NHS managers have been told not to sympathise with female colleagues worried about sharing toilets with biological males.

Thousands of workers at a hospital trust in the North East have been given a woke handbook which forbids team leaders using phrases such as 'I understand your concerns' to anyone who complains about the issue.

The 38-page document, which applies to more than 8,300 doctors, nurses and support staff, also says that it is discriminatory not to use a trans or non-binary person's preferred pronoun.

South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust has been accused of unlawfully discriminating against employees with gender-critical views, with critics calling it 'a recipe for bullying women'.

The Free Speech Union also said the policy must be withdrawn.

Ethiopia's military has clashed with fighters from a militia in the Amhara region, residents said on Wednesday, in an escalation of a simmering feud between the two former allies that a doctor said had caused more than a dozen injuries.

Fano, a part-time militia with no formal command structure, backed federal troops in a two-year civil war in the neighbouring Tigray region that ended with a truce last November.

But the relationship has soured over what some in the region say is a disregard by the national government for Amhara's security.

Igor Sofonov, a career criminal from the north Russian region of Karelia, is suspected of killing six residents of the village of Derevyannoye near Petrozavodsk. The Barents Observer has established that Sofonov fought in the Luhansk region of Ukraine in 2022.

On the night of August 1, a mass murder was committed in the village of Derevyanoe near the regional capital city of Petrozavodsk. Six people were stabbed to death - five men and a woman. The perpetrators killed an elderly man and his son, set fire to their house and went to another family. There they stabbed to death two disabled brothers, their sister and a retiree guest, after which they also set fire to the house.

The suspects were detained almost immediately. They turned out to be two residents of Karelia, Maxim Bochkaryov and Igor Sofonov. Both are repeat offenders. According to court databases, Bochkaryov was convicted of theft, carjacking, robberies, rape and sexual assault. Igor Sofonov had served sentences for thefts, robberies, and attempted murder. The men did time together — Sofonov's personal page has several pictures of them together in a prison setting.

More than a dozen Ulez enforcement cameras are vandalised or stolen every week, it was revealed on Wednesday.

With less than four weeks to go until the clean air zone is expanded to the Greater London boundary, the Met said it is investigating multiple reports of vigilantes attempting to sabotage Transport for London's equipment.

The theft of 11 Ultra Low Emission Zone cameras and 17 incidents of vandalism were reported to detectives between July 21 and August 1. At least eight in Chiswick have had their wires cut in recent weeks by so-called "blade runners".

It follows a spate of attacks earlier this year - with two men being charged with criminal damage in May.

The equipment uses Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology to identify the most polluting vehicles, that will face a £12.50 daily charge when the Ulez expands to outer London on August 29.

TfL contractors still have almost 1,000 cameras to install before the scheme goes live, while having to contend with vandalism and opposition from some councils to having them erected on local roads.

The FBI said Tuesday that it had found 200 victims of sex trafficking during a nationwide enforcement campaign last month called "Operation Cross Country."

The operation also led to the identification or arrest of 126 suspects of child sexual exploitation and human trafficking offenses, and 68 suspects of trafficking were identified or arrested.

The bureau and its partners found 59 minor victims of child sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation offenses and located 59 actively missing children during the two-week initiative.

Identified suspects will be subject to additional investigation for potential charges.

Partnering with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Operation Cross Country focused on identifying and locating victims of sex trafficking and investigating and arresting individuals and criminal enterprises involved in both child sex and human trafficking.

Law enforcement agencies identified and apprehended offenders, dismantling criminal networks.

Amazon.com (AMZN.O) said on Tuesday it is planning to invest about $7.2 billion through 2037 in Israel, and launched its Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the country.

Amazon's cloud services in the region will allow the country's government to run applications and store data in data centers located in Israel.

"The establishment of the Region will enable us to migrate substantial governmental workloads to the cloud, and we are confident that it will help us accelerate digital transformation in the public sector," said Yali Rothenberg, accountant general of Israel.

In never-before-seen footage that was withheld by Fox News, former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that January 6th was a complete debacle and a "cover up."

"Everything appears to be a cover up," Sund tells Carlson in footage obtained by the National Pulse. "Like I said, I'm not a conspiracy theorist," he continued. "...but when you look at the information and intelligence they had, the military had, it's all watered down. I'm not getting intelligence, I'm denied any support from National Guard in advance. I'm denied National Guard while we're under attack, for 71 minutes..."

