EXCESSIVE POLICING OF PENTONVILLE DEMO IN SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE ACTION HUNGER STRIKERS ~ Blade Runner ~ The traditional anarchist New Year’s Eve gathering outside HMP Pentonville was joined on December 31, 2025 by a solidarity demonstration for remand prisoners currently on hunger strike, organised by Palestine Pulse alongside other grassroots groups. Hundreds of people assembled on Caledonian Road carrying Palestinian flags and banners, with the demonstration centred on solidarity with prisoners rather than disruption. Nevertheless, police responded with a large and visibly disproportionate deployment. Protesters counted at least 21 police vans in the immediate area, equating to roughly 170 officers. Many were deployed in boiler suits and carrying long batons, signalling a preparedness for confrontation rather than assembly facilitation. Despite the heavy police presence, passing drivers repeatedly sounded their horns in support of the demonstration. Officers attempted to confine protesters behind railings on a narrow stretch of pavement, but as numbers grew this quickly became untenable. Protesters spilled onto the road and began a spontaneous march around the prison block, entering Wheelwright Street. Police reinforcements arrived as officers moved to block surrounding streets, fragmenting movement and preventing the crowd from circulating freely. > The march was halted and forced back towards Caledonian Road. Further attempts > to move south were blocked by additional cordons, leaving protesters penned-in > on the carriageway. The aggressive policing approach generated predictable > friction, resulting in minor injuries and two arrests, both reportedly > released in the early hours of 1 January. Following the standoff, demonstrators regrouped and moved away from the prison under continued police pressure, later continuing through central London and dispersing at Piccadilly Circus. At the centre of the protests is a coordinated hunger strike involving eight remand prisoners held in multiple UK prisons, including Pentonville, Bronzefield, New Hall and Peterborough. All are being held without conviction for alleged offences linked to Palestine Action. Several prisoners are approaching 60 days without food, while two others previously paused their hunger strike following severe health deterioration after more than seven weeks. The hunger strikers’ demands include the closure of Elbit Systems’ UK sites and an end to prolonged pre-trial detention. Doctors, families and supporters have repeatedly warned of escalating health risks, with hospitalisations reported and serious concerns raised about irreversible damage. > Recent demonstrations outside Pentonville have already focused on solidarity > with one of the hunger strikers, Kamran, who is among the Filton 24 arrestees > and has been hospitalised for the fifth time after more than 50 days on hunger > strike. NYE demonstrations were also planned outside prisons in Brixton and > Peterborough this year. Since the proscription of Palestine Action earlier in 2025, the British state has increasingly relied on remand, isolation, and restrictive custodial regimes against those accused of involvement in the group. Supporters describe a pattern including censorship of books and correspondence, denial of prison work, transfers far from family networks, and repeated refusals of bail. > Taken together, activists view the policing of demonstrations and the > treatment of remand prisoners as part of a domestic counter-insurgency > strategy, in which overwhelming police presence, pre-emptive containment and > punitive detention function to send a broader warning to those considering > militant solidarity with Palestine. > In this context, the hunger strike has become a focal point, seen as exposing > how prisons and public order policing are being used to suppress dissent and > discipline political resistance. > > As the new year begins, the prisoners’ fast continues. > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Photos: Blade Runner The post Hundreds at New Year’s Eve London prison protest appeared first on Freedom News.

WHAT ARE THE ODDS? ANALYZING SIX GLOBAL SCENARIOS FOR 2026.  A series of inflection points await the world. Here’s our view of what might happen next year. By JAMIE DETTMER Illustration by Michael Waraksa for POLITICO Last year, POLITICO chose to be boosterish about the future as it outlined some not entirely tongue-in-cheek reasons for optimism about 2025. Some predictions were spot-on, though others less so: Donald Trump did manage to end (maybe) the war in Gaza, but peace in Ukraine is proving more elusive.   This P28 we’re taking a different tack by offering odds on some 2026 scenarios — from the political survival of both Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to the chances of a financial crash and the likely winners of the mid-term elections in the United States.   Is the author prepared to bet his own salary on any of the episodes sketched below? Hell no! The most common mistake when it comes to gambling is to start in the first place. Just ask Harry Kakavas, one of Australia’s smartest real-estate salesmen, who made a fortune selling property on the Gold Coast only to lose tens of millions of dollars at the Baccarat tables.  But if you want to place some wagers, be my guest. There are plenty of online gambling sites that’ll be happy to take your money.   Here’s a caution though. Politics in this topsy-turvy era is even less predictable than sports. And even more so with the ever-unpredictable Donald Trump in the White House. After a whirlwind year at the start of his second term, here’s how we see things unfolding across the globe in 2026.   