Politics & Stuff

[Fulham Broadway 16,423]

18 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Well it seems like usa is close to finishing that aid. If I'm to make believe that the words in fight will amount to anything? 

It does sounds like Biden might just stop supporting Israel soon. 

And even more if he gets elected again he might start cutting back a lot of the help to Israel.... 

Probably unlikely the US will ever stop supporting its Middle East attack dog, Biden is just worried democrat support will ebb away as the genocide becomes evident to even the most blinkered.

Meanwhile, Nutty Yahoo, thinks the harbour being built out of the rubble of Palestinian houses, including presumably the skulls and bones of buried alive children, is going to be used to exile the Palestinians out of Gaza in his fucked up ethnic land grab mentality.

[Fulham Broadway 16,423]

18 minutes ago, Fernando said:

The real turn around is when another nation steps in and fight a long side.... Although that might be happening but through proxies.....

Yes, the World teeters on the brink of WW3, as Macron moots marching his legionnaires into Odessa....

[cosmicway 1,261]

Here is the betting for the US election:

Donald Trump - 1.90
Joe Biden - 2.40

Michelle Obama - 17.00
Robert Kennedy jr. - 23.00
Gavin Newsom - 26.00
Kamala Harris - 81.00

Gretchen Whitmer - 81.00
Dean Philips - 81.00
Nikki Haley - 81.00

plus many others at prices higher than 100.00.

Trump is the favourite but Biden has shortened a little the last days.
But this is n't the topic here.
The topic is what are all these other names doing here ?
The answer is either of the two real candidates may die, or both.

Now watch this: From the seven substitutes whose names I wrote down six are democrats and one is republican - Nikki Haley the 9th (!) favourite at 81.00 !
The folks with over 100.00 I did n't bother to look up.

So then -the bookies reckon- Biden is with one foot in the grave between now and November, Trump will survive !
 

Edited March 22 by cosmicway

[manpe 10,857]

11 hours ago, Fernando said:

I just don't see no one stopping Russia at this moment. I'm actually surprised that Ukraine has survived this long. But can just money and some weapons really help them survive for a lot longer? 

Yes, they can. Don't underestimate peoples' will to survive and fight for their right to exist. Russia has been beaten many times by smaller nations in the past thanks to sheer willpower. Only problem these days are nukes, which is probably why the west isn't giving weapons that could actually give Ukrainians a real chance of winning. They are only giving enough for Ukraine not to lose, but also not to win. Russia's nuke threats are very effective and Putin's probably realized clearer than ever that we are a bunch of cowards.

[Fulham Broadway 16,423]

UN Draft resolution by the US rejected by Algeria, Russia, China and many others.

The US are being sneaky, mentioning a ceasefire, but deliberately having the wording not demanding a ceasefire. Shows the powerful Zionist lobby at work again.

Meanwhile 32 000 dead, mainly children. babies and women. 12 000 permanently seriously disfigured and maimed, 74 000 injured, and thousands buried alive.

Even Schumer, (Jewish Ukrainian) Senate leader, has called them a 'pariah state'. 

[NikkiCFC 7,601]

Big terrorist attack in Moscow. 

[Fulham Broadway 16,423]

Trump appears to be scrambling for funds to pay a $464m (£365m) fraud fine. Could the stock market ride to his rescue?

Trump Media, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, is poised to become a publicly listed company, after a majority of shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp voted on Friday to acquire it. Trump is due to have a stake of at least 58% in the merged company, worth roughly $3bn at Digital World's current share prices.

It's an astonishing potential windfall for Trump in exchange for a business whose own auditor warned last year it was at risk of failure.

[Vesper 27,378]

15 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

Big terrorist attack in Moscow. 

Looks like it was ISIS related.

[Drogba210 0]

I'm also in the green zone, but I want to know if someone is in the red zone.

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,761]

On 20/03/2024 at 13:26, MoroccanBlue said:

Americans are frustrated. 

Inflation.

Cost of living.

Affordable housing. 

 

3 important things yet the government's main priority is foreign aid and false promises. The American people want a candidate that'll make those 3 a priority above else. 

Yet we'd never vote for someone who made it a priority over other things. Despite what is said our leaderships reflects the values we have sadly.

[cosmicway 1,261]

3 hours ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

Yet we'd never vote for someone who made it a priority over other things. Despite what is said our leaderships reflects the values we have sadly.

