Qatar has set Israeli sphincters twitching as they follow in Saudi footsteps in seeking F-35 jets from the US - and they only have themselves to blame. Right, so this is being sold as an argument about jets, as if Israel has suddenly developed a principled interest in the airspace of a country it doesn’t border, isn’t at war with, and routinely relies on to clean up its diplomatic messes. But nobody is actually confused about what’s happening here. Israel isn’t panicking because Qatar wants aircraft. Israel is panicking because Qatar got hit. Qatar hosts the largest American base in the region, plays mediator when Washington needs someone to talk to people it pretends not to talk to, and has spent years doing exactly what the system rewards: stay useful, stay quiet, stay embedded. Then missiles land on its territory anyway, because wars don’t stay contained anymore and guarantees don’t mean what they used to. And now Qatar is doing the unforgivable thing. It’s responding rationally. Not by escalating, not by picking sides, but by asking how much exposure it’s expected to absorb for everyone else’s freedom of action. That question is what’s rattling Israel. Not the jets. Right, so Israel is lobbying Washington hard over Qatar’s renewed interest in advanced aircraft, invoking its so-called qualitative military edge, briefing journalists about risk and instability, and trying to slow or block a decision that, on the face of it, shouldn’t trouble it at all. Qatar isn’t an enemy state. Qatar doesn’t border Israel. Qatar isn’t threatening Israeli airspace. And yet Israel is acting as if something fundamental has slipped. Because it has. Qatar sits at the centre of the American military footprint in the Middle East. Al-Udeid Air Base hosts US Central Command’s forward headquarters, thousands of personnel, and the infrastructure that underpins American air operations across the region.

Keir Starmer's Labour government is set to delay local elections for those councils who wish to again next year - someone scared by any chance? Right, so councils across England are being told they can delay local elections that were due next year. Not because of a war. Not because of a national emergency. But because central government is reorganising local authorities and says the timing is inconvenient. At the same time, the Prime Minister is reshaping how he allows himself to be questioned, moving away from collective press scrutiny toward more controlled, stage-managed access. Those two things are happening together, not years apart, not by accident. That matters, because elections and scrutiny are the two ways the public holds power to account. Delay one, and you’d better strengthen the other. Instead, both are being softened at the same time. This isn’t about party politics or one bad decision. It’s about what happens when a government starts treating democratic pressure as a problem to manage rather than a test to face. And that’s why this is blowing up in Keir Starmer’s face. Right, so I’m going to start by saying plainly what has actually happened, because once you strip out the polite language and the procedural fluff, the picture becomes very simple. The government has moved to allow large numbers of councils in England to delay local elections that were due next year, and at the same time it is reshaping how it allows itself to be questioned, moving away from collective press access and toward more managed formats, as if the press that get to question him aren’t compliant enough already. Those are not opinions. They are procedural facts. And once you put them next to each other, the politics stops being subtle. Up to 63 councils have been invited to delay elections scheduled for May 2026, pushing them back by a year, on the grounds of local government reorganisation. This is being sold as optional, as something councils can choose, but the invitation comes from the centre, during a funding crisis, in the middle of structural changes designed and imposed by central government itself. At the same time, Downing Street is signalling that the Lobby system, flawed as it is being filled with the mainstream media and nobody else, is being wound down in favour of more controlled press conferences and spokesperson-led briefings.

