A satellite image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows Hurricane Melissa churning northwest through the Caribbean on October 27, 2025. (Photo by NOAA via Getty Images)
“Unimaginable violence is hiding in the very small and compact eyewall of Melissa,” said one hurricane specialist.
Hurricane Melissa barreled toward Jamaica on Tuesday as a monstrous Category 5 storm as the island country braced for devastating landfall, humanitarian operations urgently mobilized, and experts voiced horror at the latest climate-fueled weather disaster.
Anne-Claire Fontan, the World Meteorological Organization’s tropical cyclone specialist, told reporters that “a catastrophic situation is expected in Jamaica” and described the hurricane as “the storm of the century” for the island. Melissa is expected to make landfall imminently, bringing extreme flooding, landslides, and other life-threatening impacts.
Tens of thousands of Jamaicans lost power as the slow-moving storm approached the island, bringing torrential rain and maximum sustained winds of 185 mph, with gusts over 220 mph. Storms like Melissa are the reason scientists are pushing to formally add a Category 6 for hurricanes.
“Unimaginable violence is hiding in the very small and compact eyewall of Melissa,” said Greg Postel, hurricane specialist at The Weather Channel. “Nearly continuous lightning will accompany the tornadic wind speeds.”
Melissa tonight has had one of the most powerful satellite presentations you will ever see for an Atlantic Hurricane. Perfect symmetry in all quadrants and satellite estimation techniques being maxed out, with Dvorak analysis yielding 871.1 mbar (recon found the real pressure to… pic.twitter.com/nKKFbv4g7j
The International Federation of the Red Cross said up to 1.5 million people in Jamaica—roughly half the island’s population—are expected to be directly affected by Hurricane Melissa, one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin and the strongest storm on Earth this year.
“We are okay at the moment but bracing ourselves for the worst,” Jamaican climate activist Tracey Edwards said Tuesday. “I’ve grown weary of these threats, and I do not want to face the next hurricane.”
The International Organization for Migration warned that “the risk of flooding, landslides, and widespread damage is extremely high,” meaning that “many people are likely to be displaced from their homes and in urgent need of shelter and relief.”
Melissa’s landfall will come on the same day that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said the international community has failed to prevent planetary warming from surpassing the key 1.5°C threshold “in the next few years.”
Meteorologist Eric Holthaus wrote on social media that “this is the news I’ve dreaded all my life.”
“Humanity has failed to avoid dangerous climate change,” he wrote. “We have now entered the overshoot era. Our new goal is to prevent as many irreversible tipping points from taking hold as we can.”
Hurricane Melissa will make landfall in Jamaica in a few hours as one of the two strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall anywhere in the Atlantic Basin — on par with the 1935 Labor Day hurricane in south Florida.Just horrific. The stuff of nightmares.
Climate experts said Hurricane Melissa bears unmistakable fingerprints of the planetary crisis, which is driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.
The warming climate is “clearly making this horrific disaster for Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas even worse,” Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, told the New York Times.
Akshay Deoras, a meteorologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, told the Associated Press that the Atlantic “is extremely warm right now.”
“And it’s not just the surface,” said Deoras. “The deeper layers of the ocean are also unusually warm, providing a vast reservoir of energy for the storm.”
Amira Odeh, Caribbean campaigner at 350.org, warned in a statement Tuesday that “what is happening in Jamaica is what climate injustice looks like.”
“Every home without electricity, every flooded hospital, every family cut off by the storm is a consequence of political inaction,” said Odeh. “We cannot continue losing Caribbean lives because of the fossil fuel industry’s greed.”
“As world leaders head to COP30, they must understand that every delay, every new fossil fuel project, means more lives lost,” Odeh added. “Jamaica is the latest warning, and Belém must be where we finally see a steer to change courses. The Caribbean is sounding the alarm once again. This time, the world must listen.”
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.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.
Protesters hold signs during an anti-ICE protest outside of San Francisco City Hall on October 23, 2025 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“Maybe other cities should try to convince a wealthy tech CEO or two to keep the president from siccing his agents on them,” quipped one writer.
