Ray Ellis

Khatoun Salma was a well-known poet in Lebanon. Last week, she was killed, along with her husband, by an Israeli airstrike. Her daughter, Ghida, found a handwritten, unpublished poem by her mother in the rubble. She read it to Channel 4 News.

HEGSETH: “Threatening commercial ships transiting international waters is piracy.” ALSO HEGSETH: “Two oil tankers were seized overnight. We’re going to take their 50 million barrels of oil and sell it. The hypocrisy is unbelievable. These are not serious people.

This is outrageous. Just after Trump announced his sham ceasefire, Israel bombed an ambulance workers funeral in South Lebanon. Channel 4 News was there and captured everything. Israel does NOT want peace. It wants to keep committing genocide and stealing other people’s land.

Fun fact: I qualify for UC on a nurse‘s fulltime salary in London Maybe tough love the super wealthy & tax them more to pay the rest of us better wages

@FullFact @Petrie_JohnC Seems way off but then again so is she.

Report: Israel asked Qatar to increase funds transferred to Hamas in Gaza a month before Oct. 7 haaretz.com/israel-news/20…

JD Vance is lecturing the Pope on Catholicism and Pierre Poilievre is lecturing Mark Carney on economics and RFK Jr is lecturing scientists about vaccines and Donald Trump is lecturing the world on tariffs and Pete Hegseth is quoting Pulp Fiction and thinking it’s the Bible

🚨 Netanyahu: “This is confidential… and can’t be leaked.” Too late, Bibi. Tucker Carlson just dropped the leaked interrogation tapes exposing how Netanyahu allegedly funneled $35 million a month from Qatar to Hamas using American tax dollars as a divide-and-rule strategy to weaken the Palestinian Authority and block any peace deal.

Oxford University has done the maths on "drill baby drill" vs a fully renewable UK. Maximum North Sea extraction: saves households £16–£82/year. But ONLY if the government takes every penny of tax revenue and hands it back to households. If they don't, zero benefit. Full renewables: saves households up to £441/year. Recurring. Every year. Indefinitely. The North Sea runs out around 2040. Renewables don't. The analysis was done using January 2026 prices — before the Iran war sent oil to $116 a barrel. Even with cheap fossil fuels as the baseline, renewables win. This isn't ideology. It's arithmetic. Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford. March 2026.

Israel just blew up a public high school in Marwahin, South Lebanon. Not a military base. A school.

And @BBCNews' flagship commentator Laura Kuenssberg @bbclaurak can still ask, with a straight face, "why would our close ally Israel lie?"

Utter charlatan. I can see why he appealed to Jenrick, whose convictions last for less time than an episode of newsround.

£64bn is the cost of UK capitulation to pharmaceutical companies. Secret deal commits the NHS to pay higher price for new and existing drugs No debate in parliament. Govt can tax the rich, cut other services, let people die, start manufacturing drugs. thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026-0…

