A series of attacks were carried out overnight on several French prisons with vehicles set alight and automatic weapons fired.
French justice minister Gerald Darmanin said: “Attempts have been made to intimidate staff in several prisons, ranging from burning vehicles to firing automatic weapons.”
He continued: “I am going to Toulon to support the officers concerned. The French Republic is facing up to the problem of drug trafficking and is taking measures that will massively disrupt the criminal networks.”
French media reports that six establishments were targeted – in Toulon, Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, Valence and Nîmes, Luynes, Villepinte, and Nanterre.
A residence known to house prison guards’ accommodation in the north of the city was targeted, according to local media. Two cars were set alight, and nine were tagged with the words “DDPF,” or “droit des prisonniers Français” – the rights of French prisoners.
Currently, no group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but a source said “all of this appears coordinated and clearly linked to the minister’s anti-narco-banditry strategy.”
Another source suggested these raids could also have been carried out by far-left groups, as suggested by the DDPF inscriptions found at some of the attack scenes.
France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor’s department has confirmed it is investigating the attacks. According to local media, the entrance to Toulon prison was targeted by gunmen in a car at around 1am. The gunmen fled the scene.
Gendarmes found the door had been hit seven times and several boxes of ammunition were allegedly left on the ground. No one is believed to have been injured.
In Valence, a scooter was reportedly used to set fire to vehicles outside the prison.
The prison guard union, FO Justice,its “deepest concern and anger” following the “extremely serious” attacks overnight.
The union posted updates from the aftermath of several attacks on X, including images of bullet holes in the Toulon prison windows, and of burnt-out vehicles in other prison car parks. It called for urgent government action to protect prison staff.
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said he had instructed local prefects, alongside the police and gendarmerie, to immediately step up the protection of staff and prisons.
“The State’s response must be implacable,” he wrote on X. “Those who attack prisons and prison officers should be locked up in these prisons and watched over by these officers.”
A billionaire scientist and cancer drug inventor told Tucker Carlson that the COVID virus and mRNA “vaccine” are driving an explosion in cancer among the young and old alike.
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a transplant surgeon and owner of the Los Angeles Times, recently broke down in an interview how the COVID spike protein, persisting in people’s bodies both from the virus and the mRNA shots, is contributing to unprecedented cancer diagnoses.
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is a surgeon who made billions inventing cancer drugs. He says that Covid, and the vaccines that didn’t stop it, are likely causing a global epidemic of terrifyingly aggressive cancers.
Soon-Shiong likened the disturbing rise in atypical, aggressive cancer cases to a “non-infectious pandemic,” now claiming the lives of young people afflicted with cancers highly unusual for their age. He cited the fatal post-COVID case of a 13-year-old boy he had seen with pancreatic cancer usually found in people at least 45 to 50 years old.
He told Carlson how these cases were concerning him so much that he called a doctor friend whose experience mirrored his own. Soon-Shiong recounted how his friend told him, “Patrick, I’m now seeing an eight-year-old, a 10-year-old and 11-year-old with colon cancer … We’re seeing now 30-year-old, 40-year-old ladies, young ladies with ovarian cancer.”
Soon-Shiong explained that the challenge presented by cancer can be distilled into the question of how we can increase or activate the cancer killer cells and decrease or deactivate the cells that suppress the killer cells, which he called suppressor cells.
According to the doctor, what knocks these cells “out of equilibrium” is essentially inflammation.
A mechanism by which inflammation can help contribute to cancer is by flipping infection-killing neutrophils into suppressor cells, when the inflammation is “persistent,” according to Soon-Shiong.
Worse, after 50 years of scientific research and practice, he believes that “everything we’re doing” to address cancer “is tipping the scales towards the suppressor cells.”
To give context to the potential impact of COVID and its “vaccine,” he pointed out that there are cancer-causing viruses, called oncogenic, which persist in the body, thereby creating ongoing inflammation. COVID itself, as well as the mRNA shots created in response to the virus, both produce inflammatory spike proteins, he noted, which attach to blood vessels with ACE-2 receptors, found all throughout the body.
This would explain why after COVID, dysfunction in different organs — from the pancreas to the colon, and the heart to the brain — is being seen all of a sudden, Soon-Shiong continued. “You’ve seen young people have sudden heart attacks all of a sudden. You see young people with pancreatic cancer all of sudden. You see young people’s colon cancer all of a sudden.”
