CharlieH

Turning left at a T-Junction without so much as a glance to the right for oncoming traffic.

Petty trolling/bickering exchange removed.

Hundreds of patients, including dozens of babies, remain trapped inside Gaza’s largest hospital as Israeli troops and Hamas militants take part in heavy fighting outside it. What is happening there and why? Where is al-Shifa hospital and how important is it to healthcare in Gaza? The Dar al-Shifa (House of Healing) hospital is a sprawling complex of medical facilities in Gaza City, in the north of Gaza. Located about 500 metres from the coast and a major north-south road, it comprises a group of six-storey buildings that dominate the skyline. With between 600 and 900 beds and thousands of staff, it was the mainstay of healthcare provision locally, with a range of services that few of the other hospitals in Gaza could offer. Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, it has become a shelter for those displaced by the fighting and continuing Israeli bombardment. What are the competing claims about Hamas operations there? Israel claims that Hamas has built its headquarters in bunkers and tunnels under the hospital, effectively using the building, patients and staff as a human shield. Security officials have also said that, after the surprise attacks into Israel by Hamas which killed 1,200 Israelis, mainly civilians in their homes or at a dance party, the senior Hamas leaders have been based in a “command complex” under the hospital. FULL STORY

The Biden White House condemned Donald Trump for promising, if re-elected president, to “root out” opponents within US society he called “communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs that live like vermin”. “Employing words like ‘vermin’ to describe anyone who makes use of their basic right to criticise the government ‘echoes dictators’ like Hitler and Mussolini,” the White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said, quoting Washington Post coverage of Trump’s remarks. “Using terms like that about dissent would be unrecognisable to our founders, but horrifyingly recognisable to American veterans who put on their country’s uniform in the 1940s. President Biden believes in his oath to our constitution, and in American democracy. He works to protect both every day.” Trump is the clear frontrunner to face Joe Biden in an election rematch next year, enjoying vast leads for the Republican nomination in battleground and national polls despite facing 91 criminal charges, including election subversion, and assorted civil trials including a defamation case arising from a rape allegation a judge said was “substantially true”. Trump leads or is close to Biden in numerous swing state polls. The former president spoke in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday, in the middle of the Veterans Day weekend. “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within,” said Trump, who was impeached, for a second time, for inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress in an attempt to stay in power. On Monday, Bates said: “We do not comment in the 2024 presidential election.” FULL STORY

David Cameron has said he wants to support Prime Minister Rishi Sunak "at a hard time", after making a dramatic comeback to government in a major cabinet reshuffle. The former prime minister has been appointed foreign secretary and accepted a peerage to take the post. He replaced James Cleverly, who became home secretary after Mr Sunak sacked Suella Braverman. Lord Cameron admitted it was "not usual" for a former PM "to come back". But he said at a time when the country faced "daunting challenges" in the Middle East and Ukraine, he hoped his experience would be helpful to Mr Sunak's government. "I've decided to join this team because I believe Rishi Sunak is a good prime minister doing a difficult job at a hard time," Lord Cameron said. "I want to support him." Former PM makes stunning comeback The return of David Cameron: What is going on? Suella Braverman sacked as home secretary Later the Foreign Office said Mr Cameron had spoken to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday evening, and they discussed "the conflict in the Middle East, Israel's right to self defence and the need for humanitarian pauses to allow the safe passage of aid into Gaza" - as well as their continued support for Ukraine and the strength and depth of the relationship between the UK and the US. Mrs Braverman's sacking kickstarted Monday's cabinet reshuffle by Mr Sunak, whose party is lagging far behind Labour in opinion polls, after more than 13 years in power. FULL STORY

Assume everyone is trying to kill you, even when stationary ! And you'll last alot longer than most.

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Contact forum support. give them your NEW email address and they will do the change for you.

Rishi Sunak sacks Suella Braverman as home secretary Suella Braverman has been sacked as home secretary, after she defied No 10 over an article accusing the Met Police of bias in the policing of protests. Mrs Braverman was accused of stoking tension in the article ahead of protests in London over the weekend. James Cleverly has been announced as her replacement, leaving the post of foreign secretary currently vacant. She said serving as home secretary was "the greatest privilege of my life". A quick guide to Suella Braverman Follow live: Cameron and Cleverly seen at No 10 after Suella Braverman sacked Another arrival at Number 10 on Monday morning was former prime minister David Cameron, prompting suggestions he would be returning to government as foreign secretary. Mr Cameron, who has been out of Parliament since he stood down as a prime minister in 2016, could be given a seat in the House of Lords to take up his new position. Mrs Braverman's sacking kickstarts a major Cabinet reshuffle by Rishi Sunak as he reshapes his top team ahead of next week's Autumn Statement. 'Highly irresponsible' Since her elevation to home secretary by former PM Liz Truss, Mrs Braverman has been seen as a standard bearer for the right in the Conservative party. In a statement, Mrs Braverman said: "I will have more to say in due course", leading to speculation she may cause trouble for the leadership. She lost her job following days of a political firestorm sparked when she wrote an article for The Times newspaper, accusing the police applying a"double standard" and took a tougher stance with right-wing demonstrations. The article was not cleared by No10 and it later emerged Mrs Braverman had defied a Downing Street request to tone the article down. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and some Tory MPs had called for Suella Braverman to be sacked. Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, said Mrs Braverman actions were "highly irresponsible" and inflamed tensions and making the job of the police harder. FULL STORY

