Posts Tagged ‘fake news’

Trump Not Welcome in UK, 2018

Wednesday, July 12th, 2023

Trump Not Welcome in UK: There were huge protests against the July 2018 visit by US Presdent Trump to the UK, said to be a ‘working visit’ and he was kept well away from most of them, but some protesters made their way to still protest outside the official reception at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire and when he took tea with the Queen in Windsor. But apparently he did find the time to tell Prime Minister Theresa May she was making a mess of Brexit.

I photographed the following two protests on Thursday 12th July 2018, the day he arrived in the UK, but there was much more to come the following day.

‘Trump: Climate Genocide’ Giant banner – Westminster

Climate activists marked Trump’s visit to the UK by dropping a giant banner 100 meters long on the river wall of the Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament. The banner carried the message ‘TRUMP: CLIMATE GENOCIDE’ in fluorescent orange letters around 15ft high.

Trump Not Welcome in UK, 2018

This wall directly faces the terrace where MPs and their guests could clearly see and read the message across the river a little over 250 yards wide at this point. Having photogrphed them bringing the huge banner to the scene and beginning to hang it over the wall I rushed up onto Westminster Bridge photograph it from there.

Trump Not Welcome in UK, 2018

Trump derided and ignored the clear science on climate change, supporting his fossil fuel supporters and donors in their bid to destroy human life on earth for the sake of their short-term profits. Every year now the effects of these policies in destabilising global climate become clear. US policies – not just under Trump but certainly since their refusal to get behind the 1997 Kyoto Protocol if not before, have played a major role in our current dire situation. Trump worsened this, and his actions and failures have condemned billions to death and are a major crime against humanity.

‘Trump: Climate Genocide’ Giant banner

Noise protest against Trump – Regent’s Park

Trump Not Welcome in UK, 2018

Trump’s jet landed at Stanstead Airport and a helicopter was flying from there to the US Ambassador’s residence, Winfield House in a large private estate at the northwest corner of Regent’s Park before taking him on to dinner with Theresa May at Blenheim Palace.

Hundreds of campaigners with drums, whistles, megaphones, pots and pans, recordings of the cries of migrant children and some very loud shouting had come to the nearest public part of Regent’s Park to show their feelings about him and the visit. Among them were a number of Armericans living in Britain as well as various groups on the UK left.

A 10ft wire fence separated the protesters from the large lawn and there was a high police presence at the protest. It was watched from behind the fence by a small group of police some yards away, and doubtless rather more police and others were behind them screened by the bushes and trees closer to the house.

Almost certainly the protest organisers would have wanted to protest closer to the house on the Outer Circle, from where the house is visible, though largely screened by trees. But Regent’s Park is a Royal Park, owned by the Crown Estate and they and the police will have made clear a protest there would not be tolerated. As the Royal Parks state “the location of the demonstration will be agreed through discussion between the Park Manager, the police, the organisers, and other relevant authorities.”

Although the protest was some distance from the lawn where his helicopter was taking off and landing, the noise it was making would have been audible from there and the house. Some of the protesters were intending to remain making a noise all night, but I went home soon after his helicopter landed the first time.

But, as I wrote then, “it seems likely that Trump will have been aware of them as he flew in and out and before reaching the presumably well double or triple-glazed security of Winfield House. Though he will probably have convinced himself they were welcoming him and dismissed the TV and newspaper coverage as ‘Fake News!’“

Many more pictures on My London Diary: Noise protest against Trump

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Scientists Demand Politicians Listen, Family Justice & Chechnya

Friday, April 22nd, 2022

Scientists Demand Politicians Listen, Family Justice & Chechnya – Five years ago on Saturday 22nd April 2017, thousands of scientists marched from outside the Science Museum to a rally at Parliament to demand policies based on proven research rather than fake news and fake science. Elsewhere in London people called for urgent reform of our secretive Family Courts and against the torture and killing of gay men in Chechnya.

Scientists Demand Politicians Listen, Family Justice & Chechnya

Scientists march for Science – Kensington

Scientists Demand Politicians Listen, Family Justice & Chechnya

I began my working day on Exhibition Road outsed the Science Museum where a large crowd of people was gathering, many wearing white lab coats, to clebrate the vital role of science in our lives and to demand that the UK and other governments stop listening to fake news and fake science and base policies on proven research.