“So is it by coincidence that post COVID infection, post COVID vaccine, we’re seeing all these events where we know the spike protein goes? I don’t think so. I think it’s not a coincidence,” Soon-Shiong said. “So the question is, can we prove, is what I call long COVID virus persisting?”
“And the group at University of California, San Francisco, has now definitively proven that and published that in papers like Nature,” the doctor noted.
He said there is also published research showing that the persistence of the virus, which is likely the reason for “long COVID” symptoms, suppresses natural cancer-killer cells, making them “go to sleep.”
“And that’s why I sort of abandoned everything just to focus on how do we clear the virus, because the answer is to clear the virus from the body, the answer is to stop the inflammation,” Soon-Shiong said.
He has found that the virus persists in the body at least three to four years, and told Carlson he believes it cannot be cleared from a body that is immunosuppressed.
This accords with a Harvard study pointed to by the prolific internist and cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, which shows that those suffering from long COVID likely have spike protein from the virus circulating in their bloodstream.
However, according to medical freedom champion Dr. Mark Trozzi and other doctors, there are simple ways people can clear their body of the COVID virus (or shot’s) spike protein, to which Soon-Shiong himself attributes the illness caused by the virus.
Trozzi has shared three methods by which one can help clear out the spike protein and minimize its effects: Accelerating the process of autophagy through intermittent fasting; ingesting Nattokinase, which “digests” the spike protein; and taking substances that block the uptake of the spike protein, such as ivermectin and quercetin.
Soon-Shiong believes the only way to clear the body of the virus itself is to have a “T cell, natural killer (NK) cells,” (a type of T cell), which are white blood cells which kill cancer cells. He attributed the fact that he himself did not suffer from a COVID infection to the manipulation of his own immune system, through what he calls a “bioshield.”
What the bioshield does is “educate your body to have these T cells, called memory T cells, that go and hide in the bone marrow and come out when they need it and kill that cell,” Soon-Shiong said. He told Carlson it was approved for public use in the U.S. in 2024 for bladder cancer.
Asked how we can strengthen our immune system for disease in general, Soon-Shiong said we should seek to “activate” the natural killer cell. This immune cell can be replenished with sleep and exposure to sunlight and can be preserved by avoiding food that has an immunosuppressive effect. This means sticking to natural foods and avoiding processed foods with toxins, such as red dye, according to the doctor.
During his interview with Carlson, Soon-Shiong also discussed how his proposed interventions for COVID were shut down by the FDA, the efforts to find “dirt” on him to prevent him from becoming the head of the NIH, his thoughts on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the healthcare establishment’s conflicts of interest, and why he decided to buy the Los Angeles Times.
Emma Webb delivers her speech “This is a Free Country” at our New Culture Forum Locals Conference held in Salisbury: “A Celebration of England: Magna Carta and the Making of the English” – Salisbury 29.3.25. Watch other conference speeches here: • David Starkey: Magna Carta – A Conser…
Rafał Trzaskowski, the candidate for Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition in screen shot of the televised presidential debate preceded by confusion and exclusion of some candidates and media from the venue.
Poland’s government-controlled television broadcaster TVP has been accused of participating in a presidential debate from which five candidates were excluded, leading to threats of legal action that could see the upcoming election invalidated.
The April 11 debate in legal terms was a campaign event in the town of Końskie organised by Rafał Trzaskowski, the presidential candidate of the Donald Tusk-led Civic Coalition. It was moderated by TVP and two commercial networks, TVN and Polsat.
The Polish electoral code states that public television is obliged to ensure fair access to airtime for every registered candidate, including debates between all of them.
Originally, the idea, which Trzaskowski initiated on April 9 with TVP, was for the debate to be between himself and Karol Nawrocki, the candidate for the biggest opposition party, the Conservatives (PiS).
The proposal was immediately slammed by the other candidates who alleged that public television was violating the electoral code by failing to give all candidates access.
Some of them had travelled to Końskie in southern Poland to attend a hustings organised by broadcaster TV Republika. Parliament Speaker Szymon Hołownia, who is standing for one of the parties of the ruling coalition, said he was going to turn up at the debate anyway.
