This is a shameless pre-publication advertisement, or as English BBC presenters tend to pronounce it, ‘ad-ver-ties-ment’ for my latest book, a 450 page exposé plus index, of Hollywood ethics, principles or lack of them and chicanery – an insider’s skinny of the stars.I hope readers will buy the book.
A CONTENTS TASTER
“With customary frankness and honesty, and many a memorable phrase, the Scottish writer, political activist and film producer, Gareth Wardell tells the often humorous, tongue-in-cheek tale of leaving his homeland to find work in the denizens of Hollywood.
The journey covers what happened when he met some of the most famous movie actors of the day, Sean Connery, Tom Berenger, Sandra Bullock, Denis Hopper, Rita Wilson, (Tom Hank’s wife) and the refreshingly honest Martin Sheen, to name only a few movie notables in a seven-year odyssey taken to promote and hawk his storylines and screenplays.
The story shifts from dealing with cockroaches in a cheap motel to an adventure as an extra in a Spielberg film; all the way to how he was thoroughly scammed by one of Hollywood’s most scummy, venal producers.
Wardell unwraps the shenanigans of powerful producers and Hollywood institutions, the big players who make or ruin people’s careers, the cheats and brazen thieves, the poseurs, the incompetent and encounters with sexual sleaze. To add heft to his observations, he recounts his insider experiences in the highly secretive right-wing sanctuary, the Bohemian Grove, a tented summer camp set among giant redwoods north of San Francisco where he met Clint Eastwood and Francis Ford Coppola.
This is a no-holds barred memoir, full of fascinating insights into how Hollywood works, the winners and losers, a book for anyone who is interested in film, or as antidote to help cure the chronically star-struck.“
The front coveris ‘Lifeguard Station – Zuma Beach‘ by Scotland’s Royal Academician, Dame Barbara Rae CBE RA RSA RE FRWS FRCA FRIAS.Zuma beach is halfway between Santa Monica and the movie stars domain of Malibu.
Well, dear readers, that’s sounds so enticing I can’t wait to read it myself. It will be published very soon…..onward!
Illegal rubbish dump, Bickershaw, near Wigan, 26 March 2026.Photo: Oli Scarff
This country, [England] is a dump. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean it literally. From the point of view of criminal waste gangs, it is one big potential landfill. The chances of being caught range between minimal and nonexistent, and the penalties are mostly laughable. Successive governments have given criminals a licence to print money.
Last week, the Commons public accounts committee reported that illegal waste dumping is “out of control”. The UK is now blighted with between 8,000 and 13,000 illegal waste sites. Most consist of a few lorry loads. Some contain tens of thousands of tonnes of waste, which might incorporate everything from household products to asbestos, heavy metals and highly toxic, flammable and explosive organic chemicals. The rubbish blows through local neighbourhoods, flows into rivers and seeps into soil and groundwater. And, in most cases, nothing is done.
This is no glitch, but the inevitable result of a sustained ideological assault on regulation. Governments treat essential public protections as “red tape” that must be slashed, and regulators as “checkers and blockers” who must be vanquished. But ministers cannot simply delete protections from the statute books, for fear of provoking public fury. So instead they cut the funds for monitoring and enforcement: deregulation by stealth. The result, over the past 15 years, has been to build a whole new industrial sector almost from scratch: organised waste crime. It is perhaps our most successful growth industry.
It’s great business. Someone who wants their waste removed pays you a fee to cover transit, landfill tax and the gate charges at an official disposal site. But instead of taking it to a registered landfill, you dump it on farmland, on nature reserves in ancient woodlands, across country lanes or even, as in Bickershaw, near Wigan, on the green space next to a primary school. You pocket the difference: about £2,500 per articulated lorry load. Anyone can play, as I discovered when I registered my deceased goldfish with the Environment Agency as an upper-tier waste dealer.
The chances of being caught are so low and the profits so high that waste dumping, as the House of Lords environment and climate change committee reports, has become a “gateway” to organised crime, creating networks that then branch into drugs, guns, money laundering, fraud and modern slavery. Waste crime is changing the character of the country, socially as well as physically.
So underfunded, demoralised and utterly useless have the regulators become that, even in some of the rare cases in which they’ve begun investigations and prosecutions, the dumping has continued. This is what has happened at Bickershaw, where a 25,000-tonne illegal tip has forced closures of the primary school, filled the neighbourhood with rats and flies, damaged local people’s businesses and ruined their lives. Locals first reported the dumping in late 2024. Eventually, the Environment Agency launched what it called a “major criminal investigation”. But in mid-February this year, drone footage showed that activity at the site continued: the agency, council and police had failed to secure it.
It’s the same story almost everywhere. When the first trucks began arriving on the banks of the River Cherwell, north of Oxford, in summer 2025, local anglers, neighbours and landowners reported them. The Environment Agency’s response was to issue “a cease-and-desist order”. But that was it. Not only did it fail to block the entrance, it didn’t even install a trail camera to monitor the activity and identify the culprits. Unsurprisingly, the lorries kept coming. Only months later did the Environment Agency secure the site, by which time a 20,000-tonne waste mountain, slipping into the river, had become a “critical incident”.
At Hoad’s Wood in Kent, a “strictly protected” ancient woodland, locals reported in 2020 that several acres of trees had been illegally cleared: the dumpers were preparing their site. The authorities failed to respond. Between 2020 and 2023, the gangsters deposited more than 30,000 tonnes of construction and household waste there. Local people supplied the authorities with footage of the dumping and even the names of the companies involved. Nothing happened. It wasn’t until January 2024 that the Environment Agency imposed a restriction order on the site, and it was only in February 2025 that three men were arrested. As Kent’s police and crime commissioner told a House of Lords inquiry, people “report it to the borough council, which will tell them to report it to the police, who will tell them to report it to the Environment Agency, which will tell them to report it to the council, which will tell them to report it to the police. They will just keep going round and round and round, and no one cares.” Now the cleanup operation will cost taxpayers £15m.
