Woman arrested after Palestine Action rally denies assault charges in court
Lavina Richards, 37, of Hackney, north-east London, appeared before a judge at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Wednesday charged with two counts of assaulting a police constable in the execution of their duty.
Richards is accused of assaulting two Metropolitan Police officers at the Trafalgar Square march on Monday when several protesters clashed with police, resulting in 13 arrests for offences including assaulting an emergency worker, obstructing a constable and breaching Public Order Act conditions.
Richards, who appeared in the dock wearing a large black T-shirt, pleaded not guilty on both counts.
District Judge Briony Clarke told her the case will be listed for trial at City of London Magistrates' Court on December 12.
She was granted bail until the trial date.
A handful of pro-Palestine activists stood outside the court waving a Palestinian flag, and sat in the public gallery during the hearing in support of Richards.
Another six people were charged following the rally, including Liam Mizrahi, 25, of no fixed address, who faces one count of a racially aggravated public order offence.
Eleanor Simmonds, 31, also of no fixed address, was charged with assaulting an emergency worker and was bailed to appear at Croydon Magistrates' Court on July 25.
Bipasha Tahsin, 21, of Pinchin Street, Tower Hamlets, was charged with assaulting an emergency worker. She was bailed to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on July 8.
Matthew Holbrook, 59, of Somerhill Road, Hove, Tom Jubert, 40, of Chippendale Street, Hackney, and Hafeza Choudhury, 28, of Berkeley Path, Luton, were charged with breaching Public Order Act conditions and were bailed to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on July 21.
The protest had initially been planned to take place outside the Houses of Parliament, but the location was changed early on Monday morning when Scotland Yard imposed an exclusion zone.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said in a statement on Monday afternoon that she has decided to proscribe Palestine Action and will lay an order before Parliament next week which, if passed, will make membership and support for the protest group illegal.
Belonging to or expressing support for a proscribed organisation, along with a number of other actions, are criminal offences carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.
The decision comes after the group posted footage online showing two people inside the base at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.
The clip shows one person riding an electric scooter up to an Airbus Voyager air-to-air refuelling tanker and appearing to spray paint into its jet engine.
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Spectator
3 hours ago
- Spectator
Is the Met finally getting tough on pro-Palestine protests?
It was airily pleasant to walk round Parliament Square on Monday morning. I had come up to London to go to parliament and to interview Kemi Badenoch at a Policy Exchange event across the square. Palestine Action had announced a protest march against Donald Trump's and Israel's 'genocide' for that time. Although the Met had banned it from the area, I had recently witnessed so many ill-contained and threatening protests there – almost all for Palestinian causes – that I fully expected delay, disruption and occasional harassment. This time, however, it turned out that the Met meant business. The protest was well-contained in the designated streets round Trafalgar Square. May this mark the permanent change many of us have long been calling for. The delightful absence of trouble that day brought home to me how oppressive those past protests had become. The Met's blind commitment to 'the right to protest' effectively ceded control of the streets, public spaces and Tube stations, giving the extremists a preposterous media salience. That right kept cancelling more important rights – those of MPs, peers and parliamentary staff to get on with their work and of the ordinary public to attend parliament as they please or go about their normal business. The constant threat to the security of parliament has increasingly cut it off, created ugly physical barriers and intimidated the parliamentary authorities. By besieging parliament, you subtly delegitimate it. The Met Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, justified his new toughness by saying that Palestine Action is 'an organised extremist criminal group', as witness the expensive damage it claims to have done to RAF planes at Brize Norton. It is, but he could have said much the same 18 months ago of the endless semi-violent anti-Semitic elements which so often march against Israel without a word to say against Hamas's 7 October massacres or Iran's bomb. Theirs have not been what Sir Mark calls 'protests of a different character' from those of Palestine Action. They have been cut from the same keffiyeh. He says the charges against Palestine Action 'represent a form of extremism that I believe the overwhelming majority of the public reject'. What forms of extremism do the overwhelming majority not reject? Anyway, there is joy over the sinner that repenteth. If Palestine Action is to be proscribed, this is the time to pursue its other boasted achievements. In March last year, in my Cambridge college, Trinity, it claimed responsibility for the slashing and spray-painting of de Laszlo's portrait of Arthur Balfour, prime minister, chancellor of Cambridge University and author of the Balfour Declaration. The incident was filmed and posted by the perpetrators, but a year later the police said that 'the investigation has now been filed'. It is hard to believe that these outrages are untraceable, once you identify their Islamist/far-left political motivation and therefore know where to look. By chance, it is 50 years ago this autumn that I matriculated at Trinity. There is a half-century dinner there next month for all of us, but not for me, due to a clerical error in the college's email records. This error has now been corrected with a vengeance and I have since received eight invitations to the Trinity Giving Days in which alumni contribute to bursaries. What is more exciting, however, is that the period in question has also been marked in verse. Four years ago, I drew attention (see Notes, 10 July 2021) to The Examined Life, James Harpur's book of poetry about his time at Cranleigh, his public school in Surrey, which in its 160-year existence has achieved respectability rather than celebrity and is therefore a tricky subject for the muse. The book was a brilliant success, doing what good poetry does uniquely well – suggesting the general from the minutely observed particular. Now Harpur has done this again with Trinity, where he was a year below me, in a new volume called The Magic Theatre. Cambridge has been the subject of rather more poems than Cranleigh, so the bar is higher. But I think Harpur clears it. In my first year at Trinity, I was thrilled to hear that the set I was sharing with Oliver Letwin – G3 New Court – was the same to which Tennyson returns in 'In Memoriam'. It had been occupied by his