TRUMP PULLS OFF AN END TO THE WAR IN UKRAINE For all the talk of Western sanctions crashing the Russian economy and bringing the Kremlin to heel, Vladimir Putin seems unperturbed. Regardless of the carnage on the frontlines or Russians queueing for gas because of Ukrainian drone strikes on oil refineries, he has remained fixed on pressing his maximalist demands.   Meanwhile, there are domestic political limits on what Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy can agree to without triggering a public backlash.   Nonetheless, Trump often seems more inclined than not to think a deal might be possible. After his Alaska summit with Putin, Trump was heard on a hot mic explaining to France’s Emmanuel Macron that he thinks Putin really wants to “make a deal for me.” “I think he wants to make a deal with me. Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds,” Trump added.   Of course, the stubbornness of the Russian leader has left Trump frustrated and occasionally musing about whether he’s being played — which is what Melania Trump reportedly thinks Putin is doing.  The Russian leader is adept at stringing Trump along — and his timing is impeccable when reaching out to his US counterpart. Take his two-hour-log phone call last month dangling the prospects of a summit just as Trump hinted he might give Ukraine Tomahawk Cruise missiles.   Arguably, prolonging the war is useful for Putin. It has the benefit of further straining cash-strapped European nations (see below), and risks fracturing the transatlantic alliance. A distracted West also helps Putin’s ally Xi Jinping as he calculates whether, or when, to make a move on Taiwan.  Arguably, prolonging the war is useful for Putin. | Sputnik And Putin’s regime could be imperiled if he ends the conflict abruptly. A rapid shift out of a war economy would likely trigger some dangerous sociopolitical infighting, according to Ella Paneyakh, a sociologist at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre think tank. She says it would spark “cruel and vicious competition for diminishing resources.”  With Ukraine’s severe manpower shortage — Ukrainian units are able to deploy just a dozen troops per kilometer of front — there’s always the chance of a frontline breakthrough. In short, Putin may well calculate he can get more by persisting: more land, Western security guarantees so watered down they’re worthless and a cap on the size of a postwar Ukrainian army. That would handily set the stage for a later resumption of Russian revanchist hostilities.   The counter-argument? The Russian economy is struggling with high interest rates, labour shortages and soaring government borrowing costs. There’s alarm about the bad debt Russian banks are shouldering. The status quo may not be able to last forever. Likewise, though, Ukraine could be on the ropes this winter with Russia’s relentless targeting of the country’s energy infrastructure and the Europeans unable to bankroll Kyiv sufficiently.   Odds: 4/1 2026 IS THE YEAR THE BOND MARKET SAYS ENOUGH IS ENOUGH  Bill Clinton’s campaign guru James Carville once suggested it would be fun to be reincarnated as the bond market. “You can intimidate everybody,” he said.   Even Trump appears to appreciate he’s outranked by the real masters of the universe — the bond vigilantes, hedge and pension fund bosses and high financiers. In the spring he had to pause his signature policy of “reciprocal tariffs” when the bond market frowned.   The awesome collective power of the global investment giants and traders was demonstrated three years ago when they reacted adversely to the poorly sequenced tax-cutting mini-budget of Britain’s Liz Truss. Her premiership was the shortest-lived in British history; Truss’s brief 49 days in office broke the previous record of George Canning, who served for 119 days in 1827 — but he had the excuse of dying on the job.   How many other Western heads of governments might be ushered to the door next year by the bond market as they fail to reduce rising budget deficits?   How many other Western heads of governments might be ushered to the door next year by the bond market as they fail to reduce rising budget deficits? | Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images The parlous state of public finances — from Japan to Britain and the United States — has kept long-dated borrowing costs at near multi-year peaks this year. The fiscal challenges of high levels of government borrowing, slow growth and sluggish productivity are only mounting. And it is going to be an uphill battle to keep the bond markets reassured.   Demand for government bonds worldwide has cooled with institutional investors put off by the outlook for some major governments being able to maintain their finances, including the United States. “The economic reforms needed to really cover increasing debt are lacking, and the capital market sees that,” Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing said in September.   With its exploding public debt, France has been the canary in the mine with a succession of Emmanuel Macron-appointed prime ministers unable to muster parliamentary — or public — support for serious debt-reduction. Britain is closely following. Financial crisis and political crisis go hand-in-hand, reinforcing and fueling each other. For electoral reasons, governments are equally loath to hike taxes or cut spending, but something has got to give.   Odds: 5/1 NETANYAHU SURVIVES AGAIN They call him “the Magician” for a reason. When all has seemed lost in Benjamin Netanyahu’s long political career, he has implausibly bounced back. “An obsessive, relentless fighter, failure is not a legitimate option for him,” noted one of his biographers, Ben Caspit.   The Israeli leader was first nicknamed “Bibi the Magician” in the 1990s, after beating Shimon Peres in elections held months after the assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Later, few believed he could pull off a win in 2015 given talk of criminal investigations and allegations of breach of trust and bribes. Still, Bibi pulled another rabbit out of his hat and secured reelection by courting the Israeli far right and religious nationalists — a tactic he repeated in 2019 to claw his way back.   