Scientists Demand Politicians Listen, Family Justice & Chechnya

They saw a particularly dangerous situation in the USA, where President Trump was promoting climate denial and other policies in the face of the well-established science and giant US companies particularly the fossil fuel producers have been spending unimaginable sums over the years to promote biased research and lobby to produce doubt over established facts – just as the tobacco lobby did to undermine the science behind the cancer risks of smoking.

‘The New Greenwashing’, an article just published by Nick Dowson’s article in the May-June 2022 issue of New Internationalist spells out the 6 ‘Tricks’ that Big Oil has used to prevent any meaningful action to make the drastic reductions needed in fossil fuel use and ensure that they continue to make massive profits from oil and gas as we move closer and closer to extinction.

They “Distract, delay and obfuscate” by setting distant targets and coming up with vague ideas like ‘net zero’ when what is needed is an end to fossil fuels, “Sell false solutions” such as carbon credits, carbon offsets, ecosystem services, “Greenwash gas” as being natural and clean, “Peddle futuristic-sounding fictions” particularly around hydrogen use, “Divert subsidies from renewables to unproven technologies” in particular carbon capture and storage and “Individualise, demobilise” making us feel it is our personal responsibility through gadgets such as the carbon footprint calculator invented by BP rather than a problem caused by their activities

Here in the UK Brexit is threatening our international cooperation in science and the BBC uses the excuse of impartiality to give equal billing to accepted and tested science and fake science often presented by non-scientists.

I spent some time watching the march go past, turning into Kensington Road on its way to Parliament Square, wondering what people who saw them going past would make of some of the slogans, such as like ‘Do I have large P-value? Cos I feel Insignificant‘ or ‘dT=α.ln(C1/C0)‘. Many scientists do seem to have a problem in communicating with the rest of us. Fortunately there were others easier to understand.

Scientists march for Science

Scientists Rally for Science -Parliament Square

I rejoined the scientists rather later than hoped after the rally in Parliament Square had begun, missing quite a few of the speeches.

Scientists Rally for Science

Reform Family Courts – Kensington Gardens,

When the scientists marched off from Kensington to Parliament I went in search of another group of protesters who had marched in the opposite direction, from Parliament Square to the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.

The had come to protest against the injustices perpetrated by our secret Family Court system and police and social services, and several told horrific real stories of children being taken away from victims of domestic violence, mothers who had reported child abuse by partners or former partners, and other cases of what appeared to be miscarriages of justice. Among those taking part were some unable to speak because they had been gagged by court orders. One woman was being forced to live away from friends, job and family. Another told us how the battle to regain her daughter had taken 7 years and cost her £14,000.

One of the organisers explains why we cannot mention the name of the woman the protest was organised to support

The protest had been arranged, along with another taking place in Nottingham to support a woman currently involved in a family court case. But on the afternoon before this protest, a family court judge had ruled her name could not be mentioned. Although everyone at the protest knew it, we had to refer to her only as ‘S’ to avoid committing an offence and the protest had to be renamed as ‘Justice4S’.

Also present was Sir Benjamin Slade, the owner of two castles in Somerset who had hit news headlines earlier in the week by advertising for a young wife to serve his needs. He had fought the case for one of his former workers whose children had been taken away by social services for what appeared to be trivial reasons, getting a friend who was a major newspaper editor to run a campaign which eventually got them returned. He came to the protest together with a young woman whose case he was currently involved in who was being forced against her will to live in Torquay.

Reform Family Courts

LGBT rights abuses in Chechnya – Russian Embassy, Kensington

After rushing back by tube from Kensington Gardens to Westminster for the Scientists Rally, as soon as that ended I was back on the tube to the Consular Section of the Russian Embassy on Bayswater Road where people had brought pink flowers and wrote messages on pink triangles to leave outside the tall gates of the Consular department of the Russian Embassy in a vigil to show solidarity with LGBT people in Chechnya.