That’s deregulation for you. It’s yet another instance of successive governments’ bizarrely lopsided version of “fiscal discipline”, which counts the costs of action, but not the costs of inaction. On a conservative estimate, illegal dumping costs the economy in England £1bn a year. The cost of cleaning up all the criminal dumps that have accumulated over the past 15 years will, if it ever happens, amount to tens of billions. This is before we take into account the potential contamination of aquifers by toxic waste seepage, whose costs and impacts could be many times greater. And it’s all because of the cuts, saving a tiny fraction of these costs, inflicted on regulators in the name of “efficiency”.
A fortnight ago, the government published its “waste crime action plan”. Some of the measures are welcome, but they in no way match the scale of the crisis. It allocates an extra £15m a year for waste crime enforcement: a mere wooden sword to wield against the vast organised crime networks that have grown in the regulatory vacuum. This also happens to be the cost of cleaning up just one of the 8,000 sites: Hoad’s Wood. Everything this plan proposes is undermined by the prime minister’s ongoing deregulation agenda, which also appears to be “out of control”.
Under-funding and deregulation, now in their fifth decade, is destroying England. They ensure we cannot solve our problems, spreading hopelessness and passivity. They open the door to economic mafias and to political profiteers exploiting misery and despair. There could scarcely be a more potent symbol of dysfunction and neglect than the waste piling up around us. The literal dump becomes a metaphorical one.
NOTES
Though Monbiot is discussing England, England’s economy rules Scotland’s funding, which in turn means we are liable to see fly tipping increase in Scotland. As it is, we are having trouble controlling (civilising?) pain in the arse tourists who dump caravan effluent into our streams and set heather alight causing wildfires.
Paul Benedict Cullen – Lord Pentland: “The solemn oaths I have just taken on my appointment as lord president of the Court of Session enshrine the fundamental values underpinning the judiciary: independence, impartiality and support for the rule of law. Every judge in Scotland, in each of our courts and tribunals, commits themselves when assuming judicial office to upholding these values. I renew my own dedication to them today.”
Lord Pentland, Lord Malcolm and Lord Clark concluded the Scottish Information Commissioner, David Hamilton is not entitled to order Ministers to disclose the data. An astounding judgement considering at least two of the judges think something stinks with SNP holding secret documents on the Salmond case. Will we the SNP manage to stick a thirty year secrecy rule on them?
The judges, who sat in the Inner House of Scotland’s Court of Session, had heard submissions earlier this year about the matter by lawyers acting for both the Scottish Ministers and the Information Commissioner, David Hamilton. The Government wanted the judges to overturn a decision made by the Information Commissioner, who enforces the enactment of Freedom of Information legislation, in March 2025.
Hamilton’s decision arose from a request for information made by a member of the public, a Mr Benjamin Harrop, on December 7, 2023, to the Scottish Ministers requesting that they disclose “all emails, text messages, WhatsApps, minutes and other forms of communications” between “Ministers, SPADs, civil servants and other Scottish Government officials regarding… the court case known as The Scottish Ministers v The Scottish Information Commissioner” Harrop wanted the information up to and including December 6, 2023.
The Scottish Government’s lawyer Christine O’Neill KC says the information sought was covered by legal professional privilege (LPP). In law, this covers confidential advice given to clients by lawyers – the courts have repeatedly ruled that such information should be kept confidential.
Hamilton’s advocate, David Johnston KC, told senior judges that the need to have the data, which is covered by lawyer-client confidentiality, available outweighed the need to keep it confidential.
However, in a judgment issued by the court on today, Judge Lord Malcolm wrote of how the arguments made by the information commissioner’s lawyers did not meet the legal requirements needed to justify the disclosure. Lord Malcolm, who delivered the judgment, wrote: “Generations of judges have guarded the administration of justice against the dangers inherent in the inhibition of the open and candid discussion necessary for sound legal advice, and likewise in relation to the confidential communications essential to the proper preparation for and conduct of legal proceedings.
“We find nothing in the Act which dilutes the fundamental importance of these considerations, which apply to LPP for both private individuals and public authorities. This is not to say that the exemption is elevated to an absolute status in respect of LPP. There will be occasions when any harm risked by disclosure will not outweigh the public interest in publication of information held by a public authority. We have not identified anything which could reasonably be so described in the Commissioner’s reasoning and have concluded that this constitutes an error in law which justifies upholding the Minister’s challenge to his decision.”
Harrop made a request to the Scottish Ministers asking them to release all written evidence gathered by independent investigator James Hamilton (a different Hamilton from the commissioner) during a probe in 2019. The investigation was moved after former first minister Nicola Sturgeon referred herself to the independent advisers on the Scottish Ministerial Code for an alleged breach on January 13, 2019, whilst she was still in office. Her alleged breach was said to concern whether she failed to record meetings and phone calls in accordance with the code, and/or attempted to influence the conduct of the internal investigation into Salmond’s alleged behaviour whilst he was in office as First Minister. He was later acquitted in March 2020 following a trial at the High Court in Edinburgh on 13 charges, including sexual assault, indecent assault and attempted rape, all considered false and unsubstantiated.
James Hamilton investigated and determined that Sturgeon breached the code but did not mean to.
The Scottish Ministers responded to Harrop’s December 7 request on January 9, 2024 – the government, however, withheld information from his request on several different grounds. One of the exemptions relied upon by the Scottish Ministers was section 36(1) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (“FOISA”) – that information covered by legal professional privilege does not need to be disclosed. This prompted Harrop to apply to the Commissioner to review whether the Scottish Ministers were entitled to make that decision.
