Tony Greenstein: The most important half-hour of my life | by Greg Hadfield | Aug, 2026 | Medium
Wednesday September 2^nd, 2026 at 12:55 PM

Tony Greenstein: The most important half-hour of my life

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Below is the text of the closing speech Tony Greenstein prepared for the end of his trial at Kingston Crown Court.

After a four-day trial ending on Friday, August 21 2026, Tony was acquitted of one count of inviting support for a proscribed terrorist organisation [Hamas] under Section 12(1) of the Terrorism Act 2000.

You can read Tony’s blogposts at azvsas.blogspot.com.

Note: This text has not been checked against delivery. For legal reasons, it was not published until after the jury delivered its verdict.

1. WHY I AM SPEAKING TO YOU MYSELF

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

First, a word about why I have chosen to address you in person rather than through my barrister, Lawrence McNulty. My decision implies no criticism of Lawrence. It is simply this: when my liberty is at stake, I wish to speak to you directly rather than through someone else. It is my words that are on that indictment. When someone is accused of meaning something he never meant, he should be the one to tell you what he meant.

I am not a barrister. I hope you will bear that in mind. However what I will do is speak from the heart. I am seventy-two years old. I have been arguing in public for more than fifty years, and this may be the most important half hour of argument in my life.

The prosecution say that I invited people to support an Islamic group called Hamas while accepting that I didn’t support Hamas myself. Think about that for a moment. Why should I invite people to support a group that I don’t support and never have supported? It is illogical.

According to the Prosecution’s opening statement, although I did not mention Hamas by name in my X posts, my “reference to support for the ‘Gaza ghetto uprising’ — in that specific context, on that specific date — can only have meant support for Hamas”.

In order to sustain their case the Prosecution fixated on one sentence in a blog of 10 pages, concerning the congratulation of Hamas for a well planned and audacious attack. In other words if you ever say anything about any group then you are a supporter if not a recruiting sergeant.

In fact my blog is cut off in the Bundle. At 1060 words. In fact it went on for some 1935 words, including a leading article from an Israeli paper, Ha’aretz and two contributions from American Jewish political scientist, Norman Finkelstein. That is in addition to 2000 words in the comments.

Even on the one piece they produced they had to ensure that you didn’t see all of the evidence. Let alone produce uncut the 15 or so blogs that demonstrated that I didn’t support Hamas and never had.

According to the Prosecution logic Kemi Badenoch supporting Starmer’s decision not to make British bases available for the war against Iran means she supports the Labour Party.

It is like being told that the Pope has supported abortion by helping out women who have had abortion. The fact that you support one action of a group does not mean that you therefore support the group itself. That logic escapes the Prosecution, although it should be obvious that supporting one action of a group doesn’t mean supporting the group itself.

2. WHO I AM

Before I make my case, you are entitled to know a little of my background. Firstly I am a parent, with 4 children, 3 sons and a daughter. Although I am separated from my wife, Fiona she was in the public gallery yesterday with our 35 year old son, Daniel who is severely autistic. Fiona and myself are Daniel’s carers.

I went to Brighton Polytechnic in 1974 where I obtained an honours degree in Applied Sciences. In 1996 I obtained an MA in Colonial History from Birkbeck, London University and between 2000/2 I obtained a law degree from Sussex University and the following year a Legal Practice Certificate from the College of Law in Guildford.

Apart from being a blogger I have written for, among other papers and web sites The Guardian, New Statesman, Tribune Magazine (Orwell), Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Middle East Monitor, Open Democracy and many others

I was born in 1953, in the shadow of the Holocaust. The Holocaust had ended only eight years before. My father’s parents came to England from Poland and left the rest of the family behind. Nearly all of them died in the Holocaust in Treblinka extermination camp. My father mentioned it just once in his whole life. Just one sister, who jumped off a deportation train, is known to have survived. Over three million of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews were murdered.

My father was Rabbi Solomon Greenstein. In 1936 he stood at Cable Street, where the working people of the East End — Jews and dockers together — stopped Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts from marching through a Jewish neighbourhood. That is the house I was raised in. Not a house of quietism. A house where you stood in the road.

So I am extremely aware of the trauma caused by the Holocaust. It is not history to me. It is the empty chairs at my family’s table. But what I have always fought against was those who used the murder of 6 million Jews in order to justify the murder and genocide of others. That is why authored Zionism During the Holocaust.

I was brought up as a religious Zionist. In 1967, when Israel captured what is now known as Gaza and the West Bank, I shared in the joy of fellow Jews. None of us knew then what horrors would be visited on the indigenous Palestinians who lived there.

Then, at the King David School in Liverpool, I was asked to take part in a school debate on whether Zionism was Right or Wrong and because nobody else would take that side I agreed to play devil’s advocate. In the course of researching the topic I suddenly realised that I had grown up with a series of fabrications and lies. The refugees of 1948 had not left voluntarily on the orders of the Arab regimes. They had been expelled at the point of a gun, and after a series of massacres. The documents that proved it were classified and are still classified.

This was the pivotal moment of my life. From then on I became a Jewish anti-Zionist. And I learnt something my school had never taught me: that anti-Zionism had been the majority trend amongst Jews until the second world war. It is a Jewish tradition, as old as Zionism, and I stand in that tradition. Today 44% of young British Jews describe themselves as non- or anti-Zionist. We are not a curiosity. We are a tradition, coming back.

And I have lived that tradition the way most of our Jewish ancestors did. For fifty years I have opposed fascist groups on the streets. Because racism and fascism led to the holocaust. I was also a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

I am a Jewish socialist. The Palestinian organisation whose politics I have supported for decades is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — secular, socialist, founded by a Christian Palestinian, George Habash.

Hamas is an Islamist movement. Its full name is the Islamic Resistance Movement. Ask yourselves — is a Jewish secular socialist who has spent twenty years criticising political Islam and Hamas a plausible recruiting sergeant for it?

And as you weigh that question, understand what it is to be me, standing in this dock. Someone who has spent fifty years fighting fascism on the streets of this country. I never imagined it could happen here in the mother country of democracy that I would be facing 14 years imprisonment for writing a blog and tweeting under the Terrorism Act 2000.

3. HOW THIS CASE CAME TO YOU

At half past six on 20th December a dozen counter-terror police raided my home, seized my electronic devices, and arrested me — on the basis of a single tweet posted a month previously. We live, ladies and gentlemen, in dystopian and Orwellian times.

When I applied for the return of my devices, the officer in charge explained in a witness statement why they were keeping them. They needed, he said, to fully understand my “mind set and ideology” from my internet search history, and from how, “and indeed if”, I talk about Hamas with others away from the public domain.

Is it really the job of the police to act as amateur psychologists, inquiring into people’s minds?

There might be a justification for all this if they thought I was going to set off an explosive device. But that is obviously not the case. It was the police themselves who gave me bail the same day, with three relatively trivial restrictions — which, on appeal, Westminster magistrates watered down further. Clearly, they did not think I was a terrorist.

But the Terrorism Act has been creating a whole new category of terrorist. On the Home Office’s own figures, arrests under the Terrorism Acts have leapt in 2024 from around two hundred to more than three thousand in 2025 — a more than tenfold increase.

And the profile of the average terrorist has changed too. It used to be a 31 year-old man. It is now more likely to be a 59 year-old woman. You may ask yourselves whether the word “terrorist” has quietly been given a new meaning — and whether I am standing in front of you because of it.