A volcanic eruption could destroy the Icelandic town of Grindavik or lead to extensive ash clouds, experts have warned. The country has been shaken by more than 2,000 small earthquakes in the past few days, prompting fears that the tremors could disrupt the Fagradalsfjall volcano on the Reykjanes peninsula in the southwest of the country. Thousands have been told to evacuate Grindavik as a precautionary measure, while a magma tunnel stretches below the surface. If an eruption occurs in or close to the town, the consequences will be devastating, volcanologist Armann Hoskuldsson warned. He told state broadcaster RUV: “This is very bad news. One of the most serious scenarios is an eruption in the town itself, similar to that in Vestmannaeyjar 50 years ago. This would be much worse.” Ragga Agustsdottir, who lives close to Grindavik, said residents were fearful of what could happen if an eruption struck. “The scenario on the table now is that it will happen in or just north of the town of Grindavik. There’s no good option here,” she told The Independent. FULL STORY

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Sunday compared a hypothetical second Trump White House term to that of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia and other authoritarian leaders in response to Trump’s veiled threats that he would go after his political opponents if reelected. “Well, the role of the government in his view is to advance his political fortunes and destroy his political enemies. So what would a second term look like? It would look a lot like Vladimir Putin in Russia. It would look a lot like [Prime Minister Viktor Orban] in Hungary — illiberal democracy, meaning democracy without rights, or liberties, or respect for the due process, the system, the rule of law,” Raskin said on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki.” Raskin, a member of the now dissolved House select committee that investigated the Jan 6., 2021, attack on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it, also described such countries as not accepting results that don’t benefit certain leaders. “They don’t accept elections that don’t go their way,” Raskin said. “They refuse to disavow political violence. They embrace political violence as an instrument for obtaining power, and then everything flows from the will of a charismatic politician. And that is Donald Trump in their book.” “So we are clearly headed into a completely different form of government than any of us would recognize, as continuous with the past — right-wing, authoritarian government in league with Putin, [Chinese President Xi Jinping], Orban, [former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro], you name it,” he said. Trump has repeatedly lashed out as he faces an unprecedented 91 criminal felony counts stemming from four separate indictments, two on the state level and two on the federal. FULL STORY

When political tensions are running high and there are risks to public order, any responsible politician would try to reduce the pressure, take advice from police on operational matters, and publicly urge calm. The home secretary, Suella Braverman, chose the populist road in the run-up to yesterday’s march in London to protest against Israel’s military action in Gaza: to throw caution to the wind, deploy inflammatory language and hint darkly at the worst-case scenarios that might take shape. Braverman wrote her incendiary article in the Times in the knowledge that there was a fundamental disagreement between her and the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Sir Mark Rowley, on policing strategy. She wanted yesterday’s march to be banned because it coincided with the solemnity of Armistice Day. But police powers to ban protests are – rightly – tightly proscribed by the Public Order Act: they can do so only if they believe that protesters will not comply with police restrictions and there could be serious public disorder, damage to property or disruption to the lives of the community. The legal threshold for banning a march is rightly high It is true that the marches in previous weeks have contained unsavoury elements: there have been a relatively small number of arrests, including for offences related to terrorism and inciting racial hatred. But the marches, involving hundreds of thousands of people, have been peaceful and complied with conditions imposed on them by the police. That is not to say that every marcher supports a peaceful two-state solution in the Middle East; some have adopted chants associated with the Hamas charter commitment to destroy Israel. There is no moral justification for doing so, and it understandably causes distress to many British Jews. Use of the chants should be condemned. But this does not provide a legal justification for banning a protest, on which the great majority of marchers will have been horrified both by the appalling acts of terror committed by Hamas on 7 October as well as the huge number of Palestinian civilians being killed during Israeli assaults on Hamas in Gaza. The legal threshold for banning a march is rightly high – the last time this power was used was over a decade ago – and it is the responsibility of the police to assess whether it has been met and to apply for permission to ban it if they judge it has. It is not for the home secretary to interfere by applying political pressure on the police to ban a march she does not like. That is exactly what Braverman has done. And by using incendiary terms like “hate marchers” and “mobs” to mischaracterise whole marches of many thousands of people who are legitimately exercising their democratic right to protest, she implicitly encouraged far-right protesters to come out to counter-demonstrate on Armistice Day. Come out they did: there were several skirmishes between the far right and the police in central London yesterday morning in the run-up to the two-minute silence, with masked men chanting Islamophobic slogans yards from the Cenotaph, and arrests were made. There were further violent clashes in the afternoon, and the police had to work hard to prevent far-right protesters from confronting the marchers. FULL ARTICLE