The political obituarists were quick to declare him finished two years ago after Hamas rampaged through the kibbutzim of southern Israel. His government was widely blamed for a catastrophic failure to prevent the Oct. 7 attack, seen as the worst security lapse since the 1973 Yom Kippur war that ended the legendary Golda Meir’s career.  They call him “the Magician” for a reason. When all has seemed lost in Benjamin Netanyahu’s long political career, he has implausibly bounced back. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images Parliamentary elections have to be held by October next year. The smart money is on a vote being held sooner, likely Netanyahu’s preferred option. And despite Oct 7 and Netanyahu’s legal travails, he has slowly improved his political position. The rock-bottom poll ratings of his ruling Likud party started to lift after the military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon and they continued to rise with the humbling of Iran.   And Trump may have done Bibi a big favor by pushing him into accepting the Gaza peace plan and agreeing to a ceasefire. Netanyahu was able to use Trump as the excuse for halting the military campaign in Gaza, allowing him to overrule the religious nationalists and far-right partners in his rambunctious coalition who wanted the war to continue.  Netanyahu’s political opponents are drawing comfort from the fact that Likud appears to be running short of the 35 seats it secured in the last election. Opinion polls are showing his right-wing coalition would struggle to secure 61 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. But so too would the opposition bloc. And a poll last month for Zman Yisrael, a Hebrew-language media site, suggested Bibi was enjoying increased support in the wake of the ceasefire and hostage release deal. Likud appears on course to once again emerge as the largest party in the Knesset.  The best hope for Netanyahu’s opponents is to unite and offer Israelis a simple choice. That’s the strategy former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is pursing; he’s wooing Gadi Eisenkot, a former chief of the Israeli Defense Forces, in a bid to shape the election as a head-to-head fight between himself and Bibi. Does Netanyahu have another card up his sleeve?  Odds 3/1 HUNGARY’S VIKTATOR WINS REELECTION Who would bet against Viktor Orbán leading his national conservative party, Fidesz, to another parliamentary victory?  The Viktator — a pun combining his first name and the Hungarian word for dictator — has been victorious in the past last three elections. The bête noire of Europe’s centrists and leftists, they will be determined to see him tripped up this time when Hungarians go to the polls in April, eager to be free of his EU obstructionism.   Who would bet against Viktor Orbán leading his national conservative party, Fidesz, to another parliamentary victory?  | Pierre Crom/Getty Images “The election isn’t going to be hermetically sealed off from the rest of Europe,” chuckles Frank Furedi, who heads the Brussels branch of the Hungarian government-backed college Mathias Corvinus Collegium. Furedi predicts Hungary will be the venue for a massive ideological brawl, further polarizing an already highly divided country.   Trump, MAGA influencers and Orbán’s allies in the Patriots for Europe group will be equally determined to see him remain as prime minister. They’re already drawing comfort, says Furedi, from the result in October of the Czech Republic’s parliamentary election, which saw right-wing populist Andrej Babiš’s ANO party secure a big win. The presidential election victory by a national conservative in Poland this year is also a source of confidence. But even Orbán loyalists don’t doubt this is going to be the toughest election he has faced in the past 15 years with incumbency proving a disadvantage.  And election campaigning is already underway. Péter Magyar, an MEP and former Fidesz insider, is Orbán’s main rival and hopes to capitalize on widespread public dissatisfaction with record inflation, economic woes and a series of political scandals. He’ll hope Orbán fatigue will kick in. His pro-Western and center-right party, Tisza, is running neck-and-neck with Fidesz in many polls, although some independent pollsters reckon Magyar is ahead.   But one in four Hungarians remain undecided. “A bit of trickery and a lot of campaigning” could shift the polls, according to political analyst Péter Krekó of the Budapest-based think tank Political Capital. “Tisza’s lead is not unchangeable.” Orbán is casting Magyar as a puppet of the EU and even a Ukrainian agent of influence who wants to push Hungary into war. He will hope his populist EU-baiting narratives, helped by a media controlled by his friends, shift the focus of the election toward the culture wars. It just may work, again.  Odds: 2/1 A SHADOW BANKING CRISIS ERUPTS And spare a worrying thought for the unregulated private credit market and the so-called shadow banks. The usually staid Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, has already tolled the alarm bell.  In October, he warned of parallels with the 2008 financial crash, which was sparked by an American housing bubble fueled by easy credit and the issuance of risky subprime mortgages, with their subsequent bundling into opaque financial products that spread risk throughout the global financial system. Risk turned to contagion.  Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, warned of parallels with the 2008 financial crash. | Oli Scarff/Getty Images Will the global financial system once again be brought to its knees? The private credit markets have become a major source of funding for businesses. That’s partly because traditional banks never regained their appetite for riskier lending after the 2008 crisis, and they have also been restrained because of greater regulatory scrutiny.   The hedge funds and private equity firms comprising the shadow banking sector now account for just under half of the world’s financial assets, worth around $250 trillion, according to the US Financial Stability Board.   The good news is that unlike traditional and investment banks they’re not using consumer cash deposits to invest in long-term, illiquid assets; they raise and borrow funds from investors, who in large part agree for their investment to be locked up for long periods. That reduces the short-term risks for the shadow banks — so in theory there shouldn’t be massive runs on them, like, say, what happened to Lehman Brothers in 2008.   But that’s in theory. If the private credit market is roiled, there’s bound to be an impact on other parts of the global financial system. And cash-strapped governments will be in no position to organize a bailout like in 2008, particularly at a time of even greater populist revolt. Furthermore, shadow banks have bet heavily on AI — and the AI boom might be a bubble ready to pop. It might soon be time to take cover.  Odds 3/1 DEMOCRATS VS. REPUBLICANS It will be a tall order for the Republicans to retain control of the House of Representatives.   The incumbent president’s party invariably loses control of the House in the midterms — only twice since 1938 has that not been the case. “Both exceptions reflected unusual circumstances,” according to William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank.   It will be a tall order for the Republicans to retain control of the House of Representatives.  | Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images In 2002, President George W. Bush’s Republicans surfed a rally-round-the-flag wave following the 9/11 attacks; and in 1998, Bill Clinton’s Democrats benefited from the unpopular effort by Republicans to impeach him.  Complicating the task for Democrats next year is a controversial redistricting scheme pushed by Trump in Texas and other states that should net Republicans additional seats, though some of that will be offset by Democrats redistricting in California. Nonetheless, with Republicans only enjoying a slim majority in the House, Democrats have to be odds-on favorites to win back control, especially if Trump’s net approval rating remains negative. In a reassuring sign for the party, Democrats scored big wins in gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia in November.  The Senate is another matter. The GOP has a six-seat majority currently, and they’re playing on much safer turf. Although they will be defending 22 seats next year compared to the Democrats’ 13, most of their incumbents are considered secure. Only one Republican senator is running in a state that voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election. Two Democratic incumbents will be running in states that Trump won last year.   All in all, Republicans in the Senate look to be in a much stronger position than their counterparts in the House. For Democrats to win the Senate would require a giant wave of anti-Trump fervor sweeping into even some of the most conservative states in the country. It’s unlikely, but stranger things have happened.  Democrats seize the House: 2/1 odds; Republicans keep the Senate: 2/1 odds  

Listen on * Spotify * Apple Music * Amazon Music Rixa Fürsen nutzt die ruhigen Stunden für ein Gespräch abseits des hektischen Tagesgeschäfts. Zu Gast ist Constantin Schreiber, Global Reporter bei Axel Springer und Nahost-Experte. Gemeinsam blicken sie auf ein Jahr zurück, das von Kriegen und Krisen geprägt war – von der Ukraine bis nach Israel. Ein Blick in die Welt: Schreiber berichtet von der rasanten Entwicklung in der arabischen Welt und der Stimmung in Israel nach dem 7. Oktober. Er analysiert, wie das Trauma der Geiselnahmen noch nicht verarbeitet ist und welche neuen Konfliktlinien sich in der israelischen Gesellschaft auftun. Und: Constantin Schreiber wünscht sich einen „Wahrheitstrank“ für Berlin und kritisiert leere Worthülsen und Stanzen. Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig. Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren. Mehr von Host und POLITICO Executive Editor Gordon Repinski: Instagram: @gordon.repinski | X: @GordonRepinski. Legal Notice (Belgium) POLITICO SRL Forme sociale: Société à Responsabilité Limitée Siège social: Rue De La Loi 62, 1040 Bruxelles Numéro d’entreprise: 0526.900.436 RPM Bruxelles info@politico.eu www.politico.eu

ONE DAY THERE WILL BE A RECKONING — BUT IT WON’T BE A WHITE BOY WITH A WAND AND A SCAR ~ Kell w Farshéa ~ This is a government of death. A cabinet of death-eaters who put the needs of capital and state above our humanity, and reactionary ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and disability above our shared solidarity. Death eaters who even now would rather prop up the genocidal state of Israel than attend to 8 activists on hunger strike who are being denied medical treatment or a judgement of their peers. People who have not even had a trial for crimes invented to suit the needs of Western geopolitical imperialism. People who saw the complicity of this British state and capital and fought back at source to intervene on behalf of humanity. The death-eaters manufacture consent through media as diverse as the BBC and GB News, the Guardian or the Express. Rationing social media and parliamentary questions for silence. So whilst basic access to medicine or a fair trial is denied — there is a mighty absence of the inquiring investigative journalism that the British press pretends to care about. There they are — the death eaters: Starmer, Lammy, Reeves, Mahmood, Streeting, Cooper — presiding over a cabinet of death. They take life-saving medical care from trans children and young people whilst praying to their gods in the name of love. They deport asylum seekers whilst claiming the mantle of liberalism. They pander to fascism and flag shagging, dangling the possibilities of mass deportations in the name of British fairness and British decency. A very British form of fairness built on the backs of colonial and imperial asset-stripping of half the world, of the third passage, the enslavement of millions, the cotton and sugar plantations, the indentured labourers, the gerrymandering of tribes, polities, countries and whole regions — all for the benefit of British capital and British power. The death eaters in Parliament — Farage, Badenoch, Starmer etc, — sidle up to the kleptomaniac fascist in the White House. They flatter him with baubles, monarchal fantasies of the divine right of kings, back when dictators dressed up their crimes with God (but don’t mention Charles I). Meanwhile they cut benefits for the dis/abled, play cheap tricks to push more gig economy working class people into tax brackets they cant afford. They promise whole new towns but do nothing about 700,000 empty buildings in the UK. They promise to bulldoze nuclear power stations through planning committees but still keep the oil and gas flowing from the North Sea. They demonise people who survive the prison system whilst doing nothing to address why so many veterans, ex-criminals, and people with mental health conditions will be the ones freezing on our streets this Christmas And still they cannot speak of Gaza. Gaza flooded. Gaza freezing. Gaza starving. The fake ceasefire and the Gaza land grab. Children shot for walking over invisible lines. Instead, the death eaters make political capital out of antisemitic hate crimes and mass shootings to avoid talking about Gaza. They’re all so pleased with themselves. And then there’s us. Spending our wages and benefits to keep people alive in Gaza in a global act of international solidarity. Brave comrades: arrested, harassed, punched in the face, laying down in the streets, slandered, occupying buildings, smashing the windows of the ECHR and Elbit. Same tactics, same struggles. One day there will be a reckoning. It won’t be a white boy with a wand and a scar though. It will be the whole damn world, and we will want justice. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photo: House of Commons on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 The post Governed by Death-eaters appeared first on Freedom News.

SQUATTERS ACCUSE MAYOR OF RETREATING FROM COLLABORATION AGREEMENT FOLLOWING GAZA PROTESTS ~ Cristina Sykes ~ The Askatasuna social centre in Turin, Italy was evicted early this morning, bringing to an end nearly 30 years of occupation. The operation involved the DIGOS political police and armoured vehicles, with several streets sealed off. Police entered the four-storey former municipal building building early in the morning to carry out searches and then sealed the premises. According to activists, six people were inside the building at the time of the raid. The homes of around ten activists linked to the centre and to student collectives were raided at the same time, in connection with recent Palestine solidarity protests including an action at the headquarters of arms manufacturer Leonardo.  During the day police used a water cannon to disperse a growing crowd of supporters who had gathered outside the building, while traffic in the area was blocked and at least one nearby tram line suspended. Two schools in the surrounding area were reportedly closed on the orders of the prefecture. The mayor of Turin, Stefano Lo Russo, said the city had withdrawn from a “collaboration pact” with Askatasuna that had been in place since early 2024, when the municipal council formally recognised the occupied building as a “common good” and began a process towards shared management. The mayor’s office stated that inspections by public security authorities had found violations of the conditions of the agreement. Activists and solidarity groups dispute this account, arguing that the police operation and the withdrawal of the pact unfolded on parallel tracks and that pressure from the national government played a decisive role — similarly to the eviction of Milan’s Leoncavallo social centre earlier this year. Several statements described the eviction as a politically motivated act aimed at weakening social movements, in particular those involved in organising protests against the war in Gaza and Italy’s role in international military alliances. Askatasuna, whose name means “freedom” in Basque, has been a central reference point for the city’s autonomous and radical left since 1996. Over the years it hosted political assemblies, cultural events, concerts and community services, including housing advice, children’s activities and mutual aid projects. The centre was also closely involved in major protest cycles in Turin, from the No TAV movement in the Susa Valley to anti-war and anti-fascist mobilisations. Within hours of the eviction, dozens of organisations across Italy issued statements of solidarity, including trade unions, student groups and networks of social centres. Many framed the operation as part of a broader tightening of public order policies under the far-right-led government of Giorgia Meloni. A joint statement from social centres in north-eastern Italy described the Turin operation as an “exemplary act” designed to intimidate and warned that autonomous spaces were increasingly being treated as targets of repression. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine-assisted edit. Photos: GlobalProject, Radio Onda d’Urto The post Turin: Askatasuna social centre evicted appeared first on Freedom News.