And when they interviewed me, I did not hide behind “no comment.” as my solicitor advised me. I answered every question for over an hour, and came back three months later, voluntarily, and did it again. When they asked me directly whether I supported Hamas against the Israeli army, I gave them an answer I will repeat again, because it is my whole case:

“I would probably support the devil against the Israeli army. That doesn’t mean I support the devil in itself.”

And if the devil exists it exists amongst those who prohibit anaesthetics entering Gaza so that children have to endure amputations without the benefit of pain relief. The devil exists amongst those who deliberately starve children to death because they rationalise that those children will only grow up to be terrorists. It exists among those who bomb tent encampments and literally burn children and their parents alive. It exists amongst those who call Palestinians “human animals” the same phrase used by Himmler, the head of the SS about Jewish children in a speech on October 4, 1943 to senior SS Generals.

In a situation where there is a conflict, you support the oppressed rather than the oppressor. That is not support for an organisation. That is a moral position — one, I might add, with a rather long Jewish pedigree.

4. WHAT YOU ARE BEING ASKED TO DECIDE

Her Honour will direct you on the law, and what she tells you about the law you must take from her, not from me. But you know by now what the prosecution must make you sure of, and it is worth setting out plainly, because everything I say from here on hangs from it.

They must make you sure of three things. That Hamas was proscribed on 7 October 2023 — that is agreed, and always was. That my words in fact invited support for Hamas. And that I knew, at the time, that that is what I was doing.

Three things. All three. Sure of each.

Now notice what is not on that list.

It is not on that list whether you agree with my opinions about Israel and Palestine. It is not on that list whether you find those opinions congenial, or offensive — some of you may find that they are. And it is not on that list whether Hamas ought to be proscribed. That is the government’s decision. It is not mine, and it is not yours.

The charge is not holding an opinion. The charge is inviting other people to support an organisation, Hamas. Those are two different things — and every single question in this trial lives in the distance between them.

Hold on to that distinction, because I am now going to show you what I actually wrote.

5. WHAT I ACTUALLY WROTE

This case hinges on three short posts and one article. That is the entire alleged crime. So let us read it — carefully, the way the prosecution hopes you won’t.

First. Hamas is not mentioned. Not in the first tweet. Not in the second nor the third. Not once. The prosecution invite you to supply the name yourselves — because I did not supply it.

What I wrote was “the Gaza Ghetto Uprising.” And I chose the word ghetto deliberately, but not for the reason the prosecution imply.

Let me explain, for those of you who do not know the history. In the second world war, the Nazis walled the Jews of Warsaw, half a million of them into a ghetto — a sealed district, starved and diseased, from which the trains left for the Treblinka death camp. And in 1943 the young Jews who remained did something nobody expected. With a handful of smuggled pistols, against tanks and the SS, they rose. They knew they could not win. They rose because it was better to die resisting than to be led away quietly. It is one of the proudest moments in Jewish history.

The last surviving commander of that uprising was a man named Marek Edelman. And in his old age, Edelman wrote to the Palestinian resistance and addressed them as fellow fighters — much to Israel’s annoyance. When he died, Poland gave him a state funeral, a fifteen-gun salute, the President gave the oration. Israel did not send the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy. Edelman wasn’t a Zionist.

Edelman, who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, described Gaza as a ghetto. I have used his comparison for years before October 2023. Two million people, most of them refugees or the children of refugees, sealed into a strip of land under blockade for 16 years, where the majority are children who have never once been allowed out. When I wrote “ghetto,” I meant a ghetto. My blog supported the Uprising just as I would have supported the slave uprisings of the 19th century. That is a political opinion. It was a political opinion on 7 October 2023, and it is a political opinion now.

And here is the crazy thing. Read section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and ask what it would have made of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. If this Act had existed in 1944, they could have been classified as terrorists. So could the French Resistance. That is how widely this law is drawn — and it is worth remembering when you consider who it is now being pointed at. The definition of terrorism in the Terrorism Act 2000 is no definition at all. It has been widely criticised, both by the Supreme Court in Gul and also by the Independent Reviewer of terrorism David Anderson QC as he then was.

Second. “PLEASE SHARE.” The prosecution say those two words are the invitation. Members of the jury, I have written a blog for 18 years. “Please share” means: read my article, pass it on, argue with it. Asking people to read what you have written is not asking them to support an organisation. If it were, every writer in this country would be standing where I am standing. My purpose was not to invite support for anyone. If I had wanted people to support a particular group I would have said it. I often ask for support for things such as the Al Tafawk kindergarten in Jenin. Nothing in the wording suggests that. The posts were advertising my blog. That is what writers do.

And here is what that “recruitment campaign” achieved. 56 views. 73 views. 58 views. Four shares between them. The prosecution’s case that this was an invitation to the public to support a proscribed organisation — is a fantasy that they have created out of nothing.

Third — the sentence the whole case rests on.”Whatever criticisms one can make of Hamas, we should congratulate them on this well planned and audacious attack.”

Note the words: “whatever criticisms.” Those are not the words of a recruiter. A recruiter does not open with the criticisms of the thing he is recruiting for. Those are the words of someone who has spent fifteen years making those criticisms in public — and I will show you the receipts in a moment.

And “well planned and audacious” — that is a description, not an endorsement. October 7 was well planned, and it was audacious. Israel had constructed a five billion dollar electronic fence, complete with drones, sensors and automatic machine guns, and it was breached in minutes. Retired generals said the same thing on television that week. Nobody raided their homes at dawn.

As for “Hamas should be congratulated” it is so obviously a figure of speech, not meant literally, that I am surprised that the prosecutor doesn’t blush every time she argues this.

And I will tell you what else I wrote that day, in the same article and its comments. I wrote that the retribution of Israel would be bloody and savage. I wrote to a commenter: “Graham, believe you me, I am apprehensive of the days ahead and Israel’s potential for genocide.” Apprehensive. Those are not the words of someone celebrating. They are the words of someone who feared exactly what was coming — and who, you may think, has been proved catastrophically right.

But you would not have read the latter comment because the version of the blog in your Bundle is only half the original (1060 words as opposed to 1935 words). The comments underneath were another 2,000 words and they too were not in your bundle. Why? Because it is clear that the conversation didn’t mention anyone joining Hamas. Anyone with eyes to see would understand that the blog was not an invitation to join Hamas.

It takes a certain malevolence to read that into the blog. And let it be clear that support for an action of a proscribed group is not the same as support for the group itself. expressing an opinion or belief that is shared by or coincides with the aims of a proscribed organization is not the same thing as expressing support for the organization itself That is or should be common senses. It is also good law as in the case ABJ decided recently in the Supreme Court.

So ask yourself the only question that matters. Where, in any of this, is the invitation? Did I ask anyone to join anything? Did I ask for money? Did I ask a single human being to take a single action — other than to read an article?

You may take those three posts and that article into your deliberation room and read them from beginning to end as many times as you like. You will not find it. It is not there. ‖

6. TWENTY YEARS OF MY OWN HEADLINES

The prosecution must also prove that I knew I was inviting support for Hamas. So let me show you what I have actually written about Hamas, over twenty years, under my own name. These are the titles of my articles:

We Support the Palestinian People of Gaza — not Hamas. March 2009.

Islamic Fascists Attack Children’s Summer Camp in Gaza. May 2010.

Hamas — Speaking with a Forked Tongue. December 2010.

The Lousy Hamas Government. February 2011.

Hamas Prevents Palestinian Students Studying Abroad. August 2011.

Hamas’s Attack on NGOs Resembles That of Israel. August 2011.

Hamas Pays the Price of Forced Islamicisation. April 2013.

How Israel Helped Create Hamas. July 2014.