David Hamilton accepted that the information being withheld was legally privileged, but he found that the legislation meant that it did not automatically mean it could be kept secret. The Commissioner decided they had failed to do so and ordered the information to be disclosed. in response, the Scottish Ministers instructed lawyers to appeal the decision to the Inner House.
The context of the judgement
In the judgment published today, 26 March, 2026, Lord Malcolm, who gave the judgment, also wrote of how the evidence showed that Hamilton’s decision appeared to be influenced by his unhappiness at the actions of the ministers. He wrote: “Unless some contrary implication can be read into the legislation, it appears that it does allow for circumstances in which the Commissioner investigates and determines a dispute of the present kind when he has a direct interest in the matter and without having seen the withheld information. This puts the Commissioner in a difficult position, not least in assessing whether the exemption covers any or all of the material. If he has doubts on this, how is he to resolve them?
Lord Malcolm continued, “It seems clear that the Commissioner was unhappy that the Ministers did not volunteer the documentation to him, and that this was a factor, in our view an illegitimate factor, influencing his decision on the public interest test.”
Lord Malcolm wrote of how the judges will now hear submissions about what should happen in the light of the court’s decision. He said the matter could be remitted back to the information commissioner. Lord Malcolm also wrote: “For the above reasons, the appeal is upheld.”
NOTES
The strangest outcome of the Law Lords judgement is the implication that the Information Commissioner is untrustworthy, that he will release highly confidential elements tothe press and public deliberately or by accident. Theaphorism, once privileged, always privileged, should not ever be a staple of Scots Law, not when the public are clamouring for the documents to be released. Secondly, they have effectively neutered the Information Commissioner. In large part they have removed his authority. This is doubly unfortunate when matters are related to the political show trial of Alex Salmond, generally considered a permanent stain on Scots Law, and the withholding of evidence that would have closed his trial day two, by all accounts, including Salmond’s own , had it been in the hands of the High Court Judge Lady Dorrian.
At one point, the Scottish government said it would comply with the commissioner’s decision “as soon as possible” but added the request was complicated by the need to avoid jigsaw identification. The term ‘jigsaw identification’ has become one of those catch-all phrases that gave Franz Kafka a literary career.The public who care know who was commandeered to fit-up Salmond, there names appearing regularly in discussions, and slyly on social media, but this knowledge did not deter our Law Lords from withholding evidence that ought to be in the public domain. They hold tight to the doctrine, client-legal representative discussions must remain private.
This site believes information commissioner David Hamilton is made of sterner stuff, and if he cannot fine a new route to the documents, he may decide his job is mere window dressing, worthless.After all, Hamilton is o record statinghe could no longer trust the government to handle some files “unsupervised” given “preposterous and unacceptable” excuses by ScotGov for not complying with his instruction.As for we ‘The People,’ we’d better find ways of reaffirming sovereignty belongs to us.
Charlton Fraser Heston, of Scots ancestry, as Moses, in The Ten Commandments(1956)
Scotland remains exalted as the seat of the Enlightenment, free and open questioning of old beliefs. fears and strict orthodoxies. Our philosophers and scientists altered the minds and ways of the Western world. Today’s Christian nationalism is doing its best to roll back the hard-won progress of decades that has been made in pursuit of greater freedom of thought, expression, and choice in our country. We cannot let that happen. The social revolution of the twentieth century that was both caused by and gave rise to the widespread humanist values of our contemporary society has brought lasting benefits to us all.’
Scenes of Christian preachers denouncing ‘Secular Humanism’ from the main stage of Tommy Robinson’s radical right ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally in London is a chilly warning of godliness to come, the latest evidence of consistent attempts in recent years to promote a narrow ‘Christian nationalist’ vision of Scotland and England.Here I concentrate on Scotland.
What is Christian Nationalism?
Christian Nationalism is the name for an ultra-conservative form of religious nationalism that seeks to fuse politics with Christianity. It goes further. It wants the government of the day to promote, and actively enforce, religious interests and their favoured policies. It is violently opposed to the separation of church and state and to all forms of religious pluralism – such as learning about other beliefs and cultures. More generally, it advocates very conservative Christian social policies, such as rolling back human rights, dumping the ECHR, and abortion rights. It staunchly opposes people having choice at the end of life, on the basis that their religion forbids assisted dying.
Christian nationalists frequently denounce humanism as a heresy or the source of all social ills, and argue that people can only be moral on the basis of rules handed down to them from the God of the Christian Bible. Cue instant vision of Charlton Heston holding the Commandment Stones, God’s Laws.
Historically rare in the UK and rarer in Scotland, bar the occasional Wee Free, it has been a feature of American politics for decades. In recent years the movement has increasingly aligned itself with Republican Party and since 2016 has marshalled voters in support of thee Mad Sun King Trump on the basis that he would support their mission with regards to overturning federal protections for abortion rights and same-sex marriage. Cue images of hands on his Golden Head from his surrounding staff as he sits at his desk in the Golden Oval Office.
In April 2024, Humanists UK reported that the Alliance Defending Freedom was investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Europe, particularly the UK, and as readers know, the UK is still us, Scotland, unfortunately. The money is to further the political agenda it successfully pursued in the United States, which overturned the right to abortion, (Roe v Wade). More recently, Christian nationalists in the United States of Amnesia tried to unpick separation of church and state as applies to American schools, and they have plans to do that in England and Scotland. Cue image of Herald columnist Kevin McKenna chortling on about the right of Catholic schools to exist and flourish.
