Trump & Israel Panic; Iran Adds To Their Hormuz Leverage

Starmer’s Palestine Crackdown Just Blew Up In His Face

The Starmer government's determination to see palestine Action sent down appears to now be providing cover for something even more sinister... Right, so a café owner in Manchester went to a police station to pick up devices the police had taken off him in an earlier case, and the police, instead of just handing them back, sat him down and tried to recruit him as a spy. Shams Sadiq, fifty-one years old, owns two cafés in Manchester, is known locally for his pro-Palestine activism, and he says that on the fifteenth of May two officers at Ashton-under-Lyne police station asked to speak to him "man to man," told him they'd been through his devices, told him they knew he was, in their phrase, fully involved with Palestine Action, and then told him he wouldn't be charged in relation to that earlier arrest. No charges on that. Just a favour. They said there were benefits in helping them. He asked what kind, financial? Were they going to pay his taxes? And the answer, more or less, was yes, we can help with things like that. One of them added there were other benefits too. They weren't saying he could go out and commit a serious crime, you understand, they were far too professional for that, but they could turn a blind eye to certain low-level things. So this is the law-and-order government, isn't it? This is the terrorism crackdown. The one that's already blown up in the government's own face in the High Court, though we'll get to that. And it has arrived at the point where the actual mechanism is a copper leaning across a desk offering financial benefits and leniency around low-level offences if you'll grass on your mates.

Reform Smelled Blood In Makerfield - Now It’s Their Own

As Reform's Makerfield candidate cracks up further, Labour and the Greens seem intent on self sabotage. Right, so Reform UK walked into Makerfield looking for blood, and the first body on the floor turned out to be their own candidate. Makerfield is a working-class seat just outside Wigan, in Greater Manchester, an old Labour heartland Reform has spent two years desperate to crack open to prove it can finish Labour off in the north. So they went and picked a local man, Robert Kenyon, a 41-year-old plumber and Wigan councillor, born in the area, exactly the "one of us" pitch Reform loves to run. And within days of his selection his old internet posts came crawling back to bury the campaign. On a rugby league forum he'd written, in his own words, "I'm sexist, sorry but I am," that women "can't referee, drive or give directions." There were posts sneering at women who have abortions, posts about women's bodies, and degrading comments about Carol Vorderman, who turned round and called him a misogynist and an online abuser, in public, by name. The material reported in the press was sexist and homophobic, and Reform still chose to defend him as a straight-talking local candidate. And Reform's answer to all of it? Their MP Danny Kruger went on the radio and called them the "private" comments of "an ordinary man," while a party spokesman waved the whole pile away as "locker room banter" from over a decade ago and sniffed that they "simply don't care about establishment hit jobs." Well how about this instead then Danny – is this a hit job, or just a man woefully out of his depth?

A US War Bill Just Gave Israel Something Worse Than Weapons

A hidden section of an upcoming US war bill is about to hand Israel the keys to the US defence kingdom and nobody is talking about it Right, so the week most of the American public turned against arming Israel, Congress quietly handed Israel something it has wanted for years and could never get through the front door. Not more rifles. Not another shipment of bombs. A merger. There's a single page buried in the new House defence bill that would fuse the American and Israeli militaries together more tightly than America is fused to any country on Earth, and it was written to slide past you before anyone got to vote on it. It's called Section 224, it sits inside House of Representatives Bill 8800, the new National Defence Authorisation Act, and the man who released it on the 26th of May is the House Armed Services chairman Mike Rogers, the Republican from Alabama. His committee votes on it on the 4th of June, so this coming Thursday, not long to kick up a fuss about in the meantime then? This is very much in the present and the near future, and it isn't a warning about something that might happen one day. It's on the table this week, and what's on the table is Israel getting wired into the machinery of America's next war. Section 224 carries the polite little title "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative," which is the sort of name you give something precisely so people scroll straight past it.

Trump's Warmongering EXPLODES; Iran Return Strike A US NIGHTMARE

Trump thought he was sending Iran a message; The reply came back with a new return address courtesy of Kuwait. Right, so Iran has fired a missile at an American air base in Kuwait, and the worst part of that sentence, for Trump anyway, isn't the Iranian bit. It's the American bit. Because it's the United States military itself, through Central Command, the lot who run every American operation across the Middle East, that has come out and said Kuwait got hit, and called it an egregious ceasefire violation, very much forgetting they hit Bandar Abbas just the other day – that was the ceasefire violation or are they all getting as addled as the citrus skinned commander in chief they all follow? Well, a US official went further and said it was American forces in Kuwait that were the suspected target. So no, this isn't Tehran shouting into a microphone while Washington has a little chuckle. This is Washington itself confirming that the place where America parks its soldiers in the Gulf has just been hit, hours after Donald Trump's own forces went and struck inside Iran. And the man who's spent months telling everyone he's got Iran boxed in, that the pressure's working, that the deal's nearly done, has just watched one of his own base once again become the thing on the receiving end. And of course Iran, put a little bit of video out all about this, just to hammer the point home [CLIP] So leet me lay out who did what here, because the order matters, and Trump would much rather you didn't follow it too closely, he certainly doesn’t seem to. Late Wednesday night, Washington time, US Central Command says its forces shot down five Iranian one-way attack drones near the Strait of Hormuz.

Israel Went Hunting In Lebanon - Hezbollah Found The Commanders

Hezbollah's unstoppable drones have found a new target amongst the IDF - and it's causing some proper panic. Right, so the officer Israel handed one of its proudest armoured brigades is lying in a hospital in Haifa with a serious head wound, and the thing that put him there cost less than a second-hand motorbike. His name is Colonel Meir Biderman. He is forty-one, he commands the 401st Armoured Brigade, and on a Wednesday morning in southern Lebanon a Hezbollah drone struck him in the head. He was hit on the exact stretch of ground Benjamin Netanyahu keeps telling Israelis his army has under control. Not a missile. Not an ambush by some crack unit out of a film. A small flying machine, a bit of explosive, and a thread of glass that Israel's air defences cannot see, cannot jam and cannot stop. That is the weak spot, and it is a humiliating one. The most advanced air-defence shield in the region, walked straight past by a toy. Netanyahu sold this whole campaign as clean dominance: march into Lebanon, hunt Hezbollah down, make the north safe, come home the winner. It has reached the point where an army that bills itself as the most advanced in the world cannot keep its own brigade commanders alive on the ground it claims to own. Israel went into Lebanon as the hunter. Somewhere in those villages, the hunting quietly started going the other way.