voluntary

Manchester Pride officials have shared an update regarding their financial difficulties.

Earlier this month, the LGBTQIA+ festival made headlines after various performers revealed that they hadn’t been paid for this year’s event, including Drag Race UK star Saki Yew.

“It’s gone too far. As performers, we’re used to waiting for money, but there’s no communication and no answer. A lot of performers are starting to give up hope of being paid,” Saki told BBC Newsbeat in October.

“We put in the hard work with weeks and weeks of rehearsals. We put in the time, so give us an answer.”

Drag Race UK star Zahirah Zapanta and Adam Ali echoed similar sentiments, with the latter publishing a letter on behalf of other acts who were awaiting payment.

Following immense backlash, Manchester Pride’s Board of Trustees released a statement on 16 October, revealing that they were in “the process of determining the best way forward” with their legal and financial advisers.

“We know that moments like this can raise questions and emotions. We want to ensure that our staff, interns, artists, contractors and suppliers, who are all a part of our community, are heard and considered,” they wrote.

After an additional week of silence and growing speculation, the event’s board of trustees confirmed that Manchester Pride had started the “legal process of voluntary liquidation.”

“A combination of rising costs, which are affecting the entire events and hospitality industries, declining ticket sales and an ambitious refresh of the format aimed to challenge these issues, along with an unsuccessful bid to host Euro Pride, has led to the organisation no longer being financially viable,” they wrote in a statement released on 22 October.

“We regret the delays in communicating the current situation; however, we were keen not to jeopardise financial opportunities while our discussions were ongoing. We were proactive and determined to identify solutions to the financial issues.

“We’ve been actively working with several partners, including legal and financial advisors, to do everything we could to find a positive solution. We had hoped to be able to find a way to continue, and, most importantly, to support our artists, contractors and partners. Despite our best efforts, sadly, this has not proved to be possible. We are sincerely sorry for those who will now lose out financially from the current situation.”

The board also revealed that the organisation’s staff team will be made redundant, adding that they were “very distressed at the position” they found themselves in.

“The Manchester Pride team have now handed over the details of suppliers and artists who are owed money to the liquidators who will be handling the affairs of the Charity and contacting everyone,” the board concluded.

In a separate statement to Sky News, Equity’s North West official, Karen Lockney, confirmed that they are “collecting contractual information to pursue all options to recoup money owed, and will begin these processes immediately.”

As for the future of Manchester Pride, the Manchester City Council confirmed that “a new chapter” for the festival will take place in August 2026.

“The council will play a full and active role in bringing together the LGBTQ community to help shape how the city moves forward to ensure a bright and thriving future for Manchester Pride,” the council added.

July 4 (UPI) — The United Parcel Service has announced that it is offering buyouts to full-time drivers as part of its execution of “the largest network reconfiguration” in the company’s history.

The plan was announced in a statement Tuesday, explaining it is “the first time ever” that they have offered full-time drivers the ability to volunteer to “receive a generous financial package if they choose to leave UPS.”

Specifics of the financial package were not revealed, but UPS said it will be in addition to any earned retirement benefits, including pension and healthcare.

“Each driver would have the ability to decide if this voluntary program is beneficial to their family and the plans they have for their future,” UPS said.

The company added the drivers’ union has been informed of the plan and that UPS remains committed to their 2023 agreement.

The union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, issued a statement rejecting the buyout plan as violating their commitment not only to protect 340,000 delivery workers but to create 22,500 more jobs.

“UPS is trying to weasel its way out of creating good union jobs here in America by dangling insulting buyouts in front of Teamsters drivers,” the teamsters general president, Sean O’Brien said in a statement.

“It’s an illegal violation of our national contract.”

In the five-year contract, ratified in August 2023, UPS guaranteed to fill at a minimum 22,500 permanent full-time jobs. The announcement of the buyout also comes as the union says UPS is failing to provide at least 28,000 air-conditioned vehicles to drivers by 2028.