US war secretary Pete Hegseth’s tattoo is a Jerusalem cross, a symbol of the Crusades
Christian Nationalism in Scottish politics
Scotland is long a society where religion is worn lightly by the vast majority, and in recent decades, the religious population has become a minority with churches sold off on a regular basis. Scottish statistics confirm we are one of the least religious countries in the world. (England is following suit.)
Traditionally, explicitly religious politics has not fared well in Scotland, bar the unwanted infusion of Northern Ireland extremism. We prefer our political candidates to focus on policies, not pieties. There was a time, when soon as elected, a politician ensured he and his family were seen attending church on a Sunday, affairs, corruption, mendacious policy promises aside. Recent incidents suggest that our open society is changing, with politicians talking up a belligerent ‘Christian revival’ in public pronouncements. As with hamburgers and modern imperialism, the influence comes from bible belt politicians in the United States.
In an unprecedented move, US Vice President JD Vance intervened in Scotland’s politics, (as easily as he does English governance) in relation to a Christian activist who deliberately breached a public space protection order around an abortion doctor. He was attempting to influence our Parliament’s laws in relation to religious protesters. ‘Secular humanism’ is not welcome in a Trump world and that includes his old country of Scotland. We told Vance where to go. But Trump still holds onto his golf courses.
Places in England got worse treatment. Christian bookshops tried to ban marches. I am no admirer of the anti-biological mad doctrine of 29 genders, but Vance was letting us know he shoots from the hip.
In Scotland there was a well coordinated campaign to stop the ‘Assisted Dying’ Bill, using emotive language without definition, and individuals refusing to engage in the debate because it was a ‘personal view’ they were expressing. Declared Christians were less coy by claiming it was against God’s law, but no one could see that law on the Ten Commandments.
Plans for a ‘Christian Revival’
Since 2017, hedge fund manager and Spectator owner Paul Marshall has been involved in the creation of the conservative media outlets UnHerd and GB News, which seeks to create a Fox News-like niche in the UK media colonial system. I am on record predicting no more than 2-years existence for the far-right GB News, but it manages to draw in new funds just prior to bankruptcy to keep it afloat, an indication that millionaires don’t mind losing money if it keeps their nasty propaganda outfits broadcasting.
Prospect magazine described him as a man on a ‘God-driven mission to transform the religious fabric of the nation’ who possessed ‘the money to do it’. Marshall’s states ‘traditional British liberalism rests on the Judeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures… Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness’. This is self-serving nonsense. But take note how he brushes aside years of the Enlightenment as if its was worthless drivel spoken in Edinburgh coffee shops
Back in backward Westminster, the Tory MP Danny Kruger – who defected to fascist Reform – made an impassioned speech to the Commons, (Commons: a misnomer for the privileged elite) we should support a ‘revival of the faith, a recovery of Christian politics, and a refounding of this nation’. As with all English MPs, he was referring to England alone. While he did not elaborate on what he meant that he felt dangerous, he added ‘to worship human rights is to worship fairies’.
In the United States two decades ago, Christian nationalists ultimately fought the culture war, and largely succeeded, by playing ‘the long game’. In Scotland they need a decade to infiltrate the Scottish parliament with stooges and shills to alter Scotland to their authoritarian, bogus doctrine, which is there is only one god, and he is neither an elephant standing on a tortoise, nor a fat Buddha. But our famed pollster Professor Sir John Curtice warns us that Reform lead the polls. Yes, there are dimwits out there begging to be baptised and they are not all English settlers.
We had better learn quickly how to identify a Christian fundamentalist, a new age crusader against all other religions and free thought, and know how hard to boot his arse out of Scotland.
NOTES
I might have more to say about this latest phenomenon as it spreads its horrible tentacles, an octopus easily chopped were we an independent nation, but I am likely to be dead and buried by then in a Christian burial I emphatically stated was not to be deployed for my funeral.
Trump’s eventful weekend of golfing, sightseeing, and ignoring the imploding effects of the war in Iran has Stewart wondering who the hell the president has been claiming to negotiate with overseas, and whether this “top person” even exists. Plus, airport chaos amid a government shutdown has ICE filling in for the TSA as part of Trump’s escalating chaos rampage.The extract is 21 minutes in length.
Here is our customary selection from the show’s Comments page, plus our editorial:
“I’m sitting here in South Africa where the petrol prices are about to skyrocket and everything else along with it. Because a significant number of Americans allowed this monumentally inept, impulse-driven lunatic to get back into the White House. Every brainfart reverberates around the world because of a portion of your population obsessed with the self indulgent, reductive promise of making America great again. Every person who put a mark next to his name on that ballot paper is complicit, because he had already shown who he is. It is infuriating.” Spinal Surgery
“Um….did ANYONE notice T’rump first said, THEY wiped out everybody”? Then corrected himself with, “WE…” Um, yeah, MARA LIAR, which is it??? Who really is in charge???” Black Shark
“Future history teachers will probably say to their classes, “we will miss out the years 2025-2029 because you would not believe me if I told you what happened.” Complete madness. Peter Hinson
“Funny how we’re always ‘broke’ for our own people, but suddenly there’s unlimited money for another war we got dragged into! Didn’t we shut things down before over less? People voted for America First NOT Israel first!!” Feels a straight betrayal for our country! time to impeach them all! Chaos Magic
“And food prices and healthcare price going through the roof. In many cases they shrink the quantity of food. You get 8 oranges instead of 10 in a bag, Shampoo is filled for 280ml instead of 350ml. Cat food is reduced from 100g to 85g.” Seb Keccu
“It’s scary when the best political satirist of the last few decades is at a loss for words to describe the most incompetent president in American History. This sorry excuse for a leader, a psychopathic serial liar with no empathy, no moral compass, no common sense, is endangering our lives and the future of our planet, all while bumbling around on the world stage, creating chaos and making Americans ashamed of our country and putting the very freedoms we cherish in grave danger. His “Cabinet” of jesters, molesters and detesters make these risks even more acute. Thank you Jon, for your latest episode that paints this very clear picture for anyone who truly cares about our country’s future, and the fate of generations to come.” Lay Lorn
Last week has been decidedly weird, as the saying goes, with the Mad Sun King making contradictory press announcements and off-the-cuff decisions – winging foreign policy – ensuring he has the world’s attention every day. It is easier to lay out a bullet line of his statements in chronological order that a narrative roundup. 1. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly told G7 members that the US expects the war to be over in between two and four weeks. 2. The US and Israel bombed several nuclear targets and steel facilities in Iran on Friday. 3.Iran’s foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi has said on X that Iran will “exact heavy price” for attacks on energy infrastructure. 4. Trump extended a pause on threats to bomb Iranian energy plants by 10 days. 5. US officials to meet Iranian counterparts soon, envoy says. 6. Israel’s military said early on Friday it had conducted a wave of strikes “in the heart of Tehran”. 7. EU energy ministers will hold an extraordinary video call on Tuesday to discuss the impact of the Iran war on energy security and supply, a spokesperson said. 8. US can only say with certainty that it has destroyed one-third of Iranian missiles, sources told Reuters. 9. The UN human rights chief has urged the US to conclude its investigation into a fatal strike on a primary school in Iran at the start of the attacks last month. 10. Iran-linked hackers have publicly claimed the breach of FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal inbox. Phew! More news as it come in…..