Another Palestine slogan has 'suddenly' now become an arrestable offence, but since the law hasn't changed, what are the Met Police up to? Right, so here’s the thing. In Britain, words don’t normally become crimes because a police force decides it doesn’t like the sound of them this week. Parliament passes laws, courts interpret them, and everyone else is supposed to stay in their lane. But that’s not what’s happening here. The Metropolitan Police have announced that a Palestine-related slogan may now earn you an arrest, despite no change in the law, no ban, no court ruling, just a sudden confidence that they’ve cracked the definitive meaning of a political word. Ministers, of course, are hovering nearby, nodding vigorously while insisting this is all a matter of “operational independence”, which is Whitehall shorthand for we like the outcome, don’t quote us on the method. And the media are obligingly treating police warnings as if they were statute. No vote. No judgment. Just a quiet tightening of the rules. This isn’t about a chant. It’s about how civil liberties get trimmed when the cause is Palestine and the embarrassment is Israel. Right, so what is happening is actually quite simple once you strip away the ceremony. The Metropolitan Police have announced that people may be arrested for chanting or displaying a Palestine-related slogan, not because Parliament has changed the law, not because a court has ruled the phrase inherently criminal, but because the police have decided that the meaning of the words now crosses a line. That decision is being backed rhetorically by government ministers and amplified by a compliant media cycle, and it is being presented to the public as if it were a settled legal position. It isn’t. It’s a discretionary enforcement move dressed up as necessity, and it puts civil liberties on very thin ice. I’ll come back to the slogan itself in a moment, because that’s the trap everyone is being steered into. The real issue is the mechanism. In the UK, criminal law does not work by police declaration. Words do not become illegal because a senior officer says they are “widely understood” to mean something dangerous. If that were the case, we would no longer live under law but under guidance, and guidance is whatever power needs it to be on the day.

Benjamin Netanyahu has had some self owns, but when it comes to shooting himself in the foot, this is a contender for the best yet. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu insists the International Criminal Court has no authority over him, which makes his behaviour over the past year faintly hilarious in a very dark way. Because people who genuinely believe a court is irrelevant don’t spend months trying to crush it. They don’t mobilise allies, threaten consequences, lean on funding, or attempting to sideline or intimidate judges. They shrug and move on. Netanyahu did the opposite, and in doing so told us everything we need to know. What we’re watching isn’t a miscarriage of justice. It’s a man discovering that impunity isn’t a personality trait, and that repeating “we don’t recognise you” doesn’t magically dissolve an arrest warrant once it exists. Worse for him, the effort to bury the court hasn’t just failed, it’s dragged others into the mess — governments that talk endlessly about a rules-based order right up until the moment the rules start pointing in their direction. This crisis wasn’t imposed on Netanyahu. He built it. And now he’s stuck inside it. Right, so Netanyahu built this crisis for himself. Not because an international court woke up hostile to Israel, not because activists finally shouted loudly enough, and not because the law suddenly changed, but because a series of political choices collided with a system that, for once, refused to step aside. The arrest warrant sought by the International Criminal Court has not emerged from nowhere. It has emerged from policy, from conduct, and from a sustained attempt to treat accountability as optional, followed by an even more revealing attempt to crush the institution that exists precisely to stop that kind of behaviour.

Hunger striker Qesser Zurah has deteriorated significantly overnight, but would the prison call and ambulance? Not until an MP turned up... Right, so it tells you everything about Britain right now that a woman can be on Day 46 of a hunger strike, collapsing on the floor of her cell, drifting in and out of consciousness, and the people in charge still think the real emergency is an MP and two NHS doctors turning up to ask why no ambulance has been called. That’s where we were as of the early hours of this morning. A Filton hunger striker, Qesser Zuhrah is dying, the decline has been predictable for weeks, the warnings have been shoved under ministerial carpets, and the prison’s first instinct was to shut the doors and hope the problem stayed out of sight. And when that didn’t work, they called the police on the people trying to save her life, which is the moment the state showed you exactly whose safety it values and whose it doesn’t. Right, so a prisoner is dying on hunger strike in Britain at time of writing, about half past eight in the morning as we are right now, and the state is still trying to pretend it isn’t happening, which tells you everything you need to know about where power sits in this country when someone decides to challenge the government’s favourite arms companies and the government’s favourite client state. Qesser Zuhrah is on Day 46 without food, she has collapsed repeatedly, she has drifted in and out of consciousness, her legs have been shaking uncontrollably, her chest pains have radiated into her neck and shoulder, and the people running Britain’s largest women’s prison looked at that deterioration and decided their priority was to keep an MP, two NHS doctors and a pair of journalists outside the building until the situation became impossible to ignore. That is what you’re dealing with here. A medical emergency that has been allowed to develop in full view of ministers because confronting it would mean admitting their political use of terror legislation is collapsing in real time.

