Palestinians girls play amid buildings destroyed by Israeli air and ground attacks in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, January 14, 2026
ISRAEL’S far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that the United States’ announcement of the so-called ceasefire in Gaza advancing to its second phase is largely symbolic.
Israeli forces have killed more than 400 Palestinians since the ceasefire came into force on October 10, raising questions about whether phase two of the plan will bring any more respite for Gazans.
Speaking on Wednesday night with the parents of the last Israeli hostage whose remains are still in the coastal enclave, Mr Netanyahu said that the announcement of a governing committee of Palestinians as part of the second phase was merely a “declarative move,” rather than, as described by US envoy Steve Witkoff, a sign of progress.
Israeli police officer Ran Gvili’s parents had earlier pressed Mr Netanyahu not to advance the ceasefire until their son’s remains were returned, Israel’s Hostage and Missing Families Forum said earlier that day.
Mr Netanyahu told Mr Gvili’s parents that his return remained a top priority.
The announcement of the ceasefire’s second phase marked a significant step forward but left many questions unanswered.
They include the membership of a proposed apolitical governing committee of Palestinian experts and an international “board of peace.”
The committee’s composition has been co-ordinated with Israel, said an Israeli official speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick delivers a speech during the Conservative Party Conference at the Manchester Central Convention Complex, October 7, 2025
THE dramatic dismissal of Robert Jenrick from his post on the Tory front bench and from the party itself is a landmark in the recalibration and reorganisation of the right in British politics.
It points, far more than the numerous other high-profile defections from the Conservatives to Reform, towards a concentration of significant political forces behind an exceptionally authoritarian and chauvinistic variant of neoliberalism.
The shadow justice secretary may have jumped slightly before he was ready because of Kemi Badenoch’s decisive move but his rightward trajectory was long headed towards destination Farage. The discovery of his draft resignation letter appears to have precipitated her dismissal of what had become a very troublesome princeling.
Jenrick’s growing alignment with Nigel Farage indicates first, that Reform is increasingly seen as the only viable game in town for the hard right and, second, that the party is intensifying its plans to form a government after the next general election.
To plausibly offer itself as a ruling party, Reform needs more experienced politicians who could step into ministerial office. Jenrick, a cynical and unscrupulous opportunist, fits that bill.
Originally a modestly liberal “Cameron Conservative” and a Remainer, he has rebranded himself as an authoritarian xenophobe.
Since losing the 2024 Tory leadership election to Badenoch, his most notable political interventions have been to bemoan the lack of “white faces” he saw during a brief visit to the Handsworth district of Birmingham, and a Conservative conference call for the wholesale sacking of judges he dislikes, to be replaced by those he prefers.
Nigel Farage blames the Muzzies.Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
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.
Palestinians girls play amid buildings destroyed by Israeli air and ground attacks in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, January 14, 2026
