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The ruins of the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defence building in central Belgrade are hard to miss. Shorn clean in half, the structure stands in a state of precarious decay, inner floors caving in and steel girders exposed.

Ripped apart by two NATO bombs in 1999, the building has sat undisturbed for a quarter century, an attempt to preserve the memory of a painful time in Serbia's history. There - across the street from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs - the ruins may have sat in perpetuity. Until an unlikely actor stepped in.

In May of last year, an investment firm belonging to President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner secured rights to convert the location into a luxury Trump tower development project, complete with a hotel, apartments and office space.

The move might have come as a surprise to some. But experts know that Serbia's embattled president, Aleksandar Vučić, has been cultivating a relationship with the United States and Trump family for years. The Kushner-led Trump hotel project was just the latest mutually beneficial deal to come of it.

Now, amid societal disruption and mass protests raging across the country for more than four months, the hotel project has again drawn ire - and raised questions of whether the Trump family's interests mean Washington will be a reliable ally for Vučić in a looming political showdown.

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The Serbian Crisis

Every Friday in Novi Sad, Serbia's second-largest city, people stop in action at precisely 11:52 am. They stand motionless on the street in solemn vigil for 16 minutes - one for each victim of the disaster just before noon on 1 November 2024 that sparked mass outrage at the Government.

That day is burned into Nemanja Ćurčić's memory. A 29-year-old English language and literature student at Novi Sad University, he was at work when his brother called, asking if he had travelled that day or was anywhere near the railway station.

"I was like, 'No, of course not, I'm at work,'" Ćurčić recalled saying. "And he said, 'Fine, that's good. Something bad happened.'"

Ćurčić pulled up the news. An outdoor canopy at the recently renovated local train station had collapsed. In the coming days, rescuers picking through the rubble pulled out 14 bodies. (One additional person succumbed to their injuries shortly after the incident, and another died at the Belgrade military hospital on 21 March, raising the total number of victims to 16.)

Shock turned to anger, in no part helped by the fact that the Government initially denied that the canopy had been part of its reconstruction project. Locals blamed the disaster on rampant corruption and mismanagement. Ćurčić soon found himself out on the street, protesting alongside other students in a movement that has since spread to more than 200 towns and cities across the country.

The political crisis represents one of the strongest challenges yet to the 12-year rule of Vučić's Serbian Progressive Party, and it shows no signs of abating. On 15 March, more than 100,000 protesters converged in Belgrade for one of the largest mass demonstrations in Serbia's history. A few days later, the Government led by Vučić ally Miloš Vučević resigned, raising the possibility of fresh elections in the coming months.

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If Putin is trying to stoke conflict in the Balkans, he's going to have to contend with the influence ...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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Help us build the better media Britain deserves

As authors of a book on Russian disinformation, we see a striking resemblance between the Russian regime's falsification of history and an eerily similar tendency now emanating from The White House.

Indeed, the new disinformation narrative being pumped out in MAGA world regarding Greenland sounds so familiar that it might as well have been written by the Kremlin itself: The Russian playbook on Ukraine is now being recycled in the US.

In Denmark, most people follow the facts on the ground and the attitudes within the Commonwealth closely. Eighty five percent of Greenland's citizens have rejected becoming part of the United States.

Múte B. Egede, the outgoing prime minister of Greenland, has told the Americans in no uncertain terms to stay away, while his successor, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, disparages the American "disrespect".

A recent documentary by the public broadcaster Danmarks Radio has fuelled a discussion about the actual wishes of the Greenlandic people, and you could always argue the merits of this or that opinion poll. Every analysis, including this one, is an interpretation. It is nonetheless one that is anchored in facts.

However, in MAGA media, viewers are presented with a different reality. This reality has nothing in common with our reality, but functions as a post-truth parallel universe. Loyalty does not gravitate around the truth in this universe, but is instead bound only by loyalty to the new Trump Government and attempts to please it through support of its disinformation narratives.