Heatwaves and acidification wipe out corals and other marine life. Photo: Mike Veitch
A new ‘State of the Plant’ report warns of the planet’s imbalance. Our home planet is struggling with a record energy imbalance, which is warming oceans to unprecedented levels, making weather more extreme and threatening health and food supplies, the World Meteorological Organization has warned.(This is No 68 in our Climate Change series of articles.)
The United Nations body confirmed 2015 to 2025 were the hottest 11 years ever measured, but a still bleaker message was that the rising temperature experienced by humans on the surface was only 1% of the faster-accumulating heat in the wider Earth system. More than 90% of that excess is absorbed by the oceans, which experienced the highest heat content in history last year. The rate of ocean warming has more than doubled over the past two decades, compared with the average over the previous 45 years.
The authors of the latest annual State of the Global Climate report say this highlights the increasing vulnerability of a planet that is moving ever further out of balance as a result of human activity. The burning of oil, gas, coal and forests releases heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, which are all at their highest level in at least 800,000 years.
This disrupts the planet’s energy equilibrium. In a well-functioning system, the amount of radiation entering and leaving the Earth system is roughly similar. But a heat surplus has been accumulating since at least 1960 and has noticeably accelerated in recent years. This is tracked for the first time in the new report, which shows the Earth’s energy imbalance increased by about 11 zettajoules a year between 2005 and 2025, which is equivalent to about 18 times total human energy use. Last year it was more than double that average.
At present, humans and other life forms on the surface directly suffer only a small fraction of that energy backup because 91% is absorbed by oceans, 5% by the land, 1% warms the atmosphere, and 3% melts ice at the poles and on high mountains.
But even with only a tiny share of this extra energy, the world’s surface temperatures – which are the most commonly used measure of global heating – are climbing to alarming levels. Last year was the second- or third-hottest on record, depending on the dataset. World leaders say it is now inevitable the planet will – at least temporarily – breach the target of limiting heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels set by the Paris agreement. They say the dire consequences are already evident in faltering harvests, worsening dengue outbreaks and increasingly severe heatwaves, forest fires and storms.
“The state of the global climate is in a state of emergency. Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits. Every key climate indicator is flashing red,” said the UN secretary-general, António Guterres. “Humanity has just endured the 11 hottest years on record. When history repeats itself 11 times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act.”
The effect on the oceans is still not fully understood, but the impacts are expected to be still more profound and long-lasting. Sea levels are rising at an accelerating pace, and sea ice is at its third-lowest level ever.
The authors of the paper said more of the heat is moving into the depths, which is affecting circulation and locking in the consequences for thousands of years. Nearer the surface, heatwaves and acidification are a growing problem for corals and other marine life, while the melting of ice is pushing up sea levels and weakening the planet’s ability to reflect solar radiation back into space, thus adding to the energy imbalance.
There is no respite in sight. The Pacific is coming to the end of a La Niña phase, which is usually associated with cooler temperatures at the surface across much of the world. By the end of this year, forecasts suggest this could be replaced by an El Niño, which will bring more heating.
“If we transition to El Niño we will see an increase in global temperature again and potentially to record levels,” said Dr John Kennedy, the lead author of the WMO report.
‘Bathrobe Party’: Epstein, Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson.Photo: Ghislaine Maxwell
Jeffrey Epstein, responsible for heinous sex crimes against many girls and young women, reportedly provided valuable services for years to apartheid Israel, including its intelligence services, as exposed by Drop Site News. Money played a role in Epstein’s university connections. A rich man using donations and access to burnish his ego and legitimacy is a well-worn script, from Andrew Carnegie’s libraries more than a century ago to Bill Gates’s more recent global health philanthropy. As a college drop-out, Epstein clearly craved “respect” from high-profile academics. But Epstein’s evil ran deeper than that.And he reached unheard of heights in the black art of infiltration with the help of state censorship of his activities and connections.
Irrefutable ties to Israeli leaders
The western legacy media has, as expected, largely censored out of its flood of reporting on Epstein’s criminal activities his irrefutable ties to Israeli leaders, like former PM Ehud Barak (accused of sadistic crimes), senior Israeli intelligence officers, Israel lobby groups, settler organizations, and key Israel lobby figures in the US. Robert Maxwell, the father of Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, was widely known as “Israel’s superspy.”