When I went to college the Greek government snatched me 10,000 drachmas = 33 euros is the conversion rate.
That was for some deposit and on my first day I went up to the dean of the London university to find an angle to take the deposit back - he could n't.
It was a strange law.
I abandoned pure maths in the Grk university to study engineering in London.
The junta government we had at the time said "since you are abandoning the Grk uni for something else it means you are probably trying to escape - so you have to leave a deposit".
Today this amount of money buys ten packets of fags and this is the work of both socialist and conservative governments.
90% the work of the socialists and 10% of the conservatives - who are promising to do away with socialist taxes and then keep them in place.
But strangely the only one who did something about taxes was socialist Simitis in 2002-2003.
We proceeded to vote him out of office in favour of conservative Karamanlis in 2004.
One year later his economics minister said "I 'm bringing all the socialist taxes back - I discovered that the socialist minister of 1994 who imposed them is a wonderful person
and we were terribly wrong about him".
I had some warning about this. One day I walked into the European commission's offices to enquire about something. The entrance hall and the porter's desk were empty and 
I saw a Christmas card open on a table and picked it up. It was from the old socialist minister to the new one saying "to Georgios my dearest of friends merry christmas - Giannos". I don't know
how that find itself there - maybe post office mistake.
 

Edited March 23 by cosmicway

[Fernando 6,378]

23 hours ago, Vesper said:

Looks like it was ISIS related.

I'm surprised ISIS attack them since Russia ally with Iran. And ISIS does not mess with Iran. So going with Russia is kind going against Iran.....

[lucio 5,418]

1 hour ago, Fernando said:

I'm surprised ISIS attack them since Russia ally with Iran. And ISIS does not mess with Iran. So going with Russia is kind going against Iran.....

Doubt it was them they just claim credit , probably Ukraine and USA behind it 

[Vesper 27,378]

1 hour ago, Fernando said:

I'm surprised ISIS attack them since Russia ally with Iran. And ISIS does not mess with Iran. So going with Russia is kind going against Iran.....

ISIS hates Iran and attacks them regularly, ISIS thinks all Shi'ites are apostates

Islamic State claims responsibility for deadly Iran attack, Tehran vows revenge

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-vows-revenge-after-biggest-attack-since-1979-revolution-2024-01-04/

DUBAI, Jan 4 (Reuters) - Islamic State claimed responsibility on Thursday for two explosions in Iran that killed nearly 100 people and wounded scores at a memorial for top commander Qassem Soleimani.

 

In a statement posted on its affiliate Telegram channels, the militant Sunni Muslim group said two IS members had detonated explosive belts in the crowd that had gathered at the cemetery in the southeastern Iranian city of Kerman on Wednesday.

 

The memorial was marking the fourth anniversary of the death of Soleimani, who was assassinated in Iraq in 2020 by a U.S. drone. In Washington, White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters the United States was in no position to doubt Islamic State's claim that it was responsible for Wednesday's attack.

 

Tehran has vowed revenge for the bloodiest such attack since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The twin blasts also wounded 284 people, including children. "A very strong retaliation will be meted out to them by the hands of the soldiers of Soleimani," Iran's First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber told reporters in Kerman.

 

Iranian authorities have called for mass protests on Friday, when the funerals of the victims of the twin blasts will be held, state media reported.

 

Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps described the attacks as a cowardly act "aimed at creating insecurity and seeking revenge against the nation's deep love and devotion to the Islamic Republic".

 

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has condemned what he called Wednesday's "heinous and inhumane crime". Iran's top authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, vowed revenge for the bombings.

 

The United Nations Security Council in a statement condemned what it called Wednesday's "cowardly terrorist attack" and sent its condolences to the victims' families and the Iranian government.

 

More details about the authors of the attack and their motives could not be immediately established. But Aaron Zelin, an expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy thinktank, said he would not be surprised if the attack was mounted by the Islamic State branch based in neighbouring Afghanistan, known as ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K.

 

Tehran, he said, has alleged that ISIS-K has been behind many foiled plots in the last five years. Most of those arrested were Iranians, Central Asians, or Afghans from the Afghanistan-based affiliate's network rather than from the group's Iraq and Syria network.

 

ISIS, he said, harbours a virulent hatred for Shiites - Iran's dominant sect and often the target of attacks by the group in Afghanistan – who it views as apostates, and for years has made threats against Tehran.

 

A Taliban crackdown has weakened ISIS-K inside Afghanistan, forcing some members to move to neighbouring states, but the group has continued plotting operations outside the country, according to U.S. officials.

 

"ISIS-Khorasan's increased external focus is probably the most concerning development," said a U.S. National Counterterrorism Center report published in August in CTC Sentinel, a publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

 

In 2022 Islamic State claimed responsibility for a deadly attack on a Shi'ite shrine in Iran that killed 15 people, while earlier attacks claimed by Islamic State include twin bombings in 2017 that targeted Iran's parliament and the tomb of the Islamic Republic's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

 

The attack coincides with a three-month outbreak of fresh hostilities between Israel and Gaza, and Iranian state TV earlier showed crowds gathered at cities across Iran, including Kerman, chanting: "Death to Israel" and "Death to America".