Israel's mockery of the Filton hunger strikers exposes their own contempt, but also their own fear and weakness. Right, so you know exactly what you’re dealing with when a newspaper in Israel looks at people more than forty days into a hunger strike and decides the right response is a headline telling them to “eat a sandwich.” You don’t get that from a society grappling with the seriousness of starvation; you get it from one that has trained itself to treat other people’s suffering as background noise. And when several of those hunger strikers are now in hospital, with one deteriorating sharply overnight, the joke doesn’t just fall flat — it tells you everything about who is speaking. Because only a culture that’s spent years mocking the hunger of others could pretend this is clever. It isn’t clever. It’s contempt wearing a smirk, and they were so pleased with themselves, they were proud enough to print it. Right, so you don’t get a headline like this one from the Jerusalem Post by ac by accident, and you don’t get it from a publication that pretends to operate in a moral vacuum, you get it from a political culture that has spent years teaching itself that some forms of suffering matter and others don’t, and the dividing line isn’t humanity, it’s allegiance. When an Israeli newspaper looks at people who have refused food for more than forty days and decides the appropriate framing is a jeer dressed up as journalism - 'Hungry? Eat a sandwich': Palestine Action protesters hospitalized as hunger strike exceeds 40 days - you’re not seeing a rogue decision or a misread of the moment, you’re seeing a system talking to itself, reassuring its own audience that the humanity of these hunger strikers is irrelevant, because the story was never about them in the first place. It’s about protecting a narrative that cannot survive even a moment of empathy directed at the wrong people, which is why the contempt comes so quickly and so confidently.

A trio of troubles are impacting upon notorious software giant Palantir right now all relating to trustworthiness - and if you're right or wrong to do so. Right, so Palantir. A company that insists it’s just a neutral bit of software, while somehow popping up in conversations about covert attacks, military intelligence, and the inner workings of your healthcare system, and then acting surprised that people are starting to ask questions. One minute it’s the analytical backbone of the NHS, the next it’s being waved away by Switzerland as a data risk they don’t want anywhere near their defence systems, and in between its name is being dragged into allegations about that pager attack in Lebanon that left civilians dead and mutilated. And no, that doesn’t mean guilt, before anyone reaches for the solicitor’s letter. It means something else entirely. It means the same company keeps turning up wherever power is exercised without witnesses, whether that’s on a battlefield, in a defence ministry, or inside a public service. And when that happens often enough, it stops being coincidence and starts being a pattern worth paying attention to. Right. Let’s strip this back to first principles, because the confusion around Palantir is not accidental, it’s manufactured by treating each controversy as a separate issue. They are not separate. They are converging, and the convergence is the story. One company is now appearing in three arenas that should not overlap without triggering serious political scrutiny. A covert attack in Lebanon that used civilian communication devices as weapons. A European state deciding a US technology firm is too dangerous to trust with military intelligence. And the analytical core of Britain’s National Health Service. That company is Palantir, and the alarm bells are not ringing because of a single allegation, but because of what happens when security-state infrastructure migrates into civilian governance without consent, debate, or accountability.

Claims of the Bondi attack being a false flag persist as many questions remain unanswered, but given some of the reactions, does it even matter?Right, so nobody knows yet who ordered the Bondi attack, if anyone at all. That part is still unresolved, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What is already clear, though, is who decided to grab hold of it, who rushed to define what it “meant”, and how quickly a mass killing on the other side of the world has been repurposed into a licence to police dissent elsewhere. Before investigators had finished their work, foreign intelligence claims were filling headlines, Iran and Palestinians were being dragged into the frame, and British ministers were suddenly talking about cracking down on pro-Palestine marches - as if placards here in the UK caused bullets. You can see the shape of it straight away. A tragedy happens, the facts are still settling, and power moves faster than evidence. Whether Bondi was a false flag or not almost becomes beside the point, because the aftermath is doing the job perfectly well on its own.Right, so we start with what is known, because the point of this whole exercise is that the facts are fewer than the reactions, and the reactions have already hardened into political opportunity haven’t they? A mass shooting happened on Bondi Beach. At least fifteen people were killed. Authorities and reporting have linked the attackers to a militant ideology associated with Islamic State. That is the factual floor, not the ceiling, because nothing beyond that has been publicly confirmed by investigators in Australia. There has been no verified evidence that the perpetrators acted on behalf of Iran, or Hezbollah, or Hamas, or any Palestinian organisation. That hasn’t stopped a chorus of foreign intelligence claims being injected into the story, nor has it slowed politicians using the attack to strengthen the hand of the security state at home. And that’s the point. The exploitation has moved faster than the evidence.I’ll come back to that, because it defines the entire arc of this thing: the people with the least information moved the fastest, and the people who actually know what happened haven’t finished their work. But you can already see how the story has been lifted out of the hands of investigators and repackaged by politicians, intelligence services, and the media to serve agendas that predated the attack.