Why is this important? Because exposing Israel’s use of such criminal ways to gain influence in many capitals may help shatter its “total impunity” in perpetrating its ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and its accelerated ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Israel’s livestreamed genocide, the world’s first, and its regime of settler-colonial apartheid against all Indigenous Palestinians cannot continue without the complicity of states, corporations and institutions, mostly in the colonial West.
Epstein, a convicted pedophile and sex-trafficking financier, built a massive network of relationships with powerful men – and some women – in the US, Europe, India, UAE, and elsewhere, offering them illicit sexual “services” with minors, access to circles of power, and/or generous payments. Along with the harrowing accounts of dozens of survivors, Epstein and his convicted partner eerily documented much of the horrible sexual abuse and corruption in photographs, videos and emails.
London press as shocked as the public
Even The Colonial Times of London recently asked, “Was Epstein a Mossad agent?” It cites a senior UK national security official and lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst who says, “Is it possible that Epstein was an asset to the Mossad? Yes.” Whether Epstein directly served Mossad or not, his connections to Israeli intelligence, corporations and political leaders have been methodically exposed by investigative journalists. The Epstein enterprise served Israel well for many years, enhancing its ability to build connections, deals, and influence with decision-makers in several countries.
Yet, many of the staunchest Zionists who have enabled Israel’s regime of oppression, including by striving to repress the BDS movement on Israel’s behalf, are now exposed for their intimate relationships with Epstein. David Schoen, Epstein’s lawyer, “bragged in emails to the disgraced sex offender about helping the Israeli government counter [the] Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement,” according to The New Arab. Schoen, who also represented Donald Trump during his impeachment trial, admitted in those emails his ties to the Israeli government and its legal warfare (lawfare) against the BDS movement.
Naming names
Aside from Trump, the self-declared “history’s most pro-Israel US president,” the Epstein files have implicated, in diverse ways, Israel lobbyist and Epstein’s “co-conspirator” Leslie Wexner; war-crimes advocate Alan Dershowitz; accused war criminal Tony Blair; fanatic anti-BDS former Harvard president Larry Summers; genocide-defender former US president Bill Clinton; Norwegian father of the colonial Oslo Accords Terje Rød-Larsen; leading Zionist UK politician Peter Mandelson; and World Economic Forum president and ardent BDS opponent Børge Brende. They also implicate many tech oligarchs and powerful executives including those enabling Israel’s genocide: Palantir’s Peter Thiel; Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky; Google co-founder Sergey Brin; Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; among others.
Israel as settler colony
It is crucial to historically contextualize all this. Israel was established in 1948 as a settler-colony in Palestine – by ethnically cleansing most Indigenous Palestinians – as an outpost for British imperialism. It later served as a “tool” of US imperialism, securing its interests in the highly strategic Arab region during the Cold War. Imperialists, Jewish Zionists, Christian Zionists and other anti-Jewish racists in the UK, the US, and elsewhere all agreed, for their own agendas, on creating a Jewish supremacist colony in Palestine. However, with time, the relationship, while still based primarily on common colonial interests, has changed dramatically with Israel becoming far more assertive, aggressive, and, crucially, far more influential in the US and across the colonial West.
While Israel’s leading role in the destruction of international law and the United Nations intersects with the Trump might-makes-right agenda, Israel – especially with its current fascist and unhinged establishment that is “destabilising” the region – is increasingly seen by experts as a “strategic liability” for the US. Still, it enjoys the loyalty of the White House and the absolute majority of Congress.
The plans of the Yahoo
As far back as 2001, Israeli PM Netanyahu dismissed the relevance of US disagreement with his policies, bragging that “America is something you can easily manoeuvre and move in the right direction.” This was not merely a typical expression of Israeli colonial hubris; it was also an indicator of Israel’s growing self-confidence due to its unprecedented influence in the US. An Al Jazeera suppressed undercover investigation in 2016 revealed some of the insidious tactics used by the Israel lobby to gain this influence. World renowned US economist Jeffrey Sachs goes as far as accusing Israel, its lobby groups, and neo-con friends of instigating US wars against several states in the “Middle East” that Israel regarded as enemies and wanted to subjugate or break up.
Mainly due to its genocide, Israel’s support at the grassroots and civil society levels is collapsing worldwide, even in the US (including among younger Jewish Americans) and Europe. Yet the unconditional military, financial, technological, intelligence, diplomatic, media and other forms of US and European support have kept flowing. While many US and European corporations have profited enormously from the genocide, Western states’ complicity in it has harmed the collective West’s standing, even interests, in the Arab region and among the Global Majority, some have argued. Even before the genocide, when the West’s unmasked colonial hypocrisy over Ukraine vs. Palestine became abundantly clear, a senior G7 diplomat told the Financial Times, “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”
Zionist influencein the West
Colonial affinity and interests aside, one major factor behind the West’s deepening complicity is the unprecedented influence that Israel has gained in Washington and, by extension, Brussels, London and beyond. As prominent US political scientist John Mearsheimer argues, “The reason you need a lobby is because Israel is not a strategic asset, it’s a strategic liability.” Israel’s connections to Jeffery Epstein must be understood in this wider context.
There are diverse motives for powerful Western leaders, corporate oligarchs, artists, academics, and others to continue supporting genocidal Israel. Some politicians argue that it still serves their states’ interests. Many are motivated by ideological commitment to Zionism (Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists) and to maintaining Israel as a Jewish supremacist entity in Palestine. In some cases, self-interest (profits, fame, access, etc.) is the main motive.