Hamas Does Its Best to Make Palestinian Lives a Misery. February 2018.

Abbas and Hamas — Abuse and Torture of Palestinians. October 2018.

Ten years of headlines. I called them Islamic fascists. In print. In public. Under my own name. Do the titles of those blogs indicate support for Hamas?

And these are only some of them. You can be sure that if my writings helped the prosecution in any way, they would have given them to you to read rather than objecting to them.

I have spent my political life supporting the secular, socialist tradition of Palestine. So when the prosecution tell you that on the morning of 7 October 2023 I woke up and decided to become a recruiter for the Islamic Resistance Movement, you are entitled to ask: on what planet? ‖

7. WHY, THEN, AM I HERE? — ONE LAW FOR SOME

So if the words don’t say it, and the record contradicts it, you are entitled to ask the obvious question: why is this prosecution happening at all?

Let me answer it with a comparison, and you may draw your own conclusions.

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham — Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria — was a proscribed organisation in this country until October of last year. While it was still proscribed, and while its leader, who became Syria’s President, still had a ten million dollar bounty on his head, eminent British public figures — Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, and Rory Stewart, a former Conservative MP — travelled to Damascus to conduct a friendly, filmed interview with him. This is a regime whose forces have killed thousands of Christians, Druze and Alawites because of their religion. They came home and were effusive in their opinions about him, to audiences of hundreds of thousands.

Nobody raided their homes at half past six in the morning. Nobody seized their devices to investigate their “mind set and ideology.” A decision was taken not to trouble them.

Now, when a law is implemented against certain people and not others, that goes against the first principle of the rule of law. Either laws are applicable to all, or to none. To apply them only to those whose opinions the government of the day disagrees with — that is the hallmark of a police state, not a democracy.

And you do not have to take the point from me on trust, because the same double standard is written on a larger canvas. Parliament made genocide and war crimes offences under the International Criminal Court Act 2001. Yet successive British governments have gone on supplying arms to what most of the world regard as a genocide in Gaza, and yet no minister has ever stood where I am standing.

This is not a new story. Nelson Mandela — whose statue stands today in Parliament Square, facing the Houses of Parliament — was described by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as a terrorist, and the movement he led as a terrorist movement. If this Act had been in force in those decades, that movement would have been proscribed — and anyone in Britain who wrote “we should congratulate them” would have been at risk of standing exactly where I am standing now. Mandela himself said:

“The West sees liberation movements as terrorist movements — and that is why I am accused of supporting terrorism.”

Now let me be precise about what I am saying, because it is not what the prosecution may pretend I am saying. I am not comparing any organisation to Nelson Mandela. The comparison is not between organisations at all. It is between governments — then and now — and how easily they attach the word terrorist to whoever opposes the policy of the day. Today, Mandela is widely admired. The label of terrorism should be applied to those who are terrorists not those who are not. ‖

8. THE STATE HAS ALWAYS PROSECUTED OPINIONS

Judges have always insisted that the trials before them are not political. They said it at the trial of Emmeline Pankhurst in 1912. Chief Prosecutor and Attorney General Sir Rufus Isaacs, emphasised that:

‘Suffrage is not the issue, it is the criminal behaviour of the suffragettes and their incitement to partake in militant activity at which 54 windows were broken.’

That was also the view of the Judge, Mr Justice Coleridge, who handed out a sentence of 9 months to be served in the second division of prison, despite the plea of the jury for clemency.

The Home Secretary immediately stepped in to have Pankhurst transferred to the First Division of prison — a division reserved for political prisoners. A century ago the state admitted what today it denies: that some prisoners were political.

And consider what this country has done, within my lifetime, with laws that prosecuted people for what they were and what they said. The law of blasphemous libel — repealed. The law of gross indecency, which criminalised sexual conduct between men and destroyed Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing was also repealed, and more than repealed: under the Alan Turing Law of 2017, every conviction was wiped out, as if it had never existed. Parliament itself has accepted that there are times when it has made mistakes, and the law of the day was wrong.

The Editor of Gay News, Dennis Lemon, was the last person sentenced to 6 months imprisonment suspended in July 1977 for blasphemous libel for suggesting Jesus was gay. The Judge at his trial, Alan King Hamilton, stated that homosexuality was responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire. The judge at Oscar Wilde’s trial bemoaned the fact that he could only sentence him to 2 years in prison.

Judges have nearly always been the fiercest opponents of free speech. The reason is simple. As the Law Society Gazette pointed out on 25 June 2019 ‘Senior judges “most socially exclusive” of all professionals, 75% are Oxbridge educated and 65% having gone to private school.

When the state prosecutes opinions, it always says it is prosecuting something else. And usually it eventually, apologises but usually too late.

Freedom of speech in this country was not granted to us from above, and it did not arrive with the European Convention. It was won through political struggle — at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, where cavalry rode down women and children; by the Chartists at Newport who were brutally slaughtered for peacefully demanding democratic reforms in 1839. People died for the right I exercised on 7 October 2023: the right to publish an opinion the government doesn’t like.

Benjamin Franklin warned: “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” George Orwell — a man who knew something about both socialism and dystopia — put it in one sentence:

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

And if you want the alternative philosophy — the philosophy of this prosecution — it was stated with admirable honesty by the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin:

“There is freedom of speech — but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.”

Ladies and gentlemen, you may think that sentence sums up a dawn raid over a tweet rather well. I was arrested, not for anything I did, but for what I said. This case is not about terrorism. It is about freedom of speech.

This is why the government’s own Independent Reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson KC, was critical of the new terrorism laws. I quote from his 2014 Report on Terrorism Legislation :

a) To afford over-broad discretions to Ministers, prosecutors and police is undesirable in itself. As the Supreme Court maintained in R v Gul, 91 it leaves citizens in the dark and risks undermining the rule of law.

b) To render people subject to the terrorism laws whom no sensible person would think of as terrorists risks destroying the trust upon which these special powers depend for their acceptance by the public.

I have committed no violence. I have threatened noone. I have incited nobody. Nobody in this courtroom suggests otherwise. I wrote an article.

And for that article, I face a maximum sentence of fourteen years in prison. Fourteen years. For three posts and a blog. Ask yourself what kind of country are we becoming to send a seventy-two-year-old Jewish grandfather — a carer — to prison for fourteen years over three tweets and a blog article? ‖

9. YOU — THE LAMP THAT SHOWS THAT FREEDOM LIVES

Which brings me, finally, to you, members of the Jury.

Let me be clear about what I am asking of you, and what I am not. I am not asking you to set aside the law. Her Honour will direct you on the law, and you should follow her directions. I am not asking you to agree with my politics. You may think I am wrong about everything I believe, and it would change nothing about your task.

The role of the Judge is concerned with the law. The role of juries is to ensure justice is done. That is why successive governments have slowly whittled away at the right to trial by jury. The previous Justice Secretary David Lammy wanted to abolish them for half of those who are now entitled to a jury. I have no doubt that although Andy Burnham has stopped these proposals they will return.

Because here is what the law itself gives you. You are the sole judges of the facts, of the context, and of the meaning of words. Not the prosecution. Not the police analyst who selected the phrases. Twelve ordinary people, precisely because ordinary people know what words mean. The prosecution does not get to dictate that “please share my article” means “support Hamas.” That question belongs to you, and to nobody else in this building.

That is not an accident of our constitution. It is the whole point of it. Lord Patrick Devlin — one of the greatest judges this country produced — said:

“Trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution: it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.”

The jury, he said, is “an insurance that the criminal law will conform to the ordinary man’s idea of what is fair and just.”