Just two hours before the debate was about to begin, under pressure from PiS’s Nawrocki, who expressed solidarity with the excluded candidates, Trzaskowski announced that he was inviting all the candidates to take part.
That was met with fury by candidates who were not in Końskie on that day and had no chance of arriving in time.
The right-wing Confederation party’s Sławomir Mentzen, who has been polling in third place with more than 15 per cent, was touring a region which is some 200km from Końskie. Adrian Zandberg, a left-wing candidate who has garnered around 5 per cent in recent polls, had a meeting scheduled with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
Mentzen called the situation a “circus” of “Belarusian debating standards”, accusing Trzaskowski and Nawrocki of a “set-up into which they let in some other candidates to cover tracks”.
One of Mentzen’s allies, Confederation MP Przemysław Wipler, took to X and argued that State TV funding a debate organised by one of the candidates from which half of the others were excluded “constituted grounds for annulling the election”.
Zandberg went further and said he would be reporting Trzaskowski’s campaign to the public prosecutor for having allegedly broken election law by holding a campaign event with the help of State television.
There were chaotic scenes outside the debate venue when Trzaskowski’s security team forcibly removed journalists from independent conservative broadcasters TV Republika and wPolsce24. They also denied entry to some of Nawrocki’s campaign team.
Marek Jakubiak, who is standing for the small right-wing Republican party, said that at first he too had been denied entry into the debate venue by Trzaskowski’s security guards, but eventually managed to find his way in.
Independent candidate Krzysztof Stanowski complained that even on arrival at the rostrum assigned to him at the venue he had not received any information about the rules which were to apply during the debate.
Access to the broadcast of the three-hour debate, attended by eight out of the 13 candidates standing, was granted to all other TV stations, giving those lucky enough to reach the venue in the two hours available to do so free access to millions of viewers.
During the debate itself, the most controversial moment occurred when Nawrocki approached Trzaskowski’s rostrum and placed a rainbow flag on it, apparently to remind the ruling party’s candidate of the Civic Coalition candidate’s support for LGBT causes.
Trzaskowski, who of late has been pushing his centrist credentials by talking tough on migration and security, looked displeased and said that he identified with the Polish flag only.
He took the rainbow flag off his rostrum, which triggered the Left’s Magdalena Biejat to walk over and state that she was gladly taking that flag from him as she had no problem identifying with LGBT people.
The first round of the presidential election in Poland will take place on May 18 and the top two candidates will then face each other in a run-off second ballot on June 1.
Following the release of his new book, The Dark Sides of Migration, Swiss forensic psychiatrist Frank Urbaniok has called for European asylum policy to finally take migrant crime statistics into account, claiming that certain migrant groups are “disproportionately criminal” due to cultural factors.
Urbaniok, one of Switzerland’s most prominent forensic experts with over three decades of experience analyzing violent offenders, suggests that cultural influences from countries such as Afghanistan, Morocco, and Tunisia contribute significantly to higher crime rates among migrants from these regions.
“Afghans are reported more than five times, Moroccans more than eight times, and Tunisians more than nine times more often than Swiss nationals for serious violent crimes,” Urbaniok stated in an interview with Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, citing his analysis of crime data from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
“The disproportionate crime rate has a lot to do with cultural influences. It is about how violence is dealt with, the image of women, or the role of the rule of law in these countries. I have been dealing with criminals for 33 years and have seen thousands of cases at close range. That’s why I know how strong and relevant these imprints can be. Sometimes, they persist for generations,” he said.
The cover of his book has drawn some criticism for prominently featuring a knife, which he insists is a “good symbol” as it “reflects the growing sense of insecurity in public spaces.”
While careful to clarify that he does not condemn all migrants — he explains why he preceded “Migration” in his book title with “The Dark Side of” — Urbaniok makes no secret of his belief that the cultural background of asylum seekers should influence immigration decisions. “There are countries that are unproblematic, those that are problematic, and those that are highly problematic… and I don’t understand why that doesn’t play a role in the question of who we let into the country.”
Urbaniok proposes an explicit quota system that would limit asylum admissions from countries with high crime rates. In his view, the absolute right to asylum is unrealistic and harmful to public safety: “Hundreds of millions of people would theoretically be entitled to seek asylum in Switzerland, but we could never take them all in.”