The European Broadcasting Union cleared Israel to take part in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, brushing aside demands for its exclusion and sparking an unprecedented backlash. “A large majority of Members agreed that there was no need for a further vote on participation and that the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 should proceed as planned, with the additional safeguards in place,” the EBU said in a statement Thursday. Following the decision, broadcasters in Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands and Slovenia said they disagreed with the EBU and announced they would not participate in the 70th-anniversary Eurovision in Vienna because Israel was allowed to take part. The boycotting countries said their decision was based on Israel’s war in Gaza and the resulting humanitarian crisis, as they launched a historic boycott that plunges Eurovision into its deepest-ever crisis. “Culture unites, but not at any price,” Taco Zimmerman, general director of Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS, said Thursday. “Universal values such as humanity and press freedom have been seriously compromised, and for us, these values are non-negotiable.” On the other side of the debate, Germany had warned it could pull out of the contest if Israel was not allowed to take part. Before the voting took place, Golan Yochpaz, a senior Israeli TV executive, said the meeting was “the attempt to remove KAN [Israeli national broadcasters] from the contest,” which “can only be understood as a cultural boycott.” Ireland’s public broadcaster RTÉ said it “feels that Ireland’s participation remains unconscionable given the appalling loss of lives in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there, which continues to put the lives of so many civilians at risk.” Spanish radio and television broadcaster RTVE said it had lost trust in Eurovision. RTVE President José Pablo López said that “what happened at the EBU Assembly confirms that Eurovision is not a song contest but a festival dominated by geopolitical interests and fractured.” The EBU in Geneva also agreed on measures to “curb disproportionate third-party influence, including government-backed campaigns,” and limited the number of public votes to 10 “per payment method.” RTVE called the change “insufficient.” Controversy earlier this year prompted the changes, when several European broadcasters alleged that the Israeli government had interfered in the voting — after Israel received the largest number of public votes during the final. The EBU has been in talks with its members about Israel’s participation since the issue was raised at a June meeting of national broadcasters in London. Eurovision is run by the EBU, an alliance of public service media with 113 members in 56 countries. The contest has long proclaimed that it is “non-political,” but in 2022, the EBU banned Russia from the competition following the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people in Israel, a large majority of whom were civilians, and taking 251 hostages. The attack prompted a major Israeli military offensive in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them civilians, displaced 90 percent of Gaza’s population and destroyed wide areas. The ceasefire brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump in October 2025 led to the release of the remaining 20 Israeli hostages. Shawn Pogatchnik contributed to this report.

SOLIDARITY ACTION LINKS SANREMO WITH UK DETAINEES HELD ON REMAND OVER PALESTINE ACTION CASES ~ Blade Runner ~ Italian anarchist prisoner Luca Dolce has joined from his cell in Sanremo the coordinated hunger strike that began in British prisons on 2 November — the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Britain’s colonial pledge that set the machinery of dispossession and genocide in motion. The British hunger strikers, held on remand for alleged offences linked to Palestine Action and all without conviction, say they will refuse food until Elbit Systems shuts its UK sites. Elbit, long targeted by Palestine Action’s factory occupations, remains Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. Alongside the strike, the prisoners have launched Prisoners for Palestine, an initiative to collectivise detainees charged over actions in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. At least six prisoners across Bronzefield, New Hall, Pentonville and Peterborough are currently refusing food as part of a rolling action involving dozens who have pledged to join. Since the proscription of Palestine Action earlier this year, the British state has been using remand as a form of domestic counter-insurgency. One of the six strikers spent September on hunger strike after authorities withheld her mail and removed her from her job in the prison library. Today the strikers report censorship of letters, phone calls and books, and say treatment has worsened since the ban — a predictable result when a political movement is reclassified as “terrorism” and handed to the state’s extremism apparatus. From Italy, Luca Dolce made a statement that cuts through the mainstream line that hunger strikes are simply protests about conditions: “The struggle against prison and the military techno-industrial system is essential for a struggle of broader scope, of revolutionary and internationalist resistance. … I stand by their side with serenity and resolve.” Dolce also salutes Palestinian prisoner Anan Yaeesh in Melfi prison in southern Italy, another target of isolation and transfer tactics meant to erase political prisoners. According to Dolce, whether Yaeesh remains on strike is unclear. The British state insists these prisoners are merely defendants awaiting trial. But their captivity functions neatly to suppress a movement that has repeatedly exposed and disrupted the UK’s arms pipeline to Israel. The hunger strike makes visible what the legal process tries to obscure: this is political imprisonment in the service of a war economy. The strikers aren’t appealing for prison reform. They are refusing to cooperate with the machinery designed to put militants out of action. And the fact that prisoners abroad are joining them only underscores the point they are making from their cells: the death machine is international — and so the resistance must be too. The post Italian anarchist joins UK prison hunger strike appeared first on Freedom News.

