gaza City.
Al-Wahidi, Hamza al-Deri, 10, and his eight-year-old brother Fari, were all passersby. The driver of the car, Ahmed Daghmush, 33, was also killed, the Washington Post reported.
Several others were injured in the attack, the Palestinian Information Center and Arabi Post reported.
The timing of the strike has led to speculation that Israel targeted al-Wahidi as a form of retaliation after Egypt’s coach, Hossam Hassan, used his platform at the World Cup to show support for Palestine.
Hassan dedicated his side’s round of 32 win against Australia to the Palestinian people and waved their flag.
“If there is anyone in the world who does not feel for the Palestinian people, then they have lost part of their humanity – whether they are Arab, European, or American,” he said in a press conference after the game.
Tuesday’s strike was the latest of numerous violations by Israel of a so-called ceasefire agreed with Hamas in October. It was announced on Tuesday that Hamas was handing over power to a new authority, the new National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, which is based in Cairo.
The Egyptian Relief Committee was established by Egyptian president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to provide humanitarian aid in Gaza. It distributes food, houses displaced families and clears rubble from bombsites.
The committee, which has been screening Egypt’s World Cup games in Gaza, has previously been targeted by the Israeli military. In January an Israeli drone killed five of its members who were filming a new displacement camp near Netzarim, Drop Site News reported.
Israel genocide in Gaza has killed, at a conservative estimate, over 73,000 people. Among those killed are 567 footballers, according to the Palestinian Football Association.
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2026-06-29 14:45:59 UTC

Palantir, the US spytech firm accused of abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, enjoys lavish tax breaks on UK profits that are already derived from taxpayers’ money, an analysis by openDemocracy has found.
The company has been awarded at least £670m in UK public contracts in recent years. That includes a £330m deal to manage sensitive NHS data, signed despite the fact Palantir's co-founder Peter Thiel has expressed disdain for publicly funded healthcare.
Those contracts have helped make the UK Palantir’s second-largest market by revenue, with 2024 pre-tax profits of £25.3m.
But its effective UK tax rate that year was only £2m, or 8%, far lower than the norm of 25% paid by firms with profits above £250,000. In 2023 it was even less, at 4.7%, and in 2022 it was 4.2%.
For 2025, Companies House filings suggest Palantir paid less than £820,000 in cash tax in the UK, less than it paid in Korea, Japan, France and Germany.
The low rate was due a structured arrangement that limits the amount of profits recognised in the UK, as well as a rule that awards large tax breaks to firms that compensate their employees with stock instead of cash, openDemocracy reported.
The report said the nature of filings made it difficult to assess the total amount of tax breaks Palantir has received, but by 2022 alone it had accumulated £230m in tax relief from what it called “employee share acquisition relief”.
“When profitable companies are paying very little tax, especially when much of their revenues derive from taxpayers' money itself, then it's important to ask why,” Mike Lewis, director of TaxWatch, told openDemocracy.
“Is it because tax incentives and tax breaks are poorly targeted? Or is it because companies are shifting profits in ways that our tax system is supposed to counteract?”
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2026-06-29 06:29:37 UTC

Sadiq Khan has granted Palantir a 12-month pilot project with the Metropolitan police, just weeks after he blocked a £50m deal between the two.
Citing procurement rules, Khan had stopped the deal amid loud opposition to the tech firm’s role in the Gaza genocide and its work with deportation agency ICE in the US.
Khan’s spokesperson said that Londoners only want to see public money paid to companies that “share the values of the city”.
But the mayor of London appears to have backtracked – at least temporarily. This week it emerged he has granted Palantir a £2m contract to last at least 12 months whilst the force runs a procurement process to find a longer-term supplier.
The news broke just days after the company launched a high court challenge against Khan’s decision to block the contract, which would see Palantir technology used to automate criminal investigations analysis.
A spokesperson for Khan said: “The deputy mayor has required the Met to run a new procurement process, open to a wide range of potential suppliers, to choose the long-term provider of this capability.
“Recognising the Met’s current needs, the Met may extend the current pilot to retain existing capability while this procurement takes place.”
Palantir holds contracts worth at least £670m across government institutions in the UK, including the NHS, despite widespread concerns about its ethics record.
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2026-06-24 09:36:04 UTC

