Nurses share harrowing accounts of a ‘broken system’
NURSES have shared harrowing accounts of a “broken system” of corridor care that “tortures” patients, with people left in chairs for days and one patient choking to death, unnoticed.
Publishing new findings on the practice today, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned that collapsing NHS care standards are pushing staff morale “past the point of no return.”
The report comes a year after a previous damning investigation by the union into corridor care.
RCN contacted thousands of nurses who contributed to last year’s report to assess whether corridor care was still being used and its impact.
Responses from 436 nurses showed the practice remains widespread.
Nurses described having to hold up white sheets to protect patient dignity while performing intimate procedures.
At one hospital, an elderly patient was forced to eat in a corridor beside someone who was vomiting.
A nurse working in the NHS in south-west England said patients felt “deeply embarrassed, objectified, judged, uncared for” and like “a burden on a broken system.”
They are often “wishing they had never bothered to come in and would rather have taken the risk of dying at home than go through the torture,” the nurse said.
“Because that’s what we subject them to, a type of torture.”
Venezuelan workers—one holding a sign reading, “We are nobody’s backyard”—march in support of kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro in the capital Caracas on January 14, 2026. (Photo by Ivan Mc Gregor/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The empire can do whatever it wants, but we are here to tell you that we are free, independent, and sovereign,” said one demonstrator.
Demonstrations demanding the United States release Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife continued Wednesday as thousands more people took to the streets of Caracas in a show of support for the abducted leftist leader.
Public workers led a march through Caracas, during which demonstrators chanted slogans—including “Free Maduro!”—while vowing to keep protesting until the socialist president and his wife, First Combatant Cilia Flores, return home.
“Unity is not under discussion at this time,” Capital District Head of Government Nahum Fernández said during Wednesday’s rally. “The person who conspires against unity conspires against Venezuela.”
“The Venezuelan people are going to be in the streets and they’re going to have to hand Maduro over to the Venezuelans,” Fernández added.
Labor leader Anais Herrera demanded the US release Maduro “because he is our president and we want him back, we are in the streets and we will not rest.”
“The president prepared us for this and that is why we are in combat, in the streets with the Venezuelan working class,” she said.
Maduro and Flores were kidnapped by US special forces soldiers during a January 3 invasion backed by airstrikes and an armada of naval warships deployed along with thousands of troops off the Venezuelan coast. The US operation killed more than 100 people, including Venezuelan troops and civilians and over 30 Cuban soldiers and police officers.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has indicted Maduro for alleged conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States, conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices, and possession of such weapons. Maduro has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and has called himself a “prisoner of war.”
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—who is serving as the US-backed acting president—said Wednesday that she had a long, courteous phone call with Trump, who expressed satisfaction with her move to release hundreds of prisoners held for political or national security offenses.
“This opportunity is for Venezuela and for the people of Venezuela to be able to see reflected a new moment where coexistence, where living together, where recognition of the other allows building and erecting a new spirituality,” Rodríguez said.
Trump took to his Truth Social network Wednesday to praise the “very good call” with Rodríguez.
“We are making tremendous progress, as we help Venezuela stabilize and recover,” the president wrote. “Many topics were discussed, including Oil, Minerals, Trade and, of course, National Security. This partnership between the United States of America and Venezuela will be a spectacular one FOR ALL.”
Amid widespread international condemnation of his aggression, Trump has openly declared his intention to control and exploit Venezuela’s vast oil resources, dubiously claiming that the country owes the US for losses incurred by oil companies due to past petroleum nationalization.
Trump is scheduled to meet Thursday afternoon with Venezuelan opposition leader and recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient María Corina Machado at the White House. To the chagrin of right-wing Venezuelans and much of his base, Trump has said that Machado “doesn’t have the support” to be the country’s next president.
On the streets of Caracas, one protester said Wednesday, “We say to Donald Trump, that miserable invader… [that] Maduro has already proven that he is innocent.”
“Nicolás is not a drug trafficker,” she added. “I don’t know why they haven’t returned him yet.”
Another demonstrator at the march said, “The empire can do whatever it wants, but we are here to tell you that we are free, independent, and sovereign.”