Five more defections from Labour to the Greens are sending Labour into meltdown ahead of local elections that look increasingly badRight, so five Labour councillors in Brent didn’t suddenly wake up allergic to red rosettes. They left because Keir Starmer has dragged the party so far off its moral axis that staying would’ve made them look dishonest in front of the very people who elected them and because the Green Party actually stands for the values that were formerly Labour’s. And you can see why. Councillors aren’t fools — they’re the first to feel the backlash when a party stops sounding like the values it claims to represent. So when five walk out together, and when others in Lambeth and Hammersmith & Fulham have already done the same, you’re not looking at local turbulence. You’re looking at the cost of Starmer’s leadership. Even the polling shows it: Labour slipping, Greens rising, trust evaporating. Brent isn’t an accident. It’s the bill coming due for a leader who thinks discipline can replace conviction — and is now watching the base vote with its feet.Right, so you can tell a political story is real, not manufactured, when you can trace it in the decisions of people who have nothing to gain by exaggerating and everything to lose by leaving. That is what the five councillors in Brent represent. You do not hold elected office, make yourself accountable to thousands of people, carry the routine and responsibility of being the human face of a party in your community, and then walk away without a serious reason. So when Harbi Farah, Iman Ahmadi-Moghaddam, Mary Mitchell, Tony Ethapemi and Erica Gbajumo all stepped out of Labour on the same day and joined the Greens, the temptation for Labour to brush it off as a local dispute was not just dishonest, it was insulting. Councillors do not resign en masse because they are bored.

Journalist Richard Medhurst has been exonerated of the terror allegations levied against him - another lawfare fail for an unfit for purpose law! Right, so independent Middle East journalist Richard Medhurst has been exonerated, which is the polite way of saying the British state has spent more than a year waving the word “terrorism” around, smashing up a journalist’s life, and then quietly admitting it had nothing to back it up. No charges. No trial. No conviction. Just a long, expensive shrug at the end, once the damage was already done. And here’s the thing: if this were a one-off, it would be embarrassing. But it isn’t. It’s familiar. Because this is now the rhythm of the system. Arrest first, headlines second, silence third, collapse last. Always under the same law, always aimed at the same political space, always ending the same way once evidence is required rather than insinuation. Medhurst isn’t an anomaly. He’s just the latest receipt. And if you’re wondering how many times this has to happen before it stops being a mistake and starts being a method, that’s exactly what this piece is about. Right, so Richard Medhurst has been exonerated. Not half-cleared, not quietly let off on a technicality, but released from a terrorism investigation that should never have existed in the first place. No charges. No trial. No conviction. The Crown Prosecution Service has stepped away, and the state has nothing left to say about it. That fact matters because it ends the story for him. But it does not end the story this case tells, because by now we have seen this exact sequence too many times to pretend it is an accident. Medhurst was arrested under section 12 of the Terrorism Act, the part of the law that criminalises expressions deemed “supportive” of a proscribed organisation, even where there is no intent to support anything at all. His work is journalism. Analysis, commentary, explanation. The sort of speech the law is supposed to protect. His arrest was not followed by swift charging, because there was no case to charge. Instead there was delay, seizure of devices, disruption of work, and a long stretch of silence while the machinery ground away in the background. Then, eventually, the only outcome that was ever legally available arrived: no further action. That sequence matters. Arrest first, justification later, collapse at the end. You can see the mechanics of it if we for one moment stop treating Medhurst as a personality and start treating him as a data point. Not to minimise his work at all, just bear with me here, because once you do that, you are forced to confront the fact that he is not alone, there are other data points, that he is not new.