Within this postfactual media bubble, Greenland is portrayed as a malnourished and neglected urchin being oppressed by a distant Copenhagen regime. Annexation is simultaneously framed as a matter of US national security. The people of Greenland are in fact waiting for their liberators and their future role as a prospering American vassal.

Back in the real world, the US voluntarily gave up most of their bases in Greenland. In the post-truth world, Denmark is the negligent party and a "bad ally". Greenland needs to be saved in other words - from itself.

If you think we're being hyperbolic, here's a little peak into the disinformation bubble, which is currently being erected around the US far-right media landscape.

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On FOX News, Jesse Watters tells his audience that the US might: "… have to burn down a few bridges with Denmark to take Greenland. We're big boys. We dropped an A-bomb on Japan and now they are our top ally in the Pacific… America is not handcuffed by history."

On Real America's Voice, Brian Glenn explains that the official Greenlandic rejection of the vice president couple's overtures doesn't reflect "the real attitude of the people".

One is led to the conclusion that the US will soon be greeted by its people donning MAGA-caps and draped in the stars and stripes. Similar narratives are being disseminated on One America News Network, where Trump's aggressive rhetoric on Greenland is being lauded as "the art of the deal".

While the rest of the world laughs at JD Vance complaining about the weather in Greenland, being unable to find even a single local willing to meet and greet and waving into the nothingness, the disinformation bubble uses his failed trip to further a narrative which might be priming the public for an invasion.

Here, it's also worth keeping in mind that the US interest in Greenland probably stems from a Russian disinformation campaign: A forged letter prompted...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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1. It isn't revenge and it isn't porn

It's not revenge, because the victim's done nothing wrong. And it's not porn, because viewing it is an act of violence, not of pleasure. The non-consensual sharing of someone's intimate image is sexual abuse.

'Image-based sexual abuse,' to be precise. Start calling it that - maybe society will start treating it as that.

Reports of image-based sexual abuse in the UK have increased tenfold over the past few years. Women are five times more likely to be victims of intimate image abuse than men. And one in 14 adults, which is equivalent to 4.4 million people in England and Wales, have experienced threats to share their intimate images without consent. The scale of coverage hardly reflects this.

"There are some phenomenal journalists that really understand the issue," argued Elena Michael, co-founder and director of #NotYourPorn, "but on the whole it's this watered down, diluted version" - starting with the term 'revenge porn'.

The term is not just "incredibly derogatory," Elena says, it fails to capture the multiplicity of forms in which the crime can be committed - from resharing, to peeping, to selling, to publishing, to generating 'DeepFakes' and more.

"It's limiting our understanding of who might be a survivor, but it's also limiting our understanding of who might be a perpetrator," she explained.

2. You can count on two hands the years since it's been criminalised

The residual implication of the term 'revenge porn' is that victims are victims of their own actions, for example by taking an erotic picture in the first place. This stigma might explain why non-consensual intimate image abuse was only actually criminalised in 2015.

Make no mistake, image-based sexual abuse destroys lives. "To experience it is gut-wrenching," recounted survivor Madelaine Thomas.

At points, I thought my life was not worth living because of the shame and embarrassment that I felt seeing those images and being unable to take them down

Madelaine Thomas

But Madelaine never reported what happened to her to the police because she was not even sure it was actually a crime. And even if it was, "I also felt like the shame that I was feeling would just be reflected back at me".

3. It's economic exploitation - as well as sexual exploitation

There's another reason Madelaine is wary of telling her story. "I feel like I still need to caveat my experience," she warned at the start of our interview. "I, um, had a very crap job actually. It was a crap job and, um, my husband and I had a child and my crap job didn't pay for childcare."

In short, Madelaine started selling intimate images for money. "Just some saucy nudes, nothing terribly explicit." She said she did so "in the understanding that I was selling a consensual moment for [my clients] to enjoy those pictures".