Dame Heather Hallett, who sat on the Court of Appeal for 14 years, 2005–17, gave the 2017 Blackstone Lecture on the role of the jury. She is Chair of the COVID Inquiry and previously of the inquiry into the terrorist atrocity on 7.7: She said:

A jury may refuse to convict in spite of the law and the evidence because it concludes that the law is an unjust law. The jury passes its verdict on the law. Secondly, it ensures that the prosecution and the judge are on trial.

There is a plaque inside the entrance to the Old Bailey. It commemorates the most famous legal case of all — Bushell’s. The jury in 1670, refused to convict two Quakers, William Penn and William Mead, for the crime of unlawful preaching. For that refusal the jurors were locked up for two nights without food, water, fire — or a chamber pot. They did not budge. And out of their stubbornness, in Bushell’s case, came the right that you now hold: the right of a jury to deliver its verdict according to its conscience and its convictions, and to answer to no one for it.

I am asking you to do something far more modest than those twelve did. I am asking you to read three posts and an article, in their full context, with your own common sense — and to answer honestly the only two questions in this case. Were those words an invitation to support Hamas? And was I, a Jewish socialist with twenty years of published criticism of Hamas, knowingly recruiting for them?

And understand that your answer will not stay in this room. If these three posts are terrorism, then the word has a new meaning for everyone in this country. Every student who shares an article. Every pensioner who retweets the wrong opinion. Every writer, every blogger, every one of your neighbours with a social media account and a view about a war. Can it really be the law of England that any of them — that any of you — will be condemned to fourteen years of prison for a tweet? You have the power, today, to answer that question. Whatever you answer is, it will be remembered long after this trial is forgotten.

If you are left in doubt as to whether I was genuinely inviting people to support a proscribed organisation — you must acquit. That is not politics. That is the law. ‖

10. FINALLY

I told you at the beginning what it is to be me, standing in this dock. Let me end with why it should matter to you.

I was born eight years after the gates of the camps were opened. It was British soldiers who opened the gates at Belsen. Whatever quarrels I have had with British governments — and you have heard today that I have had many — I have never once doubted what that meant.

I do not say that to ask for your sympathy. I say it because my family’s history taught me one thing above all others. The moment that matters is never the loud one. It is the quiet one — when ordinary, decent people are asked to go along with something that does not sit right with them, and they do, because it is easier, because the language is technical, because someone in authority has assured them that it is necessary. I ask you to ensure that no one else goes through what I have experienced.

Not merely a case like this hanging over my head for 3 years, but the harassment that I have experienced from the State. Five times in the past two years I have been debanked for what is called ‘regulatory reasons’. First was Nationwide Bank which I had been with for a quarter of a century, then HSBC which closed an account my wife and I opened for our son, Daniel’s disability benefits. Then First Direct which I had been with 33 years, just 3 fewer than the bank itself existed. Then this year Santander and Kent Reliance building society.

It is clear that some agency of the state — the NCA most likely — fed false and malicious information to the banks and under money laundering legislation they are not allowed to tell me.

Lord Lane, Lord Chief Justice of England from 1980 to 1992, put it best of all in a House of Lords debate on April 7 1989:

“Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight. Oppression doesn’t stand on the doorstep with toothbrush moustache and swastika armband — it creeps up insidiously… step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realises that it is gone.”

You are twelve ordinary people, and this is one of the quiet moments. You are not being asked to make a protest, or to change any law. You are being asked to look at three short messages and one article, and to answer, on your conscience: was that an invitation to support Hamas — and did I know that that was what I was doing?

Although I am on trial today, it is really freedom of speech in this country that is on trial. The pretext for this attack is terrorism. However that is all it is. A pretext. I will finish with a quote from one of America’s founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, who said:

‘Those who trade liberty for security deserve neither’.

Thank you members of the jury.

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Epiphyte City

An island mysteriously appeared — then disappeared — on B.C.'s largest reservoir | CBC News
Tuesday September 1^st, 2026 at 12:52 PM

No one knows where it came from or where it went, but a massive new island might be floating out somewhere in the Williston Reservoir in northern B.C.

The forested land mass caught the attention of B.C. Hydro and local residents earlier this month after it was spotted bobbing in the massive man-made lake north of Mackenzie.

Rocky Avery says video and pictures of the island were taken by a boater and later shared with him. He posted them on social media, and they quickly went viral.

"It was a pretty amazing sight to see, never seen anything like that in my 40 years in this country," said Avery.

"There was a big fishing derby coming up, so I wanted to make sure everybody was aware of what was going on. And I wanted B.C. Hydro to know too that it was out there, just in case it was floating down their way."

The discovery left a B.C. Hydro spokesperson incredulous when CBC News first inquired about the island's origins.

Bob Gammer says he was first skeptical about the origins of the video because of the rise of generative AI technology. Not everything posted online can be trusted as being credible at first glance, he said.

"It's certainly something we've not heard of before," said Gammer. "And with not very many people reporting it, it was difficult to locate."

LISTEN | Floating island on Williston Reservoir:

But satellite imagery dated July 21 confirmed the island was in fact real, and floating in the main body of the reservoir west of Finlay Bay, about 100 kilometres west of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam.

Gammer says the island was estimated around 70 metres wide and 140 metres long, or about 9,800 square metres in area.

According to those estimates, that's bigger than the size of a Canadian football field and nearly the size of two NFL fields.

By Aug. 5, the island was no longer showing up in satellite data.

"We've been taking more updated snapshots and we can't see the object anymore. So it's disappeared now," Gammer said.

"It doesn't mean it's gone to the bottom of the reservoir. It may have returned to a more sheltered area along the shoreline."

Gammer says no operational impacts are expected, though B.C. Hydro is monitoring for the island's possible reappearance.

Satellite data provided by B.C. Hydro shows the location and size of a floating island found in the Williston Lake reservoir in northern B.C., about 100 kilometres west of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam. (B.C. Hydro)

First full reservoir in 14 years

The Williston reservoir, impounded behind the W.A.C. Bennett Dam in 1968, is the seventh-largest reservoir in the world and visible from space.

High winter snowpacks and steady summer rains have filled it to the brim, forcing B.C. Hydro to open the dam's spillways in June and July to release water.

Gammer says it's likely the island formed over many years somewhere along the shore where driftwood accumulated, allowing plants and trees to take root in the decomposing debris.

As reservoir levels rose, it broke free, and winds carried it out into open water.

"We haven't had a full reservoir in 14 years," Gammer said. "We can't pinpoint the origin of this floating island [but that's] one explanation that seems reasonable."

Avery says this year's high water has washed out shoreline sand dunes popular for quad-biking, and pulled more trees and debris out into the lake than usual.

"There's areas we would never even drive a boat on before, and now we're going up over top of it," said Avery.

High water levels in the Williston Lake reservoir in northern B.C. prompted B.C. Hydro to open the W.A.C. Bennett Dam spillways in June and July to release water. (Matt Preprost/CBC)

Phenomenon seen across the world

While a rare sight in Williston Lake, floating islands are a rather common phenomenon seen in dam building.

In Wisconsin, massive chunks of peat bog broke off from the bottom of Lake Chippewa after it was flooded for the Winter Dam.

One of them, called the "Forty Acre Bog," has to be pushed by boat every year to prevent it from drifting into a local bridge.

In Africa, researchers are investigating how floating islands in Lake Victoria are impacting transportation, fisheries and water quality. The world's second-largest freshwater lake spans across three countries.

Mackenzie, a town north of Prince George, is one of numerous communities along Williston Lake. (Chris Corday/CBC)

Lake needs public help to monitor

Gammer says the power utility relies on public reports in monitoring its reservoirs.

