Under the Radar

Some stories receive very little coverage in our media and we have to seek them out “under the radar”. The disgraceful and continued use of illegal care homes is rarely mentioned, although these unregistered establishments, which are run for profit, are far from new. We also receive scant news from Cuba where the merciless and pointless blockade hits hard. Perhaps the western press does not like to admit that China is doing better. Some stories are reported but the bias in our MSM presents a distorted story or does not consider the context or the implications. The fact that Faber can no longer legally publish Sally Rooney has been covered, but nowhere has it been pointed out that extreme right-wing texts are readily available to buy. They promote right-wing ideology while Sally Rooney’s books are works of fiction. Google’s destruction of over 800 acres of Finland’s forest was reported in various places, but few publications looked any deeper into the story.

No to Sally Rooney, yes to the far right

You will have no problem buying a copy of Mein Kampf in the UK and no problem at all buying the books of Oswald Mosley and Tommy Robinson/Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon. All perfectly acceptable. But it is a different story for Sally Rooney, the Irish writer of novels and poetry, whose book Normal People won the Costa Book Award and the Irish Book Award in 2018, and the Encore Award in 2019. Rooney’s books will no longer be supplied to UK booksellers and it would be “a serious criminal offence” for publisher Faber to continue to do so. Rooney has reaffirmed her support for Palestine Action, which is not a proscribed organisation in the Republic of Ireland, and it is this that has led to the withdrawal of her work. Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori commented that this marked “a new low in the escalating assault on free speech”.

Al Jazeera reports on an open letter on the cover of the New Statesman signed by dozens of well-known UK figures which states that the banning of Palestine Action is a ‘repressive absurdity’. The signatories also express support for Sally Rooney. They include among others Juliet Stevenson, Paul Mescal, Tilda Swinton, Jonathan Glazer, Zadie Smith, Tariq Ali, Gary Lineker and JM Coetzee. The letter rejects censorship and calls this latest development “repressive absurdity”.“Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti-terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for granted in this country.”

And now the children’s writers Chris Haughton and Nicola Davies have announced that they will donate their royalties to Sally Rooney.

So we will not be able to buy Rooney’s work in our bookshops for much longer nor read her work as e-books, but we remain free to buy the writings of Hitler, Mosley and Yaxley-Lennon.

Finland forest destroyed thanks to Google’s arrogance

Finland’s forests are a source of natural pride. But now about 250,000 trees in 815 acres of forest in northern Finland are no more, the area stripped to build a data centre. Even the topsoil has gone and there is now “a vast gaping wound of earth…All that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery; puddles; and mounds of earth, roots, and branches”. The destruction has forced forest animals, among them wolves, out of their habitats and into villages nearby and there is considerable concern about the effect of the brown sediment and runoff polluting local streams and leading to greater acidification.

The government of Finland encouraged the investment.

Google had not completed the necessary environmental impact assessments and the Finnish Licensing and Supervision Authority (LVV) ordered Google to temporarily stop work here and on another site further southeast where about 150,000 trees were felled. 

The proposed data centres are part of Google’s €13bn (£11bn; $15bn) investment in Finland. This was announced less than a month ago and Google says it is its largest single investment in Europe.

Many people in Finland are livid, and more than 96,000 people have signed a citizens’ initiative calling for tighter control of data centers and financial compensation for local environmental damage. The human race tragically has priorities which are almost invariably connected to profit, with so little concern for the long-term health of our planet. Finnish environmentalist Hanna Halmeenpää, who chairs the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation’s board, said Google’s conduct was “pure arrogance.”

We need to inform ourselves about the future when it comes to data centres, as some of the larger ones require huge tracts of land. Expansion is needed for artificial intelligence workloads and cloud computing requirements. Large AI and cloud facilities will need an area ranging form 40 to 1,000 acres in size. This will have a massive impact on the environment and will consume huge amounts of energy, many of them burning gas to create electricity, heedless of the fact that we need to reduce our energy consumption if ever we are to save the planet from destruction.

Illegal, unregistered – the shadow market of illegal care homes

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has revealed that there are at least 500 children’s homes in England unregistered by Ofsted. It is a criminal offence to run these homes without Ofsted registration. The ‘care’ provided has failed in many instances, yet the hundreds of companies involved have received £255m of our money to operate these establishments. The numbers may be considerably higher as almost half the local authorities did not respond to the TBIJ’s freedom of information request. Local authorities may claim that they use unregistered care homes as a last resort in the absence of other facilities, but they are run as businesses, with the eyes of the providers on profit not for the wellbeing of young people.

In August this year, however, Ofsted successfully prosecuted an unregistered provider, Catalyst Care Limited. Croydon Magistrates Court imposed fines of £92,400 plus costs for operating three unregistered homes in Kent between 2022 and 2025. They continued to operate despite a number of warning letters from Ofsted. The directors (Miriam Ekhator and Davidson Lynch-Shyllon) received more than £1.7 million in public funds.

Reports about this scandal are not new. In 2024 a report by the Children’s Commissioner for England found that at any one time hundreds of vulnerable children were placed in unregistered homes for an average of six months each. The Commissioner published a further report at the beginning of this year expressing grave concern as the situation had certainly not improved: “This is what failure looks like in children’s services.. it is indicative of wide failings across an entire system.“

We are letting these children and young people down and, if humanity is measured in how a society treats its most vulnerable, we are most certainly lacking in humanity.

Cuba – the unnecessary cruelty of the US

For decades now there has been an American embargo on Cuba. Since 1960 the embargo has prevented US businesses and citizens from conducting trade or commerce with Cuban interests. Since 1992 the United Nations has been condemning it. During the Clinton and Obama presidencies, there was some relaxation of the embargo and of travel restrictions. From 2017, under the first Trump regime and under Biden, restrictions were increased again. In January this year new measures from Washington aimed to stop the supply of crude oil and refined petroleum products to Cuba, effectively setting up a fuel blockade.

In January 2026, the US introduced an extraterritorial tariff mechanism aimed at halting the supply of crude oil and refined petroleum products to the island. The UN publicly criticised the American trade policy, calling it a “fuel blockade”.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) stated in May that “Cuba has been subjected to energy starvation by the United States, a condition in which the lack of fuel cripples the functioning of essential services required for a dignified life. This unlawful blockade is not only disrupting daily life but also undermining the enjoyment of a wide range of human rights.”

In a move that supports Cuba as it struggles with shortages of electricity and blackouts China is providing thousands of solar power systems. 5,000 solar power systems arrived in August and there are further shipments of equipment. These will prove invaluable to help Cuba maintain power to essential services and to make electricity available in more rural areas. It is hoped China’s intervention will mean Cuba becomes less dependent on fossil fuels. It will not solve all Cuba’s energy problems, where the infrastructure is in very poor condition, but is certainly valuable assistance.

Of course it is not without benefit to Beijing, as China will increase its geopolitical influence and expand its markets.