SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests

LUDI SIMPSON and I were at university together in the 1970s, connected by our involvement in left politics. Then we lost touch. In recent years we found each other again and were relieved to discover that, unlike a number of our contemporaries, we have not drifted to the political centre. Our radical roots remain firmly anchored.
Ludi’s, though, flowered in a more courageous way than mine. Last Friday, he was arrested, not for the first time, alongside two other Just Stop Oil activists, after throwing vegetable soup on two of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings in the National Gallery.
The paintings are being featured as part of the Poets and Lovers exhibition there. Just Stop Oil uses non-violent civil disobedience and direct action to achieve its objective — an end to oil, gas and coal by 2030.

For 80 years, survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings have pleaded “never again,” for anyone. But are we listening, asks Linda Pentz Gunter

Starmer’s decision to recognise Palestine only as long as Israel continues to massacre its inhabitants has been met with outrage, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER

The crew of the Freedom Flotilla boat, Handala, warned Israel to obey international law but are now in captivity, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER

Waves of protesters are refusing to comply with the latest crackdowns on dissent, but the penalties are higher in Starmer’s Labour Britain than in Trump’s autocratic United States, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER