Shouts of ‘genocide’ in Commons as David Lammy denounces Israel’s ‘intolerable’ actions in Gaza

Published

13 hours ago

May 20, 2025

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The foreign secretary has denounced Israel’s actions in Gaza as “intolerable” but stopped short of saying it had committed genocide.

MPs could be heard shouting “genocide” in the Commons chamber as David Lammy announced the government was suspending its trade negotiations with Israel and summoning Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, to the Foreign Office.

The UK has also sanctioned a number of individuals and groups in the West Bank which it says have been linked with acts of violence against Palestinians – including Daniella Weiss, a leading settler activist who was the subject of Louis Theroux’s recent documentary The Settlers.

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Israel immediately criticised the UK government actions as “regrettable” and said the free trade agreement talks, which ministers have now backed out of, were “not being advanced at all by the UK government”.

Oren Marmorstein, a spokesperson for the Israeli foreign affairs ministry, said: “If, due to anti-Israel obsession and domestic political considerations, the British government is willing to harm the British economy – that is its own prerogative.”

Mr Lammy’s intervention came in response to Israel ramping up its latest military offensive in Gaza and its decision to limit the amount of aid into the enclave.

Tom Fletcher, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, accused Israel of “deliberately and unashamedly” imposing inhumane conditions on Palestinians by blocking aid from entering Gaza more than 10 weeks ago.

He also told the UN’s security council last week that it must “act now” to “prevent genocide” – a claim that Israel has vehemently denied.

Speaking in the Commons, the foreign secretary said the threat of starvation was “hanging over hundreds of thousands of civilians” and that the 11-week blockade stopping humanitarian aid reaching Gaza was “indefensible and cruel”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to allow a limited amount of aid into the besieged enclave in response to global concern at reports of famine.

Mr Lammy said Mr Netanyahu’s govenrment was “isolating Israel from its friends and partners around the world, undermining the interests of the Israeli people and damaging the image of the state of Israel in the eyes of the world”.

“We are now entering a dark new phase in this conflict,” Mr Lammy added.

“Netanyahu’s government is planning to drive Gazans from their homes into a corner of the strip to the south and permit them a fraction of the aid that they need.”

Referring to one of the far-right ministers in Mr Netanyahu’s government, he said Bezalel Smotrich “even spoke of Israeli forces cleansing Gaza, destroying what’s left of residents, Palestinians being relocated, he said, to third countries”.

MPs from across the house shouted “genocide” as Mr Lammy said: “We must call this what it is. It is extremism. It is dangerous. It is repellent. It is monstrous and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.”

In the Commons, a number of Labour MPs urged the government to go further against Israel.

Yasmin Qureshi, the Labour MP for Bolton South and Walkden, said there needed to be a “full arms embargo” and said: “Can I ask the foreign secretary what additional steps he’s going to be taking in order to stave off this genocide?”

Another Labour MP told Sky News that while the statement was “better than previously…without a concrete timeline and a sanctioning of responsible ministers, it’s hard to know what tangible difference it will make.”

Israeli officials have said its plans to seize all of Gaza and hold it indefinitely. – which would move the civilian population southward – will help it achieve its aim of defeating Hamas.

Israel also believes the offensive will prevent Hamas from looting and distributing humanitarian aid, which it says strengthens the group’s rule in Gaza.

Mr Netanyahu has defended Israel’s actions in Gaza and reacted angrily to a joint statement penned by the leaders of the UK, France and Canada, in which they urged Israel to end its military offensive in Gaza and lift restrictions on humanitarian aid allowed into the enclave.

The Israeli prime minister said: “By asking Israel to end a defensive war for our survival before Hamas terrorists on our border are destroyed and by demanding a Palestinian state, the leaders in London, Ottawa and Paris are offering a huge prize for the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7 while inviting more such atrocities.

“No nation can be expected to accept anything less and Israel certainly won’t. This is a war of civilisation over barbarism. Israel will continue to defend itself by just means until total victory is achieved.”