The renowned psychiatrist rejected accusations of exaggeration in his book, countering that much of the public discourse on foreigner crime amounts to “targeted disinformation” designed to downplay uncomfortable truths. “Many fear that citizens will not be able to deal with the facts,” he said.
In several European nations, foreign crime data is obscured by the fact that naturalized citizens in their respective countries are categorized as, for example, “German” or “Austrian,” even if they are foreign-born or of a historic migration background.
“Too many problematic people remain here,” Urbaniok said. “I see them in the statistics and every day in my profession for thirty years. That’s unpleasant. What is really unpleasant is the realization that these problems can still exist a generation later. That’s why you can’t say that we have the matter under control. On the contrary, the problems are huge.”
Urbaniok has appeared at events hosted by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), a party known for its hardline stance on immigration. While acknowledging that the SVP identifies the scale of the issue, Urbaniok criticized the party for what he considers to be a too simplistic solution. “It is a sign of their perplexity when they believe that all you have to do is control the borders and everything will be fine.”
He also spoke of the firewall against the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which he believes prevents the party from becoming more moderate and mainstream and enables radicals with pro-Russia and unpalatable, overtly xenophobic views to ride its coattails.
“The AfD does not distance itself enough from right-wing radical and xenophobic forces. It represents positions, for example vis-à-vis Russia, that I consider unacceptable. I don’t like their agitational language, but I think it is wrong to try to contain a party that has over 20 percent of the vote with firewalls. This only promotes the radical forces in this party,” he told the Swiss newspaper.
Despite the backlash against the issues raised in his book, Urbaniok remains defiant and optimistic about its release later this month. “The publishers were afraid for their image,” he said, revealing that several publishers declined to publish his book. “They try to have an educational effect on the population, and I think that is wrong and harmful to our democracy.”
Two months ago, the English podcast host Louise Perry hosted David Betz, a professor at King’s College, London, and an expert in civil wars. The topic? “The Coming British Civil War.” Betz argues that the United Kingdom now has all the traditional hallmarks of a society on the verge of violent civil conflict. He mentions the collapse of faith in British institutions, the two-tier justice system, Islamic radicalization, and the polarization wrought by official multiculturalism, among other factors.
The YouTube version of the interview has had nearly 200,000 views—so many that Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley noticed, writing in his April 3 column that events both in Britain and on the European continent (he cites a French court banning Marine Le Pen from running for the presidency) are driving things to a reckoning.
Writes Stanley:
Every conspiracy theory is confirmed, and without a democratic outlet for anger—seeing their aspirations limited and being too poor to emigrate—where else will a militant faction of angry whites go but to violence?
Nearly every educated English person I know under the age of forty is seeking to emigrate, having lost hope that their country has the wherewithal to pull out of its cultural and economic crisis. In Oxford recently, an American student told me, “If the ruling class here openly hated the British people, it’s hard to know what they would be doing differently.”
Spending a week in France last month, I recalled the scandalous open letter that 20 retired French generals and 1,000 active duty service members released in 2021, warning that their country was headed to civil war unless the government acted firmly against Islamic radicals in the suburbs, and turned away from divisive policies driven by so-called “anti-racism.”
In a number of private conversations with ordinary French people—this was before the Le Pen verdict—I brought up the Betz interview (none had heard about it), and asked them if they foresaw civil war coming to France. Nearly all of them said yes. They said so with an unnerving sense of calm, as if they accepted it as a matter of course. When I complimented one couple on their country, and told them that one day I would like to live in France, they responded in unison, “No!” Stay in Hungary, they said; you’ll be safe there.
You would never know from the mainstream media that this sort of sentiment is bubbling among the population of Europe and the UK. In his interview with Perry, Betz says that many people suffer from what he calls “normalcy bias”—that is, the belief that such a thing cannot happen here. Oh, but it can!
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992, violent civil conflicts broke out in some of the former Soviet republics, once the majority non-Russian populations ceased to fear the Communist yoke. They weren’t formal civil wars, with two armies lined up against each other. These were often spontaneous, undirected spasms of orgiastic violence—exactly what Prof. Betz says civil war in the UK and in Europe would be like. He also says that given mass media, especially social media, a civil war sparking off in one country would likely trigger them almost instantly in others.