Greta Thunberg has warned that 40C heatwaves in the UK are “only the beginning” and says Britain’s leaders have “their heads completely buried in the sand” regarding climate change.
Her comments follow revelations that Labour ministers met fossil fuel industry lobbyists more than 500 times during the party’s first year in power, while Labour MPs took tens of thousands of pounds in donations from oil and gas lobbyists.
The activist, 23, was speaking as the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) issued a rare red heat-health alert for the first time since 2022, with temperatures forecast to reach as high as 40C later this week.
“This is what experts have been warning about for decades,” Thunberg told Metro. “This is unfortunately only the beginning.”
She added: “We know that the climate crisis is here and now, and not a faraway threat in the future, and those suffering the most are the ones who have contributed the least to cause it.”
The red alert – which indicates heat that is life-threatening for even the healthy population – covers the East and West Midlands, London, and southern and east England from 1am on Wednesday until 11pm on Thursday.
The heatwave could also disrupt transport infrastructure, food and water access, energy supplies and force businesses to close, UKHSA warned.
Thunberg said: “What is most concerning about this is not only that we continuously shatter heat records and destabilise the entire biosphere way faster than models have been predicting, but that it is not treated as the existential crisis it is in media and politics.
“The UK’s responsibility for the climate crisis cannot be overstated, still its leaders continue acting as if there was no tomorrow.”
Research by UKHSA published last year found that as well as the elderly, the very young and people with pre-existing medical conditions, people experiencing poverty, overcrowded housing or difficult economic circumstances are also at far greater risk in the heat.
Thunberg’s comments were echoed by climate scientists, including professor Friederike Otto of Imperial College London, who said politicians had failed to respond to the first red heat-health alert in 2022.
“Our first 40C day was supposed to be a wake-up call, but clearly someone hit snooze,” she said.
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2026-06-07 07:20:02 UTC

Reform-run Essex county council has been accused of banning libraries from promoting Pride and Black History events.
Workers were informed they were not allowed to advertise LGBTQ-themed events in a verbal briefing, the BBC reported.
Chris Hossack, Reform councillor for residents and community services, said there was “plenty of opportunity for campaigns and organisations that want to promote Women's Day [and] Black History to do that, and what I'm saying is, we're not going to do that in our libraries," the outlet reported.
A council spokesperson told Novara Media: “The pause in promotion applies to content on the council’s marketing channels, such as social media and newsletters. This pause is applied to all groups and events being promoted while the new administration reviews everything.”
They added that the “pause” did not apply to in-library promotional displays.
But rights advocates interpreted the ban as a bid to suppress queer and minority voices.
A spokesperson for Essex Pride said the ban “sends a negative message, that LGBTQ+ people should be hidden away, rather than acknowledged as a part of society.”
“This is very disturbing and alarming news,” a spokesperson for Save Our Libraries Essex told the Yellow Advertiser. “What possible reason is there not to display Pride promotional material… other than pure prejudice?”
Colchester-based drag artist Shar Cooterie (pictured, left), who has hosted family-friendly Drag Storytime events at Colchester Library, called the move "politically motivated".
"There is a suggestion that the existence of an LGBTQ+ person is in some way political, which I don't think it should be,” she added.
Hossack said in a statement: “Our libraries are spaces for everybody… With this in mind, we need to be careful not to highlight any particular groups or themes, so, mindful of this, and unless the activity is specific to libraries, we have taken a decision to pause promotion of such events at libraries via the council’s public-facing communication channels.”
Earlier this year Nigel Farage faced criticism after defending the party’s Scottish leader, Malcolm Offord, for making a homophobic joke about the partner of late singer George Michael.
Last year the Reform leader was accused of “vile homophobia” after claiming that "most stable relationships, the ones that last the longest, tend to be between men and women".
Reform activists in Clacton were captured on camera referring to a Pride flag as “degenerate” in a Channel 4 documentary in 2024.
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2026-06-04 10:38:15 UTC

Israeli forces have detained a player on the Palestinian national women’s football team, along with a former national player, sparking renewed anger at Fifa for its failure to ban the apartheid state’s football association.
Rand Halawani, 20, was taken on Tuesday night in Jerusalem and a court extended her detention until Friday, amid reports that her family did not know where she was being held.
Ex-national player Natalie Abu Diyeh, was also detained in the illegally occupied West Bank alongside three other young Palestinian women, AFP reported. Israel’s military claimed, without offering evidence, that the women were suspected of “terrorist-related” activity.
Palestinians detained by Israel are at serious risk of abuse. Israeli rights group B’Tselem has found that Israel runs a “network of torture camps” where Palestinians are subjected to beatings, starvation, sleep deprivation and sexual violence.
The Palestinian Football Association (PFA) said the players’ detention was part of a “pattern of systematic targeting of Palestinian athletes, which continues without accountability”.
Palestinian footballers are “denied freedom of movement, safety and the basic right to participate in sport under equal conditions, rights that Fifa explicitly guarantees,” it added.
Fifa has not commented on the players’ detention, even though the PFA is a member.
“The continued silence and inaction of the international football community… enables these illegal practices to continue with impunity,” the PFA said.
As the federation gears up to host the World Cup in North America next week, it is under renewed scrutiny for continuing to allow the Israel Football Association (IFA) to be a member despite Israel’s long history of suppressing Palestinian sports.
In 2014, Israeli soldiers repeatedly shot two Palestinian footballers in the feet as they returned from a training session in the West Bank, ending their careers.
In March, Fifa’s disciplinary committee said Israel had brought “football into disrepute” and was practising a “de facto system of segregation” by excluding Palestinians from the sport and failing to take action against rampant anti-Arab racism in many clubs.
But it stopped short of banning or suspending the country’s football association, as it did with Russia shortly after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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2026-05-08 09:55:14 UTC

Labour has failed to communicate what it believes in and is suffering a brutal set of local election defeats as a result.
Speaking to the BBC, @ayocaesar says Labour was wrong to pander to the right, rather than addressing issues that unite people across the political spectrum.
“The most important issue across all the different parts of the electorate is the cost of living,” says Sarkar, adding that tackling it could bring together “a working class Muslim voter in east London” and “a white working class voter in the northeast”.
https://static.mastox.eu/media_attachments/files/116/538/350/604/326/508/original/bbd996fea30c23bf.mp4

2026-04-16 21:19:10 UTC

Orbán’s government had repeatedly blocked EU measures aimed at reining in Israel’s abuses.
https://novaramedia.com/2026/04/13/israel-loses-key-european-ally-as-viktor-orban-defeated-in-hungary/

2026-04-15 18:31:01 UTC

"The Greens are on the rise, with 50 Labour councillors defecting to the party in the last six months."
https://novaramedia.com/2026/03/23/10-seats-to-watch-in-the-local-elections/

2026-04-14 02:57:05 UTC

Massive Attack frontman Robert Del Naja was among the 500 people arrested after attending a mass protest against the ban on Palestine Action on Saturday.
Hundreds turned out in Trafalgar Square to protest the continued proscription of Palestine Action.
In February, the high court found that the ban was unlawful, but the Metropolitan Police promised it would continue making arrests until a pending government challenge is heard in court.
In a statement following his arrest, Del Naja labelled the ban "total madness" and urged the government to "act with the integrity of neighbours such as Spain" by refusing to assist the US-Israeli attacks on Iran.
Hundreds of people accused of showing public support for the activist group are awaiting trial while the court battle over Palestine Action's legality continues.
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