THE ‘NARCOTERRORIST’ IS FABRICATED IN PLACE OF AN INTERNAL THREAT, CAPABLE OF SETTING THE CITY ABLAZE ~ Camila Jourdan, LASInTec ~ What threat should bodies displayed in public squares produce? What lesson of terror has always been expressed by public executions? Alongside this: what authorises the modern state to kill? How can death be produced and, at the same time, one claim to be doing so in defence of the democratic rule of law? How can a row of bodies be publicly displayed while simultaneously writing the caption: ‘city returns to normal after operation’? How can massacre and extermination be placed under the aegis of normality? From the day of the operation, television insisted on saying that all the dead were ‘criminals,’ even if it wasn’t known who they were. Everything had been done to maintain order and social peace. Peace for whom, after all? The implication: ‘he died, therefore he was a drug dealer’ is old in this context of producing discourses of the supposed ‘war on drugs,’ and has been around for at least four decades. We know that the term ‘asymmetric warfare’ is used to avoid calling it a massacre, extermination, slaughter, persecution of the poor, crime management, and territorial control through fear. When the media finally starts calling them ‘suspects,’ it’s always accompanied by depersonalsation. It’s important to make the targets non-subjects, and this is done in many ways. By displaying bodies in mountains. By placing numbers as the subject of the sentence. By attempting to avoid any empathy. More than 100 people were murdered, but this must be treated as a whole; only the family and friends of the four police officers are shown crying, feeling, demonstrating grief. The murdered people have no family, or this family is a hidden subject mentioned to acknowledge the guilt of the dead son; no one cares, they are just numbers: ‘128 dead’, ‘128 bodies’, no subjectivity… hence the backdrop for the governor’s statement, repeated by the security secretary: “we only had 4 victims in this operation, the police officers,” the others were contained, eliminated, shot down. The others are not people. All this is then accompanied by the impossibility of defence; the animalised other is the place of the social enemy, and the social enemy is the one who can be eliminated without punishment. More than that, whose attempt at self-defence must always trigger their own death. The place occupied by those who are labelled as non-human is what the designation of ‘terrorist’ should produce, the place that people without rights should occupy. The interviews given by the governor and the secretary of security intransigently defend an illegal operation, supported by this discursive stratagem: the place where defence is impossible is also the place of the prey. That’s why it’s so important for them to say that what’s at stake is no longer the drug trade, but the defence of the state, that these are ultimately very dangerous ‘narcoterrorists’. The ‘narcoterrorist’ is killable par excellence, an enemy of civilisation, fabricated in place of an internal threat, capable of setting the city ablaze, paralysing the market, disrupting roads, bringing chaos. Against him, any violence is presented as perfectly legitimate. Only in this way is it possible to justify leaving them in the woods for their families to retrieve the bodies. A refinement of cruelty, undoubtedly, but one that conveniently prevents forensic investigation. Because if they go to retrieve them, they are also accused of being criminals, of having tampered with the crime scene, of having generated any mark on the body that does not correspond to the version of the resistance report. But, if they were all in conflict, why weren’t their rifles found? Wouldn’t it be important for the police to leave evidence supporting their narrative at the scene, since they were acting in self-defense? How can unarmed bodies be seen as threats? Hence the importance of them being collected by their loved ones, those people who, even in the face of this sadistic strategy, insist on having empathy, like Antigone in the ancient myth. […] We shouldn’t claim that what happened was a tragedy, because it wasn’t; it was planned and executed according to plan. In this, the governor didn’t lie. In any case, Claudio Castro said that the police officers who died in the confrontation are heroes. I don’t want to dispute heroism. But if there is one action that can be applauded amidst all this, it is that of those who spent the night searching for the bodies of their relatives, friends, or even just neighbours in the middle of the woods. These people allow us to confront the fear that is systematically imposed on us as a policy of death. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abridged machine translation The post Rio massacre: The politics of extermination appeared first on Freedom News.