"It was a consensual moment of an exchange of trust, as well as exchange of financial remuneration."

Six months later, she learned some of her images had made their way onto a porn site. "Of course," was her first thought, "I should expect this to happen to me". But then she thought again.

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Mathilda Mallinson

Strangers were making a profit using her body, without her consent, and without paying her a penny. Call it theft, call it trafficking - it is tantamount to forced labour.

Very often in cases of image-based abuse, sexual violence is overlaid with economic v...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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It's been a strange couple of weeks here in Kyiv - after the absolute madness of March with its Oval Office showdowns and ongoing bromance between the American and Russian presidents, recent days have seemed relatively calm in comparison.

But that's not to say it hasn't been eventful over here, so let's get right into it.

The Ceasefire

Let's get one thing straight first - on March 11, Ukraine agreed to a full, 30-day ceasefire.

Russia refused.

In the nearly one month since, the Kremlin (and the White House) have made a lot of noise about partial ceasefires in the Black Sea and on strikes against energy infrastructure. It's all just noise. Russia has conceded nothing it can't afford to concede.

By agreeing to partial ceasefires in the Black Sea and on energy infrastructure, the Kremlin is trying to give the impression it's genuinely interested in peace, but in reality, all it's done is gain a reprieve in the two theaters of war in which it was getting an absolute hammering.

Despite barely having a navy, Ukraine has decimated Russia's Black Sea Fleet, keeping vital shipping lanes open and scoring hit after hit on Moscow's ships.

And despite being reliant on the still-fledgling technology of long-range attack drones, Ukraine has scored hit after hit on Russian oil refineries hundreds, and sometimes thousands of miles inside Russia. No wonder the Kremlin has been so willing to make it stop.

But where it actually counts, Russia shows no signs of wanting peace, and instead there are signs it's actually preparing for more war. President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned of Russian troop build-ups across the border from Ukraine's Sumy and Kharkiv regions, saying the Kremlin is preparing for new spring offensives.

Citing G7 diplomatic sources, the Associated Press also reported that Russia is likely preparing to launch a new offensive on multiple fronts in an effort to strengthen its position in possible peace talks.

Meanwhile, Russian missile and drone attacks against Ukrainian cities carry on unabated. In the latest incident, a ballistic missile hit a residential area in the city of Kryvyi Rih.

Russia said it had successfully targeted a meeting of Ukrainian military officials. Video from the scene showed it had successfully targeted a playground. At least 18 people - including nine children - were killed, and more than 60 were injured.

After seemingly being taken for a ride by Vladimir Putin for the last few weeks, over in Washington, there are signs that Trump's patience is beginning to wear thin as he begins to realize what everyone else has known all along - Russia isn't interested in peace in the slightest.

Trump has said he is "pissed off" and "very angry" at Putin's actions in recent days, threatening to "put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia".

But the perennial question remains - will he actually do anything or is he, once again, all talk when it comes to Russia?

We should find out soon enough - on April 4, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: "We will know soon enough, in a matter of weeks, not months, whether Russia is serious about peace or not. I hope they are".

So yes, they're a bit slow on the uptake in the White House but they seem to be getting there eventually.

The Occupied Territories

If you read one article about Ukraine this week, I very much encourage you to make it this one about Ukrainians in Russian-occupied territories being forced to take Russian passports or face being deported to… well, no one actually knows where.

With all the talk of ceasefires and "freezing the front lines," there's very little coverage of the people who w...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

It's hard to believe, but it's happening. On 27 March 2025, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order, 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History'. Among its main concerns was the Smithsonian American Art Museum which, the order complained, featured an exhibit that claimed that "sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism".

The White House was especially upset that the exhibit "promoted the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating 'Race is a human invention.'"

On 15 February, a memo from the US General Services Administration removed an explicit 'Prohibition of Segregated Facilities' (like waiting rooms, restaurants and drinking fountains) for federal contractors. Though the memo cannot overturn the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race, colour or other traits in public facilities, legal experts describe it as a powerful symbolic act exemplifying Trump's embrace of a segregationist agenda.