If you want an idea of how hideous this kind of thing can be, read the testimonies in Secondhand Time: The Last Of The Soviets, a riveting oral history of the fall of the USSR. Ordinary people opened up to writer Svetlana Alexievich with their traumatic stories of what life in the 1990s and 2000s was like in the ruins of the Soviet state.
Russians, Armenians, and Tajiks living in the ethnic republics found that their longtime friends and neighbors turned on them overnight.
This is what can easily happen when the law disappears, and people feel at liberty to act out their darkest passions. It’s human nature: back to blood, or religion, or class solidarity. Don’t think for one second that Europeans are not like the Soviets: the history of the Holocaust reveals that Germans, Poles, and others turned viciously on their Jewish friends and neighbors when permitted to. The skull is always just below the skin.
J.D. Vance angered many European elites in his Munich speech when he warned them that the greatest security threats their countries face are within—and that their attempt to deny them by squelching free speech was only making matters worse. This—the danger not of war with other nations, but of civil war—is precisely what he was talking about.
In that blockbuster podcast interview, Prof. Betz says that “normalcy bias” is especially strong in Britain, which, unlike other European countries, has been relatively peaceful. Today, though, there is no reason to believe that the past predicts the future. Many of the cultural traditions that kept the English peaceable have dissolved in the face of modernity—especially multiculturalism.
“Multiculturalism has drained our nation’s social capital. It’s encouraged factionalism and polarization, both of which are up massively,” Betz says. “The belief of people in pre-political loyalty has been shattered by the triumph of identity politics in our society. So as a result of which, we see that nativist sentiments are increasingly manifested in a narrative of downgrading or displacement that is one of the most powerful causes of civil conflict.”
“Downgrading” and “displacement” are technical terms used in civil war scholarship to describe the feeling among native peoples that they are losing ground in their own country to rival groups. This is what the French writer Renaud Camus means by his concept of the Great Replacement.
This did not start in Britain with the current Labour government, says Betz, but the Starmer administration’s mad policies—in particular, its attempts to squelch criticism of the Pakistani rape gangs scandal—are a textbook example of how to provoke civil war. The Starmer government is destroying its own legitimacy through “failure to secure the country, the failure to secure its borders against what can only be described as a large-scale border raid, and the failure to protect children, the most vulnerable people in our society from the most extraordinary and grotesque predation on very large scale.”
What’s happening in Britain is happening all over western Europe. Alas, the professor thinks it’s too late to stop civil war in his own country. What about the rest of Europe? If Betz is right about the likelihood that civil war in one European country would likely set it off in others, that question might be in vain. If so, then history will record that the great villains of Europe’s 21st-century civil wars will not be the natives, or the Muslims, or the migrants, but rather the very social and political elites who spent decades assembling the tinder for this bonfire.
NHS trusts are “discriminating” against white job applicants by manipulating interview shortlists to favour black and ethnic minority candidates.
Documents show NHS England encourages the use of the Rooney Rule, an American football policy making it mandatory for ethnic minorities to be shortlisted for interviews if they apply.
Other “inclusive recruitment practices” range from making managers justify hiring white British nationals to using race as a “tie-breaker” when candidates are equally qualified.
An NHS hospital in Liverpool admitted it had previously used “positive discrimination” to shortlist applicants from minority backgrounds, The Telegraph has revealed.
These revelations come amid growing controversy over hiring policies in public sector services.
The Rooney Rule is just one of several measures being implemented across NHS trusts.
NHS England’s East of England region guidance titled “improving the selection process” explicitly tells employers to “consider using a version of the Rooney Rule”.
Some trusts only interview if there is “at least one BME candidate and one woman candidate shortlisted”.
NHS Employers encourages hospitals to use race as a “tie-breaker” if two candidates are equally qualified.
This “equal merit” provision of the Equality Act allows under-represented groups to be given priority when equally qualified as white candidates.
East Lancashire Hospitals Trust and several NHS boards have adopted this measure.
Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust introduced “positive discrimination at the shortlisting stage” until 2023 to guarantee interviews for people from “the global majority”.
Some NHS trusts have gone further, requiring managers to explain why they hire white candidates.