After threatening for days to deploy troops to San Francisco, President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he would pull back for the moment, apparently after some of his billionaire “friends” in the city called him and asked him not to.
“The Federal Government was preparing to ‘surge’ San Francisco, California, on Saturday,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “But friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge in that the Mayor, Daniel Lurie, was making substantial progress.”
Trump said he “spoke to Mayor Lurie last night and he asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around. I told [Lurie], I think he is making a mistake, because we can do it much faster, and remove the criminals that the Law does not permit him to remove. I told him, ’It’s an easier process if we do it, faster, stronger, and safer but, let’s see how you do?‘”
In a separate post, Lurie affirmed that he had spoken with Trump. He said he told the president that “San Francisco is on the rise,” and that a military occupation would “hinder our recovery.”
Although Trump is walking back his troop threat, for now, US Customs and Border Protection agents still arrived in the Bay Area on Thursday as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants.
The Associated Pressreported that “police used at least one flash-bang grenade to clear a handful of demonstrators from the entrance” of Coast Guard Island in Alameda, where the CBP agents will be based.
In addition to threatening San Francisco in recent days, Trump has sent National Guard troops to Los Angeles, California; Washington, DC; Portland, Oregon; and Chicago, Illinois—where a judge has halted the deployment.
Like virtually all of the cities where Trump has either surged or threatened to surge federalized troops, San Francisco has no crime wave to “turn around.” In fact, crime has been falling precipitously in the city. Homicides dropped by 35% during 2024 and hit a 60-year low this year, contradicting Trump’s assertions that the city is a “mess” and that people there lived in constant fear of being “mugged, murdered, robbed, raped, assaulted, or shot.”
Lurie said he agreed to help Trump go to war on this imaginary crime wave, and said he would welcome “would welcome continued partnerships with the FBI, DEA, ATF, and US attorney.”
Trump said he was persuaded to hold off on the surge of troops after he was called by two Silicon Valley billionaires, Marc Benioff and Jensen Huang, whom he called “great people.”
Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, was a longtime Democrat who quickly morphed into an outspoken Trump supporter after his victory in 2024. He was also an initial champion of Trump’s proposal to send troops to San Francisco, but later backed off and even apologized after facing criticism from local officials and former political allies.
Huang, the CEO of the computer tech company Nvidia, meanwhile, cut an unprecedented deal with Trump in August that allowed the company to sell computer chips in China if it handed 15% of the revenue from those sales to the federal government, which was described as a “shakedown” by one financial columnist.
Trump said that these two and some unspecified “others” called him, “saying that the future of San Francisco is great” and that “they want to give [Lurie’s efforts] a ’shot.‘”
“Therefore,” Trump said, “we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday.”
Hafiz Rashid, a writer for the New Republic, quipped that “maybe other cities should try to convince a wealthy tech CEO or two to keep the president from siccing his agents on them.”
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Every few decades, Americans rediscover that their republic was built on a rejection – the rejection of being ruled by a monarch. Now, in one of the largest protest movements in many years, the phrase “No kings” is everywhere: on placards, online memes, and in chants aimed at a president who seems to want to rule rather than serve.
Yet the words are hardly new. They are the first note in the American political scale, the country’s founding slogan before it even had a flag.
Long before it echoed through the colonies, the slogan “No king but Jesus” rang out in the English civil war, where it was used to declare that divine authority, not royal prerogative, should rule the conscience.
When it crossed the Atlantic, colonial Americans inherited a phrase, a stance and an image that could turn theology into politics and rebellion into virtue.
As Thomas Paine put it in his 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense: “Of more worth is one honest man than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” Republican speech was invented by rejecting monarchy.
When independence was achieved, America’s experiment rested on a paradox: it needed strong leadership but feared the aura of command. “No kings” was a self-diagnosis of a nervous republic. A way of keeping the charisma of a leader on a leash.