The vigil was one of several taking place across the UK after over a hundred men, suspected by the authorities of being homosexual have been rounded up an put into camps and tortured, with three thought to have been killed. Those held include many well-known in the country, including TV personalities and religious figures. An Amnesty petition stated “The Chechen government won’t admit that gay men even exist in Chechnya, let alone that they ordered what the police call ‘preventive mopping up’ of people they deem undesirable”.

LGBT rights abuses in Chechnya

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Scientists Call For Research-Based Policies

Thursday, April 22nd, 2021

Recent events have brought scientists much more into centre stage, and politicians now claim to be “following the science” although this often means simply picking and choosing those bits from the wide range of scientific advice that suits their particular agenda.

Science isn’t monolithic, and its predictions are generally in terms of probabilities rather than certainties. Different disciplines may bring rather different emphases to aspects of complex problems and sometimes we need a wider view than that of a particular specialism – and even some common sense.

It seems clear that at the beginning of the Covid outbreak our government placed to much confidence in the advice of some mathematical modellers and failed to follow that based on medical experience in dealing with earlier pandemics on wearing masks and tightly controlling international travel that kept infection rates near zero in some countries. And that they had dismissed the evidence of earlier exercises in pandemic control and failed to follow the conclusion that we needed stockpiles of protective equipment.

Simple mathematical predictions close to the start of 2020 – like those I made metaphorically on the back of an envelope from then available data – suggested that by leaving the progress of the virus essentially unchecked we might expect around 400,000 deaths. It was perhaps calculations such as these that led to a massive programme of ordering vaccines.

Our various lockdown control measures – too little and too late – and gradual improvements in the care of those infected have so far managed to keep the numbers down to a little under half that initial estimate, though another wave may take us rather closer, particularly if variants prove more resistant to current vaccines.

A couple of days ago I was invited to complete an online opinion survey about the political challenges facing our government. One question asked me to pick one from a list as the major political challenge facing the UK government. I read through the list, which began with something about immigration and was shocked to find after reading the 10 choices I had to pick ‘Other’ and type in ‘Climate Change’.

It was climate change that essentially prompted the protest by scientists on April 22nd 2017 to march through London from the Science Museum to a rally at Parliament. They came to celebrate the vital role that science plays in our lives and to call for an end to the fake news and fake science such as climate denial by politicians such as Trump which will prove disastrous.

The march drew attention to the need for international cooperation to combat the existential challenge of man-made global warming – and warned of the danger to this from Brexit and isolationism around the world.

It was an unusual event in many respects. As I pointed out on My London Diary and elsewhere:

“It was a considerably more nerdy protest than most, and some of the posters and placards were difficult event for someone like me with a couple of science degrees in my past to understand. Many scientists do seem to have a problem in communicating with the rest of us and write slogans like ‘Do I have large P-value? Cos I feel Insignificant’ or ‘dT=α.ln(C1/C0)’.”

My London Diary

As well as covering the march and rally by scientists I also photographed campaigners calling for the reform of our secretive Family courts, Poice and Social Services which cover up their failures and corruption by gagging orders, and a protest outside the Consular department of the Russian Embassy to show solidarity with LGBT people in Chechnya, where over a hundred men suspected of being homosexual have been rounded up an put into camps and tortured, with three thought to have been killed. You can see more about these events and the scientists’ protest on the links below.

Reform Family Courts
LGBT rights abuses in Chechnya
Scientists Rally for Science
Scientists march for Science

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Remainers march

Wednesday, December 18th, 2019

Back in July there still was hope that we might be able to avoid the huge mistake of Brexit, and thousands came to march in support of staying in Europe. And while the recent election makes it almost certain we will leave – and leave on terms that will be very damaging to the country, I still suspect that in a few years time we will be begging Europe to let us back in, or at least to come to some much closer arrangement than is likely to result from negotiations by the current government.

Like the referendum, the election campaign was marked by an enormous amount of misinformation and lies, mainly from the Conservative Party; First Draft checked out the ads from both parties on Facebook from Dec1 to Dec 4, and, according to Full Fact, ” found that a majority of the Conservative ads during this period included or linked to claims that Full Fact has questioned“. First Draft give a figure: ” 88% (5,952) of the most widely promoted ads featured claims about the NHS, income tax cuts, and the Labour Party which had already been labelled misleading by Full Fact.