Suella Braverman has demanded “further action” against pro-Palestine marches, as centrist Conservative MPs expressed despair at Rishi Sunak’s delay in sacking his rogue home secretary. One senior backbencher predicted “a lot of noise” from angry colleagues when they return to parliament on Monday, with no signs of imminent action from Sunak after a series of controversies involving Braverman. Another MP said: “Every day she remains in office it further undermines the prime minister’s authority.” In her first public pronouncement since far-right groups fought officers near the Cenotaph, the home secretary made no comment on claims by Labour and the Met police that tensions had been inflamed in part by her own rhetoric. Condemning violence among both a large pro-Palestine demonstration and what she termed “counterprotesters”, Braverman focused on what she called “sick, inflammatory and, in some cases, clearly criminal chants, placards and paraphernalia openly on display” at the main march. Writing on X, she said: “This can’t go on. Week by week, the streets of London are being polluted by hate, violence, and antisemitism. Members of the public are being mobbed and intimidated. Jewish people in particular feel threatened. Further action is necessary.” Last week Braverman provoked fury after she ignored Downing Street’s request that she tone down an opinion piece for the Times, in which she accused the police of bias in how they deal with political protests. FULL STORY

As far-right protesters rallied in London bellowing “England til I die” on Saturday, a familiar face was walking out in front. Tommy Robinson was beaming as a throng of angry men headed towards Whitehall to “defend the Cenotaph” from those protesting over Palestine on Armistice Day, chanting: “We love you Tommy, we do.” He jumped in a taxi before the violence, but was accused of being instrumental in encouraging people to attend. Since being reinstated on X, formerly known as Twitter, earlier this month, the English Defence League (EDL) founder has experienced a resurgence. Robinson, 40, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, claims in his latest profile that this is a “new era” for him. Among those concerned about his return to the mainstream is Nick Lowles, the chief executive of the anti-fascist group, Hope Not Hate. He said: “The fact that all this has blown up around the Cenotaph and the pro-Palestine demos in the fortnight that he’s come back on to X, I think has obviously been significant,” he said. “I think it just highlights how important banning hate figures on social media is, because even though they can go on to fringe platforms, it’s much more difficult to speak to people outside their bubble.” Lowles, whose biography of Robinson, Tommy, was published last year, said Robinson was careful to appear moderate in his videos and had not been there when protesters clashed with police on Saturday, but he had set the scene for what happened next. “He turns up, leads the crowd down Whitehall, and then leads a group up into Chinatown and then jumps in a taxi and goes away,” he said. “But he has lit the fuse. He’s wound people up. “His videos are powerful. His email list is several hundreds of thousands people. He’d send out emails to the list with a video embedded in the email, saying we must take action, we must take to the streets. He winds people up. He’s the Pied Piper.” FULL STORY

Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned Ukrainians to prepare for new waves of Russian attacks on infrastructure as winter approaches, saying that troops were anticipating an onslaught in the eastern theatre of the war. His comments came on Sunday as a military spokesperson said Russian attacks on the shattered eastern town of Avdiivka had eased in the past day, but were likely to intensify. And Ukrainian military intelligence said an explosion killed at least three Russian servicemen in the Russian-occupied southern town of Melitopol, which it described as an “act of revenge” by resistance groups. Zelenskiy issued his warning during his nightly video address a day after Russian forces carried out their first missile attack on the capital, Kyiv, in seven weeks. “We are almost halfway through November and must be prepared for the fact that the enemy may increase the number of drone or missile strikes on our infrastructure,” Zelenskiy said. “Russia is preparing for Ukraine. And here, in Ukraine, all attention should be focused on defence, on responding to terrorists, on everything that Ukraine can do to get through the winter and improve our soldiers’ capabilities.“ Last winter, about 10 months into the invasion, Russia made waves of attacks on power stations and other plants linked to the energy network, prompting rolling blackouts in widely disparate regions. The energy minister, German Galushchenko, said on Saturday that Ukraine would have enough energy resources to get through the winter, but added: “The question is how much future attacks can affect supplies.“ Ukrainian officials on Wednesday said Russia had struck Ukrainian infrastructure 60 times in recent weeks, an indication that a renewed campaign may already be under way. FULL STORY

