Pro-Palestine protesters demonstrate against supply of F-35 parts to Israel
Protesters have gathered outside the premises of F-35 fighter jet manufacturer Lockheed Martin UK, calling on it to stop sending parts to Israel for use against Palestine.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign organised the demonstration at the site in Havant, Hampshire, with protests also taking place at other manufacturers in Rochester, Kent, and Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
Scores of people waving flags and holding banners and placards paraded from Havant town centre to the Lockheed Martin premises which had closed ahead of the protest taking place.
A speaker told the crowd: 'I am ashamed at the police today, they should be storming this building, this is a terrorist training camp, this is the sponsored UK terrorism and the police should be shutting it down.'
Protester Alan Elliot, 70, from Southampton, who served in the Army for 28 years held up a placard saying 'Veterans against genocide in Gaza'.
He told the PA news agency: 'I don't want to see babies, children and women being killed indiscriminately – this sends a message but always that message is ignored.
'The only way to stop these things is to stop the money.'
Writer and activist Sarah Goldsmith-Pascoe, 69, from Bournemouth, Dorset, said: 'I feel compelled to do everything I can to stop this horror, especially as a Jew because all of us Jews have been told a load of lies about what Israel does.
'This is genocide and large companies are doing nothing about it, I have nightmares.'
The Government halted 30 out of around 350 arms sales licences to Israel in September last year, for fear they may be used for war crimes.
MPs critical of Israel's actions have called on ministers to go further, and to halt all UK arms sales to the country.
A Foreign Office spokesperson said previously: 'Since day one, this Government has rigorously applied international law in relation to the war in Gaza.
'One of our first acts in Government was to suspend export licences that could be used by the Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza.
'We have successfully implemented the suspension decision and continue to refuse all relevant licence applications.
'We have suspended direct exports of F-35 parts for use by Israel, and we categorically do not export any bombs or ammunition which could be used in Gaza.
'We have also suspended negotiations on a free trade agreement, while supporting humanitarian efforts through the restoration of funding to UNRWA, and the commitment of over £230 million in assistance across the past two financial years.'
A Lockheed Martin spokeswoman said: 'We respect the right to peaceful protest, and we remain focused on supporting our customers to deliver strategic deterrence and security solutions.'
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The Independent
26 minutes ago
- The Independent
People desperately trying to call family in Iran are getting mysterious robotic responses
When Ellie, a British- Iranian living in the United Kingdom, tried to call her mother in Tehran, a robotic female voice answered instead. 'Alo? Alo?' the voice said, then asked in English: 'Who is calling?' A few seconds passed. 'I can't heard you,' the voice continued, its English imperfect. 'Who you want to speak with? I'm Alyssia. Do you remember me? I think I don't know who are you.' Ellie, 44, is one of nine Iranians living abroad — including in the U.K and U.S. — who said they have gotten strange, robotic voices when they attempted to call their loved ones in Iran since Israel launched airstrikes on the country a week ago. They told their stories to The Associated Press on the condition they remain anonymous or that only their first names or initials be used out of fear of endangering their families. Five experts with whom the AP shared recordings said it could be low-tech artificial intelligence, a chatbot or a pre-recorded message to which calls from abroad were diverted. It remains unclear who is behind the operation, though four of the experts believed it was likely to be the Iranian government while the fifth saw Israel as more likely. The messages are deeply eerie and disconcerting for Iranians in the diaspora struggling to contact their families as Israel's offensive targeting Iranian nuclear and military sites pounds Tehran and other cities. Iran has retaliated with hundreds of missiles and drones, and the government has imposed a widespread internet blackout it says is to protect the country. That has blocked average Iranians from getting information from the outside world, and their relatives from being able to reach them. 