The White House's open support for racist and eugenicist ideas does not come out of the blue. It is the culmination of decades of subversion by scientific racists seeking to move their fringe beliefs into the mainstream.

But two individuals in particular became the connecting points between the traditional fascism of the 1930s, and the new digital era. What began as fringe internet musings about eugenics, racial IQ differences, and supposedly natural social hierarchies has seeped into elite tech circles and, remarkably, into the heart of American politics.

In 2007, an obscure American software engineer-turned-blogger began posting lengthy screeds under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, denouncing democracy as "ineffective and destructive" and praising authoritarian rule. Around the same time, a British philosopher began penning essays lauding scientific racism and absolutist micro-states.

These two figures - Curtis Yarvin (Moldbug's real name) and Nick Land - helped spawn an intellectual movement that became known as the Dark Enlightenment, a neo-reactionary revolt against modern democracy.

Despite some major media outlets scurrying to look into the influence of Yarvin and Land on the American right, they have largely overlooked and obfuscated the roots of their ideas in Nazi-inspired scientific racism and eugenics.

Delving into some of their most racially-charged ideas - Nick Land's support for "hyperracism" and Curtis Yarvin's existential fear of the global extinction of a cognitively superior white race - throws unnerving light on what the Trump administration is preparing for, and why it is working to protect anti-Black racism and the eugenics belief that sees race as a biological reality.

Eugenics Rebranded: The 'Human Biodiversity" Doctrine

For most journalists writing about the Dark Enlightenment, the most significant thing about Yarvin and Land is their opposition to democracy and support for techno-authoritarian rule. But this barely scratches the surface of what is really driving their belief systems.

Yarvin and Land built their worldviews on a foundational belief: human inequality is biologically hard-wired. They drew on a network of bloggers and authors in the early 2000s who promoted race-based genetic theories - the HBD (human biodiversity) community, which put a pseudo-academic gloss on old-fashioned scientific racism which was supercharged under Nazi rule in the early 20th century.

As I reveal in my new book Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West From Within, the HBD movement attempted to repackage ideas cemented under Nazi ideology.

Those ideas were originally pr...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

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Last week's Spring Statement decision to cut the benefits of the weakest members of our society, on the basis of a series of forecasts by the Government's spending watchdog the Office for Budget Responsibility, wasn't democratic but technocratic. The argument of the Chancellor was that she had no choice and the fiscal rules imposed this on her and us. But what then is the point of voting when a body which is totally unaccountable to us ultimately decides our fate?

The OBR is just one example of this broader problem, albeit an important one of decisions being outsourced from democrats to technocrats. Representative democracy is ultimately an issue of trust. Will the people we've elected deliver on the promises contained in their manifestos? For decades trust in politicians has been breaking down. The world has become more complex and much more difficult for politicians to run while we have become much less trusting, less deferential and more cynical. The answer has been to ditch democracy for technocracy.

The critical moment in the long march to the outsourcing of power came with the Trilateral Commission in 1973. This was a non-governmental body established by the banker David Rockefeller which brought together decision makers from the USA, Western Europe and Japan to look at the growing threat of inflation. The Commission determined politicians could not be trusted to control price rises as they gave in too easily to demands from their electorate to 'spend more money than they had'. The key recommendation of the Commission was the establishment of independent central banks to take key macro-economic decisions out of the hands of politicians and the people and into those of the bankers.

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In the UK this elite shift in thinking eventually manifested itself in Labour's 1997 move to give interest rate decisions to the Bank of England, ironically without any mention in their manifesto. The establishment of the OBR in 2010 by George Osborne to act as a control on government spending, was a further development of this trend and a confirmation that the politicians didn't trust themselves. Politics had now been separated from power.

