Dr Mimi Syed, a US emergency physician, joins Centre Stage to talk about the horrific reality she witnessed during her two trips to Gaza in 2024. She shares evidence she says indicates the Israeli military is deliberately targeting children, the stories she carries from the patients and families she met and explains why she believes the US is no longer merely an accessory to Israel’s war on Gaza— but fully complicit.
Published On 4 Sep 20254 Sep 2025
THERE is a reckoning coming. The people of Britain have had enough.
A new poll by Find Out Now has Reform UK winning a majority of 140 seats at the next general election. The big poll-of-polls gives us a 10-point lead. People are fed up. And one thing they are fed up with the most is illegal immigration.
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I went along to watch a protest outside the Britannia Hotel in London’s Canary Wharf, now a luxury hostel for asylum seekers, and felt for myself how high feelings are running.
Protesters like the famous Pink Ladies don’t want these illegal immigrants in their communities. Does anybody? Who voted for this madness?
That’s why our party, Reform UK, is backing more peaceful protests and asking people to demand that their local councils take action to empty the migrant hotels. But we can’t stop there.
We need to detain and deport illegal immigrants. Then I think they’re going to stop coming, and we can get back to some sort of peace and normality.
It’s no wonder people are angry. Just look at the shocking numbers that came out this past week.
We learned that, in the year up to June 2025, 110,000 more migrants applied for asylum in Britain –that’s the highest number since records began. More than 50,000 illegal immigrants have landed on our beaches since Labour were elected last July.
At the end of June, 32,100 asylum seekers were housed in hotels at taxpayers’ expense – up another 8 per cent since Keir Starmer moved into 10 Downing Street.
Over that same year, the Labour government spent £4.76 billion managing the asylum mess that they and their Tory predecessors have created.
This outrageous sum is the equivalent of hiring 86,500 more police officers, or 16 million winter fuel payments for British pensioners at the higher rate.
If I were a young male over the Channel in a migrant camp, I’d be thinking to myself it doesn’t matter where I’m from or what I’ve done in the past, get on a small boat to Britain and within 24 hours I could be in a four-star hotel, three meals a day, wifi, mobile phone, free to roam the streets and do pretty much whatever you want, because the authorities haven’t got the foggiest who you are.
What have we done as a nation? We see it in the news every week now, that an asylum seeker has been either charged or found guilty of disgusting attacks on women and girls.
The door’s open, we’ve invited these people in, some of them serious wrong ‘uns, and treated them like honoured guests.
But the tide is starting to turn. Last week the decent people of Epping in Essex won a big victory for us all, when the high court ruled that asylum seekers must leave the town’s Bell Hotel.
Parents and concerned residents had been protesting outside the hotel since an illegal migrant housed there was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
They were slandered as “far-right” lunatics by Labour and the BBC, and attacked by leftie “Antifa” thugs who we saw being bussed in by the police! But they bravely stood up and won, despite home secretary Yvette Cooper shamefully hiring expensive lawyers to attack them in court.
People around the country are now protesting outside migrant hotels and telling their councils to take action. Nigel Farage was the first to call for more peaceful protests, and the councils that Reform won in the May elections will do everything in their power to follow Epping’s lead.
Now we need to go further. Next week, Reform UK will announce our proposals for mass deportations that will finally stop the boats and tackle the crisis.
And we are very clear that, to make this happen, the UK will need to quit the European Convention on Human Rights, which lets liberal foreign judges override the sovereignty of our parliament on immigration law.
This is a national emergency. Labour’s latest scheme, to move migrants from hotels into homes into our communities, can only make matters worse.
But let’s not forget that the last Conservative government started the problem. So it’s a bit rich for them to start attacking migrant hotels now.
When I was a Tory MP, I spoke up asking the government to detain illegal immigrants in secure camps ready for deportation. Instead, they housed them in hotels.
I was constantly told to shut up by the “One Nation” lot of Conservative MPs. This is of their making, and they should all apologise right now.
Reform Uk stands foursquare with the people protesting peacefully across Britain. And we will defend free speech against the authorities that want to lock up anybody who speaks out.
On a protest in my constituency of Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, some women in their sixties and seventies came up to me and said Lee, are we really far-right? And I said no, you’re just right.
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Leaders in the LGBTQ+ rights movement are taking stock and looking for lessons after a difficult few years.
When the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Obergefell vs. Hodges case 10 years ago that same-sex couples have a right to marry nationwide, the sense of triumph was palpable. Celebrations broke out in the streets, and courthouses were flooded with newlyweds.