beloved Arthur Hallam, whom the poem mourns: Up that long walk of limes I past To see the rooms in which he dwelt. Another name was on the door: I linger'd; all within was noise Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys That crash'd the glass and beat the floor; Where once we held debate, a band Of youthful friends, on mind and art, And labour, and the changing mart, And all the framework of the land; When one would aim an arrow fair, But send it slackly from the string; And one would pierce an outer ring, And one an inner, here and there; And last the master-bowman, he, Would cleave the mark.' That could have been an exact description of Oliver's debating prowess, displayed in those very rooms. The trouble with 'In Memoriam', however, is that such exactness is mostly absent. It is a great poem, but more about grief and 'the unquiet heart' ('in words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er') than one rooted in the specific. In this sense, I get more out of Harpur's Cambridge than Tennyson's. Whether he writes about revising or punting or amateur acting ('the tinnitus of humiliation') or lost love, he places his young self in those strange three years granted to you in that (then) small town where your life is more imagined than real, and the better for it. On one tiny point I must correct James Harpur. In a poem which turns out to be about me, I have 'a sleeve of navy velvet'. No; it was only corduroy. We were poor students, after all.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
RE settler raid
Dozens of Israeli settlers have attacked a Palestinian West Bank town, sparking a confrontation that ended with Israeli forces killing three Palestinians. In a separate incident, a 15-year-old boy was killed by the Israeli army in the northern West Bank town of Al-Yamoun, amid a surge of violence and near-daily confrontations between settlers and Palestinians. Three Palestinians were killed and seven wounded in the violence in Kafr Malik on Wednesday, north-east of Ramallah, the Palestinian health ministry said. An Israeli military statement said dozens of Israelis set fire to property, and military and police forces were dispatched to the scene after receiving a report of ensuing violence that included an exchange of stone-throwing. The military statement alleged that several Palestinians opened fire and hurled rocks at the forces, who returned the fire. Five Israeli suspects were arrested. An Israeli army officer was lightly wounded. Video footage showed at least two cars had been set ablaze. Reuters could not independently verify the video. Hussein al-Sheikh, the deputy to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, posted on X: 'The government of Israel, with its behaviour and decisions, is pushing the region to explode.' 'We call on the international community to intervene urgently to protect our Palestinian people,' he said. Earlier on Wednesday, a Palestinian boy was shot dead by the Israeli army during a raid on Al-Yamoun, a West Bank town west of Jenin, the Palestinian Red Crescent said. The Ramallah-based health ministry said in a statement: 'The child Rayan Tamer Houshiyeh was killed after being shot in the neck by soldiers' in Al-Yamoun, north-west of Jenin. The Al-Yamoun incident marked the second time a teenager has been reported killed in the West Bank in two days. On Monday, the health ministry said Israeli fire killed a 13-year-old it identified as Ammar Hamayel, also in Kafr Malik. Earlier this month, the army confirmed it had killed a 14-year-old who threw rocks in the town of Sinjil. In a similar incident in April, a teenager who held US citizenship was shot dead in the neighbouring town of Turmus Ayya. The mayor of Turmus Ayya, Adeeb Lafi, said that Omar Mohammad Rabea, 14, was shot along with two other teenagers by an Israeli settler at the entrance to Turmus Ayya. The Israeli military said it had killed a 'terrorist' who threw rocks at cars. Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967, and violence in the territory has soared since the Hamas attack on 7 October, 2023 that triggered the Gaza war. Since then, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 941 Palestinians, including many militants, according to the health ministry. Over the same period, at least 35 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military operations, according to Israeli figures.
North Wales Chronicle
7 hours ago
- North Wales Chronicle
Woman arrested after Palestine Action rally denies assault charges in court
Lavina Richards, 37, of Hackney, north-east London, appeared before a judge at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Wednesday charged with two counts of assaulting a police constable in the execution of their duty. Richards is accused of assaulting two Metropolitan Police officers at the Trafalgar Square march on Monday when several protesters clashed with police, resulting in 13 arrests for offences including assaulting an emergency worker, obstructing a constable and breaching Public Order Act conditions. Richards, who appeared in the dock wearing a large black T-shirt, pleaded not guilty on both counts. District Judge Briony Clarke told her the case will be listed for trial at City of London Magistrates' Court on December 12. She was granted bail until the trial date. A handful of pro-Palestine activists stood outside the court waving a Palestinian flag, and sat in the public gallery during the hearing in support of Richards. Another six people were charged following the rally, including Liam Mizrahi, 25, of no fixed address, who faces one count of a racially aggravated public order offence. Eleanor Simmonds, 31, also of no fixed address, was charged with assaulting an emergency worker and was bailed to appear at Croydon Magistrates' Court on July 25. Bipasha Tahsin, 21, of Pinchin Street, Tower Hamlets, was charged with assaulting an emergency worker. She was bailed to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on July 8. Matthew Holbrook, 59, of Somerhill Road, Hove, Tom Jubert, 40, of Chippendale Street, Hackney, and Hafeza Choudhury, 28, of Berkeley Path, Luton, were charged with breaching Public Order Act conditions and were bailed to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on July 21. The protest had initially been planned to take place outside the Houses of Parliament, but the location was changed early on Monday morning when Scotland Yard imposed an exclusion zone. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said in a statement on Monday afternoon that she has decided to proscribe Palestine Action and will lay an order before Parliament next week which, if passed, will make membership and support for the protest group illegal. Belonging to or expressing support for a proscribed organisation, along with a number of other actions, are criminal offences carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison. The decision comes after the group posted footage online showing two people inside the base at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. The clip shows one person riding an electric scooter up to an Airbus Voyager air-to-air refuelling tanker and appearing to spray paint into its jet engine.