We now live in this grim world where some decisions are outsourced and others not, sometimes politicians agree with the technocrats they appoint, other times they don't. The confusion and the contradictions cement the crisis of democracy, which unless resolved, will only benefit the anti-democratic authoritarian populists.

Just look at the mess Labour is now in. Before the Spring Statement Labour argued that benefit reforms were designed to get people working, but on the eve of the statement the OBR reported that the cuts announced were insufficient to hit the £5bn target that it had stipulated for the government to stay within its fiscal rules.

So overnight another £1.4bn cuts were found, which evidently had nothing to do with getting people into work and everything to do with jumping the hurdle set by the technocrats. Later last week the Prime Minister clashed with the independent Sentencing Council for England and Wales over so-called two-tier sentencing. Next month the first private rail company will lose its franchise and become part of GB Railways, an arm's length body from the Transport Department. But only a few weeks before the Health Minis...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

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Help us build the better media Britain deserves

Peter Mandelson has a dream. The original spin doctor and Tony Blair's former communications guru is now Britain's ambassador to the USA. And in Washington DC, he's dreaming about a "full spectrum technology partnership between Britain and America", one which rivals the nuclear partnership of the 1960s.

This time, the partnership could encompass genomics, protein design and engineering, artificial intelligence, data centres and quantum computer, and more nuclear technology.

And the deal that could give this vision lift-off, Mandelson has dubbed the 'Make our Economies Great Again' agreement.

This deal is already more than a figment of Lord Mandelson's imagination. Since Keir Starmer's Oval Office visit, US and British negotiators have been trying to put flesh on the bones of such an agreement. Starmer views it as a way of removing Trump's 'liberation day' tariffs. And he might succeed in the short-term, but in the process he will have given away vitally important tools that we need to rein in the Big Tech monopolists and regulate their technologies.

What's more, Trump is a bully. He is partly using tariffs as a revenue raiser to cut taxes on his oligarch friends. But he is also using them to blackmail foreign governments into making concessions that run counter to their interests.

In essence, he wants the rest of the world to pay for tax cuts for America's super rich. And if he sees the British prime minister roll over, he's unlikely to stop there.

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Alexandra Hall Hall

What is the Deal?

The UK has twice tried to agree a trade deal with the US. The first was TTIP, the EU-US deal, of which Peter Mandelson was a leading champion. The second attempt, post-Brexit, fell apart when Trump was voted out of office. Both prospective deals became deeply unpopular with the UK public after they realised that they posed a threat to public services, farmer's livelihoods and food standards - threatening to unleash chlorine-washed chicken and similarly unsavoury products onto Britain's supermarket shelves.

This time, Starmer and Mandelson want to focus more on "clicks and portals than goods and mortar." There is no evidence that Britain will be able to limit a deal in this way, in fact Trump has already said that Britain should accept chlorine chicken if they want to reduce tariffs. But even if they could, a digital-only trade deal carries serious threats for UK citizens, workers, public services, the environment and democracy itself. This would not be a deal that helps build a strong British economy, but an extreme liberalisation deal that hands even more power to US corporations.

Any deal would be based on a wishlist dreamt up by the Big Tech giants over the last decade. In essence they have learnt from the pharmaceutical corporations who, in the 1980s and '90s, worked to get politicians in rich countries to use enforceable trade rules to cement the monopoly power of their businesses across the world. The result is the dysfunctional industry that produces our medicines today - highly financialised giants, addicted to sky-high profits, yet unable to make the medicines we needs at a price we can afford.

Similarly today, Big Tech wants to enshrine its monopolies, in perpetuity, through a series of trade rules. Their wishlist was pushed as US policy in Trump's first term, but Biden's administration dropped it, saying countries had to balance trade objectives wit...

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On Monday Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far right party Le Rassemblement National was found guilty of embezzling 4.4 million euros of public funds from the EU in relation to the so-called "fictitious assistants scandal".

