UK universities have sanctioned students and academics for donning keffiyehs and using the watermelon emoji as part of a crackdown on Palestinian solidarity protests, a report from Amnesty International has warned.

The human rights charity has warned that universities including Cambridge, Oxford, LSE and Birmingham have taken extreme measures to restrict solidarity with Palestinians amongst students and academics.

Students and academics have faced suspensions, campus bans and threats to visa status for chanting, clapping and wearing keffiyehs, the report outlined. Some institutions used legal and bureaucratic means to restrict protests and events on campuses relating to Palestinian solidarity, they said.

The University of Birmingham, for example, withdrew approval for a staff-student listening session on the legal and humanitarian situation in Palestine in November 2023, citing the appearance of a watermelon emoji in promotional materials.

I didn't expect this post from the Guardian.

He arrived in the UK aged 12, but for the last 14 years Hall has been under threat of being sent back to Barbados – a country he doesn’t remember and where he has no surviving relatives.

All this time he has been kept on a deportation list, which means he cannot work, rent somewhere to live, receive benefits or do anything that would allow him to start rebuilding his life. Instead, he remains on the edge of destitution, reliant on the kindness of family and friends to survive.

In 2001 he was convicted of a serious crime – conspiracy to rob and having a firearm with intent; he spent eight years in prison. He had been planning with friends to hold up a security van taking money to a bank; he was carrying a toy gun, but there was also a real gun in the car. Police stopped them before a crime was committed.

The principle of rehabilitation suggests that Hall, having served his sentence, should then have been allowed to restart his life, as his co-defendants did.

Every fortnight Hall must attend an appointment at a Home Office reporting centre, carrying a document printed with his mugshot above a letter that warns him he is liable to be detained “pending a decision to deport you/because a decision has been made to deport you”. The journey there takes him the best part of two hours, and involves a few stops on the overground, a short bus ride, then six stops on the underground and another bus ride, followed by a queue at the reporting centre, a brief checking of documents and the reverse trip home. By now, he estimates that he has performed this time-consuming ritual more than 350 times.

The outlet, founded in 2015 at the height of support for the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said in a social media post it would be closing “for the foreseeable future”.

In a statement, the Canary said: “After 11 years, we take this action with deep sadness and regret. The extent of the lies, defamation, and harassment by ex-staff – coupled with the constant attacks by the state and those who’d see us destroyed – has become too much.”

However, some journalists at the Canary have said they believed the outlet’s banking issues had been used to distract from wider financial mismanagement. They claim that additional funding received over the summer – believed to be more than £2m – had been squandered on projects including a short-lived newspaper and the purchase of other websites.

Engineers have removed the masts of the SS Richard Montgomery – a second world war cargo ship that sank in 1944 with approximately 1,400 tonnes of munitions onboard – without triggering the kind of feared explosion that has kept the wreck under constant guard for decades.

Umm, why is that still there?! Sounds like. There's no plan to get rid of it. Just ask ships to go around it.

Luke Campbell, a former Olympic boxing champion and the mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire, is understood to have been questioned under caution by Humberside police earlier this month.

The woman said she had felt “shocked, embarrassed and humiliated” and claimed she had been forced out of her job soon after, according to documents submitted as part of an internal grievance procedure at Hull and East Yorkshire combined authority (Heyca).

I broadly agree with Zack Polanski here. I'm glad he's taken a stance.

I'm not sure about "no state has the right to exist", but whatever.

More than 500,000 Israelis have reached voting age since the last election in 2022, and three-quarters of first-time Jewish voters define themselves as right or centre-right, a recent poll for Channel 12 television found (it did not survey Palestinian citizens of Israel).

“All Israelis, and particularly younger people, have been living in a political environment where not only is the government rightwing but the general terms of debate are really populist and ultra-nationalist. That’s all they know. They’re socialised into it,” Scheindlin said.

“There’s been a real downplaying of anything to do with democracy, universal values or human rights. Those are seen as weak, if they’re discussed at all, possibly as bad as betrayal. And very few politicians talk about peace, concessions, negotiations, Palestinian self-determination, or even Palestinian wellbeing.”

The man leading the field to replace Netanyahu, Gadi Eisenkot, is a former head of the Israeli military who formulated the notorious Dahiya doctrine of using “disproportionate force” to cause damage and destruction.

On The Democrats:

The Democrats, the only remaining political home for Israel’s Zionist left, are led by Golan, a former general and deputy head of Israel’s military who personally rushed to border communities under the Hamas attack on the morning of 7 October to rescue civilians.

No Jewish-led party backed a future Palestinian state and only the Democrats opposed settlement expansion

Golan rejects a two-state solution and is campaigning on a policy platform that would be solidly centrist in much of Europe. Yet even so, Israel’s political shift to the right is so pronounced that the party’s campaigners have been repeatedly attacked – physically and verbally – as a radical fringe.

Last week, rightwing thugs assaulted Democrats volunteers manning a stand at Jerusalem’s historic Mahane Yehuda market, kicking, hitting and spitting at the group and stealing a phone while police stood by and watched.

Reform has said it had opened investigations where activists or members had “clearly behaved inappropriately”, adding there was “no room for racism” in the party.

If there's no room for that they'll have to fire most of their staff, and then they'll only be left with the ones who are only corrupt.

If you haven't seen it yet, this video by the NYC Mayor's Office is a funny little 50 second PSA letting you know how you can report businesses for making it hard to cancel subscriptions.

The intitial investigation is in.

In a “bizarre and unprecedented” cyber-attack, hackers had remotely overridden the temperature settings on thousands of freezers, fridges and chiller cabinets pushing them from as low as -27C (-16.6F) to well over 50C (122F).

If shop managers first assumed it was an isolated failure, it soon became clear up to 700 stores – including those from the Intermarché, Coopérative U, Carrefour, Leclerc and Monoprix chains along with a number of smaller independent shops – had been victims of a cyber-attack.

The hackers had pirated the controllers supplied by the Danish company Danfoss that controls the freezers and fridges. Most supermarket cold aisles are connected to the internet to allow remote maintenance and alerts for system failures. Initial investigations suggest the hackers disabled alarm systems before tampering with the thermostats, or extended the defrost programme by several hours to avoid triggering alarms.

Danfoss said it had identified security flaws last year and had “long recommended” that customers install updates or replace obsolete unsupported systems. The affected refrigeration units were “running outdated firmware”, it said. In the days following the first wave of attacks, France’s cyber-attack alert centre ANSSI confirmed supermarkets using controllers from two other companies were also targeted.