“You can meet with whomever you want,” the man said in a message meant for Trump, “but you must meet with who represents our government, and you must release Nicolás Maduro—our president—and Cilia Flores.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Elon Musk listens as reporters ask US President Donald Trump questions during a press availability in the Oval Office at the White House on May 21, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The world’s richest man believes it is “treason” to teach students the plain fact that the United States was built on stolen Native American land.
Self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk believes schoolteachers should be “imprisoned” for educating students on topics that portray America negatively—including the nation’s history of racism and the displacement of Native Americans.
The world’s richest man, who was a prolific donor to President Donald Trump and a member of his administration, expressed this desire in a post on his social media app X on Thursday in response to a survey of high school students from 2022 conducted by the right-wing Manhattan Institute, about whether they had been taught concepts labeled as part of “critical social justice.”
The post Musk replied to specifically emphasized that, according to the poll, 45% of students said they had been taught that “America was built on stolen land,” while another 22% said they’d heard it from an adult at school.
Teaching people to hate America fundamentally destroys patriotism and the desire to defend our country.
Such teachings should be viewed as treason and those who do it imprisoned. https://t.co/CNW0PlOTfM
Any even cursory retelling of US history makes such a statement beyond dispute. Since the arrival of European settlers in what would become the United States, Native Americans have been subject to over 300 years of well-documented forced migration policies, wars of extermination, and coercive treaties codifying their dispossession from lands they lived on for centuries.
In 2021, a year before the survey was conducted, researchers examined the first comprehensive dataset quantifying the forced removal of Native Americans and found that Indigenous people had lost approximately 99% of the lands they historically occupied.
The poll showed that students had also been taught other ideas about America that, while politically contentious, are also well-founded by US history and ongoing realities of legal and economic inequality—including that “America is a systemically racist country,” that “white people have white privilege,” and that “America is a patriarchal society.”
With state-level bans on what it calls “critical race theory,” “gender ideology,” and other supposedly “divisive concepts” in public education, the right has in recent years been systematically chipping away at classroom discussions related to the uglier parts of US history and resulting ongoing inequality. Meanwhile, the second Trump administration has sought to use federal funds to coerce public schools into adopting his standards for “patriotic education.”
But Musk, who donated an unprecedented $290 million to Trump to help him reclaim the presidency in 2024, thinks merely banning students from learning negative things about the country is not enough.
“Teaching people to hate America fundamentally destroys patriotism and the desire to defend our country,” he wrote. “Such teachings should be viewed as treason and those who do it imprisoned.”
The irony was immediately apparent to many. Musk’s call comes just days after he claimed that by pushing to ban his platform X over its proliferation of nonconsensual artificially generated pornography, including of children, the United Kingdom “want[s] to suppress free speech.”
Musk has on numerous previous occasions emphasized the importance of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees the right to free expression.
“You can’t claim to care about the First Amendment if you believe this,” responded Billy Binion, a reporter for the libertarian news outlet Reason.“ Treason is a capital offense. Imprisoning or executing people for their words is impossible to reconcile with any understanding of free speech. Incoherent and un-American.”
The billionaire has long claimed to be one of free speech’s foremost defenders, but often only in cases involving his ideological allies.
Since he took over the social media platform formerly known as Twitter in 2022, those who have criticized him, reported negative news stories about him, or promoted causes he disagrees with—particularly Palestinian or LGBTQ+ rights—have often had their accounts suspended or their content’s reach limited.
In recent weeks, echoing rhetoric from the Trump administration about deporting tens of millions of nonwhite American citizens, Musk has spiraled further into explicit calls for the ethnic cleansing of the United States, endorsing posts stating that white people must “reclaim our nations” or “be conquered, enslaved, raped, and genocided” and that “if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered,” necessitating “white solidarity.”
“Obviously, the whole Elon-is-a-free-speech-absolutist thing is long dead,” wrote Alex Griswold, a spokesperson for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, commonly known as FIRE. “But it goes beyond that to the point that he is significantly more censorial than the median American.”