AS TEN LEICESTER STUDENTS ARE CONVICTED FOR PROTESTING THE UNIVERSITY’S COMPLICITY IN THE ARMS TRADE, THE SILENCE OF THE RIGHT’S SUPPOSED ‘DEFENDERS OF FREE SPEECH’ SPEAKS VOLUMES ~ punkacademic ~ The news that ten student protestors at the University of Leicester have been convicted of ‘aggravated trespass’ with the connivance of the University authorities should, even today, give pause for thought as to what British universities have become. The first to be convicted for a campus occupation in over a decade, they were arrested in November 2024 for protesting the University’s complicity in the arms trade which enabled Israel to lay waste to Gaza. As these students are ‘cancelled’, the supposed arch-defenders of free speech on campus are unsurprisingly silent. The manufactured ‘free speech crisis’ of the past decade has served its purpose on the right, bringing universities to heel if they do not bow to pressure to host racist speakers or allow transphobic bile on campus. It was never really about free speech; it certainly wasn’t about students. But the present escalation represents a further disenchantment of any idea of universities as the ‘utopian place’ Edward Said once claimed they might be. As anarchists we are rightly sceptical of universities’ privilege and exclusion, but the idea of an egalitarian learning community has its merits. More bluntly it is something, rightly or wrongly, that most UK university students—and staff—have on some level believed in. Though the triumph of the knowledge economy and the imposition of fees regimes has largely reduced university education to bang for buck students still—still—arrive at university keen to discover themselves, each other, and the possibilities new ideas can give them. ‘Academic freedom’ (as it was termed before that phrase was captured by fascists as a licence to spread hate without censure) incorporated both students and staff. A republican idea of citizenship in a learning community, it drew on German ideas about research and teaching and medieval debates on ‘the arts of liberty’. It was repackaged in the post-war period as a bulwark against totalitarianism, the institutionalised ability to criticise without fear. Some of this was always liberal bullshit, but in post-war Britain it influenced how academics and students thought of themselves. They were at the heart of protest in the 1960s, in the UK as elsewhere. The 1968 revolt in France—in part spurred by actions by anarchist students at Nanterre—had its echo in Britain. For a time students were taken seriously enough that a Penguin Special was dedicated to their insurrection, including essays from several prominent student members of the New Left. The Freedom Press journal Anarchy—edited by Colin Ward—approvingly remarked that “Anarchist flags flew over not only the Odeon in Paris, but over the University of Kent at Canterbury”. But the ties between British universities and the warfare state were strong. Apart from universities’ role in the science base, some enlisted corporate spies to watch their students carefully during the student revolt of the 1960s, a trend which is the norm today. During an occupation at Warwick in 1970 files were found evidencing surveillance of students and academic staff. Working with the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, the students exposed this scandal which shocked the nation, first in the pages of New Society magazine (which Ward also wrote for) and then in the form of the book Warwick University Ltd. Today students find themselves saddled with debt in an economy devastated with financialisation, whilst universities have been demonised as ‘treasonous’ institutions in a febrile political environment where far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories of ‘cultural Marxism’ have been normalised into mainstream political positions on the right. This includes baseless claims that ‘woke academics’ are ‘cancelling’ the views of those they disagree with, and that ‘student mobs’ are undermining ‘academic freedom’ itself by having the temerity to disagree with things like genocide or transphobia. These right-wingers argued—as did their well-funded think tanks and billionaire backers—that the key was to restore ‘free speech’. With their tribunes in the right-wing press close at hand, conspiracy theory based on lies became government policy; the Office for Students was created and ultimately handed powers to enforce a ‘free speech duty’ including fining universities and ‘de-registering’ them if they did not comply. The University of Exeter in 2018 appointed the Regional PREVENT coordinator to its governing body, embedding a key figure in the state apparatus at the heart of its governance. Repression of student political protest in the UK has proceeded apace, with universities pursuing students with disciplinary procedures for their support of pro-Palestine activism and collaborating with arms companies to surveil their students at their behest. In one case, a university even offered to monitor students’ social media and responded to requests to involve their Safeguarding team against student activists. Students then, who do not generally have columns in The Times, the Daily Telegraph, or the Spectator, are being cancelled en masse with the collusion of their institutions. Supposedly taught to be ‘citizens for change’ at Leicester, when they attempted to effect change they faced disciplinary procedure or prosecution. As anarchists, we can never be complacent about the practical realities of institutions founded by the state, funded by the state, and in the service of the state. But the prosecution of the Leicester students is both an act of gross repression in itself, and a fundamental illustration of the absolute lie that was the right’s confected ‘free speech crisis’ of the past decade. Now there is a free speech crisis in universities today—a free speech crisis over the right to protest genocide—and the students are the ones cancelled. As if any further proof were needed, the fate of the courageous Leicester students – and the silence of right-wing provocateurs who supposedly believed in ‘free speech on campus’—is a perfect example of why good faith should never be extended to a politics rooted in lies and deceit, a politics which destroys the very thing it claims to defend. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photo: Devon Winters / Leicester Gazette CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 The post Free speech on campus? Only for racists and transphobes appeared first on Freedom News.

COMPANY “COMPLICIT IN THE WORLD’S WARS AND GENOCIDES”, SAY ACTIVISTS ~ Cristina Sykes ~ Groups including Shut the System, Carnage Total and Scientist Rebellion say their activists last night smashed windows and spray-painted offices of Allianz, a major global insurance company, over its complicity in Israeli arms. The groups said offices were defaced in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Taiwan, and Birmingham. Provided photos from Paris The actions follow the 1 November renewal of Allianz’s contract with Israeli arms company Elbit Systems. The group noted the actions coinciding with the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. “Palestine is a crux point for our shared struggle for justice against imperialist forces”, said a UK spokesperson in a press release. “They massacre communities so that greed-driven multinationals can ravage the land for oil, gas and minerals, devastating the support systems for all life on Earth”. Elbit Systems supplies up to 85% of Israel’s military drones and land-based equipment, while its British exports to Israel mostly concern drone and aircraft components, military electronics, and target and acquisition systems The post Elbit insurer Allianz targeted in 8 countries appeared first on Freedom News.