That allergy to grandeur shaped the early republic. In the 1790s when John Adams proposed that the president be addressed as “His Highness”, he was swiftly mocked as “His Rotundity”. The laughter mattered. It expressed the conviction that democracy could not survive reverence.
By the 1830s, this suspicion of pomp had become visual. Critics of the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, issued a famous broadside “King Andrew the First” showing him crowned and trampling the constitution. It wasn’t just partisan art – it was an act of democratic hygiene.
Abraham LIncoln depicted as a king in 1864. Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection
A generation later, Abraham Lincoln faced the same charge. During the American civil war, a notorious 1864 pamphlet Abraham Africanus I accused him of seeking to become a “hereditary ruler of the United States”. His sweeping wartime powers fed old fears that emergency rule would harden into monarchy.
Sometimes, the charge is justified. When Puck magazine in 1904 depicted Theodore Roosevelt crowning himself Louis XIV (or perhaps Napoleon), it captured the public’s mixture of thrill and alarm at his trust-busting, canal-building, imperial swagger. Citizens wanted vitality in office, but not vanity.
How the American Spectator depicted Barack Obama in 2014. American Spectator
Other times, the imagery seemed to speak more to American paternal longings. Take images of Dwight Eisenhower as “King Ike” in the 1950s, a genial ruler among smiling courtiers, soothing cold war nerves.
In our own century, the crown returns in sharper form. The American Spectator’s 2014 cover, “The Good King Barack” showed Obama beaming beneath a red velvet crown.
When Donald Trump triumphed in 2016, crown memes returned as America’s simplest moral shorthand for power that has gone too far.
It fell to his successor Joe Biden to officially declare, in response to the July 2024 Supreme Court ruling that Trump was not immune from prosecution: “This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America.”
Why the crown keeps returning
The crown is both insult and safety valve at once. It’s an instantly legible piece of political folk art reminding citizens that authority is temporary, fallible and – like its wearer – mortal.
When protesters revive “No kings”, they aren’t just quoting the revolution. They’re translating an older language of civic republican virtue into an accent everyone can understand. No person above the law, no office above criticism, no citizen beneath respect.
The slogan reawakens the moral reflex that freedom depends on vigilance, and that dignity belongs to the governed as much as the governors.
And here’s the irony: both parties were founded on that same cry. Democrats and Republicans trace their roots to the anti-monarchical Democratic-Republicans of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who defined their movement against the spectre of kingly power. That party later fractured, giving rise to both modern traditions.
In that sense, “No kings” was the nation’s first party platform, the point of agreement from which every later disagreement grew.
Can it still work?
In today’s fractured America, “No kings” offers something rare: a language of protest that feels constitutional rather than ideological. It has the potential to speak to conservatives alarmed by executive overreach, to progressives wary of authoritarian drift, and to independents nostalgic for civic balance.
"CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!" –President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/IMr4tq0sMB
That gives it unusual rhetorical strength. Unlike most modern slogans – “Drill baby, drill”, “Make America great again” (Maga), or “Defund the police” – it doesn’t divide, it recalls a principle. “No kings” reminds Americans that what unites them is the rejection of tyranny.
The phrase also appeals to exhaustion as much as outrage. After years of political spectacle, “No kings” gestures toward humility, order and self-restraint: the virtues both parties claim to miss.
The movement may go nowhere. But if this moment does turn out to be an inflection point, it is a fitting way to frame it.
To chant “No kings” now is not nostalgia but muscle memory. That is how a republic tests its pulse: by mocking grandeur, refusing awe and rediscovering equality in the act of saying no.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
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Activist Sami Al Arian (R), author Kenize Mourad (2nd R), Professor Christine Chinkin (3rd R), academic Biljana Vankovska (3rd L), activist Chandra Muzaffar (2nd L), and Dr. Ghada Karmi (L) attend final session of the Gaza Tribunal, a global and independent initiative established to investigate Israel’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza, held at Istanbul University, Turkiye on October 24, 2025. [Muhammed Enes Yıldırım – Anadolu Agency]
The Gaza Tribunal’s final session continued Friday at Istanbul University, with powerful expert testimony asserting that Israel deliberately dismantled Gaza’s health care and public health systems as part of a larger policy of “mass harm to civilians,” Anadolu reports.