Because the Williston reservoir is so huge, he says it's not feasible to surveil it by water, and that B.C. Hydro will keep an eye out for sightings of the island via satellite.

Avery says local tugboat crews do a good job pulling what logs they can out of the lake, but says people need to be careful boating on the waters.

"When it's calm, it's fine. You can usually see them, but you get a little bit of choppy waves and it's really hard to see them until you're right on top," he said.

"Some are full-size trees and it'll do a lot of damage to your boat. So you got to be super careful."

Subscribe to CBC's Fort St. John Weekly for a roundup of the best news and stories from B.C.'s Peace and Northern Rockies.

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Vancouver strip club's Instagram taken down after sign calls out Trump's lake fiasco - Castanet.net
Tuesday September 1^st, 2026 at 12:32 AM

Brendan Kergin / Vancouver is Awesome - Aug 31, 2026 / 4:13 pm | Story: 629800

Photo: Ben Jackson

The Instagram post from Vancouver's Penthouse was a photo of their new marquee.

Vancouver's Penthouse Night Club has done it again.

It appears the strip club had its Instagram account taken down not because of nudity, but because of a statement on their sign.

The club's marquee on Seymour Street was updated by Ben Jackson with one of his witticisms, calling out U.S. President Donald J. Trump's "renaming" of Lake Ontario.

Can't handle a post

The sign had a simple message, short enough for anyone to understand.

"Can't handle a pool, but wants our lake?"

The Lake Ontario/Lake America spat is part of Trump's trade negotiations with Canada. Ontario Premier Doug Ford responded with his own sign stating "Lake Ontario: Now and Always."

Jackson's sign also refers to the Washington reflecting pool debacle. For weeks, the pool at the Lincoln Memorial was filled with algae and became a national embarrassment for Trump, and cost millions to fix. Trump blamed "VANDALISM." One person was charged, but the case was dismissed.

Penthouse owner Danny Filippone and Jackson talked about the sign before it was put up, had some giggles, and then Jackson put it up Friday afternoon (Aug. 28).

Filippone says he knew it was a hit right after it went up, as cars driving down Seymour honked and gave the thumbs up.

Social media post taken down

It seems not everyone is a fan, though.

"Around midnight, it's like all the music stopped," says Filippone. "I looked at the bartenders and asked what's going on. They showed me their phone and said 'Our Instagram has just got wiped out.'"

After putting the sign up, Jackson had posted a photo of the sign to the @Penthouse47 account with a caption reading "Make Lakes Ontario Again." As of publication, the Penthouse account remains offline.

"It took six hours before someone, we assume on the other side of the border, to think it wasn't funny," says Filippone.

The Penthouse has some experience making sure their usual posts don't cross the line.

"Running a strip club Instagram account is difficult enough," Jackson tells Vancouver Is Awesome. "There are so many things you can get punished for these days, but I don't think a funny sign should be one of them."

Filippone says they're careful not to break any of the rules one might expect a strip club to break.

"If you follow our Instagram, this sign would not be on your bingo card for what would get us taken down," Filippone says.

He also says that the sign doesn't name any names.

"It goes to show you what sort of tensions there are between Canada and the U.S."

Small sign, big hit

The Seymour sign has been a popular sight in Vancouver for a few years now, with several of Jackson's Penthouse marquees going viral.

The club went international last year for its "Forever Neighbours, Never Neighbors" sign, which also took a shot at Trump's attacks on Canada.

That sign also got the Penthouse in hot water with a different social media platform when Twitter/X took down their account.

Filippone says the stated reason was "hate speech." It took the Penthouse around a week to regain control of their account that time. That platform has left the Penthouse alone this time (so far).

The "Can't handle a pool, but wants our lake?" might surpass "Forever Neighbours," Filippone says, as far as popularity. He's getting texts and emails of support.

"They appreciate that there's a strip bar on Seymour Street of all the places fighting back," he says. "It's hard to believe, but it is what it is."

He's again surprised by the role the marquee has taken in Vancouver.

"Once again, it always amazes me how the Penthouse Night Club, that's been there for 80 years, and how a sign on Seymour Street has become a part of Vancouver," he adds.

In the meantime, Jackson is in contact with Meta, trying to regain control of the Penthouse Instagram account.

"I'm sure we will figure it out," Filipone says. "In the meantime, the sign is proudly up there."

Vancouver Is Awesome has reached out to Meta for more information on the take down.

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Updated migraine prevention guidelines reflect new drug options | STAT
Monday August 31^st, 2026 at 7:50 PM

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The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet review – the fabulous life of Barbara Cartland | Biography books | The Guardian
Sunday August 30^th, 2026 at 10:35 AM

The Guardian

Barbara Cartland was famous for dictating her novels. With a pekingese clamped to her hot pink bosom she would lie back on a library couch and exhale a story about virginal girls taming wayward dukes, damaged airmen or misunderstood surgeons. Meanwhile Miss Savory, Mrs Smith or Mrs Morgan, picked for being unfidgety and sneezeless, would take everything down in immaculate Pitman shorthand. Cartland reckoned on being able to polish off 8,000 words a day. “In this way,” she told one of the many reporters who quizzed her on her astonishing productivity, “the typescript for an 80,000-word novel is finished in a fortnight.” At her peak she was pushing out 23 books a year which added up to 723 in total. Only Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare topped her lifetime sales of 750m.

Cartland was a dictator in other ways, too. Husbands, dogs, houses and the local council were all expected to bend themselves to her indomitable will. Resistance, let alone opposition, was futile. The managing director of the company that printed her books suggested that she read Nietzsche on the perceptive grounds that they had a lot of ideas in common. Oddly, he also declared himself madly in love with her. Behind that marshmallowy exterior, all pink chiffon, candyfloss hair and soft, smudgy lines, there lurked sinews of high-tensile steel.

Anyone expecting this biography of Barbara Cartland to be an amusing takedown of a monstre sacré along the lines of Craig Brown’s witty 2017 decimation of Princess Margaret will be disappointed. Rather, Matthew Sweet pays his subject the compliment of absolute seriousness, regarding her as a cultural phenomenon whose extraordinary life, stretching the entire 20th century, deserves deep study. Sweet has had unfettered access to the cornucopia of material that Cartland left behind at Camfield Place, the Hertfordshire manor house where she lived until her death in 2000 at the age of 98. Conducting a fingertip search of her letters, scrapbooks and typescripts, Sweet has crafted a generous but clear-sighted account of a woman who was too often reduced to the status of a lazy joke.

She was born in 1901 into the lower upper class. On her father’s side she was pure trade. James Cartland and Son was a Birmingham metalworkers turning out umbrella stands, crocodile-shaped inkwells, shelf brackets shaped like sea monsters and “pharaonic letterboxes embossed with meaningless hieroglyphs”. Her adored mother Polly, meanwhile, was Gloucestershire gentry and there had been the usual rows about marrying down. Cartland’s paternal grandfather killed himself when the business went bust and her father retreated into alcoholism, leaving Polly to manage the tricky business of getting her daughter launched into a life the family could no longer afford.

Sweet suggests that this constellation of losses and compensations set the emotional template for Cartland’s adult life. Men were necessary but fragile and certainly best not relied upon. Having come out as a deb in 1919 into a world where there were not enough husbands to go round, Barbara set out to become financially self-sufficient by plunging into the only kind of work for which she was qualified. For the next decade she filed gossipy titbits about young London society to the Express, the Mirror and the Daily Mail.