The London Ambulance Service and Royal Free Hospital require interview panels to justify not appointing shortlisted ethnic minority candidates.
NHS England guidance called “A Model Employer” encourages recruiters to always include at least one minority person on interview panels.
It states hiring managers are “accountable for institutionalising diverse shortlisting and interview panels” with “seldom acceptable exceptions for not having a BME member”.
Grant Shapps, the former Tory Cabinet minister, described these policies as a “tick-box exercise” that is “entrenching racial quotas”.
He said: “This kind of tick-box policy is patronising, divisive, and fundamentally wrong. Jobs should be awarded on merit, not skin colour.”
Neil O’Brien, a former health minister, criticised “race-based hiring policies” where “people are chosen based on the colour of their skin”.
A Conservative Party source called the practices “social engineering” and “racial discrimination”.
They added: “No employer, least of all one funded by taxpayers, should discriminate against applicants based on their race.”
The NHS has a target of ensuring its leadership is representative of the overall BME workforce by 2028.
A national scheme called the Workforce Race Equality Standard measures NHS organisations’ progress on increasing diversity.
One key metric is the “relative likelihood of white applicants being appointed from shortlisting compared to BME applicants”.
The practice has spread beyond the public sector to major companies.
Welsh Water, ITN, and Reed in Partnership all offer guaranteed interviews to minority candidates.
Riverside Group Ltd guarantees interviews to qualified ethnic minorities for roles with salaries above £35,000.
An NHS spokesman said: “All NHS organisations should have recruitment policies that are fair for everyone.”
The gang’s ringleader – Mohammed Imran Ali Akhtar – was given a jail sentence of 23 years NCA
Members of a Rotherham grooming gang received over £600,000 in legal help, GB News can reveal.
A total of £611,204 in aid was splashed out on the predators – with the gang’s ringleader receiving a total of £143,696 in funding.
In this case, seven defendants were convicted and handed a jail sentence for 101 years in 2018 for their abuse of five girls in Rotherham between 1998 and 2005.
The gang’s ringleader – Mohammed Imran Ali Akhtar – was given a jail sentence of 23 years.
Patrick Christys revealed on his GB News show: “The taxpayer-funded legal aid paid to the legal representatives acting for a single Rotherham grooming gang has topped £600,000.
“The costs are set to soar further. Ringleader Mohammed Imran Ali Akhtar was handed a whopping £143,500 to fund his defence at trial between 2017 to 2019.
“These are new figures released in a Freedom of Information request. He was caged for 23 years in 2018 for a string of previous sex offences against young girls, but that total I outlined there does not include costs for a separate trial last year, in which he was handed a further 12-year stretch for raping a vulnerable 13-year-old girl he had plied with drugs and alcohol.
“His sentence is set to run concurrently.”
The funding that he has racked up does not include his time going on trial for another conviction for raping a 13-year-old girl after he plied her with drugs and alcohol.
Meanwhile, a further five perpetrators – who were each jailed for around 10 and 20 years – received up to £99,168 in legal aid, while the seventh gang member was given £90,849.
All – excluding one defendant – were found guilty of rape.
One convict fell asleep while victims’ impact statements were read out to the court.
The latest revelation on the cost of the trials come as accusations are thrown at the Government after Labour seemingly backtracked on its promise to deliver an independent inquiry into child sexual abuse.
A package of £5million – which was originally ear-marked to fund five local inquiries – will now fund individual projects, such as victims’ panels.
As a result, the move has led some to speculate that the Labour Party was attempting to appease Pakistani voters.
Meanwhile, former Equalities Commission chief Sir Trevor Phillips said that ministers were “utterly shameful” for their action.
Patrick hit out at the “astonishing” costs, adding: “You also pay the wages of Jess Phillips, Yvette Cooper and Keir Starmer as well.
“And has there been a bigger, more barefaced betrayal of the Pakistani rape gang victims than what Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has just served up?”
Kim Harrison, president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL), said: “The Government has effectively dumped the recommendations on its ‘too hard’ pile, thereby brushing away victims and survivors as an inconvenience.”
A spokeswoman for the Home Office added: “Any claims that the funding has been watered down, or that we are backing down from supporting local inquiries, is patently false.
“A flexible approach to funding will allow us to support more than five inquiries.”
