Free Range Network members involved with the High Court injunctions against genetixSnowball ‘queue for justice’, 1999
General News Review
A review of interesting and useful articles from across the media landscape, organized in reverse chronological order, and subdivided by month, for the last rolling calendar year.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg has been arrested in central London at a demonstration in support of the Palestine Action protesters on hunger strike in prison, the Prisoners for Palestine protest group said. In a video shared by the group, Thunberg, 22, can be seen holding a sign reading “I support the Palestine Action prisoners. I oppose genocide” at a demonstration by Prisoners for Palestine outside the central London offices of Aspen Insurance.
Rising temperatures in the UK will become "the new normal", a leading government climate adviser has warned, as she called for more to be done to prepare for the impacts of climate change. It comes as the Met Office revealed 2025 was on course to be the UK's hottest year since records began, with climate change continuing to drive higher temperatures.
A compound found in magic mushrooms can treat depression by cutting brain activity that gets people stuck in loops of negative thinking, a new study revealed. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide struggle with depression, with women likelier than men to live with the condition.
A key UN report on the state of the global environment has been "hijacked" by the United States and other countries who were unwilling to go along with the scientific findings, the co-chair has told the BBC. The Global Environment Outlook, the result of six years' work, connects climate change, nature loss and pollution to unsustainable consumption by people living in wealthy and emerging economies. It warns of a "dire future" for millions unless there's a rapid move away from coal, oil and gas and fossil fuel subsidies.
Machines mining minerals in the deep ocean have been found to cause significant damage to life on the seabed, scientists carrying out the largest study of its kind say.
The chair of a House of Lords committee has said she was "alarmed" the Environment Agency (EA) did not notify it about a number of illegal waste sites. The agency submitted evidence to an inquiry into illegal waste dumping that included the locations of several waste sites in England.
The accelerating global arms race is hindering climate action as critical minerals that are key to a sustainable future are being diverted to make the latest military hardware, according to a report. The study from the Transition Security Project – a joint US and UK venture – reveals how the Pentagon is stockpiling huge stores of critical minerals that are needed for a range of climate technologies including solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and battery storage.
Police could see a boost in powers under facial recognition technology plans touted by the government as the ‘biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching’. Facial recognition has been used to snare violent criminals and find missing people, but is yet to be used across national police forces.
More than 520 chemicals have been found in English soils, including pharmaceutical products and toxins that were banned decades ago, because of the practice of spreading human waste to fertilise arable land. Research by scientists at the University of Leeds, published as a preprint in the Journal of Hazardous Materials, found a worrying array of chemicals in English soils. Close to half (46.4%) of the pharmaceutical substances detected had not been reported in previous global monitoring campaigns.
A coastal engineer has told residents in a village facing "unstoppable" coastal erosion that "some homes where they are at the moment are unsustainable".
High-income households in the UK recorded a massive drop in willingness to contribute via taxes to solving global problems, according to new polling shared exclusively with Novara Media. New Ipsos polling for think tank Global Nation, which studies international cooperation, surveyed more than 22,000 people across 31 countries to assess public global solidarity on three measures: whether people identify as citizens of the world, whether they’re willing to contribute taxes to tackle global problems, and whether they believe international institutions should be empowered to enforce solutions.
Protesters carrying signs reading "our forests are not for sale" broke through security lines of the COP30 climate talks on Tuesday night in Belém, Brazil. BBC journalists saw United Nations security staff running behind a line of Brazilian soldiers shouting at delegates to immediately leave the venue.
More than 5,000 fossil fuel lobbyists were given access to the UN climate summits over the past four years, a period marked by a rise in catastrophic extreme weather, inadequate climate action and record oil and gas expansion, new research reveals.
Air pollution in England and Wales has fallen, but the poorest neighbourhoods are still exposed to the most extreme levels of toxins, new analysis has found. Experts have called this a “grave environmental injustice” as the inequality around who is exposed to air pollution has dramatically grown in the last decade.
Every fully operational liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in the US has violated federal pollution limits in recent years, a new report has found. The analysis of public records comes as the Trump administration is aiming to fast-track the approval of new export terminals in an attempt to sell more domestic LNG to Europe and Asia. Joe Biden had previously placed a pause on LNG exports, which Donald Trump lifted on the first day of his return to office.