'I don't know why they're doing this,' said Ellie, whose mother is diabetic, low on insulin and trapped on the outskirts of Tehran. She wants her mother to evacuate the city but cannot communicate that to her. A request for comment sent to the Iranian mission to the U.N. was not immediately answered. Most of the voices speak in English, though at least one spoke Farsi. If the caller tries to talk to it, the voice just continues with its message. A 30-year-old women living in New York, who heard the same message Ellie did, called it 'psychological warfare.' 'Calling your mom and expecting to hear her voice and hearing an AI voice is one of the most scary things I've ever experienced,' she said. 'I can feel it in my body.' And the messages can be bizarre. One woman living in the U.K. desperately called her mom and instead got a voice offering platitudes. 'Thank you for taking the time to listen,' it said, in a recording that she shared with the AP. 'Today, I'd like to share some thoughts with you and share a few things that might resonate in our daily lives. Life is full of unexpected surprises, and these surprises can sometimes bring joy while at other times they challenge us.' Not all Iranians abroad encounter the robotic voice. Some said when they try to call family, the phone just rings and rings. Colin Crowell, a former vice president for Twitter's global policy, said it appeared that Iranian phone companies were diverting the calls to a default message system that does not allow calls to be completed. Amir Rashidi, an Iranian cybersecurity expert based in the U.S., agreed and said the recordings appeared to be a government measure to thwart hackers, though there was no hard evidence. He said that in the first two days of Israel's campaign, mass voice and text messages were sent to Iranian phones urging the public to gear up for 'emergency conditions.' They aimed to spread panic — similar to mass calls that government opponents made into Iran during the war with Iraq in the 1980s. The voice messages trying to calm people 'fit the pattern of the Iranian government and how in the past it handled emergency situations,' said Rashidi, the director of Texas-based Miaan, a group that reports on digital rights in the Middle East. Mobile phones and landlines ultimately are overseen by Iran's Ministry of Information and Communications Technology. But the country's intelligence services have long been believed to be monitoring conversations. 'It would be hard for anybody else to hack. Of course, it is possible it is Israeli. But I don't think they have an incentive to do this,' said Mehdi Yahyanejad, a tech entrepreneur and internet freedom activist. Marwa Fatafta, Berlin-based policy and advocacy director for digital rights group Access Now, suggested it could be 'a form of psychological warfare by the Israelis.' She said it fits a past pattern by Israel of using extensive direct messaging to Lebanese and Palestinians during campaigns in Gaza and against Hezbollah. The messages, she said, appear aimed at 'tormenting' already anxious Iranians abroad. When contacted with requests for comment, the Israeli military declined and the prime minister's office did not respond. Ellie is one of a lucky few who found a way to reach relatives since the blackout. She knows someone who lives on the Iran-Turkey border and has two phones — one with a Turkish SIM card and one with an Iranian SIM. He calls Ellie's mother with the Iranian phone — since people inside the country are still able to call one another — and presses it to the Turkish phone, where Ellie's on the line. The two are able to speak. 'The last time we spoke to her, we told her about the AI voice that is answering all her calls,' said Ellie. 'She was shocked. She said her phone hasn't rung at all.' Elon Musk said he has activated his satellite internet provider Starlink in Iran, where a small number of people are believed to have the system, even though it is illegal. Authorities are urging the public to turn in neighbors with the devices as part of an ongoing spy hunt. Others have illegal satellite dishes, granting them access to international news. M., a woman in the U.K., has been trying to reach her mother-in-law, who is immobile and lives in Tehran's northeast, which has been pummeled by Israeli bombardment throughout the week. When she last spoke to her family in Iran, they were mulling whether she should evacuate from the city. Then the blackout was imposed, and they lost contact. Since then she has heard through a relative that the woman was in the ICU with respiratory problems. When she calls, she gets the same bizarre message as the woman in the U.K., a lengthy mantra. 'Close your eyes and picture yourself in a place that brings you peace and happiness,' it says. 'Maybe you are walking through a serene forest, listening to the rustle of leaves and birds chirping. Or you're by the seashore, hearing the calming sound of waves crashing on the sand.' The only feeling the message does instill in her, she said, is 'helplessness.'