This one will require a stiff drink. In the early 1990s, the government came up with a clever idea. Instead of borrowing money cheaply to build hospitals, schools, and roads, it would get the private sector to build them and then pay the private sector back over 25 to 30 years. The Private Finance Initiative. PFI. The attraction was obvious. You got a shiny new hospital today. The bill didn't show up on the government's books. The cost was deferred into the future. Politicians got ribbon-cutting ceremonies without the awkward conversation about borrowing. It was, in effect, the nation's credit card. Buy now, pay later. Except the interest rate was extraordinary. The total capital value of everything built under PFI was around £50 billion. As of March 2024, there were 665 PFI contracts still running across the UK, with roughly £136 billion in remaining payments stretching out to the early 2050s. These are payments public bodies are contractually locked into. Hospitals, schools, councils, government departments. Paying for buildings that in many cases were constructed twenty or thirty years ago. And the terms are extraordinary. PFI contracts were structured so the private sector would not just build the facility but manage its services. Cleaning. Maintenance. Catering. Portering. These services are bundled into long-term contracts with built-in inflation increases that the public sector cannot renegotiate, cannot exit without paying massive penalties, and often cannot even fully scrutinise because of commercial confidentiality clauses. In one case raised in Parliament, a hospital was charged £333 to change a lightbulb. That isn't an urban myth. It was cited in Hansard. The NHS has been hit hardest. According to parliamentary analysis, the capital cost of NHS PFI projects was around £13 billion. The total repayments are estimated at around £80 billion. And the peak of NHS PFI annual repayments isn't even here yet. It arrives in 2029. The bills are still going up. In 2020-21, NHS trusts paid £457 million purely in interest charges on PFI contracts. Not services. Not maintenance. Interest. In the last five years, NHS trusts have handed over more than £1.8 billion in PFI interest alone. We Own It calculates that money would have covered the starting salaries of over 50,000 new doctors. One NHS trust, Essex Partnership, has reportedly paid back 27 times what was originally borrowed. Some hospitals are spending more on PFI repayments than on medicines for patients. And remember, these repayments come out of the same NHS budget that's supposed to fund patient care, staff, and equipment. Scotland got it just as badly. Audit Scotland reported that Scottish taxpayers will pay a cumulative £40 billion for PFI assets worth just £9 billion. North Ayrshire Council will have paid £440 million by 2038 for four schools that cost £83 million to build. Now here's what makes this worse. Many of these contracts are starting to expire. The buildings are being handed back to the public sector. And the NAO has warned of significant risks around the handback process, including cases where public bodies were dissatisfied with the condition of assets being returned to them. Decades of payments. And some of these buildings may come back needing significant further investment. So what actually happened? The government could have borrowed money at significantly lower rates to build these hospitals and schools itself. Sovereign borrowing has always been cheaper than private finance. Instead, it paid the private sector to borrow at a premium and passed the inflated cost on to the taxpayer. The private sector took the profit. The taxpayer took the risk. The buildings are now ageing. The debts are still being paid. And the services that were supposed to benefit are being squeezed partly because so much of their budget is locked into contractual obligations they cannot escape. PFI wasn't investment. It was an accounting trick. A way for governments to build things without the borrowing showing up in the national debt figures. It made politicians look fiscally responsible while loading future generations with obligations they had no say in and no ability to renegotiate. Both parties did this. The Conservatives created PFI in 1992. Labour massively expanded it after 1997. More than 700 projects were signed. The coalition eventually wound it down. The current government scrapped the latest version. But the contracts remain. The payments continue. And the damage is already done. This is what it looks like when a country chooses to buy its infrastructure on hire purchase instead of investing properly. You lock in above-market rates for decades. You lose control of the assets. You tie the hands of future governments. And when the bill keeps coming due, you're told there's no money for doctors, teachers, or social care. There was always money. It just went somewhere else.

Hand picked judges , no juries, 9 minute “trials” , terrorism that is no longer terrorism but you can still be arrested for it !!! and now this👇. The shenanigans out of this government rigging everything against us is naked authoritarianism and an attack on our rights.

So many words to avoid saying, ISRAEL IS STILL BLOCKING AID.

Despite the pressure,When the World Sleeps is about to come out in English too (US:@otherpress; UK/Australia:@HardieGrant). While it’s about Palestine, past and present, and the law in its most accessible form, it cuts through the noise and shows why truth itself is such a threat

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, quoting an Israeli military source: “We are operating in the villages of southern Lebanon exactly as we did in #Gaza, and our SUCCESS is measured by the number of buildings we demolish each day.” Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid called for ethnic cleansing in Lebanon. He said Israel should depopulate and destroy every village in southern Lebanon to create a “sterile zone,” explicitly likening it to the Yellow Line in Gaza as the model. The Gazification of Lebanon 🇱🇧.

Where our money goes… remember when they say “ welfare” they are talking about your pension which makes up by far the highest amount..

Today, on the 37th anniversary of Hillsborough, I stood in the Commons as Parliamentary lead of the Hillsborough Law campaign and with a profound sense of obligation to the 97, their families including my constituent Debbie Matthews, survivors, and all victims of state cover‑ups. I asked the Prime Minister to use the power of his office to make good on his promise to finally deliver a full Hillsborough Law that is worthy of the name. #JFT97 #HillsboroughLawNow