“Our members cannot be bought off and we will not allow them to be sold out,” O’Brien said.

“The Teamsters are prepared to fight UPS on every front with every available resource to shut down this illegal buyout program.”

The announcement comes after UPS said in late April that they expected to reduce their workforce by about 20,000 positions during this year.

Israel is no longer concealing its intention to forcibly displace Palestinians from their homeland, as it now announces this plan more openly than ever before through official rhetoric at the highest levels, said Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor in a report issued today.

Through actions on the ground and institutional measures designed to reframe the crime as “voluntary migration”, explained Euro-Med Monitor, Israel has attempted to implement its displacement campaign by exploiting the international community’s near-total silence, which has enabled the continuation of the crime and Israeli impunity despite the unprecedented nature of humanity’s first livestreamed genocide.

“Israel is now attempting to carry out the final phase of its crime, and its original goal: the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine, specifically from the Gaza Strip. For a year and a half, Israel has carried out acts of genocide, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of people, erasing entire cities, dismantling the Strip’s infrastructure, and systematically displacing its population within the enclave. These actions aim to eliminate the Palestinian people as a community and as a collective presence.”

The current plans for forced displacement, said the Geneva-based rights group, are a direct extension of Israel’s long-standing, settler-colonial project, aimed at erasing Palestinian existence and seizing land. What distinguishes this stage, it added, is its unprecedented scale and brutality.

“Israel is targeting over two million people who have endured a full-scale genocide and have been stripped of even the most basic human rights, under coercive, inhumane conditions that make living any sort of a normal life impossible. Israel’s deliberate objective is to pressure Palestinians into leaving by making it their only means of survival.”

Having succeeded in revealing the weak principles of international law, such as protections for civilians based on their perceived racial superiority or lack thereof, Israel is now reshaping the narrative once again.

READ: Gaza reaches WHO’s most critical malnutrition level amid Israeli blockade

“Armed with overwhelming force and emboldened by the international community’s abandonment of legal and moral responsibilities, Israel seeks to portray the mass expulsion of Palestinians as ‘voluntary migration’,” said the group. “This is a blatant attempt to rebrand ethnic cleansing and forced displacement using dishonest language — like ‘humanitarian considerations’ and ‘individual choice’ — and is a direct contradiction of legal facts and the reality on the ground.”

Euro-Med Monitor emphasised that forced displacement is a standalone crime under international law, because it involves the removal of individuals from areas where they legally reside, using force, threats, or other forms of coercion, without valid legal justification.

“Coercion, in the context of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, goes beyond military force. It includes the creation of unbearable conditions that render remaining in one’s home practically impossible or life-threatening.” A coercive environment includes fear of violence, persecution, arrest, intimidation, starvation or other forms of hardship that strip individuals of free will and force them to flee.

“Israel has already committed the crime of forced displacement against Gaza’s population, having driven them into internal displacement without legal grounds and in conditions that violate international legal exceptions, which only permit evacuation temporarily and under imperative military necessity, while ensuring safe areas with minimum standards of human dignity,” said Lima Bustami, Director of Euro-Med Monitor’s Legal Department.

“None of these standards have been met. In fact, Israel has used this widespread and repeated pattern of displacement as a tool of genocide, aimed at destroying and subjecting the population to deadly living conditions.”

Bustami added that although the legal elements of the crime are already fulfilled, Israel is further escalating it to a more lethal level against the Palestinian people, manifesting its settler-colonial vision of expulsion and replacement. “Now it is attempting to market the second phase of forced displacement — beyond Gaza’s borders — as ‘voluntary migration’: a transparent deception that only a complicit international community — one that chooses silence over accountability — would accept.”

Today, the people of the Gaza Strip endure catastrophic conditions that are unprecedented in recent history, said Euro-Med Monitor. “Israel has obliterated all forms of normal life; there is no electricity or infrastructure, and there are no homes, no essential services, no functioning healthcare or education systems, and no clean water services.”