Pam Fessler, a former news correspondent for NPRwrote that “People who call for the imprisonment of those who teach facts are the ones who ‘hate’ America.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
The Hughes fire burns north of Santa Clarita, California on January 22, 2025. (Photo by Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
“Pretty much all federal scientists working on climate in the US have had to self-censor,” said one scientist. “Thankfully much of the underlying science is still occurring, even if they cannot talk about it.”
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Administrator Bill Nelson declared a year ago that “once again, the temperature record has been shattered—2024 was the hottest year since recordkeeping began in 1880,” and NASA’s statement noted climate change and its consequences, from sweltering heat to devastating wildfires. This week, under a president who has called the fossil fuel-driven crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” there was no such language from the US agency.
NASA did release a statement about its latest findings on Wednesday. The agency said that, like other experts around the world, its scientists found that “Earth’s global surface temperature in 2025 was slightly warmer than 2023—but within the margin of error the two years are effectively tied,” and “the hottest year on record remains 2024.”
Specifically, 2025 saw average temperatures 2.14°F or 1.19°C above the 1951-80 average, the statement said, also detailing NASA’s data sources. However, in line with what President Donald Trump’s second administration has done across the federal government, the release does not mention human-caused climate change.
The omission quickly caught the attention of journalists and scientists, including Agence France-Presse‘s Issam Ahmed, who began a Wednesday report on the topic with, “Don’t say the c-word” and spoke with various experts:
“The US government is now, like Russia and Saudi Arabia, a petrostate under Trump and Republican rule, and the actions of all of its agencies and departments can be understood in terms of the agenda of the polluters that are running the show,” University of Pennsylvania climatologist Michael Mann told AFP. “It is therefore entirely unsurprising that NASA administrators are attempting to bury findings of its own agency that conflict with its climate denial agenda.”
Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, added, “I’m just happy they were allowed to put out a press release.”
“Pretty much all federal scientists working on climate in the US have had to self-censor and leave out reference to human influences on climate change, unfortunately,” he told AFP. “Thankfully much of the underlying science is still occurring, even if they cannot talk about it.”
Mike Scott of Carbon Copy Communications, toldEuronews Green on Thursday that NASA’s new statement is “consistent” with the administration’s other “anti-climate actions.”
In September, the US Department of Energy—led by climate liar and former fracking CEO Chris Wright—added “climate change” to its “list of words to avoid” at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Other banned terms include carbon/CO2 “footprint,” clean, decarbonization, “dirty” energy, emissions, energy transition, green, sustainability/sustainable, and tax breaks/tax credits/subsidies.
Last month, the Trump administration removed all references to human-caused climate change from Environmental Protection Agency webpages, as well as data showing global warming over recent decades and the resulting risks. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, called it “one of the more dramatic scrubbings we’ve seen so far in the climate space.”
Since returning to office nearly a year ago with support from Big Oil’s money, Trump has also declared a “national energy emergency” to help deliver on his campaign pledge to “drill, baby, drill,” rolled back various climate policies implemented under his Democratic predecessor, ditched the Paris climate agreement again along with dozens of other international treaties and organizations, refused to attend an annual United Nations summit, and more.
“They have attacked the federal scientific enterprise built up over decades through taxpayer investments, fired or forced out agency experts, and cut funding for critical science. And a compliant Congress has enabled this destructive agenda, including by rubber-stamping some of the president’s illegal actions and by failing to exercise its constitutional powers to check his tyrannical power grabs,” she continued.
“This year has also brought extraordinary efforts to expose and fight back against the worst excesses of this unhinged administration,” she noted, pointing to lawsuits, organizing, and wins in states. “And as we face down another tough year under the anti-science, authoritarian Trump administration, we’re fired up to keep up the fight for science and for our democracy. We hope you’ll join us—because despite it all, that future is ours to build.”
Like Cleetus, Scott of Carbon Copy Communications expects Trump and his allies to continue waging its war on science.
“It’s not clear what climate institutions are left for Trump to try and dismantle, but there is little doubt that if he finds them, he will go after them,” he warned. “The climate denial is really worrying and out of line with almost every other country in the world, including most of the world’s largest oil producers. Failing to acknowledge the impacts of climate change will leave the US less able to deal with those impacts—which will continue to happen whatever Trump thinks.”
