Andy Prentice

Plan to reintroduce banned pesticide in France overruled by constitutional council ‘Duplomb bill’ provision to allow use of acetamiprid, toxic to pollinators, found not to abide by environmental charter

#GoodNews #CampaigningWorks

Public Health 1 Pesticides 0

70 questions the UK government must answer about Gaza ‘Mainstream’ journalists have failed to investigate the UK’s complicity in Israel’s genocide. Here is what every minister should be asked.

Q35 — The MoD holds aerial surveillance footage of Gaza from the day that Israel killed 7 aid workers in April 2024.

❓ Why is the government refusing to publish the tape, or even share it with the families of the British victims❓

www.declassifieduk.org/70-questions...

Reeves and Starmer to prepare ground for tax rises in a difficult autumn budget Exclusive: The Guardian has been told that discussions about increases include a near-certain gambling levy

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Without dropping Brexit red lines, tax increases were always inevitable. Labour were naive &/or intransigent to believe otherwise.

Let's just hope that, this time, they make better choices as to who/what to tax.

And yet they are throwing money at nuclear and carbon capture. Both very expensive, long term and unnecessary given the alternatives.

Reeves and Starmer to prepare ground for tax rises in a difficult autumn budget Exclusive: The Guardian has been told that discussions about increases include a near-certain gambling levy

Have had several chats with UK officials in the last few days and the picture they all paint is of a chronically short-termist Number 10. Looks like discussions on this year's budget are getting going in the same way. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

⛱️This summer, let’s say it louder: No room for fossil fuels in green finance! 🌱💶

🚨 Right now, our laws on investments have loopholes allowing greenwashing

🌳 Investors deserve to know that their funds will not back #FossilFuels

The upcoming SFDR revision can fix that!
tinyurl.com/sfdrffx

Netanyahu announces plan to take over Gaza City, marking another escalation in devastating war Plan will likely displace tens of thousands of Palestinians already suffering from famine and comes after PM said he wanted to take control of entire territory

Netanyahu announces plan to take over Gaza City, marking another escalation in devastating war www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

How one crazy idea became an epic town-wide book festival A wild idea in a pandemic sparked a nomadic fringe book festival – this time in a town without a bookshop

No rules. No big sponsors.
Just a wild idea, a lot of grit, and a love of books.

This is how a festival was born – and it starts Saturday...

Jackie Carreira has the story

And elected leaders in the US are irate about the wildfire smoke. Maybe instead of having “timber tantrums” as the Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, calls them, they ought to start doing something about the climate crisis 🤔💭🔥

Regular reminder that one of the many bad things done by the Blair government was to create a Ministry of Justice by lumping the courts together with prisons/probations to create an underfunded 'super-ministry' invariably at the end of the Whitehall queue for funding.

And here is a Home Office paper with further details of what it is calling the UK/European applicant transfer scheme will work. With the government expected to accept around just 50 migrants per week when the scheme starts, it is expected that only a small proportion of applications will be accepted. The document says people will be chosen via a three-stage process. First, they must be from a group with an 80% or higher chance of being granted protection status in the first instance. Judging by asylum claim figures for the year ending March 2025, that would mean they would have to be from Sudan (99% success ragte), Yemen (98%), Syria (98%) or Eritrea (86%). (The figures for Syria have probably changed since the fall of the Assad regime.) Second, applicants will have to show they have a connection with the UK, defined as having "previously been in the UK with permission for more than 6 months continuously in the last 5 years and have not overstayed or breached the conditions of their permission". And, in the third stage, people will be chosen at random out from applicants who have passed the first two stages.

The government's criteria for who will be able to apply for asylum under its "one in one out policy" would be farcical if it wasn't so cruel. Stage 2 is negated in many cases by stage 1. This is a system designed to prevent people getting to somewhere feel safe and are able to rebuild their lives 1/

Pod of this week’s Last Word on the environment with Matt Cooper is now available. We discussed carbon impact of AI, plus hazards of lead ammunition and cherry laurel a dangerous - yet legal - invasive species.

www.todayfm.com/podcasts/the...