Eighteen Israelis have been injured, one critically, after the Iranian backed Hezbollah militia fired anti-tank missiles from southern Lebanon in a further sign that the skirmishes along the border are steadily escalating. Several vehicles near the northern community of Dovev were hit in the missile strike, whose victims included Israel Electric Corporation employees who had arrived to repair power lines damaged by previous fire from Lebanon. Hezbollah sources had claimed they were soldiers, an assertion denied by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). The Magen David Adom emergency service said one of the civilians injured in the attack was in a critical condition. Israel’s chief military spokesperson, R Adm Daniel Hagari, said the IDF was “at a very high state of readiness in the north” and that “Lebanon’s citizens will bear the cost of this recklessness”. In a day of sporadic missile and droneexchanges, Israel also targeted two Hezbollah units that launched mortars from Lebanon at areas near the communities of Manara and Yir’on. Seven soldiers were lightly wounded in the Manara incident and taken to hospital, the army said. Hezbollah-linked media reported that Israeli artillery targeted the town of Labbouneh and that sirens sounded at the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) centre in Naqoura. The rightwing Israeli newspaper Maariv reported on Sunday that the IDF was preparing to deal a “strong blow” to Hezbollah in response to the escalation of its attacks. Israeli fire has killed at least 70 Hezbollah fighters since the start of hostilities. An Israeli army spokesperson later said that a fighter jet and other aircraft attacked several Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, including “a military compound containing a warehouse of weapons and military infrastructure”. Hezbollah’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, said on Saturday that his group was using new weapons including attack drones “for the first time in the history of the resistance” in Lebanon. Nasrallah’s speech prompted a warning from Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, who said Lebanese citizens would “pay the price” and added: “What we’re doing in Gaza, we can also do in Beirut.” Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, praised Hezbollah for its “patriotism” and said he had drawn up a three-month contingency plan in the even of a full war breaking out involving Lebanon. “Caution is still being exercised and we hope that the contacts will lead to a cessation of Israeli attacks in the south of the country,” he said. “Hezbollah behaves very patriotically and I trust the rationality of this movement. What matters most to me is keeping Lebanon far from war. We have always sought stability.” An Israeli military spokesperson said: “At a time the Lebanese premier has said that he is reassured over the rationality of Hezbollah’s actions, the saboteurs of the terrorist party fired anti-tank shells at Israeli civilians from the electricity company, wounding several of them. “This is a terrorist, irrational attack that targeted civilians and is risking Lebanon as a state. I believe that the Lebanese premier should not be reassured over the rationality of Hezbollah’s actions.” FULL STORY

Intense Israeli airstrikes have continued in Gaza after the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed to press Israel’s advance into the territory with “full force” and laid out an uncompromising vision of a postwar settlement. The bombardment on Sunday appeared concentrated around al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, the biggest such facility in the territory, where much of the most intense fighting between Hamas and Israeli ground forces is taking place. The hospital was “totally surrounded and bombardments are going on nearby”, its director, Mohammad Abu Salmiya, said in a statement late on Saturday. The fierce clashes over recent days have trapped thousands of sick, wounded and displaced people in al-Shifa with no electricity and dwindling supplies. Medics and aid workers have warned patients will die unless there is a pause in the battle. Thousands more are trapped in other health facilities in the north of Gaza as Israel’s campaign to “crush” Hamas moves towards its sixth week. Despite growing pressure from even staunch allies, Netanyahu has so far rejected international calls for a ceasefire. “The war against [Hamas] is advancing with full force, and it has one goal: to win. There is no alternative to victory,” he said late on Saturday in televised comments. Netanyahu also made clear he wanted Israel to retain overall security control after any conflict “with the ability to go in whenever we want in order to kill terrorists”. “There will be no Hamas. There will be no civilian authority that educates their children to hate Israel, to kill Israelis, to destroy the state of Israel. There can’t be an authority there that pays the families of murderers. There needs to be something else there,” he said. The comments appeared to rule out any role for the Palestinian Authority after the conflict, a solution favoured by the US and many European powers. Israel has said doctors, patients and thousands of evacuees who have taken refuge at hospitals in northern Gaza must leave so it can tackle Hamas gunmen who, it says, have placed command centres under and around them. Hamas denies using hospitals this way. Medical staff say patients could die if they are moved and Palestinian officials say Israeli fire makes it dangerous for others to leave. Israel believes that Hamas has its headquarters beneath al-Shifa, claims which the hospital and Hamas have denied. FULL STORY

Troll comments and responses removed.

Some posts removed. Please do not make further reference to excluded members. This POTY cannot include previously banned members, it should be ran on current members with a minimum post count of 100 in order to enter the Lounge where it should be ran. Thank you.

A bunch of petty bs removed, as usual.

Again, The Lounge is the closest you are going to get to that.

Agreed, but as mentioned previously, those kind of warnings are rare now and would be an accumalation not an immediate result.

And contrary to popular belief, banning someone is not an easy move either, certainly cannot be done on a whim.