Doctors and humanitarian specialists detailed what they described as systematic attacks on medical workers, hospitals, water systems, and the basic means of civilian survival.
During Friday morning’s panel titled “Targeting of Civilians and Civilian Infrastructure—Medical Systems,” four medical professionals, including International President of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) Dr. Javid Abdelmoneim, Turkish physician Dr. Taner Kamaci, Norwegian emergency doctor and professor Dr. Mads Gilbert, and UK-based systemic psychotherapist and trainer Gwyn Daniel, presented evidence from the past two years of the Gaza war, calling for international accountability.
Dr. Javid Abdelmoneim, a British emergency physician and humanitarian with MSF, testified that Gaza’s hospitals and health workers were not merely collateral victims of conflict but the direct targets of a systematic strategy:
“Members of the jury, our health system has not collapsed by chance. It’s destroyed when hospitals are deliberately struck. Supplies are choked off. Health care workers are killed or detained. And the water and sanitation system is ruined.”
He noted staggering casualties among medical personnel, saying: “Over 1,700 health care workers have been killed since October 2023. At MSF, 15 of our colleagues have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.”
Abdelmoneim directly cited incidents communicated to Israeli authorities in advance, including the November 2023 strike on Al-Awda Hospital.
“We had repeatedly informed Israeli authorities that Al-Auda was a working hospital with patients and medical staff and therefore protected under international humanitarian law.”
He said two MSF doctors, Mohamed Abou-Jaida and Ahmed As-Saffar, were killed in the attack.
He added, several days earlier, “Our colleague Abad Shabab, a nurse, was killed when a clearly marked MSF convoy came under attack in Gaza City. Despite our authorization to evacuate, he was shot in the head.”
Abdelmoneim also described the detention and disappearance of medical personnel, referencing the Oct. 26 arrest of Dr. Abou-Jaida, who he said remains in prison without charge.
Stressing that public health failures were engineered, he provided examples to back up his claim. He said: “Less than a third of the fuel needs for desalination pumps and water trucks were allowed by Israel… Polio was declared in Gaza while I was there. It had been eradicated years previously.”
The consequences were visible in every clinic, he noted: “Patients with trauma injuries, chronic diseases, cancer, communicable illnesses, malnourished children, and pregnant women were dying from preventable causes.”
Abdelmoneim also urged the panel to treat these medical stories as legal evidence.
“It remains an urgent need for credible and proactive mechanisms to deliver justice for the thousands that have been killed and injured by Israeli actions over the past two years.”
He concluded with a stark indictment, saying: “It is the deliberate dismantling of the means to survive… The genocide is far from over.”
Dr. Taner Kamaci, speaking as a Turkish health official who worked inside Gaza, described health care conditions as a complete breakdown of protection for civilians.
“For two years, every day, people who have been deprived of electricity, water, and bread… have been deprived of their physical, social, and mental health. Therefore, Israel has deprived all people of water for the past two years, which is essential for their health.”
He shared firsthand accounts of surgery without anesthesia, children transported to hospitals by donkey carts, and patients dying in hallways due to a total shortage of surgical capacity.
His remarks underscored that the survival struggle does not end once the bomb falls, saying: “It’s not just a bomb… Surviving in Gaza during the war is almost a miracle.”
Kamaci cited numbers from Gaza health authorities documenting 1,722 health workers killed and 362 imprisoned. In two years, “at least 4,000 children, nearly 15,000 people, lost at least one limb.”
He finished by framing the war as an outright assault on humanity: “What is the meaning of the name of this genocide?”
– Evidence-based testimony on 40-year pattern
Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian emergency physician who has worked in Gaza for decades, began by naming colleagues killed with their families. “Within all these numbers we have, Palestinians are of course not numbers but humans with families just like us,” he said.
Gilbert broadened the timeline of alleged violations and said: “This has been going on… for more than 40 years… the root cause of ill health is the Israeli occupation.”