Tots, bots, measles and the surging distrust in vaccines How does the decline in take-up of the measles vaccination tell a tale of our times?

A disease we eliminated is back, writes Liz Crosbie.

Measles is surging - and one in six children aren’t fully vaccinated.
Here’s why ⤵️

Italian MPs wear the colours of Palestine's flag in Parliament.

"Today, we don't hold up the flag because you'd try to take it from us. Instead, we wear it on our skin."

Where I used to work we had a tech admin who paid for half of her post pursuing drivers and insurance companies. She left and was never replaced and recovery stopped overnight.

Captain mainwearing vibes here

Can Solar Energy Save Us? Bill McKibben’s new book argues that sun power can displace fossil fuels.

“Sometime in the early part of the 2020s, civilization crossed an invisible line where the cost of producing energy from the sun dropped below the cost of fossil fuel. That’s not yet common knowledge—because so much of the solar revolution is taking place in China.”
www.thenation.com/article/envi...

It’s well past time that highways people understood the needs of residents instead of seeing every bit of tarmac as a piece of scalextric track.

Residents of Dipton in co Durham are kicking off cos the council wants to RAISE the speed limit from 30 to 40 cos few drivers stick to 30.
Maybe site a camera van there a few times a week.
www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/2537084...

Peru – Lima High Court declares COVID-19 an occupational disease for all workers Peru – Lima High Court declares COVID-19 an occupational disease for all workers

It should be remembered that a high court in Lima, Peru ruled covid as an occupational health disease for ALL WORKERS. Peru have treated it more seriously than the US or the UK. We have had a dismal political, not science based response. www.covid19litigation.org/news/2023/09...

Wild-born chough fledges in Kent for first time in 200 years The red-billed chough, once a common sight, vanished in Kent due to habitat loss and persecution.

#GoodNews on #biodiversity, because we all need some

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Glasgow wall Graffiti
West End.
Xpan 45mm Tasma type 42
I may well be finally accepting the Xpan with its limitations.
I still need to get a wider lens but that's for another day.
45 is just too tight top to bottom.
#film #filmphotographers #filmphotography #xpan #panoramic

Mad for TWO reasons:

1. Explicit admission that most claims from certain groups are valid, even though Labour are ALSO claiming that ALL small boats arrivals are illegal.

2. A lottery? Really? At the end of the day, coming to Britain if you have a valid claim involves being drawn out of a hat?!

Home Office could send children who cross Channel in small boats back to France Unaccompanied minors would not be deported – but children travelling with adult relatives could be sent to France under the scheme

Based on the Home Office's track record of mis-aging unaccompanied children as adults it is pretty much certain that, no matter what they claim, they will deport unaccompanied children, along with families with children. Everything about Labour's policy is atrocious.
inews.co.uk/news/politic...

Fundraiser to buy new RNLI lifeboat named after Nigel Farage set to hit £300,000 target The likes of Farage and Reform criticising the work of the RNLI has backfired, leading to a surge in donations for the charity.

'The likes of Farage and Reform criticising the work of the RNLI has backfired, leading to a surge in donations for the charity' leftfootforward.org/2025/08/fund...

#stowmarket book festival

How one crazy idea became an epic town-wide book festival A wild idea in a pandemic sparked a nomadic fringe book festival – this time in a town without a bookshop

What do you do when your town has no bookshop?
Start a book festival, obviously.
And it’s about to start, with lots of free events for adults and children! Jackie Carreira enthuses
📖✨

At risk of being tedious, since the facts are making their way very slowly through some thick skulls, here is the statement from the Allotment Society & the story from Hort Week.
"Some sites were given better land to replace them, one increased from 40 to 60+ plots "
www.hortweek.com/no-evidence-...

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