Indeed, the group’s report notes that around 2.3 million Palestinians are confined to less than 34 per cent of the Strip’s 365 square kilometres. Approximately 66 per cent of the territory has been turned into so-called “buffer zones”, or areas that are completely off-limits to Palestinians and/or that have been forcibly depopulated through Israeli bombings and displacement orders. “Most of the population is now living in tattered tents amid the spread of famine, disease and epidemics and an accumulation of waste, conditions symptomatic of the near-complete collapse of the humanitarian system.”

Moreover, Israel continues to systematically block the entry of food, medicine and fuel; destroy all remaining means of survival; and obstruct any efforts aimed at reconstruction or restoring even the minimum conditions for a healthy life.

“These conditions in place are not the result of a natural disaster,” the Euro-Med report says pointedly. “They have been deliberately engineered by Israel as a coercive tool to pressure the population into leaving the Gaza Strip. The absence of any genuine, voluntary alternative for Palestinians in the enclave renders this situation a textbook case of forcible transfer, as defined under international law and affirmed by relevant jurisprudence.”

READ: Israel advocate says, ‘I’m OK with as many dead kids as it takes’

According to Bustami, “While population transfers may be permitted in certain humanitarian contexts under international law, any such justification collapses if the humanitarian crisis is the direct consequence of unlawful acts committed by the same party enforcing the transfer. It is impermissible to use forced displacement as a response to a disaster one has created, a principle clearly upheld by international tribunals, particularly the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.”

Framing this imposed reality as a “voluntary” migration and an option not only constitutes a gross distortion of truth, said Euro-Med Monitor, but also undermines the legal foundations of the international system, erodes the principle of accountability, and transforms impunity from a failure of justice into a deliberate mechanism for perpetuating grave crimes and entrenching the outcomes of such crimes.

“Repeated public statements from the highest levels of Israel’s political and security leadership have escalated in intensity over the past year and a half, and expose a clear, coordinated intent to displace the population of the Gaza Strip. In a blatant bid to enforce a demographic transformation serving Israel’s colonial-settler agenda, senior Israeli officials — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir — have publicly called for the expulsion of Palestinians from the Strip and for the settlement of Jewish Israelis in their place.”

Netanyahu expressed full support in February 2025 for US President Donald Trump’s plan to resettle Palestinians outside of the Gaza Strip, describing it as “the only viable solution for enabling a different future” for the region. Likewise, Smotrich announced in March that the Israeli government would back the establishment of a new “migration authority” to coordinate what he termed a “massive logistical operation” to remove Palestinians from the Strip.

Ben-Gvir, meanwhile, has openly advocated for the encouragement of “voluntary migration” coupled with calls to resettle Jewish Israelis in the territory.

The human rights organisation referred to the 23 March decision of the Israeli Security Cabinet to establish a dedicated directorate within the Ministry of Defence, to manage what it calls the “voluntary relocation” of the Gaza Strip’s residents to third countries. “This is evidence that this displacement is not a by-product of destruction or political rhetoric, but an official policy,” it noted. “This policy is being implemented through institutional mechanisms, directed from within Israel’s own security apparatus, with full operational powers, executive structures, and strategic goals.”

READ: Israel bombing kills 4-year-old twin girls as they slept in Gaza

Furthermore, current Defence Minister Israel Katz’s statement on the new directorate confirmed that it would “prepare for and enable safe and controlled passage of Gaza residents for their voluntary departure to third countries, including securing movement, establishing movement routes, checking pedestrians at designated crossings in the Gaza Strip, as well as coordinating the provision of infrastructure that will enable passage by land, sea and air to the destination countries.”

The true danger of establishing such a directorate, said Euro-Med Monitor, lies not only in its institutionalisation of forced transfer, but in the new legal and political reality it seeks to impose. “It rebrands displacement as an ‘optional’ administrative service while stripping civilians of their ability to make free, informed decisions, therefore cloaking a war crime in a veneer of bureaucratic legitimacy.”

