UK Plays "Critical" Role in Yemen Drone War - Reports
The British government is directly involved in the covert US programme in Yemen, including secret drone strikes, it’s emerged, despite having denied such involvement for several years.
An investigation by Vice News, published today, has revealed that UK personnel have played a "crucial and sustained role" in the programme, with UK officials taking part in so-called "hits", "triangulat[ing]" intelligence for target lists, preparing "target packages", and participating a "joint operations room" with US and Yemeni forces in support of strikes.
A former senior CIA official called the UK's role "pretty critical", while the former Foreign Minister of Yemen said the US and the UK had a "blank check" to carry out the operations.
The reports appear to contradict years of denials by the UK about involvement in US operations in Yemen. In 2014, the Ministry of Defence told human rights organization Reprieve - which assists the civilian victims of drone strikes - that: "The UK does not provide any military support to the US campaign of Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) strikes on Yemen", and that "use of RPAS strikes for counter-terrorist purposes is a matter for the states involved." The government denied knowledge of an 'operations room' involved in the identification of targets. Ministers also told MPs, in 2014, that there were only two UK military personnel present in Yemen.
According to today's reports, British military personnel have been seconded to UK intelligence agencies to carry activities in Yemen under the aegis of the Foreign Office. The arrangement appears to mirror that of the US, where US Air Force pilots are seconded to the CIA for drone strikes, which are carried out in secret. A British official confirmed to Vice News that these seconded personnel were involved in the drone programme, saying: "Once they are seconded, the MoD loses any control over what they get up to."
The UK activities are understood to have continued despite reports of large numbers of civilian casualties from US drone strikes in Yemen. Among the Yemeni civilians killed in strikes carried out with UK involvement was Nasser Salim, a 19 year old student who was hit in May 2012. Nasser - whose family are assisted by Reprieve - was killed in what was the fourth US attempt to kill a militant, Fahd al Quso. A recent investigation by Reprieve found that such 'multiple kills' of named targets are common in the US drone programme, with some 1,147 unknown people killed in attempts to target 41 named individuals.
News of the UK's role comes ahead of the expected release, later this month, of the first White House estimate of the numbers of civilians killed by US drones. Asked about the issue last weekend, President Obama said that there was "no doubt" that civilians had been killed by US drones.
Commenting, Jen Gibson, staff attorney at Reprieve, said:
"For years, the government has denied any involvement in US's covert drone war in Yemen, saying it's 'a matter for the states involved.' It's now beyond dispute the UK is one of those states - working hand in glove with the Americans to create the very 'kill list' that drives those strikes. Even more disturbing, the UK has copied wholesale the US model of outsourcing the military to the intelligence agencies in order to hide their involvement and avoid any accountability.
"Nasser Salim's family, and the hundreds of other innocent civilians killed by this failed programme, deserve answers. There needs to be an urgent inquiry into just how far the UK's involvement in this covert drone programme goes - both in Yemen and beyond."
Reprieve is a UK-based human rights organization that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantanamo Bay.
'Insure Our Survival': XR Launches Campaign at British Insurance Industry Awards Night
"We left the leading lights of the industry in no doubt about what they need to do: Stop insuring new oil, gas, and coal and focus on underwriting renewable energy," one activist said.
Key industry players arriving at London's Royal Albert Hall Wednesday night for the British Insurance Awards were met with a warning: Stop underwriting new oil, gas, and coal projects or face direct action from Extinction Rebellion.
Climate activists greeted the insurers with signs, photographs of extreme U.K. flooding, protest music, performance art, and business cards announcing XR's new "Insure Our Survival" campaign to pressure the industry away from backing fossil fuels.
"This is just the beginning," Insure Our Survival spokesperson Alex Penson said in a statement. "Thousands of XR activists stand ready to focus their nonviolent direct action energy on the insurance firms who are greenlighting the climate crisis by providing fossil fuel crooks with the insurance they need to dig and drill for oil, gas, and coal."
"It's time for insurers to use their superpower or be held responsible when all of our children face a future like the children in the photographs we showed at our protest,"
The insurance industry has emerged as a target of the climate movement in recent years, as advocates point out that new fossil fuel projects would not be able to move forward without it.