Labour put out far fewer FB ads during this time and for technical reasons the first report by Full Fact missed any misleading claims in them; later they updated the figure to say that of their 104 ads during the same period only 6.7% contained or linked to misleading data.

The Brexit referendum was similarly marked by deliberate misleading by the ‘Leave’ campaign, including the figure on the side of their bus. But perhaps even more importantly we were told that leaving Europe would be a simple process, and the public were given the impression that once they had voted it would all be over within a few months.

But the politicians are only a part of the story, and the huge misinformation campaign of both referendum and election is largely driven by the media, both newspapers and broadcasting. The Sun has previously boasted of having determined the results of UK elections, and certainly it and the other newspapers, mainly owned by a handful of billionaires, have played a vital role. Most of the broadcast media, with the exception of the BBC are also similarly controlled.

The BBC is a special case, and has long been under attack by both the left and right in politics for failing to be impartial. Unfortunately this doesn’t imply that it is getting the balance right, as the two sides attack it for very different reasons. Many Tories have long wanted to close it down largely because it is a public service and as such not making money for them and their friends, but at the same time have been very effective in getting members of a highly conservative establishment into positions of power within it. Labour have seen in taking up the anti-Labour views of the press and collaborating with the opposition to Jeremy Corbyn, conspiring with some Labour MPs opposed to him and even inventing fake news to discredit him and the party.

What we are left in now is a real mess. A country which would now almost certainly vote to remain being taken out of the EU, on the basis of a promise made by a former Prime Minister over a non-binding referendum. A referendum result that had it been binding would almost certainly have been challenged and rendered invalid in the courts. Scotland looking increasingly likely to break away and rejoin the EU after we have left. A border in the Irish Sea that makes the reunification of Ireland seem much closer (perhaps the only positive outcome of the whole sad business.) And a country that is going to become much poorer and more unequal. But most important of all will be the failure to take action over the climate crisis.

No to Boris, Yes to Europe

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Angola & Muslims

Saturday, May 18th, 2019

I don’t know how much you know about Muslims in Angola, but when I took the picture above outside the Angolan Embassy just off Baker St in London I knew very little. So of course I Googled it, and came up with several articles, including one in The Guardian and I think on Wikipedia, and wrote a little about why this protest was taking place to go with my pictures, along with rather more about Anjem Choudary who came along to speak at the event.

Thanks to a post by AFP Fact Check, from AFP Kenya, I now know that these pictures have in recent months been shared on social media along with pictures from various countries showing mosques being demolished in posts falsely claming that Islam has been banned in Angola

Mary Kulundu, the author of ‘No these pictures are not evidence of Angola banning Islam‘ searched for the pictures online:

Finally, there are two photographs of Muslims protesting against the Angolan government. A reverse image search on Tineye showed that these two images were originally published in 2013 by the British photographer Peter Marshall on his website, My London Diary.

It isn’t of course true that Islam was banned in Angola, but an Islamic organisation had failed to get legal recognition in Angola, along with many other non-Christian organisations, which greatly restricts their activities. Several mosques have been destroyed and others closed and Wikipedia gives some some details, though the article may not be not up to date. But there are said to be 60 mosques still open in the country and Muslims are free to practice their religion.

But Muslims in Angola are still trying to get official recognition almost six years later, though apparently there is less opposition now, and the number of signatures required by any religious congregation to acheive recognition has been lowered from 100,000 to 60,000. Estimates of the total number of Muslims in Angola vary wildly from around 80,000 to 800,000, almost all of them Sunni Muslims.

Back in November 2013 I speculated on why Choudary had not yet been arrested, and a couple of years later he was, and sentenced for urging others to support ISIS. Of course when I took these pictures in November 2013, few had heard of ISIS, which was only proscribed in June 2014 . When Choudary talked about Sunni armies being on the move and establishing the Khalifa (caliphate) I thought he was being a fantasist, but all too soon the reality became clear.

See and read more at Islamists Protest Angolas Ban on Muslims

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