The Guardian
34 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Ancient trees are shipped to the UK, then burned – using billions in ‘green' subsidies. Stop this madness now
How green is this? We pay billions of pounds to cut down ancient forests in the US and Canada, ship the wood across the Atlantic in diesel tankers, then burn it in a Yorkshire-based power station. Welcome to the scandal of Drax, where Britain's biggest polluter gets to play climate hero. The reality is that billions in public subsidies has enabled Drax to generate electricity by burning 300m trees. Now the government is trying to force through an extension that would grant Drax an estimated £1.8bn in public subsidies on top of the £11bn it has already pocketed, keeping this circus going until at least 2031. This isn't green energy. The mathematics alone should horrify anyone who cares about value for money or the environment. Burning wood creates 18% more CO2 emissions than coal. Even if you replant every tree Drax destroys, it takes up to a century for new growth to reabsorb the carbon released. We're supposed to reach net zero by 2050, not 2125. Yet through circus-trick accounting, all of Drax's massive emissions magically disappear from Britain's climate ledger. They've simply been wished away – counted as 'zero', while the company becomes our largest single contributor to climate breakdown. Extraordinarily, this scandal unites opposition across the political spectrum. From the Greens to Reform, from the Morning Star to the Daily Telegraph, there's rare consensus that Drax represents everything wrong with our approach to climate policy. The Labour-dominated public accounts committee condemned Drax as a 'white elephant' that's been allowed to 'mark its own homework' while claiming 'billions upon billions' in subsidies. A Lords committee agreed, saying parliament needs to see key documents before approving any more funding. I don't agree with Ed Miliband on everything – we clearly have different views on nuclear power. I respect the energy secretary's commitment to tackling climate crisis, and it is worth noting that the further subsidies are half of what was previously on offer for Drax. But that's exactly why continuing to subsidise Drax at all is so disappointing. When Miliband announced his plans to 'ramp up' biomass burning back in 2009, he was genuinely trying to find alternatives to fossil fuels. But 16 years on, this policy has gone badly astray. What was meant to be a bridge to renewable energy is actually making emissions worse. If, on Monday, the House of Lords votes to extend this unabated wood burning for another four years, what is to stop these subsidies being extended again and again? And why should the government deal with a firm as untrustworthy as Drax? Perhaps most damning is what Drax refuses to reveal. After the BBC's devastating Panorama investigation into the company's destruction of Canadian primary forests, Drax asked auditor KPMG to investigate, hoping for a clean bill of health. However, the evidence was so damning that the reports are still being hidden from the public. If Drax has nothing to hide, why not publish these reports? A former top Treasury official turned whistleblower accused it of deliberately concealing unsustainable practices to secure subsidies. The case, now settled, raises questions of dishonesty that should disqualify any company from public funding. The extra billions Drax is seeking could help build enough wind and solar capacity to power millions of homes. It could create permanent jobs in genuine renewable industries, not temporary employment destroying irreplaceable ecosystems. Every pound spent subsidising tree burning is a pound not invested in technologies that could actually deliver net zero. While other countries race ahead with wind, solar and battery storage, we're burning money on the most primitive fuel known to humanity. There's a huge loophole in the government's pledge to stop Drax burning trees from primary forest. Their restrictions on Drax only apply to subsidised electricity supplied to the grid. Drax wants to power private data centres but there is no plan that prevents it from destroying ancient forests to power 21st-century AI searches. That means Drax could be cutting down even more primary forests than it does today. MPs have lost trust in the government's ability to hold Drax to account – the criticism from parliamentary committees has been brutal. The environmental movement didn't fight to establish renewable energy so politicians could facilitate the burning of ancient forests that took millennia to grow. Real climate action means making hard choices, not hiding behind accounting tricks that make our emissions disappear on paper while making them worse in reality. It is time for Labour MPs to speak up; the fight for net zero is hard enough. More subsidies for Drax's wood burning in the name of sustainability is just more fuel on that fire. Dale Vince is a green energy industrialist and campaigner
The Guardian
34 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Outcome of Israel's war with Iran is uncertain even if US joins conflict