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‘Hawk tuah girl’ Haliey Welch says FBI probed her ‘memecoin disaster’

Published

3 hours ago

May 21, 2025

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‘Hawk tuah girl’ Haliey Welch says FBI probed her ‘memecoin disaster’

Haliey Welch, better known as the “Hawk tuah girl,” says the Federal Bureau of Investigation briefly probed her after her “memecoin disaster” — the failed launch of a token in her image that she promoted.

Welch said in a May 21 episode of her “Talk Tuah” podcast that the FBI showed up at her grandmother’s house looking to speak to her over the Hawk Tuah (HAWK) crypto token, which many crypto commentators have called an exit scam.

“After the coin launch, the feds came to granny’s house and knocked on her door, and she called me, having a heart attack, saying: ‘The FBI is here after you, what have you done?’”

Welch said she handed over her phone to the FBI and met with agents who “interrogated me, asking me questions and everything else related to crypto.”

“They cleared me, I was good to go,” Welch said.

Welch went viral for her response about an oral sex technique in a vox pop interview posted to YouTube in June.

The HAWK memecoin, based on her viral catchphrase, launched in early December and almost immediately lost 90% of its value and blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps’ alleged insider wallets and snipers bought up and dumped massive quantities of the token at launch.

Welch said on her podcast that the Securities and Exchange Commission also asked for her phone, and she sent it off “for two or three days” before she was cleared.

Welch’s lawyer James Sallah told TMZ in March that the SEC “closed the investigation without making any findings against, or seeking any monetary sanctions from, Haliey.”

“I trusted the wrong people”

Welch admitted knowing very little about crypto before the HAWK memecoin and said she “trusted the wrong people” for the launch.

She claimed a company, which she said she couldn’t name for legal reasons, was in full control of her X account, which posted videos of her promoting the memecoin.

Welch said she was sent lines to record on video, which were then posted on her X account by someone she trusted but could also not legally name.

She added that on the day of HAWK’s launch, she “kind of knew something was up” and was pulled into a room where a team of people told her to talk on a livestream with YouTuber Stephen Findeisen, better known as Coffeezilla.

“Coffeezilla got on there and they’re like ‘Mute it, mute it,’” Welch said. “Nobody warned me about this guy at all, like nobody at all, they didn’t tell me he was like a crypto wizard, that’s exactly what he is — he ate me the fuck up.”

Welch said she was only paid a marketing fee and “did not make a dime from the coin itself,” which she said had been totally spent on legal and public relations fees.

Despite being cleared of any legal wrongdoing, Welch took some accountability, admitting that she let many of her fans down who invested in the coin:

“It makes me feel really bad that they trusted me, and I led them to something that I did not have enough knowledge about. I did not have enough knowledge about crypto to be getting involved with it. And I knew that, but I got talked into it, and I trusted the wrong people.”

A group of HAWK buyers sued the alleged creators of the token in December, claiming Alex Schultz, the token’s backing Tuah the Moon Foundation, the token launchpad overHere Limited, and its founder Clinton So promoted and sold HAWK as an unregistered security.

Welch wasn’t named as a defendant.

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Politics

Revealed: Why Keir Starmer’s strategy to tackle Reform UK could end up backfiring

Published

4 hours ago

May 21, 2025

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Revealed: Why Keir Starmer's strategy to tackle Reform UK could end up backfiring

Has Labour got the right strategy to tackle Reform UK?

Nigel Farage’s party cost the Tories dozens, maybe 100-plus seats at the general election. Now it looks like the party is hitting Labour too. But has Sir Keir Starmer got the right answers?

Last year, Labour won a landslide because the Tory vote collapsed, in part because Reform UK took chunks of their supporters in constituencies across the UK.

And here is the situation on 1 May this year – the national equivalent vote share at the council elections put Reform well ahead in first place. Success – this time at the expense of Labour too.