This was the world of the Bright Young Things, so often written up today as a madcap time of pyjama parties and midnight dashes to the continent. In fact, Cartland’s columns reveal a society still in shock from the first world war: fathers are dead (Cartland lost hers in the trenches in 1918), grand family houses have been sold, divorce is everywhere and life seems impossible without alcohol or drugs. The men whom Cartland stepped out with were not the heart-throb dukes and dashing airmen that she would later write about, but broken people without the language to express their desolation. “My contemporaries were ashamed to show emotion,” she observed with characteristic perception in her 1943 memoir The Isthmus Years. “We had all of us a horror of sympathy.”

So instead she simply carried on with a brittle determination to make the best of things. After plenty of dalliances with men called things like Pingo Langrishe and Nigs Ratendone she made a tactical marriage to a dull man called Alexander McCorquodale who was heir to a printing fortune. When he retreated into drink – shades of her father – she effected a neat swap by divorcing, then marrying his paternal cousin. In this way there was no need to change her surname: she had replaced one Mr McCorquodale with another. It rankled that she never achieved a title until she herself was made a Dame in 1991. By contrast, her ambitious daughter, Raine, managed to insert herself into the peerage not once but three times through each of her carefully strategic marriages.

The only man who really mattered to Cartland was her beloved younger brother, Ronald. They went on holiday together and endlessly discussed the cod-eastern philosophies that were all the rage in the 1920s: Ouspensky and Gurdjieff were favourites and Cartland retained a vague mysticism to the end of her life involving ghosts and spiritual healing. She also believed in flying saucers and the power of honey to cure just about anything.

Brother and sister bonded too over politics, specifically a socially engaged, internationalist Toryism. Barbara bossed Ronald into parliament where he became a leading anti-appeaser. She in turn wrote one of the first of the tiny number of 1930s British novels that dealt specifically with the evils of Nazi antisemitism. Dangerous Experiment (1936) involves the improbable story of Lena Carrington who, after a shipwreck and a spell as the slave of a tribe of thunder-worshippers in the Caucasus, ends up in Germany where she is courted by a Nazi lover. In the end she breaks things off when she sees him mistreating a Jewish refugee.

This, of course, is not the Barbara Cartland that most of us remember from the 80s and beyond. In what Sweet calls her “imperial phase” she was writing novels with paper-thin plots that she endlessly recycled. She was also a relentless self-promoter. Bed linen, candles and towels were all enthusiastically marketed under her name, although with remarkable restraint she drew the line at scented toilet paper. She also pulled off a promotion with Dewhurst the butcher, which offered customers one of six previously unpublished Cartland novels for every £12 they spent. The promotion was not a great success because of the sheer weirdness of “being given a copy of Desire in the Desert with a parcel of mince”.

But when, in a stroke of fortune so improbable that even now it hardly seems real, her daughter, Raine, became Diana Spencer’s stepmother, Cartland sensed new opportunities for cross-pollination. She took to announcing “I invented virgins” and managed to imply that the royal wedding of 1981 was somehow her doing, despite being pointedly not invited. Raine, a chip off the old block, made sure that the gift shop at the Spencer family seat, Althorp, stocked a full run of Barbara Cartlands.

It would be easy to dismiss Cartland as a quirk, an aberration the likes of which we will not see again. But the great triumph of this brilliant book is the way that Sweet embeds her firmly in the economic, political, social and artistic transformations of the 20th century while charting the ways in which she also transcended them. Somehow, and this remains the deep mystery of it all, Barbara Cartland emerges as that rather admirable thing: an entirely self-made woman.

The Great Dictator: a Life of Barbara Cartland by Matthew Sweet is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com

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Trends in pneumonia mortality among US adults,... : Medicine
Sunday August 30^th, 2026 at 10:23 AM

Research Article: Observational Study

Nawei Song^a
Juan He^a
Xianghua Shuai^a
Hana Zhu^a
Keran Xia^{a^,}^*

Influenza combined with pneumonia creates a persistent public health burden across the United States, continuously threatening adult survival and consuming massive medical resources. This population-based epidemiological research aims to map long-term mortality shifting patterns linked to flu and pneumonia among American adults spanning the 25-year window from 1999 to 2023. Our analytical data were extracted from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention WONDER public mortality repository. Deaths triggered primarily by influenza or pneumonia were screened through International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision diagnostic codes J09 to J18. Two core mortality indicators, crude rates and age-standardized mortality rates, were computed for the whole population and separate subgroups. Joinpoint regression modeling was adopted to quantify yearly percentage shifts (annual percent change) and average annual changing magnitudes (average annual percent change), paired with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) to judge statistical significance. Stratified subgroup comparisons were completed across demographic and geographic dimensions, with statistical significance defined as P < .05. Across the full research timeframe, the national age-adjusted mortality rate for influenza and pneumonia dropped substantially, falling from 35.93 per 100,000 residents in 1999 to 16.46 per 100,000 residents in 2023, with an average annual decline of 3.18% (95% CI = −3.53 to −2.83, P < .05). Mortality burdens consistently ran higher in male populations relative to females. Among all racial subgroups, non-Hispanic Black adults bore the heaviest baseline mortality pressure in 1999 (38.66 per 100,000 population) and also saw the most marked relative reduction by 2023 (19.01 per 100,000 population). Rural counties maintained elevated age-adjusted mortality values compared with metropolitan regions in all survey years. Adults aged 85 and above exhibited the highest crude death rate, peaking at 751.78 per 100,000 people in 1999. Notably, the 55 to 64 middle-aged group was the only stratum with a statistically meaningful upward trend in crude mortality, with an average annual percent change of 0.78% (95% CI = 0.20–1.37, P < .05). This study demonstrates long-term declining trends in US influenza and pneumonia-related mortality with persistent disparities by sex, age, race/ethnicity, and urban–rural status.

Influenza and pneumonia form a paired respiratory hazard that imposes enduring public health pressure within the United States, generating extensive annual cases, premature deaths, and overloading local medical service systems year after year.^[] Influenza viral infection often weakens lower respiratory tract defenses, raising the risk of secondary pneumonia development; this close clinical correlation explains why the 2 diseases are frequently documented together on official death certification forms.^[,] According to surveillance reports released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), influenza and pneumonia together account for a large share of annual fatalities nationwide, with pneumonia most commonly recorded as the primary underlying cause of mortality.^[,] Given their tight clinical linkage and co-occurrence in mortality records, aggregating deaths coded under International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10) influenza and pneumonia categories represents a rational method to track population-level mortality trajectories.

Over the past 3 decades, nationwide death patterns associated with these 2 respiratory disorders have undergone notable transformations. Even so, existing published literature lacks comprehensive long-term trend assessments and in-depth exploration of health inequities across diverse population subgroups. The CDC WONDER platform delivers standardized, anonymized national mortality datasets covering multi-decade time spans, offering reliable population-level evidence for respiratory disease epidemiological analysis. By integrating this database with joinpoint regression tools to pinpoint inflection points in mortality trends, the present research fills 2 major research voids identified in prior work. First, most earlier analyses covered only short time horizons and failed to capture mortality fluctuations occurring after the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Second, few previous papers carried out complete stratified analyses covering age brackets, gender, ethnic identity, urban–rural residence, and geographic census regions, leaving subgroup-specific health disparities insufficiently characterized. Findings generated from this research can supply quantitative evidence for customized public health policy design, narrow avoidable health inequalities, and optimize clinical and population-level prevention strategies for high-risk demographic groups.