But in many other cases, support for Israel cannot be reasonably attributed to ideological commitment or interests being served by it. There is more compelling evidence now on how Israel, directly or through its lobby groups and well-placed “assets,” has used coercion, extortion, and bribery to ensure loyalty. For instance, it has deployed the export of its weaponized spyware, as well as its disinformation and election-rigging services, as diplomacy tools to gain influence in many countries, south and north.
Exhibit A and Exhibit B
The US Congress and the White House, regardless whether Democrat or Republican, are Exhibit A and Exhibit B of such crimes, as many prominent US experts have affirmed. This reality is increasingly being recognized not just on the political Left but also within Trump’s own MAGA movement. Leaders in both major parties in the US, which has a fundamentally anti-democratic, oligarchic, and exceptionally corrupt election system, are “bought and paid for” by various lobby groups, including the weapons lobby, tech lobby, and the Israel lobby – the latter exposed by mainstream figures in US media and academia. The fact that over 95% of members of Congress received money from Israel lobby groups in the election cycle of 2023-2024, for instance, explains repeated statements by Jeffrey Sachs that: “The Israel lobby dominates American politics.”
The “Israel First” agenda of the US administration and Congress has not only secured tens of billions of dollars in support of Israel’s apartheid regime over the years, including over $30B spent by the US to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This agenda has been a decisive factor behind US wars in South-West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) that have directly and indirectly killed millions of Iraqis, Afghanis and others, devastated their societies, and cost US taxpayers trillions, all at the expense of healthcare, fair jobs, education, affordable homes, social services, etc. It has also cost the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians and the livelihood of millions of Palestinians across historic Palestine, as well as mass devastation in Lebanon and Syria.
Israel, the leading factor
Israel is certainly not the only factor behind US imperialist wars that go back decades, but it has become an undeniably leading factor. Epstein, who arguably served Israel as a weapon of mass extortion, has been caught, but others may still be out there. It is a moral obligation to escalate nonviolent BDS pressure to end Israel’s “stranglehold” over US foreign policy, and beyond, as one necessary step towards ending complicity in Israel’s genocide and apartheid.
For Palestinians and other Arabs, for the peoples of the wider SWANA region, Latin America, Greenland, the people of the US, and for humanity at large, we need to form the broadest possible strategic, intersectional, anti-racist coalitions that recognize our common principles, fight for accountability and an end to impunity, and build a critical mass of people power to end injustice and oppression. We all deserve and will relentlessly strive for freedom, justice and equality, from Palestine and Lebanon to Venezuela and Cuba, and everywhere across the world.
NOTES
Report by Drop Site News, based on leaked emails and court documents released between late 2025 and early 2026. They allege that Jeffrey Epstein maintained extensive ties to Israeli political and intelligence figures, acting as an informal intermediary and “fixer” to advance Israeli security interests. These investigations, conducted by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain, claim that while Epstein may not have been a formal agent, he operated as an “asset” who helped facilitate surveillance technology deals and intelligence-related initiatives for Israel.
Trump’s war in the Middle East rages on, with Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz and Americans gearing up to face the infamous R-word: recession. FCC Chair Brendan Carr and feisty Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth aren’t happy with the news media’s confused coverage of the war in Iran, so Jon Stewart gets some truth and clarity from a panel of experts: President Trump, Donald J. Trump, DJT, and John Barron. Extract is 20 minutes in length.(Apologies for intrusion of ads.)
Here is our customary selection from the show’s Comments page, plus our editorial:
“Japanese here. It’s confusing to see the US start a war and then demand that Japan join in to help them. This is the complete opposite of the ‘partnership’ we thought we had.” Altoria
“In my college political science 101 class, I won’t even say how many decades ago that was, the Prof went into great detail as to why no US President tried regime change in Iran (since 1953 of course). Number one was their ability to shut down oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and the adverse effect that would have on almost every aspect of the global economy. There were other points, like the size of Iran’s (modern) army and their historic reluctance to compromise, but to suggest that in Hormuz “Nobody saw this coming” is one of the craziest, most dishonest things Trump has ever said – and the bar is sky-high on that one.” Jon Draeger
“Concerns that gas prices went up. Not for an illegal war. Not for civilian casualties. Not for American soldiers dying. Gas prices. That’s Republicans and Maga for you. They don’t care about laws or human lives. Just their pocketbook” Psylocke
“The New Mexico Governor passed a law no armed ICE agents can be present at voting polling centers. Every state needs to do this asap!! In March 2026, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed Senate Bill 264, making New Mexico the first state to explicitly prohibit armed federal agents, including ICE officers, from appearing at polling places. While federal law (specifically 18 U.S.C. 592) already prohibits deploying “troops or armed men” to polling sites, the New Mexico law was passed to address specific modern concerns and provide local enforcement mechanisms.” Not My President
“Iranian here, I’m crying and laughing at the same time. The reality on the ground in Iran is that US and Israel are bombing residential property and oil depots that has led to acid rain . This is poisoning people, water, and air for years to come. This is the definition of chemical warfare. This is where your tax money is going to.” Mitragh
Two weeks ago, some politicians in the uS and the UK argued for seeing Israel’s decapitation of the Tehran regime as being in the same category as Trump’s toppling of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela in January. Both events are illegal, but that did not trouble their confidence. They brushed off genuine anxieties as an overnight operation with a planned and limited outcome. What we got was chaos, death and destruction. (The same might have been true of the Maduro kidnap but for good luck.) War in the Middle East is now open-ended. People are beginning to suggest the worst thing to happen to Palestine’s was the UN handing a chunk of the most verdant corner terrorist Zionists and survivors of the holocaust. Switching back to the UK, there is no argument to have King Charles take a trip to the USA. There should be no outright cancellation – it was to celebrate a bond of peoples, not governments – but it surely cannot proceed while the Mad Sun King sets fire to half the planet under the instruction of Israel’s psychopath, The Yahoo. England’s monarch cannot be seen shaking hands with a madman. Above all, the bombing must stop and the rest of the world must say ‘no more!’