 

The United States denied on Wednesday any involvement in the explosions and said it also had no reason to believe Israel was involved. It said the blasts appeared to represent "a terrorist attack" of the type carried out in the past by Islamic State.

 

Tehran often accuses its arch enemies, Israel and the United States, of backing anti-Iran militant groups that have carried out attacks in the past. Baluchi militants and ethnic Arab separatists have also staged attacks in Iran.

 

The U.S. assassination of Soleimani in a Jan. 3, 2020, drone attack at Baghdad airport, and Tehran's retaliation - by attacking two Iraqi military bases that house U.S. troops - brought the United States and Iran close to full-blown conflict.

 

As chief commander of the elite Quds force, the overseas arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, Soleimani ran clandestine operations abroad and was a key figure in Iran's longstanding campaign to drive U.S. forces from the Middle East.

[Vesper 27,378]

I exposed Tavistock clinic. Now gender ideology is even more entrenched

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hannah-barnes-tavistock-clinic-gender-identity-trans-dzknslv9x

Tucked to one side in the lobby of the BBC’s New Broadcasting House, there is a statue of George Orwell, which Hannah Barnes used to walk past every day on her way to her job as investigations producer at Newsnight. It was the inscription beside it that would play on her mind: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.”

That phrase has become symbolic of Barnes’s long crusade to expose what was really happening at the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), based at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, both through her reporting at the BBC and through her bestselling book Time to Think, which was published last year.

The book was a damning account of the groupthink that led to more than 2,000 children in the UK being prescribed experimental drugs with little evidence to suggest they would help them. Rigorously investigated and calmly reported, Barnes’s book helped to reset the dial in the febrile national conversation about the treatment of children with gender identity issues.

The updated paperback, published next week, is no less revelatory. In it Barnes, 42, exposes the extent of the chaos that has paralysed youth gender services since NHS England announced in 2022 that Gids would close. Far from marking the end of the medicalisation of children’s gender issues, it resulted in positions becoming even more entrenched. “When I first wrote the conclusion to this book, I said that I had ‘not found Gids staff to be in the grip of an ideology’,” Barnes writes in the updated paperback. “But I am not so sure I would make the same assessment now.”

The book describes how, as the waiting list of young people needing treatment for gender issues has spiralled to more than 6,000, GPs working for the NHS have been exploiting loopholes to prescribe cross-sex hormones to 16-year-olds and some private practices have been prescribing puberty blockers to children as young as 13.

Given the sound and fury that characterises the trans debate, it’s not surprising that Barnes encountered some obstacles to her story, yet the details are sobering. She started digging into Gids in 2019 when a report by Dr David Bell, then a consultant psychiatrist at the trust and the staff governor, was leaked to The Sunday Times. Bell said Gids was providing “woefully inadequate” care to its patients and that its own staff had “ethical concerns” about some of the service’s practices, such as giving “highly disturbed and distressed” children access to puberty blockers.

It transpired that staff had been raising concerns since as early as 2005, primarily about the trust’s willingness to prescribe puberty blockers — strong drugs meant for treating children going through puberty early — to children as young as 12. These cases were frequently complex, involving children who often had histories of abuse, self-harm and eating disorders, but at Gids they were treated for one thing only, in what would later be labelled “diagnostic overshadowing”. Little was known about the long-term impact of the drugs.

Staff who raised concerns — a sizeable minority — were silenced in an increasingly toxic wider environment. What Barnes brought to the debate was balance: a compassionate, fact-based approach in which her own opinions are notably absent.

People are always curious to know what her personal interest in the story is. Barnes, who has two young children and lives with her husband, Pat, an IT consultant, insists that there isn’t one. “It was a healthcare story,” she says, “about the prescription quite routinely of a really powerful drug which is not licensed for this purpose and for which we have no long-term data.”

 

She reported what she found: that while some studies describe the self-reported high satisfaction of young people and their families as a result of being on puberty blockers, others suggest that they lead to changes in sexuality and sexual function, poor bone health, stunted height, low mood and tumour-like masses in the brain. Those treated early enough who later moved on to taking cross-sex hormones — which can involve giving oestrogen to biological males or testosterone to biological females — experienced infertility.

The BBC did not always appreciate the significance of the story, says Barnes, who had been at the corporation for 16 years, but left this year to join the New Statesman as associate editor. “The BBC didn’t really back our work at all,” she says. “I mean, it wasn’t blocked but there’s a really big difference [between running a story and properly projecting it].” She was lucky, she says, to have had two extremely supportive editors on Newsnight, but getting any backing from the wider organisation was a struggle. Her early films on the subject “weren’t promoted across the BBC. It wasn’t like Panorama, you didn’t hear it on the news bulletins, you didn’t see it on the Six or the Ten [O’Clock News]”. She and her editors would have to “push and push” to get stories written up online.