This retrospective population-based study used mortality data from the CDC WONDER Underlying Cause of Death database (https://wonder.cdc.gov/), which provides de-identified data on all deaths in the United States with standardized cause-of-death coding. Data were extracted for the period from 1999 to 2023, in line with the availability of ICD-10 coding for influenza and pneumonia.

Inclusion criteria were: deaths occurring in the United States from 1999 to 2023; influenza and/or pneumonia recorded as the underlying cause of death on death certificates, identified via ICD-10 codes J09 to J18 (J09: influenza due to novel influenza A virus; J10: influenza due to other identified influenza A virus; J11: influenza due to unidentified influenza virus; J12: viral pneumonia, not elsewhere classified; J13–J15: bacterial pneumonia; J16: pneumonia due to other infectious agents; J17: pneumonia in diseases classified elsewhere; J18: pneumonia, unspecified).

Restricting analyses to the underlying cause of death was chosen to ensure consistency with standard population-level mortality studies, minimize potential overestimation of the mortality burden, and enhance comparability with published literature.

Exclusion criteria were: deaths with incomplete demographic information (sex, age, race/ethnicity, or residential address); deaths in individuals under 25 years of age, as this study focuses on adult mortality trends.

Demographic and regional data were extracted, including sex, race/ethnicity (Hispanic, non-Hispanic (NH) Black, NH White, NH other), age (25–34, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, 65–74, 75–84, 85+ years), urban–rural classification, US Census Region (Northeast, Midwest, South, West), and state. Urban–rural classification adopted the 2013 National Center for Health Statistics Urban–Rural Classification Scheme,^[] dividing counties into metropolitan (urban) areas (≥50,000 population) and nonmetropolitan (rural) areas (<50,000 population). Census regions were categorized in accordance with United States Census Bureau definitions.^[]

The primary outcome was the influenza and pneumonia-related mortality rate, including the crude mortality rate calculated by dividing the number of influenza and pneumonia-related deaths by the corresponding US population size (per 100,000 people) and the age-adjusted mortality rate (AAMR) standardized using the 2000 United States standard population to eliminate the impact of age structure differences on mortality rate comparisons, with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) calculated to reflect statistical uncertainty.

For age-group analyses, crude mortality rates were used because age strata were mutually exclusive and directly reported by CDC WONDER; age adjustment within narrow age groups is unnecessary and would not meaningfully alter trend interpretation, and crude rates support straightforward interpretation of the absolute mortality burden within each age category.

For urbanization-stratified analyses, 2020 AAMR data were used as a proxy for 2023 due to data availability constraints in the CDC WONDER database. This substitution may limit the interpretation of urban–rural differences after 2020 given changes in rural healthcare access and service availability, and conclusions regarding urban–rural comparisons for 2023 should be interpreted cautiously.

All statistical analyses were conducted using R software (version 4.2.3; R Core Team, R Foundation for Statistical Computing). Joinpoint regression models were fitted using the “Joinpoint” package to identify significant temporal changes in mortality trends. A maximum of 3 joinpoints was tested, and model selection was based on the Bayesian Information Criterion and permutation tests to determine the optimal number of statistically significant trend segments. The annual percent change for each trend segment and the average annual percent change (AAPC) for the full study period were estimated with corresponding 95% CIs. Trends were considered statistically significant if 95% CIs for annual percent change excluded zero or P < .05 across demographic, geographic, and urban–rural subgroups using stratified analyses.

From 1999 to 2023, the total number of influenza and pneumonia-related deaths decreased from 63,006 in 1999 to 44,625 in 2023, representing a 29.17% change. The overall AAMR decreased from 35.93 per 100,000 population (95% CI = 35.65–36.21) in 1999 to 16.46 per 100,000 population (95% CI = 16.31–16.61) in 2023. The AAPC was −3.18% (95% CI = −3.53 to −2.83, P < .05; Table 1).

Influenza and pneumonia deaths and AAMR in the United States from 1999 to 2023 and their changing trends.

Characteristic	Deaths	AAMR
1999	2023	Percent change (%)	1999 (95% CI)	2023 (95% CI)	AAPC (95% CI)
Total	63,006	44,625	−29.17	35.93 (35.65 to 36.21)	16.46 (16.31 to 16.61)	−3.18 (−3.53 to −2.83)
Sex
Female	35,669	21,750	−39.02	31.40 (31.07 to 31.73)	14.17 (13.98 to 14.36)	−3.25 (−3.65 to −2.86)
Male	27,337	22,875	−16.32	43.69 (43.16 to 44.22)	19.47 (19.21 to 19.72)	−3.27 (−3.59 to −2.95)
Census region
Northeast	14,249	9138	−35.87	37.72 (37.10 to 38.34)	18.04 (17.67 to 18.41)	−2.90 (−3.30 to −2.50)
Midwest	16,120	9075	−43.70	37.65 (37.07 to 38.23)	15.89 (15.56 to 16.22)	−2.99 (−3.42 to −2.56)
South	22,149	16,929	−23.57	36.56 (36.08 to 37.04)	16.44 (16.19 to 16.69)	−3.14 (−3.44 to −2.83)
West	10,488	9483	−9.58	30.81 (30.22 to 31.41)	15.55 (15.23 to 15.86)	−2.92 (−5.25 to −0.55)
Race
Hispanic	2130	3973	86.53	28.67 (27.40 to 29.93)	14.46 (13.99 to 14.92)	−3.37 (−3.76 to −2.97)
NH Black	5576	5093	−8.66	38.66 (37.63 to 39.69)	19.01 (18.47 to 19.55)	−2.87 (−3.23 to −2.51)
NH White	53,943	32,878	−39.05	35.94 (35.64 to 36.25)	16.56 (16.37 to 16.74)	−3.14 (−3.51 to −2.76)
NH other	1097	2519	129.63	27.99 (26.27 to 29.72)	13.36 (12.83 to 13.88)	−3.78 (−4.59 to −2.96)
Urbanization
Metropolitan	49,540	36,983	−25.34	35.06 (34.75 to 35.37)	19.25 (19.07 to 19.44)	−3.14 (−3.56 to −2.72)
Nonmetropolitan	13,466	7642	−43.24	39.61 (38.94 to 40.28)	23.49 (23.02 to 23.96)	−2.42 (−2.86 to −1.97)
Age groups
25–34 yr	339	458	35.10	0.84 (0.75 to 0.93)	1.01 (0.91 to 1.10)	0.63 (−0.75 to 2.03)
35–44 yr	1063	967	−9.03	2.36 (2.22 to 2.50)	2.18 (2.04 to 2.32)	0.04 (−0.80 to 0.89)
45–54 yr	1697	1739	2.47	4.64 (4.42 to 4.86)	4.29 (4.09 to 4.50)	0.26 (−0.50 to 1.03)
55–64 yr	2625	4602	75.31	11.04 (10.62 to 11.46)	11.00 (10.68 to 11.31)	0.78 (0.20 to 1.37)
65–74 yr	6861	9005	31.25	37.25 (36.37 to 38.13)	25.96 (25.43 to 26.50)	−1.40 (−2.22 to −0.58)
75–84 yr	19,192	12,623	−34.23	156.99 (154.77 to 159.21)	68.72 (67.52 to 69.92)	−3.42 (−3.74 to −3.10)
85+ yr	31,229	15,231	−51.23	751.78 (743.44 to 760.12)	245.86 (241.96 to 249.76)	−4.50 (−7.58 to −1.31)

AAMR = age-adjusted mortality rate, AAPC = average annual percent change, CI = confidence interval, NH = non-Hispanic.

In the context of urbanization, the 2023 AAMR data were substituted with that from 2020, and the AAPC was calculated based on the period from 1999 to 2020.

