A juror — a JUROR — in the Palestine Action case is now speaking at a rally in their support. 😵‍💫 This is the collapse of the apparatus of our freedoms. What is Britain becoming?

No spines were shattered at Filton. The officer walked unaided from A&E. Later a small, hairline fracture to the transverse process (the bony projection that sticks out from the side of a vertebra) was identified & the officer was advised to take paracetamol. Truth matters.

There are lots of people on here drinking the security services Kool Aid over the sentencing of the Filton Four. They believe the judge was right to overturn the jury's decision to convict four anti-genocide activists of criminal damage and make it a terrorism offence instead, overturning centuries of legal precedent. Why? Because, they claim, the four activists broke / smashed / shattered a police woman's spine. But that obviously can't be the explanation because three of the activists had nothing to do with that incident and yet they were convicted as terrorists by the judge anyway. Even Samuel Corner, the activist who was convicted over this incident (which left the police woman with a minor fracture, according to the medical authorities who testified), shouldn't have been sentenced as a terrorist for it because that is not what the jury, which heard the actual evidence, decided. The jury convicted Samuel Corner of grievous bodily harm *without intent*. The prosecution had charged him with GBH *with intent* because they needed that as his conviction to build a public mood in support of the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. If Corner could be presented as having entered Israel's Elbit weapons factory with intent to commit violence, then the implication would be that the other activists were in on that plan – a conspiracy – and the government would be off the hook of violating fundamental legal norms by proscribing Palestine Action. By stripping out intent, the jury pulled the rug from under the government's feet. Judge Johnson's task was put the rug firmly back in place by riding roughshod over the jury's decision and sentencing them as terrorists anyway. The timing couldn't be more convenient. On Monday, the Appeal Court will be deciding on the government's appeal against the High Court declaring its proscription of Palestine Action unlawful. If you're peddling the "But they smashed the back of a police woman" line you've been fed by the Daily Mail and BBC, it's because that is exactly what the government needs you spouting as it upends our age-old rights to jury trials, as it stamps out an honourable tradition of direct action dating back to the Suffragettes and before, and as it gives itself cover for continuing complicity in a genocide. Stop being a cuck. Don't fall for this psy-op.

The Irish playright George Bernard Shaw, photographed 119 years ago, at the age of 51. I have cleaned and enhanced this very striking Autochrome portrait by Alvin Langdon Coburn, taken in colour in 1907 via the Lumiere brother's newly-patented colour glass-plate process.