Israel's assault on Iran, including its nuclear and ballistic weapons programme, is unlikely to secure its long-term strategic objectives, even if Benjamin Netanyahu manages to persuade the Trump administration into joining the conflict in the coming days and weeks, experts have said. According to diplomats, military specialists and security analysts, Israel – and its prime minister – is likely to face mounting headwinds in the campaign, amid warnings that it risks dangerously destabilising the region. There is mounting scepticism over whether even the US's use of massive ground-penetrating bombs would be able to knock out Iran's Fordow nuclear facility, which is buried deep beneath a mountain, and questions have emerged about Israel's ability to sustain a long-range offensive that has exposed its cities to counterattack by ballistic missiles. Experts make the distinction between Israel's operational success in targeting key Iranian sites and individuals, and its strategic objectives which appear to have expanded to regime change in Tehran, on top of destroying its nuclear programme. 'There is a dominant trend in Israel going back to the formation of the state that has suggested to politicians that violence will deliver a solution to what are political problems,' said Toby Dodge, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. 'My gut feeling is Iranian regime is more stable than has been suggested. And because Iran has a long history of commitment to technological modernisation and proliferation, well, that's something you can't simply remove with a bomb.' Analysts are also puzzled by an Israeli strategy that appears to have gambled on triggering a conflict in the hope of pushing a highly erratic US president in Donald Trump to join, supplying the firepower that Israel lacks in terms of massive bunker-busting bombs. Experts assess that the US would probably have to use several of these bombs, which would need to be dropped relatively close to the Fordow plant, protected by up to 90 metres of bedrock, in a complex and risky operation that is not guaranteed to succeed, and would probably draw retaliation from Iran against US bases, risking further escalation. 'Subcontracting the Fordow job would put the United States in Iran's sights,' Daniel C Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Israel, and Steven N Simon, a veteran of the national security council, wrote in Foreign Affairs this week. 'Iran would almost certainly retaliate by killing American civilians. That, in turn, would compel the United States to reciprocate. 'Soon enough the only targets left for Washington to hit would be the Iranian regime's leaders, and the United States would again go into the regime-change business – a business in which exceedingly few Americans want to be involved any longer.' The prospect of regime change, perhaps by killing Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which has been raised by Israeli officials (and reportedly vetoed by Trump) is already causing profound alarm in the region. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the senior Iraqi cleric, made a rare intervention, warning of the profound dangers to the region. Another sceptic is Andreas Krieg, an associate professor in the Department of Defence Studies at King's College London, who has worked widely in the Middle East and is doubtful that air power can alone can make the kind of impact being sought by Israel, both in terms of destroying Iran's nuclear knowhow or removing the clerical regime. 'It's not the holy grail. We'd learned the lesson that air power alone doesn't work. And then we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan that even massive numbers of boots on ground doesn't work,' he said. 'What we're seeing is not a strategic approach but one that is operational using air power, and the operational approach is starting the consume the strategic one which is about the political endgame. 'The best Israel can best can hope for is something like the campaign against Hezbollah, which has probably delivered a short-lived success, in that it was very successful in degrading Hezbollah's network. 'Iran is very similar in that its defence strategy is built around a decentralised mosaic. Decapitation doesn't work against that kind of network. You can take out key nodes, but the best [Israel] can hope for in killing Khamenei would be to trigger the succession crisis which in any case had been anticipated.' And if Netanyahu has miscalculated, it is in an area where he has long claimed expertise: in reading and playing US politics. With American support for US intervention polling dismally, and the issue threatening to split Trump's Maga movement, Israel may find itself on the wrong side of a toxic argument that has far more salience for Trump than helping Netanyahu. Failing a US intervention to support Israel's campaign, Israel is likely to face growing challenges amid indications it is running low on some missile interceptors. Crew fatigue for the long-range sorties, aircraft maintenance cycles and the exhaustion of prepared target lists are all likely to militate against Israel's ability to maintain a prolonged conflict at the current high level of intensity. Any drop-off will be used by Tehran to suggest to Iranians that it has weathered the worst of the storm. There is a third possibility. Writing in his book Waging Modern War, in the aftermath of the Nato air campaign in Kosovo in 1999 – seen as one of the more successful uses of air power – the organisation's former supreme allied commander Wesley Clark, described the campaign as having one objective – to force the Serbs to the negotiating table. With contacts now re-established with Iranian negotiators, including talks in Geneva on Friday with European countries, Trump himself has suggested there is more time for diplomacy to run. Even if Iran is forced to a nuclear deal, Israel may find it comes with heavy hidden costs, not least the potential for survival of a clerical regime with every reason to be even more hostile to Israel and Israelis, and the limitations of Israeli military power, perhaps, exposed. 'If Khamenei has the sense to step back, if America doesn't come in,' says Dodge, 'then Israel has stuck its finger in a hornets' nest.'