He described a long-documented pattern of Israeli attacks on hospitals, ambulances, and health workers, which he said had continued despite UN investigations dating back to 1982.
“We have surpassed 100,000 killed in Gaza. And don’t forget that three out of four are women and children, and between 80 and 90% are civilians.”
He described his approach as “evidence-based solidarity,” citing UN statistics, scientific studies, and 42 years of clinical experience.
Gilbert cited 328 UN situation reports since October 7, 2023, noting that scientists found 41% underreporting in the first year of casualties. He added that 10,000-20,000 more people are likely buried under the rubble.
Gilbert testified that at least 1,700 Palestinian health care workers have been killed, and 301 have been detained, many of whom have been tortured. According to a WHO dashboard, 2,853 health care workers and patients have been killed or injured in Gaza in the last two years alone—”one every six hours,” he said.
He described the attacks as “extremely systematic” with a clear strategic purpose. Removing hospitals from society’s safety net only leads to more deaths and to extinguishing the will to resist, he said.
Gilbert warned that 1,000-2,000 child amputees would need 10-20 surgeries to walk again, and described a campaign to “invalidate and harm as much as possible.”
He also highlighted dramatic collapses in public health indicators.
“It is the starvation program: dehydration, lack of water, and untreated diseases. Half the population is under 18. You have a system of genocide using scientific knowledge of what creates health to destroy health.”
Gilbert condemned the silence of Western medical institutions. “Staying silent, while pretending to be neutral, is a form of oppression. We will never forget, and we will never forgive.”
Yet he closed by affirming the perseverance of Palestinian health workers risking their lives daily. “To resist is to exist,” he remarked.
Gwyn Daniel, a systemic family therapist based in the UK, said that two years of continuous Israeli bombardment have precipitated an unprecedented psychological collapse in Gaza, describing conditions as “an ongoing genocide.”
“How do we understand mental health in the context of a genocide, an ongoing genocide?” she said. “One of the criteria for genocide is causing serious bodily and mental harm to members of the group. The mental harm is one that we all know about.”
Daniel stressed that Gaza’s trauma cannot be treated as a past event. “As my Palestinian colleagues always point out, there is no place for trauma. Trauma is continuous and ongoing.”
She argued that ethical mental health responses must confront the political causes of suffering.
“The only ethical responses to collective trauma on this scale are those that address evidence of political violence and the need for self-determination and liberation,” she said. “That means supporting interventions that embrace activism and modes of resistance.”
– Children bear most extreme impact
Daniel described a population living “in a death zone,” where people feel “they are already dead, or longing to be alive,” and where the destruction of hospitals, schools, and community structures “aids at the heart and soul of the community… its collective consciousness and its systems of mutual support.”
Children, she said, are bearing the most extreme impact. “Nearly 40,000 children have lost their lives there,” she noted. Constant fear and hyperarousal “will have a permanent impact, because there are no contacts by children from those states.”
Despite the devastation, Daniel emphasized the courage of Palestinian professionals who continue working: “It means supporting those mental health practitioners already operating in Gaza… operating at great risk to themselves.”
Quoting the latest report from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, she concluded: “Gaza, despite the pain, continues to pulse with life… it is the duty of all of us in the international community to remain alongside it.”
Keir 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.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/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas 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.
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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the media after visiting the Civil-Military Coordination Center in southern Israel on October 24, 2025. [Photo by FADEL SENNA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images]
The US is exploring ways to deploy international forces to Gaza, possibly under a UN mandate, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday, Anadolu reports.
“Some of these countries can’t participate unless they have a mandate from the UN,” Rubio told the press at the US-Israel coordination center for Gaza in Kiryat Gat, a city in southern Israel.
“So maybe it’ll be a UN resolution—that’s one route. We could have an international agreement as well. We’re working through that. We’ll find the right formula to do it. Maybe the UN,” he added.
Rubio also warned about Israeli bills to annex the occupied West Bank. “It’s a threat to the peace process.”
Keir 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.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/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas 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.