Offshore windfarm companies may be exempted from new UK nature rules in an attempt to keep down the cost of renewable energy, the Guardian has learned. The energy firms have said they would be unable to build the vast number of turbines required to meet the government’s green electricity goals if they have to meet new rules for nationally significant infrastructure projects (Nsips).
The court action is against industrial chicken production firms, Avara Foods Limited and Freemans of Newent Limited as well as sewage company Welsh Water, Dwr Cymru Cyfyngedig, who are blamed for extensive and widespread pollution in the rivers Wye and Lugg and their tributaries. Welsh Water is blamed for pollution in the river Usk. The three companies have denied the claims to law firm Leigh Day which represents the claimants. The legal case is the biggest ever to be brought in the UK over environmental pollution in the UK.
The UK’s advertising watchdog has upheld a complaint that Britain’s biggest farm assurance scheme misled the public in a TV ad about its environmental standards. The Red Tractor scheme, used by leading supermarkets including Tesco, Asda and Morrisons to assure customers their food meets high standards for welfare, environment, traceability and safety, is the biggest and perhaps best known assurance system in Britain.
Europe's human rights watchdog has raised concerns about the policing of protests in the UK following arrests over the ban on Palestine Action, and called for broader protest laws to be reviewed. In a letter to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Council of Europe human rights commissioner Michael O'Flaherty said law changes had allowed authorities to "impose excessive limits on freedom of assembly".
From the riots against the poll tax in both the 14th century and the 1980s, to the Suffragette and Chartist campaigns for voting rights, the fight against racism in the Bristol Bus Boycott and the mass demonstrations against the Iraq War, Britain’s past and present have been shaped by protest movements. But has change ever been achieved through a single day of marching with placards?
Microplastics have been found almost everywhere: in blood, placentas, lungs – even the human brain. One study estimated our cerebral organs alone may contain 5g of the stuff, or roughly a teaspoon. If true, plastic isn’t just wrapped around our food or woven into our clothes: it is lodged deep inside us.
As human societies became more complex, following the immensely long hunter-gatherer phase, law came into existence as a way of enabling human communities to live together. It provided a framework that transcended every individual’s desire to defend what was theirs. The object, therefore, was positive and life-affirming. However, from the very beginning, law has tended to be oppressive.
The UK government has announced plans for police to get new powers to restrict “repeat protests”, including banning such protests outright. The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said that police should be able to consider the “cumulative impact” of protest activity when placing conditions on where and when protests can take place.
Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, has been banned many times by different prime ministers since 2011 over concerns about earthquakes and environmental impacts.
A Palestine Action protester was arrested for his clever choice of clothes last week, triggering an ‘embarrassing’ police de-arrest that’s now gone viral.
It was the biggest protest since the government proscribed the group in July under the Terrorism Act, making membership of or support for it a criminal offence, punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
Labour has settled claims brought by 20 people, mainly former staffers, who featured in a leaked internal document about antisemitism in the party, with the costs estimated to be close to £2m.
Companies such as Murdoch’s News Corp and defence contractors like Lockheed Martin are able to conceal how much funding they are giving to APPGs by funding the secretariat, but not the APPG itself.
UN Office of the Commissioners for Human Rights, 25th July 2025:
While AI feels suspended in servers and clouds, there are material consequences on the ground, on our earth, to real living people. And those leading the charge are doing so with very little oversight.
England’s sharp wealth threshold has created a system in which care home providers focus on richer areas, with low incentive to operate in poorer, high need areas.
Labour MPs have voted to impose £2 billion-a-year cuts on disabled people who cannot work, despite a last-minute intervention by UN disability rights experts, and repeated warnings that the bill will cost lives.
Our groundbreaking analysis has uncovered a rapidly expanding network of organisations working to undermine human rights protections, targeting reproductive freedoms, LGBTI rights and promoting dangerous practices.
What if the race to save the planet is harming the people who protect it? Indigenous advocate Galina Angarova exposes the hidden cost of the green energy transition.
Just over 110 million people, or more than 20% of Europeans, are exposed to high levels of transport noise that exceed thresholds set under EU reporting rules and which harm our health, the environment and the economy.