But that wasn’t the only response.
Opponents of LGBTQ+ rights immediately began implementing new strategies to limit the decision’s reach and reverse the broader momentum toward LGBTQ+ acceptance, including by casting a small, less understood subset of the queer community — transgender people — as a growing threat to American families and values.
“Right after Obergefell, every effort to advance any equality measure was met with an anti-trans backlash,” said Chase Strangio, a transgender attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the nation’s leading voices on LGBTQ+ legal rights.
In statehouses and governors’ mansions across the country, the number of bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights have increased year after year, with 800 being introduced this year alone. The Trump administration also has embraced the shift, with federal agencies aggressively investigating California and threatening its funding over its trans-inclusive policies. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that states may ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors.
The White House is lighted in rainbow colors in 2015 after the Supreme Court’s ruling to legalize same-sex marriage.
(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)
The strategy has delighted many conservatives. But it has also frightened a community that had seen itself as being on a path toward progress, reviving discussions about the legacy of the Obergefell decision and igniting a fierce debate within the community about the wisdom of its political strategy over the past decade.
Some have questioned whether the efforts since Obergefell to broaden transgender rights were pursued too fast, too soon, playing into the hands of the movement’s political foes. Others say those concerns sound strikingly similar to ones raised during the fight for marriage equality, when some argued that same-sex couples should settle for civil unions to avoid alienating religious moderates.
The conversation is not a comfortable one. Nerves are raw and fear is palpable. Some worry that pointing the finger will further embolden those working to dismantle LGBTQ+ rights. But others argue that a strategic reassessment is necessary after years of setbacks.
“This can be an inflection point for how we move forward — whether we galvanize resources in [an] aligned effort to push back, [or] continue to let ourselves be divided by campaigns and movements and strategies that seek to divide us,” Strangio said. “That’s the real question for this moment.”
Strangio, now co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, had worked on the Obergefell case and was outside the Supreme Court the day the decision came down. He thought about his younger self, and how impossible such a ruling would have seemed just years before — when state marriage bans were sweeping the country.
But he didn’t have much time to dwell on the victory, he said, as it became clear “within minutes” that anti-LGBTQ+ forces were already regrouping and preparing for the next fight.
One of their first targets was transgender people’s use of public bathrooms. Within months of the Obergefell decision, voters in Houston rejected an anti-discrimination measure after opponents falsely claimed that the ordinance’s gender-identity protections would allow sexual predators to enter women’s bathrooms.
In 2016, North Carolina passed the nation’s first law barring transgender people from using bathrooms aligned with their identities. The measure sparked huge backlash and statewide boycotts, led in part by corporate America — and the bill was rolled back in 2017.
People gather in North Carolina in 2016 to protest the state’s restrictive bathroom bill.
(Emery P. Dalesio / Associated Press)
LGBTQ+ activists were jubilant, viewing North Carolina’s embarrassment as a clear sign that history was on their side and that expanded transgender rights and protections were inevitable. And there would be big wins to come — including the 2020 Supreme Court ruling that the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects LGBTQ+ employees from workplace discrimination nationwide.
However, the tide was already beginning to shift, including as right-wing groups began to identify specific transgender issues that resonated with voters more than bathrooms, and as Trump — in his first term — began taking aim at transgender rights.
Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said his organization “poll tested all of these issues, the bathrooms, the showers, the locker rooms,” and found that many were “incredibly unpopular to voters” — but some more than others.
One of the issues that resonated the most, Schilling said, was kids’ healthcare and competition in girls sports. So his group ran with that, including in the 2019 race for governor in Kentucky, when it ran an ad suggesting the Democratic candidate and ultimate victor — Andy Beshear — supported boys competing in girls’ wrestling competitions, when in fact Beshear supported policies barring discrimination based on kids’ gender identity.
Schilling said it was “the left’s insistence that we need to start trans’ing kids” that made the issue a political one. But his group’s strategy in Kentucky helped wake conservatives up to the political value of highlighting it.
“We’re really just tapping into a real vulnerability that Democrats started for themselves,” Schilling said.
Trump had pursued various anti-transgender policies during his first term, including a ban on transgender service members. But during his campaign for reelection, he centered transgender issues like never before, dumping millions of dollars into anti-transgender ads that cast his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as an extreme progressive on such issues.
“Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you,” one ad said.
Once in office, Trump moved even more aggressively against transgender rights than the community had feared — prompting various lawsuits from LGBTQ+ organizations that are still pending.