Starmer’s government has yet to tell the nation’s public what the cost has been so far to support Ukraine in its war again Russian incursions, and to aid Israel in its genocidal campaigns against anything that looks non-Jewish. What we do know is the wars are wrecking the UK’s fragile recovery from the Covid pandemic. And yet Starmer keeps spending millions on weapons and war aid to stay pals with the psychopath Netanyahu, and the Mad Sun King Trump.However, the USA is one nation that believes everything should be written down, computerised, as a record of political decisions, army, navy, air force, but not CIA, a state within a state that functions without government approval.We know what the illegal aggression against Iran, an engineered war, has cost the USA so far because the USA publishes figures, and what is not yet announced can be reasonably easy to calculate.
More than 3,000 people are believed to have been killed across Iran so far, and the Pentagon says more than 15,000 targets in the country have been hit in the first two weeks. A girls’ school in the south-eastern Iranian city of Minab lies in rubble, with about 175 children and teachers killed in a strike that the US is believed to have carried out. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow sea passage turned choke-point for the Gulf’s oil and the world, is, in effect, closed. And the cost, according to analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is growing by roughly half a billion dollars every day.
A week after American and Israeli forces began their Me-First assault on Iran, Pentagon officials told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing that the cost of the war had already exceeded $11.3 billion in its first six days. But that figure is only part of the story: sources familiar with the content of the briefing estimate appeared largely limited to munitions expenditures and not the full cost of the opening days of the conflict, which could include forces deployed to the region, medical expenses, and the replacement of military aircraft lost in combat.
By day six, CSIS put the cumulative cost at $12.7 billion. Today, it is likely to have exceeded $18bn – and the meter is still running. Trump’s main electioneering promise was to bring employment to the millions of poor Americans, and reduce their living costs. As petrol and gas prices rise faster than a thermometer in the Sahara Desert, he keeps spending billions a day on killing people in far off lands.
The opening hours of the war were dominated by some of the most expensive weapons in the American arsenal. Those long-range missiles, ballistic missile interceptors and radar systems were consumed at a pace that has already drawn down stockpiles. The Pentagon has since changed to cheaper, shorter-range weapons, but the damage to US arsenal stockpiles has been done. Using cost analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, we analyse where America’s war dollars are going, in a war that was never declared in the first place.
On 28 February at 1.15am, the US launched Operation Epic Fury.
The same day, a Tomahawk missile hit the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, killing 175 people. A single Tomahawk missile costs about $3.5m. Six days into the war in Iran, the US had used over 300 Tomahawk missiles, according to estimates from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (‘Center’: US spelling.) The total cost: $1.2 billion.
Tomahawk missiles are far from the only munition. US officials said that by the sixth day of the war, US forces struck over 2,500 targets. The estimated cost of the offensive strike munitions is $5.5 billion.
By 3 March, Iran launched 2,500 drones and missiles in retaliation. Air defence cost an estimated $5.7 billion for interceptors like the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD). Adding in US combat losses of $1.4 billion and operations costs of $27m, the first six days of the war is estimated to have cost $12.7 billion. That’s $q12.7 billion not spent on the well-being of Americans.
The cost of the first six days of the US war on Iran could have paid for 9% of elementary school teachers, 47% of US firefighters, Medicare for 693 veterans, 1.5 million house units, Medicaid for 3.6 million children.
The big question for us is, how much has the illegal war on Iran cost the UK nations so far? Factor in the cost of maintain a pretence of a poor, innocent Ukraine, and the UK becomes its own enemy, happy and ever-ready to deplete its reserves and damage the already fragile economy of its nations, Ulster province and Gibraltar protectorate for decades to come.
NEXT WEEK: The cost for Scots, and the other UK nations.
NOTES
CSIS reached their estimates by working backwards from the $11.3bn estimate the Pentagon gave to Congress. That estimate only included unbudgeted costs and didn’t include the cost of force buildup prior to the start of the war or the cost of repairing US infrastructure in the region. CSIS used FY 2026 Department of Defense (DoD) budget documents, DoD fact-sheets, Congressional Budget Office estimates of the costs of operating different military units, and statements from military officials to reach their own estimates. The cost categories do not add to the $12.7bn total due to rounding.The true cost of the war and what the US is paying for is highly subject to the actual munitions used and other factors.
Readers of this site will be familiar with the saga of procuring strong sea going catamarans a third of the price of conventional mono-hull ferries. As a back-of-the-hand slap in the face to a chronically short-sighted Scottish government paying hand-over-fist for expensive large ships, Professor Alfred Baird, promoter of catamarans, sent us this short letter:
Today further new ropax (passenger, car and trucks) catamaran ferries of established proven design (by Sea Transport Corp, chaired by Scotsman Dr. Stuart Ballantyne) are enroute ex shipyard Indonesia for delivery in Australia, a trip of 5000+NM.
These are 60m vessels designed for rough sea operation, able to carry 80+ cars (and trucks) and 250+ passengers at 16 knots, and with a new build price less than GB£15 million per boat.
This is less than one third the price Scot Gov and its ‘expert’ ferry agencies insist on paying for similar capacity unique unproven design/prototype monohull ferries (i.e. £50m+ for a 100-car capacity mono-hull ferry).
The proven catamarans are repeat designs and builds, part of a long series of successful medium-speed steel-hull catamarans ferries developed and delivered over the past 30 years for routes worldwide, (including MV Pentalina to Orkney in 2009).
Grouse Beater 
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