I explained a while ago that it would be impossible to say anything about Trump’s Iranian ‘adventure’ with absolute certainty. I’m sorry, I was wrong. He will *never* do anything that genuinely upsets or angers Vladimir Putin. Whether in Iran, in Ukraine or even in the USA. It is his only constant.
I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public.
I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are.
1/ Here's what I can share:
Quite the thread.
EXCL: Reform UK have been processing cryptocurrency donations through Poland, under a 'lax' regulatory regime which previously housed a Cambodian crime syndicate sanctioned by the US Treasury for laundering $4 billion in illicit funds (inc. proceeds from North Korean state-sponsored cyber heists)
There's so much to unpack in the words of the Israeli Defense Minister here... the use of "blood libel" to describe specific actions caught on camera by specific IDF soldiers, and his open admission that the IDF legal system is designed to protect IDF soldiers, not prosecute them where necessary.
Maybe it should matter that the President of the United States threatened the lives of the Iranian soccer team, who can say
Daily Mail front page regurgitating Badenoch’s claim that appointing Mandelson USA ambassador makes Starmer ‘unfit to govern’.
And the co-host of Peter Mandelson’s drinks reception before last year’s White House Correspondents Dinner was…
‘Medical records showed the detainee was taken to hospital in the summer of 2024 with injuries including broken ribs, a punctured lung and rectal damage, according to Israeli media reports on the indictment.’
In late August the battle for Stalingrad was in its first few days. It would continue, with ever increasing savagery until February 1943. It ended with one of the most consequential German defeats in history.
The UK's asylum appeals backlog has reached a record high, almost doubling in size in almost a year, according to data published by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) on Thursday
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
MAGA's rhetoric of western civilizational emergency is so weird. They look at ICE arresting grandmothers and they see the ancient Greeks defeating the Persians or the Franks stopping the Islamic invaders in 732.
Everyone else sees ICE arresting grandmothers.
newrepublic.com/article/2076...
Tweet by Thomas van Linge saying it is striking that historians may one day view the Iran war as less thought-out than the Iraq war.
That's what happens when you use a foreign war as a distraction from your problems back home.
Wes Streeting admits another cut to mental health spend share
The proportion of the NHS budget spent on mental healthcare will be cut for the third year in a row, the health secretary has admitted
www.hsj.co.uk/mental-healt...
You’ve always gotta be careful with what you wish for….
Rogers has been one of the loudest voices articulating the fiction that free speech is under assault in the UK.
I can't even find the words to express how repugnant and despicable this post is.
People who spew such Islamophobic bile don't belong in the United States Congress. The job of elected officials is to combat hate, not fan its flames. (1/2)
Bellingcat's latest documentary, Killing Anna, a tale of catfishing Syrian war criminals and exposing their roles in a massacre, will be shown at CPH:DOX in March. The ultimate Doxxing at DOX.
cphdox.dk/film/killing...
With everything else going on I missed Badenoch committing the Tories to a policy of “enforced” assimilation into officially approved culture.
What can make inclusion & belonging work in the fastest-changing borough in London - and indeed the UK as a whole? I have been chairing the Independent Commission on Inclusion and Belonging on a multi-ethnic Newham, whose final report is published today
www.britishfuture.org/newham-shoul...
‘Practically nothing less to target’
Trump, 2026
Stalingrad has been 'destroyed and [was] without any further worthwhile targets.’
von Richthofen, (senior Luftwaffe commander), August 1942
What a thread.
Hitting desalination plants is so bad. Not just evil but strategically incomprehensible. Without desalination 75% of the entire population of the Middle East will be refugees. Israel and Kuwait depend on desalination for 90% of their water and other Middle East states aren’t far behind.
When Israel targeted Gaza’s water supply, people rightly called it out as a war crime, denying civilians the most basic supplies.
The GOP has a new candidate for Texas-23, Brandon Herrera. In addition to being a Mein Kampf-brandishing admirer of Adolf Hitler, Herrera is also well known for organizing a recreation of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in which he gleefully pulled the trigger.
It is absolutely insane that the US appears to have targeted desalination plants first – putting them onto the board. Iran seems to have already retaliated against one in Bahrain. This is one of the most obvious ways this could spiral.
FT coverage is just so good at a time like this at explaining stuff in a really concise, clear way. www.ft.com/content/1355...
Wow -- as first spotted by @BadFoxGraphics on X, Fox & Friends this morning used *old footage of a previous dignified transfer* to mislead their audience about the fact that Trump wore a baseball cap during the one yesterday
It’s past time for Trump and Hegseth to come clean on this. They already know the truth. What they are doing now is simply refusing to accept responsibility.
A reminder that Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch and the entire Conservative-supporting press have spent the past week lambasting Keir Starmer for not joining the Iran war.
Here's what has happened since then to public opinion
“He is, of course, a serial liar & prone to espousing completely contradictory positions within moments of each other.” It is extraordinary to me that journalists continue to ‘analyse’ Donald Trump without adding this constant caveat. It does readers, listeners & viewers a grave disservice.