She was editing Newsnight on the night she revealed that the Tavistock trust’s medical director, Dr Dinesh Sinha, had failed to mention a number of safeguarding concerns raised by Gids staff in a review he had published of the service. It was a turning point in the story: a revelation that prompted the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to conduct its own review, in which Gids would ultimately be rated “inadequate”. Barnes had worked a 16-hour shift, editing the package down so that the story could air on the various news bulletins. None of it ran. “It wasn’t anywhere on the BBC. The online piece was so buried that even though I had written it, I couldn’t find it.”

She thinks the organisation was crippled by fear. “It is a fact that every time we did a film or segment, there were complaints. But so what? If you don’t cover important topics because you’re scared of complaints, where do you end up?”

Barnes has become accustomed to obstacles. Her book was turned down by 22 publishers before it was eventually picked up by the independent Swift press (in a neat twist, it was shortlisted for the Orwell prize for political writing last year). “One of the clinicians I spoke to described the word ‘gender’ as being a magic cloak and somehow everyone assumes it’s so special that none of the normal rules apply,” she says.

If some of this fear has dissipated, it is in no small part thanks to her. “Several MPs have been in touch and said that [the book] is what has shifted things for them and that they feel in Westminster that it’s easier to talk about than it was,” Barnes says.

More importantly, perhaps, the medical establishment appears to be changing direction — or trying to. European countries, including Norway, Denmark and Germany, are now moving towards a more cautious, less medicalised approach — though Australia and America are not.

Earlier this month NHS England published new guidance banning the prescription of puberty blockers to children unless it is part of a clinical trial. Yet Barnes is cautious. The decision by NHS England to publish new guidance last week, allowing cross-sex hormones for people “around their 16th birthday”, has “baffled” her, she says. Previously, 16-year-olds could access hormones only if they had been on puberty blockers for 12 months.

The new guidance, which was published without consultation, is a radical shift away from the planned direction for the new youth services, “which was for a therapeutic, talking first, non-medical or at least last-ditch medical approach”, Barnes says.

Little is known about the long-term effects of hormone therapy. “For those born female, even a short period of time on testosterone will have completely irreversible effects,” she argues. “The question is whether anyone approaching their 16th birthday can possibly understand the full consequences of what they are doing.”

People are finding ways to push beyond the more cautious, less medicalised approach. Barnes writes that Sam Hall, a GP partner at the Brighton Health and Wellbeing centre, appears to have been prescribing cross-sex hormones to 16-year-olds with little in the way of assessment, by issuing “bridging prescriptions” intended to sustain a patient with gender identity issues until they can see a specialist. Barnes interviewed the parents of Charlotte, “a vulnerable 16-year-old” who has been identified as having severe autism and ADHD. Her parents believe that she was able to get an advance prescription for testosterone from Hall after a ten-minute consultation using this loophole.

Hall, who is himself transgender and has described his own experience of starting hormones as “sublime”, has become a focal point for those seeking treatment. At least two charities, Gendered Intelligence, which supports trans children and their families, and Allsorts, a Brighton youth charity, have been referring gender-dysphoric young people to Hall’s clinic, according to Barnes. Charlotte’s mother claims to have spoken to at least ten other families whose children have been prescribed hormones at 16 by Hall. The Wellbeing centre told Barnes: “We use the well-established principle of Gillick competence to assess capacity to consent in young peoples, as per NHS guidance.”

Meanwhile, more than 6,000 distressed young people are waiting for treatment — a situation Barnes describes as “shameful”. The level of anger among them is unsurprising, she says. “This [the use of puberty blockers] was allowed to go on for so long without the evidence base,” she says. “There are thousands of teenagers who believe that this is the only thing that can help them.” Barnes’s message is still one that divides opinion: there is no evidence that it does.

 

 

 

 

[NikkiCFC 7,601]

9 hours ago, lucio said:

Doubt it was them they just claim credit , probably Ukraine and USA behind it 

Theory of inside job is also not out of question. 

[cosmicway 1,261]

10 hours ago, Fernando said:

I'm surprised ISIS attack them since Russia ally with Iran. And ISIS does not mess with Iran. So going with Russia is kind going against Iran.....

They do and they mess even with talibanesque Afghanistan.

[Fulham Broadway 16,423]

11 hours ago, Fernando said:

I'm surprised ISIS attack them since Russia ally with Iran. And ISIS does not mess with Iran. So going with Russia is kind going against Iran.....

ISIS are useful bogeymen for some states. Israel looked after them, and gave them medical treatment in Syria