Any departure from the Gaza Strip under current circumstances cannot be considered “voluntary”, it added, but rather constitutes, in legal terms, forcible transfer, which is strictly prohibited under international law. “All individuals compelled to leave the Strip retain their inalienable right to return to their land and property immediately and unconditionally. They also have the full right to seek compensation for all damages and losses incurred as a result of Israeli crimes and rights violations, including the destruction of homes and property, physical and psychological harm, the assault on human dignity, and the denial of livelihood and basic rights.”

Under its obligations as an occupying power responsible for the protection of the civilian population, Israel is prohibited from forcibly transferring Palestinians and bears full legal responsibility to ensure their protection from this crime.

The rules of international law, particularly customary international law and the Geneva Conventions, require all states not to recognise any situation arising from the crime of forcible transfer and to treat it as null and void. States are also obligated to withhold all material, political and diplomatic support that would contribute to the entrenchment of such a situation.

“International responsibility goes beyond mere non-recognition,” said the rights group. “It includes a legal duty for states to take urgent effective steps to halt the crime, hold perpetrators accountable, and provide redress to victims. This includes ensuring the safe, voluntary return of all displaced persons from the Gaza Strip, and providing full reparations for the harm and violations they have suffered. Any failure to act in this regard constitutes a direct breach of international law and complicity that could subject states to legal accountability.”

READ: Israeli air strike hits Gaza children’s hospital

Euro-Med Monitor said that the international community must move beyond deafening silence and abandon paltry rhetorical condemnations, which have come to represent the maximum response it dares to make in the face of the livestreamed genocide unfolding before its eyes. “It must act swiftly and effectively to halt Israel’s ongoing project of mass displacement in the Gaza Strip and prevent it from becoming an entrenched reality. This action must be based on international legal norms, a commitment to justice and accountability, and an honest reckoning with the root structural cause of the crimes: Israel’s unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 1967.”

Endorsing or remaining silent about Israeli plans to forcibly transfer Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip not only exonerates Israel but rewards it for its illegal conduct by granting it gains secured through mass killing, destruction, blockade, and starvation, said the organisation. “This is not just a series of war crimes or crimes against humanity, it embodies the legal definition of genocide, as established by the 1948 Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.”

All states, individually and collectively, must uphold their legal obligations and take all necessary measures to halt Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip.

This includes taking immediate, effective steps to protect Palestinian civilians and to prevent the implementation of the US-Israeli crime of forcible transfer that is openly threatening the Strip’s population.

“The international community must impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel for its systematic and grave violations of international law. This includes halting arms imports and exports; ending all forms of political, financial and military support; freezing the financial assets of officials involved in crimes against Palestinians; imposing travel bans; and suspending trade privileges and bilateral agreements that offer Israel economic advantages that sustain its capacity to commit further crimes.”

The rights group insisted that states must also hold complicit governments accountable — chief among them the United States — for their role in enabling Israeli crimes through various forms of support, including military and intelligence cooperation, financial aid and political or legal backing.

“The ethnic cleansing and genocide taking place right now in the Gaza Strip would not be possible without Israel’s decades-long unlawful colonial presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. This is the root structural cause of the violence, oppression, and destruction in the besieged enclave,” concluded Euro-Med Monitor. “Any meaningful response to the escalating crisis in the Strip must begin with dismantling this colonial reality, recognising the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, and securing their freedom and sovereignty over their national territory.

“As Israel and its allies must be compelled to abide by the law, international intervention is the only path to ending the genocide, halting all forms of individual and collective forcible transfer, dismantling the apartheid regime, and establishing a credible framework for justice, accountability, and the preservation of human dignity.”

OPINION: Palestinian voices are throttled by the promotion of foreign agendas

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Reporting from Berkeley — The school bus ride was less than three miles from one side of Berkeley to the other, but from 1969 to 1973 it transported Carole Porter to an entirely different world.