He issued an executive order declaring there are only two genders, and suggesting transgender people don’t actually exist. He again banned transgender people from serving in the military. He threatened the funding of states such as California with trans-inclusive school policies. He ordered transgender athletes out of youth sports. He said federal law enforcement would target those who provide gender-affirming care to minors. And his administration said it would stop providing transgender people with passports reflecting their identities.
President Trump signs an executive order in February banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.
(Jabin Botsford / Washington Post via Getty Images)
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the American people “voted for a return to common sense,” and Trump was “delivering on every campaign promise.”
“President Trump’s historic reelection and the overall MAGA movement is a big tent welcome for all and home to a large swath of the American people,” Fields said.
Reggie Greer, who served as a senior advisor on LGBTQI+ Persons at the State Department in the Biden administration, remembers being in North Carolina during the 2016 bathroom bill fight. While local Democrats were pleased with how it had backfired on Republicans, it was clear to him that “hate is lucrative,” Greer said — with the anti-rights groups raising hundreds of millions of dollars.
He now sees the episode as an early warning of what was to come.
Nick Hutchins handled public affairs around the Obergefell case before joining the Human Rights Campaign, where he worked on state affairs and communications. Traveling through conservative states, he watched as more Republicans began seizing on LGBTQ+ issues after Trump’s 2016 victory.
“It was a moment when Republicans saw an opening and wanted to chip away at LGBTQ rights in any way they could,” Hutchins said. “That’s where you began to see a spaghetti-against-the-wall approach from their end, pursuing the bathroom bills that evolved into various education-focused bills, and healthcare.”
Inside the HRC during Trump’s first term, leadership felt confident that public opinion remained on their side. LGBTQ+ rights organizations had secured victories in statehouses on bathroom and healthcare issues, and were buoyed by Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020.
Yet, several warning signs emerged. Internal state polling by the HRC found large majorities of Americans supported trans rights, but a plurality opposed allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports.
One former HRC staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the organization had not paid much attention to the issue until a series of political attacks in conservative states. The governor’s race in Kentucky was one, followed by a statehouse push in Louisiana.
Still, other battles — including “confronting whiteness in the movement” — took precedent, the former staffer recalled.
“There were significant generational divides within the organization between the older teams and their younger staff that were more diverse on these issues,” the staffer said. “It was a distraction.”
Hutchins said LGBTQ+ organizations today are having “autopsy conversations” to take stock of how things have played out in recent years and identify lessons to be learned.
Among the most prominent leaders of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, there is consensus on many things.
It’s a scary time for LGBTQ+ people and other vulnerable groups, including immigrants and women. Trump represents an existential threat to American democracy. The LGBTQ+ rights movement needs more resources to continue fighting back. Nobody is going to throw transgender people under the bus just because some Democrats have suggested it would help them rebound politically.
“No one person, no one community, is expendable. End of story,” said Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the marriage case.
The actor Laverne Cox, one of the most recognizable transgender women in the country, said the marriage victory in 2015 left the right in need of “a new boogeyman,” and they picked transgender people — a tiny portion of the U.S. population, at around 1%.
They further picked on transgender people in sports — an even tinier group — in order to focus the conversation on “hormones and physical ability,” which is “a great way to objectify trans people, to reduce us to our bodies, and thus dehumanize us,” Cox said.
The best way to fight back, she said, is to refocus the conversation on transgender people’s humanity by allowing them to tell their own stories — rather than allowing their narratives to be “hijacked by propaganda.”
The actor Laverne Cox, shown in April, said trans people should be able to tell their own stories.
(Andy Kropa / Invision / Associated Press)
“We’re just like everybody else in terms of what we want, need, desire, our hopes and fears,” she said. “Living authentically and being able to be oneself is where the focus should be.”
Evan Wolfson, an attorney and founder of the advocacy group Freedom to Marry, which is widely credited with securing the 2015 victory in the Obergefell case, said there are “three significant factors” that got the country to where it is today on transgender issues.
The “most important factor by far,” he said, “is the right-wing attack machine and the political agenda of some who are trying to attack and scapegoat and divide” the country around transgender issues.
A second factor, he said, is that transgender identities are still a “relatively new” concept for many Americans, and “that conversation is just not as far along as the very long conversation about who gay people are.”
A third and far less significant factor, he said, are the “missteps” by LGBTQ+ advocates in the last decade, including some vocally renouncing anyone who is not 100% supportive of trans rights.
