Since December, PN has carried a series of reports by the Electronic Intifada gathering together evidence that a number of Israeli citizens were deliberately killed by the Israel defence forces on 7 October last year, during the Hamas-led attacks (see PNs 2669, 2670, 2671 - print editions only).
The weight of evidence has finally broken through into the mainstream British press, in the Telegraph and the Guardian.
A long story on this…
Despite claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that Hamas used rape as a weapon of war on 7 October.
That is the conclusion of months of investigation by Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone, Mondoweiss, YES! and other independent investigators, who have carefully assembled evidence undermining the credibility of key witnesses. They’ve also shown the ‘evidence’ supplied to be very weak.
An article that persuaded many people that there…
If you film your campaign group in action, the footage can be used on social media or even broadcast news to get the message out to a wider audience.
By filming it yourself, you are being part of DIY (Do It Yourself) culture and not relying on the mainstream media to turn up.
Here are a few hints to get you going, using a smartphone.
ImageBefore you go out
Try and make sure your phone is fully charged.
Pack your…
SeaChange Sussex is a private not-for-profit company which has received tens of millions of pounds of public money to ‘regenerate’ Hastings in East Sussex. Andrea Needham has been monitoring it through Seachangewatch.
I’ve been plugging away trying to expose SeaChange for many years now. And, finally, it feels as if I’m not on my own.
For years, I read minutes of meetings, put in Freedom of Information requests, wrote blogposts, and posted them on my website. I sent out press…
On 12 May, peace activist Maria Gallastegui sprayed ‘Priti Patel Save Julian Assange’ on the wall of Belmarsh high-security prison where Assange is being held. She used a drill in a mock break-out attempt as a protest over Assange’s pending extradition.
To prevent any confusion, Maria had a placard saying ‘Jailbreak in progress’. She was taken into custody and held for four hours.
Journalists and free speech groups from around the world have called on the home secretary, Priti…
Reel News has just shown the power of independent media to help bring about social change.
On 11 May, the high court threw out an injunction that the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association union tried to take out against the London-based activist video collective. Reel News describe this as ‘a huge victory for free speech and press freedom.’
On 7 May, Reel News had uploaded a video interview with a former organiser, Claire Laycock, detailing serious…
Kaufman, a documentary producer who works at the Office of Open Learning at MIT (the top science and technology university in the US), begins by establishing what he calls the ‘Monsterverse’. This is a somewhat vague but playful concept that covers all of the interests (both state and private) engaged in a ‘relentless effort to crush freedom of thought, independent thinking, expertise’ and the general spread of ‘free access to knowledge’.
Kaufman explores a number of historical…
On 24 January, the high court in London decided that Julian Assange can appeal to the supreme court to continue fighting extradition on 18 counts of ‘espionage’.
The US government has asked for Assange’s extradition because of his work at WikiLeaks. In 2010, WikiLeaks publicised documents leaked by Chelsea Manning exposing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
A district judge at Westminster magistrates’ court ruled in January 2021 that the extradition should not go ahead…
‘There is a general policy by the MoD [ministry of defence] to keep the horror of what’s going on in Afghanistan out of the public domain,’ a senior officer told the Telegraph in September 2008. ‘If the real truth were known it would have a huge impact on Army recruiting and the Government would come under severe pressure to withdraw the troops.’
Unsurprisingly then, while there has been a huge amount of media coverage of the US-UK-NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, lots of…
On 4 January, district judge Vanessa Baraitser, sitting at the central criminal court in London, refused an application for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage.
However, the judge also ruled that Assange would have committed an offence under UK law if the acts complained about by the US had taken place in the UK. Judge Baraitser refused extradition on the grounds that Assange would be a suicide risk if extradited.
Two days…
On 7 September, Julian Assange faced a new extradition hearing in London, set to last four weeks.
The US had been demanding his extradition to face charges of conspiracy to receive, obtain and disclose classified US diplomatic and military documents – because of his work with WikiLeaks.
If found guilty on all charges, Julian could face up to 175 years in jail.
Clive Stafford-Smith, founder of the legal charity Reprieve, told the court that documents published by…
Even after an Iranian air defence unit mistakenly shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 on 8 January, killing 176 passengers and crew, the British press failed to remind readers of a relevant incident involving Iran.
On 5 January, Ali Larijani, speaker of the Iranian parliament, compared the US assassination of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani to the CIA-organised coup of 1953 that overthrew parliamentary democracy in Iran, and to the shooting down of an Iranian…
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s full extradition hearing is scheduled for 24 February at Woolwich crown court in South London.
The investigative journalist was arrested at the Ecuadorean embassy last April, having spent seven years there after claiming asylum to avoid possible extradition to the US via Sweden.
Sexual assault charges Julian was facing in Sweden have since been dropped, but he has been kept in Belmarsh high security prison because of an extradition request…
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, who developed the Propaganda Model for understanding the western mass media, once explained: ‘That a careful reader looking for a fact can sometimes find it, with diligence and a skeptical eye, tells us nothing about whether that fact received the attention and context it deserved, whether it was intelligible to most readers, or whether it was effectively distorted or suppressed.’
In the case of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, there were a lot of…
When Noam Chomsky first observed that the United States had attacked South Vietnam, he was upending a particularly tedious case of media conformism from that era, namely that the West was fighting Communists in the North to defend Saigon. However, the young professor was spectacularly right. By the end of the war,…