Like her neighbor and friend Kamala Harris, Porter was one of thousands of black children bused into predominantly white neighborhoods to learn. It was part of Berkeley’s bold experiment in desegregation.

But even in a city that had become a worldwide symbol of 1960s counterculture revolt, systemic racial prejudice in education and housing remained deeply entrenched.

“That’s a really hard thing to reconcile,” said Porter, 55. “Berkeley was an oxymoron. It was a contradiction in many ways.”

Harris’ three years of busing from her family’s mainly black working-class neighborhood to a prosperous white enclave in the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay was at once universal and uniquely Berkeley.

As in many American cities, the discriminatory housing policy known as redlining kept blacks from moving into white neighborhoods in Berkeley and busing fueled some white flight to the suburbs.

But unlike other sizable cities, Berkeley undertook its busing program voluntarily and required both white and black families to travel into unfamiliar neighborhoods. Rapid demographic and political changes shielded the community from the most extreme pushback, including violence, that hobbled busing efforts nationwide.

More than 50 years after Berkeley launched its busing program, Harris, one of its most famous participants, thrust it back into the spotlight in last week’s Democratic presidential debate.

As California’s first black senator chastised her rival Joe Biden for his fight against forced busing in the ’70s, she leaned on her personal history in Berkeley, portraying herself as a beneficiary of the charged battle for educational equality.

“There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said. “And that little girl was me.”

Thelette A. Bennett, 71, a retired vice principal of Berkeley High School, grew up in the same neighborhood as Harris.

(Josh Edelson / For The Times)

Contrary to its enduring reputation as a progressive mecca, the Berkeley of Harris’ childhood was more politically muddled. The conservative John Birch Society operated two bookstores in the area. It wasn’t until the early 1960s that Democrats cracked a Republican stronghold on the city council. Black residents were restricted to living to the southern and western flats, while whites resided in the northern hills.

Thelette A. Bennett, 71, a retired vice principal of Berkeley High School, grew up in the same neighborhood as Harris.

Bennett’s father, a black World War II Navy veteran, was an airplane mechanic at a local naval air station in 1945, when redlining blocked him and his wife from buying a house in a white neighborhood. Even in the black neighborhood where they settled, she said, they needed to get a white real estate agent to buy a home and transfer it to them.

“There were only certain areas where they could buy a home,” Bennett said. “We lived where they allowed us to live.”

But a large influx of African Americans during and after World War II and whites affiliated with UC Berkeley were pulling the local politics to the left, paving the way for desegregation. Black leaders raised concerns about segregation in the city starting in the late 1950s.

In response, the school board studied the matter, concluding that all but three of the district’s 17 elementary schools and two of the three junior high schools were segregated. (Berkeley High, the city’s only high school, was integrated by default.) In 1964, the school board voted to desegregate its junior high schools.

Residents’ reactions were not as extreme as the segregation battles elsewhere in the country, such as the South, but “it wasn’t as far from that as you might assume,” said Natalie Orenstein, a reporter for local news site Berkeleyside. “There were definitely really angry parents and hours-long school meetings.”

Desegregation opponents launched recall campaigns of multiple school board members over the junior high busing program, but lost by a wide margin.

“When the recall failed, that vote was interpreted by the school board and liberals as a vote to go ahead,” said Charles Wollenberg, author of “Berkeley: A City in History.” “So in 1968, they also began integration of the elementary schools.”

This January 1970 photo provided by the Kamala Harris campaign shows her, left, with her sister, Maya, and mother, Shyamala, outside their apartment in Berkeley after her parents’ separation.

(Kamala Harris campaign via AP)

Harris began attending a white school in 1970 as a first-grader. Her mother would kiss her goodbye and then she would walk to the corner and get on the bus to Thousand Oaks Elementary School, Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir. “I only learned later that we were part of a national experiment in desegregation.… At the time, all I knew was that the big yellow bus was the way I got to school.”

Leading the charge was Neil Sullivan, the Berkeley schools superindendent previously tasked with integrating Prince Edward County, Va., which had closed its public schools to defy desegregation orders.