The Legal Aid Agency confirmed that funding is paid to their legal representatives – rather than defendants directly “to ensure access to justice and, in criminal cases, to ensure a fair trial”.
If you collect 45s, as my brother and I did, then you remember that one-hit wonder Thunderclap Newman and “Something in the Air.” To this day, I think the song was about something unexpected, sort of like people rethinking or “getting it together now” over climate change. This is from Joel Kotkin:
Like the Marxist dialectic, or the predictions of the Gospels, the green movement has long seen its triumph as preordained. Yet sometimes the inevitable turns out to be not so.
Over the past few years green policies — notably the drive for “net zero” — have been failing. Both markets and politicians have seen the light. What Joe Biden’s treasury secretary Janet Yellen once called “the greatest business opportunity of the twenty-first century” has revealed itself to be something of a disaster.
Something of a disaster? Yes, I would say so. Let’s check out how it’s working.
The Paris Climate Accord is not much of a deal anymore, in large part because it’s hard to fix the climate if nothing stops China. In other words, we finally came to terms with the reality that China and India are polluting the air a lot more than the Western countries who couldn’t wait to sign it.
The language has changed, too. You may remember when we called it global warming. Everything now is “climate change,” a convenient way of blaming everything on the climate.
Last, but not least, what killed the climate change cult is all of those predictions that turned out to be false. How many times can you get it wrong? I guess a million if you are making predictions about warming and cooling. Let’s remember some of the biggest hits:
1) In 1970, S. Dillon Ripley, a wildlife conservationist who served as secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, warned that 75 percent to 80 percent of species would be extinct by 1995. Wrong.
2) In 1970, Kenneth Watt, an ecologist and professor at the University of California, Davis, warned that “there won’t be any more crude oil,” that “none of our land will be usable” for agriculture, and the world would be 11 degrees colder by the year 2000. False.
3) In 1970, biologist Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University warned that by the end of the decade up to 200 million people would die each year from starvation due to overpopulation, life expectancy would plummet to 42 years, and all ocean life would perish. Extremely false.
4) In 1970, Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, predicted that “world population will outrun food supplies” and “the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine” by the year 2000. Didn’t happen.
5) In 1971, Dr. S. I. Rasool, an atmospheric scientist at NASA, predicted the coming of a “new ice age” within 50 years. Incorrect.
As I recall, the one about the coming ice age made the cover of Newsweek or Time. It had me wondering if they would have to cancel baseball or force every city to build a dome stadium.
Check out more hits:
6) In 1975, Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist, warned that 90 percent of tropical rainforests and 50 percent of species would disappear within 30 years. Erroneous.
7) In 1988, Hussein Shihab, environmental affairs director of the Maldives, warned that his island nation would be completely underwater within 30 years, which wouldn’t even matter because experts also predicted the Maldives would run out of drinking water by 1992. False.
8) In 2004, a Pentagon analysis warned of global anarchy due to climate change. Major European cities would be underwater by 2020, at which point Britain would suffer from a “Siberian” climate. Extremely false.
As it turned out, Britain never got a Siberian winter, but they do have a lot of immigrants who hate everything about the country. They didn’t run out of water in the Maldives, either, but a lot of people are going there for vacation. Maybe they drink bottled water in all of those fancy resorts.
And we round out the list with two more:
9) In 2008, Bob Woodruff of ABC News hosted a two-hour climate change special warning that New York City could be underwater by 2015, among other apocalyptic predictions. Didn’t happen.
10) In 2009, former vice president and climate activist Al Gore predicted the Arctic Ocean would have no ice by 2014, which is the same thing Greta Thunberg said would happen by 2022. Nope.
Well, New York City did not go underwater, but it’s a horrible place to live as more people bail out from high taxes. And V.P. Gore and Greta will likely not live to see the end of ice on the Arctic Ocean. We also have not yet lived to see a Gore presidency, which was the best part of the story.
So yes, there is something in the air, because climate talk is not what it used to be. I guess that’s what shutting down power plants and making bad predictions will do to a movement.
On today’s #NCFWhittle, we are joined by former Metropolitan Police officer Paul Birch, a commentator on the politicisation of British police forces. After a quarter of a century in the police, Mr. Birch explains how the police went woke and why it’s so dangerous.