The verdict delivered a penalty of four years in prison, two of which are suspended, two of which are to be served at home with an electronic tag, a 100,000 euro fine and, most importantly, five years of ineligibility to run for public office with "proximate execution" meaning that the penalty applies even during the appeal process.

This means that it will be highly unlikely she can run for office again at the presidential election in 2027.

Following the verdict, US President Donald Trump denounced it as a "Witch Hunt" posting on his Truth Social platform that it was "another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going so far as to put that Opponent in prison."

Dismissing the case against Le Pen as a "bookkeeping" error, Trump demanded that France "FREE MARINE LE PEN!"

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The reality of the case is quite different, however.

According to the judgement, Le Pen sat at "the heart" of a "carefully organised system" of embezzlement of EU parliamentary funds by running a fake jobs racket in which permanent members of party staff were declared EU parliamentary assistants and had their salaries paid by the EU.

Several other high-ranking members of the RN were also found guilty of embezzlement as part of this system, such as MP Julien Odoul, Perpignan mayor and RN vice-president Louis Aliot and the MEP Nicholas Bay who now sits with Identite et Liberte, a micro-party founded by Marion Marechal Le Pen, Marine's niece.

MEPs for the Front National (now rebranded as the Rassemblement National) would have one assistant dedicated to their parliamentary work and the rest of their budget for staff would be spent on permanent members of the party.

Two of the assistants for MEP Ferdinand Le Rachinel for example never actually worked for him and were in fact Jean Marie Le Pen's private secretary and bodyguard.

The judgement describes how when Marine Le Pen inherited the system from her father Jean Marie, she actively chose to maintain it.

She instructed MEPs at a meeting in July of 2014 that they should give Charles Van Houtte power of attorney to decide their budget allocation and choose their cabinets and told the assembled that they would only need one assistant for their parliamentary work and the remaining balance of their budget would be at the party's disposal.

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Le Pen has continued to protest her innocence by using the argument that it is normal that parliamentary assistants should do political work. She told the court "I have absolutely no sense of having committed the slightest irregularity, or the slightest illegal act", reiterated her innocence after the verdict and immediately said that she would launch an appeal.

This set of facts, and the news of the judgment, set political discourse alight as one of the most infamous figures of global politics was banned from running in a presidential race that polling suggests she had a good chance of win...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

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Thames Water's preferred investor KKR, previously signed a deal to manage the US municipal water company of Bayonne New Jersey which "sent bills soaring" and has been described by residents of the city as "drowning us".

On Monday Thames Water, the UK's biggest water supplier, which has been struggling under mounting debt, announced the American private equity firm KKR as its preferred buyer in a bid to prevent nationalisation. KKR is expected to acquire a stake of around £4 billion in Thames Water.

While KKR has some experience managing water companies, both in the UK and the US, the company has not always left customers happy.

In 2012, the New Jersey city of Bayonne signed a deal with KKR and Suez to manage their municipal water system which was in dire need of repairs to its crumbling infrastructure.

In 2016, the New York Times reported that "those crusty brown pipes have been replaced by shiny cobalt-blue ones" but this came "with a hefty price tag - not just to pay for new pipes, but also to help the investors earn a nice return".

The deal the financially desperate city signed with KKR and Suez guaranteed the company a return of over half a billion dollars over 40 years. However, water rates rose 28% between the signing of the deal in 2012 and 2016 and continued to rise afterwards. The deal promised residents a four year freeze on water rates, which never materialised because of the revenue guarantee.

KKR sold its share in Bayonne's water company to Argo in 2018, making a return of 2.8 times the amount invested, though the deal signed alongside Suez remains in place.

The company also has a record of overseeing price rises, and allegations of sewage dumping in the UK.

At Prime Minister's Question Time on Wednesday Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey criticised Kier Starmer's refusal to bring Thames Water into special administration by while raising KKR's previous investment in Northumbrian Water.