Beginning around 19 minutes into the conversation, Sund tells Tucker: "If I was allowed to do my job as the chief we wouldn't be here, this didn't have to happen," adding that he's "pissed off" about being "lambasted in public" over what happened that day.

The full interview has thus far been hidden from the public at the behest of Rupert Murdoch's increasingly left-wing Fox News channel, which unceremoniously fired its prime time host Tucker Carlson allegedly as part of a private settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. -National Pulse

The news that the government may be in possession of "nonhuman" biological matter and UFOs was met with surprising apathy online.

The House Oversight subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs held a hearing on UFOs — officially known as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — on Wednesday. Lawmakers called for more transparency about UAPs and raised national defense concerns.

While the Defense Department has said there's no evidence linking UAPs to aliens yet, many social media users still took the hearing as proof aliens exist.

The hearing did spawn a lot of memes, but many of them signaled how uninterested users were in the findings.

UFOs, previously a hot topic for conspiracy theorists, are now almost too mundane to break through the news cycle, some users said.

"It's funny; they were talking about UFOs and 'non human biologics' in a hearing yesterday and nobody is paying any attention. There are so many conspiracy theories going on right now, we aren't even fascinated by Area 51 anymore," one person wrote.

On March 17, 2020, a group of several eminent virologists published a paper on the "proximal origin" of Covid-19. "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," it trumpeted. The editor in chief of Nature Medicine proudly retweeted it: "Let's put conspiracy theories about the origin of #SARSCoV2 to rest and help to stop spread of misinformation." The paper went on to say, "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."

One of the scientists, Kristian Andersen, sent an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci that morning, alerting him to the paper's publication. Fauci replied to Andersen that very day, "Thanks for your note. Nice job on the paper." He had praised an early draft of it as "very thoughtful summary and analysis."

Almost simultaneously, Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, which was the cutout through which the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded research on coronaviruses in Wuhan, sent an email to University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill virologist Ralph Baric informing him that an investigative committee would not be looking into a lab-origins theory.

Now Fauci tells the New York Times that he's not sure he ever read the paper.

One of the most well-known surgeons who operates on children under the guise of "gender affirming care" is Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher. She is recognized as both a renegade in her field and a human rights disaster in the making. Dr. Gallagher is infamous for her social media content, which misguides children into thinking that their bodies are wrong and should consider surgical interventions. Dr. Gallagher recruits adolescent customers by glamorizing the surgical experience. By telling these children that they are born in the wrong body and therefore a member of a marginalized demographic, she is able to convince these kids that they have a gender identity misalignment (that did not exist until they gained access to social media).

The way that activists like Dr. Gallagher talk about "transgender kids'' is similar to how one may talk about racial groups, sexual orientation, populations defined by immutable characteristics, using both quantitative and qualitative data in order to measure characteristics in these populations. "Transgender" does not work the same way. Since gender is socially constructed, the way it manifests in our culture is completely dependent on the way that society views gender norms. Unlike the gay/lesbian population, which is measurable and cross-culturally remains consistent over time, gender-diverse populations manifest based on the sociocultural norms that change over time. It is impossible to define a group of people based on a philosophical belief that has no basis in material reality. Similar to being straight, being LGB is something that you are. "Trans" is something that you do, whether that entails pursuing medical intervention or simply going off of self-identification. Two people may undergo medical interventions for completely unrelated reasons and barely have anything in common. A middle-aged male who pursues this treatment due to autogynephilic transvestism has a completely different reality and experience than a teenage girl on the autism spectrum who is unsure of their identity. In Iran, gay men are forced to undergo these procedures as a way to "convert" them, turning gay men into a transsexually-constructed medical victims, whose culture could not stand the fact that some men are more feminine and not interested in women. What we refer to as "transgender" takes different forms depending on societal context - it is currently being forced upon children. In actuality, "transgender" is a sociopolitical/ideological term that is attributed to various groups of people, based on the notion that their biological sex is irrelevant to their human existence. This creates a lot of confusion, especially when it comes to children. Perhaps the first mistake was turning a clinically-defined population into an identity group in the first place.