For the age groups, the crude mortality rate was used as a substitute for AAMR, and the AAPC was computed based on the crude mortality rate.

In 1999, the AAMR was 43.69 per 100,000 population for males and 31.40 per 100,000 population for females. In 2023, the AAMR was 19.47 per 100,000 population for males and 14.17 per 100,000 population for females. The AAPC was −3.25% (95% CI = −3.65 to −2.86) for females and −3.27% (95% CI = −3.59 to −2.95) for males (both P < .05). The total number of deaths decreased by 39.02% in females and 16.32% in males over the study period (Fig. 1).

In 1999, the AAMR was highest among NH Black individuals (38.66 per 100,000 population), followed by NH White individuals (35.94 per 100,000 population), Hispanic individuals (28.67 per 100,000 population), and NH other individuals (27.99 per 100,000 population). By 2023, all groups exhibited decreased AAMR: 19.01, 16.56, 14.46, and 13.36 per 100,000 population for NH Black, NH White, Hispanic, and NH other individuals, respectively (Fig. 2).

In 1999, the AAMR was highest in the Northeast (37.72 per 100,000 population) and Midwest (37.65 per 100,000 population), followed by the South (36.56 per 100,000 population) and West (30.81 per 100,000 population). In 2023, the AAMR was lowest in the West (15.55 per 100,000 population), followed by the Midwest (15.89 per 100,000 population), South (16.44 per 100,000 population), and Northeast (18.04 per 100,000 population; Fig. 3).

Throughout the study period, AAMR was consistently higher in nonmetropolitan (rural) areas than in metropolitan (urban) areas. In 1999, the AAMR was 39.61 per 100,000 population for nonmetropolitan areas and 35.06 per 100,000 population for metropolitan areas. In 2020, the AAMR was 23.49 per 100,000 population for nonmetropolitan areas and 19.25 per 100,000 population for metropolitan areas (Fig. 4).

In 1999, the crude mortality rate was highest among adults aged 85 years and older (751.78 per 100,000 population) and lowest among those aged 25 to 34 years (0.84 per 100,000 population). In 2023, adults aged 85+ years remained the group with the highest crude mortality rate (245.86 per 100,000 population). The total number of deaths decreased by 51.23% in the 85+ age group, while increasing by 35.10% in the 25 to 34 age group and 75.31% in the 55 to 64 age group (Fig. 5).

This epidemiological analysis tracked mortality risks attributable to influenza and pneumonia over a quarter-century among American adults, relying on ICD-10 J09 to J18 codes to identify fatalities rooted in these 2 respiratory illnesses. Our statistical outputs revealed a steady nationwide fall in age-standardized death metrics, alongside stark health disparities that persisted across demographic and geographic divisions throughout the observation period. These observations align with prior population-based investigations documenting gradual declines in respiratory disease mortality while spotlighting unresolved inequities among distinct population cohorts.^[,]

Gender-based gaps in fatal respiratory outcomes remained consistent across all survey years, with male adults repeatedly facing higher death risks than their female counterparts. This gender divergence has been repeatedly validated in national influenza and pneumonia monitoring datasets released by US public health authorities.^[,] At the baseline year of 1999, NH Black communities carried the largest baseline mortality burden; although this group experienced the most substantial proportional drop in mortality by 2023, racial disparities had not been fully eliminated by the end of our study window. Such persistent ethnic gaps mirror well-established inequities in infectious disease survival reported in previous population health studies.^[,] When separating participants by residential setting, rural residents consistently exhibited slower mortality declines and higher overall death rates compared to urban dwellers. This divide echoes widely documented disadvantages in rural medical infrastructure, outpatient accessibility, and community public health outreach for chronic and acute respiratory conditions.^[,] Among all age brackets, advanced age stood out as the strongest predictor of lethal influenza or pneumonia episodes, consistent with established research confirming extreme vulnerability to severe respiratory complications in adults aged 85 and older.^[,]

One distinctive finding of this study centers on the 55 to 64-year-old middle-aged subgroup, which was the only population segment with a statistically significant rising crude mortality rate across the 25-year timeframe. This emerging risk trend has rarely been highlighted in prior long-duration mortality research, marking a critical signal that public health programs need enhanced targeted surveillance for this middle-aged demographic.^[,] However, limitations inherent to aggregate ecological data prevent us from pinpointing the exact drivers of this upward shift – potential contributing factors may include generational health differences, updates to death certificate coding standards, shifting comorbidity prevalence, or unmeasured socioeconomic confounders that our dataset cannot capture.

The broad downward trajectory of combined influenza and pneumonia mortality across the United States aligns with nationwide advancements in respiratory disease prevention frameworks and sustained investment in public health infrastructure over recent decades.^[,] Nevertheless, all interpretations drawn from this observational dataset remain descriptive rather than causal. Our dataset lacks granular individual indicators, including influenza vaccination uptake, inpatient treatment protocols, local medical resource availability, and health policy rollouts, making it impossible to definitively attribute the observed mortality shifts to specific intervention measures.^[]

This research advances existing literature in 2 key respects: it extends longitudinal mortality tracking through 2023 to capture post-pandemic shifts following the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, and it delivers full stratified breakdowns across age, gender, ethnicity, and urban–rural residence to unpack layered health inequities. Collectively, our results reinforce the necessity of continuous population-level respiratory disease monitoring to spot newly emerging high-risk groups and tackle long-standing health gaps between distinct community subgroups.

This study has key limitations that warrant consideration. A central constraint is that combining influenza and pneumonia using ICD-10 codes J09 to J18 introduces unavoidable misclassification, as the dataset cannot distinguish influenza-associated pneumonia from pneumonia due to other pathogens or separate the independent contributions of each condition.

As an ecological study based on aggregate population-level data, this investigation cannot adjust for individual-level confounders, including comorbidities, health behaviors, socioeconomic status, or vaccination status, and causal inferences cannot be established.

For urban–rural analyses, 2020 data were used as a proxy for 2023 due to database availability, which may introduce uncertainty given changes in rural health care access after 2020. Analyses restricted to underlying causes of death may also not capture the full burden of deaths in which influenza or pneumonia contributed as secondary conditions. Despite these limitations, the study provides reliable, long-term population-level mortality trend and disparity estimates.

This study demonstrates significant long-term declines in influenza and pneumonia-related mortality among US adults from 1999 to 2023, with persistent disparities by sex, race/ethnicity, age, and urban–rural status. Mortality was highest among adults aged 85 years and older, while a significant increasing trend was observed among adults aged 55 to 64 years. These findings highlight key population-level patterns and inequalities. Further research incorporating individual-level risk factors, vaccination data, and pathogen-specific coding is needed to clarify the drivers of these trends and disparities.

Conceptualization: Nawei Song.

Data curation: Nawei Song.

Formal analysis: Nawei Song.

Investigation: Nawei Song, Juan He, Hana Zhu.

Methodology: Nawei Song, Juan He, Xianghua Shuai, Hana Zhu.

Software: Juan He, Hana Zhu, Keran Xia.

Supervision: Juan He, Hana Zhu, Keran Xia.

Project administration: Xianghua Shuai, Hana Zhu.

Resources: Xianghua Shuai, Hana Zhu, Keran Xia.

Validation: Keran Xia.

Writing – review & editing: Nawei Song, Juan He, Keran Xia.

AAMR: age-adjusted mortality rate
AAPC: average annual percent change
CDC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
CI: confidence interval
ICD-10: International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision
NH: non-Hispanic

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CDC WONDER; mortality; pneumonia; US adults

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