“The US stance is bad for science, it’s bad for the US economy and its citizens, and it’s bad for the climate,” Scott added. “It’s also unsustainable. Climate change will not stop because the US administration doesn’t believe in it. The American response to climate-related disasters will be worse if it doesn’t understand why extreme weather events and other climate impacts are happening.”
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Demonstrators protest outside of the Whipple federal building on January 14, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
“The Insurrection Act was always the plan,” warned one critic of the president.
President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to put the US military on American streets, unless demonstrations against federal immigration operations in Minneapolis come to an end.
In a Truth Social post, Trump demanded that Minnesota elected officials “stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], who are only trying to do their job.”
If this doesn’t happen, the president said, he would invoke the Insurrection Act and “quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place” in the state.
“The Insurrection Act was always the plan, and Minneapolis is the test case,” said Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health. “They sent ICE in to terrorize and attack Black and brown communities to provoke a response that would justify deploying the military domestically in Blue cities. This has never been about immigration.”
“Invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces against the American people is the exact opposite of what Minneapolis — and the country — needs right now.” —Lisa Gilbert, Public Citizen
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) made a similar warning last week, amid protests that erupted after the killing of Renee Nicole Good by a federal agent.
“What we are seeing right now,” said Omar, “not only from the surge of 2,000 federal agents—now we have another 1,000 apparently coming in—it is essentially trying to create this kind of environment where people feel intimidated, threatened, and terrorized. And I think the ultimate goal of [Homeland Security Security Secretary] Kristi Noem and President Trump is to agitate people enough where they are able to invoke the Insurrection Act to declare martial law.”
“There is,” she continued, “no other justifiable way to describe what is taking place in Minneapolis at this moment. There is no justifiable reason why this number of agents is here in our state.”
The Insurrection Act has not been used since 1992, when President George HW Bush invoked it at the request of then-California Gov. Pete Wilson to quell riots that had broken out in Los Angeles after a jury acquitted police officers who were caught on camera beating Rodney King.
“Invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces against the American people is the exact opposite of what Minneapolis — and the country — needs right now,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen in a statement Thursday morning.
“The violence in Minneapolis is being perpetrated by ICE. The solution is to end the ICE surge, not to further militarize the city, ” added Gilbert. “Deploying military forces against the city and its citizens would be a doubling down on the threat Americans are facing from their own government. Trump should abandon this idea immediately and stop threatening to use the military against the American people.”
Mass protests have erupted throughout Minneapolis since ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot local resident Good, whom the Trump administration posthumously smeared as a “domestic terrorist.”
Protests against ICE presence in the city intensified on Wednesday night after a federal agent shot a man in the leg during what the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called a “targeted traffic stop.”
The Trump administration last week began surging thousands of ICE agents into Minneapolis, resulting in mass school closures and the disruption of daily life for the city’s residents.
The editorial board of the Minnesota Star Tribune on Thursday described the city as being “under siege” by the federal government.
“Battalions of armed federal agents are moving through neighborhoods, transit hubs, malls and parking lots and staging near churches, mosques and schools,” the editorial explains. “Strangers with guns have metastasized in spaces where daily life should be routine and safe. It feels like a military occupation.”
The editors then declared that “what we are witnessing is the storming of the state by the federal government,” insisting that “the occupation of Minnesota by ICE cannot stand.”
A local Minneapolis resident who was out protesting against the ICE presence on Wednesday night toldStatus Coup News that he felt like the entire city was under assault.
🚨"This is nuts! What the f*ck is going on, this is insane! ICE is just trying to scare people; they tell you it's only immigrants—it's f*cking anybody!" -furious Minneapolis resident tells our @ZDRoberts after ICE shot a man in the leg tonight. LIVE NOW ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/7edvCRpDNk
“This is nuts!” he said. “What the fuck is going on, dude, this is insane… You know what really pisses me off is the fact that they detain people, cuff them, and then still beat the shit out of them! They tell you it’s immigrants, it’s only immigrants? It’s fucking anybody! I have friends who got detained and all they were doing was driving home from work!”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
A general view of staff on a NHS hospital ward