"The insurance industry has a superpower," Penson said. "At a stroke, it could stop the fossil fuel crooks in their tracks and save the lives of billions of people threatened from the worst-case climate scenarios that scientists are saying are increasingly possible."
However, to date the industry has not chosen to use that power. According to the most recent report from the global Insure Our Future campaign, not one of the 30 major insurance firms it analyzed in 2023 had policies in line with limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. The insurers included in the U.K.-based Lloyd's market were the leading fossil fuel insurers, Insure Our Future found, earning $1.6-2.2 billion in premiums from oil, gas, and coal in 2022.
"It's time for insurers to use their superpower or be held responsible when all of our children face a future like the children in the photographs we showed at our protest," Penson continued, "struggling to survive in barely habitable countries haunted by crop failures, malnutrition, deadly storms, floods, and heatwaves."
At Wednesday's event, XR activists held up photos taken by photographer Gideon Mendell, showing massive flooding in the U.K. that has been made worse by the climate emergency. They also held up signs reading, "Stop Insuring New Fossil Fuels" and "Insure Our Survival."
(Photo: Extinction Rebellion)
At the sound of a violin, XR's Oil Slickers—activists draped in black cloth to resemble an oil spill—glided around the insurance luminaries as they approached the hall for the industry's annual awards ceremony.
(Photo: Extinction Rebellion)
A choir also sang a song to the tune of "Imagine," including the line, "Imagine all insurers, fighting for us all."
"Last night we challenged insurers having a good time and congratulating each other on their good work at the Royal Albert Hall to face up to some uncomfortable truths—that some of their work leads to flooded homes and wrecked lives for their customers facing more and more climate crisis-driven extreme weather events," Penson said.
The activists also distributed business cards to the attendees warning them that, if they continued to back new fossil fuel projects, XR would target them with direct action designed to hurt both their reputations and their bottom line.
Pension said: "We left the leading lights of the industry in no doubt about what they need to do: Stop insuring new oil, gas, and coal and focus on underwriting renewable energy to speed a just transition to a low or no-carbon economy."
XR's U.K.-based Insure Our Survival campaign emerged from the global Insure Our Future campaign, and in particular an international week of action it organized in late February and early March, including events in London and around the U.K.
About a month after the protests, Zurich Insurance announced that it would no longer underwrite new oil and gas projects.
Sierra Signorelli, Zurich's chief executive of commercial insurance, said at the time that Zurich took the action in keeping with its goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
"Further exploration and development of fossil fuels isn't required for the transition," Signorelli said. "We think it's the right time to evolve our position."
Insure Our Survival campaigner Lucy Porter said that since the spring, many insurance employees, in both senior and junior positions, had spoken to XR saying they supported a move away from backing climate-polluting projects.
"We intend to work with them to make insurance part of the climate solution, not part of the problem, and we invite other people in the industry to contact us and work with us," Porter said.
Porter continued, "To those who continue to put their profits before a livable planet we say: We will hold you accountable through an escalating campaign of nonviolent direct action across the country."
'More Unhinged by the Minute': Senior Israeli Lawmaker Suggests Nuclear Attack on Iran
"It is not possible anymore to stop the Iranian nuclear program with conventional means," the hardline Knesset member and former Israeli defense minister said.
A longtime Israeli lawmaker and former defense minister took to the airwaves and social media on Wednesday to suggest his country should do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
"It is not possible anymore to stop the Iranian nuclear program with conventional means," Avigdor Liberman of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party said during a Channel 12 interview. "And we will have to use all the means that are available to us."
"We will have to stop with the deliberate policy of ambiguity, and it needs to be clear what is at stake here," Liberman continued, apparently referring to Israel's refusal to say whether it has nuclear weapons. "What is at stake here is the future of this nation, the future of the state of Israel, and we will not take any risks."
Member of Knesset and former Minister of Defense, Avigdor Liberman, live on Channel 12, openly calls to use nuclear weapon against Iran, in order to prevent it from reaching weaponization of its nuclear program. What a fuckin' psycho. pic.twitter.com/NYGfQ1zqVp
— B.M. (@ireallyhateyou) July 4, 2024
When pressed on what he meant by stopping Iran with non-conventional means, Liberman said, "I said it very clearly."