He said "three years ago the American private equity firm KKR bought a 25% stake in Northumbrian Water, since then people across the North East have seen their water bills soar, while last year alone Northumbrian Water has dumped nearly one million tonnes of raw sewage in to Durham's Whitburn coast conservation area".

Davey asked if Starmer would guarantee that Thames Water would not be allowed "to pull the same trick of raising bills and dumping raw sewage at the same time".

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Mathhew Topham of the campaign group We Own It told Byline Times "KKR inspired a book and film called Barbarians at the Gate precisely because of its rampant profiteering and financial abuse of service users so we know that it is completely ill suited to delivering a public service that works in the interests of its users and the environment".

KKR claims to have moved beyond its asset stripping past. In a 2019 Forbes article titled "Gentleman at the Gate" Henry Kravis one of the co-founders stated "You can't buy a company and strip out all the costs. It's not a sustainable business model […] "If you're not putting money back in to come up with new products, new plants and new ways of doing business in new geographies, you'll die eventually".

In July last year KKR bought FibreCop from Telecom Italia, the major Italian telecoms network. In September 2024, Fibrecop announced that they were cutting 1300 jobs through a voluntary redundancy scheme.

In January the CEO of Fibrecop Luigi ...

Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on 'what the papers don't say' - without fear or favour.

To support its work, subscribe to the monthly Byline Times print edition, packed with exclusive investigations, news, and analysis.

Help us build the better media Britain deserves

Family members of British nationals who are currently or have previously been detained abroad are calling on ministers to develop a 'clear and consistent' strategy that supports British nationals who are unfairly detained abroad.

A new campaign from Amnesty International outlines the "many failings" from successive UK governments in securing the release of arbitrarily detained prisoners.

Hong Kong journalist Jimmy Lai waited three years for the UK Government to publicly call for his release while being kept in solitary confinement with no access to light (he remains imprisoned by the Chinese state).

British-Iranian labour activist Mehran Raoof had to wait for four and a half years whilst suffering health problems in jail.

And Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe saw then-PM Boris Johnson incorrectly claim she was teaching journalism at the time of her arrest, which her family say jeopardised efforts to secure her release from Iran.

Meanwhile, Laila Soueif went on hunger strike for 149 days before being hospitalised to raise awareness of her son's plight. She remains on an extremely calorie-restricted diet in hospital in protest over her British-Egyptian son Alaa Abdel-Fattah's continued imprisonment in Egypt.

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Now a new campaign video from Amnesty features these figures or their family members and friends, including Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Leila Soueif (Alaa's mother), Sebastien Lai (Jimmy Lai's son) and others, all calling for a proper strategy and process for handling unfair detentions of Brits overseas.

Labour's 2024 manifesto saw the party commit to better support for British nationals abroad and especially those whose human rights are being violated, which Amnesty says was "important and welcome."

However, the campaign group says the problem of British nationals being detained arbitrarily is significant and appears to be growing. "It is important that the government urgently develops a clear strategy for how it will support those caught in this terrible predicament," Deshmukh adds.

Backing the campaign, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe said: "I was never visited by any of the UK government or embassy staff, and it took eighteen months for them to even call for my release.

"The turmoil that my child has gone through is one of the things that I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive. What I would like to say to the UK Government is, when a person is arrested, that person's life matters."

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Richard Ratcliffe: Families Face 'Suppression and Isolation'

Richard Ratcliffe, husband of Nazanin, who campaigned for her release from Iran, tells Byline Times in an interview: "The first thing they need to do is to recognise the problem. At the moment, the Government doesn't acknowledge anyone detained overseas as being arbitrarily detained or hostage."

The US has a mechanism whereby they'll check and decide if someone is unfairly detained, and they call them "wrongfully detained".

Ratcliffe says: "There's a door you can knock on to say, 'Listen, I'm unfairly imprisoned, and I want my Government's help' The UK doesn't do that."

Successive Conservative Governments buried the problem, he adds. Evidence that then-Foreign Secret...