“We worked hard in the Freedom to Marry campaign to bring people along and to distinguish between those who were our true opponents, those who were really anti-gay, anti-rights, anti-inclusion on the one hand, and those who I called the ‘reachable but not yet reached’ — people who weren’t with us, but weren’t our true opponents, people who were still wrestling with the question,” Wolfson said.
Allowing people a bit more time and space to be brought along on transgender issues will be necessary moving forward, he said — though he stressed that does not mean that advocates should slow down or pull back.
Wolfson rejected the idea that the LGBTQ+ community is moving too fast on transgender rights, which was also argued about marriage, and the idea that transgender rights should be abandoned as a political liability. “There is no reason to believe that we would profit from selling out our principles and doing the wrong thing just to avoid this tough moment,” Wolfson said.
Strangio said the fight for LGBTQ+ rights today cannot be viewed in a vacuum, and that zooming out, “there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about basic constitutional principles and civil rights protections” for all sorts of vulnerable people under the Trump administration.
Still, he said, he believes in the queer community’s “ability to move through setbacks” and come out on ahead of the “billion-dollar global campaigns to undermine equality protections” that began after the Obergefell decision.
“Fighting back was the right course,” he said, “and continuing to assess how we can effectively build support for the entire community is going to be a critical part of this next decade.”
CANNES, France — Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt arrived in France in 1996’s “Mission: Impossible” clinging to a high speed train through the Chunnel, pursued and nearly skewered by a helicopter. It was, as the French might say, une entrée dramatique. In 2018’s “Mission: Impossible — Fallout,” he leapt from an airplane to plummet four-and-a-half miles down to the glass roof of Paris’ Grand Palais and now, for the big finale of his franchise, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” he’s come to conquer the Cannes Film Festival.
One boisterous fan outside the premiere shoved her Chihuahua at Cruise so he could see it was wearing a pink sweatshirt with his face. Another brandished a DVD of 2000’s “Mission: Impossible 2,” arguably the worst entry in the series. Cruise took a photo with her anyway. “Le selfie!” the red-carpet announcer cried.
The series hasn’t been kind to its French actors: Emmanuelle Béart was shot, Jean Reno blown up by exploding chewing gum, Léa Seydoux kicked out of a window at the Burj Khalifa. (Pom Klementieff, whose character’s name is Paris, has survived to co-star in this eighth entry.) Yet, you didn’t have to parler français to glean the excitement on the ground.
This is only Cruise’s third trip to Cannes and it took him nearly half an hour to walk the 60 yards of red carpet, an exhausting amount of waving, even for someone lauded for his cardio. He took care to acknowledge everyone who’d come to cheer, even trotting back down a few steps to make eye contact and thump on his heart for the fans in the corner flank.
In 2022, as part of the lead-up to “Top Gun: Maverick,” the blockbuster that would defibrillate the pandemic box office, Cruise received an honorary Palme d’Or and a salute from eight zipping French jets. During his first visit, for 1992’s “Far and Away,” times were different and he felt free to be outspoken, telling the press that the then-recent Rodney King verdict “sickened me.” Today, he seems to feel the weight of championing the theatrical experience, just as Ethan Hunt is repeatedly forced to shoulder the burden of saving the world. Neither of them truly has the freedom to “choose to accept it.” More than any of his movie star peers, Cruise seems aware that someone has to symbolize an increasingly bygone era of filmmaking, to be this century’s Charlie Chaplin.
The vibe before the screening of “Final Reckoning” was a bit bar mitzvah. The DJ alternated between dance-floor classics — Kool & the Gang, Joan Jett — and remixes of Lalo Schifrin’s pulsating “Mission: Impossible” theme, one by four beatboxers who mimicked police sirens, another classed-up by a live saxophone and violins. This year’s big Cannes fashion headline is that women are no longer allowed to wear “voluminous” frocks on the steps. Nevertheless, Hayley Atwell, who plays Grace, a pickpocket-turned-secret-agent, wore a gown on the daring end of puffy. Red with large flares at her hips and ankles, she resembled the vintage biplane Cruise dangles from in the film. He could have clung onto her elbow for a teaser.
But when the movie started, the mood turned funereal. This farewell to Ethan Hunt begins with a three-decade-spanning montage of Cruise that could double as the intro to his inevitable honorary Oscar. “I want to thank you for a lifetime of unrelenting and devoted service,” Angela Bassett’s President Erika Sloane tells Ethan in the opening minute. Later, she slips him a code with an important date — May 22, 1996 — which also happens be the day the “Mission: Impossible” franchise launched. The whole film is a panegyric: big speeches and weighty moments with very little sense of play. Tonally, it starts with an ending and keeps on ending for the next 2 hours and 49 minutes.