How big a threat is this to MPs? As a very crude experiment, Sky News has looked at what would happen if this result was replicated evenly across parliamentary constituencies.

Within the areas where there were county council elections are 77 complete Westminster seats with sitting Labour MPs.

This includes places like Wycombe, where Treasury minister Emma Reynolds holds. Or Lincoln, won by Foreign Office minister Hamish Falconer.

Now if – for fun – we mapped the country council results from 1 May evenly across these general election constituencies, almost all those Labour seats are gone. All lost, apart from five. That’s 72 out of 77 Labour MPs losing their seats and mostly to Reform UK.

What if we took that swing an applied across the whole country, places where there weren’t local elections?

Angela Rayner in Greater Manchester and Jess Phillips in Birmingham would lose their seats.

Yes this is a crude measure – it assumes a uniform swing can be drawn from the 1 May polls – and local and national elections are very different.

But importantly, YouGov’s latest national opinion polls paint a similar picture to the council elections. Meanwhile, 89 out of 98 constituencies where Reform came second place have Labour in first. Labour MPs are feeling the heat from Farage.

The Reform threat is real. Sir Keir Starmer knows it – and this year has started chasing Reform votes. Slashing aid spending. Abandoning green promises. Hard talk about immigration and living on an “Island of Strangers”.

Sensible given the clear and evident Reform UK threat? Actually – maybe not. Look at the data in detail:

This block here is all the people who voted Labour in last year’s general election. Now thanks to YouGov polling, we know what people in this block would do with their vote now.

It shows Labour has lost more than half of last year’s voters. Just 46% still say they’d still vote for Sir Keir’s party. But – despite the PM’s strategy – they’re not actually going to Reform in large numbers.

Just 6% of Labour’s voters at last year’s general election – six out of every 100 – said they would vote Reform now. That’s all. So where have they gone?

Well, they’ve been lost much more to liberal and left-wing parties – 12% to the Lib Dems, 9% to the Greens.

So just pause there. That means the number of Labour voters who have switched to the Lib Dems and Greens, arguably on the left of the political spectrum, is three times the number going to Reform to the right.

Just 2% go to the Tories.

And much more seriously for Labour, 22% aren’t going to vote, don’t know or won’t say.

The bottom line is people who voted Reform have never backed Labour in large numbers.

This shows how Reform supporters last year voted in each election since 2005. You can see – Reform voters are former UKIP voters. They’re Boris Johnson’s Tories.

Let’s put it another way. While 11% of Labour voters may one day be open to voting Reform, 70% are at risk of going to the Lib Dems or Greens – seven times the threat from Reform.

And typically, these voters don’t like the hard line, Reform-leaning policies of Sir Keir Starmer recently.

The local elections show there is a threat to Labour from Reform. But our data suggests Keir Starmer trying to be Nigel Farage lite isn’t the answer.

Is Labour’s strategy really working?

Politics

SEC charges Unicoin and executives for alleged $100 million fraud

Published

6 hours ago

May 21, 2025

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SEC charges Unicoin and executives for alleged 0 million fraud

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged crypto platform Unicoin and three of its executives, alleging they made false and misleading statements about its crypto assets that raised $100 million from investors.

The SEC said on May 20 that it charged Unicoin CEO Alex Konanykhin, board member Silvina Moschini, and former investment chief Alex Dominguez with misleading investors about certificates that conveyed rights to receive Unicoin tokens and stock.

Mark Cave, associate director in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, claimed the trio “exploited thousands of investors with fictitious promises that its tokens, when issued, would be backed by real-world assets including an international portfolio of valuable real estate holdings.”

“The real estate assets were worth a mere fraction of what the company claimed, and the majority of the company’s sales of rights certificates were illusory,” Cave added.

The SEC’s complaint, filed in a Manhattan federal court, charged Unicoin and the three executives with various securities laws violations and asks for permanent injunctive relief, along with paying back the allegedly ill-gotten gains.

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