School busing and race tore L.A. apart in the 1970s. Now, Kamala Harris is reviving debate »

“School integration can change attitudes — that is the key factor,” Sullivan wrote in a 1969 book about his Berkeley tenure. “It is our hope that in the integrated school we shall not raise another generation of bigots.”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in a foreword to Sullivan’s book, said that he had felt discouraged about the progress of school integration nationwide. But upon hearing the Berkeley superintendent’s desegregation plan, “hope returned to my soul and spirit.”

Berkeley was distinct for choosing to integrate on its own, not under duress from the court, and made the busing requirements apply equally to black and white children.

Covering Kamala Harris

“They weren’t just requiring black children to go to school in white neighborhoods,” said Erica Frankenberg, an education and demography professor at Penn State University who researched the Berkeley programs. “They were also saying we need to be equitable in sharing the burden of going further away…. That was extremely rare.”

Some white families embraced the experiment. Sophie Hahn, currently a Berkeley City Council member, said her family moved from neighboring Kensington into the hills of northern Berkeley so she could participate in busing.

From fourth to sixth grade, she rode the bus to Columbus Elementary School (later renamed after civil rights icon Rosa Parks), where most of the students and teachers were black. Hahn learned African history and some Swahili, and the kids sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a civil rights ballad often called the Black National Anthem.

“People were giddy,” said Hahn, 57. “I was brought up thinking that what we were doing in Berkeley was going to change the world.”

But others fled to avoid busing. The district saw a decline in enrollment in the 15 years after integration, from 16,000 students to 9,000, partly fueled by white flight, according to Berkeleyside.

Harris has fondly recounted her early school days.

“Because the students came from all over the area, we were a varied bunch; some grew up in public housing and others were the children of professors,” she wrote in her memoir. “I remember celebrating varied cultural holidays at school and learning to count to ten in several languages.”

Carole Porter similarly spoke warmly of the experience, recalling Swedish, Jewish and Latina friends she made at Thousand Oaks Elementary School — which is now emblazoned with a mural featuring its famous alumna, Harris.

“I think it made me who I am today,” she said.

Her younger sister, Lois Porter, however, said being bused to Thousand Oaks in 1970 for kindergarten was difficult.

“We were treated horribly,” by the white teachers, and the white students “wouldn’t play with us,” she said.

“I just remember it being very tense,” she said. “I didn’t trust white people for a long time.”

The tumult in Berkeley over busing paled in comparison to other American cities. In 1974, court-ordered busing led to violent clashes in Boston. Five years later, Los Angeles voters recalled the school board president who pledged to follow court orders for mandatory busing.

Nearly 90% of the American public opposed busing, according to a Gallup poll in the early 1970s. In Berkeley, just over half of parents opposed busing before it went into effect, and only 30% opposed it once the program was put in place.

Sen. Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden, left, speak as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) looks on during the second night of the first Democratic presidential debate on June 27 in Miami.

(Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

Today, Berkeley operates under a newer desegregation plan that is based on socioeconomic and demographic data instead of a student’s race. The original desegregation policy remains a source of civic pride.

“The legacy is that every single kid in Berkeley from grades K-5 has baseline the same resources at their schools, the same quality of teachers school to school,” said Orenstein, the Berkeleyside reporter. “But I think it’s a complicated and unfinished legacy given the persistent achievement gap and equity issues that public school districts everywhere are faced with.”

For the black students of those first integrated classes, the socializing and networking with white children was just as crucial as the classroom learning, said Carole Porter. She believes it formed a springboard for Harris’ presidential ambitions.

“She would not be where she is today if she had not had that opportunity,” she said.

Neighbor Jane Yamashiro takes a selfie in front of a mural depicting presidential candidate Kamala Harris on a wall at Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley on June 29.

(Josh Edelson / For The Times)

Times staff writers Michael Finnegan reported from Berkeley, Seema Mehta and Melanie Mason from Los Angeles.