The eight “Mission” films can be cleaved into two groups. The first four made a point of swapping directors and moods and even Ethan’s core identity: Brian De Palma made him a jaundiced naif; John Woo, a hot-blooded flirt; J.J. Abrams, a devoted husband; Brad Bird, a near-mute human cartoon. The last four are all helmed by Christopher McQuarrie (who’s co-written this script with Erik Jendresen) but neither has added much to his personality. We’re told, over and over, that Ethan is a gambler and a rule-breaker — and paradoxically, that he’s the only human worthy of our trust, an odd thing to say about a spy who wears masks of other people’s faces like party hats.
Of all the “Mission: Impossible” films, this is the only one that needs you to remember what happened in the previous entry, 2023’s “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” which introduced an all-knowing AI villain called the Entity and its equally unemotional minion Gabriel (Esai Morales) that made a fun foil for Cruise himself, as a sinister duo that values digital trickery over human sweat. Now, the Entity intends to annihilate humanity in four days unless it can be taken offline by a key that accesses a gizmo in the Arctic Sea that connects to a whatsit that Ving Rhames’s weary Luther is attempting to invent from a makeshift hospital bed somewhere in the subway tunnels of London. A grunting Cruise batters a goon while huffing, “You spend! Too much time! On the internet!”
That last film managed to introduce Atwell’s Grace and collect the key while still enjoying a sense of play, like an axle-cracking Fiat chase through Rome and flirtations manifested via close-up magic. Here, the plot weighs everything down. Not just the threat-of-extinction stuff, which includes Bassett’s POTUS debating which American city to blow up as a preemptive gesture, but by its own irritating God’s-eye omniscience that rarely allows the suspense to spool out in the present. The editing is always cutting to the past or the future. There’s flashbacks to things that happened five minutes earlier and flash-forwards to how a stunt could look instead of just getting on with it.
Just as exhausting is how the entire cast trades lines of exposition to explain Ethan’s daredevil feats before he actually does them. There are almost no conversations, only premonitions and plans delivered in bullet-points like a group research project. No one steps on anyone else’s dramatic pauses. They may as well be reciting how to build an IKEA Billy bookcase. I can’t think of anything more thrill-stifling, even with cinematographer Fraser Taggart lighting everybody’s eyeballs to look so shiny that the actors continually appear on the verge of tears. Still, even within those limitations, Simon Pegg is delightful as Hunt’s longtime tech-whiz teammate Benji, as are new and returning ensemble members Tramell Tillman, Lucy Tulugarjuk and Rolf Saxon, the latter of whom plays a throwback character once threatened with manning a radar tower in Alaska — a punishment that did, in fact, come to pass.
But Cruise is reason audiences will, and should, see “Final Reckoning” on a large and loud screen. His Ethan continues to survive things he shouldn’t. (One too-miraculous rescue attempts to distract us from asking questions by inserting an out-of-place close-up of Atwell’s heaving bosom.) Yet, what I’ve most come to appreciate about Ethan is that he doesn’t try to play the unflappable hero. Clinging to the chassis of an airplane with the wind plastering his hair to his forehead and oscillating his gums like bulldog in a convertible, he is, in fact, exceedingly flapped.
The flight chase is fantastic. It’s what Isaac Newton might have made if he’d demonstrated velocity by placing an apple in a bucket and whipping it in circles. But even its exhilaration gets bested by a centerpiece underwater sequence in which Cruise scuba dives alone in silence suffering stunts that you cannot believe. I couldn’t tell you how long he swam — at some point, my heart stopped — but there are images of vertical sheets of water and the star in shivering, fetal isolation that felt like the franchise wasn’t just trying to top itself, but hoping to best “Titanic” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
As the sound design rumbled with queasy creaks over shots of a submarine teetering on the edge of a deep-sea cliff, I found myself thinking most of all of that famous sequence of a frozen shack sliding off a cliff in Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 “The Gold Rush,” which celebrates its centennial anniversary this fall. By coincidence or grand design, a gorgeously restored “The Gold Rush” was also the first movie screened at this year’s Cannes. If there’s a Cannes in 2125, maybe it’ll play a 100-year-old Tom Cruise classic. It won’t be this “Mission: Impossible” over the first, third or fourth. Regardless, I bet the fans will still be cheering.
‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’
Rated: PG-13, for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language
Running time: 2 hours, 49 minutes
Playing: In wide release Friday, May 23