"Right now there is no time to stop the Iranian nuclear program, their weaponization, by using conventional means," he added.
Liberman made similar comments on social media, where his remarks sparked alarm and condemnation. The lawmaker's hardline call comes amid powder keg tensions between Tel Aviv and Tehran, which warned last week that any Israeli invasion of Lebanon—from which Iranian ally Hezbollah is resisting Israel's annihilation of Gaza—would trigger an "obliterating war."
According to the Arms Control Association (ACA), a U.S.-based advocacy group, Iran is a "threshold state," meaning "it has developed the necessary capacities to build nuclear weapons."
However, a February 2024 threat assessment report authored by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence stated that "Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device."
"Since 2020, however, Tehran has stated that it is no longer constrained by any JCPOA limits," the report says, a reference to so-called Iran Nuclear Deal from which the U.S. unilaterally withdrew in 2018 under former President Donald Trump. "Iran has greatly expanded its nuclear program, reduced [International Atomic Energy Agency] monitoring, and undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so."
Iran maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, although Kamal Kharazi, a foreign policy advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
told the Financial Times earlier this week that his country would "have to change our doctrine" if faced with an existential threat.
The ACA and others estimate that Israel has around 90 nuclear warheads and fissile material for approximately 200 more.
Liberman isn't the first Israeli lawmaker to suggest nuclear war against Iran. Far-right Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi—who sparked outrage by saying Israeli forces are "too humane" in Gaza and should "burn" the Palestinian territory—said in April that "in the event of a conflict with Iran, if we do not receive American ammunition, we will have to use everything we have."
'They're Everywhere': Common Foods Linked to Elevated Levels of PFAS in Body
Results from a new study "definitely point toward the need for environmental stewardship, and keeping PFAS out of the environment and food chain," a co-author said.
Common foods including white rice and eggs are linked to higher levels of "forever chemicals" in the body, new research from scientists at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth shows.
The researchers also found elevated levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in people who consumed coffee, red meat, and seafood, based on plasma and breast milk samples of 3,000 pregnant people. The findings, published in Science of the Total Environment, add to the mounting evidence of the accumulation of PFAS, which were developed by chemical companies in the mid-20th century, in the natural environment and the body.
"The results definitely point toward the need for environmental stewardship, and keeping PFAS out of the environment and food chain," Megan Romano, a Dartmouth epidemiologist and co-author of the paper, toldThe Guardian. “Now we're in a situation where they're everywhere and are going to stick around even if we do aggressive remediation."
PFAS are a class of 16,000 compounds linked to a wide range of adverse health conditions including cancer, with research ongoing. The chemicals' development and production went effectively unregulated for decades, but has received significant attention in recent years, with alarming studies coming out regularly.
3M, a consumer goods multinational that developed and manufactured many PFAS compounds, knew that they were accumulating dangerously in the blood of the general public, but concealed it, according to a recent investigation co-published by ProPublica and The New Yorker; the article was written by journalist Sharon Lerner, who previously reported on PFAS-related deception by 3M and Dupont for The Intercept.
Such corporations may yet face unprecedented legal action. As Steven Shapin wrote in the London Review of Books on Thursday, "It is thought that the monetary scale of American lawsuits against companies responsible for PFAS water pollution may eventually dwarf those involving asbestos and tobacco, considering that people are in a position to decide whether or not to smoke cigarettes but everybody has to drink water."
While much of the concern about PFAS has rightly centered on drinking water—in which they're found worldwide—that is just one of the ways the chemicals can get into the human body. A new study this week showed they can be absorbed through the skin.
Food intake is also a primary means of accumulation in the body, and the new Dartmouth study indicates which foods are the worst. The study doesn't explore why, though Romano discussed some possible reasons with The Guardian. Rice is likely contaminated because of PFAS in soil or agricultural water, while coffee could have PFAS because of various factors including filters. Animal products can be contaminated if, among other reasons, the ground that the animals lived off was treated with PFAS-fouled toxic sludge, which is used by farmers as a cheap alternative to fertilizer.
Even consumption of backyard chicken eggs lead to elevated levels of PFAS, and that could be because of the table scraps the chickens are often fed, Romano said.